trusted in a pleasant anointing, an outpouring of
balm without any previous wounds. I am of a less trusting disposition,
and will only ask my friend to use his judgment in insuring me against
posthumous mistake.

Thus I make myself a charter to write, and keep the pleasing, inspiring
illusion of being listened to, though I may sometimes write about
myself. What I have already said on this too familiar theme has been
meant only as a preface, to show that in noting the weaknesses of my
acquaintances I am conscious of my fellowship with them. That a
gratified sense of superiority is at the root of barbarous laughter may
be at least half the truth. But there is a loving laughter in which the
only recognised superiority is that of the ideal self, the God within,
holding the mirror and the scourge for our own pettiness as well as our
neighbours'.

II.

LOOKING BACKWARD.

Most of us who have had decent parents would shrink from wishing that
our father and mother had been somebody else whom we never knew; yet it
is held no impiety, rather, a graceful mark of instruction, for a man to
wail that he was not the son of another age and another nation, of which
also he knows nothing except through the easy process of an imperfect
imagination and a flattering fancy.

But the period thus looked back on with a purely admiring regret, as
perfect enough to suit a superior mind, is always a long way off; the
desirable contemporaries are hardly nearer than Leonardo da Vinci, most
likely they are the fellow-citizens of Pericles, or, best of all, of the
Aeolic lyrists whose sparse remains suggest a comfortable contrast with
our redundance. No impassioned personage wishes he had been born in the
age of Pitt, that his ardent youth might have eaten the dearest bread,
dressed itself with the longest coat-tails and the shortest waist, or
heard the loudest grumbling at the heaviest war-taxes; and it would be
really something original in polished verse if one of our young writers
declared he would gladly be turned eighty-five that he might have known
the joy and pride of being an Englishman when there were fewer reforms
and plenty of highwaymen, fewer discoveries and more faces pitted with
the small-pox, when laws were made to keep up the price of corn, and the
troublesome Irish were more miserable. Three-quarters of a century ago
is not a distance that lends much enchantment to the view. We are
familiar with the average men of that p