hink the gazing world is asleep, and dwell in green hedges,
and fancy themselves invisible to all eyes but those of love.

There are persons, and of grave judgments too, who verily believe that
the quantity of conscience amongst mankind is not worth speaking of, and
treat of human actions as entirely independent of it. And this fault
honest Montaigne finds with Guicciardini:--"I have also," says he,
"observed this in him, that of so many persons and so many effects, so
many motives and so many counsels as he judges of, he never attributes
any one of them to virtue, religion, or conscience, as if all those were
utterly extinct in the world; and of all the actions, however brave an
outward show they make, he always throws the cause and motive upon some
vicious occasion, or some prospect of profit. It is impossible to
imagine but that, amongst such an infinite number of actions as he makes
mention of, there must be some one produced by the way of reason. No
corruption could so universally have affected men, that some of them
would not have escaped the contagion, which makes me suspect that his
own taste was vicious; from whence it might happen that he judged other
men by himself." You, Eusebius, will be perfectly of Montaigne's
opinion. We would rather trust that there are few in whom this moral
principle has no vitality whatever. The wayside beggar, when he divides
his meal--which, perhaps, he has stolen--with his dog, acts from its
kind impulse; and see how uncharitable I am at my first impulse, to
suppose, to suggest that the meal is stolen--so ready are we to steal
away virtues, one after the other, and in our judgments to be thieves
upon a large scale. And so a better feeling pricks me to charity. I
doubt if we ought even to say that the parliamentary reprobate, who
openly confessed "that he could not afford to keep a conscience," had
none--he was but dead to some of its motions. If it were not that it
must be something annexed to an immortal condition, would you not,
Eusebius, say that the beggar's dog conscientiously makes his return of
service and gratitude for the scraps thrown to him? See him by the
gipsies' tent: how safely can the infant children be left to his sole
care by the roadside! It is a beautiful sight to see the sagacious, the
faithful creature, watching while they sleep, and lying upon the outer
fold of the blanket that enwraps them. Has he not a sense of duty--a
sort of bastard conscience? And what i