lady [159] has written:

"A noble heart doth teach a virtuous scorn--
To scorn to owe a duty overlong,
To scorn to be for benefits forborne,
To scorn to lie, to scorn to do a wrong,
To scorn to bear an injury in mind,
To scorn a freeborn heart slave-like to bind."

We have, however, to be on our guard against impatient scorn. The best
people are apt to have their impatient side; and often, the very temper
which makes men earnest, makes them also intolerant. [1510] "Of all mental
gifts," says Miss Julia Wedgwood, "the rarest is intellectual patience;
and the last lesson of culture is to believe in difficulties which are
invisible to ourselves."

The best corrective of intolerance in disposition, is increase of wisdom
and enlarged experience of life. Cultivated good sense will usually save
men from the entanglements in which moral impatience is apt to involve
them; good sense consisting chiefly in that temper of mind which enables
its possessor to deal with the practical affairs of life with justice,
judgment, discretion, and charity. Hence men of culture and experience
are invariably, found the most forbearant and tolerant, as ignorant and
narrowminded persons are found the most unforgiving and intolerant. Men
of large and generous natures, in proportion to their practical wisdom,
are disposed to make allowance for the defects and disadvantages of
others--allowance for the controlling power of circumstances in the
formation of character, and the limited power of resistance of weak and
fallible natures to temptation and error. "I see no fault committed,"
said Goethe, "which I also might not have committed." So a wise and good
man exclaimed, when he saw a criminal drawn on his hurdle to Tyburn:
"There goes Jonathan Bradford--but for the grace of God!"

Life will always be, to a great extent, what we ourselves make it. The
cheerful man makes a cheerful world, the gloomy man a gloomy one. We
usually find but our own temperament reflected in the dispositions of
those about us. If we are ourselves querulous, we will find them so; if
we are unforgiving and uncharitable to them, they will be the same to
us. A person returning from an evening party not long ago, complained to
a policeman on his beat that an ill-looking fellow was following him: it
turned out to be only his own shadow! And such usually is human life to
each of us; it is, for the most part, but the reflection of ourselves.