touch you every now and again like a red-hot iron.  You wince, acquit them of any desire to wound, but find forgiveness a hard task.  These persons remember everything about themselves, and forget everything about you.  They have the instinct of a flesh-fly for a raw.  Should your great-grandfather have had the misfortune to be hanged, such a person is certain, on some public occasion, to make allusion to your pedigree.  He will probably insist on your furnishing him with a sketch of your family tree.  If your daughter has made a runaway marriage—­on which subject yourself and friends maintain a judicious silence—­he is certain to stumble upon it, and make the old sore smart again.  In all this there is no malice, no desire to wound; it arises simply from want of imagination, from profound immersion in self.  An imaginative man recognises at once a portion of himself in his fellow, and speaks to that.  To hurt you is to hurt himself.  Much of the rudeness we encounter in life cannot be properly set down to cruelty or badness of heart.  The unimaginative man is callous, and although he hurts easily, he cannot be easily hurt in return.  The imaginative man is sensitive, and merciful to others, out of the merest mercy to himself.

In literature, as in social life, the attractiveness of egotism depends entirely upon the egotist.  If he be a conceited man, full of self-admirations and vainglories, his egotism will disgust and repel.  When he sings his own praises, his reader feels that reflections are being thrown on himself, and in a natural revenge he calls the writer a coxcomb.  If, on the other hand, he be loving, genial, humourous, with a sympathy for others, his garrulousness and his personal allusions are forgiven, because while revealing himself, he is revealing his reader as well.  A man may write about himself during his whole life without once tiring or offending; but to accomplish this, he must be interesting in himself—­be a man of curious and vagrant moods, gifted with the cunningest tact and humour; and the experience which he relates must at a thousand points touch the experiences of his readers, so that they, as it were, become partners in his game.  When X. tells me, with an evident swell of pride, that he dines constantly with half-a-dozen men-servants in attendance, or that he never drives abroad save in a coach-and-six, I am not conscious of any special gratitude to X. for the information.  Possibly, if my establishments boast only of Cinderella, and if a cab is the only vehicle in which I can afford to ride, and all the more if I can indulge in that only on occasions of solemnity, I fly into a rage, pitch the book to the other end of the room, and may never afterwards be brought to admit that X. is possessor of a solitary ounce of brains.  If, on the other hand, Z. informs me that every February he goes out to the leafless woods to hunt early snowdrops, and brings home bunches of them in his hat; or that he