Tomlinsoniana

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Эдвард Бульвер-Литтон. Tomlinsoniana

TOMLINSONIANA

INTRODUCTION

MAXIMS ON THE POPULAR ART OF CHEATING,

BRACHYLOGIA; OR, ESSAYS, CRITICAL, SENTIMENTAL, MORAL, AND ORIGINAL

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Having lately been travelling in Germany, I spent some time at that University in which Augustus Tomlinson presided as Professor of Moral Philosophy. I found that that great man died, after a lingering illness, in the beginning of the year 1822, perfectly resigned to his fate, and conversing, even on his deathbed, on the divine mysteries of Ethical Philosophy. Notwithstanding the little peccadilloes to which I have alluded in the latter pages of “Paul Clifford,” and which his pupils deemed it advisable to hide from—

his memory was still held in a tender veneration. Perhaps, as in the case of the illustrious Burns, the faults of a great man endear to you his genius. In his latter days the PROFESSOR was accustomed to wear a light-green silk dressing-gown, and, as he was perfectly bald, a little black velvet cap; his small-clothes were pepper and salt. These interesting facts I learned from one of his pupils. His old age was consumed in lectures, in conversation, and in the composition of the little morceaux of wisdom we present to the public. In these essays and maxims, short as they are, he seems to have concentrated the wisdom of his industrious and honourable life. With great difficulty I procured from his executors the manuscripts which were then preparing for the German press. A valuable consideration induced those gentlemen to become philanthropic, and to consider the inestimable blessings they would confer upon this country by suffering me to give the following essays to the light, in their native and English dress, on the same day whereon they appear in Germany in the graces of foreign disguise.

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Never commit the error of the over-shrewd, and deem human nature worse than it is. Human nature is so damnably good that if it were not for human art, we knaves could not live. The primary elements of a man’s mind do not sustain us; it is what he owes to “the pains taken with his education,” and “the blessings of civilized society!”

Whenever you doubt, my pupils, whether your man be a quack or not, decide the point by seeing if your man be a positive asserter. Nothing indicates imposture like confidence. Volney saith well, “that the most celebrated of charlatans—[Mahomet]—and the boldest of tyrants begins his extraordinary tissue of lies by these words, ‘There is no doubt in this book!’”

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