torial curiosity; when it becomes a matter of delight to
find a person behaving characteristically, striking the hour punctually,
and being, as Mr. Bennet thought of Mr. Collins, fully as absurd as one
had hoped. It then becomes a pleasure, and not necessarily an unkind
one, because it gives the deepest satisfaction to the victim, to tickle
the egotist as one might tickle a trout, to draw him on by innocent
questions, to induce him to unfold and wave his flag high in the air.
I had once a worthy acquaintance whose occasional visits were to me a
source of infinite pleasure--and I may add that I have no doubt that
they gave him a pleasure quite as acute--because he only required the
simplest fly to be dropped on the pool, when he came heavily to the
top and swallowed it. I have heard him deplore the vast size of his
correspondence, the endless claims made upon him for counsel. I have
heard him say with a fatuous smile that there were literally hundreds of
people who day by day brought their pitcher of self-pity to be filled
at his pump of sympathy: that he wished he could have a little rest, but
that he supposed that it was a plain duty for him to minister thus to
human needs, though it took it out of him terribly. I suppose that some
sort of experience must have lain behind this confession, for my friend
was a decidedly moral man, and would not tell a deliberate untruth; the
only difficulty was that I could not conceive where he kept his stores
of sympathy, because I had never heard him speak of any subject except
himself, and I suppose that his method of consolation, if he was
consulted, was to relate some striking instance out of his own
experience in which grace triumphed over nature.

Sometimes, again, the dramatic sense takes the form of an exaggerated
self-depreciation. I was reading the other day the life of a very
devoted clergyman, who said on his death-bed to one standing by him, "If
anything is done in memory of me, let a plain slab be placed on my grave
with my initials and the date, and the words, 'the unworthy priest of
this parish'--that must be all."

The man's modesty was absolutely sincere; yet what a strange confusion
of modesty and vanity after all! If the humility had been PERFECTLY
unaffected, he would have felt that the man who really merited such
a description deserved no memorial at all; or again, if he had had no
sense of credit, he would have left the choice of a memorial to any who
might wish