But these evanescent graces seemed
the effect of enchantment; and I imperceptibly breathed softly, lest
I should destroy what was real, yet looked so like the creation of
fancy.
Dryden's fable of the flower and the leaf was not a more
poetical reverie.
Adieu, however, to fancy, and to all the sentiments which ennoble
our nature. I arrived at Laurvig, and found myself in the midst of
a group of lawyers of different descriptions. My head turned round,
my heart grew sick, as I regarded visages deformed by vice, and
listened to accounts of chicanery that was continually embroiling
the ignorant. These locusts will probably diminish as the people
become more enlightened. In this period of social life the
commonalty are always cunningly attentive to their own interest; but
their faculties, confined to a few objects, are so narrowed, that
they cannot discover it in the general good. The profession of the
law renders a set of men still shrewder and more selfish than the
rest; and it is these men, whose wits have been sharpened by
knavery, who here undermine morality, confounding right and wrong.
The Count of Bernstorff, who really appears to me, from all I can
gather, to have the good of the people at heart, aware of this, has
lately sent to the mayor of each district to name, according to the
size of the place, four or six of the best-informed inhabitants, not
men of the law, out of which the citizens were to elect two, who are
to be termed mediators.
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