"Sweep away the snow from thine own door, and heed not the frost upon thy neighbour's tiles." The Greek and Latin classics are not wanting in various readings of the same theme. Demosthenes meant much the same thing when he said that we must beware of austerely scrutinizing the actions of others, unless first we are conscious of having acquitted ourselves aright: οὐ γὰρ ἐστι πικρῶς ἐξετάσαι τι πέπρακται τοῖς ἀλλοῖς, ἂν μὴ παρ ὑμῶν ἀυτῶν πρῶτον ὑπάρξη τὰ δέοντα.” "Man is blind to his own faults, but keen-sighted to perceive those of others," is a Latin adage: "Vitiis suis pervidendis cæcus est homo, in alienis perspicax." "Is it never your way to look at yourself when you are abusing another ?" is a question in Plautus: "Non soles respicere te, cum dicas injuste alteri ?" Cicero pronounces it to be of the nature of folly to see the faults of others, and to forget one's own: "Proprium est stultitiæ aliorum vitia cernere, oblivisci suorum." Horace shrewdly submits that the man who is desirous that his friends should not take offence at his own protuberances, will "ignore" that friend's warts:

"Qui, ne tuberibus propriis offendat amicum,
Postulat, ignoscat verrucis illius."

And at least as pointed and piquant is the passage beginning,

66

'Quum tua pervideas oculis male lippus inunctis,
Cur in amicorum vitiis tam cernis acutum," etc.

The query Plautus puts, "How is it that no man tries to search into himself, but each fixes his eyes on the wallet of the one who goes before him ?" is in allusion to the fable of Jupiter having loaded men with a couple of wallets; the one, filled with our own vices, being slung at our backs,

"Propriis repletam vitiis post tergum dedit ;"

the other, heavy with our neighbour's faults, hung in front,

"Alienis ante pectus suspendit gravem."

To pardon those absurdities in ourselves which we cannot suffer in others, is neither better nor worse, says Dean Swift, than to be more willing to be fools ourselves than to have

others so. The proverbs of all nations show all nations to be alive to the ridiculous in this respect. The kiln calls the oven, burnt house, says one. In Italy, the pan says to the pot, Keep off, or you'll smutch me. In Spain, the raven bawls hoarsely to the crow, Get out, blackamoor! (Quitate allá, negro !) In Germany, one ass nicknames another, Long-ears. And Dr. Trench is rather taken with a certain originality in the Catalan version of the proverb: "Death said to the man with his throat cut,' How ugly you look!"" They should be fair, hints Juvenal, who venture to deride the disproportioned leg or sooty hide, Loripedem rectus derideat, Æthiopem albus. Yet, as the Ettrick shepherd once sang in his native Doric :

"There's some wi' big scars on their face,

Point out a prin scart on a frien';

And some, black as sweeps wi' disgrace,

Cry out, the whole warld's unclean."

Molière's Chrysale twits her sister Bélise, who is a femme savante, with snapping up everybody short who makes a slip with the tongue, while herself liable to graver censure for slips of conduct:

:

"Le moindre solécisme en parlant vous irrite;

Mais vous en faites, vous, d'étranges en conduite."

Sappho, again, in Mademoiselle de Scudéry's portentous romance-once the rage of readers in France, despite its plurality of volumes, as "Clarissa" was in England, a century later-ridicules the bizarre orthography of the fine-ladyism of the day, while amused at the fact that the fine ladies in question, who perpetrated such gross errors in writing, and who lost every particle of wit the moment they took up a pen, would yet make game for days together of some poor foreigner who happened to use one term for another. As if it were less a matter of mirth or marvel for a grande dame, claiming to be a woman of wit, too, and a power in society, to commit a thousand blunders in writing her native language, than for a raw foreigner to make a few slips in speaking it.

We every day and every hour, observes Montaigne, say

things of another that we might more properly say of ourselves, could we but revert our observation to our own concerns as well as extend it to others. And the old essayist has his fling at not a few authors of the day who, in this manner, prejudiced their own cause by running headlong upon those they attacked, and darting those shafts against their enemies that might, with much greater propriety and effect, be hurled back at themselves.

A stanza in the most elaborate of Shakspeare's poems that are not plays for are not all his plays poems?-runs into this eloquence of remonstrant appeal :—

"Think but how vile a spectacle it were

To view thy present trespass in another.
Men's faults do seldom to themselves appear;

Their own transgressions partially they smother :
This guilt would seem death-worthy in thy brother.
O, how are they wrapped in with infamies,

That from their own misdeeds askance their eyes!"

It is of their common friend Breuning that Beethoven writes to Ferdinand Ries,-" He certainly possesses many admirable qualities, but he thinks himself quite faultless, whereas the very defects that he discovers in others are those which he possesses himself to the highest degree." One of the most natural and truthfully, as well as forcibly, drawn characters in Mrs. Inchbald's "Simple Story,"-Sandford,—a man of understanding, of learning, and a complete casuist, yet all whose faults were committed for the want of knowing better, is described as constantly reproving faults in others, and most assuredly too good a man not to have corrected and amended his own, had they been known to him; but known to him they were not. He had been, we are told, for so long a time the spiritual superior or preceptor of all with whom he lived, and so busied with instructing others, that he had not once recollected that he needed instruction himself; and in such awe did his habitual severity keep all about him, that although he had numerous friends, not one of them told him of his failing. "Was there not then some reason for him to suppose he had no faults?

His enemies, indeed, hinted that he had; but enemies he never hearkened to; and thus, with all his good sense, he wanted the sense to follow the rule, 'Believe what your enemies say of you rather than what is said by your friends."" He had yet to learn, and to learn by heart, the wide and practical import of the prayer—

"Teach me to love and to forgive,

Exact my own defects to scan,

What others are to feel, and know myself a Man."

Well may the demoniac guide of Don Cleofas, in Le Sage's symbolical fiction, say, and well does he say, "J'admire messieurs les hommes; leurs propres défauts leur paraissent des minuties, au lieu qu'ils regardent ceux d'autrui avec un microscope." To their own faults more than a little blind, to those of others they are not a little unkind.

Gay begins his fable of the Turkey and the Ant with the smoothly-turned truism, that

"In other men we faults can spy,

And blame the mote that dims their eye;

Each little speck and error find;

To our own stronger errors blind."

One of the most classical masters of modern English, whether in verse or prose, was employing the same metre-of fatal facility, as it is called-when he closed his address to a brother bard in a strain that must also close this chapter of instances: "We, who surround a common table, And imitate the fashionable, Wear each two eye-glasses: this lens Shows us our faults, that other men's. We do not care how dim may be This by whose aid our own we see ; But, ever anxiously alert

That all may have their whole desert,

We would melt down the stars and sun

In our heart's furnace, to make one

Through which th' enlightened world might spy
A mote upon a brother's eye."

STRANGERS AND PILGRIMS.

I PETER ii. 11.

ETER, an apostle of Jesus Christ, to the strangers scat

PETER; aro ahout Asia Minor, addressed the urgent ap

peal that as strangers-strangers and pilgrims-they should abstain from fleshly lusts, which war against the soul.

Consider what you are, he seems to say, as his words are paraphrased by the greatest of all commentators on his first epistle: "If you were citizens of this world, then you might drive the same trade" with the men of this world, "and follow the same lusts; but seeing you are chosen and called out of this world, and invested into a new society, made free of another city, and are therefore here but travellers passing through to your own country, it is very reasonable that there be this difference betwixt you and the world, that while they live at home your carriage be such as fits strangers, not glutting yourselves with their pleasures, nor surfeiting upon their delicious fruits, as some unwary travellers do abroad; but as wise strangers living warily and soberly, and still minding most of all your journey homewards, suspecting dangers and snares in your way, and so walking with a holy fear, as the Hebrew word for a stranger imports."

The topic is one upon which Archbishop Leighton ever writes feelingly. As again in his comment on the psalmist's profession of being a stranger with God, and a sojourner as all his fathers were, the same devout expositor observes that he who looks on himself as a stranger, and is sensible of the darkness round about him in this wilderness, will often put up that request with David, "I am a stranger in the earth: hide not Thy commandments from me." What, Leighton asks, is the joy of our life, but the thoughts of that other life, our home before us? "And certainly he that lives much in these thoughts, set him where you will here, he is not much pleased nor displeased; but if His Father call him home, that word gives him his heart's desire."

Once again, in the sixth of his lectures on the immortality