Yes, it is a thing slowly learnt,—­by many not learnt at all.  How many persons you meet walking along the street who evidently think that everybody is looking at them!  How few persons can walk through an exhibition of pictures at which are assembled the grand people of the town and all their own grand acquaintances, in a fashion thoroughly free from self-consciousness!  I mean without thinking of themselves at all, or of how they look; but in an unaffected manner, observing the objects and beings around them.  Men who have attained recently to a moderate eminence are sometimes, if of small minds, much affected by this disagreeable frailty.  Small literary men, and preachers with no great head or heart, have within my own observation suffered from it severely.  I have witnessed a poet, whose writing I have never read, walking along a certain street.  I call him a poet to avoid periphrasis.  The whole get-up of the man, his dress, his hair, his hat, the style in which he walked, showed unmistakably that he fancied that everybody was looking at him, and that he was the admired of all admirers.  In fact, nobody was looking at him at all.  Some time since I beheld a portrait of a very, very small literary man.  It was easy to discern from it that the small author lives in the belief, that, wherever he goes, he is the object of universal observation.  The intense self-consciousness and self-conceit apparent in that portrait were, in the words of Mr. Squeers, “more easier conceived than described.”  The face was a very commonplace and rather good-looking one:  the author, notwithstanding his most strenuous exertions, evidently could make nothing of the features to distinguish him from other men.  But the length of his hair was very great:  and, oh, what genius he plainly fancied glowed in those eyes!  I never in my life witnessed such an extraordinary glare.  I do not believe that any human being ever lived whose eyes habitually wore that expression:  only by a violent effort could the expression be produced, and then for a very short time, without serious injury to the optic nerves.  The eyes were made as large as possible; and the thing after which the poor fellow had been struggling was that peculiar look which may be conceived to penetrate through the beholder, and pierce his inmost thoughts.  I never beheld the living original, but, if I saw him, I should like in a kind way to pat him on the head, and tell him that that sort of expression would produce a great effect on the gallery of a minor theatre.  The other day I was at a public meeting.  A great crowd of people was assembled in a large hall:  the platform at one end of it remained unoccupied till the moment when the business of the meeting was to begin.  It was an interesting sight for any philosophic observer seated in the body of the hall to look at the men who by-and-by walked in procession on to the platform, and to observe the different ways in which they walked in.  There were several very great