Page:Tales by Musæus, Tieck, Richter, Volume 2.djvu/137

Rh stand with himself to do so, and in the adoption of this reflex morality, Government should not constrain him.

It might be that, as, according to Tristram Shandy, clothes; according to Walter Shandy and Lavater, proper names exert an influence on men, appellatives would do so still more; since, on us, as on testaceous animals, the foam so often hardens into shell: but such internal morality is not a thing the State can have an eye to; for, as in the fine arts, it is not this, but the representation of it, which forms her true aim.

I have found it rather difficult to devise for our different offices different verbal-virtues; but I should think there might many such divisions of Virtue (at this moment, Love of Freedom, Public-spirit, Sincerity and Uprightness occur to me) be hunted out; were but some well-disposed minister of state to appoint a Virtue-board or Moral Address Department, with some half dozen secretaries, who, for a small salary, might devise various virtues for the various posts. Were I in their place, I should hold a good prism before the white ray of Virtue, and divide it completely. Pity that it were not crimes we wanted—their subdivision I mean;—our country Judges might then be selected for this purpose. For in their tribunals, where only inferior jurisdiction, and no penalty above five florins Frankish, is admitted, they have a daily training how out of every mischief to make several small ones, none of which they ever punish to a greater amount than their five florins. This is a precious moral Rolfinkenism, which our Jurists have learned from the great Sin-cutters, St. Augustin and his Sorbonne, who together have carved more sins on Adam’s Sin-apple than ever Rolfinken did faces on a cherry-stone. How different one of our Judges from a Papal Casuist, who, by side-scrapings, will rasp you down the best deadly sin into a venial!—

School-offices (to come to these) are a small branch of traffic certainly; yet still they are monarchies,—school-monarchies, to wit,—resembling the Polish crown, which, according to Pope’s verse, is twice exposed to sale in the century; a statement, I need hardly say, arithmetically false, Newton having settled the average duration of a reign at twenty-two years. For the rest, whether the city Council bring the young of the community a Hameln Rat-and-Child-catcher; or a Weisse’s Rh