The career of legislation may also furnish some instances of honours which possess this character of analogy.In the digest of the Sardinian laws, every praiseworthy care was taken to inform the people to which of their sovereigns they were indebted for each particular law.It is an example worthy of imitation.It may have been intended as a mark of respect, as well as for convenience of reference, that it has been customary to designate by the title of the Grenville Act , the admirable law which this representative of the people procured to be enacted for the impartial decision of questions relative to contested elections.
Had the statue of this legislator been placed in the House of Commons, from which he banished a scandalous disorder, it would both have been a monument of gratitude, and a noble lesson: it might have for its companion a statue of his noble rival, the author of Economical Reform.It is thus that the impartial judgment of posterity, forgetting the differences which separated them, delights to recollect the excellencies which assimilated them to each other: it is thus that it has placed, side by side of each other, Eschines and Demosthenes.The more men become enlightened, the more clearly will they perceive the necessity, at least, of dividing honour between those who cause nations to flourish by means of good laws, and those who defend them by their valour.
Among the most obvious and efficacious means of conferring honorary rewards, are pictures, busts, statues, and other imitative representations of the person meant to be rewarded.These spread his fame to posterity, and, in conjunction with the history of the service, hand down the idea of the person by whom it was rendered.They are naturally accompanied with inscriptions explanatory of the cause for which the honour was decreed.When the art of writing has become common, these inscriptions will frequently give disgust, by the length or extravagance of the elogium;and it will then become an object of good taste to say as much in as few words as possible.Perhaps the happiest specimens of the kind that were, or ever will be produced, are the two inscriptions placed under the statues of Louis XIV.and Voltaire; the one erected by the town of Montpellier, the latter by a society of men of letters, of whom Frederick III.king of Prussia was one:---`` A Louis XIV.après sa mort.'' `` AVoltaire, pendant sa vie : ``To the king, though no longer the object of hope and fear: to the poet and philosopher, though still the butt of envy.The business, on occasions like these, is not to inform but to remind:
history and the art of printing do the rest.
The greater number of the rewards of which we have spoken above, are occasional, that is, applied to a particular action.
There are others which are more permanent in their character, such as the Hospitals of Chelsea and Greenwich, in England, and l'Hôtel des Invalides at Paris.
