e Prince's part in the lines
beginning,

"Alack, one lies oneself
Even in the stating that one's end was truth," (p. 209.)

for they farther declare that though we aim at truth, our words cannot
always be trusted to hit it. The best cannon ever rifled will sometimes
deflect. Words do this also. We recognize the conviction of the
inadequacy of language which was so forcibly expressed in the Pope's
soliloquy in "The Ring and the Book," but in what seems a more defined
form.

"BISHOP BLOUGRAM'S APOLOGY."

"Bishop Blougram's Apology" is a defence of religious conformity in
those cases in which the doctrines to which we conform exceed our powers
of belief, but ate not throughout opposed to them; its point of view
being that of a Roman Catholic churchman, who has secured his preferment
by this kind of compromise. It is addressed to a semi-freethinker, who
is supposed to have declared that a man who could thus identify himself
with Romish superstitions must be despised as either knave or fool; and
Bishop Blougram has undertaken to prove that he is not to be thus
despised; and least of all by the person before him.

The argument is therefore special-pleading in the full sense of the
word; and it is clear from a kind of editor's note with which the poem
concludes, that we are meant to take it as such. But it is supposed to
lie in the nature of the man who utters, as also in the circumstance in
which it is uttered: for Bishop Blougram was suggested by Cardinal
Wiseman;[57] and the literary hack, Gigadibs, is the kind of critic by
whom a Cardinal Wiseman is most likely to be assailed: a man young,
shallow, and untried; unused to any but paper warfare; blind to the
deeper issues of both conformity and dissent, and as much alive to the
distinction of dining in a bishop's palace as Bishop Blougram himself.
The monologue is spoken on such an occasion, and includes everything
which Mr. Gigadibs says, or might say, on his own side of the question.
We must therefore treat it as a conversation.

Mr. Gigadibs' reasoning resolves itself into this: "_he_ does not
believe in dogmas, and he says so. The Bishop cannot believe in them,
but does not say so. He is true to his own convictions: the Bishop is
not true to his." And the Bishop's defence is as follows.

"Mr. Gigadibs aims at living his own life: in other words, the ideal
life. And this means that he is living no life at all. For a man, in