who that has ever really
suffered from shyness does not feel his heart sink as he drives up in
a brougham to the door of some strange house, and sees a grave butler
advancing out of an unknown corridor, with figures flitting to and fro
in the background; what shy person is there who at such a moment would
not give a considerable sum to be able to go back to the station and
take the first train home? Or who again, as he gives his name to a
servant in some brightly-lighted hall, and advances, with a hurried
glance at his toilet, into a roomful of well-dressed people, buzzing
with what Rossetti calls a "din of doubtful talk," would not prefer to
sink into the earth like Korah, Dathan, and Abiram, and be reckoned no
more among the living?

It is recorded in Tennyson's Life that he used to recommend to a younger
brother the thought of the stellar spaces, swarming with constellations
and traversed by planets at ineffable distances, as a cure for shyness;
and a lady of my acquaintance used to endeavour as a girl to stay her
failing heart on the thought of Eternity at such moments. It is all
in vain; at the urgent moment one cares very little about the stellar
motions, or the dim vistas of futurity, and very much indeed about the
cut of one's coat, and the appearance of one's collar, and the glances
of one's enemies; the doctrines of the Church, and the prospects of
ultimate salvation, are things very light in the scales in comparison
with the pressing necessities of the crisis, and the desperate need to
appear wholly unconcerned!

The wild and fierce shyness of childhood is superseded in most sensitive
people, as life goes on, by a very different feeling--the shyness
of adolescence, of which the essence, as has been well said, is "a
shamefaced pride." The shyness of early youth is a thing which springs
from an intense desire to delight, and impress, and interest other
people, from wanting to play a far larger and brighter part in the lives
of every one else than any one in the world plays in any one else's
life. Who does not recognise, with a feeling that is half contempt and
half compassion, the sight of the eager pretentiousness of youth, the
intense shame of confessing ignorance on any point, the deep desire
to appear to have a stake in the world, and a well-defined, respected
position? I met the other day a young man, of no particular force or
distinction, who was standing in a corner at a big social gathering,
bursting