general theme might be played from Shakespeare's plays! Sir Valentine, for instance, denouncing the falsity of that other, so-called, but so far mis-called, Gentleman of Verona :

"Now I dare not say

I have one friend alive; thou wouldst disprove me.
Who should be trusted now, when one's right hand

Is perjured to the bosom? Proteus,

I am sorry I must never trust thee more,

But count the world a stranger for thy sake.

The private wound is deepest: O time most curst!
'Mongst all foes that a friend should be the worst!

Polixenes, again, argues touching the breach of amity between him and Leontes, that revenge is like to be all the more bitter for the cordiality of past confidence. Then, too, the implication of Lord Scroop, of Masham, in the conspiracy with Grey and Cambridge against Henry V.,—

"Nay, but the man that was his bedfellow,

Whom he hath cloy'd and graced with princely favours,—
That he should, for a foreign purse, so sell

His sovereign's life to death and treachery!"

Henry reminds Scroop that he bore the key of all his counsels, and knew the very bottom of his soul; and he wept for him,"for this revolt of thine, methinks, is like another fall of man." -A later king of England, Edward IV., is made to despair when he sees his brother Clarence among the supporters of the foe: "Yea, brother of Clarence, art thou here too? Nay, then, I see that Edward needs must down."-And once again, there is the Et tu Brute cue from which we started, thus set forth in all its suggestive force by Shakespeare's Antony :

"For Brutus, as you know, was Cæsar's angel :
Judge, O you gods, how dearly Cæsar loved him!
This was the most unkindest cut of all:

For when the noble Cæsar saw him stab,

Ingratitude, more strong than traitor's arms,

Quite vanquish'd him: then burst his mighty heart."

But as we recur to this, as the first among these secular annotations on a Scripture text, so we recur to Scripture, in conclusion, for a pathetic parallel, also from the Book of

Psalms: "For it was not an enemy that reproached me; then I could have borne it; neither was it he that hated me that did magnify himself against me: then I would have hid myself from him. But it was thou, a man mine equal, my guide, and mine acquaintance. We took sweet counsel together, and walked unto the house of God in company." The companionship past intensifies the cruelty present. Without so recent and vivid a remembrance of sweet counsel together, and companionship hallowed by the sanctuary itself, the present cruelty could have been borne; but with them it hardly can.

A

"JUDGE NOT.”

ST. MATTHEW vii. I.

STRINGENT motive is adduced to enforce the strenuous monition, "Judge not,”—and it is, "that ye be not judged. For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged; and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again." There is one Lawgiver, who is able to save and to destroy; even He who hath committed all judgment unto the Son: who art thou that judgest another?

Appalled were all who gazed on the last struggles of Cardinal Beaufort, rendered hideous by the tortures of agonizing remorse. Hope had he none. Despair was impersonated in the frenzied contortions of that dying man. King and peers stood beside the death-bed, awe-stricken and shocked. The king prayed for the cardinal, that the Eternal mover of the heavens might "look with a gentle eye upon this wretch:

O beat away the busy meddling fiend

That lays strong siege upon this wretch's soul,
And from his bosom purge this black despair."

See, says a less gentle observer, Warwick, how the pangs of death do make him grin. Royal Henry, on devouter thoughts

intent, bids "peace to his soul," in parting, "if God's pleasure be." And then the monarch solemnly, urgently, importunes the moribund cardinal to give some token, ere he quite depart, that Despair has not made him all her own: "Lord cardinal, if thou think'st on heaven's bliss, hold up thy hand, make signal of thy hope." But the cardinal-dies, and makes no sign. The appeal is fruitless: no hand is held up; no signal of hope displayed. The baffled prince, cut to the heart, can but exclaim, "He dies, and makes no sign: O God, forgive him!" Warwick again interposes a harsher voice, "So bad a death argues a monstrous life," he is sure. But his sovereign hushes his damning criticism with a right royal veto :

"FORBEAR TO JUDGE, for we are sinners all.

Close up his eyes, and draw the curtain close;
And let us all to meditation."

Forbear to judge. And the Shakspearean Henry practises in person the monition thus enforced. It is his rule to check

in himself every tendency to uncharitable judgment. As when proof all but positive distresses him of his uncle Gloster's death being due to violence, he yet restrains the bent of his convictions by the prayer,

"O Thou that judgest all things, stay my thoughts:

My thoughts, that labour to persuade my soul
Some violent hands were laid on Humphrey's life!

If my suspect be false, forgive me, God;

For judgment only doth belong to Thee !"

It is by the deathbed of the man self-convicted of Duke Humphrey's death, that Henry can yet say, even of him, when from so bad a death is argued a monstrous life, Forbear to judge, for we are sinners all.

Are we to infer that Shakspeare was himself for backing to the full this royal veto? That, perhaps, were going too far. The veto is dramatically true to character, and designedly characteristic of the royal speaker. But if Shakspeare himself (we are assuming him to be the author of this disputed play) would or could scarcely in this particular instance have enforced

P

such a lesson of charity, we may at least be assured, from the large tolerance and subtle apprehension so patent in his own kingly nature, that he would in spirit have echoed the king's forbear. Perhaps his own feeling might be as nearly as possible expressed in other words of his, put into the mouth of quite another character, and referring to quite another occasion:"And how his audit stands, who knows, save heaven?

But, in our circumstance and course of thought,

'Tis heavy with him."

Forbear to judge, is, nevertheless, the moral of this strain, as of the other. Human ignorance in the one case, human frailty in the other, ousts human nature from the judgment-seat.

No man, avers Sir Thomas Browne, can justly censure or condemn another; because, in fact, no man truly knows another. "This I perceive in myself; for I am in the dark to all the world, and my nearest friends behold me but in a cloud. Further, no man can judge another, because no man knows himself." In a former section of this his profession of faith, this good physician warns those who, upon a rigid application of the law, sentence Solomon unto damnation,* that they condemn not only him, but themselves, and the whole world; "for, by the letter and written word of God, we are without exception in the state of death: but there is a prerogative of God, and an arbitrary pleasure above the letter of His own law, by which alone we can pretend unto salvation, and through which Solomon might be as easily saved as those who condemn him."

The Vicar of Gravenhurst, in his position of parish priest, owns himself compelled to confess that the best people are not the best in every relation of life, and the worst not bad in every relation of life; so that, with experience, he finds himself growing lenient in his blame, if also reticent in his praise. "Again and again I say to myself that only the Omniscient can be the equitable judge of human beings-so complicated are our

* St. Augustine, Lyra, Bellarmine, and others, are chargeable with this judgment and sentence.

virtues with our failings, and so many are the hidden virtues, as well as hidden vices, of our fellow-men." If judge at all we dare, and do, be it in the spirit and to the letter of Wordsworth's counsel :

"From all rash censure be the mind kept free;

He only judges right who weighs, compares,
And, in the sternest sentence which his voice
Pronounces, ne'er abandons Charity."

Well and wisely said La Bruyère, that "La règle de Descartes, qui ne veut pas que l'on décide sur les moindres vérités avant qu'elles soient connues clairement et distinctement, est assez belle et assez juste pour devoir s'étendu au jugement que l'on fait des personnes." Real character, as William Hazlitt says, is not one thing, but a thousand things: actual qualities do not conform to any factitious standard in the mind, but rest upon their own truth and nature. "The dull stupor under which we labour in respect of those whom we have the greatest opportunities of inspecting nearly, we should do well to imitate, before we give extreme and uncharitable verdicts againsts those whom we only see in passing, or at a distance." "Well-after all

"What know we of the secret of a man?

His nerves were wrong. What ails us, who are sound,
That we should mimic this raw fool, the world,
Which charts us all in its coarse blacks or whites,
As ruthless as a baby with a worm,

As cruel as a schoolboy ere he grows

To pity-more from ignorance than will."

Who can say, asks Samuel Rogers, "In such circumstances I should have done otherwise?" Who, did he but reflect by what slow gradations, often by how many strange occurrences, we are led astray; with how much reluctance, how much agony, how many efforts to escape, how many sighs, how many tears-who, did he but reflect for a moment, would have the heart to cast a stone? *

* " Fortunately these things are known to Him, from whom no secrets are hidden; and let us rest in the assurance that His judgments are not as ours."-Rogers's Italy.