F.D. Roosevelt's Second Bill of Rights 1944

F.D.Roosevelt’s Second Bill of Rights

The Second Bill of Rights was a list of rights proposed by Franklin D. Roosevelt, the then President of the United States, during his State of the Union Address on January 11, 1944. In his address Roosevelt suggested that the nation had come to recognize, and should now implement, a second "bill of rights". Roosevelt's argument was that the "political rights" guaranteed by the constitution and the Bill of Rights had "proved inadequate to assure us equality in the pursuit of happiness." Roosevelt's remedy was to declare an "economic bill of rights" which would guarantee:
Employment, with a living wage,
Freedom from unfair competition and monopolies,
Housing,
Medical care,
Education, and,
Social security

Excerpt from President Roosevelt's January 11, 1944 message to the Congress of the United States on the State of the Union[1]:
It is our duty now to begin to lay the plans and determine the strategy for the winning of a lasting peace and the establishment of an American standard of living higher than ever before known. We cannot be content, no matter how high that general standard of living may be, if some fraction of our people—whether it be one-third or one-fifth or one-tenth—is ill-fed, ill-clothed, ill-housed, and insecure.
This Republic had its beginning, and grew to its present strength, under the protection of certain inalienable political rights—among them the right of free speech, free press, free worship, trial by jury, freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures. They were our rights to life and liberty.
As our nation has grown in size and stature, however—as our industrial economy expanded—these political rights proved inadequate to assure us equality in the pursuit of happiness.
We have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. “Necessitous men are not free men.”[2] People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.
In our day these economic truths have become accepted as self-evident. We have accepted, so to speak, a second Bill of Rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all—regardless of station, race, or creed.
Among these are:
The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the nation;
The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation;
The right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living;
The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad;
The right of every family to a decent home;
The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health;
The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment;
The right to a good education.
All of these rights spell security. And after this war is won we must be prepared to move forward, in the implementation of these rights, to new goals of human happiness and well-being.
America's own rightful place in the world depends in large part upon how fully these and similar rights have been carried into practice for all our citizens.
For unless there is security here at home there cannot be lasting peace in the world.

William James as Revolutionary Thinker

To Hell with Culture


Quoted by Herbert Read from the essay “The Cult of Leadership,” by William James

I am against bigness and greatness in all their forms, and with the invisible molecular moral forces that work from individual to individual, stealing in thru the crannies of the world like so many soft rootlets, or like the capillary oozing of water, and yet rending the hardest monuments of man’s pride, if you give them time. The bigger the unit you deal with, the hollower, the more brutal, the more mendacious is the life displayed. So I am against all big organizations as such, national ones first and foremost; against all big successes and big results; and in favour of the eternal forces of truth which always work in the individual and immediately unsuccessful way, underdogs always, till history comes, after they are long dead, and puts them on top.

William James, Letters II, 90

Tobias Smollet, Author of Don Quixote

Tobias Smollett, Author of Don Quixote



“Fame is a form of incomprehension—perhaps the worst,” wrote Jorge Luis Borges in “Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote.” It should not be surprising then that the most famous novel of all time is one of the most misunderstood classics of world literature. I’m always outraged when I hear people state, “I read it as a child.” It is possible that an extremely precocious child could read the novel in its entirety, but Don Quixote is not a novel for children. It is one of the bloodiest, most graphically violent, shamelessly sexual, and sadistic novels ever written. Nabokov was not entirely in the wrong for disliking the novel for its appalling violence and cruelty. (Parents who allow their children to read Don Quixote should be arrested for putting at high risk the mental health of their offspring).

Don Quixote is also the best-known least read book of all time. I’ve met hundreds of people who have started it, but never finished it. It’s even all right for an American novelist as prominent and honored as Jonathan Franzen to confess that: “I have started Moby-Dick … Don Quixote, without coming anywhere near finishing them.” In the English-speaking world when I mention the novel in conversation, many people immediately will say, “I love Man of La Mancha;” some even begin to hum a bar or two of the infectious “To Dream the Impossible Dream.”

As befits a work of such importance, there are hundreds of translations of Don Quixote in all known languages, and close to twenty into English—most of them mediocre, but a few of them exceptional works in their own right. When I meet English-born speakers who say to me: “I read it in Spanish and it should never be read in translation,” I know they haven’t read it or didn’t understand much of it. With malevolent satisfaction, I remind these people that Borges (who was obsessed with the novel) said once that he loved it when he read it in English as a child but found it disappointing when he read it as an adult in the original. I should point out, though, that Borges, like his immortal creation, Pierre Menard, had the “ironic habit of propagating ideas that were the exact opposite of those he himself held.”

Still, to read the novel in Spanish (despite Cervantes’s modernity—he’s the first meta-fictional novelist) is a daunting task. The man who practically invented Castilian (the language we know as Spanish) used thousands of words whose meaning time has obscured. Without the aid of profuse footnotes, it is exceedingly hard for most Spanish readers nowadays to grasp their meaning. When Edith Grossman’s magnificent new translation appeared in the United States, I mentioned it to a poet friend during a visit to Spain. His comment: “Now she should translate it into Spanish so we can understand it.”

How often we forget that the novel itself, Cervantes claims, is a translation into Castilian of the work of the Moor Cid Hamet Benengeli, who is often referred to as “a liar.” I have read and studied Don Quixote in its original language, but I’ve always taught Tobias Smollet’s translation, which first appeared in 1755. Smollet must have identified with Cervantes and his hero on many levels. His own novels are influenced by the episodic and picaresque nature of Cervantes’s work. The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, his vicious and hilarious satire of English society in the XVIII century, owes a great debt to Cervantes’s masterwork, right down to its ramshackle structure. In an act of further madness and identification, Smollett wrote Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves, a rewriting of Don Quixote, set in England.

Salman Rushdie wrote that Cervantes was lucky to find a translator whose “rambunctious personality” ideally matches that of the author. And Cervantes was nothing if not irreverent. Smollet takes other extraordinary liberties with the novel. For example, he does away with all the sonnets that introduce the narrative (even though the one spoken by Don Quixote’s horse, Rocinante, is among the most delightful things Cervantes ever wrote.) In many places, Smollet cuts and adds as he pleases; his own footnotes are masterpieces of irony, playful mimicry of style, and erudition: “Here Don Quixote seems to have been too scrupulous for, tho’ no squire was permitted to engage with a knight on horseback, yet they were allowed, and even enjoined, to assist their masters when they were unhorsed or in danger, by mounting them on fresh steeds, supplying them with arms, and warding off the blows that were aimed at them. Davy Gam, at the battle of Agincourt, lost his life defending Henry V. of England, and St. Severin met with the same fate in warding off the blows that were aimed at Francis I of France, in the battle of Paris.”

There are scholars who claim that Tobias Smollet did not know Spanish, that he must have translated the novel from the French. I’m more impressed with how, following Pierre Menard’s method of writing Don Quixote, Smollet almost became Miguel de Cervantes. He joined the English navy and participated in an epochal battle of his time. He was a surgeon mate on HSM Cumberland, during the Battle of Cartagena in 1741, which turned out to be one of the greatest defeats the mighty English navy ever suffered. Cervantes himself, as is well-known, was a soldier in the Battle of Lepanto, where he lost the use of his left arm. Eventually, the life of the author and translator intersected: Cervantes had petitioned the court of Phillip II to grant him a job in the Colombian port of Cartagena where, after suffering as many defeats as his mad knight, and as Smollet himself, the novelist hoped to have a fresh start.

Tobias Smollett is not only the most audacious and ingenious translator of Don Quixote; we should honor him as being one of its first Pierre Menards. Of all the books I’ve read in translation, it is one of the very few that seems to me to be as great as the original.

Jaime Manrique


Published PEN America 14 2011

Elegía a la muerte de Andrés Caicedo

A la muerte de Andrés Caicedo

En tu grande y noble deseo de ir a un lugar
Diferente, percibo ese desdén
Ese conocimiento de “il mondo e poco”.
Ahora ha llegado de nuevo la primavera:
Yo quisiera que tus ojos verdigris
Pudieran apreciar el milagro de las tiernas hojas;
Quisiera sostener tu mano y ayudarte a cruzar el río.
Donde tú estás, donde mis palabras ya no te alcanzan
Sé que puedes verme aunque tus cartas
Ya no lleguen entrega inmediata
Ni tus llamadas me despierten a la madrugada.
“Sólo me interesa la pasión que conduce a la muerte”,
Decías en la última. Todas estas noches
Al cerrar los ojos al cielo estrellado
Recuerdo nuestra última tarde juntos
En el tope de una montaña
Nuestros cuerpos desnudos al sol
Maduros e impacientes como frutas salvajes.
Ahora nuestras promesas están truncas
Como los árboles endebles
Que no aguantan el rigor del inverno.
Habíamos planeado escribir un libro
Hacer una película, vivir juntos.
Tú descansas en un cielo azul y calmo
Y quiero recordarte azul y amplio como un cielo.
Querido Andrés, ambos jugamos a la vida
Y ahora la muerte te pasó la cuenta.
Esta nueva primavera cada despertar
Me recuerda que ya no estás entre nosotros.
Yo escribiriré el libro, haré el viaje
Y algún día volveremos a encontrarnos.
De ahora en adelante, donde quiera que esté
Dondequiera que te busque sin encontrarte
Siempre te tenderé la mano para decirte
Que aun te quiero. Esta noche de primavera
Llueve sobre la tierra negra y sé
Que tu corazón escucha las gotas de lluvia
Aunque tus ojos mortals ya no puedan verlas.
Mi corazón es como ese cielo que llora
Mis lágrimas la ligazón entre este mundo y el tuyo.
Tú también, como yo, deseabas el descanso.
Yo también, como tú, me voy poco a poco.
Tú muerte no es una traición. Ni tu me has abandonado.
Cuando la primavera cambia su coraza
El corazón se ajusta a los nuevos elementos.
Espero que tu morada sea amable, querido amigo.
Que los árboles sean verdes.
Que el cielo se abra ante tí sin misterios.
Espero que hayas encontrado el reposo.
Después del hielo del invierno
Estas lluvias primaverales llegan descongelándolo todo.
Yo sé que donde quieras que estés
(Porque no puedo imaginarte en la region del hielo!)
Tú me has perdonado.
El mundo después de todo es poco.
Sólo la primavera como la muerte
Regresa para otorgarnos la vida.
Dime Andrés, ¿es el lugar verde?
¿El campo siempre florido?
¿Y una vez llegado allí
Existe el perdón, la bendicíon del olvido,
La promesa de que el dolor
Como el frío del invierno
Finalmente será abolido?
1979
Jaime Manrique

El Amante de Sevilla

In Seville, when I was young, the scent of orange trees in permanent bloom attenuated the sweet reek of bodies buried under rose beds, or at the foot of trees. Sevillanos believed that the loveliest and most fragrant roses and sweetest oranges were those fertilized by the flesh of Nubian slaves. This tang of human decay and fruit trees in bloom was the first thing a visitor noticed upon nearing Seville.

The Guadalquivir was barely more than a sandy stream as it ran past Córdoba; but as it got close to Seville, it swelled into a wide olive-colored river. At dawn, the river bustled with barges, swift sloops, feluccas, shallots, tartans, and piraguas. The smaller vessels carried merchandise destined for the bellies of big ships that sailed to the West Indies and beyond. These small boats were like soldier bees that fed the insatiable belly of their Queen.

The river fed my wanderlust, making me hunger for the world beyond the confines of the Iberian Peninsula. The river was the road that led to the Mediterranean and the west, to the Atlantic Ocean and the Canary Islands, halfway to the wondrous New World. Young sevillanos who became sailors—often for the rest of their lives—were referred to as those who had been "swallowed by the sea."

There was no more thrilling sight than the fleets of cargo ships, accompanied by powerful galleons to protect them from English corsairs and privateers, sailing off twice a year for the world Columbus had discovered. The ships sailed away with the hopes of the sevillanos, who would send off their men with festive songs of farewell. If fortune smiled on these adventurers, they would return from the Indies laden with gold and glory.

My imagination was set afire, my eyes bulged, as I watched the ox-drawn carts on their way to the Royal Chambers, carrying open trunks that brimmed with glowing emeralds, pearls, and stacks of blinding bars of silver and gold. Other carts transported bales of tobacco, furs of animals unknown in Europe, spices, coconuts, cocoa, sugar, indigo, and cochineal. For weeks after the arrival of the ships, I remained intoxicated by these sights. A great desire awakened in me to visit New Spain and Peru.

In the heart of the city, buildings faced each other so closely that I could run down the cobblestone passageways with arms outspread to touch the walls on either side. These were the streets that schooled me in the customs and costumes, religions and superstitions, foods, smells and sounds of other nations. Merchants arrived in Seville with white, black, and brown slaves from Africa, the Arab countries, the New World. The names of the countries they came from—Mozambique, Dominica, Niger—were as exotic as their looks. I would get dizzy from hearing so many languages that I didn't understand, whose origins I couldn't pinpoint. What stories did they tell? What was I missing? Would I ever get the chance to learn a few of them and visit the places where they were spoken?

During those years, I felt as though I were living in the future, in a city that had nothing to do with the rest of Spain. Pícaros from every corner of the world—false clerics, false scholars, impostors of every imaginable and unimaginable kind, pickpockets, swindlers, counterfeiters, sword swallowers, gamblers, assassins for hire, soldiers of fortune, murderers of every sort, whores, Don Juans (whose profession was to ruin the most beautiful and chaste maidens), Gypsies, fortune-tellers, fire-eaters, forgerers, puppeteers, ruffians, bon vivants, and snake charmers—came to Seville and made the city their stage. Life there was dangerous and thrilling, as festive and bloody as a bullfight. Successful gamblers were as admired as the bullfighters or famous military heroes. It was common to hear a child say that when he grew up he wanted to be a gambler like Manolo Amor, who on one occasion had gambled away an entire fleet of galleons that was not his.

Seville was the place where I belonged. It was created for me and I wanted to be its historian. Seville was mine and it owned me.

Most Sevillanos stayed inside during the hottest hours, and went out only at night, when the evening breezes, sweeping up the Guadalquivir from the Mediterranean, cooled the city by a few degrees. Then it was as if a curtain rose, and the proscenium that was Seville became a magical stage for the theatre of life. I can still hear in the recesses of my brain the clacking sounds of castanets, coming from every street and plaza. The clacking was a reminder to strut with the arrogant elegance of a peacock displaying all his colors. People rushed out of their homes to sing on the plazas and dance the salacious zarabandas, which were forbidden by the Church. In the plazas, illuminated by torches, beautiful and lascivious women dancers (young and old alike) wiggled their behinds with impudence and rapped their castanets with fury, turning the instruments into weapons that could seduce and then snuff the life out of you.

The dancers' looks were an invitation to dream about the countless pleasures of the body; and the movements of their hands spoke intricate languages and summoned the spectators with seductive signs to caress the dancers' amber-flushed cheeks. It was thrilling to see the male dancers leap high in the air, spinning in circles, as though to exorcise demons that were eating them from the inside out. Mid-air, these men seemed half-human, half-bird. From midnight until dawn, the loveliest señoritas were serenaded by their inflamed wooers. Brawls often broke out during these serenatas, and the corpses of unfortunate lovers were found in the mornings, beneath the balconies of their inamoratas, glued to puddles of coagulated blood.

Seville was a city of witches and enchanters. You had to be careful not to cross a woman, because any female, aristocratic or peasant, married or unmarried, old or young, beautiful or ugly, Christian or Moor, slave or free, could have satanic powers. Witches made red roses bloom in their homes in December. They could make or break marriages, could make grooms hang themselves or evaporate on the eve of the wedding, could make pregnant women give birth to litters of puppies.

Unlucky men who crossed the enchantresses were turned into donkeys. As husbands and lovers disappeared, new donkeys materialized and the women who owned these donkeys took delight in making them carry heavy loads. It was common to see a woman whose husband had vanished go around the city addressing every donkey she saw by her husband's name. When an ass brayed in response, the woman would drop on her knees, cross herself and give thanks to God that she had found her husband. If she wanted her man back, she had to buy the donkey from its owner. Then she would go back home, happy to have found her spouse, and spend the rest of her life trying to undo the enchantment. Or she might be just as happy to keep her husband in donkey form. It was said that some of the happiest marriages in Seville were between a woman and her ass.

The Holy Office whipped many women in the public plazas for the extraordinary pleasures they boasted of receiving from their equine lovers. Debauched cries and crescendos of lust traveled to remote villages in the mountains where herds of wild asses brayed with envy. Gypsies took to bringing donkeys that brayed anytime a desperate woman addressed them. If a donkey became erect and tried to mount a young wife who called him by her husband's name, or a donkey tried to kick an old, withered harpy who claimed him as her husband, or scurried away when an ugly one threw her arms around his neck, that, too, was considered proof of having found her husband. When a sevillano allowed inflated notions to swell his head, he was reminded, "Remember, today you are a man, but tomorrow you may well be a donkey."

During Holy Week people did penance for all the sins they indulged the rest of the year. Then alone would sevillanos fast and drag themselves on their knees to the cathedral. But Seville's cathedral was not oppressive. Instead, it was filled with light, color, ostentatious displays of gold and jewels, illuminated as much by its oil lamps and its candles as by the iridescent light that poured in through its stained-glass windows. It was a place where we went to experience the splendors of the world, not a glum building where we expiated our sins. It seemed to me, as a young man, that God had to be more receptive to our prayers in a place like this, where everybody knew that hope, joy, and beauty were also a part of his covenant with us. I used to walk out of Seville's cathedral content, as if I had just eaten a mariscada and washed it down with wine.

Often, in those days, I escorted my mother on her visits to the cathedral. Our enjoyment of the place was a secret between the two of us that excluded the rest of the family and gave us respite from our dingy house, with its worn-out, second-hand furnishings and leaks in the ceiling of every room. The cathedral's sumptuous altars seemed to relieve Mother, momentarily, of the pain caused by Father's impecuniousness. She loved music above all things. It's true Father played the vihuela at home, but nothing he did gratified her. Only in the cathedral could she listen to music. Her face glowed, her eyes gleamed as the sounds of the clavichord or spinet swelled. Singing made Mother happy. Her untrained voice was clear, and it could hit many of the high notes. I'd only heard it when she sang romances in the kitchen, as she went about her chores, on those occasions when my father left to visit relatives in Córdoba. In the cathedral she would let her voice spill out and rise, with the same abandon and ecstasy I heard in the lament of the flamenco singers.

After church, she would hook my arm in hers, and we would stroll along the banks of the Guadalquivir and stop to gaze at the foreign ships and glorious Armada galleons. One evening, grabbing my hand by the wrist, she implored me, "Don't stay in Spain, Miguel. Go far away from here to some place where you can a make a fortune for yourself. In the Indies you will have a brilliant future awaiting you, my son."

She did not mention my father's name, yet I sensed she was pushing me to look for a life completely different from his. Because I was a dreamer, like my father, she feared that, like him, I would become a ne'er-do-well. She had begun to see me as another unrealistic Cervantes male: I would live surrounded by criminals, constantly borrowing reales from my friends and relatives, incapable of understanding how to put food on the table. But If I let my imagination flow, the wide waters of the Guadalquivir would eventually lead me to the Indies in the West, or to Italy in the East, or to burning Africa in the South, or to the Orient, beyond Constantinople, to the splendors and mysteries of Arabia, and perhaps even to the fabled court of the Emperor of China.

Jaime Manrique
Published in PEN America Issue 11
Fall 2009

El patio de la Calle 58

En la habitación de mi madre
una ventana miraba
el callejón donde
criabámos patos; la otra
se abría hacia el patio
--con sus matas de plátano y yuca--
donde las gallinas, palomas y conejos
se engordaban para nuestra mesa.
Al fondo del patio
por encima de la alta paredilla
se desbordaban los gajos
de los palos de mango y naranja
de los vecinos en la Calle 57.

Recuerdo a mi madre
recostada contra la ventana
contemplando las arenas negras
del patio como una Tahitiana
de Gaugin con ojos brillantes
hipnotizados por una jungla oscura
donde pernoctaba
el tigre de su infancia.

Mi madre colgaba sus manos
del marco de la ventana
para que la brisa le secase
el esmalte rosa
de sus uñas recién pintadas.
Serían las cuatro de la tarde
una hora muerta
entre la luz y la oscuridad
que se avecinaba.

Una noche oscura y helada
en Nueva York, me instalo
frente a la ventana del tiempo
para ver lo que ya
no puede ver mi madre.
Ante mí se abre el camino
de nuestras vidas, las estaciones
de buses y trenes
en las cuales nos bajamos,
las casas donde vivimos,
otros patios con diferentes
árboles frutales y animales,
y contemplo con mis ojos
disminuídos, el destino
final de mi madre
mas no el mío, pues mis ojos
solo sirven para ver
el pasado, no para descifrar el fluir oscuro
del tiempo que los devora.

Publicado en El malpensante, abril 2010

Don Quixote on the Decoration of the Soul

The following are the "First Series of Instructions" which Don Quixote gives his squire, Sancho Panza, before Sancho leaves to become governor of the imaginary Barataria island. Great posts and offices of state, Don Quixote says, are a profound "gulph" of confusion.

The instructions appear so late in Book II that some readers of Don Quixote overlook these words of wisdom. Though Don Quixote is giving these instructions to Sancho, I can't help but think that he's also addressing the readers of the novel.

Translation by Tobias Smollett

"In the first place, O my son, you are to fear God: the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom; and, if you are wise you cannot err.

"Secondly, you must always remember who you are, and endeavour to know yourself; a study of all others the most difficult. This self-knowledge will hinder you from blowing yourself up like the frog, in order to rival the size of the ox: if, therefore, you succeed in this learning, the consideration of thy having been a swineherd, will, like the peacock's ugly feet, be a check upon thy folly and pride." "I own I once kept hogs, when I was a boy," said Sancho; "but, after I grew up, I apprehended, that matter is not of great consequence; for, all governors are not descended from the kingly race." "No, sure," answered the knight; "and, for that reason, those who are not of noble extraction, ought to sweeten the gravity of their function, with mildness and affability; which, being prudently conducted, will screen them from those malicious murmurs that no station can escape. Rejoice, Sancho, in the lowness of your pedigree, and make no scruple of owning yourself descended from peasants: for, no body will endeavour to make you blush for that of which they see you are not ashamed: and value yourself more upon being a virtuous man of low degree, than upon being a proud sinner of noble birth: innumerable are those, who, from an humble stock, have risen to the pontifical and imperatorial dignity; a truth which I could prove by so many examples that you would not have patience to hear them.

"Take notice, Sancho, if you choose virtue for your medium, and pique yourself upon performing worthy actions, you will have no cause to envy noblemen and princes; for, blood is heredity, but virtue is acquired; consequently, this last has an intrinsic value which the other does not possess.

"This being the case, as undoubtedly it is, if peradventure any one of your relations should come to visit you in your island, you must not discountenance and affront him, but, on the contrary, let him be kindly received and entertained; and, in so doing, you will act comfortably to the will of heaven, which is displeased at seeing its own handywork despised; and, perform your duty to the well concerted rights of nature.

"If you send for your wife, and, indeed, those who are concerned in governing, ought not to be long without their helpmates, take pains in teaching, improving, and civilizing her: for, all that a sagacious governor can acquire, is very often lost and squandered by a foolish, rustic wife.

"If, perchance, you should become a widower, (a circumstance that may possibly happen) and have it in your power to make a more advantageous match, you must not choose such a yokefellow as will server for an angling hook, fishing rod, or equivocating hood: for, verily, I say unto thee, all that a judge's wife receives must be accounted for at the general clearance, by the husband, who will repay fourfold after death, what he made no reckoning of during life.

"Never conduct yourself by the law of your own arbitrary opinion, which is generally the case with those ignorant people who presume upon their own self-sufficiency.

"Let the tears of the poor find more compassion in thy breast, tho' not more justice, than the informations of the rich.

"Endeavour to investigate the truth from among the promises and presents of the opulent, as well as from the sighs and importunities of the needy.

"When equity can, and ought to take place, inflict not the whole rigour of the law upon the delinquent; for, severity is not more respected than compassion, in the character of a judge.

"If ever you suffer the rod of justice to be bent a little, let it not be warped, by the weight of corruption, but the vowels of mercy.

"If ever you should have an opportunity to judge the process of your enemy, recall your attention from the injury you have received, and fix it wholly upon the truth of the case.

"In another man's cause, be not blinded by private affection; for, the errors thus committed are generally incurable; or, if they admit of remedy, it will be greatly at the expense of your fortune and credit.

"If a beautiful woman should come to demand justice, withdraw your eyes from her tears, and your hearing from her sighs, and deliberate at a distance upon the substance of her demand, unless you have a mind that your reason should be overwhelmed by her complaint, and your virtue buried in her sighs.

"Abuse not him in word whom you are resolved to chastise in deed: for, to such a wretch, the pain of the punishment will be sufficient, without the addition of reproach.

"In judging the delinquents who shall fall under your jurisdiction, consider the miserable object Man, subject to the infirmities of our depraved nature; and, as much as lies in your power, without injury to the contrary party, display your clemency and compassion: for, although all the attributes of God are equally excellent, that of mercy has a better effect in our eye, and strikes with greater luster than justice.

"If you observe, and conduct yourself by these rules and precepts, Sancho, your days will be long upon the face of the earth: your fame will be eternal, your reward complete, and your felicity unutterable: your children will be married according to your wish; they and their descendants will enjoy titles; you shall live in peace and friendship will all mankind: when your course of life is run, death will overtake you in an happy and mature old age, and your eyes will be shut by the tender and delicate hands of your posterity; in the third or fourth generation.

"The remarks I have hitherto made, are documents touching the decoration of your soul; and, now you will listen to those that regard the ornaments of the body."

Note by Don Jaime: And these ornaments of the body are so wonderful indeed that they deserve a new chapter.