LETTER XVIII.

ON TRUE AND FALSE HONOUR.

YOU wonder I should speak against hohour, when it is the principle upon which every gentleman ought to act. I grant it; but there are two sorts of honour; the one gehuiné, the other spurious; the one is the honour of wise men, the other of fools. Honour, in its best sense, is the regard which a virtuous 'man hath to the preservation of his character it is, properly speaking, the motesty of the mind, or moral modesty, which is shocked with the inputation of an unworthy action. But then you will observe, that the person who pretends to be a man of honour, must first be well informed concerning the nature of good and evil; without which he' may be shocked at any appearance of goodness in himself, and glory in his shame; which is a very common case. False honour may always be distinguished by these two marks; first, that it is a very irritable principle; and secondly, that it makes the opinion or fashion of the world the only rule of its conduct.

The honour which preserves a man is good; the honour which inflames him is bad; and if he has no rule, but the custom of his company, whereby to judge of good and evil, hiş company may be very bad, and very much mistaken, and then he will be led into great absurdities, and act more like a madman than a gentleman. According to this idea of homour, a man hates what his company hates; and thus it happens, that we find a sort of honour among thieves and pick-pockets, who, like other societies, are a rule to one another.

Without these necessary distinctions, that sense of honour, which you take to be the security of your character, will endanger the loss of it; because you will be tempted either to mean or rash actions, for fear of losing the esteem of those whose judgment is of no value.

Suppose a man, whose birth and fortune put him amongst gentlemen, is a scandalous and notorious liar. When such a person is charged with his fault before company, he ought to confess and repent of it, by all the laws of conscience, virtue, and religion. But what saith honour? It bids him persist in the denial of his guilt, and murder his accuser, if it is in his power; when the voice of reason and justice

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justice would have thanked him for the admonition.

First, a man tells a lie, to defame the cha racter of another; then he tells a second by denying the first; then he fights in defence of his denial: and the vulgar notion of honour not only acquits him, but obliges him to it. Between this honour and the frantic fury of actual madness, there is no difference but in the name: if there is any difference, it is only this, that honour acts deliberately upon principle, and madness raves by accident and misfortune. The devil would be better pleased if the world were full of such honour; but God and all good men must detest it, as one of the greatest plagues that ever prevailed upon earth.

LETTER

ON LITERARY COMPOSITION.

COMPOSITION is not only a difficult task, but is indeed a miserable drudgery, when you have neither rules to direct you, nor matter to work upon; which is the case with many poor boys, who are obliged to squeeze out of their brains an exercise against the time appointed.

To store the mind with good matter, you must accustom yourself to the reading of good authors, such as historians, poets, orators, philosophers, and controversialists; the last are particularly to be studied for the well managing of an argument. The political and theological controversialists are best; but they seldom fall in the way of the younger

sort of readers.

When you are to write upon any subject, the best way of entering upon it, is to set down what your own mind furnishes, and say all you can, before you descend to consult books and read upon it for if you apply to books before you have laid your plan, your

own

own thoughts will be dissipated, and you will dwindle from a composer to a transcriber.

In thinking upon a subject, you are to consider, that every proposition is an answer to some question: so that if you can answer all the questions that can be put to you concerning it, you have a thorough understanding of it: and in order to compose, you have nothing to do but to ask yourself those questions; by which you will raise from your mind the latent matter, and having once got it, you may dispose of it and put it into form afterwards.

Suppose the discovery of America by CoJumbus were proposed; you might put these questions upon it: How came he to think of such an expedition? What evidence had he to proceed upon? Did the ancients believe any thing that might lead him to such a discovery? What steps did he take in the affair? How was his opinion received? What hap pened to him in the attempt? How did it succeed? How was he rewarded afterwards? What were the consequences of this discovery to the old world, and what farther consequences may still be expected? When you have given a circumstantial answer to all these questions, you will have composed a methodical history of the discovery of America.

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