hese manifestations of futile jealousy.

People of obscurity are never vilified. Only those whose merits have
placed them in the limelight are the targets for the attacks of envy and
for the slanders of falsehood.

A precept that has often been enunciated, and can not be too often
repeated, which should, indeed, be inscribed in letters of gold over the
doors of every institution where men meet together, runs as follows:
"Envy and malice are nothing more than homage rendered to superiority."

Only those who occupy an enviable position can become objects of
calumny.

Such calumny is always the work of the unworthy, who think to advertise
their own merits by denying those of better men.

Men of resolution under such circumstances simply shrug their shoulders
and pass by.

The rest, those who are enslaved by timidity, become confused.

Their ego, which they cultivated in a fashion at once obscure and
absolute, becomes so profoundly affected that they lack all courage to
openly defend it.

Moreover, that instinctive need of sympathy, which is so marked a
characteristic of the timid, is deeply wounded, while their chronic fear
of disapprobation is strengthened by the criticisms spread abroad.

The illogicality of these sentiments is obvious. The man who is timid
shuns society, yet nevertheless the judgments of this same society are
for him a question of absorbing interest. Timidity is, in effect, a
disease of many forms, every one of which is founded upon illogicality.

It is always a mental weakness. It is sometimes vanity, but never pride,
that reasonable pride that a philosophy now abandoned once numbered as
one of the principal vices, and which, if rightly estimated, can be
considered as the motive power of every noble action.

Pride is a force. It is therefore a virtue which must of necessity be
one of the components of poise, so long as it contains within it no
seeds of vanity. Under such circumstances it is a primal condition of
success in the achievement of poise. Pride must, however, be free from
vanity, otherwise it ceases to be a force and becomes a cause of
deterioration.

As a matter of fact, those who are conceited are always the dupes of
their own desire to bulk largely in the minds of others, and at the mere
thought that they will not shine as they have hoped to do the majority
of them are put entirely out of countenance and are quite at a loss for
means of expression.

The inevitable result of