r subjects to become your tyrants; and believe me no
experience is so deep as that of one who has committed faults, and who
has discovered their causes."

* This I do believe to be the real (though perhaps it is a new) light in
which Lord Bolingbroke's life and character are to be viewed. The same
writers who tell us of his ungovernable passions, always prefix to his
name the epithets "designing, cunning, crafty," etc. Now I will venture
to tell these historians that, if they had studied human nature instead
of party pamphlets, they would have discovered that there are certain
incompatible qualities which can never be united in one character,--that
no man can have violent passions _to which he is in the habit of
yielding_, and be systematically crafty and designing. No man can be all
heat, and at the same time all coolness; but opposite causes not unoften
produce like effects. Passion usually makes men changeable, so sometimes
does craft: hence the mistake of the uninquiring or the shallow; and
hence while------writes, and------compiles, will the characters of great
men be transmitted to posterity misstated and belied.--ED.

"Apply, my dear Lord, that experience to your future career. You
remember what the most sagacious of all pedants,* even though he was an
emperor, has so happily expressed,--'Repentance is a goddess, and the
preserver of those who have erred.'"

* The Emperor Julian. The original expression is paraphrased in the
text.

"May I _find_ her so!" answered Bolingbroke; "but as Montaigne or
Charron would say,* 'Every man is at once his own sharper and his own
bubble.' We make vast promises to ourselves; and a passion, an example,
sweeps even the remembrance of those promises from our minds. One is too
apt to believe men hypocrites, if their conduct squares not with their
sentiments; but perhaps no vice is more rare, for no task is more
difficult, than systematic hypocrisy; and the same susceptibility which
exposes men to be easily impressed by the allurements of vice renders
them at heart most struck by the loveliness of virtue. Thus, their
language and their hearts worship the divinity of the latter, while
their conduct strays the most erringly towards the false shrines
over which the former presides. Yes! I have never been blind to the
surpassing excellence of GOOD. The still, sweet whispers of virtue have
been heard, even when the storm has been loudest, and the bark of Reason
been driven the