even by the journals most opposed to him.  It is right that kings and nobles should be, for the most part, spoken of in public as if they actually were what they ought to be.  It is something of a reminder and a rebuke to them:  and it is just as well that mankind at large should not know too much of the actual fact as to those above them.  I should never object to calling a graceless duke Tour Grace:  nor to praying for a villariously bad monarch as our most religious and gracious King (I know quite well, small critic, that religious is an absurd mistranslation:  but let us take the liturgy in the sense in which ninety-nine out of every hundred who hear it understand it):  for it seems to me that the daily recurring phrases are something ever suggesting what mankind have a right to expect from those in eminent station; and a kindly determination to believe that such are at least endeavoring to be what they ought.  No doubt there is often most bitter rehuke in the names!  This law of Restraint extends to all the doings of civilized men.  No one does anything to the very utmost of his ability.  No one speaks the entire truth, unless in confidence.  No one exerts his whole bodily strength.  No one ever spoke at the very top of his voice, unless in mortal extremity.  Unquestionably, the feeling that you must work within limits curtails the result accomplished.  You may see this in cases in which the restraint of the civilized man binds him no longer.  A man delirious or mad needs four men to hold him:  there is no restraint keeping in his exertions; and you see what physical energy can do when utterly unlimited.  And a man who always spoke out in public the entire truth about all men and all things, would inspire I know not what of terror.  He would be like a mad Malay running a muck, dagger in hand.  If the person who in a deliberative assembly speaks of another person as his venerable friend, were to speak of him there as he did half an hour before in private, as an obstructive old idiot, how people would start!  It would be like the bare bones of the skeleton showing through the fair covering of flesh and blood.

The shadows are lengthening eastward now; the summer day will soon be gone.  And looking about on this beautiful world, I think of a poem by Bryant, in which he tells us how, gazing on the sky and the mountains in June, he wished that when his time should come, the green turf of summer might be broken to make his grave.  He could not bear, he tells us, the idea of being borne to his resting-place through sleety winds, and covered with icy clods.  Of course, poets give us fanciful views, gained by looking at one side of a picture:  arid De Quincey somewhere states the opposite opinion, that death seems sadder in summer, because there is a feeling that in quitting this world our friend is losing more.  It will not matter much, friendly reader, to you and me, what kind of weather there may be on the day of our respective funerals; though one would wish for a pleasant, sunshiny