his riches, his
family, his servants, his furniture and array. The other kind has no
taint of self-aggrandisement, but is rooted in the faculties of love
and humour, and this latter kind is never offensive, because it
includes others, and knows no scorn or exclusiveness. The one is the
offspring of a narrow and unimaginative personality; the other of a
large and genial one. There are persons who are the terrors of
society. Perfectly innocent of evil intention, they are yet, with a
certain brutal unconsciousness, continually trampling on other people's
corns. They touch you every now and again like a red-hot iron. You
wince, acquit them of any desire to wound, but find forgiveness a hard
task. These persons remember everything about themselves, and forget
everything about you. They have the instinct of a flesh-fly for a raw.
Should your great-grandfather have had the misfortune to be hanged,
such a person is certain, on some public occasion, to make allusion to
your pedigree. He will probably insist on your furnishing him with a
sketch of your family tree. If your daughter has made a runaway
marriage--on which subject yourself and friends maintain a judicious
silence--he is certain to stumble upon it, and make the old sore smart
again. In all this there is no malice, no desire to wound; it arises
simply from want of imagination, from profound immersion in self. An
imaginative man recognises at once a portion of himself in his fellow,
and speaks to that. To hurt you is to hurt himself. Much of the
rudeness we encounter in life cannot be properly set down to cruelty or
badness of heart. The unimaginative man is callous, and although he
hurts easily, he cannot be easily hurt in return. The imaginative man
is sensitive, and merciful to others, out of the merest mercy to
himself.

In literature, as in social life, the attractiveness of egotism depends
entirely upon the egotist. If he be a conceited man, full of
self-admirations and vainglories, his egotism will disgust and repel.
When he sings his own praises, his reader feels that reflections are
being thrown on himself, and in a natural revenge he calls the writer a
coxcomb. If, on the other hand, he be loving, genial, humourous, with
a sympathy for others, his garrulousness and his personal allusions are
forgiven, because while revealing himself, he is revealing his reader
as well. A man may write about himself during his whole life without
once tiring