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 recognize 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 at a modern levee. 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 struck dumb with wonder at the facility with
which men will fill in chasms in their information with
conjecture; will guess at the motives which have
prompted actions; will pass their censures, as if all
secrets of the past lay out on an open scroll before
them. He