One of the most inexcusable weaknesses of Americans is in signing their names to what are called credentials.  But for my interposition, a person who shall be nameless would have taken from this town a recommendation for an office of trust subscribed by the selectmen and all the voters of both parties, ascribing to him as many good qualities as if it had been his tombstone.  The excuse was that it would be well for the town to be rid of him, as it would erelong be obliged to maintain him.  I would not refuse my name to modest merit, but I would be as cautious as in signing a bond. [I trust I shall be subjected to no imputation of unbecoming vanity, if I mention the fact that Mr. W. indorsed my own qualifications as teacher of the high-school at Pequash Junction.  J.H.] When I see a certificate of character with everybody’s name to it, I regard it as a letter of introduction from the Devil.  Never give a man your name unless you are willing to trust him with your reputation.

There seem nowadays to be two sources of literary inspiration,—­fulness of mind and emptiness of pocket.

I am often struck, especially in reading Montaigne, with the obviousness and familiarity of a great writer’s thoughts, and the freshness they gain because said by him.  The truth is, we mix their greatness with all they say and give it our best attention.  Johannes Faber sic cogitavit would be no enticing preface to a book, but an accredited name gives credit like the signature to a note of hand.  It is the advantage of fame that it is always privileged to take the world by the button, and a thing is weightier for Shakespeare’s uttering it by the whole amount of his personality.

It is singular how impatient men are with overpraise of others, how patient with overpraise of themselves; and yet the one does them no injury while the other may he their ruin.

People are apt to confound mere alertness of mind with attention.  The one is but the flying abroad of all the faculties to the open doors and windows at every passing rumor; the other is the concentration of every one of them in a single focus, as in the alchemist over his alembic at the moment of expected projection.  Attention is the stuff that memory is made of, and memory is accumulated genius.

Do not look for the Millennium as imminent.  One generation is apt to get all the wear it can out of the cast clothes of the last, and is always sure to use up every paling of the old fence that will hold a nail in building the new.

You suspect a kind of vanity in my genealogical enthusiasm.  Perhaps you are right; but it is a universal foible.  Where it does not show itself in a personal and private way, it becomes public and gregarious.  We flatter ourselves in the Pilgrim Fathers, and the Virginian offshoot of a transported convict swells with the fancy ef a cavalier ancestry.  Pride of birth, I have noticed, takes two forms.  One complacently traces himself up to a coronet; another, defiantly, to a lapstone.  The sentiment is precisely the same in both cases, only that one is the positive and the other the negative pole of it.