'There is no better argument to prove that the Scriptures were written by divine inspiration than that excellent saying of our Saviour, If any man will go to law with thee for thy cloak, give him thy coat also. 'Birds are taken with pipes that imitate their own voices, and men with those sayings that are most agreeable to their own opinions. 'If the French nobility should follow our fashions, and send their children over to learn our language, and receive their education from us, we should have as glorious an opinion of ourselves, and as mean a value of them, as they have of us; and therefore we have no reason to blame them, but our own folly for it.' It is interesting to learn Butler's opinion of Dryden as a critic: 'Dryden weighs poets in his virtuoso's scales that will weigh to the hundredth part of a grain, as curiously as Juvenal's lady pedantess-- "Committit vates, et comparat inde Maronem, Atque alia parte in trutina suspendit Homerum." He complained of Ben Jonson for stealing scenes out of Plautus. Set a thief to find out a thief.' George Savile, Marquis of Halifax, who ranks with Shaftesbury and Temple among the few politicians of that age entitled to the appellation of statesman, enriched English literature with a small volume of essays, the most important of which are his vindication of his own political course and principles in _The Character of a Trimmer_ and _The Anatomy of an Equivalent_. Of these Macaulay justly says: 'What particularly strikes us is the writer's passion for generalization. He was treating of the most exciting subjects in the most agitated times; he was himself placed in the very thick of the civil conflict; yet there is no acrimony, nothing inflammatory, nothing personal. He treats every question as an abstract question, begins with the widest propositions, argues these propositions on general grounds, and often, when he has brought out his theorem, leaves the reader to make the application, without adding an allusion to particular men or to passing events.' The effect of this remarkable breadth of view was not with Halifax, as so frequently the case, to paralyze energy, and render the comprehensive mind unfit for practical action. He was not retained in equilibrium by the difficulty of deciding between two courses, but was an enthusiast for the _via media_, as great a zealot for compromise as zealots commonly are for strong measures; and, though sometimes too yielding or too speculative for the unquiet times in which his lot was cast, would have made an almost ideal prime minister for the nineteenth century. His praise of trimming, which to more fiery spirits must have seemed an ignoble policy, rings with the eloquence and passion of the most genuine conviction: