94 ONE THOUSAND FAMOUS THINGS

Deceit

o

WHAT a tangled we!) we weave
When first we practice to deceive !

Sir Walter Scott

Sir Walter Going Out of ike World

I AM drawing near to the close of my career ; I am fast shuffling
off the stage.

1 have been perhaps the must, voluminous writer of the day, and
it is a comfort to me to think that I have tried to tmse.ltle no man's
faiths to corrupt no man's principle, and that T have written nothing on
my deathbed 1 should wish blotted out. Sir Walter Scott, dying

i

Surely We May Endure
ir God bears with the very worst of us, we may surely endure
each other. Sir Walter Scott
A Word Abuut King Charles
WHAT, after all, are the virtues ascribed to Charles ? A religious
zeal, not more sincere than that of his son, and fully as weak
and narrow-minded, and a few of the ordinary household decencies
which half the tombstones in England claim for those who lie beneath.
them, A good father ! A good husband ! Ample apologies indeed
for fifteen years of persecution, tyranny, and falsehood !
We charge him with having broken his coronation oath ; and we
are told that he kept his marriage vow ! We accu.se him of having
given up his people to the merciless inflictions of the most hot-headed
and hard-hearted of prelates ; and the defence is that he took his
little son on his knee and kissed him 1 We censure him for having
violated the articles of the Petition of Right, after having, for good
and valuable consideration,, promised to observe them ; and we are
informed that he was accustomed to hear prayers at six o'clock
in the morning 1 It is to such considerations as these, together
with his Vandyke dress, his handsome face, and his peaked beard,
that he owes, we verily believe, most of his popularity with the
present generation.
For ourselves, we own that we do not understand the common
phrase, A good man but a bad king* We can as easily conceive a
good man and an unnatural father, or a good man and a treacherous
&iend. We cannot, in estimating the character of an individual,
leave out of our consideration his conduct in the most important of
all human relations ; and if in that relation we find him to have been
selfish, cruel, and deceitful, we shall take the liberty to call him a
bad man* in spite of all Ms temperance at table, and all his regularity
at chapel. Macaulay