but they certainly come out of a miserable one.  The happier any human being is, the better and more kindly he thinks of all.  It is the man who is always worried, whose means are uncertain, whose home is uncomfortable, whose nerves are rasped by some kind friend who daily repeats and enlarges upon everything disagreeable for him to hear,—­it is he who thinks hardly of the character and prospects of humankind, and who believes in the essential and unimprovable badness of the race.

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This is not a treatise on the formation of character:  it pretends to nothing like completeness.  If this essay were to extend to a volume of about three hundred and eighty pages, I might be able to set out and discuss, in something like a full and orderly fashion, the influences under which human beings grow up, and the way in which to make the best of the best of these influences, and to evade or neutralize the worst.  And if, after great thought and labor, I had produced such a volume, I am well aware that nobody would read it.  So I prefer to briefly glance at a few aspects of a great subject just as they present themselves, leaving the complete discussion of it to solid individuals with more leisure at their command.

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Physically, no man is made the most of.  Look at an acrobat or a boxer:  there is what your limbs might have been made for strength and agility:  that is the potential which is in human nature in these respects.  I never witnessed a prize-fight, and assuredly I never will witness one:  but I am told, that, when the champions appear in the ring, stripped for the combat, (however bestial and blackguard-looking their countenances may be,) the clearness and beauty of their skin testify that by skilful physical discipline a great deal more may be made of that human hide than is usually made of it.  Then, if you wish to see what may be made of the human muscles as regards rapid dexterity, look at the Wizard of the North or at an Indian juggler.  I am very far, indeed, from saying or thinking that this peculiar preeminence is worth the pains it must cost to acquire it.  Not that I have a word to say against the man who maintains his children by bringing some one faculty of the body to absolute perfection:  I am ready even to admit that it is a very right and fit thing that one man in five or six millions should devote his life to showing the very utmost that can be made of the human fingers, or the human muscular system as a whole.  It is fit that a rare man here and there should cultivate some accomplishment to a perfection that looks magical, just as it is fit that a man here and there should live in a house that cost a million of pounds to build, and round which a wide tract of country shows what may be made of trees and fields where unlimited wealth and exquisite taste have done their best to improve Nature to the fairest forms of which it is capable.