Who can say, asks Samuel Rogers, “In such circumstances I should have done otherwise?” Who, did he but reflect by what slow gradations, often by how many strange occurrences, we are led astray; with how much reluctance, how much agony, how many efforts to escape, how many sighs, how many tears—who, did he but reflect for a moment, would have the heart to cast a stone?[20] The autobiographer of one of Mr. Wilkie Collins’s earlier fictions proposes in an opening chapter to give a sketch of his character. But he sensibly refrains from the execution of a too ambitious plan. For, “what man can say: I will sound the depth of my own vices and measure the height of my own virtues; and be as good as his word? We can neither know nor judge ourselves—others may judge, but cannot know us—God alone judges and knows too.” “Who made the heart, ’tis He alone Decidedly can try us; He knows each chord—its various tone, Each spring, its various bias: Then at the balance let’s be mute, We never can adjust it.” Dunsford the essayist’s objection to all hasty judgment of our fellow-creatures is based on the ground of its being “such an unscientific proceeding.” You comment, he says, upon another man’s conduct, and attribute motives to him. Now an ingenious and imaginative person—a lawyer making a speech for him—might show many different motives of equal probability. You fix upon one, perhaps because it is consonant to your own mind and nature, or because it is the uppermost or easiest one to conjecture; but really you often ignore the doctrine of chances, and perhaps you will find upon strict calculation that the chances are fairly four to one against your having named the right motive. As the winning horse is often “a dark one,” at any rate not the favourite, so after all some obscure and improbable motive is often the true cause of a man’s actions. In short, Dunsford maintains that our condemnation of others is often as unscientific as it is unchristian. When the Doge of Venice, Foscari, in Byron’s tragedy, agitated by the summons to judge his son, speculates somewhat wildly on the burden of the mystery of all this unintelligible world, Marina submissively suggests that “These are things we cannot judge On earth.” And how then, demands the old man,— “And how then shall we judge each other, Who are all earth?” Mr. Lockhart, in the closing chapter of his admirable Life of Scott, quoting Keble’s lines,— “Not even the tenderest heart, and next our own, Knows half the reasons why we smile or sigh,”