28 LIFE AND HABIT. 



now. It will be remembered that he took bribes when 

 he came to be Lord Chancellor. 



It is on the same principle that we find it so 

 distasteful to hear one praise another for earnestness. 

 For such praise raises a suspicion in our minds ('pace 

 the late Dr. Arnold and his following) that the 

 praiser's attention must have been arrested by sin- 

 cerity, as by something more or less unfamiliar to him- 

 self. So universally is this recognised that the word has 

 for some time been discarded entirely by all reputable 

 people. Truly, if there is one who cannot find himself 

 in the same room with the life and letters of an earnest 

 person without being made instantly unwell, the same 

 is a just man and perfect in all his ways. 



But enough has perhaps been said. As the fish in 

 the sea, or the bird in the air, so unreasoningly and 

 inarticulately safe must a man feel before he can be 

 said to know. It is only those who are ignorant and 

 uncultivated who can know anything at all in a 

 proper sense of the words. Cultivation will breed in 

 any man a certainty of the uncertainty even of his 

 most assured convictions. It is perhaps fortunate for 

 our comfort that we can none of us be cultivated upon 

 very many subjects, so that considerable scope for 

 assurance will still remain to us; but however this may 

 be, we certainly observe it as a fact that the greatest 

 men are they who are most uncertain in spite of 

 certainty, and at the same time most certain in spite 

 of uncertainty, and who are thus best able to feel that 

 there is nothing in such complete harmony with itself as 

 a flat contradiction in terms. For nature hates that any 



