youth of people who have become great and eminent. I read with much
disgust a biography of Mr. Disraeli which recorded, no doubt accurately,
all the sore points in that statesman's history. I remember with great
approval what Lord John Manners said in Parliament in reply to Mr.
Bright, who had quoted a well-known and very silly passage from Lord
John's early poetry. "I would rather," said Lord John, "have been the
man who in his youth wrote those silly verses than the man who in mature
years would rake them up." And with even greater indignation I regard
the individual who, when a man is doing creditably and Christianly
the work of life, is ever ready to relate and aggravate the moral
delinquencies of his school-boy and student days, long since repented of
and corrected. "Remember not," said a man who knew human nature well,
"the sins of my youth." But there are men whose nature has a peculiar
affinity for anything petty, mean, and bad. They fly upon it as a
vulture on carrion. Their memory is of that cast, that you have only
to make inquiry of them concerning any of their friends, to hear of
something not at all to the friends' advantage. There are individuals,
after listening to whom you think it would be a refreshing novelty,
almost startling from its strangeness, to hear them say a word in favor
of any human being whatsoever.

It is not a thing peculiar to immaturity; yet it may be remarked, that,
though it is an unpleasant thing to look back and see that you have said
or done something very foolish, it is a still more unpleasant thing to
be well aware at the time that you are saying or doing something very
foolish. If a man be a fool at all, it is much to be desired that he
should be a very great fool; for then he will not know when he is making
a fool of himself. But it is painful not to have sense enough to know
what you should do in order to be right, but to have sense enough to
know that you are doing wrong. To know that you are talking like an ass,
yet to feel that you cannot help it,--that you must say something, and
can think of nothing better to say,--this is a suffering that comes with
advanced civilization. This is a phenomenon frequently to be seen
at public dinners in country towns, also at the entertainment which
succeeds a wedding. Men at other times rational seem to be stricken into
idiocy when they rise to their feet on such occasions; and the painful
fact is, that it is conscious idiocy. The man's