If to this my petition, you start no objection, My cousin, Tom Erskine, has pledged his protection, I suppose, like the Scots--on account of connection! [3] A celebrated Milliner of the day. Lord Ancram was of particularly low stature. ❦ [Sidenote: Taste and Custom.] Taste and custom govern the opinion in this day, as in those more ancient. An Athenian and a Lacedemonian lady being placed near to each other at an assembly where they met, each hastily, and with apparent disgust, turned her head from the other. The Athenian, because she could not endure the smell of _oil_ which came from the Spartan, and the latter from her dislike to the perfumes of the Grecian. ❦ [Sidenote: Filial Duty.] It was the commandment of the Eternal God himself, delivered amid the lightnings and thunders of the holy mountain, “Honour thy father and mother;” and there was no reservation found upon the tablet of stone. Man may persecute, sickness may change, grief may depress, poverty may chill, or grief may blacken the heart of the parent, but the bonds of the child are never loosened. The affection of a child for a parent, in its strongest degree does not amount to a hundredth part of that which a parent feels for a child; and it is not until the child becomes a parent, that he is aware of this. If the voice of infancy should ever call you “Mother,” you will then know (but never till then) how hard, how impossible it is to dry up the fountain of a parent’s love, or teach the trunk to shake off and cast from it the blossoms which thence derive their being. ❦ [Sidenote: King of Prussia and Voltaire.] Kings who affect to be familiar with their companions, make use of _men_ as they do of _oranges_; they take oranges to extract their juice, and when they are well sucked they throw them away. The King of Prussia applied this observation to himself in his dispute with Voltaire. ❦ [Sidenote: To a daughter on her marriage.] Dear to my heart, as life’s warm stream Which animates this mortal clay, For thee I court the waking dream, And deck with smiles the future day: And thus beguile the present pain With hopes that we shall meet again! Yet will it be as when the past Twined every joy, and care, and thought, And o’er our minds one mantle cast Of kind affections, finely wrought? Ah no! the groundless hope were vain For so, we ne’er can meet again! May he who claims thy tender heart, Deserve its love, as I have done; For kind and gentle as thou art, If so beloved thou’rt fairly won. Bright may the sacred torch remain, And cheer thee till we meet again. ❦ [Sidenote: James I.] It was said of King James I. that there were two sorts of men he never had kindness for; those whose hawks flew, and dogs ran as well as his own, and those who were able to speak as much reason as himself. ❦