vice and squalor crouching under its walls—­let all this be written down by an enemy, or let it be ascertained hereafter by the investigation of a posterity which desires to judge us as we generally have judged our forefathers, and few years will show darker in the English annals than the year which has so lately closed behind us.  Yet we know, in the honesty of our hearts, how unjust such a picture would be.  Our future advocate, if we are so happy as to find one, may not be able to disprove a single article in the indictment—­and yet we know that, as the world goes, he will be right if he marks the year with a white stroke —­as one in which, on the whole, the moral harvest was better than an average.

Once more:  our knowledge of any man is always inadequate—­even of the unit which each of us calls himself; and the first condition under which we can know a man at all is, that he be in essentials something like ourselves; that our own experience be an interpreter which shall open the secrets of his experience; and it often happens, even among our contemporaries, that we are altogether baffled.  The Englishman and the Italian may understand each other’s speech, but the language of each other’s ideas has still to be learnt.  Our long failures in Ireland have risen from a radical incongruity of character which has divided the Celt from the Saxon.  And again, in the same country, the Catholic will be a mystery to the Protestant, and the Protestant to the Catholic.  Their intellects have been shaped in opposite moulds; they are like instruments which cannot be played in concert.  In the same way, but in a far higher degree, we are divided from the generations which have preceded us in this planet—­we try to comprehend a Pericles or a Caesar—­an image rises before us which we seem to recognize as belonging to our common humanity.  There is this feature which is familiar to us—­and this—­and this.  We are full of hope; the lineaments, one by one, pass into clearness; when suddenly the figure becomes enveloped in a cloud—­some perplexity crosses our analysis, baffling it utterly; the phantom which we have evoked dies away before our eyes, scornfully mocking our incapacity to master it.

The English antecedent to the Reformation are nearer to us than Greeks or Romans; and yet there is a large interval between the baron who fought at Barnet field, and his polished descendant at a modern levee.  The scale of appreciation and the rule of judgment—­the habits, the hopes, the fears, the emotions—­have utterly changed.

In perusing modern histories, the present writer has been struck dumb with wonder at the facility with which men will fill in chasms in their information with conjecture; will guess at the motives which have prompted actions; will pass their censures, as if all secrets of the past lay out on an open scroll before them.  He is obliged to say for himself that, wherever he has been fortunate enough to discover authentic explanations of English historical difficulties, it is rare indeed that he has found any conjecture, either of his own or of any other modern writer, confirmed.  The true motive has almost invariably been of a kind which no modern experience could have suggested.