John Foster, in one of his thoughtful essays, has this suggestive passage: "If a reflective, aged man were to find at the bottom of an old chest--where it had lain forgotten fifty years--a record which he had written of himself when he was young, simply and vividly describing his whole heart and pursuits, and reciting verbatim many passages of the language which he sincerely uttered, would he not read it with more wonder than almost every other writing could at his age inspire? He would half lose the assurance of his identity, under the impression of this immense dissimilarity. It would seem as if it must be the tale of the juvenile days of some ancestor, with whom he had no connection but that of name." Said Swift, "If a man would register all his opinions upon love, politics, religion, learning, etc., beginning from his youth, and so go on to old age, what a bundle of inconsistencies and contradictions would appear at last." Says Montaigne, "Never did two men make the same judgment of the same thing; and 'tis impossible to find two opinions exactly alike, not only in several men, but in the same men, at different times." Says Pope, "What is every year of a wise man's life but a censure or critique on the past? Those whose date is the shortest live long enough to laugh at one half of it; the boy despises the infant; the man, the boy; the philosopher, both; and the Christian, all." Diet, health, the weather, affairs,--a thousand things,--determine our views. "I knew a witty physician," says Emerson, "who found the creed in the biliary duct, and used to affirm that if there was disease in the liver, the man became a Calvinist, and if that organ was sound, he became a Unitarian." Voltaire declared that the fate of a nation had often depended on the good or bad digestion of a prime minister; and Motley holds that the gout of Charles V. changed the destinies of the world. Our views change so often that the writer who would be consistent would never write at all. The sentence that would express his thought at one time would fail at another. Alteration would only confuse. An attempt to find words to express his thoughts upon any one thing at all times would be given up in despair. Voltaire once praised another writer very heartily to a third person. "It is very strange," was the reply, "that you speak so well of him, for he says you are a charlatan." "Oh," replied Voltaire, "I think it very likely that both of us are mistaken." A day or two after the production of one of Sheridan's comedies, a friend met the author, and told him he had seen Cumberland at the theatre on its representation. "Ah, well," replied Sheridan, "What did he say to it?" "He wasn't seen to smile from the beginning to the end of the comedy," said the friend. "Come, now, that's very ungrateful of him," retorted Sheridan, "for I went to see his tragedy the other evening, and laughed through the whole of it." Smith gives an account of