men.  There is no newspaper published in Britain which contains abler writing than the “Edinburgh Scotsman.”  And of course no one need say anything as to the literary merits of the “Times.”  Well, one day within the last few months, the “Times” and the “Scotsman” each published a somewhat elaborate review of a certain book.  The reviews were flatly opposed to one another; they had no common ground at all; one said the book was extremely good, and the other that it was extremely bad.  You must just make up your mind that in matters of taste there can be no unvarying standard of truth.  In aesthetic matters, truth is quite relative.  What is bad to you is good to me, perhaps.  And indeed, if one might adduce the saddest of all possible proofs how even the loftiest and most splendid genius fails to commend itself to every cultivated mind, it may suffice to say, that that brilliant “Scotsman” has on several occasions found fault with the works of A.K.H.B.!

If you, my reader, are a wise and kind-hearted person, (as I have no doubt whatever but you are,) I think you would like very much to meet and converse with any person who has formed a bad opinion of you.  You would take great pleasure in overcoming such a one’s prejudice against you; and if the person were an honest and worthy person, you would be almost certain to do so.  Very few folk are able to retain any bitter feeling towards a man they have actually talked with, unless the bitter feeling be one which is just.  And a very great proportion of all the unfavorable opinions which men entertain of their fellow-men found on some misconception.  You take up somehow an impression that such a one is a conceited, stuck-up person:  you come to know him, and you find he is the frankest and most unaffected of men.  You had a belief that such another was a cynical, heartless being, till you met him one day coming down a long black stair, in a poor part of the town, from a bare chamber in which is a little sick child, with two large tears running down his face; and when you enter the poor apartment, you learn certain facts as to his quiet benevolence which compel you suddenly to construct a new theory of that man’s character.  It is only people who are radically and essentially bad whom you can really dislike after you come to know them.  And the human beings who are thus essentially bad are very few.  Something of the original Image lingers yet in almost every human soul:  and in many a homely, commonplace person, what with vestiges of the old, and a blessed planting-in of something new, there is a vast deal of it.  And every human being, conscious of honest intention and of a kind heart, may well wish that the man who dislikes and abuses him could just know him.