Too easy to snigger

I do like the idea, written about most persuasively by Kathryn Hughes in today's Guardian, of the value in trying to 'inhabit the opposition's  mindset'.  The article was a review of a book on Cavaliers of the English Civil War by John Stubbs, 'Reprobates'.  The context was a discussion of the Edinburgh lawyer Archibald Johnstone, a man who spent his wedding night with his fourteen year-old bride (sic) 'testing her on her catechism'.  She died eight months later and Johnstone's eventual, if painful rationalisation of the tragedy, was that it marked 'God's special favour'.  Hughes writes, 'It would be easy to snigger, but Stubbs watches over Archibald's unlovely Calvinism with something approaching tenderness.  Here is a man already in a hell of his own making: who would begrudge him the capacity to wrangle darkness from light'.  I like too her saving of the essayist Aubrey who, 'With his crashing snobbery, his fussy antiquarianism and loose way with a fact, he has long been consigned to the status of historical mediocrity.  But Stubbs reminds us of Aubrey's better qualities'.  Yes.  I sometimes worry that it is too easy 'to mock' colleagues and to forget or deliberately ignore their 'better qualities'.  Something to remember on Monday morning.  Along with the story of the poet William Davenant who, ingesting mercury to cure his syphilis, 'had his head sown into a medicated hood to protect his ruined features.  It didn't work:  once the hood was off he found himself cupping the remains of his septum in his hands'.