e Harold_ to a great poet's inspired yearning for
immortality. Still, we fear, there is room for a doubt whether the world
would ever have seen _Childe Harold_ if the great poet had not happened
to be also a morbidly vain and, in some respects, remarkably small man.
But even if we assume that the big affairs of life may be left to big
motives, and do not require such a little motive as vanity to help them,
these are, after all, few and far between.

For one action that may safely be left to yearnings for immortality, or
ambition, or love, or something equally lofty and grand, there are
thousands which society must get done somehow, and which it gets done
pleasantly and comfortably only because, by a charmingly convenient
illusion, the vanity of each agent makes him attach a peculiar
importance to them. There is no act so trivial, or to all appearance so
unworthy of a rational being, that the magic of vanity cannot throw a
halo of dignity over it, and persuade the agent that it is mainly by his
exertions that society is kept together, as Moliere's dancing-master
reasoned that the secret of good government is the secret of good
dancing--namely, how to avoid false steps. And it is this genial
promoter of human happiness, this all-powerful diffuser of social
harmony, this lubricating oil without which the vast and complex
machinery of life could never work, that man, in his ignorant
ingratitude, dares to denounce.

We should like to ask one of these thoughtless revilers of vanity
whether it has ever been his misfortune to meet a woman without it. He
would probably try to escape by declaring that a woman without vanity is
a purely imaginary being, if not a contradiction in terms; and we admit
that there is something to be said in favor of this view. Nothing is
more astonishing to the male philosopher than the odd way in which, from
some stray corner of character where he would have least thought of
looking for it, female vanity now and then suddenly pops out upon him.
He fancied that he knew a woman well, that he had studied her character
and mastered all its strong and weak points, when, by some accident or
at some unguarded moment, he suddenly strikes a rich, deep, vein of
vanity of the existence of which he never had the remotest suspicion. He
may perhaps have known that she was not without vanity on certain
points, but for these he had discovered, or had fancied he had
discovered, some sort of reason. We do not necessar