ience in life, that whenever I find a man coming forward with these
self-denunciations on his lips, I am prepared for an exhibition of
intolerance, spiritual pride, and envy, hatred, malice, and all
uncharitableness, towards any poor fellow-creature who has floundered a
little out of the straight path, and being all too conscious of his
errors, is not prepared to proclaim them in those broad emphatic terms
which come so readily to the lips of the censors, who at heart believe
themselves spotless,--just as complaints about poverty, and inability to
buy this and that, come from the fat lips of the millionaire, when he
shows you his gallery of pictures, his stud, and his forcing-frames.

No; it is hard to choose between the two. The man who has no defect or
crack in his character--no tinge of even the minor immoralities--no
fantastic humour carrying him sometimes off his feet--no preposterous
hobby--such a man, walking straight along the surface of this world in
the arc of a circle, is a very dangerous character, no doubt; of such
all children, dogs, simpletons, and other creatures that have the
instinct of the odious in their nature, feel an innate loathing. And
yet it is questionable if your perfectionised Sir Charles Grandison is
quite so dangerous a character as your "miserable sinner," vociferously
conscious that he is the frailest of the frail, and that he can do no
good thing of himself. And indeed, in practice, the external symptoms of
these two characteristics have been known so to alternate in one
disposition as to render it evident that each is but the same moral
nature under a different external aspect,--the mask, cowl, varnish,
crust, or whatever you like to call it, having been adapted to the
external conditions of the man--that is, to the society he mixes in, the
set he belongs to, the habits of the age, and the way in which he
proposes to get on in life. It is when the occasion arises for the mask
being thrown aside, or when the internal passions burst like a volcano
through the crust, that terrible events take place, and the world throbs
with the excitement of some wonderful criminal trial.[24]

[Footnote 24: It has often been observed that it is among the Society of
Friends, who keep so tight a rein on the passions and propensities, that
these make the most terrible work when they break loose. De Quincey, in
one of his essays on his contemporaries, giving a sketch of a man of
great genius and high scholar