s proud, it
may be, but not fatuous; for shyness as a rule implies a comparative
quickness and alertness of intellect: its exceeding sensibility is
exclusive of dulness; and it is frequently due to the presence in a
reluctant body of a mind endowed with active powers.

Inasmuch as diffidence appears where the subtler formalities of life are
compulsory, it is clear that it essentially belongs to the class called
gentle, for this class alone enforces that exacting code of etiquette to
which our discomfiture is so largely due. Shyness has seldom place in
the patriarchal life where men live, "sound, without care, every man
under his own vine or his own fig-tree," nor among those who, perforce
pursuing a too laborious existence, have no leisure for superficial
refinements. Though here and there you may find a Joseph Poorgrass, it
is rare among the simple; it is not a popular weakness, and therefore
wins no popular sympathy. Such is its first social limitation: it is
almost restricted to the classes which are outwardly refined.

But it has another limitation of equal importance which may be described
as climatic; for this malady is not found in equal degrees all over the
habitable globe. There are many lands where it hardly exists at all even
among the class which is alone liable to it; and in its serious form it
is found only over a small part of the earth. There are many causes
which conduce to this partial distribution. In one country manners are
not minutely schooled, women being held of secondary account, and men
content without subtlety; in another, life is in itself too primitive to
devise the artifices of refinement; in a third, the fundamental disunion
between the mind and the physical organism is prevented by the kindly
hand of nature. For these reasons all the savage world, all the East,
and the whole of southern Europe have little knowledge of the diffident,
and what zoologists would call the area of distribution of the species
is confined within narrow geographical limits.

It is in fact chiefly in the north and west of our own continent that
the haunts of the diffident are to be found, for there alone are all the
conditions necessary to their maintenance fulfilled--a society
sufficiently leisured and wealthy to have elaborated conventional rules
of intercourse, the assemblage of both sexes upon an equal footing, and
a climate which exaggerates the antagonism between the quick mind and
the unresponsive body. He