First impressions of England and its people / By Hugh Miller.

  • Miller, Hugh, 1802-1856.
Date:
1847
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: First impressions of England and its people / By Hugh Miller. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    142/440 (page 118)
    “ never degenerate when carefully attended to ; and horses in particular always show their blood in their shape, spirit, and swiftness ; hut a coxcomb may beget a philosopher, as a man of virtue may leave a worthless progeny.” It is not uninstruc- tive to observe how strongly the philosophy of the remark is borne out by the facts of Hume’s own history. The mean, pusillanimous, foolish John was the son of the wise, dauntless Henry the Second, and the brother of the magnanimous Rich¬ ard Coetir de Lion. His immediate descendant and successor, nearly as weak, though somewhat more honest than himself, was the father of the fearless, politic, unscrupulous Edward the First; and he, of the imbecile Edward the Second; and he, in turn, of the brave, sagacious Edward the Third; and then comes one of those cases which the phrenologist picks out from the general mass, and threads together, as with a string: the heroic Edward the Third was the father of the heroic Black Prince. And thus the record runs on, hearing from beginning to end the same character; save that, as common men are vastly less rare, as the w^ords imply, than uncommon ones, it is inevitable that instances of the ordinary producing the ordinary should greatly predominate over instances of an opposite cast. We see, however, a brutal Henry the Eighth succeeded by his son, a just and gentle Edward the Sixth; and he by his bigoted, weak-minded sister, the bloody Mary; and she by his other sister, the shrewd, politic Elizabeth. But in no history is this independence of man’s mental and moral nature of the animal laws of transmission better shown than in the most ancient and authentic of all. The two first brothers the world ever saw^,—children of the same father and mother,—were persons of diametrically opposite characters ; a similar diversity obtained in the families of Noah and of Ja¬ cob : the devout Eli was the father of profligate children;