well-meaning, but densely stupid old ladies.  I did not think the advices worth much, even then; and now, by longer experience, I can discern that they were utterly idiotic.  Yet they were given with entire confidence.  No thought ever entered the heads of these well-meaning, but stupid individuals, that possibly they were not competent to give advice on such subjects.  And it is vexatious to think that people so stupid may do serious harm to a young clergyman by head-shakings and sly innuendoes as to his orthodoxy or his gravity of deportment.  In the long run they will do no harm, but at the first start they may do a good deal of mischief.  Not long since, such a person complained to me that a talented young preacher had taught unsound doctrine.  She cited his words.  I showed her that the words were taken verbatim from the “Confession of Faith,” which is our Scotch Thirty-Nine Articles.  I think it not unlikely that she would go on telling her tattling story just the same.  I remember hearing a stupid old lady say, as though her opinion were quite decisive of the question, that no clergyman ought to have so much as a thousand a year; for, if he had, he would be sure to neglect his duty.  You remember what Dr. Johnson said to a woman who expressed some opinion or other upon a matter she did not understand.  “Madam,” said the moralist, “before expressing your opinion, you should consider what your opinion is worth.”  But this shaft would have glanced harmlessly from off the panoply of the stupid and self-complacent old lady of whom I am thinking.  It was a fundamental axiom with her that her opinion was entirely infallible.  Some people would feel as though the very world were crumbling away under their feet, if they realized the fact that they could go wrong.

Let it here be said, that this vain belief of their own importance, which most people cherish, is not at all a source of unmixed happiness.  It will work either way.  When my friend, Mr. Snarling, got his beautiful poem printed in the county newspaper, it no doubt pleased him to think, as he walked along the street, that every one was pointing him out as the eminent literary man who was the pride of the district, and that the whole town was ringing with that magnificent effusion.  Mr. Tennyson, it is certain, felt that his crown was being reft away.  But, on the other hand, there is no commoner form of morbid misery than that of the poor nervous man or woman who fancies that he or she is the subject of universal unkindly remark.  You will find people, still sane for practical purposes, who think that the whole neighborhood is conspiring against them, when in fact nobody is thinking of them.

All these pages have been spent in discussing a single thing slowly learnt:  the remaining matters to be considered in this essay must be treated briefly.