apostles, that you know they are not serious, that you have a much better opinion of them than they would have you have, and that you are very sure they would not practise the doctrine they preach. But put your private mark upon them, and shun them for ever afterwards. [Same date.]
Value of Character.—Show yourself, upon all
occasions, the advocate, the friend, but not the bully,
of virtue. Colonel Chartres,[1] whom you have certainly
heard of (who was, I believe, the most notorious
blasted rascal in the world, and who had, by all
sorts of crimes, amassed immense wealth), was so
sensible of the disadvantage of a bad character that
I heard him once say, in his impudent, profligate
manner, that though he would not give one farthing
for virtue, he would give ten thousand pounds for
- ↑ A notorious, wretched debauchee, who has been pilloried
into a miserable and degraded immortality by Arbuthnot, Pope
and Hogarth; the painter has given us his portrait in "The
Harlot's Progress," plate 1. Pope has set him up as an instance
of that hardest trial to good men, the success of the
wicked:
"Should some lone temple, nodding to its fall,
For Chartres' head reserve the nodding wall."And Arbuthnot wrote the most tremendously severe epitaph in the whole range of literature on him while yet alive: "Here continueth to rot the body of Colonel Francis Chartres," etc. Finally, Chesterfield points him out to his son as the most notorious blasted rascal in the world—blasted, indeed, as by lightning. It is needless to say that this word is not used as a vulgar oath, but to point out a man whose name is, as the Bible of 1551 has it: "Marred forever by blastynge."
