XIII.

In this high summertide, I remember with a strange feeling that there are people who, of their free choice, spend day and night in cities, who throng to the gabble of drawing-rooms, make festival in public eating-houses, sweat in the glare of the theatre.  They call it life; they call it enjoyment.  Why, so it is, for them; they are so made.  The folly is mine, to wonder that they fulfil their destiny.

But with what deep and quiet thanksgiving do I remind myself that never shall I mingle with that well-millinered and tailored herd!  Happily, I never saw much of them.  Certain occasions I recall when a supposed necessity took me into their dismal precincts; a sick buzzing in the brain, a languor as of exhausted limbs, comes upon me with the memory.  The relief with which I stepped out into the street again, when all was over!  Dear to me then was poverty, which for the moment seemed to make me a free man.  Dear to me was the labour at my desk, which, by comparison, enabled me to respect myself.

Never again shall I shake hands with man or woman who is not in truth my friend.  Never again shall I go to see acquaintances with whom I have no acquaintance.  All men my brothers?  Nay, thank Heaven, that they are not!  I will do harm, if I can help it, to no one; I will wish good to all; but I will make no pretence of personal kindliness where, in the nature of things, it cannot be felt.  I have grimaced a smile and pattered unmeaning words to many a person whom I despised or from whom in heart I shrank; I did so because I had not courage to do otherwise.  For a man conscious of such weakness, the best is to live apart from the world.  Brave Samuel Johnson!  One such truth-teller is worth all the moralists and preachers who ever laboured to humanise mankind.  Had he withdrawn into solitude, it would have been a national loss.  Every one of his blunt, fearless words had more value than a whole evangel on the lips of a timidly good man.  It is thus that the commonalty, however well clad, should be treated.  So seldom does the fool or the ruffian in broadcloth hear his just designation; so seldom is the man found who has a right to address him by it.  By the bandying of insults we profit nothing; there can be no useful rebuke which is exposed to a tu quoque.  But, as the world is, an honest and wise man should have a rough tongue.  Let him speak and spare not!

XIV.

Vituperation of the English climate is foolish.  A better climate does not exist—­for healthy people; and it is always as regards the average native in sound health that a climate must be judged.  Invalids have no right whatever to talk petulantly of the natural changes of the sky; Nature has not them in view; let them (if they can) seek exceptional conditions for their exceptional state, leaving behind