and of one elsewhere who cries: "I have lost my reputation! I have lost the immortal part, sir, of myself, and what remains is bestial." Do we not see again the dread law of retribution in the passage: "Suspicion always haunts the guilty mind: The thief doth fear each bush an officer," and Gay tells us how at last all has to be faced, and the responsibility of one's actions has to be realised-- "Then comes a reckoning when the banquet's o'er, The dreadful reckoning, and men smile no more." As an alternative to a picture so sombre, we may quote the declaration, that "Chastisement is the knife that tells we still abide in the Vine." Detraction, hypocrisy, ingratitude are all scourged by proverbs, but one feels over and over again how very much the proverbial wisdom of our ancestors seemed to dwell on the darker side of things. One may find a dozen adages that have ingratitude as their theme, but scarcely one that sings the praise of sweet thankfulness, and in like manner pretension, boasting, time-serving, self-interest have their attendant proverbs, while the praise of gentle modesty and sweet self-surrender finds little or no place. It may, perhaps, be said that this latter end is reached practically by the denouncing of the evil, but this is scarcely so--a scathing attack on falsehood is in its time needful, but there is still place and need for the recognition of the spotless beauty of truth. Denunciation may do much, but sweet persuasiveness yet more. Shakespeare, in his "Cymbeline," writes of deadly slander-- "Whose edge is sharper than the sword; whose tongue Outvenoms all the worms of Nile"; and again, in "Much Ado about Nothing," we find the line--"Done to death by slanderous tongues"; and yet again warns us that "No might nor greatness in mortality can censure 'scape," and that "Back-wounding calumny the whitest virtue strikes." Byron writes in his "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage" of those whose evil task is "Sapping a solemn creed with solemn sneer," and Thomson tells how "Still the world prevailed, and its dread laugh,"--a laugh "which scarce the firm philosopher can scorn."