...We mourn over the leaves of our peaches and plum-trees, as they
wither under a blight. What does Paley see in this? A legion of
animated beings (for such is a _blight_) claiming their portion of
the bounty of Nature, and made happy by our comparatively trifling
privation, We are tortured by bodily _pain_,--Paley himself was so,
even at the moment that he was thus nobly vindicating God's wisdom
and ways. What of that? Pain is not the object of contrivance--no
anatomist ever dreamt of explaining any organ of the body on the
principle of the thumb screw; it is itself productive of good; it
is seldom both violent, and long continued; and then its pauses and
intermissions become positive pleasures. "It has the power of shedding
a satisfaction over intervals of ease, which I believe," says this
true philosopher, "few enjoyments exceed." The returns of an hospital
in his neighbourhood lie before him. Does he conjure up the images of
Milton's lazar-house, and sicken at the spectacle of human suffering?
No--he finds the admitted 6,420--the dead, 234--the _cured_, 5,476;
his eye settles upon the last, and he is content.

There is nothing in the world which has not more handles than one; and
it is of the greatest consequence to get a habit of taking hold by the
best. The bells speak as we make them; "how many a tale their music
tells!" Hogarth's industrious apprentice might hear in them that he
should be "Lord Mayor of London"--the idle apprentice that he should
be hanged at Tyburn. The landscape looks as we see it; if we go to
meet a friend, every distant object assumes his shape--

"In great and small, and round and square,
'Tis Johnny, Johnny, every where."

Crabbe's lover passed over the very same heath to his mistress and