to a friend of the great man, lamented that the great man set so bad an example before his humbler neighbors.  “How can that man go to church?” was the reply; “his taste, and his entire critical faculty, are sharpened, to that degree, that, in listening to any ordinary preacher, he feels outraged and shocked at every fourth sentence he hears, by its inelegance or its want of logic; and the entire sermon torments him by its unsymmetrical structure, its want of perspective in the presentment of details, and its general literary badness.”  I quite believe that there was a moderate proportion of truth in the excuse thus urged; and you will probably judge that it would have been better, had the great man’s mind not been brought to so painful a polish.

The mention of dried-up old gentlemen reminds one of a question which has sometimes perplexed me.  Is it Vealy to feel or to show keen emotion?  Is it a precious result and indication of the maturity of the human mind to look as if you felt nothing at all?  I have often looked with wonder, and with a moderate amount of veneration, at a few old gentlemen whom I know well, who are leading members of a certain legislative and judicial council held in great respect in a country of which no more need be said.  I have beheld these old gentlemen sitting apparently quite unmoved, when discussions were going on in which I knew they felt a very deep interest, and when the tide of debate was setting strongly against their peculiar views.  There they sat, impassive as a Red Indian at the stake.  I think of a certain man who, while a smart speech on the other side is being made, retains a countenance expressing actually nothing; he looks as if he heard nothing, felt nothing, cared for nothing.  But when the other man sits down, he rises to reply.  He speaks slowly at first, but every weighty word goes home and tells:  he gathers warmth and rapidity as he goes on, and in a little you become aware that for a few hundred pounds a year you may sometimes get a man who would have made an Attorney-General or a Lord-Chancellor; you discern, that, under the appearance of almost stolidity, there was the sharpest attention watching every word of the argument of the other speaker, and ready to come down on every weak point in it; and the other speaker is (in a logical sense) pounded to jelly by a succession of straight-handed hits.  Yes, it is a wonderful thing to find a combination of coolness and earnestness.  But I am inclined to believe that the reason why some old gentlemen look as if they did not care is that in fact they don’t care.  And there is no particular merit in looking cool while a question is being discussed, if you really do not mind a rush which way it may be decided.  A keen, unvarying, engrossing regard for one’s self is a great safeguard against over-excitement in regard to all the questions of the day, political, social, and religious.

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