cowardice leading to trickery and
falsehood: or a special disposition to envy and evil-speaking: or a
very strong tendency to morbid complaining about their misfortunes and
troubles: or an invincible bent to be always talking of their sufferings
through the derangement of their digestive organs. Now, you grow angry
at these things. You cannot stand them. And there is a substratum of
truth to that angry feeling. A man _can_ form his mind more than he can
form his body. If a man be well-made, physically, he will, in ordinary
cases, remain so: but he may, in a moral sense, raise a great hunchback
where Nature made none. He may foster a malignant temper, a grumbling,
fretful spirit, which by manful resistance might be much abated, if not
quite put down. But still, there should often be pity, where we are
prone only to blame. We find a person in whom a truly disgusting
character has been formed: well, if you knew all, you would know that
the person had hardly a chance of being otherwise: the man could not
help it. You have known people who were awfully unamiable and repulsive:
you may have been told how very different they once were,--sweet-tempered
and cheerful. And surely the change is a far sadder one than
that which has passed upon the wrinkled old woman who was once (as you
are told) the loveliest girl of her time. Yet many a one who will look
with interest upon the withered face and the dimmed eyes, and try to
trace in them the vestiges of radiant beauty gone, will never think of
puzzling out in violent spurts of petulance the perversion of a quick
and kind heart; or in curious oddities and pettinesses the result of
long and lonely years of toil in which no one sympathized; or in cynical
bitterness and misanthropy an old disappointment never got over. There
is a hard knot in the wood, where a green young branch was lopped away.
I have a great pity for old bachelors. Those I have known have for the
most part been old fools. But the more foolish and absurd they are, the
more pity is due them. I believe there is something to be said for even
the most unamiable creatures. The shark is an unamiable creature. It
is voracious. It will snap a man in two. Yet it is not unworthy of
sympathy. Its organization is such that it is always suffering the most
ravenous hunger. You can hardly imagine the state of intolerable famine
in which that unhappy animal roams the ocean. People talk of its awful
teeth and its vindictive eye. I suppos