Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: reality was nothing, the sound and colour everything. But how many grown-up persons are running about the world, quite as anxious as the little girl was to get the name of Pishashees! Only she did not understand it. True modesty does not consist in an ignorance of our merits, but in a due estimate of them. Modesty then is only another name for self-knowledge ; that is, for the absence of ignorance on the one subject which we ought to understand the best, as well from its vast importance to us, as from our continual opportunities of studying it. And yet it is a virtue. But what, on second thoughts, are these merits ? Jeremy Taylor tells us, in his Life of Christ: " Nothing but the innumerable sins which we have added to what we have received. For we can call nothing ours, but such things as we are ashamed to own, and such things as are apt to ruin us. Everything besides is the gift of God ; and for a man to exalt himself thereon is just as if a wall on which the sun reflects, should boast itself against another that stands in the shadow." Considerations upon Christ's Sermon on Humility. After casting a glance at our own weaknesses, how eagerly does our vanity console itself with deploring the infirmities of our friends ! T. It is as hard to know when one is in Paris, as when one is out of London. R. The first is the city of a great king ; the latter, of a great people. M. When the moon, after covering herself with darkness as in sorrow, at last throws off the garments of her widowhood, she does not expose her beauty at once barefacedly to the eye of man, but veils herself for a time in a transparent cloud, till by degrees she gains courage to endure the gaze and admiration of beholders. To those whose god is honour, disgrace alone is sin. Some people carr...