Their own transgressions partially they smother:
This guilt would seem death-worthy in thy brother.
O, how are they wrapped in with infamies,
That from their own misdeeds askance their eyes!”
It is of their common friend Breuning that Beethoven writes to Ferdinand Ries,—“He certainly possesses many admirable qualities, but he thinks himself quite faultless, whereas the very defects that he discovers in others are those which he possesses himself to the highest degree.” One of the most natural and truthfully, as well as forcibly, drawn characters in Mrs. Inchbald’s “Simple Story,”—Sandford,—a man of understanding, of learning, and a complete casuist, yet all whose faults were committed for the want of knowing better, is described as constantly reproving faults in others, and most assuredly too good a man not to have corrected and amended his own, had they been known to him; but known to him they were not. He had been, we are told, for so long a time the spiritual superior or preceptor of all with whom he lived, and so busied with instructing others, that he had not once recollected that he needed instruction himself; and in such awe did his habitual severity keep all about him, that although he had numerous friends, not one of them told him of his failing. “Was there not then some reason for him to suppose he had no faults? His enemies, indeed, hinted that he had; but enemies he never hearkened to; and thus, with all his good sense, he wanted the sense to follow the rule, ‘Believe what your enemies say of you rather than what is said by your friends.’” He had yet to learn, and to learn by heart, the wide and practical import of the prayer—
“Teach me to love and to forgive,
Exact my own defects to scan,
What others are to feel, and know myself a Man.”
Well may the demoniac guide of Don Cleofas, in Le Sage’s symbolical fiction, say, and well does he say, “J’admire messieurs les hommes; leurs propres défauts leur paraissent des minuties, au lieu qu’ils regardent ceux d’autrui avec un microscope.” To their own faults more than a little blind, to those of others they are not a little unkind.
Gay begins his fable of the Turkey and the Ant with the smoothly-turned truism, that