al; while with people who think you stupid and silly, you find
yourself under a malign influence which tends to make you actually so
for the time. If you want a man to gain any good quality, the way is to
give him credit for possessing it. If he has but little, give him credit
for all he has, at least; and you will find him daily get more. You know
how Arnold made boys truthful; it was by giving them credit for truth.
Oh that we all fitly understood that the same grand principle should
be extended to all good qualities, intellectual and moral! Diligently
instil into a boy that he is a stupid, idle, bad-hearted blockhead, and
you are very likely to make him all _that_. And so you can see that it
is not judicious to choose for a special friend and associate one who
thinks poorly of one's sense or one's parts. Indeed, if such a one
honestly thinks poorly of you, and has any moral earnestness, you could
not get him for a special friend, if you wished it. Let us choose for
our companions (if such can be found) those who think well and kindly of
us, even though we may know within ourselves that they think too kindly
and too well. For that favorable estimation will bring out and foster
all that is good in us. There is between this and the unfavorable
judgment all the difference between the warm, genial sunshine, that
draws forth the flowers and encourages them to open their leaves,
and the nipping frost or the blighting east-wind, that represses and
disheartens all vegetable life. But though thus you would not choose
for your special companion one who thinks poorly of you, and though you
might not even wish to see him very often, you have no reason to have
any angry feeling towards him. He cannot help his opinion. His opinion
is determined by his lights. His opinion, possibly, founds on those
aesthetic considerations as to which people will never think alike, with
which there is no reasoning, and for which there is no accounting. God
has made him so that he dislikes your book, or at least cannot heartily
appreciate it; and that is not his fault. And, holding his opinion, he
is quite entitled to express it. It may not be polite to express it to
yourself. By common consent it is understood that you are never,
except in cases of absolute necessity, to say to any man that which is
disagreeable to him. And if you go, and, without any call to do so,
express to a man himself that you think poorly of him, he may justly
complain, not of