rs, and have admired their penetrating
force and comprehensive scope, will not misunderstand me when I say that
he was, in this respect, a little child; not from defect of vision, but
from thorough nobleness of nature.

I do not think it was by effort and self-command that he rid himself of
suspicion. In the simple and strong aim of the man to be good himself, it
belonged to the very strength and simplicity of that aim, that he should
also think others good. I recollect, and I dare say you better recollect,
one of his sayings: "I have a habit of believing people." To some these
words may not seem to import a peculiarity. But as descriptive of him they
indicate what of all the points of his character seemed to me most
peculiar. I have known one man as free from suspicions as was Lord
Aberdeen, but he was not a politician. I am far from thinking statesmen,
or politicians, less honourable than other men, quite the reverse; but the
habit of their life renders them suspicious. The vicissitudes of politics,
the changes of position, the changes of alliance, the sharp transitions
from co-operation to antagonism, the inevitable contact with revolting
displays of self-seeking and self-love; more than all these perhaps, the
constant habit of forecasting the future and shaping all its contingencies
beforehand, which is eminently the merit and intellectual virtue of the
politician, all these tend to make him, and commonly do make him,
suspicious even of his best friend. This suspicion may be found to exist
in conjunction with regard, with esteem, nay with affection. For it must
be recollected that it is not usually a suspicion of moral delinquency,
but at least as it dwells in the better and higher natures, of
intellectual error only, in some of its numerous forms, or at most of
speaking with a reserve that may be more or less or even wholly
unconscious. None of these explanations are needed for Lord Aberdeen. He
always took words in their direct and simple meaning, and assumed them to
be the index of the mind; and its full index too, so that he did not
speculate to learn what undiscovered residue might still remain in its
dark places. This entire immunity from suspicion, which makes our minds in
general like a haunted place, and the sense of the immunity that he
conveyed to his friends in all his dealings with them, combined with the
deep serenity of his mind, which ever seemed to beguile and allay by some
kindly process of nature e