declares considerations of this kind to have always induced him to regard with small respect any attempt to delineate fully and exactly any human being’s character. He avows his distrust of our capacity for, even in very humble cases, judging our neighbour fairly; and cannot but pity the presumption that must swell in the heart and brain of any ordinary brother of the race, when daring to pronounce, _ex cathedrâ_, on the whole structure and complexion of a great mind, from the comparatively narrow and scanty materials which can by possibility have been placed before him. Men who see _into_ their neighbours, observes Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, are very apt to be contemptuous; but men who see _through_ them find something lying behind every human soul which it is not for them to sit in judgment on, or to attempt to sneer out of the order of God’s manifold universe. The same wise-hearted writer—wise of heart as well as head—has a dialogue between doctor and minister concerning a quasi-reprobate, to whom the former has been kind, and about whose destiny the other is hardly more severe than certain. “Bad enough, no doubt,” Doctor Kittredge owns this scampish half-breed to be; “but might be worse. Has some humanity left in him yet. Let him go. God can judge him—I can’t.” “You are too charitable, doctor,” objects the minister. “He has saved his neck—but his soul is a lost one, I am afraid, beyond question.” “I can’t judge men’s souls,” the doctor replies. “I can judge their acts, and hold them responsible for those; but I don’t know much about their souls. If you or I had found our soul in a half-breed body, and then been turned loose to run among the Indians, we might have been playing just such tricks as this fellow has been trying.” What said a greater doctor when Boswell asked him whether, in the case of an aggressor forcing on a duel by ill usage, and getting killed in it, there is not almost no “ground to hope that he is gone to a state of happiness”? “Sir,” said Johnson, “we are not to judge determinately of the state in which a man leaves this life. He may in a moment have repented effectually.” And then Johnson quoted, apparently with approval, at any rate with hopeful interest, an epitaph, from Camden’s Remains, upon a very wicked man, who was killed by a fall from his horse, in which epitaph he is supposed to say, “Between the stirrup and the ground, I mercy asked, I mercy found.” On another occasion Johnson appealed to Richard Baxter’s avowed belief that a suicide—if hurried by sudden passion to self-slaughter—may be saved. And “if,” says Baxter, “it should be objected that what I maintain may encourage suicide, I answer, I am not to tell a lie to prevent it.” Who, as Campbell asks, after surmising that the hand which smote its kindred heart, might yet be prone to deeds of mercy,— ... “Who may understand Thy many woes, poor suicide, unknown? He who thy being gave shall judge of thee alone.”