uitably have been that of negative
beneficence. Is it really to the advantage of an opinion that I should
be known to hold it? And as to the force of my arguments, that is a
secondary consideration with audiences who have given a new scope to the
_ex pede Herculem_ principle, and from awkward feet infer awkward
fallacies. Once, when zeal lifted me on my legs, I distinctly heard an
enlightened artisan remark, "Here's a rum cut!"--and doubtless he
reasoned in the same way as the elegant Glycera when she politely puts
on an air of listening to me, but elevates her eyebrows and chills her
glance in sign of predetermined neutrality: both have their reasons for
judging the quality of my speech beforehand.

This sort of reception to a man of affectionate disposition, who has
also the innocent vanity of desiring to be agreeable, has naturally a
depressing if not embittering tendency; and in early life I began to
seek for some consoling point of view, some warrantable method of
softening the hard peas I had to walk on, some comfortable fanaticism
which might supply the needed self-satisfaction. At one time I dwelt
much on the idea of compensation; trying to believe that I was all the
wiser for my bruised vanity, that I had the higher place in the true
spiritual scale, and even that a day might come when some visible
triumph would place me in the French heaven of having the laughers on my
side. But I presently perceived that this was a very odious sort of
self-cajolery. Was it in the least true that I was wiser than several of
my friends who made an excellent figure, and were perhaps praised a
little beyond their merit? Is the ugly unready man in the corner,
outside the current of conversation, really likely to have a fairer
view of things than the agreeable talker, whose success strikes the
unsuccessful as a repulsive example of forwardness and conceit? And as
to compensation in future years, would the fact that I myself got it
reconcile me to an order of things in which I could see a multitude with
as bad a share as mine, who, instead of getting their corresponding
compensation, were getting beyond the reach of it in old age? What could
be more contemptible than the mood of mind which makes a man measure the
justice of divine or human law by the agreeableness of his own shadow
and the ample satisfaction of his own desires?

I dropped a form of consolation which seemed to be encouraging me in the
persuasion that my discontent w