others to do? In
fine, we must live amongst the living, and let the river run under the
bridge without our care, or, at least, without our interference. In
truth, why do we meet a man with a hunch-back, or any other deformity,
without being moved, and cannot endure the encounter of a deformed mind
without being angry? this vicious sourness sticks more to the judge than
to the crime. Let us always have this saying of Plato in our mouths: "Do
not I think things unsound, because I am not sound in myself? Am I not
myself in fault? may not my observations reflect upon myself?"--a wise
and divine saying, that lashes the most universal and common error of
mankind. Not only the reproaches that we throw in the face of one
another, but our reasons also, our arguments and controversies, are
reboundable upon us, and we wound ourselves with our own weapons: of
which antiquity has left me enough grave examples. It was ingeniously
and home-said by him, who was the inventor of this sentence:

"Stercus cuique suum bene olet."

["To every man his own excrements smell well."--Erasmus]

We see nothing 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 u