"We must patiently suffer," says Montaigne, "the laws of our condition; we are born to grow old, to grow weak, and to be sick, in spite of all physic. 'Tis the first lesson the Mexicans teach their children; so soon as ever they are born, they thus salute them: 'Child, thou art come into the world to endure, suffer, and say nothing.'" "Half the miseries of human life," thought Hazlitt, "proceed from our not perceiving the incompatibility of different attainments, and consequently aiming at too much. We make ourselves wretched in vainly aspiring after advantages we are deprived of; and do not consider that if we had these advantages it would be quite impossible for us to retain those which we actually do possess, and which, after all, if it were put to the question, we would not consent to part with for the sake of any others." "Men of true wisdom and goodness," says Fielding, "are contented to take persons and things as they are, without complaining of their imperfections, or attempting to amend them; they can see a fault in a friend, or relation, or an acquaintance, without ever mentioning it to the parties themselves or to any others; and this often without lessening their affection: indeed, unless great discernment be tempered with this overlooking disposition, we ought never to contract friendships but with a degree of folly which we can deceive; for I hope my friends will pardon me when I declare, I know none of them without a fault; and I should be sorry if I could imagine I had any friends who could not see mine. Forgiveness of this kind we give and demand in turn: it is an exercise of friendship, and perhaps none of the least pleasant, and this forgiveness we must bestow without desire of amendment. There is, perhaps, no surer mark of folly, than an attempt to correct the natural infirmities of those we love: the finest composition of human nature, as well as the finest china, may have a flaw in it; and this, I am afraid, in either case, is equally incurable, though nevertheless the pattern may remain of the highest value." "In short," says Bulwer, "I suspect that every really skilled man of the world--as the world exists for its citizens in this nineteenth century--who, at the ripe age of forty, looks from the window of his club on the every-day mortals whom Fourier has hitherto failed to reform, has convinced him that, considering all the mistakes in our education and rearing,--all the temptations to which flesh and blood are exposed--all the trials which poverty inflicts on the poor--all the seductions which wealth whispers to the rich,--men, on the whole, are rather good than otherwise, and women, on the whole, are rather better than the men."