rowing against wind and tide, and some people could be good only by doing that ceaselessly.  I am not thinking now of pirates and pickpockets.  But take the case of a sour, backbiting, malicious, wrong-headed, lying old woman, who gives her life to saying disagreeable things and making mischief between friends.  There are not many mortals with whom one is less disposed to have patience.  But yet, if you knew all, you would not be so severe in what you think and say of her.  You do not know the physical irritability of nerve and weakness of constitution which that poor creature may have inherited; you do not know the singular twist of mind which she may have got from Nature and from bad and unkind treatment in youth; you do not know the bitterness of heart she has felt at the polite snubbings and ladylike tortures which in excellent society are often the share of the poor and the dependent.  If you knew all these things, you would bear more patiently with my friend Miss Limejuice, though I confess that sometimes you would find it uncommonly hard to do so.

As I wrote that last paragraph, I began dimly to fancy that somewhere I had seen the idea which is its subject treated by an abler hand by far than mine.  The idea, you may be sure, was not suggested to me by books, but by what I have seen of men and women.  But it is a pleasant thing to find that a thought which at the time is strongly impressing one’s self has impressed other men.  And a modest person, who knows very nearly what his humble mark is, will be quite pleased to find that another man has not only anticipated his thoughts, but has expressed them much better than he could have done.  Yes, let me turn to that incomparable essay of John Foster, “On a Man’s writing Memoirs of Himself.”  Here it is.

“Make the supposition that any given number of persons,—­a hundred, for instance,—­taken promiscuously, should be able to write memoirs of themselves so clear and perfect as to explain, to your discernment at least, the entire process by which their minds have attained their present state, recounting all the most impressive circumstances.  If they should read these memoirs to you in succession, while your benevolence, and the moral principles according to which you felt and estimated, were kept at the highest pitch, you would often, during the disclosure, regret to observe how many things may be the causes of irretrievable mischief.  ‘Why is the path of life,’ you would say, ’so haunted as if with evil spirits of every diversity of noxious agency, some of which may patiently accompany, or others of which may suddenly cross, the unfortunate wanderer?’ And you would regret to observe into how many forms of intellectual and moral perversion the human mind readily yields itself to be modified.

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