Good Manners giving a vital energy and efficacy to good Laws--in these few words, gentlemen, may be comprised the needful constituents of National Happiness and Prosperity--the foremost conditions. TALBOYS. Ay--ay--sir. For good Laws without good Manners are an empty breath--whilst good Manners ask the protecting and preserving succour of good Laws. But the good Manners are of the first necessity, for they naturally produce the good Laws. NORTH. What does history show, Talboys, but nations risen up to flourish in wealth, power, and greatness, that with corrupted and luxurious manners have again sunk from their pre-eminence; whilst another purer and simpler people has in turn grown mighty, and taken their room in the world's eye--some hardy, simple, frugal race, perhaps, whom the seeming disfavour of nature constrains to assiduous labour, and who maintain in the lap of their mountains their independence and their pure and happy homes. TALBOYS. The Luxury--the invading Goth and Hun--the dismembering--and new States uprisen upon the ruins of the World's fallen Empire. There is one line in Collins' _Ode to Freedom_--Mr North--which I doubt if I understand. NORTH. Which? TALBOYS. "No, Freedom, no--I will not tell How Rome before thy weeping face Pushed by a wild and artless race From off its wide, ambitious base, With heaviest sound a giant-statue fell-- What time the northern Sons of Spoil awoke, And all the blended work of strength and grace, With many a rude repeated stroke, And many a barbarous yell, to thousand fragments broke." NORTH. Which? TALBOYS. "How Rome before thy _weeping face_." NORTH. Freedom wept at Rome's overthrow--though she had long been Freedom's enemy--and though her destroyers were Freedom's children--and "Spoil's Sons"--for how could Freedom look unmoved at the wreck "of all that blended work of strength and grace"--though raised by slaves at the beck of Tyrants? It was not always so. BULLER. Let me, Apollo-like, my dear sir, pinch your ear, and admonish you to return to the point from which, in discursive gyrations, you and Seward have been---- NORTH. Like an Eagle giving an Eaglet lessons how to fly---- BULLER. You promised solemnly, sir, not to mention Eagles this evening. NORTH. I did not, sir. BULLER. But, then, Seward is no Eaglet--he is, and long has been, a full-fledged bird, and can fly as well's yourself, sir. NORTH. There you're right. But then, making a discursive gyration round a point is not leaving it--and there you're wrong. Silly folk--not you, Buller, for you are a strong-minded, strong-bodied man--say "keep to the point"--knowing that if you quit it one inch, you will from their range of vision disappear--and then they comfort themselves by charging you with having melted among the clouds. BULLER.