Mrs. Gaskell, in her biography of Charlotte Bronte, tells of a squire of distinguished family and large property, who died at his house, not far from Haworth, not many years ago. His great amusement and occupation had been cock-fighting. When he was confined to his chamber with what he knew would be his last illness, he had his cocks brought up there, and watched the bloody battle from his bed. As his mortal disease increased and it became impossible for him to turn so as to follow the combat, he had looking-glasses arranged in such a manner around and above him, as he lay, that he could still see the cocks fighting. And in this manner he died. "Qualities," says Helps, "are often inserted in a character in the most curious and inharmonious way; and the end is that you have a man who is the strangest mixture of generosity and meanness, of kindness and severity, even of dishonesty and nobleness. Then the passions enter. Sometimes these just fit in, unfortunately, with good points of character,--so that one man may be ruined by a passion which another and a worse man would have escaped unhurt from. Then there are the circumstances to which a character is exposed, and which vary so much that it hardly seems that people are living in the same world, so different are to them the outward things they have to contend with. Altogether, the human being becomes such a complicated creature, that though at last you may know something about some one specimen,--what it will say and what it will do on a given occasion,--you never know enough about the creature to condemn it." "Neither the vices nor the virtues of man," says Taine, "are his nature; to praise or to blame him is not to know him; approbation or disapprobation does not define him; the names of good or bad tell us nothing of what he is. Put the robber Cartouche in an Italian court of the fifteenth century; he would be a great statesman. Transport this nobleman, stingy and narrow-minded, into a shop; he will be an exemplary tradesman. This public man, of inflexible probity, is in his drawing-room an intolerable coxcomb. This father of a family, so humane, is an idiotic politician. Change a virtue in its circumstances, and it becomes a vice; change a vice in its circumstances, and it becomes a virtue. Regard the same quality from two sides; on one it is a fault, on the other a merit. The essential of a man is found concealed far below these moral badges. A character is a force, like gravity, weight, or steam, capable, as it may happen, of pernicious or profitable effects, and which must be defined otherwise than by the amount of weight it can lift or the havoc it can cause. It is therefore to ignore man, to reduce him to an aggregate of virtues and vices; it is to lose sight in him of all but the exterior and social side; it is to neglect the inner and natural element."