least interest in any other topic of discourse; and who is ever trying to bring back the conversation to number one. I have at this moment in my mind's eye a man, a woman, and a lad, in each of whom conceit appears to a degree which I never saw paralleled elsewhere. When you look at or listen to any one of them, the analogy to the blownup bladder instantly suggests itself. They are very much alike in several respects. They are not ill-natured: though very commonplace, they are not utter blockheads: their great characteristic is self-complacency so stolid that it never will see reason to come down; and so pachydermatous that it will be unaware of any gentle effort to take it down. There is a beautiful equanimity about the thorough dunce. He is so completely stupid, that he never for an instant suspects that he is stupid at all. He never feels any necessity to intellectually come down. A clever man has many fears that his powers are but small, but your entire booby knows no such fear. The clever man can appreciate, when done by another, that which he could not have done himself: and he is able to make many comparisons which take him down. But there are men, who could read a sermon of their own, and then a sermon by the bishop of Oxford, and see no great difference between the two.

And now, kindly reader, we have arrived at the end of the six long slips of paper, and this essay approaches its close. Let me say, before laying down the pen, that it is for commonplace people I write, when I advise those who look at these pages to come down intellectually to the mark fixed for them by their fellow-creatures to believe that they are estimated pretty fairly, and appreciated much as they deserve. You and I, my friend, may possibly have fancied, once upon a time, that we were great and remarkable men; but many takings down have

We

So be it.

taught us to think soberly, and we know better now. shall never do anything very extraordinary: our biography will not be written after we are gone. Fiat Voluntas Tua! We are quite content to come down genially. It does not matter much that we never shall startle the world with the echoes of our fame. Let us rank ourselves with Nature's unambitious underwood, and flowers that prosper in the shade.' But, of course, there are great geniuses who ought not thus to come down men who, though lightly esteemed by those around them, will some day take their place, by the consent of all enlightened judges, among the most illustrious of human kind. The very powers which are yet to make you famous, may tend to make the ignorant folk around you regard you as a crackbrained fool. You remember the beautiful fairy tale of the ugly duckling. The poor little thing was laughed at, pecked, and persecuted, because it was so different from the remainder of the brood, till it fled away in despair. But it was unappreciated, just because it was too good; for it grew up at length, and then met universal admiration: the ugly duckling was a beautiful swan! Even so that great man John Foster, preaching among a petty dissenting sect fifty years since, was set down as a perfect fool.' But intelligent men have fixed his mark now. It was because he was a swan that the quacking tribe thought him such an ugly duck. You may be such another. The chance is, indeed, ten thousand to one that you are not. Still, if you have the fixed consciousness of the divine gift within you, do not be false to your nature. Resolutely refuse to come down only be assured, my friend, that should such be your resolution, you will have to resist many temptations to give up!

6

CHAPTER XII.

CONCERNING THE DIGNITY OF DULNESS.

F any man wishes to write with vigour and decision upon one side of any debated ques

tion, it is highly expedient that he should

write before he has thought much or long upon the debated question. For calmly to look at a subject in all its bearings, and dispassionately to weigh that which may be said pro and con., is destructive of that unhesitating conviction which takes its side and keeps it without a misgiving whether it be the right side, and which discerns in all that can be said by others, and in all that is suggested by one's own mind, only something to confirm the conclusion already arrived at. It must be often a very painful thing to have what may be termed a judicial mind that is, a mind so entirely free from bias of its own, that in forming its opinion upon any subject, it is decided simply by the merits of the case as set before it; for the arguments on either side are sometimes all but exactly balanced. Yet it may be necessary to say yes to the one side and no to the other; it may be impossible to make a compromise-i. e., to say to both sides at once both yes and no. And if great issues depend upon the conclusion come to, a conscientious man may undergo an indescribable distraction and anguish before he concludes what to believe or to do. If a man be lord

chancellor, or general commanding an army in action, there must often be a keen misery in the incapacity to decide which of two competing courses has most to say for itself. Oh, that every question could be answered rightly by either yes or no! Oh, that one side in every quarrel, in every debate, were decidedly right, and the other decidedly wrong! Or, if that cannot be, the next blessing that is to be desired by a human being who wishes to be of use where God has put him in this world, is, the gift of vigorous and intelligent one-sidedness; for in practice conflicting views are often so nearly balanced, and the loss of time and energy caused by indecision is so great, that it is better to adopt the wrong view resolutely, and act upon it unhesitatingly, than to adopt the right view dubiously, and take the right path falteringly, and often looking back. And one feels somehow as if there were something degrading in indecision; something manly and dignified in a vigorous will, provided that vigorous will be barely clear of the charge of blind, uncalculating obstinacy. For the spiritual is unquestionably a higher thing than the material, the living is better than the inert, the man than the machine. But the judicial mind approaches to the nature of a machine. It seems to lack the power of originating action; to be determined entirely by foreign forces. It is simply a very delicate pair of scales. In one scale you put all that can be said on one side, in the other scale you put all that can be said on the other side, and the beam passively follows the greater weight. Of course, the analogy between the physical and the spiritual is never perfect. The scales which weigh argument differ in various respects from the scales which weigh sugar or tea. The material weighingmachine accepts its weights at the value marked upon

them, while the spiritual weighing-machine has the additional anguish of deciding whether the argument put into it shall be esteemed as an ounce, a pound, or a ton.

All this which has been said has been keenly felt by the writer in thinking of the subject of the present essay. I am sorry now that I did not begin to write it sooner. I could then have taken my side without a scruple, and have expressed an opinion which would have been resolute if not perfectly right. Various facts which came within my observation impressed upon me the fact that, in the judgment of very many people, there is a dignity about dulness. Various considerations suggested themselves as tending to prove that it is absurd to regard dulness as a dignified thing; and the business of the essay was designed to be, first to state and illustrate the common view, and next, to show that the common view is absurd. But who is there that does not know how in most instances, if it strikes you on a first glance that the majority of mankind hold and act upon a belief that is absurd, longer thought shakes your confident opinion, and ultimately you land in the conviction that the majority of mankind are quite right? The length of time requisite to reach those second thoughts which are proverbially best, varies much. It seems to require a lifetime (at least for men of warm heart and quick brain) to arrive at calm, enduring sense in the complications of political and social science.

In the mellow autumn of his days, the man who started as a republican, communist, and atheist, has settled (never again to be moved) into liberal conservatism and unpretending Christianity. It requires two or three years (reckoning from the first inoculation with the poison) to return to common sense in metaphysics. For myself,