‘O wad some power the giftie gi’e us
To see oorsels as ithers see us,’[573]
is what I would often say. Lately, a wonder whether I can have misjudged or exaggerated my remembrance of the long-ago has made me give many solitary evenings to old-letter reading; yet contemporary letters only confirm all I have expressed. How interesting they are! It is as Archbishop Magee says, ‘Old letters are like old ghosts, coming often uncalled for and startling us with their old familiar faces—pleasant some of them, and some of them very ugly, but all of them dead and bearing the stamp of death—and yet they will survive ourselves.’
“Most extraordinarily virulent certainly reviews can be! Really, ‘hurricanes of calumny and tornados of abuse’[574] have been hurled at me. As Cardinal Manning said, ‘To write anonymously is always a danger to charity, truth, and justice.’ Blackwood (i.e. the Maurice spirit in Blackwood), in an article which breathes of white lips, after dwelling scornfully upon ‘the sickening honey of the “Memorials,”’ writes:—
“What is Mr. Augustus Hare? He is neither anybody nor nobody—neither male nor female—neither imbecile nor wise.... As we wade through this foam of superannuated wrath ... this vicious and venomous personal onslaught ... Mr. Hare’s paragraphs plump like drops of concentrated venom over the dinted page.... Such a tenacity of ill-feeling, such a cold rage of vituperation, is seldom to be met with.’
“I wonder a little if any one can really from his heart have offered such ‘a genuine tribute of undissembled horror,’ or whether these sentiments were only written to order? And then I look at Dante and read:—
‘Vien dietro a me, e lascia dir le genti;
Sta come torre ferma che non crolla
Giammai la cima per soffiar de’ venti’[575]
And so—
‘I, painting from myself and to myself,
Know what I do, am unmoved by men’s blame,
Or their praise either.’”[576]