After reminding Atticus of the sort of advice which should have been given--the want of which in the first moment of his exile he regrets--and doing this in words of which it is very difficult now to catch the exact flavor, he begs to be pardoned for his reproaches.

"You will forgive me this," he says.

"I blame myself more than I do you; but I look to you as a second self, and I make you a sharer with me of my own folly." I take this letter out of its course, and speak of it as connected with that terrible period of doubt to which it refers, in which he had to decide whether he would remain in Rome and fight it out, or run before his enemies.

But in writing the letter afterward his mind was as much disturbed as when he did fly.

I am inclined, therefore, to think that Middleton and others may have been wrong in blaming his flight, which they have done, because in his subsequent vacillating moods he blamed himself.