confess to feeling the most minute and detailed interest in the
smallest matters connected with other people's lives and
idiosyncrasies. I cannot bear biographies of the dignified order, which
do not condescend to give what are called personal details, but confine
themselves to matters of undoubted importance. When I have finished
reading such books I feel as if I had been reading The Statesman's
Year-book, or The Annual Register. I have no mental picture of the
hero; he is merely like one of those bronze statues, in frockcoat and
trousers, that decorate our London squares.

I was reading, the other day, an ecclesiastical biography. The subject
of it, a high dignitary of the Church, had attended the funeral of one
of his episcopal colleagues, with whom he had had several technical
controversies. On the evening of the day he wrote a very tender and
beautiful account of the funeral in his diary, which is quoted at
length: "How little," he wrote, "the sense of difference, and how
strong my feeling of his power and solid sense; how little I care that
he was wrong about the Discipline Bill, how much that he was so happy
with us in the summer; how much that he was, as all the family told me,
so 'devoted' to my Nellie!"

That is a thoroughly human statement, and preserves a due sense of
proportion. In the presence of death it is the kindly human relations
that matter more than policies and statesmanship.

And so it may be said, in conclusion, that we cannot taste the fulness
of life, unless we can honestly say, Nihil humani a me alienum puto. If
we grow absorbed in work, in business, in literature, in art, in
policy, to the exclusion of the nearer human elements, we dock and maim
our lives. We cannot solve the mystery of this difficult world; but we
may be sure of this--that it is not for nothing that we are set in the
midst of interests and relationships, of liking and loving, of
tenderness and mirth, of sorrow and pain. If we are to get the most and
the best out of life, we must not seclude ourselves from these things;
and one of the nearest and simplest of duties is the perception of
others' points of view, of sympathy, in no limited sense; and that
sympathy we can only gain through looking at humanity in its wholeness.
If we allow ourselves to be blinded by false conscience, by tradition,
by stupidity, even by affection, from realizing what others are, we
suffer, as we always suffer from any wilful blindness; indeed, wil