e, some persons are so constituted that the very excellence of an
idea seems to them a convincing reason that it must be, if not solely,
yet especially theirs. It fits in so beautifully with their general
wisdom, it lies implicitly in so many of their manifested opinions, that
if they have not yet expressed it (because of preoccupation) it is
clearly a part of their indigenous produce, and is proved by their
immediate eloquent promulgation of it to belong more naturally and
appropriately to them than to the person who seemed first to have
alighted on it, and who sinks in their all-originating consciousness to
that low kind of entity, a second cause. This is not lunacy, nor
pretence, but a genuine state of mind very effective in practice, and
often carrying the public with it, so that the poor Columbus is found to
be a very faulty adventurer, and the continent is named after Amerigo.
Lighter examples of this instinctive appropriation are constantly met
with among brilliant talkers. Aquila is too agreeable and amusing for
any one who is not himself bent on display to be angry at his
conversational rapine--his habit of darting down on every morsel of
booty that other birds may hold in their beaks, with an innocent air, as
if it were all intended for his use, and honestly counted on by him as a
tribute in kind. Hardly any man, I imagine, can have had less trouble in
gathering a showy stock of information than Aquila. On close inquiry you
would probably find that he had not read one epoch-making book of modern
times, for he has a career which obliges him to much correspondence and
other official work, and he is too fond of being in company to spend his
leisure moments in study; but to his quick eye, ear, and tongue, a few
predatory excursions in conversation where there are instructed persons,
gradually furnish surprisingly clever modes of statement and allusion on
the dominant topic. When he first adopts a subject he necessarily falls
into mistakes, and it is interesting to watch his gradual progress into
fuller information and better nourished irony, without his ever needing
to admit that he has made a blunder or to appear conscious of
correction. Suppose, for example, he had incautiously founded some
ingenious remarks on a hasty reckoning that nine thirteens made a
hundred and two, and the insignificant Bantam, hitherto silent, seemed
to spoil the flow of ideas by stating that the product could not be
taken as less than a h