In one sense it is completed only with life, but its influence affects ourselves and others all through. We are like the weaver who plies his shuttle and fills in the web, thread by thread, but has to wait to the end to see it as a whole. We work on the wrong side, like him, and need Death to reverse it before we can see it aright. But the loom goes unrestingly, and the pattern is daily fuller. The point is, whether we work at God's loom or the Devil's.

Character grows, for the most part, insensibly, as the life grows at first. Now and then it gets notable impulses which we can mark, but commonly, it grows imperceptibly, like our bodies. It drinks in food like the tree, from both earth and sky, and from hidden sources in both, and, like it, shows its whole history on its boughs and branches from the first. The sunshine and the storm; the cold north wind and the soft south; the knife or the neglect, write themselves all over life, in its knots and gnarls, or smooth branches; in its leaning this way or that; in its stunted barrenness or broad shadow; its bending fruitfulness, or its woody wantonness. Not a leaf but leaves its mark; not a sunbeam but has told on it, not a rain drop but has added to it. The same tree that is soft and spongy in a fat swamp, with its heavy air, grows hard and noble on the hill side. Spitzbergen forests are breast-high, and Nova Scotia hemlocks mourn their cold wet sky in long weird shrouds of white moss. The influences round us are self-registering. Our spirits, ike the winds, unconsciously write their story

Slowly

in all its fulness on the anemometer-Life. in light airs, quickly in storms--all goes down. Little by little the whole comes in the end. Single acts may show Character, but they seldom form it, though some are supreme and ruling. It grows ring by ring, and the twig of this year becomes the bough of next. Our habits are another name for it, and they grow like the grass. The man's face lies behind the boy's, but it comes out only after a round of winters and

summers.

We may for a time deceive men as to our character, but the very cheat is true to nature, when discovered; it marks a moral blemish which goes to make up the man. There is no falsifying character, rightly read; to the All-Knowing the man and his act are substance and shadow. The light and shade write themselves in a sun picture which is beyond bribery, and does not know flattery. There are no profiles, like Hannibal's portrait, to hide a blind side, but only the full face, like Cromwell's, with the warts or wrinkles, as well as anything nobler.

Character, like a well-cut jewel, shines whichever way we approach it. Life without it is only a mask. What is called public opinion is the verdict of the world on it, and is courted, and dreaded as their master, by kings and even by nations. It stops armies; reforms abuses; colours diplomacy; and makes despots liberal. No will is so overgrown but its waves are stayed by its feeble sands. Opinion, as Pascal well says, governs everything, and

nothing more directly than personal character. lose it is ostracism to a king as much as to a peasant. Honour, without it, is like the shout to Herod in his silver robes that he was a god, when he felt himself being eaten of worms. A good name is the best jewel in any crown; the pearl of great price without which all others are a lie. Intellect is as sensitive in this as grosser powers. Social proscription withered all Byron's laurels and made his life a sad agony, cheered only by the hope of posthumous vindication. Wealth quails before it, and offers a king's ransom to win back even an appearance of respectability. Australia has many such stories of millionaire convicts. In common life Character is existence. To feel oneself a leper is the last misery: it damps all energy, cows the looks, roots up self-respect, and makes a man tremble at the rustle of a leaf. Guilt, real or

It

imputed, feels itself dogged by a double shadow. knows its own story, and thinks every one else knows it. It loses the bright face and straight look, and dreads the tipstaff at each corner. A ghost walks the dreary chambers of a guilty conscience, and there is no laying it. Penitence may make peace with heaven, but not with ourselves: the spots come out again, let us wash them in a whole lake of tears. There is no peace to the wicked. Cain's mark was not limited to murder.

Some men, indeed, are so sunken that their standing with the world at large does not trouble them, but even they do homage to the value of Character in

some lesser circle.

No one can live without a good The lowest have their confraterni

name with some. ties whose good opinion salves self-respect. We are climbing plants that must run up something, and cling to weeds if we have not standards. But in the measure in which we are indifferent to the loss of Character we mark our own degradation. To be happy without it is to be less than a man; and is a more terrible punishment than even self-accusation. Like caterpillars, with the winged Imago eaten out of them, and nothing but the worm left,* such beings, without a soul, are only the form and ghastly wreck of men. There is nothing left to die but the body.

So inexpressibly precious is a good name, that the very dread of its loss is often fatal. Misfortune often has slander in its train, and the terror of her evil tongue many times breaks the spirits and not seldom the heart. A pointed cannon is nothing to a pointed finger, when the sensibilities are keen. To think, even wrongly, that we have lost it, gnaws like the Spartan's fox. To look men in the face, to stay in the same neighbourhood, are impossible: old associations are broken up; any sacrifice made; friends left; and escape sought in new scenes.

What others besides the victim suffer tells the same story of its supreme value. No one ever bears all the burden of real or imputed wrong doing. A father suffers hardly less than his profligate son, and

* The Ichneumon fly does this with different insects ; notably, with the Pontia Brassicæ, the common Cabbage Butterfly.

certainly feels more, in many cases.

Like corruption,

a speck infects all round it. A whole family withers under the blight of the lost character of one of its members, as the whole body is fevered by a local injury. When the tares are pulled up the wheat comes with them. What tears, what prayers, what sacrifices, what humiliation does the shadow of shame wring from a household. Round dishonour there is only desolation.

Character, if well-nigh alone, still commands our respect or love, in spite of many defects or weaknesses. Intellect, like ice, is colourless: no one has more of it than the devil. Power, eloquence, exact morals, so far as the world sees, knowledge, and Ahitophel's wisdom, may dazzle or awe, but may after all count for little in our estimate of their possessors; but goodness has our homage and our hearts. It makes up for many wants. All the world loves my Uncle Toby; and what is it that makes us reverence little children? The Image of God is the same whatever reflects it, and nothing can make up for its absence.

A good name is one of the few honours which all men alike desire. Flattery cannot court a monarch with anything beyond it, and the humblest think themselves still rich if they retain it. Hypocrisy is the homage that worthlessness pays it. Vice makes a mask of the skin of Virtue, and whitens its sepulchres laboriously. There is no sin but seeks to cheat the world by an alias, and hardly a sinner who does not cheat himself by apologies and mitigations. We are