beam out of our own eye before we meddle with the mote in the
Jesuit's?

But where is my description of the weather all this time?

I cannot, I am sorry to say, give any very cheerful account of the
weather that day. But what matter? Are Englishmen hedge-gnats, who
only take their sport when the sun shines? Is it not, on the
contrary, symbolical of our national character, that almost all our
field amusements are wintry ones? Our fowling, our hunting, our
punt-shooting (pastime for Hymir himself and the frost giants)--our
golf and skating,--our very cricket, and boat-racing, and jack and
grayling fishing, carried on till we are fairly frozen out. We are
a stern people, and winter suits us. Nature then retires modestly
into the background, and spares us the obtrusive glitter of summer,
leaving us to think and work; and therefore it happens that in
England, it may be taken as a general rule, that whenever all the
rest of the world is in-doors, we are out and busy, and on the
whole, the worse the day, the better the deed.

The weather that day, the first day Lancelot ever saw his beloved,
was truly national. A silent, dim, distanceless, steaming, rotting
day in March. The last brown oak-leaf which had stood out the
winter's frost, spun and quivered plump down, and then lay; as if
ashamed to have broken for a moment the ghastly stillness, like an
awkward guest at a great dumb dinner-party. A cold suck of wind
just proved its existence, by toothaches on the north side of all
faces. The spiders having been weather-bewitched the night before,
had unanimously agreed to cover every brake and brier with gossamer-
cradles, and never a fly to be caught in them; like Manchester