Page:Table-Talk, vol. 2 (1822).djvu/371

 sperate acts. This need not lessen our abhorrence of the crime, though it does of the criminal; for it has the latter effect only by showing him to us in different points of view, in which he appears a common mortal, and not the caricature of vice we took him for, or spotted all over with infamy. I do not, at the same time, think this is a lax or dangerous, though it is a charitable view of the subject. In my opinion, no man ever answered in his own mind (except in the agonies of conscience or of repentance, in which latter case he throws the imputation from himself in another way) to the abstract idea of a murderer. He may have killed a man in self-defence, or “in the trade of war,” or to save himself from starving, or in revenge for an injury, but always “so as with a difference,” or from mixed and questionable motives. The individual, in reckoning with himself, always takes into the account the considerations of time, place, and circumstance, and never makes out a case of unmitigated, unprovoked villainy, of “pure defecated evil” against himself. There are degrees in real crimes: we reason and moralise only by names and in classes. I should be loth, indeed, to say that “whatever is, is right”; but almost every actual choice inclines