The writings of Mr. Arthur Helps are honourably distinguished by an oft-recurring plea for mutual tolerance, on the ground of the little we really know one of another. In “Companions of my Solitude,” for instance, the author remarks that were it only considered how utterly incompetent men are to talk of the conduct of others as they do, the talkers would often be silenced at once, and the sufferers as readily consoled. Take the one question merely of difference of temperament—which, amongst men, is probably as great as that amongst the different species of animals—as between that, for example, of the lively squirrel and the solemn crane. “Now, if only from this difference between them, the squirrel would be a bad judge of the felicity, or generosity, or the domestic conduct, of the crane. “Probably when we are thinking or talking of a person, we recall some visual image of that person. I have thought what an instructive thing it would be, if under some magic influence—like that, for example, which would construct a ‘palace of truth’—it were arranged that as we gave out our comments on the character or conduct of any person, this image on the retina of memory should change according to the truth, or rather the want of it, in our remarks. Gradually, feature after feature would steal away till we gazed at nonentity, or we should find another image glide into the field of view,—somebody we had never seen, perhaps, but to whom the comments we were uttering really did apply.” Accordingly, our author would have the sufferers from injurious and unjust comment treat the whole thing as one which lacked reality. No thoughtful man, he urges, ought to be long vexed at such stuff, immaterial in every sense: such stuff as dreams are made of. In one of his Dialogues, again, he makes Dunsford declare the most curious thing, as regards people living together, to be the intense ignorance they sometimes are in of each other. And Milverton follows up the remark by adding, that people fulfil a relation towards each other, and only know each other in that relation: they perform orbits round each other, each gyrating, too, upon his own axis, so that there are parts of the character of each which are never brought into view of the other. In another Dialogue, Milverton refers to the habit divines have of reminding us, that, in forming our ideas of the government of Providence, we should recollect that we see only a fragment. The same observation, in its degree, he holds to be true as regards human conduct. “We see a little bit here and there, and assume the nature of the whole. Even a very silly man’s actions are often more to the purpose than his friends’ comments on them.”