its first effect when repeated. Still, there have not been wanting
readers who have preferred this second series of papers to the first.
The new papers were more aggressive than the earlier ones, and for that
reason found a heartier welcome in some quarters, and met with a sharper
antagonism in others. It amuses me to look back on some of the attacks
they called forth. Opinions which do not excite the faintest show of
temper at this time from those who do not accept them were treated as if
they were the utterances of a nihilist incendiary. It required the
exercise of some forbearance not to recriminate.

How a stray sentence, a popular saying, the maxim of some wise man, a
line accidentally fallen upon and remembered, will sometimes help one
when he is all ready to be vexed or indignant! One day, in the time when
I was young or youngish, I happened to open a small copy of "Tom Jones,"
and glance at the title-page. There was one of those little engravings
opposite, which bore the familiar name of "T. Uwins," as I remember it,
and under it the words "Mr. Partridge bore all this patiently." How many
times, when, after rough usage from ill-mannered critics, my own
vocabulary of vituperation was simmering in such a lively way that it
threatened to boil and lift its lid and so boil over, those words have
calmed the small internal effervescence! There is very little in them
and very little of them; and so there is not much in a linchpin
considered by itself, but it often keeps a wheel from coming off and
prevents what might be a catastrophe. The chief trouble in offering such
papers as these to the readers of to-day is that their heresies have
become so familiar among intelligent people that they have too
commonplace an aspect. All the lighthouses and land-marks of belief bear
so differently from the way in which they presented themselves when these
papers were written that it is hard to recognize that we and our
fellow-passengers are still in the same old vessel sailing the same