Lord Mahon is also a little too fond of uttering moral
reflections in a style too sententious and oracular. We shall
give one instance: "Strange as it seems, experience shows that we
usually feel far more animosity against those whom we have
injured than against those who injure us: and this remark holds
good with every degree of intellect, with every class of fortune,
with a prince or a peasant, a stripling or an elder, a hero or a
prince." This remark might have seemed strange at the Court of
Nimrod or Chedorlaomer; but it has now been for many generations
considered as a truism rather than a paradox. Every boy has
written on the thesis "Odisse quem loeseris." Scarcely any lines
in English poetry are better known than that vigorous couplet,

"Forgiveness to the injured does belong;
But they ne'er pardon who have done the wrong."

The historians and philosophers have quite done with this maxim,
and have abandoned it, like other maxims which have lost their
gloss, to bad novelists, by whom it will very soon be worn to
rags.

It is no more than justice to say that the faults of Lord Mahon's
book are precisely the faults which time seldom fails to cure,
and that the book, in spite of those faults, is a valuable
addition to our historical literature.

Whoever wishes to be well acquainted with the morbid anatomy of
governments, whoever wishes to know how great states may be made
feeble and wretched, should study the history of Spain. The