s when he has a mind. Thus the dull
physician is present at "some desperate recovery, and is slandered with
it, though he be guiltless"; and the attorney does not fear doomsday
because "he hopes he has a trick to reverse judgment!"

But though one would not ask on behalf of impostors or scoundrels for
suspension of sentence, one does wish for more than a single picture of
the young man "who sins to better his understanding." The companionship
of one who by his 34th year "had so much dispatched the business of life
that the oldest rarely attain to that knowledge and the youngest enter not
the world with more innocence,"[V] might have induced Earle to pourtray
more than the weaknesses of immature manhood.

We could not, however, have missed this or the other pictures of
characterless persons whether young or "having attained no proficiency by
their stay in the world." Inexperience may fail to recognise them and
suffer for it; or the gilding of rank and fashion may win for such persons
a name in society above that which they deserve, and the moralist is bound
to unmask them. These studies nevertheless are somewhat sombre;[W] and
there is something much lighter and pleasanter in his presentation of
some not unfamiliar phases of manners. There is the self-complacency that
deals with itself like a "truant reader skipping over the harsh places";
the frank discourtesy that finds something vicious in the conventions and
"circumstance" of good breeding; the patronising insolence[X] that "with
much ado seems to recover your name"; the egoism of discontent that "has
an accustomed tenderness not to be crossed in its fancy"; or lastly, that
affectation of reticence which is as modern as anything in the book,
though its illustrations look so remote. Where we meet with such a temper,
Earle's is still the right method--"we must deal with such a man as we do
with Hebrew letters, spell him backwards and read him!"

Despite all this searching analysis and the biting wit which accompanies
it, I cannot think the epithet cynical, which I have heard ascribed to
Earle, is defensible. There is a vast difference between recognising our
frailty which is a fact, and insisting that our nature is made up of
nothing else, which is not a fact. The severe critic and the cynic differ
chiefly in this: the first reports distressing facts, the second invents
disgraceful fictions; the one distrusts, the other insults our common
nature; and in doing justice