ng of this hypocrisy--a desire to excel, a desire to be
hearty, fruity, generous, strength-imparting--is a virtuous and noble
ambition; and it is most difficult for a man in his own case, or his
neighbor's, to say at what point this ambition transgresses the boundary
of virtue, and becomes vanity, pretence, and self-seeking. You are
a poor man, let us say, showing a bold face to adverse fortune, and
wearing a confident aspect. Your purse is very narrow, but you owe no
man a penny; your means are scanty, but your wife's gown is decent; your
old coat well brushed; your children at a good school; you grumble to no
one; ask favors of no one; truckle to no neighbors on account of their
superior rank, or (a worse, and a meaner, and a more common crime still)
envy none for their better fortune. To all outward appearances you are
as well to do as your neighbors, who have thrice your income. There
may be in this case some little mixture of pretension in your life
and behavior. You certainly DO put on a smiling face whilst fortune is
pinching you. Your wife and girls, so smart and neat at evening parties,
are cutting, patching, and cobbling all day to make both ends of life's
haberdashery meet. You give a friend a bottle of wine on occasion, but
are content yourself with a glass of whiskey-and-water. You avoid a cab,
saying that of all things you like to walk home after dinner (which you
know, my good friend, is a fib). I grant you that in this scheme of life
there does enter ever so little hypocrisy; that this claret is
loaded, as it were; but your desire to PORTIFY yourself is amiable, is
pardonable, is perhaps honorable: and were there no other hypocrisies
than yours in the world we should be a set of worthy fellows; and
sermonizers, moralizers, satirizers, would have to hold their tongues,
and go to some other trade to get a living.

But you know you WILL step over that boundary line of virtue and
modesty, into the district where humbug and vanity begin, and there the
moralizer catches you and makes an example of you. For instance, in
a certain novel in another place my friend Mr. Talbot Twysden is
mentioned--a man whom you and I know to be a wretched ordinaire, but who
persists in treating himself as if he was the finest '20 port. In our
Britain there are hundreds of men like him; for ever striving to swell
beyond their natural size, to strain beyond their natural strength,
to step beyond their natural stride. Search, search