round them; an insurrection making its authors seem weak, helpless, and unsuccessful to the world and amidst the struggles of the world, but enabling them to know the joy and peace for which the world thirsts in vain, and inspiring in the heart of mankind an irresistible sympathy. "The twelve Imams," says Gibbon, "Ali, Hassan, Hussein, and the lineal descendants of Hussein to the ninth generation, without arms or treasures or subjects, successively enjoyed the veneration of the people. Their names were often the pretence of sedition and civil war; but these royal saints despised the pomp of the world, submitted to the will of God and the injustice of man, and devoted their innocent lives to the study and practice of religion."

Abnegation and mildness, based on the depth of the inner life, and visited by unmerited misfortune, made the power of the first and famous Imams, Ali, Hassan, Hussein, over the popular imagination. "O brother," said Hassan, as he was dying of poison, to Hussein who sought to find out and punish his murderer, "O brother, let him alone till he and I meet together before God!" So his father Ali had stood back from his rights instead of snatching at them ; so of Hussein it was said by his successful rival, the usurping Caliph Yezid: "God loved Hussein, but he would not suffer him to attain to any thing." They might attain to nothing, they were too pure, these great ones of the world as by birth they were; but the people, which itself also can attain to so little, loved them all the better on that account, loved them for their abnegation and mildness, felt that they were dear to God, that God loved them, and that they and their lives filled the void in the severe religion of Mahomet. These saintly self-deniers, these resigned sufferers, who would not strive nor cry, supplied a tender and pathetic side in Islam; the conquered Persians, a more mobile, more impressionable, and gentler race than their concentrated, narrow, and austere Semitic conquerors, felt the need of most, and gave most prominence to the ideals which satisfied the need; but in Arabs and Turks also, and in all the Mahometan world, Ali and his sons excite enthusiasm and affection. Round the central sufferer, Hussein, has come to group itself every thing which is most tender and touching; his person brings to the Mussulman's mind the most human side of Mahomet himself, his fondness for children, Mahomet had loved to nurse the little Hussein on his knee, and to show him from the pulpit to his people. The Family of the Tent is full of women and children, and their devotion and sufferings, blameless and saintly women, lovely and innocent children;-there too, are the beauty and the love of youth; all follow the attraction of the pure and resigned Imam, all die for him; their tender pathos flows into his and enhances it, till there arises for the popular imagination an immense ideal of mildness and self-sacrifice, melting and overpowering the soul.

for

Even for us, to whom almost all the names are strange, whose interest in the places and persons is faint, who have them before us for a moment to-day, to see them again, probably, no more forever, -even for us, unless I err greatly, the power and pathos of this ideal are recognizable. What must they be for those to whom every name is familiar and calls up the most solemn and cherished associations; who have had their adoring gaze fixed all their lives upon this exemplar of self-denial and gentleness, and who have no other? If it was superfluous to say to English people that the religion of the Koran has not the value of the religion of the Old Testament, still more is it superfluous to say that the religion of the Imams has not the value of Christianity. The character and discourse of Christ possess, I have often elsewhere said, two signal powers: mildness and sweet reasonableness. The latter, the power which so puts before our view duty of every kind as to give it the force of an intuition, as to make it seem, make the total sacrifice of our ordinary self seem,most simple, natural, winning, necessary thing in the world, has been hitherto applied with but a very limited range; it is destined to an infinitely wider application, and has a fruitfulness which may yet transform the world. Of this the Imams have nothing, except so far as all mildness and selfsacrifice have in them something of sweet reasonableness,

- to the

and are its indispensable preliminary. This they have, mildness and self-sacrifice; and we have seen what an attraction it exercises. Could we ask for a stronger testimony to Christianity? Could we wish for any sign more convincing, that Christ was indeed, what Christians call him, the Desire of all nations? So salutary, so necessary is what Christianity contains, that a religion-great, powerful, successful religion arises without it, and the missing virtue forces its way in! Christianity may say to these Persian Mahometans, with their gaze fondly turned towards the martyred Imams, what in our Bible God says by Isaiah to Cyrus, their great ancestor :-"I girded thee, though thou hast not known me." It is a long way from Kerbela to Calvary; but the sufferers of Kerbela hold aloft to the eyes of millions of our race the lesson so loved by the Sufferer of Calvary. For he said: "Learn of me, that I am mild and lowly of heart; and ye shall find rest unto your souls.”

THE IRON CAGE.

It was at the time when all sorts of plots and conspiracies were being hatched at Venice, that a certain private individual, Luca Orioli by name, lived in the town, along with his sister Brigida, who kept house for him, and looked after his wants. Brigida was altogether devoted to her brother, and seemed to live but for him, to attend to his comforts, and forward in all things whatever objects he had in view. There are some women like this, who devote themselves to others, and seem to lose sight of themselves altogether. There are not too many of them, but they exist.

Orioli was by calling a missal painter, an illuminator of ancient manuscripts; but the concerns in which at the time I speak of he was entirely absorbed, were neither literary nor artistic. He was altogether occupied with politics, machinations against the existing government, plans for overthrowing it, and setting up in its place a commonwealth, in which equal rights were to be accorded to all, in which the highest noble in Venice was to enjoy no privileges whatever beyond those which were to be accorded to the meanest citizen in the town.

It was a most hazardous plot against the State in which this Orioli was engaged; he, and I know not how many others; some living at Venice, some elsewhere, at Chioggia, at Verona, at Ravenna even, who knows? At all events, they were scattered hither and thither, and had to be communicated with, when any intelligence was to be made known to the fraternity, by letter. Altogether there was a deal of writing to be got through; not letters only, but reports, statements, projects drawn up on paper to be circufated among the different conspirators. And it was in copying such writings out, or taking down the matter of which they were to consist from her brother's lips, that Brigida made herself more useful than in almost any other way. The girl was an excellent writer, and could copy out a document so that it should be as readable as print. This was a rare accomplishment in those days, and Brigida was kept hard at it you may be assured, writing from dictation, copying papers of which duplicates were wanted, and so all through the day, and part of the night as well. But for all she was so hard worked, the young lady found time to do a little writing on her own account. The fact is, that the signorina had a lover, one Filippo, ordinarily called Lippo, Rinaldi, living at Padua, and with this young fellow she would correspond whenever she got a chance of sending a letter. She would write to him of every thing that was going on, both of her brother's doings and her own; and very pretty letters they were, no doubt, and such as any young gentleman, as much in love as Lippo was, would be very glad to get.

on,

This brother and sister lived, as I have heard the story told, in a little piazzetta at the back of the Riva dei Schiavoni, and not far from the church of St. Giorgio de Greci. It was an out-of-the-way kind of place, for it was very important for Orioli that he should live as retired as possible, and be as much as possible unobserved by anybody. Here, then, it was that for the most part all those plots and machina

tions in which Orioli was so deeply implicated were con cocted; and here, sometimes, one or more of the conspira tors would come to confabulate with him, at times when there seemed to be the least chance of discovery.

One autumn afternoon the brother and sister were engaged in preparing a document to be sent to Verona by special messenger that night. As often happened, Luca was dictating, and his sister was writing. The light was fast fading, and Brigida had established herself close to the window to take advantage of all that was to be had. Orioli was at the window too, but he was standing, leaning his forehead against one of the cross mullions which enclosed the small panes of glass, and gazing out into the little piazza behind the house, which had, it may be mentioned, two entrances, one giving on the piazzetta, and the other on one of the small canals which intersect the town in all directions. There was little light in the room except just close to the window, and the gathering darkness held undisputed possession of the other end of the apartment.

Orioli stood and looked out on the piazzetta, but his eyes took in, as far as he was conscious, nothing of the scene before him. He was absorbed in the letter which he was dictating to his sister, and which related to a final meeting of the brotherhood to which he belonged, which was to take place in a few days, and the time, place, and object of which he was notifying to his Veronese friend. Now and then he would pause in the work of dictation, to say a few words to his sister on some subject connected with the matter in hand.

"Brigida," he said, on one of these occasions, "I think I was followed last night when I parted from Tito Grimani and his brother Bartolommeo, in the enclosure at the back of the palace. The vile spies and secret officers of the senate are everywhere, and I surely think that I detected one of them dogging my footsteps last night."

Brigida looked quickly up from her writing with anxious, frightened eyes.

"I am always fearing it," she said. "Dear Luca, the thought that this plot will one day be discovered, and that you will be taken and imprisoned, is forever haunting me. How I wish that the old days, before you had become involved in any of these terrible risks, were back again!"

At this moment a slight noise in the room attracted Luca's attention, and turning hastily from the window, and looking into that part of the apartment which was involved in comparative obscurity, he was able to detect the shadowy forms of three men, whom he felt at once were servants of the State.

"We come to arrest you as head conspirator in a plot against the lawful authority of the Venetian senate," said the chief officer, stepping forward out of the obscurity.

The Venetian senate in those days made short work of the trial of political offenders. There were so many of these that the government, in its alarm for its own safety, dealt out severe justice to all such who got within its reach. The evidence against Luca Orioli was irresistibly strong, and it being considered that an opportunity of "making an example" was afforded by his detection, it was determined that a punishment should be resorted to in his instance which was only used very rarely, and principally in cases which were marked by especial atrocity: parricides, persons who were convicted of sacrilege, monks or nuns who had broken their vows, and the like exceptionally gross offenders. The punishment in question consisted in being hung out in an iron cage which was suspended from the top of the great bell-tower or Campanile of Venice, and in which the victim was suffered to perish miserably of starvation and exposure. This was the horrible penalty which was awarded to Luca Orioli.

his

--

But what was the saddest part of all and it was certainly felt to be so by Luca himself— was that his sister, poor little Brigida, was convicted of complicity with him in this disastrous plot, and was condemned to share his punishment.

It was that skill of hers in penmanship which had ruined her. All sorts of documents of the most compromising

character, plans of action to be adopted by the leading conspirators, letters to them from Luca himself on matters connected with the plot, which, though intrusted to careful hands for delivery, had fallen into the clutches of the numerous spies who were always on the look out for such papers, a great mass of such writings had been seized, and proved beyond doubt to be in the young girl's handwriting; proved, indeed, by comparison with the piece of writing on which she was actually engaged at the moment when the officers of justice made their arrest of Luca.

The crushing weight with which this implication of his little sister fell on Luca can hardly be described in words. Brigida-Brida, as he always called her had been so many years under his care, her parents having died in her childhood, and was so much his junior, that he had got to regard her almost more as a daughter than as a sister, so much did a feeling of care for her, and a sense that she was a creature to be sheltered from all harm, and protected by him at all cost, pervade all the relations between the two. Nay, it is impossible to say whether the physical difference between them-for Luca was a big, powerful man, while Brida was slightly and delicately formed in an uncommon degree-may not have helped to strengthen this feeling on the brother's part, that to keep his little sister out of harm's way was one of the chief occupations of his life.

That this frail creature should be involved through him in so terrible a calamity was to Orioli a thought which was entirely insupportable. Her constitution was delicate as her frame was, and there could be little doubt that the exposure to the cold and damp, for it was now late autumn, must cause her the extremest suffering. Death, of course, was inevitable for both, as they were to hang there in the iron cage till famine did its work, but that she should suffer as well as die! It was too terrible, and the carnest and passionate appeal which Luca made to the judges on his sister's behalf- he had made no such appeal for himself— might have touched, one would have thought, even harder hearts than those to which he had to address himself. "It is my doing, and mine only," he cried, at last. "She did what I told her miserable that I am. On me let the penalty falla double penalty if you choose. Let me be tortured, burnt at a slow fire, anything, only spare her, my little Brigida, a creature incapable of harming any one, and whose love for her brother has been her only fault."

But he spoke to men of stone when he addressed that pitiless assembly in the dimly-lighted council-chamber of the Doge's Palace. The fiat had gone forth, and must be obeyed. She was sentenced, and must suffer.

A damp, cold night at the end of October. An iron cage hung out upon a crane-like arm projecting from the top of the great belfry tower of Venice, and in it were the two malefactors who had incurred the wrath of the Venetian senate. The cage and its occupants had been hung out a little before sunset, and while the light lasted the people in the piazza below had stood about the base of the pillar gazing up at the uncommon sight.

There was not much to see. Little could be made out at that height of the two figures in the cage; the structure itself and its occupants, looking not much bigger than a birdcage with a couple of linnets inside. Still the people knew that human creatures were up there, and they gazed so long as the light lasted, and not till it had quite faded did the last of them go away. The cage would be there the next day, however, "that was one comfort," and after that who could tell how long. There would be a couple of corpses in it one day instead of these living creatures. The spectacle would be more interesting, if possible, then even than now.

Hand in hand, the brother and sister sat crouching on the floor of the cage, quiet, resigned, and waiting for the end. They spoke but seldom, a word or two now and then, an attempt to encourage each other; then there would come a long pause, while they took half unconscious note of the scene around, above, below. Mechanically their eyes dwelt on the near details of the huge column to which their prison was suspended, the ornamentation which looked so smooth

and elaborate from below, but here close by seemed quite rough and unfinished. The stars burnt above them, the twinkling lights came out in the city below, the dark lagoon stretched out as far as they could see; the tower and belfries of the town showed dimly above the other buildings, but none came near in height to the great Campanile from which they hung, and which, when the bells rang out, seemed positively to sway with the vibration of the deafening sound.

They were utterly we tried and exhausted. It was cold, and the damp ro: e from the canal and the lagoon, and seemed to chill them to he bone. Poor little Brigida shivered involuntarily from time to time. The absence of all hope --all possibility of deliverance - seemed to depress her vital power, and produced a degree of chill which the actual condition of the temperature did not account for.

"My poor Brida," said Luca, tenderly, looking kindly_on her in the dim light, "they might have spared you. What

a conspirator," he added, smiling bitterly, "what a danger ous subject. Oh!" he cried, his tone changing suddenly, "that something could be done to deliver you from this dreadful fate!"

"Do you wish me away, then, Luca?" She paused a moment, and her thoughts went back to happier times. "Luca," she went on, " how happy we used to be before you were mixed up with these dreadful plots and conspiracies; when you used to work all day at your beautiful missals, and I sat by you making the patterns which you had designed on my embroidery; and Lippo, who used to be with us so often. Poor Lippo! I wonder what he is doing, and if he got the letter which I sent him after you were arrested "

She stopped abruptly as her brother started up from the crouching position in which he had lain so long, causing the cage to swing violently to and fro by the sudden

movement.

"What was that?" he cried. Something rushed by me in the air; was it a bird? It came quite near my head. Again!" he cried, after a short interval. "Ah! it is not a bird. It is-it is an arrow!"

"An arrow?" echoed Brigida; "what can that mean?" The moon had come out brightly just at this time from behind a cloud, and they both gazed down on the piazza. The sky was covered again presently, and every thing was indistinct, but Brigida thought she had made out something like the figure of a man in the great square near the base of the column. "What can it mean?" said Brigida again.

"It means,” replied her brother, "that we are hung up here as a mark to be shot at. But in the dark, why in the dark?"

Brigida shuddered involuntarily, and drew nearer to her brother. "I hope they will kill me first," she said.

The words were hardly out of her mouth when a third arrow came whizzing through the air. This time it struck Luca full on the shoulder.

A

"They aim well by this dim light," he said. "Strange," he added after a pause; "the arrow hit me full, and yet it has not pierced my skin, nor I think made any wound. But what is this?" he added a moment afterwards. lie had fallen across his arm, and as he drew one end of it to him he found that it was attached to the arrow which had struck him. "The arrow is blunted at the end, and there is a silken line attached to it."

Quick in her woman's wit, quicker still in her love instinct, Brigida Saw in an instant what had happened. "It is from Lippo," she cried; "you know what a good marksman he is. I knew he would help us.'

"There is something fastened to the line," said Luca, pulling it swiftly into the cage. "It is heavy," he continued, "and gets heavier as I draw it nearer. rope!"

It is a

An exclamation of relief burst from brother and sister at once. It was followed, as often happens, by a reaction.

"But the cage!" cried Brigida. "How can we get out?" "Easily," was the reply. "They have thought that the height from the ground was safeguard enough against any attempt to escape, and have not considered it necessary to

place the bars very near together. A little squeezing, dear, and we shall get that small body of yours through between these two bars, which by some accident have got more forced apart than the others."

Brigida shuddered involuntarily, but her brother allowed her no time for reflection. Rapidly, but skilfully, he fastened one end of the rope to the cage, and then tenderly, but very securely, wound the other end about his sister's body.

"How terrible it looks," said the girl, gazing down into the darkness below. 66 Luca," she cried, as if a sudden thought had struck her, "you will let me down, but who will let you down?"

"I shall descend the rope hand over hand as I have done scores of times for pastime at the gymnasium. It is nothing to me." O Luca! are you sure? And the bars. If I can get through them, which seems hardly possible, are you sure you can, dear?”

"I am as slippery as an eel," he answered with a forced laugh, "and shall get through as easily as possible. Come, dear," he added, hurriedly, "there is not a moment to lose. The rope is safely round you, it cannot slip. Now, dear, courage -a little pain in squeezing through and you are

safe."

He gave her, in his merciful consideration, no time to think, and very firmly, but with such care as a surgeon uses when subjecting his patient to inevitable pain, he forced her through the opening between the bars, which at the particular part might have been perhaps from seven to seven and a half inches asunder.

"O Luca, Luca!" cried the girl, "take me back, you will never, never be able to follow me. You are so much bigger. Take me back, and let me stay with you to the end."

She struggled and clung to the cage, but Luca would not listen to her. He detached her hands from the bars, only too easily, for she was half fainting, then he leaned over and kissed her head, and then with rapid but cautious action paid out the rope through the bars.

When Brigida reached the termination of her hazardous journey she was insensible, and it was in that state that Lippo received her into his arms. By the time she was released from the rope which was bound about her body, the poor girl had regained possession of her senses. Lippo's first care, after almost suffocating his recovered treasure with caresses, was to provide for Brigida's immediate escape. He had a boat ready in the canal close by, manned by a couple of boatmen whom he could implicitly trust, and he was for hurrying her away at once, lest any of the officers of the night-watch, in making their rounds, should enter the piazza. But Lippo's entreaties, usually so powerful with Brigida, were in this case of no avail. Till Luca was free of the cage, and stood there beside her, nothing would induce her to consult her own safety. She would fly with him or not at all, and the utmost that Lippo's persuasion could effect was to induce her to hide herself, within a recess in the great building which flanked the south side of the square, and came near to the Campanile's base.

The girl was, in truth, in an agony of apprehension lest that escape from the cage, which, even in her case, had been effected with so much difficulty, should for her brother be a thing altogether impracticable. With every moment that passed this terrible apprehension gained increase of strength. As to what Luca himself was about, neither she nor Lippo could do more than form the vaguest conjectures. At that height, and in the darkness, they could see nothing but the general outline of the cage against the sky. They could make out, too, that the rope was violently agitated and shaken, evidently owing to the movement imparted to the cage by the efforts of its occupant to force himself through the bars. But time passed, and there was still no indication of that descending figure for which they were looking with such absorbing eagerness, and Brigida could no longer resist a sickening conviction that her worst fears were realized. "Oh," she cried," why did I leave him! It was selfish, it was cruel. I knew he could not get through. Those

must send it up to him again; but how? is drawn up-ah, there is the rope !

The silken cord

As Lippo spoke, he looked up and saw what seemed to take the very power of speaking away from him. He stretched out his hand, and seizing Brigida by the wrist, pointed upward toward the top of the column.

A dim faint glimmer of approaching dawn was just beginning to make itself felt rather than seen, in the eastern quarter of the sky. It was not dawn yet, only the first hint of the coming morning twilight, enough to give some slight additional distinctness to any object that stood out against the sky, and no more. The true daybreak, which was presently to bathe the whole of the heavens in loveliest pellucid light, was near at hand, but it was not there yet.

When Brigida looked up in the direction indicated by her lover, she could at first see nothing but the mighty pile of masonry at whose feet she was standing, black and enormous against the sky; but, as she continued to gaze, she became presently conscious that high up in the air, suspended between earth and heaven, there hung some object which moved, and swung, and swayed this way and that as it descended, for it was descending, towards the still distant earth. The file had done its work.

Mechanically she fell upon her knees, it was only in that attitude that she could await the end, and with clasped hands gazed upwards at that slowly descending form, which now with every inch of nearer approach became more distinctly and more surely recognizable.

My little story has reached its end. As soon as Luca reached the ground, after safely accomplishing his perilous descent, the three made off, with such speed as belongs to those who fly for life, to the boat which was awaiting them, and, long before their flight had been suspected, or the fact proclaimed that the iron cage was empty, its late occupants were far away from terrible Venice, and safe from their pursuers. And in due time the old days of the missal painting and embroidering were revived, only the scene was in a tranquil Dutch town, and Lippo, now the husband of happy little Brigida, was a permanent part of the establishment.

THE CRITICAL SPIRIT.

BY CHARLES KINGSLEY.

"JUDGE nothing before the time." This is a hard saying. Who can bear it? It certainly was never harder to bear and to obey than in England at the present day. We are all tempted to judge, bidden to judge; indeed -as it seems to us-compelled to judge. There was never a country, perhaps, in which the critical spirit was so thoroughly in the ascendant. I simply state the fact, without approving it or disapproving it, when I say that every man now is—or, in the opinion of his fellow-citizens, ought to be an independent critic, exercising his own private opinion to the utmost in all matters, and judging boldly of creeds, institutions, statesmen, prelates, artists, poets, men of science. He has his word about them each and all; and usually his word of blame as well as his word of praise. To accept fully —or, as it is now called, wholesale; to follow loyally-or, as it is now called, blindly; to admire heartily-or, as it is now called, fanatically, these are considered signs of weakness or credulity. To believe intensely, to act unhesitatingly, to admire passionately, all this is, as the latest slang phrases it, bad form; a proof that a man is not likely to win in the race of this world, the prize whereof is the greatest possible enjoyment with the least possible work.

The wise man, therefore, we are told, must nowadays judge all things; -men, opinions, plans. He must, for his own safety's sake, take care how he commits himself rashly; and therefore he must be on the watch everywhere for elements of weakness,- for self-seeking, for double-mindedness, for illogicality, for inaccuracy, for all which may endanger success. He must, if he can, judge for himself. If not, he must let the press judge for him, and tell him what and whom to approve or disapprove. By so doing he does no give up his own independence, his own self-opinion, any

more than the devotee does when she chooses a spiritua director. She judges her director ere she submits to him; so does the man of the world his periodical; and each, in the act of surrendering reason and judgment to another's keeping, commits thereby an act of the purest self-will and self-opinion.

I am not blaming; I am not even complaining: such a state of mind is inevitable at the present time.

For this is-it is folly to deny it. - an essentially revolutionary age. I do not talk of political revolutions. They are but a symptom—and a very unimportant one-of a far deeper and wider fact; of an universal dissatisfaction, an universal spirit of change, in all classes, of all opinions; the spirit of change which is gaining ground day by day in this rising generation, till, in the eyes of the great majority, a man is not considered to be doing his duty as a man unless he has a project for altering something or other.

I do not complain of this. I believe that this, too, is God's doing; that infinite good will come out of it—to the good: to the bad no good can come out of any thing. For knaves and fools it matters not whether they alter for better or for worse, or whether they remain as they are. They will be still on the broad road which (whatever round it may traverse) still leads to destruction.

But meanwhile, while the creeds and institutions of the last fifteen hundred years are seething peacemeal in the Medea's caldron of reform, thoughtful men will, and must, stand by and hold their peace, to see what will come out again reorganized into new life and usefulness. Indeed, the thoughtful man has a right to say,-Critical? And why should not I be critical? If men cannot make up their minds, why should I? Would you have me go out into the wilderness and expose myself to trouble and disappointment, that I may worship that reed shaken with the wind called nowadays public opinion? Or to worship either those clothed in purple and fine linen, who used to be found in the palaces of Eastern despots, but now haunt rather the counting-house and the exchange, preaching - Get money; honestly if you can, but still get money. But am I to go out to find a prophet? Let the prophet first proclaim himself a prophet. Why should I call him one? Why should I call a man infallible when he does not call himself infallible? Why should I believe in a man when he does not believe in himself? Let me rather, with the old Stoics, refrain from giving any opinion, and refuse to commit myself on matters concerning which I do not decide, and cannot decide.

Nay, let me go further; and say to the preacher,— You accuse me and my critical spirit of judging. That is exactly what I am trying not to do. I am trying to obey, in my own way, the very command of the apostle which you quote against me; trying to judge nothing before the time, until some one or something-you with St. Paul say that it will be the Lord-shall come who will bring to light the hidden things of darkness, and make manifest the counsels of hearts. And then I will tell you what I think, because I shall know what to believe.

Well and reasonably spoken; if it were not that such men are too apt to omit (as I have just omitted) the last piece of the paragraph, And then shall every man have praise of God. Possibly, but not at present, praise from man.

For the moderate rule is,- Praise no man, lest he come to shame, and bring you to shame with him. Unless, of course, he is your own delegate, and reflects your own_opinion; for then, in praising him, you praise yourself. Praise no man. God, of course, may praise him; for he sees the secrets of the heart. But you who cannot see the secrets of the heart, what can you do in common prudence, but judge every man by yourself? Impute to him the same motives, weaknesses, vices, which you find in yourself. Why should you fancy him a better man, a wiser man than you are? Is not every man as good as his neighbor? I do not trust myself, says the man of the world. Why should I trust any man? I am not certain of my own opinions. Why should I put my faith in those of any man?

Alas, alas! from that tendency to evil which (let philan thropists say what they will) does exist and work in human