behind us; we mock ourselves an hundred times a day; when
we deride our neighbours; and we detest in others the defects which are
more manifest in us, and which we admire with marvellous inadvertency and
impudence. It was but yesterday that I heard a man of understanding and
of good rank, as pleasantly as justly scoffing at the folly of another,
who did nothing but torment everybody with the catalogue of his genealogy
and alliances, above half of them false (for they are most apt to fall
into such ridiculous discourses, whose qualities are most dubious and
least sure), and yet, would he have looked into himself, he would have
discerned himself to be no less intemperate and wearisome in extolling
his wife's pedigree. O importunate presumption, with which the wife sees
herself armed by the hands of her own husband. Did he understand Latin,
we should say to him:

"Age, si hic non insanit satis sua sponte, instiga."

["Come! if of himself he is not mad enough, urge him on."
--Terence, And., iv. 2, 9.]

I do not say that no man should accuse another, who is not clean
himself,--for then no one would ever accuse,--clean from the same sort of
spot; but I mean that our judgment, falling upon another who is then in
question, should not, at the same time, spare ourselves, but sentence us
with an inward and severe authority. 'Tis an office of charity, that he
who cannot reclaim himself from a vice, should, nevertheless, endeavour
to remove it from another, in whom, peradventure, it may not have so deep
and so malignant a root; neither do him who reproves me for my fault that
he himself is guilty of the same. What of that? The reproof is,
notwithstanding, true and of very good use. Had we a good nose, our own
ordure would stink worse to us, forasmuch as it is our own: and Socrates
is of opinion that whoever should find himself, his son, and a stranger
guilty of any violence and wrong, ought to begin with himself, present
himself first to the sentence of justice, and implore, to purge himself,
the assistance of the hand of the executioner; in the next place, he
should proceed to his son, and lastly, to the stranger. If this precept
seem too severe, he ought at least to present himself the first, to the
punishment of his own conscience.

The senses are our first and proper judges, which perceive not things but
by external accidents; and 'tis no wonder, if in all the parts of the
service of our society,