Moreover, in all domestic arrangements, it is the better nature that yields; a violent temper is despotic the moment that it crosses your threshold. I disliked her, too, for her depreciating way; she had an if and a but for every person named. Now, the individual who can find no good in any one else has certainly no good in himself:
"How can we reason but from what we know?"
Pope talked very readily and playfully about his translation of Homer: for example, some discussion arising about what flower was meant by the asphodel of Homer, he said, laughing,—"Why, I believe it to be the poor yellow flower that grows wild in our fields: what would you say if I had rendered the line thus,—
'The stern Achilles
Stalked through a mead of daffodillies?'"
He also told me an anecdote quite as characteristic of the teller as that of Swift's. There was a Lord Russell, who had ruined his con-
