bring out and foster all that is good in us.  There is between this and the unfavorable judgment all the difference between the warm, genial sunshine, that draws forth the flowers and encourages them to open their leaves, and the nipping frost or the blighting east-wind, that represses and disheartens all vegetable life.  But though thus you would not choose for your special companion one who thinks poorly of you, and though you might not even wish to see him very often, you have no reason to have any angry feeling towards him.  He cannot help his opinion.  His opinion is determined by his lights.  His opinion, possibly, founds on those aesthetic considerations as to which people will never think alike, with which there is no reasoning, and for which there is no accounting.  God has made him so that he dislikes your book, or at least cannot heartily appreciate it; and that is not his fault.  And, holding his opinion, he is quite entitled to express it.  It may not be polite to express it to yourself.  By common consent it is understood that you are never, except in cases of absolute necessity, to say to any man that which is disagreeable to him.  And if you go, and, without any call to do so, express to a man himself that you think poorly of him, he may justly complain, not of your unfavorable opinion of him, but of the malice which is implied in your needlessly informing him of it.  But if any one expresses such an unfavorable opinion of you in your absence, and some one comes and repeats it to you, be angry with the person who repeats the opinion to you, not with the person who expressed it.  For what you do not know will cause you no pain.  And all sensible folk, aware how estimates of any mortal must differ, will, in the long run, attach nearly the just weight to any opinion, favorable or unfavorable.

Yes, my friend, utterly put down the natural tendency in your heart to be angry with the man who thinks poorly of you.  For you have, in sober reason, no right to be angry with him.  It is more pleasant, and indeed more profitable, to live among those who think highly of you—­It makes you better.  You actually grow into what you get credit for.  Oh, how much better a clergyman preaches to his own congregation, who listen with kindly and sympathetic attention to all he says, and always think too well of him, than to a set of critical strangers, eager to find faults and to pick holes!  And how heartily and pleasantly the essayist covers his pages which are to go into a magazine whose readers have come to know him well, and to bear with all his ways!  If every one thought him a dull and stupid person, he could not write at all:  indeed, he would bow to the general belief, and accept the truth that he is dull and stupid.  But further, my reader, let us be reasonable, when it is pleasant; and let us sometimes be irrational, when that is pleasant too.  It is natural to have a very kindly feeling to those who think well of us.  Now, though, in