care for it?  I don’t mean that you despise it:  I mean that it causes you no feeling but one of amusement and pleasure.  You feel that it is written by a clever man and a gentleman:  you know that there is not a vestige of malice in it.  You would like to shake hands with the writer, and to thank him for various useful hints.  As for reviewing which is truly malignant—­that which deals in intentional misrepresentation and coarse abuse—­it is practically unknown in respectable periodicals.  And wherever you may find it (as you sometimes may) you ought never to be angry with the man who did it:  you ought to be sorry for him.  Depend upon it, the poor fellow is in bad health or in low spirits:  no one but a man who is really unhappy himself will deliberately set himself to annoy any one else.  It is the misery, anxiety, poverty, which are wringing the man’s heart, that make their pitiful moan in that bitter article.  Make the poor man better off, and he will be better natured.

And so, my friend, now that our task is finished, let us go out in this kindly temper to enjoy the summer day.  But you must first assure your mind that your work is really finished.  You cannot thus simply enjoy the summer day, if you have a latent feeling rankling at your heart that you are neglecting something that you ought to do.  The little jar of your moral being caused by such a feeling, will be like the horse-hair shirt, will be like the peas in the pilgrim’s shoes.  So, clerical reader, after you have written your allotted pages of sermon, and answered your few letters, turn to your tablet-diary, or whatever contrivance you have for suggesting to your memory the work you have to do.  If you have marked down some mere call to make, that may fairly enough be postponed on this hot day.  But look at your list of sick, and see when you visited each last, and consider whether there be any you ought to visit to-day.  And if there be, never mind though the heat be sweltering and the roads dusty and shadeless:  never mind though the poor old man or woman lives five miles off, and though your horse is lame:  get ready, and walk away as slowly as you can, and do your duty.  You are not the reader I want:  you are not the man with whom I wish to think of summer days:  if you could in the least enjoy the afternoon, or have the faintest pleasure in your roses and your grass, with the thought of that neglected work hanging over you.  And though you may return four hours hence, fagged and jaded, you will sit with a pleased heart down to dinner, and you will welcome the twilight when it comes, with the cheerful sense of duty done and temptation resisted.  But upon my ideal summer day, I suppose that after looking over your sick-list, and all your memoranda, you find that there is nothing to do that need take you to-day beyond your own little realm.  And so, with the delightful sense of leisure to breathe and think, you walk forth into the green shade to spend the summer afternoon.  Bring with