or offending; but to accomplish this, he must be
interesting in himself--be a man of curious and vagrant moods, gifted
with the cunningest tact and humour; and the experience which he
relates must at a thousand points touch the experiences of his readers,
so that they, as it were, become partners in his game. When X. tells
me, with an evident swell of pride, that he dines constantly with
half-a-dozen men-servants in attendance, or that he never drives abroad
save in a coach-and-six, I am not conscious of any special gratitude to
X. for the information. Possibly, if my establishments boast only of
Cinderella, and if a cab is the only vehicle in which I can afford to
ride, and all the more if I can indulge in _that_ only on occasions of
solemnity, I fly into a rage, pitch the book to the other end of the
room, and may never afterwards be brought to admit that X. is possessor
of a solitary ounce of brains. If, on the other hand, Z. informs me
that every February he goes out to the leafless woods to hunt early
snowdrops, and brings home bunches of them in his hat; or that he
prefers in woman a brown eye to a blue, and explains by early love
passages his reasons for the preference, I do not get angry; on the
contrary, I feel quite pleased; perhaps, if the matter is related with
unusual grace and tenderness, it is read with a certain moisture and
dimness of eye. And the reason is obvious. The egotistical X. is
barren, and suggests nothing beyond himself, save that he is a good
deal better off than I am--a reflection much pleasanter to him than it
is to me; whereas the equally egotistical Z., with a single sentence
about his snowdrops, or his liking for brown eyes rather than for blue,
sends my thoughts wandering away back among my dead spring-times, or
wafts me the odours of the roses of those summers when the colour of an
eye was of more importance than it now is. X.'s men-servants and
coach-and-six do not fit into the life of his reader, because in all
probability his reader knows as much about these things as he knows
about Pharaoh; Z.'s snowdrops and preferences of colour do, because
every one knows what the spring thirst is, and every one in his time
has been enslaved by eyes whose colour he could not tell for his life,
but which he knew were the tenderest that ever looked love, the
brightest that ever flashed sunlight. Montaigne and Charles Lamb are
egotists of the Z. class, and the world never wearies reading the