There is so much bad in the best of us,
And so much good in the worst of us,
That it hardly behooves any of us,
To talk about the rest of us.
—Robert Louis Stevenson.
781
Leviticus xix. 16.—"Thou shalt not go up and down as a talebearer among thy people."
At a small town in ——shire lives a decent honest woman, who has for more than forty years gained her livelihood by washing in gentlemen's families. She gives the highest satisfaction to all her employers, and has, in several instances, been the whole of that time in the employ of the same families. Indeed, those whom she has once served never wish to part with her. She has one distinguishing excellency, it is this: through all this course of years,—forty—she has never been known, by either mistress or servant, to repeat in one house what was said or done in another.
—John Whitecross, Edinburgh, 1835.
782
Tale-bearers, as I said before, are just as bad as the tale-makers.
—Sheridan.
