upon, is no fate that can be due to the memory of Sterling. It was
not as a ghastly phantasm, choked in Thirty-nine-article
controversies, or miserable Semitic, Anti-Semitic street-riots,--in
scepticisms, agonized self-seekings, that this man appeared in life;
nor as such, if the world still wishes to look at him should you
suffer the world's memory of him now to be. Once for all, it is
unjust; emphatically untrue as an image of John Sterling: perhaps to
few men that lived along with him could such an interpretation of
their existence be more inapplicable."


Whatever truth there might be in these rather passionate
representations, and to myself there wanted not a painful feeling of
their truth, it by no means appeared what help or remedy any friend of
Sterling's, and especially one so related to the matter as myself,
could attempt in the interim. Perhaps endure in patience till the
dust laid itself again, as all dust does if you leave it well alone?
Much obscuration would thus of its own accord fall away; and, in Mr.
Hare's narrative itself, apart from his commentary, many features of
Sterling's true character would become decipherable to such as sought
them. Censure, blame of this Work of Mr. Hare's was naturally far
from my thoughts. A work which distinguishes itself by human piety
and candid intelligence; which, in all details, is careful, lucid,
exact; and which offers, as we say, to the observant reader that will
interpret facts, many traits of Sterling besides his heterodoxy.
Censure of it, from me especially, is not the thing due; from me a far
other thing is due!--

On the whole, my private thought was: First, How happy it
comparatively is, for a man of any earnestness of life, to have no