But, after all, as with many things, much depends upon the way that illusions are cherished.  When this dramatic sense is bestowed upon a heavy-handed, imperceptive, egotistical person, it becomes a terrible affliction to other people, unless indeed the onlooker possesses the humorous spectatorial curiosity; when it becomes a matter of delight to find a person behaving characteristically, striking the hour punctually, and being, as Mr. Bennet thought of Mr. Collins, fully as absurd as one had hoped.  It then becomes a pleasure, and not necessarily an unkind one, because it gives the deepest satisfaction to the victim, to tickle the egotist as one might tickle a trout, to draw him on by innocent questions, to induce him to unfold and wave his flag high in the air.  I had once a worthy acquaintance whose occasional visits were to me a source of infinite pleasure—­and I may add that I have no doubt that they gave him a pleasure quite as acute—­because he only required the simplest fly to be dropped on the pool, when he came heavily to the top and swallowed it.  I have heard him deplore the vast size of his correspondence, the endless claims made upon him for counsel.  I have heard him say with a fatuous smile that there were literally hundreds of people who day by day brought their pitcher of self-pity to be filled at his pump of sympathy:  that he wished he could have a little rest, but that he supposed that it was a plain duty for him to minister thus to human needs, though it took it out of him terribly.  I suppose that some sort of experience must have lain behind this confession, for my friend was a decidedly moral man, and would not tell a deliberate untruth; the only difficulty was that I could not conceive where he kept his stores of sympathy, because I had never heard him speak of any subject except himself, and I suppose that his method of consolation, if he was consulted, was to relate some striking instance out of his own experience in which grace triumphed over nature.

Sometimes, again, the dramatic sense takes the form of an exaggerated self-depreciation.  I was reading the other day the life of a very devoted clergyman, who said on his death-bed to one standing by him, “If anything is done in memory of me, let a plain slab be placed on my grave with my initials and the date, and the words, ’the unworthy priest of this parish’—­that must be all.”

The man’s modesty was absolutely sincere; yet what a strange confusion of modesty and vanity after all!  If the humility had been perfectly unaffected, he would have felt that the man who really merited such a description deserved no memorial at all; or again, if he had had no sense of credit, he would have left the choice of a memorial to any who might wish to commemorate him.  If one analyses the feeling underneath the words, it will be seen to consist of a desire to be remembered, a hope almost amounting to a belief that his work was worthy of commemoration, coupled with a sincere desire not to exaggerate its value.  And yet silence would have attested his humility far more effectually than any calculated speech!