He proceeds on the de mortuis nil nisi bonum principle, which I venture to suggest is a very bad principle.

Let us apply this loving tenderness to our living neighbours, and judge the dead according to their merits.

Thus the living will be doubly benefited, and no harm be done to the dead.

Still, the evidence before us--including that exclamation about his "best of mothers" in one of Chopin's letters, written from Vienna, soon after the outbreak of the Polish insurrection in 1830: "How glad my mamma will be that I did not come back!"-- justifies us, I think, in inferring that Justina Chopin was a woman of the most lovable type, one in whom the central principle of existence was the maternal instinct, that bright ray of light which, dispersed in its action, displays itself in the most varied and lovely colours.

That this principle, although often all-absorbing, is not incompatible with the wider and higher social and intellectual interests is a proposition that does not stand in need of proof.