actions which home should have
supplied, and which indeed were essential requirements of his nature, he
had failed to find in his home. He had not the alternative that under
this disappointment some can discover in what is called society. It did
not suit him, and he set no store by it. No man was better fitted to
adorn any circle he entered, but beyond that of friends and equals he
rarely passed. He would take as much pains to keep out of the houses of
the great as others take to get into them. Not always wisely, it may be
admitted. Mere contempt for toadyism and flunkeyism was not at all times
the prevailing motive with him which he supposed it to be. Beneath his
horror of those vices of Englishmen in his own rank of life, there was a
still stronger resentment at the social inequalities that engender them,
of which he was not so conscious and to which he owned less freely. Not
the less it served secretly to justify what he might otherwise have had
no mind to. To say he was not a gentleman would be as true as to say he
was not a writer; but if any one should assert his occasional preference
for what was even beneath his level over that which was above it, this
would be difficult of disproof. It was among those defects of
temperament for which his early trials and his early successes were
accountable in perhaps equal measure. He was sensitive in a passionate
degree to praise and blame, which yet he made it for the most part a
point of pride to assume indifference to; the inequalities of rank which
he secretly resented took more galling as well as glaring prominence
from the contrast of the necessities he had gone through with the fame
that had come to him; and when the forces he most affected to despise
assumed the form of barriers he could not easily overleap, he was led to
appear frequently intolerant (for he very seldom was really so) in
opinions and language. His early sufferings brought with them the
healing powers of energy, will, and persistence, and taught him the
inexpressible value of a determined resolve to live down difficulties;
but the habit, in small as in great things, of renunciation and
self-sacrifice, they did not teach; and, by his sudden leap into a
world-wide popularity and influence, he became master of everything that
might seem to be attainable in life, before he had mastered what a man
must undergo to be equal to its hardest trials.

Nothing of all this has yet presented itself to notice, except