MISCELLANEOUS THOUGHTS. 803 modern page with their warm and splendid images ? It is not nature and reason, but mere fashion, that bath branded this practice with the odious name of puritanism, or of pe- dantry; and I think I may congratulate the present age, that it begins a little to be revived, even by the writers of the first rank. May I presume again to enquire why we should absolutely renounce the fashion of our fore - fathers, in adorning their churches and their houses with the wise and pious sayings of phi- losophers, or of prophets and men inspired ? God himself in- vented this practice, and made it a law for the Jews, his favourite people, That they should write his statutes on the posts of their houses, and on their gates, to strike the eye and heart of them that come in. Nor is there any thing superstitious and Jewish in this matter.: The walls of christian temples were wont to be inscribed with remarkable precepts of piety taken from the word of God ; moral and divine mottos were, in former centuries, thought an ornament to the narrow pannels of their wainscot, and long and beautiful sentences ran round the cornish of a pri vate house, and carried virtue and peace with them all the way. That divine rule of equity, Deal with others, as you would have others deal with you, has stood guard in a tradesman's shop against every appearance of fraud, and every temptation to over - reach a customer. Closets and counting- houses often told our ancestors their duty when they were alone ; and their large and spacious halls taught virtue and goodness to the world in fair and legible characters. The parlour and the dining -room put their friends in mind of God and heaven, in letters of vermilion and gold ; and the kitchen and the out - houses instructed the servants in their duty, and reproved them to the face when they ventured to practise iniquity out of the sight of their master. I know there is a decorum to be observed in all things of this kind. I am not for pasting up whole pages of morality round the rooms, nor filling every naked pannel with little Gothic emblems and ornaments, with pious rhymes or lectures of reli- gion : But methinks we run to a wide extreme, when we abso- lutely exclude every such lesson of virtue from all the places of our residence. And since the present mode has condemned all these inscriptions of truth and goodness, I know not what is come in the room of them, unless it be the filthy abuse of letters, and a lewd or a profane couplet graven with a diamond on a pane of glass. Our walls in ages past wore the signatures of honour and virtue : Now there are too many windows, that as soon as they admit the light, discover our shame. I wonder how any man that pretends to politeness and elegancy, should scribble such lines as female modesty ought never to see, and A a 2
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