spirit) eschewed vain company:  and who by and bye learned to laugh at all serious things, and ran into the utmost extremes of giddiness and extravagant gaiety.  And not merely should all of us be thankful if we feel that in regard to the gravest sentiments and beliefs our mind and heart remain year after year at the same fixed point:  I think we should be thankful if we find that as regards our favourite books and authors our taste remains unchanged; that the calm judgment of our middle age approves the preferences of ten years since, and that these gather strength as time gives them the witchery of old remembrances and associations.  You enthusiastically admired Byron once, you estimate him very differently now.  You once thought Festus finer than Paradise Loft, but you have swung away from that.  But for a good many years you have held by Wordsworth, Shakspeare, and Tennyson, and this taste you are not likely to outgrow.  It is very curious to look over a volume which we once thought magnificent, enthralling, incomparable, and to wonder how on earth we ever cared for that stilted rubbish.  No doubt the pendulum swings quite as decidedly to your estimate of yourself as to your estimate of any one else.  It would be nothing at all to have other people attacking and depreciating your writings, sermons, and the like, if you yourself had entire confidence in them.  The mortifying thing is when your own taste and judgment say worse of your former productions than could be said by the most unfriendly critic; and the dreadful thought occurs, that if you yourself to-day think so badly of what you wrote ten years since, it is probable enough that on this day ten years hence (if you live to see it) you may think as badly of what you are writing to-day.  Let us hope not.  Let us trust that at length a standard of taste and judgment is reached from which we shall not ever materially swing away.  Yet the pendulum will never be quite arrested as to your estimate of yourself.  Now and then you will think yourself a block-head:  by and bye you will think yourself very clever; and your judgment will oscillate between these opposite poles of belief.  Sometimes you will think that your house is remarkably comfortable, sometimes that it is unendurably uncomfortable; sometimes you will think that your place in life is a very dignified and important one, sometimes that it is a very poor and insignificant one; sometimes you will think that some misfortune or disappointment which has befallen you is a very crushing one; sometimes you will think that it is better as it is.  Ah, my brother, it is a poor, weak, wayward thing, the human heart!