, at its barest among children, who often reflect the youth of the
world, and are like little wild animals or infant savages, in spite of
all the frenzied idealisation that childhood receives from well-dressed
and amiable people.

Shyness is thus like those little bits of woods and copses which one
finds in a country-side that has long been subdued and replenished,
turned into arable land and pasture, with all the wildness and the
irregularity ploughed and combed out of it; but still one comes upon
some piece of dingle, where there is perhaps an awkward tilt in the
ground, or some ancient excavation, or where a stream-head has cut out a
steep channel, and there one finds a scrap of the old forest, a rood or
two that has never been anything but woodland. So with shyness; many
of our old, savage qualities have been smoothed out, or glazed over,
by education and inheritance, and only emerge in moments of passion and
emotion. But shyness is no doubt the old suspicion of the stranger, the
belief that his motives are likely to be predatory and sinister; it is
the tendency to bob the head down into the brushwood, or to sneak behind
the tree-bole on his approach. One sees a little child, washed
and brushed and delicately apparelled, with silken locks and clear
complexion, brought into a drawing-room to be admired; one sees the
terror come upon her; she knows by experience that she has nothing to
expect but attention, and admiration, and petting; but you will see her
suddenly cover her face with a tiny hand, relapse into dismal silence,
even burst into tears and refuse to be comforted, till she is safely
entrenched upon some familiar knee.

I have a breezy, boisterous, cheerful friend, of transparent simplicity
and goodness, who has never known the least touch of shyness from his
cradle, who always says, if the subject is introduced, that shyness
is all mere self-consciousness, and that it comes from thinking about
oneself. That is true, in a limited degree; but the diagnosis is no
remedy for the disease, because shyness is as much a disease as a cold
in the head, and no amount of effort can prevent the attacks of the
complaint; the only remedy is either to avoid the occasions of the
attacks,--and that is impossible, unless one is to abjure the society
of other people for good and all;--or else to practise resolutely the
hardening process of frequenting society, until one gets a sort of
courage out of familiarity. Yet even so,