_Justice._--You say in the usual spirit of vanity, Y or X has the same degree of the spirit of justice as V. This is easily said, but the test is, what will he _do_ for it? Suppose a man to propose rewards exclusively to those who assisted at a fire, then X and Y, suppose, have equally seen that many did _not_ assist, even refused to do so. But X perhaps will shrink from exposing them; V will encounter any hatred for truth and justice by exposing the undeserving. It is a foolish thing to say 'Hard words break no bones.' How impossible to call up from the depths of forgotten times all the unjust or shocking insinuations, all the scornful refusals to understand one aright, etc. But surely an injury is nothing to them; for that may be measured, made sensible, and cannot be forgotten, whereas the other case is like the dispute, 'Is he wrong as a _poet_?' compared with this, 'Is he wrong as a _geometrician_?' There need be no anger with the latter dispute; it is capable of decision. Then, again, a heart so lacerated is required by Christianity to forgive the lacerator. Hard it is to do, and imperfectly it is ever done, except through the unbuckling of human nature under higher inspirations _working together with time_. Instead of being any compliment it is the most profound insult, the idea one can write something rapidly. It is no homage to the writer; it is villainous insensibility to the written. Two subjects of stories occur to me. 1. For my Arabian tales, founded on the story of the Minyas Treasure-House at Orchomenus. 2. Another of an abbess, who was such by dispensation, but had been married; her accomplished son succeeds in carrying off a nun. She labours for the discovery and punishment of the unknown criminal, till she learns who he is; then parting from him for ever in the early dawn, she, sacrificing to a love that for her was to produce only hatred and the total destruction of the total hopes of her ageing life. Splendide Mendax! and the more angel she. I find the double effect as the reason of my now reading again with profit every book, however often read in earlier times, that by and through my greater knowledge and the more numerous questions growing out of that knowledge, I have deeper interest, and by and through this deeper interest I have a value put upon those questions, and I have other questions supervening through the interest alone. The interest is incarnated in the wider knowledge; the knowledge is incarnated in the interest, or at least the curiosity and questions.