But I intended to specify, with a little minuteness, two or three
points of service. Nature never spares the opium or nepenthe; but
wherever she mars her creature with some deformity or defect, lays her
poppies plentifully on the bruise, and the sufferer goes joyfully
through life, ignorant of the ruin, and incapable of seeing it, though
all the world point their finger at it every day. The worthless and
offensive members of society, whose existence is a social pest,
invariably think themselves the most ill-used people alive, and never
get over their astonishment at the ingratitude and selfishness of their
contemporaries. Our globe discovers its hidden virtues, not only in
heroes and archangels, but in gossips and nurses. Is it not a rare
contrivance that lodged the due inertia in every creature, the
conserving, resisting energy, the anger at being waked or changed?
Altogether independent of the intellectual force in each, is the pride
of opinion, the security that we are right. Not the feeblest grandame,
not a mowing idiot, but uses what spark of perception and faculty is
left, to chuckle and triumph in his or her opinion over the absurdities
of all the rest.
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