God knows! that at times I derive a comfort even from my infirmities, my sins of omission and commission, in the joy of the deep feeling of the opposite virtues in the two or three whom I love in my heart of hearts. Sharp, therefore, is the pain when I find faults in these friends opposite to my virtues. I find no comfort in the notion of average, for I wish to love even more than to be beloved, and am so haunted by the conscience of my many failings that I find an unmixed pleasure in esteeming and admiring, but, as the recipient of esteem or admiration, I feel as a man, whose good dispositions are still alive, feels in the enjoyment of a _darling_ property on a doubtful title. My instincts are so far dog-like that I love beings superior to myself better than my equals. But the notion of inferiority is so painful to me that I never, in common life, feel a man my inferior except by after-reflection. What seems vanity in me is in great part attributable to this feeling. But of this hereafter. I will cross-examine myself.
There are actions which left undone mark the greater man; but to have done them does not imply a bad or mean man. Such, for instance, are Martial's compliments of Domitian. So may we praise Milton without condemning Dryden. By-the-bye, we are all too apt to forget that contemporaries have not the same _wholeness_, and _fixedness_ in their notions of persons' characters, that we their posterity have. They can _hope_ and _fear_ and _believe_ and _disbelieve_. We make up an ideal which, like the fox or lion in the fable, never changes.
I have several times seen the stiletto and the rosary come out of the same pocket.
A man who marries for love is like a frog who leaps into a well. He has plenty of water but then he cannot get out.
[Not until national ruin is imminent will Ministers contemplate the approach of national danger]; as if Judgment were overwhelmed like Belgic towns in the sea, and showed its towers only at dead low water.
The superiority of the genus to the particular may be illustrated by music. How infinitely more perfect in passion and its transition than even poetry, and poetry again than painting! And yet how marvellous is genius in all its implements!