died out long ago.  There are some men whose lives seem to us as undesirable as the lives of toads or serpents; yet these men breathe in tolerable content and satisfaction.  If a man could hear all that his fellows say of him—­that he is stupid, that he is henpecked, that he will be in the Gazette in a week, that his brain is softening, that he has said all his best things—­and if he could believe that these pleasant things are true, he would be in his grave before the month was out.  Happily no man does hear these things; and if he did, they would only provoke inextinguishable wrath or inextinguishable laughter.  A man receives the shocks of life on the buffer of his vanity.  Vanity acts as his second and bottleholder in the world’s prize-ring, and it fights him well, bringing him smilingly up to time after the fiercest knock-down blows.  Vanity is to a man what the oily secretion is to a bird, with which it sleeks and adjusts the plumage ruffled by whatever causes.  Vanity is not only instrumental in keeping a man alive and in heart, but, in its lighter manifestations, it is the great sweetener of social existence.  It is the creator of dress and fashion; it is the inventor of forms and ceremonies, to it we are indebted for all our traditions of civility.  For vanity in its idler moments is benevolent, is as willing to give pleasure as to take it, and accepts as sufficient reward for its services a kind word or an approving smile.  It delights to bask in the sunshine of approbation.  Out of man vanity makes gentleman.  The proud man is cold, the selfish man hard and griping—­the vain man desires to shine, to please, to make himself agreeable; and this amiable feeling works to the outside of suavity and charm of manner.  The French are the vainest people in Europe, and the most polite.

As each man is to himself the most important thing in the world, each man is an egotist in his thinkings, in his desires, in his fears.  It does not, however, follow that each man must be an egotist—­as the word is popularly understood—­in his speech.  But even although this were the case, the world would be divided into egotists, likable and unlikable.  There are two kinds of egotism, a trifling vainglorious kind, a mere burning of personal incense, in which the man is at once altar, priest, censer, and divinity; a kind which deals with the accidents and wrappages of the speaker, his equipage, his riches, his family, his servants, his furniture and array.  The other kind has no taint of self-aggrandisement, but is rooted in the faculties of love and humour, and this latter kind is never offensive, because it includes others, and knows no scorn or exclusiveness.  The one is the offspring of a narrow and unimaginative personality; the other of a large and genial one.  There are persons who are the terrors of society.  Perfectly innocent of evil intention, they are yet, with a certain brutal unconsciousness, continually trampling on other people’s corns.  They