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One of the meanest men that ever held a county office went to the bar tender and had a thin slice of Limburger cheese cut off, and when the party were looking at the frescoed ceiling through beer glasses this wicked person slipped the cheese under the sweat leather of the hat, and the man put it on and walked out.
On the contrary, in the debasement of a common or humble attachment, he would encounter, even among his meanest subjects, carping and sarcastic remarks; he would forfeit his character of infallibility and inviolability. Having descended to the region of petty human miseries, he would be subjected to paltry contentions.
Now, if this were true, and they were really ever so bad, they ought never to be treated cruelly, never teased and tormented. None but the meanest boy will ever torment any animal. He who created us created also the little fly that crawls upon the window pane.
A husband would be thought mad that exacted any degree of economy from his wife, whose expenses are no way limited but by her own fancy. 'Tis his business to get money, and hers to spend it: and this noble prerogative extends itself to the very meanest of the sex.
A prince of the blood could not strike the meanest laborer without a liability to prosecution, in theory at least, and that is something. In America any man may strike any slave he meets, and if the master does not choose to notice it, he has no redress. I do not suppose human nature to be widely different in England and America.
Now the gentleman who propounded this pleasant piece of criticism was, according to trustworthy history, the meanest, most useless, and most despicable man of his set; yet he could venture to assume haughty airs towards a man whose shoes he was not fit to black, and he could assume those airs on the strength of his slangy impassivity his "good form."
Although to obtain a black ribbon, which physicians ought not to intrigue for, he was capable of dropping a prayer-book out of his pocket at Court, in his heart he mocked at everything; he had a deep contempt for men, after studying them from above and below, after detecting their genuine expression when performing the most solemn and the meanest acts of their lives.
Another mighty pull, and another, and another, and we slide over into smooth water. Then I breathe freely, and yell myself. The little boat seems to gasp for breath as a drowning man, saved in the nick of time, shudders in every limb with pain and fear. As we tied up in smooth water, all the men, from the laoban to the meanest tracker, laughed and yelled and told each other how it was done.
When appealed to by the inhabitants of the plundered district, the royal Philip replied, with tears in his eyes, that his heart bled for them that they were his children that every cow taken from the meanest peasant was like a limb torn from his own body; but that duty must be done, that the interests of the country demanded the sacrifice, and that in fact, they might go to the deuce.
I received the strangest and the meanest prodigies of Scripture, with the same unhesitating faith, as if I had never understood a proposition of physical philosophy, nor a chapter of Hume and Gibbon. Whether such a distinction can be preserved is quite another question. The view here exhibited is essentially that of Paley, and was in my day the prevalent one at Oxford.
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