him something-some feeling, some remembrance—that, if known, would make you hate him. No doubt the saying is exaggerated, is Lord Lytton's comment; but still, what a gloomy and profound sublimity in the idea, what a new insight it gives into the hearts of the common herd! What if Heaven for once, as Keble suggests,

Lent to some partial eye, disclosing all

The rude bad thoughts, that in our bosom's night
Wander at large, nor heed Love's gentle thrall?

Who would not shun the dreary uncouth place?
As if, fond leaning where her infant slept,
A mother's arm a serpent should embrace :

So might we friendless live, and die unwept.

Then keep the softening veil1 in mercy drawn,

Thou who canst love us, though Thou read us true;
As on the bosom of the aerial lawn

Melts in dim haze each coarse ungentle hue."

Mrs. Browning, in one of her sonnets, affirms that if all the gentlest hearted friends she knew concentred in one heart their gentleness, that still grew gentler, till its pulse was less for life than pity,—she should still be slow to bring her own heart nakedly below the palm of such a friend :

Some plait between the brows, some rougher chime
In the free voice.
O angels, let your flood
Of bitter scorn dash on me! Do ye hear
What I say, who bear calmly all the time
This everlasting face-to-face with GOD?"

The tone of this reminds us of a passage in one of Mrs. St.

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1 Compare with this image of a veil what Don Alphonse writes to his sister, in Madame de Rémusat's Lettres Espagnoles, on the uses and advantages, as well as drawbacks, of court ceremonialism. 'Auprès des princes, l'intérêt personnel est tellement éveillé, les mauvaises passions humaines sont si frequemment en jeu, que, s'il nous fallait agir d'après nos sensations réelles et nos vraies motions, nous donnerions à qui nous observe un triste spectacle. L'etiquette jette un voile uniforme sur tout cela: c'est une sorte de mesure positive qui donne à des tons discordants les apparences de l'harmonie.'

George's letters, on the death of a dear friend: "Perhaps she knows everything I am now saying, and smiles at the vanity and shortsightedness of a mortal, whose faults may now be all laid open to her, stript of that veil with which we naturally seek to conceal them from those we respect and love. I think that a painful reflection on losing a friend. She will, however, see that I loved her much."

Mr. Hawthorne, in the introduction to one of his earlier books, deprecates the charge of unconditional egotism which some readers might be disposed to bring against him; and he declares himself free from reproach of conscience for betraying "anything too sacredly individual to be revealed by a human spirit to its brother or sister spirit." Has the reader, he asks, gone wandering hand in hand with him, the author, through the inner passages of his being, and have they groped together in all its chambers? Not so. "So far as I am a man of really individual attributes, I veil my face; nor am I one of those supremely hospitable people who serve up their own hearts, delicately fried, with brain sauce, as a titbit for their beloved public." Elsewhere he observes that as, on the one hand, a man seldom repeats to his nearest friend, any more than he realises in act, the purest wishes which, at some blessed time or other, have arisen from the depths of his nature; so, on the other hand, there is enough on every leaf of that mystic volume, the human heart, to make the good man shudder for his own wild and idle wishes, as well as for the sinner whose whole life is the incarnation of a wicked desire. Another popular writer remarks that Iago, in a play or a novel, is obliged to give utterance to his schemes with tolerable clearness; whereas the real Iago is reticent, even in commune with himself, and huddles his blackest thoughts into some dark corner of his mind, where they lie conveniently hidden from the eye of conscience. Le vice, toujours sombre, says Boileau, aime l'obscurité. But he also says,

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It may well be called a very curious sensation to sit by a man who has found you out, and who as you know has found you out, or, vice versa, to sit with a man whom you have found out. "How men have to work, to talk, to smile, to go to bed, and try and sleep, with this dread of being found out on their consciences !" "Ah me," sighs Mr. Thackeray, "what would life be, if we were all found out, and punished for all our faults? Jack Ketch would be in permanence; and then who would hang Jack Ketch ?" A fellow satirist speculates on the effect that would be produced in London alone, if from to-morrow morning, for one month only, every man, woman, and child were to speak the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth; and he bids us only reflect" upon the thousands of— at present-most respectable, exemplary people, congregated in the highways and market places, making a "clean breast" to one another, each man shocking his neighbour with the confession of his social iniquity, of his daily hypocrisy, of his rascal vice that he now feeds and cockers like a pet snake in private. "If all men were thus to turn themselves inside out, the majority of blacks would, I fear, be most alarming. We might have Hottentot chancellors, and even Ethiopian bishops.” "We never," moralizes Mrs. Gamp, "know wot's hidden in each other's hearts; and if we had glass winders there, we'd need to keep the shetters up, some on us, I assure you." That is a sad stanza of George Herbert's,—

It is a mercy our own thoughts are concealed from one another, muses Sir Walter Scott, in his private journal, in reference to a then recent case of suddenly disclosed crime in one of his own

1 1 Just so, again, the author of the Roundabout Papers: "After the clergyman has cried his peccavi, suppose we hoist a bishop, and give him a couple of dozen! (I see my Lord Bishop of Double-Gloucester sitting in a very uneasy posture on his right reverend bench.) After we have cast off the bishop, what are we to say to the minister who appointed him?" etc.

class if not companionship; and he goes on, with unwonted solemnity, to write these further reflections: "Oh! if at our social table we could see what passes in each bosom around, we would seek dens and caverns to shun human society! To see the projector trembling for his falling speculations—the voluptuary rueing the event of his debauchery-the miser wearing out his soul for the loss of a guinea,-all, all bent upon vain hopes and vainer regrets,— —we should not need to go to the hall of the caliph Vathek to see men's hearts broiling under their black veils. Lord keep us from all temptation, for we cannot be our own shepherd! "1 Apemantus, as usual, paints in coarse colours and exaggerated tones when he touches, if so rough a hand can be said to touch, on this subject; the scene is Timon's banquet :

"I wonder men dare trust themselves with men :
Methinks they should invite them without knives;

1 Colonel Whyte Melville calls it curious to observe a large well dressed party seated at dinner, all apparently frank and open as the day, full of fun and good humour, saying whatever comes uppermost, and to all outward seeming laying bare every crevice and cranny of their hearts, and then to reflect that each one of the throng has a separate life, entirely distinct from that which he or she parades before the public, cherished perhaps with a miser's care, or endured with a martyr's fortitude.

His Sir Guy, for instance, is sketched sitting at the bottom of his table, looking a merry, thoughtless, jovial country gentleman-open hearted, joyous, and hospitable. But while Sir Guy smacks his lips over those bumpers of dark red Burgundy, does he never think of Damocles and the hanging sword? "Could he summon courage to look into the future, or fortitude even to think of the past? Sir Guy's was a strong, healthy, sensuous nature, in which the physical far outweighed the intellectual; and yet I verily believe his conscience sometimes nearly drove him mad." Then there is my lady, at the top of her table, the very picture of a courteous, affable, well bred hostess-perhaps, if anything, a trifle too placid and unmovable in her demeanour. "Who would have guessed at the wild and stormy passions that could rage beneath so calm a surface?" for there had been a page or two in my lady's life that, with all his acuteness, would have astonished Lavater himself. Some of the guests are hit off in the same way: Frank Lovell, for one, gay and debonair; outwardly the lightest hearted man in the company; inwardly, tormented with misgivings and stung by self reproach. All, in short, "were sedulously hiding their real thoughts from their companions; all were playing the game with counters, of which indeed they were lavish enough; but had you asked for a bit of sterling coin fresh from the mint, and stamped with the impress of truth," why, we are plainly told, they would have buttoned their pockets closer than ever.

Good for their meat, and safer for their lives.
There's much example for 't; the fellow that
Sits next him now, parts bread with him, and pledges
The breath of him in a divided draught,

Is the readiest man to kill him: it has been proved."

Macbeth, the murderer, is urged by his wife to sleek o'er his rugged look, and be bright and jovial among his guests that night; and he promises to comply, recognising keenly how needful for them both it is to "make our faces vizards to our hearts, Disguising what they are." In one of Landor's plays, the scene being a masquerade, a reveller utters the wish to discover the face below a certain mask: "I would give something for a glimpse at what that mask conceals." Fra Rupert is prompt with the moral: "Oh! could we catch a glimpse of what all masks conceal, 't would break our hearts. Far better hidden from us." When a man is spoken ill of, he should, says Dean Swift, thank God that no worse is said; for could his enemy but look into the dark and hidden recesses of his heart, "what man in the whole world would be able to bear the test?" Hamlet professes himself " indifferent honest," but yet could he accuse himself of such things that it were better his mother had not borne him. That "outward sainted deputy," Angelo, is, on Isabella's showing, "yet a devil: his filth within being cast, he would appear a pond as deep as hell." Of the same smooth dissembler, another who has found him out exclaims:

"Oh, what may man within him hide,
Though angel on the outward side!"

To cite Macbeth again: "Away, and mock the time with fairest show: False face must hide what the false heart doth know." Or, again, to apply the words of the Roman conspirator, asking what cavern can be found dark enough to hide the monstrous visage of crime :

"Hide it in smiles, and affability:

For if thou hast thy native semblance on,

Not Erebus itself were dim enough

To hide thee from prevention."