"Passions, prejudices, and frailties!" "There is no man so good," says Montaigne, "who, were he to submit all his thoughts and actions to the laws, would not deserve hanging ten times in his life. [Talleyrand, when Rulhière said he had been guilty of only one wickedness in his life, asked, "When will it end?">[ We are so far from being good men, according to the laws of God, that we cannot be so according to our own; human wisdom never yet arrived at the duty that it had itself prescribed; and could it arrive there, it would still prescribe itself others beyond it, to which it would ever aspire and pretend; so great an enemy of consistency is our human condition." Of prejudice it has been truly said by Basil Montagu, in a note to one of his publications, that "it has the singular ability of accommodating itself to all the possible varieties of the human mind. Some passions and vices are but thinly scattered among mankind, and find only here and there a fitness of reception. But prejudice, like the spider, makes everywhere its home. It has neither taste nor choice of place, and all that it requires is room. There is scarcely a situation, except fire and water, in which a spider will not live. So let the mind be as naked as the walls of an empty and forsaken tenement, gloomy as a dungeon, or ornamented with the richest abilities of thinking; let it be hot, cold, dark or light, lonely or inhabited, still prejudice, if undisturbed, will fill it with cobwebs, and live, like the spider, where there seems nothing to live on. If the one prepares her food by poisoning it to her palate and her use, the other does the same; and as several of our passions are strongly characterized by the animal world, prejudice may be denominated the spider of the mind." "We are all frail, but do thou esteem none more frail than thyself." "Those many that need pity," says Jeremy Taylor, "and those infinities of people that refuse to pity, are miserable upon a several charge, but yet they almost make up all mankind."
"Lord, what is man—what the best of men—but man at the best!" exclaimed the impassioned and pious Whitefield.
"Then gently scan your brother man,
Still gentler sister woman;
Though they may gang a kennin wrang,
To step aside is human:
One point must still be greatly dark,
The moving why they do it:
And just as lamely can ye mark,
How far perhaps they rue it.
"Who made the heart, 'tis He alone
Decidedly can try us,
He knows each chord—its various tone,
Each spring—its various bias:
Then at the balance let's be mute,
We never can adjust it;
What's done we partly may compute,
But know not what's resisted."
It is said that when Leonardo da Vinci had finished his celebrated picture of the Last Supper, he introduced a friend to inspect the work privately, and give his judgment concerning it. "Exquisite!" exclaimed his friend; "that wine-cup seems to stand out from the table as solid, glittering silver." Thereupon the artist took a brush and blotted out the cup, saying, "I meant that the figure of Christ should first and mainly attract the observer's eye, and whatever diverts attention from him must be blotted out." Could we poor mortals just as readily blot out of our lives whatever diverts attention from the real good that is in us, how differently would we appear to others.
"Artists," says Hawthorne, "are fond of painting their own portraits; and in Florence, there is a gallery of hundreds of them, including the most illustrious, in all of which there are autobiographical characteristics, so to speak; traits, expressions, loftinesses, and amenities, which would have been invisible had they not been painted from within. Yet their reality and truth are none the less."
A good woman, who had bred a large family, and led a long life of devotion and self-sacrifice—worn out by care, and weary of her burdens—came at length to what was supposed to be her death-bed. A clergyman in the neighborhood thought it to be his duty to call upon her. He asked her in usual language if she had made her peace with her Maker; to which she replied that she was not aware that there had been any trouble.
"The most important thing in life," said Pascal, "is the choice of a profession; and yet this is a thing purely in the disposal of chance." We, however, take little or no account of the effects of particular professions or occupations upon the mind and character, holding all alike responsible for opinions and conduct. It does not occur to us as possible that even suicide and murder may primarily result from vocation. Rösch and Esquirol affirm from observation that indigo-dyers become melancholy; and those who dye scarlet, choleric.
Cottle, the bookseller, wrote with a pencil some lines on the wall of the room in Bristol, Newgate, where poor Savage died, which were admired by Coleridge. These are two of them:—
"If some virtues in thy breast there be,
Ask if they sprang from circumstance or thee."