not be too absolutely an impersonation of it; but rarely well he represented it in the secondary and common sense of freedom from guile, or as one of Lucian's commentators explains the word, that kind of simplicity which makes an honest man think every other as undesigning as himself, and which therefore has a mixture of folly in it. Folly may be a main ingredient in the compound; as in that "poor creature" of Fielding's drawing, Mrs. Miller, who, he says, might indeed be called simplicity itself,—she being one of that order of mortals who are apt to believe everything that is said to them; to whom nature has neither indulged the offensive nor defensive weapons of deceit, and who are consequently liable to be imposed upon by any one who will be at the expense of a little falsehood for that purpose. Elsewhere Fielding enters upon the discussion whence it is that the knave is generally so quicksighted to those symptoms and operations of knavery which often dupe an honest man of a much better understanding. It is only, he concludes, because knaves have the same things in their heads, and because their thoughts are turned the same way. A later Fielding, as some love to account a late novelist of his school, speaks of that heart where self has found no place and raised no throne, as being slow to recognize its ugly presence when it looks upon it. "As one possessed of an evil spirit was held in old time to be almost conscious of the lurking demon in the breasts of other men, so kindred vices know each other in their hiding-places every day, when Virtue is incredulous and blind." Fielding is ironical on his foremost hero's blameable want of caution and diffidence in the veracity of others, "in which he was highly worthy of censure." we are significantly instructed that there are but two ways by which men become possessed of this excellent quality (of distrust)—the one from long experience, and the other from nature; of which two the latter is "infinitely the better," not only as we are masters of it much earlier in life, but as it is much more infallible and conclusive; for a man who has been imposed on by ever so many, may still hope to find others more honest; whereas, he who receives certain necessary ad

CONFIDING SIMPLICITY.

259

monitions from within, that this is impossible, must have very little understanding indeed, if he ever renders himself liable to be once deceived. Rousseau says bitterly of Grimm, "Il a sondé son propre cœur, et n'a estimé les hommes que ce qu'ils valent. Je suis faché, pour l'honneur de l'humanité, qu'il ait calculé si juste." Misanthropic Jean Jacques might have come in time, despite his cherished theories of original sinlessness and ultimate (if not proximate) perfectibility, to have chimed in with that Captain Waters of a popular fiction, the habit of whose life it was to assign to every human creature with whom he associated, the worst, the most selfish motives possible. "My lot has been cast among bad specimens of humanity," the captain would say, candidly, in adverting to his own cynicism. For more years than he could count, the worst people in the worst Continental towns had been his study; and when by accident he has to deal with the really good and virtuous, he mechanically applies the same low standard to them as to the rest. "And it is really curious to remark," he would add, putting up his eyeglass, and looking languidly in his listener's face, "curious, very, to remark how nicely the same measure seems to fix everybody after all!” Take Rousseau's estimate of himself, and he was the most gullible of gifted spirits, the most easily duped of master minds, the most credulous and unsuspecting of great men. "Sans art, sans dissimulation, sans prudence, franc, ouvert,” etc.,—“ n'imaginant pas même que personne eût intérêt, ni volonté," to cross his schemes of benevolence, or to undermine his reputation as a social benefactor, and all that. Again and again, in the Confessions, he prides himself, albeit pitying himself too, on the naturel pleinement confiant with which he was born. If he had had better eyes, he must have seen what a serpent he was cherishing in his bosom-this is his plaint on the subject of the manœuvres he alleged to be practised against him by Mme. La Vasseur, in common with the Diderot, Grimm and D'Holbach clique; but his blind confidence, serenely selfassured, was, on his own showing, so sublimely supreme, that he scouted the mere notion of any one having it in him to

injure another who had claims on his regard. He professed, and he was a great professor, to judge others by himself.

"For they who credit crime, are they who feel

Their own hearts weak to unresisted sin;

Memory, not judgment, prompts the thoughts which steal
O'er minds like these, an easy faith to win;

To thee the sad denial still held true,

For from thine own good thoughts thy heart its mercy drew.”

In some half-dozen words Laura Fairlie is said to have unconsciously given Walter Hartright the key to her whole character; to that generous trust in others which, in her nature, grew innocently out of the sense of her own truth. The old Italian savant in his cell at the Château d'If tells Dantes, the new comer, when unravelling the web of conspiracy that has made a prisoner of him, "It is clear as daylight, and," shrugging his shoulders, "you must have had a very ingenuous and good heart not to have guessed the state of the case from the first." As the detective process becomes more and more convincing, "You make me shudder,” exclaims Dantes to the Abbé; "is the world then peopled with tigers and crocodiles?" Faria's answer is, "Yes; only tigers and crocodiles with two feet are more dangerous than any other kind." The John Mellish of another popular romance is ticketed in large plain figures as unsuspicious as a child, who believes that the fairies in a pantomime are fairies for ever and ever, and that the harlequin is born in tinsel and mask. Never having an arrière pensée himself, he is described as looking for none in the words of other people, but supposing every one to blurt out their real opinions, and so to offend or please their fellows, as frankly and blunderingly as himself. Harry Cockburn tells us of Francis Jeffrey (to drop for once the handle to the name of each as Scottish lords of session), that his own constant sincerity and reasonableness made him always incredulous of the opposite quality in others; and that hence his having more charity for cunning enemies, than toleration for honest friends, was an infirmity that too often beset him. Seigneur, he might have been addressed, by his courtesy title, in Racine's

WHERE NO ILL SEEMS.”

261

style, but not in Racine's sense, by those who would caution him against this unwary confidence in a crafty foe,

"Seigneur, ne jugez pas de son cœur par la vôtre;

Sur des pas différents vous marchez l'un et l'autre.”

The worst that Macaulay can impute even to Bellamont, who had drawn in all the rest, in the matter of the Adventure Galley and Captain Kidd, is, that he had been led into a fault by "the generosity of a nature as little prone to suspect as to devise villanies." Endless would be this chapter of instances, were our poets and playwrights at large examined for them. Chaucer would detain us with his

"Allas! yonge Gamelyn, nothing he ne wiste

With which a false tresoun his brother him kiste."

Milton would show us the false dissembler unperceived by Uriel, though regent of the sun, and held the sharpest sighted spirit of all in heaven; for,

oft, though wisdom wake, suspicion sleeps

At wisdom's gate, and to simplicity

Resigns her charge, while goodness thinks no ill

Where no ill seems."

And Young would give us Zanga's query in the Revenge—

"Is not Alonzo rather brave than cautious,
Honest than subtle, above fraud himself,
Slow, therefore, to suspect it in another ?"

PAINED REMEMBRANCE OF PLEASURES PAST. LAMENTATIONS i. 7.

T is written in, and it is one of, the Lamentations of

affliction and of her miseries, all the pleasant things that she had in the days of old. So did it embitter the present misery of Job, to recall the days when the candle of his Maker shone upon his head, when he washed his steps with butter, and the

rock poured him out rivers of oil; when his root was spread out by the waters, and the dew lay all night upon his branch. "O woe is me!

To have seen what I have seen, see what I see !"

So mourns one of Shakspeare's heroines. And we may apply the words of another, quite another, of them:

"Having no more but thought of what thou wert,
To torture thee the more, being what thou art."

The apprehension of the good, as his Bolingbroke phrases it, gives but the greater feeling to the worse. Miserum isthuc verbum et pessimum est, Habuisse, et nihil habere, says Plautus. Dante's famous passage affirming that greater grief there is none, than to remember days of joy, when misery is at hand, is supposed to have been suggested by Boëtius, De Consol. Philosoph., a book that had early and specially engaged the Tuscan poet's attention: "In omni adversitate fortunæ infelicissimum genus est infortunii fuisse felicem et non esse." And Dante has had his imitators by the dozen. Thus Marino:

"Che non ha doglia il misero maggiore,
Che ricordar la gioia entro il dolore."

So Fortiguerra, quoted by Cary: "Rimembrare il ben perduto
Fa più meschino lo presente stato." So Chaucer, in the
Troilus and Creseide:

"For of Fortune's sharp adversite
The worste kind of infortune is this,
A man to have been in prosperite,
And it remember when it passèd is."

Homer's Penelope is Popishly sententious to this effect, that pleasure past supplies a copious theme for many a dreary thought and many a doleful dream. Malesherbes has said in French what Mr. Tennyson has memorably Englished,

That a sorrow's crown of sorrow is remembering happier things."

Does the reader not know, inquires Mr. Carlyle in Past and