not to crush her sleeves or stain her bonnet-strings? The problem is repeated everywhere, either in mockery or deadly earnestness, according to the questioner's disposition, and the old springs of simple sentiment are drying fast within us. It is heartless to laugh, it is foolish to cry, it is indiscreet to love, it is morbid to hate, and it is intolerant to espouse any cause with enthusiasm.
There was a time, and not so many years ago, when men and women found no great difficulty in making up their minds on ordinary matters, and their opinions, if erroneous, were at least succinct and definite. Nero was then a cruel tyrant, the Duke of Wellington a great soldier, Sir Walter Scott the first of novelists, and the French Revolution a villainous piece of business. Now we are equally enlightened and confused by the keen researches and shifting verdicts with which historians and critics seek to dispel this comfortable frame of darkness. Nero, perhaps, had the good of his subjects secretly at heart when he expressed that benevolent desire to dispatch them all at a blow, and Robespierre was but a practical philanthropist, carried, it may be, a
