so often find
ourselves liable, ought certainly to teach us moderation and forbearance
towards those who cannot accommodate themselves to our sentiments: if
they are deceived, we have no right to attribute their mistake to
obstinacy or negligence, because we likewise have been mistaken; we may,
perhaps, again change our own opinion: and what excuse shall we be able
to find for aversion and malignity conceived against him, whom we shall
then find to have committed no fault, and who offended us only by
refusing to follow us into errour?

It may likewise contribute to soften that resentment which pride
naturally raises against opposition, if we consider, that he who differs
from us, does not always contradict us; he has one view of an object,
and we have another; each describes what he sees with equal fidelity,
and each regulates his steps by his own eyes: one man with Posidippus,
looks on celibacy as a state of gloomy solitude, without a partner in
joy, or a comforter in sorrow; the other considers it, with Metrodorus,
as a state free from incumbrances, in which a man is at liberty to
choose his own gratifications, to remove from place to place in quest of
pleasure, and to think of nothing but merriment and diversion: full of
these notions one hastens to choose a wife, and the other laughs at his
rashness, or pities his ignorance; yet it is possible that each is
right, but that each is right only for himself.

Life is not the object of science: we see a little, very little; and
what is beyond we only can conjecture. If we inquire of those who have
gone before us, we receive small satisfaction; some have travelled life
without observation, and some willingly mislead us. The only thought,
therefore, on which we can repose with comfort, is that which presents
to us the care of Providence, whose eye takes in the whole of things,
and under whose direction all involuntary errours will terminate in
happiness.

[1] Livy has described the Achaean leader, Philopaemen, as actually so
exercising his thoughts whilst he wandered among the rocky passes of
the Morea, xxxv. 28. In the graphic page of the Roman historian, as
in the stanzas of the "Ariosto of the North:"

"From shingles grey the lances start,
The bracken bush sends forth the dart,
The rushes and the willow wand
Are bristling into axe and brand."
Lady of the Lake, Canto v. 9.

[2]
"Count o'er the joys thine hours have seen,
Count o