f a posterity which desires to judge us as we generally
have judged our forefathers, and few years will show darker in the
English annals than the year which we have just left behind us. Yet we
know, in the honesty of our hearts, how unjust such a picture would be.
Our future advocate, if we are so happy as to find one, may not be able
to disprove a single article in the indictment; and yet we know that, as
the world goes, he will be right if he marks the year with a white
stroke--as one in which, on the whole, the moral harvest was better than
an average.

Once more: our knowledge of any man is always inadequate--even of the
unit which each of us calls himself; and the first condition under which
we can know a man at all is, that he be in essentials something like
ourselves; that our own experience be an interpreter which shall open
the secrets of his experience; and it often happens, even among our
contemporaries, that we are altogether baffled. The Englishman and the
Italian may understand each other's speech, but the language of each
other's ideas has still to be learnt. Our long failures in Ireland have
risen from a radical incongruity of character which has divided the Celt
from the Saxon. And again, in the same country, the Catholic will be a
mystery to the Protestant, and the Protestant to the Catholic. Their
intellects have been shaped in opposite moulds; they are like
instruments which cannot be played in concert. In the same way, but in a
far higher degree, we are divided from the generations which have
preceded us in this planet--we try to comprehend a Pericles or a
Caesar--an image rises before us which we seem to recognise as belonging
to our common humanity. There is this feature which is familiar to
us--and this--and this. We are full of hope; the lineaments, one by one,
pass into clearness; when suddenly the figure becomes enveloped in a
cloud--some perplexity crosses our analysis, baffling it utterly, the
phantom which we have evoked dies away before our eyes, scornfully
mocking our incapacity to master it.

The English antecedent to the Reformation are nearer to us than Greeks
or Romans; and yet there is a large interval between the baron who
fought at Barnet field, and his polished descendant in a modern
drawing-room. The scale of appreciation and the rule of judgment--the
habits, the hopes, the fears, the emotions--have utterly changed.

In perusing modern histories, the present writer has been st