some fair faces when I have first been presented before them.  This direct perceptive judgment is not to be argued against.  But I am tempted to remonstrate when the physical points I have mentioned are apparently taken to warrant unfavourable inferences concerning my mental quickness.  With all the increasing uncertainty which modern progress has thrown over the relations of mind and body, it seems tolerably clear that wit cannot be seated in the upper lip, and that the balance of the haunches in walking has nothing to do with the subtle discrimination of ideas.  Yet strangers evidently do not expect me to make a clever observation, and my good things are as unnoticed as if they were anonymous pictures.  I have indeed had the mixed satisfaction of finding that when they were appropriated by some one else they were found remarkable and even brilliant.  It is to be borne in mind that I am not rich, have neither stud nor cellar, and no very high connections such as give to a look of imbecility a certain prestige of inheritance through a titled line; just as “the Austrian lip” confers a grandeur of historical associations on a kind of feature which might make us reject an advertising footman.  I have now and then done harm to a good cause by speaking for it in public, and have discovered too late that my attitude on the occasion would more suitably have been that of negative beneficence.  Is it really to the advantage of an opinion that I should be known to hold it?  And as to the force of my arguments, that is a secondary consideration with audiences who have given a new scope to the ex pede Herculem principle, and from awkward feet infer awkward fallacies.  Once, when zeal lifted me on my legs, I distinctly heard an enlightened artisan remark, “Here’s a rum cut!”—­and doubtless he reasoned in the same way as the elegant Glycera when she politely puts on an air of listening to me, but elevates her eyebrows and chills her glance in sign of predetermined neutrality:  both have their reasons for judging the quality of my speech beforehand.

This sort of reception to a man of affectionate disposition, who has also the innocent vanity of desiring to be agreeable, has naturally a depressing if not embittering tendency; and in early life I began to seek for some consoling point of view, some warrantable method of softening the hard peas I had to walk on, some comfortable fanaticism which might supply the needed self-satisfaction.  At one time I dwelt much on the idea of compensation; trying to believe that I was all the wiser for my bruised vanity, that I had the higher place in the true spiritual scale, and even that a day might come when some visible triumph would place me in the French heaven of having the laughers on my side.  But I presently perceived that this was a very odious sort of self-cajolery.  Was it in the least true that I was wiser than several of my friends who made an excellent figure, and were perhaps praised a little