[20] “Fortunately these things are known to Him, from whom no secrets are hidden; and let us rest in the assurance that His judgments are not as ours.”—_Rogers’s Italy._ [21] The friends spoken of were Coleridge and Miss Wordsworth. The scene was the eastern shore of Grasmere. The date of the poem is 1800. [22] On the “false humility” which shrinks from all censure or reprobation of what is evil, under cover of the text “judge not, that ye be not judged,”—as if it were the intent of that text, not to warn us against rash, presumptuous, and uncharitable judgments, but absolutely to forbid our taking account of the distinction between right and wrong,—see Sir Henry Taylor’s essay on Humility and Independence in his valuable “Notes from Life.” The man of true humility, we are there taught, will come to the task of judgment, on serious occasions, not lightly or unawed, but praying to have “a right judgment in all things;” and whilst exercising that judgment in no spirit of compromise or evasion, he will feel that to judge his brother is a duty and not a privilege; and he will judge him in sorrow, humbled by the contemplation of that fallen nature of which he is himself part and parcel. (See “Notes from Life” (1847), pp. 46, _sqq._) [23] Were we all turned inside out, however, Mr. Trollope elsewhere surmises, some of us might find “our shade of brown to be very dark.”—_The Bertrams_, chap. xix. [24] The avoidance of moral _estimate_, on the other hand, is imputed to an insufficient sense of the duty incumbent on all of us to form determinate estimates of men and actions, if only as bearing on our own conduct in life. (See “W. C. Roscoe’s Essays,” vol. ii., p. 308.) [25] Owen Meredith: “The Artist.” [26] “Cleon,” by Robert Browning. [27] Completed. _Finis coronat opus._ Children and fools, it has been observed, should not see a work that is half done, they not having the sense to make out what the artist is designing. “The whole of this world that we see, is a work half done; and thence fools are apt to find fault with Providence.”—ARCHBISHOP WHATELY. [28] Sonnets, by Elizabeth Barrett Browning: “Perplexed Music.” [29] He is said to have emptied two baskets of figs and of eggs, which he swallowed alternately, and the repast was concluded with marrow and sugar. In one of his pilgrimages to Mecca, Soliman is asserted to have eaten, at a single meal, seventy pomegranates, a kid, six fowls, and a huge quantity of the grapes of Tayaf. “If,” says Gibbon, “the bill of fare be correct, we must admire the appetite rather than the luxury of the sovereign of Asia.”—_Hist. Rom. Empire_, ch. lii. [30] A broken-down old schoolmaster bore witness to Dr. Chalmers’ _modus operandi_. “Many a pound-note has the doctor given me, and he always did the thing as if he were afraid that any person should see him. May God reward him!”—Hanna’s “Life of Chalmers,” chap. i.