Who does an injury may receive one.

man is so circumspect, so considerate, or so fearful of offending, but he has much to answer for. A generous prisoner cannot immediately comply with all the sordid and laborious offices of a slave. A footman that is not breathed, cannot keep pace with his master's horse. He that is over watched may be allowed to be drowsy. All these things are to be weighed, before we give any ear to the first impulse. If it be my duty to love my country, I must be kind also to all my countrymen: if a veneration be due to the whole, so is a piety also to the parts, and it is the common interest to preserve them. We are all members of one body, and it is as natural to help one another, as for the hands to help the feet, or the eyes the hands. Without the love and care of the parts, the whole can never be preserved; and we must spare one another, because we are born for society, which cannot be maintained without a regard to particulars. Let this be a rule to us, never to deny a pardon that does no hurt either to the giver or receiver. That may be well enough in one, which is ill in another; and therefore we are not to condemn any thing that is common to a nation, for custom defends it. But much more pardonable are those things which are common to mankind.

It is a kind of spiteful comfort, that whoever does me an injury, may receive one; and that there is a power over him that is above me. A man should stand as firm against all indignities as a rock does against the waves. As it is some satisfaction to a man in a mean condition, that there is no security in a more prosperous; and as the loss of a son in a corner is borne with more patience, upon the sight of a funeral carried out of a palace, so

The wisest have their failings. We should bear one with another.

are injuries and contempts the more tolerable from a meaner person, when we consider that the greatest men and fortunes are not exempt. The wisest also of mortals have their failings, and no man living is without the same excuse. The difference is, that we do not all of us transgress the same way: but we are obliged in humanity to bear with one another. We should, every one of us, bethink ourselves how remiss we have been in our duties, how immodest in our discourses, how intemperate in our cups, and why not as well how extravagant we have been in our passions. Let us clear ourselves of this evil, purge our minds, and utterly root out all those vices, which, upon leaving the least sting, will grow again, and recover. We must think of every thing, expect every thing, that we may not be surprised. "It is a shame," said Fabius," for a commander to excuse himself by saying-I was not aware of it.”

TAKE NOTHING ILL FROM ANOTHER MAN, UNTIL YOU HAVE MADE IT YOUR OWN CASE.

It is not prudent to deny a pardon to any man without first examining, if we do not stand in need of it ourselves; for it may be our lot to ask it, even at his feet to whom we refuse it. But we are willing enough to do, what we are very unwilling to suffer. It is unreasonable to charge public vices upon particular persons; for we are all of us wicked, and that which we blame in others we find in ourselves. It is not a paleness in one, or a leanness in another, but a pestilence that has laid hold upon all. It is a wicked world, and we make part of it; and the way to be quiet, is to bear one with another.

We should not condemn hastily.

Such a man, we cry, has done me a shrewd turn, and I never did him any hurt. Well, but it may be, I have mischieved other people, or at least I may live to do as much to him as that comes to me. Such a one has spoken ill things of me; but if I first speak ill of him, as I do of many others, this is not an injury, but a repayment. What if he did overshoot himself? he was loth to lose his conceit, perhaps, but there was no malice in it; and if he had not done me a mischief, he must have done himself one. How many good offices are there that look like injuries? nay, how many have been reconciled, and good friends, after a professed hatred?

But

Before we lay any thing to heart, let us ask ourselves if we have not done the same thing to others. where shall we find an equal judge? He that loves another man's wife (only, perhaps, because she is another's) will not suffer his own to be so much as looked upon. No man so fierce against calumny as the evil speaker; none so strict exacters of modesty in a servant, as those that are most prodigal of their own. We carry our neighbour's crimes in sight, and we throw our own over our shoulders. The intemperance of a bad son is chastised by a worse father; and the luxury that we punish in others we allow to ourselves. The tyrant exclaims against homicide, and sacrilege against theft. We are angry with the persons, but not with the faults.

Some things there are that cannot hurt us, and others will not; as good magistrates, parents, tutors, judges, whose reproof, or correction, we are to take as we do abstinence, bleeding, and other uneasy things, which we are the better for. In which cases, we are not so much to reckon upon what we suffer, as upon what we have

No man can absolve himself to his conscience.

done. I take it ill, says one; and I have done nothing, says another when at the same time we make it worse, by adding arrogance and contumacy to our first error. We cry out presently-What law have we transgressed? As if the letter of the law were the sum of our duty, and that piety, humanity, liberality, justice, and faith, were things beside our business. No, no, the rule of human duty is of greater latitude, and we have many obligations upon us, that are not to be found in the statute books. And yet we fall short of the exactness, even of that legal innocency. We have intended one thing, and done another, wherein only the want of success has kept us from being criminals. This very thing, methinks, should make us more favourable to delinquents, and to forgive not only ourselves, but the gods too, of whom we seem to have harder thoughts in taking that to be a particular evil directed to us, that befals us only by the common law of mortality. In fine, no man living can absolve himself to his conscience, though to the world perhaps he may. It is true, that we are also condemned to pains and diseases, and to death too, which is no more than the quitting of the soul's house. But why should any man complain of bondage, that wheresoever he looks, has his way open to liberty? that precipice, that sea, that river, that well, there is freedom in the bottom of it. It hangs upon every crooked bough, and not only a man's throat, or his heart, but every vein in his body opens a passage to it.

To conclude: where my proper virtue fails me, I will have recourse to examples, and say to myself—am I greater than Philip, or Augustus, who both of them put up greater reproaches? many have pardoned their ene

We should do as we would be done by.

mies, and shall not I forgive a neglect, a little freedom of the tongue? Nay, the patience but of a second thought does the business; for, though the first shock be violent, take it in parts, and it is subdued. And, to wind up all in one word, the great lesson of mankind, as well in this as in all other cases, is-to do as we would be done by.

OF CRUELTY.

THERE is so near an affinity betwixt anger and cruelty, that many people confound them: as if cruelty were only the execution of anger in the payment of a revenge; which holds in some cases but not in others. There are a sort of men that take delight in the spilling of human blood, and in the death of those that never did them any injury, nor were ever so much as suspected for it-as Apollodorus, Phalaris, Sinis, Procrustes, and others that burnt men alive, whom we cannot so properly call angry as brutal. For anger does necessarily presuppose an injury either done, or conceived, or feared; but the other takes pleasure in tormenting, without so much as pretending any provocation to it, and kills merely for killing sake. The original of this cruelty, perhaps, was anger, which, by frequent exercise and custom, has lost all sense of humanity and mercy, and they that are thus affected, are so far from the countenance and appearance of men in anger, that they will laugh, rejoice, and entertain themselves with the most horrid spectacles, as racks, gaols, gibbets, several sorts of chains and punishments, dilaceration of members, stigmatizings and wild beasts, with other exquisite in