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I had ceased to believe in the truth of that in which I had hitherto trusted, and yet could find nothing in which I could put any fixed or deliberate belief. I was, indeed, in a labyrinth! In what did I not doubt? With respect to crime and virtue I was in doubt; I doubted that the one was blameable and the other praiseworthy. Are not all things subjected to the law of necessity?

Take a sip of pure rum, and you will enjoy it surely. Say, my brave General, will you come and join me? It will cure any little disquietude down here." With a pleasant smile Charron laid his hand on the part of his commander which he supposed to be blameable. Carne made an effort to get up and kick him, but fell back with everything whirling around, and all human standards inverted.

Vivian listened unwillingly and uneasily to the friendly counsel: he was more hurt than he had ever before felt himself by any of Wharton's sarcasms, because there was now in them a mixture of truth; and a man seldom feels more irritable than when he is conscious that he is partly to blame, and apprehensive that others will think him more blameable than he really is.

Again, for some time, we were both silent; yet, unwilling to leave him to reflections which could not but be to my disadvantage, I summoned sufficient courage to say, "There is no young creature, my Lord, who so greatly wants, or so earnestly wishes for, the advice and assistance of her friends, as I do: I am new to the world, and unused to acting for myself;-my intentions are never willfully blameable, yet I err perpetually!-I have hitherto been blessed with the most affectionate of friends, and, indeed, the ablest of men, to guide and instruct me upon every occasion:-but he is too distant, now, to be applied to at the moment I want his aid:-and here,-there is not a human being whose counsel I can ask."

Nevertheless, he was certainly blameable for having chosen such an unwholesome situation. At the approach of winter he retired into quarters, in hopes of being reinforced with seven thousand Danes, who had already arrived in Britain. These auxiliaries were stipulated in a treaty which William had just concluded with the king of Denmark.

If, therefore, you should unfortunately have no intrinsic merit of your own, keep up, if possible, the appearance of it; and the world will possibly give you credit for the rest. A versatility of manner is as necessary in social life, as a versatility of parts in political. This is no way blameable, if not used with an ill design.

Thus much, however, is plain, that the mean state is praiseworthy, in virtue of which we are angry with those with whom, and at those things with which, we ought to be angry, and in right manner, and so on; while the excesses and defects are blameable, slightly so if only slight, more so if greater, and when considerable very blameable.

In the first place, anxiety to avoid drawing the characters that were to be blameable or ridiculous from any individuals in real life, led me to apply whatever circumstances were taken from reality to characters quite different from those to whom the facts had occurred; and consequently, when so applied, they were unsuitable and improbable: besides, as my father remarked the circumstances which in real life fix the attention, because they are out of the common course of events, are for this very reason unfit for the moral purposes, as well as for the dramatic effect of fiction.

Several complaints, I hear, of the Monmouth's coming away too soon from the chaine, where she was placed with the two guard-ships to secure it; and Captain Robert Clerke, my friend, is blamed for so doing there, but I hear nothing of him at London about it; but Captain Brookes's running aground with the "Sancta Maria," which was one of the three ships that were ordered to be sunk to have dammed up the River at the chaine, is mightily cried against, and with reason, he being the chief man to approve of the abilities of other men, and the other two slips did get safe thither and he run aground; but yet I do hear that though he be blameable, yet if she had been there, she nor two more to them three would have been able to have commanded the river all over.

In that first concern, the conduct of the man, there was ever but one side on which I was habitually blameable, and there I have secured myself in the way pointed out by nature and nature's God.