ies us with the materials for wisdom. It is probably
more instructive to entertain a sneaking kindness for any unpopular
person.... than to give way to perfect raptures of moral indignation
against his abstract vices.

*****

In the best fabric of duplicity there is some weak point, if you can
strike it, which will loosen all.

*****

It is at best but a pettifogging, pickthank business to decompose
actions into little personal motives, and explain heroism away. The
Abstract Bagman will grow like an Admiral at heart, not by ungrateful
carping, but in a heat of admiration.

*****

After an hospital, what uglier piece is there in civilisation than a
court of law? Hither come envy, malice, and all uncharitableness to
wrestle it out in public tourney; crimes, broken fortunes, severed
households, the knave and his victim, gravitate to this low building
with the arcade. To how many has not St. Giles's bell told the first
hour after ruin? I think I see them pause to count the strokes and
wander on again into the moving High Street, stunned and sick at heart.

*****

There are two things that men should never weary of--goodness and
humility.

*****

It is not enough to have earned our livelihood. Either the earning
itself should have been serviceable to mankind, or something else must
follow. To live is sometimes very difficult, but it is never meritorious
in itself; and we must have a reason to allege to our own conscience
why we should continue to exist upon this crowded earth. If Thoreau
had simply dwelt in his house at Walden, a lover of trees, birds, and
fishes, and the open air and virtue, a reader of wise books, an idle,
selfish self-improver, he would have managed to cheat Admetus, but, to
cling to metaphor, the devil would have had him in the end. Those who
can avoid toil altogether and dwell in the Arcadia of private means, and
even those who can, by abstinence, reduce the necessary amount of it
to some six weeks a year, having the more liberty, have only the higher
moral obligation to be up and doing in the interest of man.

*****

A man may have done well for years, and then he may fail; he will hear
of his failure. Or he may have done well for years, and still do well,
but the critic may have tired of praising him, or there may have sprung
up some new idol of the instant, some 'dust a little gilt,' to whom they
now prefer to offer sacrifice. Here is the obverse and the reverse of
that empty and ug