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away, and black become white; but much that is now very black would, he submits, be reduced to that sombre, uninviting shade of ordinary brown which is so customary to humanity."* It is much the same humane thought which underlies Pelayo's apology for Roderick, when we read how closely that generous prince would and did

"cherish in his heart the constant thought
Something was yet untold, which, being known,
Would palliate his offence, and make the fall
Of one till then so excellently good,
Less monstrous, less revolting to belief,
More to be pitied, more to be forgiven."

As one of George Eliot's good parsons has it, God sees us as we are altogether, not in separate feelings or actions, as our fellow-men see us. We are always doing each other injustice, and thinking better or worse of each other than we deserve, he says, because we only hear and see separate words and actions -not each other's whole nature. Do not philosophic doctors tell us, again, the reflective author in person elsewhere muses, that we are unable to discern so much as a tree, except by an unconscious cunning which combines many past and separate sensations; that no one sense is independent of another, so that in the dark we can hardly taste a fricassee, or tell whether our pipe is alight or not, and the most intelligent boy, if accommodated with claws or hoofs instead of fingers, would be likely to remain on the lowest form? If so, it is easy to understand that our discernment of men's motives must depend on the completeness of the elements we can bring from our own susceptibility and our own experience. "See to it, friend, before you pronounce a too hasty judgment, that your own moral sensibilities are not of a hoofed or clawed character." For, as this penetrating writer insists, in continuation of the metaphor, the keenest eye will not serve, unless you have the delicate fingers, with their subtile nerve filaments, which elude scientific

*Were we all turned inside out, however, Mr. Trollope elsewhere surmises, some of us might find "our shade of brown to be very dark."-The Bertrams, chap. xix.

lenses, and lose themselves in the invisible world of human sensations.

Deeds which, to quote another popular though less powerful penwoman, our acquaintance designate our follies, may at another tribunal be our virtues-our single redeeming points; who judges rightly, who can rightly judge, where so many of our efforts are bent to seem other than we are, and the universal conjuring trick of this world is to throw dust expertly in our neighbours' eyes?

Centuries ago, well-nigh two score, it was written by the most philosophic, and perhaps the best, of Roman emperors, that men's actions look worse than they are; and, says he,

one must be thoroughly informed of a great many things before one can be rightly qualified to give judgment in the case." The sceptic Bayle was a better Christian than Scaliger, when he protested against the assertion of that peremptory scholar that Bellarmin did not believe a word of what he wrote, and was at heart an atheist Bellarmin's life and deathbed to the

besides the testimony of contrary, such judgments

are, said Bayle (and no friend to the Jesuits he), a usurpation of the rights of One who alone is the Judge of hearts, and before whom there is no dissembling.

An apostle's reason given for the counsel, Speak not evil one of another, brethren,-is this: that whoso speaketh evil of his brother, and judgeth his brother, speaketh evil of the law, and judgeth the law. Now, there is one Lawgiver, who is able to save and to destroy; who art thou that judgest another?

"Oh what are we,

Frail creatures as we are, that we should sit

In judgment man on man! and what were we,
If the All-merciful should mete to us

With the same rigorous measure wherewithal
Sinner to sinner metes !"

No observant reader of Mr. Carlyle but will have noticed, if not (which were better) laid to heart, his habitual abstention from that dogmatism of the judgment-seat in which smaller spirits delight. For instance, in his moral estimate of so erring

a genius as Hoffmann, if, in judging him, Mr. Carlyle is forced to condemn him, it is with mildness, with a desire to do justice. Let us not forget, urges the critic, that for a mind like Hoffmann's, the path of propriety was difficult to find-still more difficult to keep. "Moody, sensitive, and fantastic, he wandered through the world like a foreign presence, subject to influences of which common natures have happily no glimpse." A good or a wise man we must not call him; but among the ordinary population of this world, "to note him with the mark of reprobation were ungrateful and unjust." So, again, in the same author's review of the life and writings of Werner-who, always in some degree an enigma to himself, may well be obscure to us. For "there are mysteries and unsounded abysses in every human heart; and that is but a questionable philosophy which undertakes so readily to explain them." Religious belief especially, Mr. Carlyle urges, at least when it seems heartfelt and well-intentioned, is no subject for harsh or even irreverent investigation. "He is a wise man that, having such a belief, knows and sees clearly the grounds of it in himself; and those, we imagine, who have explored with strictest scrutiny the secret of their own bosoms, will be least apt to rush with intolerant violence into that of other men's." Still more elaborate and emphatic is the exposition of this doctrine as applied to the case of Robert Burns. The world, it is alleged, is habitually unjust in its judgments of such men, since it decides, like a court of law, by dead statutes, and not positively but negatively,-less on what is done right, than on what is or is not done wrong. Whereas, by Mr. Carlyle's doctrine, not the few inches of deflection from the mathematical orbit, which are so easily measured, but the ratio of these to the whole diameter, constitutes the real aberration. "This orbit may be a planet's, its diameter the breadth of the solar system; or it may be a city hippodrome; nay, the circle of a ginhorse, its diameter a score of feet or paces. But the inches of deflection only are measured; and it is assumed that the diameter of the ginhorse, and that of the planet, will yield the same ratio when compared to them!" Here,

according to our author, lies the root of many a blind, cruel condemnation of Burnses, Swifts, Rousseaus, which one never listens to with approval. "Granted, the ship comes into harbour with shrouds and tackle damaged; the pilot is blameworthy; he has not been all-wise and all-powerful: but to know how blameworthy, tell us first whether his voyage has been round the globe, or only to Ramsgate and the Isle of Dogs."

To a very different style of sinners the same judgment— rather the same refusal to judge—is accorded, when the doom of Chaumette, Gobel, and other reddest of red-republican reprobates, is rehearsed, in the history of France's reign of terror, while the revolution was devouring so greedily her own children. "For Anaxagoras Chaumette, the sleek head now [April 1794] stript of its bonnet rouge [and a traveller by tumbril to Sainte Guillotine], what hope is there? Unless Death were an eternal sleep'? Wretched Anaxagoras! God shall judge thee, not I."

Once more: "Unhappy soul! who shall judge him ?" is the historian's deprecating query in the instance of August of Poland, the physically strong,-who dies, confessedly a very great sinner, early in 1733. Who shall judge him?

"Hereafter?-And do you think to look
On the terrible pages of that Book

To find his failings, faults, and errors?
Ah, you will then have other cares,
In your own shortcomings and despairs,
In your own secret sins and terrors !"

Corporal Trim was once moved to avow his belief-rather hotly, for his esprit de corps was piqued-that when a soldier "gets time to pray, he prays as heartily as a parson-though not with all his fuss and hypocrisy. Thou shouldst not have said that, Trim, said my uncle Toby-for God only knows who is a hypocrite, and who is not. At the great and general review of us all, Corporal, at the day of judgment (and not till then)-it will be seen who have done their duties in this world, and who have not."

In a like spirit, another clerical novelist, of a more recent type, and whose distinctive evangel is Muscular Christianity, introduces a "double-first" candidate for orders who reminds him of Mr. Bye-Ends in Bunyan: "And yet," comes the charitable clause conditional, "I believe the man was really in earnest. He was really desirous to do what was right, as far as he knew it; and all the more desirous, because he saw, in the present state of society, what was right would pay him. God shall judge him, not I. Who can unravel the confusion of mingled selfishness and devotion that exist even in his own heart, much less in that of another?"

In Mr. Thackeray's instance, exception has been taken, on ethical grounds, by no vulgar critic, to his habit of shrinking from moral estimate as well as moral judgment, in dealing with his characters. Into that distinction not without a difference, this is not the place (nor this the pen) to enter. But the critic in question-for some years a main support of the National Review-recognises this avoidance of moral judgment as springing from kindly feeling, from the just and humble sense we all should have that our own demerits make it unseemly for us to ascend the judgment-chair, and from a wide appreciation of the variety and obscurity of men's real motives of action.*

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PART KNOWLEDGE.

I CORINTHIANS xiii. 9.

E know in part," said the apostle; who, therefore, prophesied in part; always with the assurance that when that which is perfect is come, then shall that which is in part be done away. Meanwhile, we see through a glass darkly, through a medium obscurely-"now I know in part."

*The avoidance of moral estimate, on the other hand, is imputed to an insufficient sense of the duty incumbent on all of us to form determinate estimates of men and actions, if only as bearing on our own conduct in life. (See "W. C. Roscoe's Essays," vol. ii., p. 308.)

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