he to save his life have got a picture into the Royal Academy exhibition?
He built two organs and could play the Minuet in _Samson_ on one and the
March in _Scipio_ on the other; he was a good carpenter and a bit of a
wag; he was a good old fellow enough, but why make him out so much abler
than he was?"

"My boy," returned my father, "you must not judge by the work, but by the
work in connection with the surroundings. Could Giotto or Filippo Lippi,
think you, have got a picture into the Exhibition? Would a single one of
those frescoes we went to see when we were at Padua have the remotest
chance of being hung, if it were sent in for exhibition now? Why, the
Academy people would be so outraged that they would not even write to
poor Giotto to tell him to come and take his fresco away. Phew!"
continued he, waxing warm, "if old Pontifex had had Cromwell's chances he
would have done all that Cromwell did, and have done it better; if he had
had Giotto's chances he would have done all that Giotto did, and done it
no worse; as it was, he was a village carpenter, and I will undertake to
say he never scamped a job in the whole course of his life."

"But," said I, "we cannot judge people with so many 'ifs.' If old
Pontifex had lived in Giotto's time he might have been another Giotto,
but he did not live in Giotto's time."

"I tell you, Edward," said my father with some severity, "we must judge
men not so much by what they do, as by what they make us feel that they
have it in them to do. If a man has done enough either in painting,
music or the affairs of life, to make me feel that I might trust him in
an emergency he has done enough. It is not by what a man has actually
put upon his canvas, nor yet by the acts which he has set down, so to
speak, upon the canvas of his life that I will judge him, but by what he