perplexing circumstances, for temptations which we have never experienced, and for motives which we can but partially analyze. Certain it is that they who, from their earliest years, have lived always in affluence-who have never known the cravings of a hunger that they knew not how to satisfy,—who have been supplied with a constant succession of innocent pleasure to relieve the monotony of life, and with all the appliances of art to cheat pain of its sting, have but a faint conception of the privations and anxieties, the irritating and maddening thoughts, that torture the victim of poverty, and drive him, with an impulse dreadfully strong, to deeds of darkness and blood. Well did Maggie Mucklebacket, in Scott's novel, retort to the Laird of Monkbarns, when he expressed a hope that the distilleries would never work again: "Ay, it is easy for your honor, and the like o' you gentle folks, to say sae, that hae stouth and routh and fire and fending, and meat and claith, and sit dry and canny by the fireside; but an ye wanted fere, and meat and dry claise, and were deeing o' cauld, and had a sair heart into the bargain, which is warst ava, wi' just tippence in your pouch, wadna ye be glad to buy a dram wi't, to be eilding, and claise, and a supper, and heart's ease into the bargain, till the morn's morning?" We may not admit the strict logic of this appeal, for the dram is too often the cause, as well as the effect, of the absence of fire, and meat, and heart's ease; but the fact upon which the poly-petticoated philosopher insists so pathetically is unquestionably a key, not only to nine-tenths of the vices, but also to many of the darkest crimes, that stain the annals of the poor. Easy, indeed, is it, for such persons as Maggie describes, those for whom a serene and quiet life has been provided by fortune,— who are free from all harrassing cares,their livelier and more errant feelings all settled down into torpidity,—with not even any tastes to lead astray,-nothing, in short, to do but to live a life of substantial comfort within the easy bounds which worldly wisdom prescribes,-easy is it for all these sleek and well-fed members of the venerable corps of "excessively good and rigidly righteous people," as Burns calls them,— "Whose life is like a weel gaun mill, Supplied wi' store o' water, The heapet happer's ebbing still, And still the clap plays clatter, " to abstain from vice and crime; for were they to be guilty of the outrageous sins of the distressed and tempted, they would be monsters indeed. men, But, before such sit in judgment on their fellow "Their dousie tricks, their black mistakes, Their failings and mischances," or boast of keeping their own feet within the prescribed bounds of virtue, would they not do well to ask themselves how many inward struggles this negative merit has cost them, or whether their circumstances were not such as to render temptation to any glaring error impossible? It is said that John Bunyan, seeing a drunkard staggering along the street, exclaimed, "There, but for the grace of God, goes John Bunyan!" "Tolerance," says Goethe, "comes with age. I see no fault committed that I myself could not have committed at some time or other." Truly, we have but to look into our own hearts to find the germ of many a crime which only our more favored circumstances have prevented us from committing, and would we ponder on this thought with a wise humility, it might teach us, not to palliate or excuse, but "more gently to scan our fellow man," -to judge mercifully of the sinner while we hate the sin,-and, above all, meekly to thank God, not that we are better than other men, but that we, too, have not been brought into temptations too fiery for our strength. "No man," says the large-hearted poet, Burns, "can say in what degree any other persons, besides himself, can be with strict justice called wicked. Let any of the strictest character for regularity of conduct among us examine impartially how many vices he has not been guilty of, not from any care or vigilance, but for want of opportunity, or some accidental circumstance intervening; how many of the weaknesses of mankind he has escaped because he was out of the line of such temptation; and what often, if not always, weighs more than all the rest, how much he is indebted to the world's good opinion, because the world does not know all; I say, any man who can thus think, may view the faults and crimes of mankind around him with a brother's eye." It was in a land of harsh moralists, and in an age when little pity was shown to the erring, that Burns wrote these words; but, though in these days a great advance has been made, it is doubtful if we yet have sufficient sympathy for those who stray from the paths of virtue. We need again and again to be reminded that the bad are not all bad; that there is "a soul of goodness in things evil;" and that in balancing the ledger of human conduct, we should make a large subtraction from the bad man's debit side, as from the good man's credit side, of the account. Not more true is it that there are many "mute, inglorious Miltons," or "village Hampdens," whose lofty intellectual powers, like the music of an untouched instrument, have remained dormant for the want of circumstances to call them forth, than that there sleep in the breast of many an innocent man impulses and tendencies of a wicked character, which need but the breath of occasion to start them into a giant life. The pregnant story of Hazel furnishes not the only instance of a nature which, in ordinary circumstances, was shocked at the very imputation of wrong, and yet, when clothed with despotic authority, exhibited all the odious features of the oppressor and the tyrant. "Nature," says the sententious Bacon, "may be buried a great while, and yet revive on the occasion of temptation; like as it was with Esop's damsel, turned from a cat to a woman, who sat very demurely at the board's end till a mouse ran before her." It is a striking fact, noted by Sir Arthur Helps, that the man in all England whose duty it is to know most about crime has been heard to say that he finds more and more to excuse in men, and thinks better of human nature, even after tracking it through the most perverse and intolerable courses. It is the man who has seen most of his fellows, who is most tolerant of his fellow man. In the great Battle of Life, we may see many a fellow creature fall beneath a templation which from our own shield would have glanced harmless; but let us reflect that, though we might have been adamant to this, there are a thousand other darts of Satan, better suited to our natures, by which, though pressing with less crushing force, we might have perished without a struggle. Only the All-Seeing Eye can discern how far the virtues of any one are owing to a happy temperament, or from how many vices he abstains, not from any care or vigilance, but, as Burns says, "for want of opportunity, or some accidental circumstances intervening." When Henry Martyn was in college he was such a slave to anger that he one day hurled a knife with all his force at a fellow student, which might have killed or fearfully mutilated him, had it not missed the mark, and stuck in the wainscot of the room. "Martyn," exclaimed his friend, in consternation, "if you do not learn to govern your temper, you will one day be hanged for murder!" He did learn to govern it; became meek and humble; won high honors in college; went to India as a missionary; distinguished himself as a linguist; translated the Testament into several languages; and died, after doing and enduring a vast deal to rescue the East from the darkness of paganism. What if, with his sensitive and fiery organism, he had been born amid the squalor and vice of St. Giles? Or who can say what Martin Luther would have become, if, born as he was with organs of destructiveness like those of a bull-dog, he had not been led by his religious training to employ his destructive energies in killing error instead of in killing human beings? An English writer was so struck with the prodigious energy, the native feral force of Chalmers, that he declared that had it not been intellectualized and sanctified it would have made him, who was the greatest of orators, the strongest of ruffians, a mighty murderer upon the earth. On the other hand, who does not remember that even Nero, at one time of his life, could lament that he knew how to read or write, when called on to sign a death warrant. The colliers of Bristol had been noted for ages as among the most hardened and profligate of beings, till Whitefield touched them one day with the wand of his magic eloquence. Even a Nancy Sykes, amid the grossest degradation, could do many virtuous actions; and the stern Milton has said that "it was from the rind of one apple that the knowledge of good and evil, as two twins cleaving together, leaped forth into the world." Moderate, then, O thou stern moralist! thy harsh and unrelenting views of human guilt: — "Still mark if vice or nature prompt the deed; Shakespere's Style. Words in a master's hands seem more than words; he seems to double or quadruple their power by skill in using, giving them a force and significance which in the dictionary they never possessed. Yet, mighty as is the sorcery of these wizards of words, that of Shakespere is still greater. The marvel of his diction is its immense suggestiveness, the mysterious synthesis of sound and sense, of meaning and association, which characterizes his verse; a necromancy to which Emerson alludes in a passage which is itself an illustration almost of the thing it describes. Speaking of the impossibility of acting or reciting Shakespere's plays, he says: "The recitation begins, when lo! one golden word leaps out immortal from all this painted pedantry, and sweetly torments us with invitations to its own inaccessible homes." Hardly less surprising than this suggestiveness of Shakespere, |