_Qualis vita, finis ita_, is a rhyming proverb not quite worthy of all acceptation. That Country Parson whose Recreations made him a name (such name, at least, as four initials may comprise) declares himself to have no look but one of sorrow and pity to cast on the poor suicide’s grave, and thinks the common English verdict is right as well as charitable, which supposes that in every such case reason has become unhinged, and responsibility is gone. “No doubt it is the saddest of all sad ends; but I do not forget that a certain Authority, the highest of all authorities, said to all human beings, ‘Judge not, that ye be not judged.’ The writer has, in the course of his duty, looked upon more than one suicide’s dead face; and the lines of Hood appeared to sketch the fit feeling with which to do so:— “‘Owning her weakness, Her evil behaviour; And leaving, with meekness, Her soul to her Saviour.’” A different spirit informs the Kirk from the day when Wishart complained that, in their arrogance, her ministers, “as if they had been privy to the councils of God, or the dispensers of His vengeance to the world,” presumed to pronounce upon the future state of their adversaries, and “doomed them, both body and soul, to eternal torments.” Pity but the poet had been better man and Christian who wrote these strong lines on damnatory sentences _de mortuis_, even when there remains nought to show— ... “save a life misspent,— And soul—but who shall answer where it went? ’Tis ours to bear, not judge the dead; and they Who doom to hell, themselves are on the way, Unless those bullies of eternal pains Are pardoned their bad hearts for their worse brains.” More in a reverent spirit, and in a farther-seeing one, is the mystic finale of the Laureate’s memorable Vision of Sin, and its open verdict on the obscure crime of a great criminal:— “At last I heard a voice upon the slope Cry to the summit, ‘Is there any hope?’ To which an answer pealed from that high land, _But in a tongue no man could understand_; And on the glimmering limit far withdrawn, God made Himself an awful rose of dawn.” Never let it be forgotten, insists a Quarterly Reviewer, that there is scarcely a single moral action of a single human being of which other men have such a knowledge—its ultimate grounds, its surrounding incidents, and the real determining causes of its merits,—as to warrant their pronouncing a conclusive judgment.