And it is worth remarking, that you will find many persons who are very charitable to blackguards, but who have no charity for the weaknesses of really good people. They will hunt out the act of thoughtless liberality, done by the scapegrace who broke his mother's heart, and squandered his poor sisters' little portions they will make much of that liberal act: such an act as tossing to some poor Magdalen a purse, filled with money which was probably not his own; and they will insist that there is hope for the blackguard yet. But these persons will tightly shut their eyes against a great many substantially good deeds, done by a man who thinks Prelacy the abomination of desolation, or who thinks that stained glass and an organ are sinful. I grant you that there is a certain fairness in trying the blackguard and the religionist by different standards. Where the pretension is higher, the test may justly be more severe. But I say it is unfair to puzzle out with diligence the one or two good things in the character of a reckless scamp: and to refuse moderate attention to the many good points about a weak, narrow-minded, and uncharitable good person. I ask for charity in the estimating of all human characters: even in estimating the character of the man who would show no charity to another. I confess freely that in the last-named case, the exercise of charity is extremely difficult.

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CHAPTER VIII.

THE

OUTSIDE.

HERE is a tremendous difference between being Inside and being Outside. The distance in space may be very small but the distance in feeling is vast. Sometimes the outside is the better place, sometimes the inside: but I have always thought that this is a case in which there is an interruption of nature's general law of gradation. Other differences are shaded off into each other. Youth passes imperceptibly into age: the evening light melts gradually into darkness: and you may find some mineral production to mark every step in the progress from lava to granite, which (as you probably do not know) are in their elements the same thing. But it is a positive and striking fact, that you are outside or inside. There is no gradation nor shaking off between the two. I am sitting here on a green knoll: the ground slopes away steeply on three sides, down to a little river. The grass is very rich and fresh and it is lighted up with innumerable buttercups and daisies.

You can see that the old monks, who used to worship in that lovely Gothic chapel, brought these acres under cultivation in days when what is now the fertile country round, was a desolate waste. And the warm air of one of the last days of May is just stirring the thick trees around. But all this is because I am outside. There is an inside hard by where things are very different. Down below this green knoll, but on a rock high above the little river, you may see the ruins of an old feudal castle. Last night I passed over the narrow bridge that leads to the rock on which the ruins stand and a young fellow, moderately versed in its history, showed me all that remains of the castle. You go away down, stair after stair, and reach successive ranges of chambers, all of stone, formerly guardrooms and kitchens. These chambers are sufficiently cheerful; for though on one side far underground, on the other side they are high above the glen and the river. The setting sun was streaming into their windows: and the fresh green of beeches and pines looked over from the other side of the narrow gorge. now the young fellow mentioned that the dungeons were still far beneath; and in a pitch-dark passage, he made me feel a small doorway, black as night, going down to the horrible dark recesses below, to which not a ray of light was admitted, and to which not a breath of the fragrant spring air without could ever come. You could not but think what it must have been, long ago, to be dragged through those dark

But

passages, and violently thrust through that narrow door, and down to the black abyss. You felt how thoroughly hopeless escape would be: how entirely you were at the mercy of the people who put you there. And coming up from those dungeons, climbing the successive stairs, you reached the daylight again : and descending the steep walks of the garden, you reached a place just outside the dungeons: which on this side are far above ground. There was the pleasant summer sunset: there were the milk-white hawthorns and the fragrant lilacs; there was an apple-tree, whose pink-and-white blossoms were gently swayed by the warm wind against the outside of the dungeon wall. And, almost hidden by green leaves, you could hear the stream below, whose waters (it is to be confessed) had suffered somewhat from the presence, a few miles above, of various paper-mills. And here, I thought, were the outside and the inside: only six feet of wall between: but in all their aspect, and above all in the feeling of the crushed captive within, a thousand miles apart. Of course, there was no captive there now: but all this scene was the same in the days when those dungeons were fully inhabited. And doubtless, many of those who were then thrust into those disinal places, liked them just as little as you and I should; and were missed and needed by some outside, just as much as you or I could be.

In this case, you observe, it is better to be outside than to be inside. But there are many cases in which it is otherwise.

You may be outside physically as you would be if you were to fall, unnoticed, and in the night, overboard from a ship; and it to pass on, and leave you to perish in the black waters. Many human beings have done that: an old school-fellow of mine did. It must be a dreadful thing. It would be better, in such a case, not to be able to swim : for then the suffering would be the sooner over; and the mind would be in such a bewildered, hurried state, that there would be less room for the agony of thought. But in warmer seas, where the chill of the water would not speedily benumb into loss of power and consciousness, the single hour through which, as Cowper tells us, an unaided swimmer might sustain himself in life, would seem like a lifetime. I know a man who supported himself for a whole night by the help of two oars, after his vessel had gone down in the Indian Ocean. His wife and child went with it and after desperate efforts to save them, he found himself in the water, clinging to his two oars. Three times, through that awful night, he cast the oars away from him, and dived deep under the surface, hoping that he might never come up: but the instinctive clinging to life was too strong: and each time he faintly struggled back to his oars again.

Then you may be outside morally. You may somehow have turned out of the track in which those who started with you are going on in life. Perhaps through folly: perhaps through sin: you have got