be older.  I have outgrown your stage; but I was once such as you, and all my sympathies are with you yet.  But it is a difficulty in the way of the essayist, and, indeed, of all who set out opinions which they wish to be received and acted on by their fellow-creatures, that they seem, by the very act of offering advice to others, to claim to be wiser and better than those whom they advise.  But in reality it is not so.  The opinions of the essayist or of the preacher, if deserving of notice at all, are so because of their inherent truth, and not because he expresses them.  Estimate them for yourself, and give them the weight which you think their due.  And be sure of this, that the writer, if earnest and sincere, addressed all he said to himself as much as to any one else.  This is the thing which redeems all didactic writing or speaking from the charge of offensive assumption and self-assertion.  It is not for the preacher, whether of moral or religious truth, to address his fellows as outside sinners, worse than himself, and needing to be reminded of that of which he does not need to be reminded.  No, the earnest preacher preaches to himself as much as to any in the congregation; it is from the picture ever before him in his own weak and wayward heart that he learns to reach and describe the hearts of others, if, indeed, he do so at all.  And it is the same with lesser things.

It is curious and it is instructive to remark how heartily men, as they grow towards middle age, despise themselves as they were a few years since.  It is a bitter thing for a man to confess that he is a fool; but it costs little effort to declare that he was a fool, a good while ago.  Indeed, a tacit compliment to his present self is involved in the latter confession:  it suggests the reflection, what progress he has made, and how vastly he has improved, since then.  When a man informs us that he was a very silly fellow in the year 1851, it is assumed that he is not a very silly fellow in the year 1861.  It is as when the merchant with ten thousand a year, sitting at his sumptuous table, and sipping his ’41 claret, tells you how, when he came as a raw lad from the country, he used often to have to go without his dinner.  He knows that the plate, the wine, the massively elegant apartment, the silent servants, so alert, yet so impassive, will appear to join in chorus with the obvious suggestion, “You see he has not to go without his dinner now!” Did you ever, when twenty years old, look back at the diary you kept when you were sixteen,—­or when twenty-five, at the diary you kept when twenty,—­or at thirty, at the diary you kept when twenty-five?  Was not your feeling a singular mixture of humiliation and self-complacency?  What extravagant, silly stuff it seemed that you had thus written five years before!  What Veal! and, oh, what a calf he must have been who wrote it!  It is a difficult question, to which the answer cannot be elicited, Who is the greatest fool in this world?  But every candid