d forbidding air, much like a gay equipage, and seem
to say like that, "Who are you, Sir?" Yet they all are his, suitors
for his notice, petitioners to his faculties that they will come out
and take possession. The picture waits for my verdict: it is not to
command me, but I am to settle its claims to praise. That popular
fable of the sot who was picked up dead drunk in the street, carried
to the duke's house, washed and dressed and laid in the duke's bed,
and, on his waking, treated with all obsequious ceremony like the
duke, and assured that he had been insane,[206] owes its popularity to
the fact that it symbolizes so well the state of man, who is in the
world a sort of sot, but now and then wakes up, exercises his reason,
and finds himself a true prince.

Our reading is mendicant and sycophantic. In history, our imagination
plays us false. Kingdom and lordship, power and estate, are a gaudier
vocabulary than private John and Edward in a small house and common
day's work; but the things of life are the same to both; the sum total
of both is the same. Why all this deference to Alfred,[207] and
Scanderbeg,[208] and Gustavus?[209] Suppose they were virtuous; did
they wear out virtue? As great a stake depends on your private act
to-day, as followed their public and renowned steps. When private men
shall act with original views, the luster will be transferred from the
actions of kings to those of gentlemen.

The world has been instructed by its kings, who have so magnetized the
eyes of nations. It has been taught by this colossal symbol the mutual
reverence that is due from man to man. The joyful loyalty with which
men have everywhere suffered the king, the noble, or the great
proprietor to walk among them by a law of his own, make his own scale
of men and things, and reverse theirs, pay for benefits not with money
but with honor, and represent the law in his person, was the
hieroglyphic[210] by which they obscurely signified their
consciousness of their own right and comeliness, the right of every
man.

The magnetism which all original action exerts is explained when we
inquire the reason of self-trust. Who is the Trustee? What is the
aboriginal Self, on which a universal reliance may be grounded? What
is the nature and power of that science-baffling star, without
parallax,[211] without calculable elements, which shoots a ray of
beauty even into trivial and impure actions, if the least mark of
independence appear? Th