or a painting which is its final test,—­at all events, possessing it, it has the elements of endurance.  Apart from its other values, it has, in virtue of that, a biographical one; it becomes a study of character; it is a window through which you can look into a human interior.  There is a cleverness in the world which seems to have neither father nor mother.  It exists, but it is impossible to tell from whence it comes,—­just as it is impossible to lift the shed apple-blossom of an orchard, and to discover, from its bloom and odour, to what branch it belonged.  Such cleverness illustrates nothing:  it is an anonymous letter.  Look at it ever so long, and you cannot tell its lineage.  It lives in the catalogue of waifs and strays.  On the other hand, there are men whose every expression is characteristic, whose every idea seems to come out of a mould.  In the short sentence, or curt, careless saying of such when laid bare, you can read their histories so far, as in the smallest segment of a tree you can trace the markings of its rings.  The first dies, because it is shallow-rooted, and has no vitality beyond its own; the second lives, because it is related to and fed by something higher than itself.  The famous axiom of Mrs. Glass, that in order to make hare-soup you “must first catch your hare,” has a wide significance.  In art, literature, social life, morals even, you must first catch your man:  that done, everything else follows as a matter of course.  A man may learn much; but for the most important thing of all he can find neither teachers nor schools.

Each man is the most important thing in the world to himself; but why is he to himself so important?  Simply because he is a personality with capacities of pleasure, of pain, who can be hurt, who can be pleased, who can be disappointed, who labours and expects his hire, in whose consciousness, in fact, for the time being, the whole universe lives.  He is, and everything else is relative.  Confined to his own personality, making it his tower of outlook, from which only he can survey the outer world, he naturally enough forms a rather high estimate of its value, of its dignity, of its intrinsic worth.  This high estimate is useful in so far as it makes his condition pleasant, and it—­or rather our proneness to form it—­we are accustomed to call vanity.  Vanity—­which really helps to keep the race alive—­has been treated harshly by the moralists and satirists.  It does not quite deserve the hard names it has been called.  It interpenetrates everything a man says or does, but it inter-penetrates for a useful purpose.  If it is always an alloy in the pure gold of virtue, it at least does the service of an alloy—­making the precious metal workable.  Nature gave man his powers, appetites, aspirations, and along with these a pan of incense, which fumes from the birth of consciousness to its decease, making the best part of life rapture, and the worst part endurable.  But for vanity the race would have