To pardon those absurdities in ourselves which we cannot suffer in others, is neither better nor worse, says Dean Swift, than to be more willing to be fools ourselves than to have others so. The proverbs of all nations show all nations to be alive to the ridiculous in this respect. The kiln calls the oven, burnt house, says one. In Italy, the pan says to the pot, Keep off, or you’ll smutch me. In Spain, the raven bawls hoarsely to the crow, Get out, blackamoor! (_Quítate allá, negro!_) In Germany, one ass nicknames another, Long-ears. And Dr. Trench is rather taken with a certain originality in the Catalan version of the proverb: “Death said to the man with his throat cut, ‘How ugly you look!’” They should be fair, hints Juvenal, who venture to deride the disproportioned leg or sooty hide, _Loripedem rectus derideat, Æthiopem albus_. Yet, as the Ettrick shepherd once sang in his native Doric:— “There’s some wi’ big scars on their face, Point out a prin scart on a frien’; And some, black as sweeps wi’ disgrace, Cry out, the whole warld’s unclean.” Molière’s Chrysale twits her sister Bélise, who is a _femme savante_, with snapping up everybody short who makes a slip with the tongue, while herself liable to graver censure for slips of conduct:— “Le moindre solécisme en parlant vous irrite; Mais vous en faites, vous, d’étranges en conduite.” Sappho, again, in Mademoiselle de Scudéry’s portentous romance—once the rage of readers in France, despite its plurality of volumes, as “Clarissa” was in England, a century later—ridicules the _bizarre_ orthography of the fine-ladyism of the day, while amused at the fact that the fine ladies in question, who perpetrated such gross errors in writing, and who lost every particle of wit the moment they took up a pen, would yet make game for days together of some poor foreigner who happened to use one term for another. As if it were less a matter of mirth or marvel for a _grande dame_, claiming to be a woman of wit, too, and a power in society, to commit a thousand blunders in writing her native language, than for a raw foreigner to make a few slips in speaking it. We every day and every hour, observes Montaigne, say things of another that we might more properly say of ourselves, could we but revert our observation to our own concerns as well as extend it to others. And the old essayist has his fling at not a few authors of the day who, in this manner, prejudiced their own cause by running headlong upon those they attacked, and darting those shafts against their enemies that might, with much greater propriety and effect, be hurled back at themselves. A stanza in the most elaborate of Shakspeare’s poems that are not plays—for are not all his plays poems?—runs into this eloquence of remonstrant appeal:—