selfsame cylinders, and the paddles turn astern. It is so oftentimes
in the moral world. The turning of a straw decides whether the
engines shall work forward or backward.

Now, given a friend, to whom you are very warmly attached: it is
a toss-up whether your affection for your friend shall make you,

1. Quite blind to his faults; or,

2. Acutely and painfully alive to his faults.

Sincere affection may impel either way. Your friend, for instance,
makes a speech at a public dinner. He makes a tremendously bad
speech. Now, your love for him may lead you either

1. To fancy that his speech is a remarkably good one; or,

2. To feel acutely how bad his speech is, and to wish you could
sink through the floor for very shame.

If you did not care for him at all, you would not mind a bit whether
he made a fool of himself or not. But if you really care for him,
and if the speech be really very bad, and if you are competent to
judge whether speeches in general be bad or not, I do not see how you
can escape falling either into Scylla or Charybdis. And accordingly,
while there are families in which there exists a preposterous
over-estimate of the talents and acquirements of their several
members, there are other families in which the rifle-bullet has
glanced off in the opposite direction, and in which there exists
a depressing and unreasonable under-estimate of the talents and