dinner to which he has invited you, with several others, is unnecessarily fine, is somewhat extravagant, is beyond what he can afford.  The young friend asks you back in a week or two, and sets before you a feast of salt herrings and potatoes.  Now the fellow did not run into this extreme with the honest intention of doing right.  He knew perfectly well that this was not what you meant.  He did not go through this piece of folly in the sincere desire to avoid the other error of extravagance.  Or, you are a country clergyman.  You are annoyed, Sunday by Sunday, by a village lad who, from enthusiasm or ostentation, sings so loud in church as to disturb the whole congregation.  You hint to him, as kindly as you can, that there is something very pleasing about the softer tones of his voice, and that you would like to hear them more frequently.  But the lad sees through your civil way of putting the case.  His vanity is touched.  He sees you mean that you don’t like to hear him bellow:  and next Sunday you will observe that he shuts up his hymn-book in dudgeon, and will not sing at all.  Leave the blockhead to himself Do not set yourself to stroke down his self-conceit:  he knows quite well he is doing wrong:  there is neither sense nor honesty in what he does.  You remark at dinner, while staying with a silly old gentleman, that the plum-pudding, though admirable, perhaps errs on the side of over-richness; next day he sets before you a mass of stiff paste with no plums at all, and says, with a look of sly stupidity, ’Well, I hope you are satisfied now.’  Politeness prevents your replying, ’No, you don’t.  You know that is not what I meant.  You are a fool.’  You remember the boy in Pickwick, who on his father finding fault with him for something wrong he had done, offered to kill himself if that would be any satisfaction to his parent.  In this case you have a more recondite instance of this peculiar folly.  Here the primary course is tacitly assumed, without being stated.  The primary impulse of the human being is to take care of himself; the opposite of that of course is to kill himself.  And the boy, being chidden for doing something which might rank under the general head of taking care of himself, proposed (as that course appeared unsatisfactory) to take the opposite one.  ‘You don’t take exercise enough,’ said a tutor to a wrong-headed boy who was under his care:  ’you ought to walk more.’  Next morning the perverse fellow entered the breakfast parlour in a fagged condition, and said, with the air of a martyr, ’Well, I trust I have taken exercise enough to-day:  I have walked twenty miles this morning.’  As for all such manifestations of the disposition to run into opposite extremes, let them be treated as manifestations of pettedness, perversity, and dishonesty.  In some cases a high-spirited youth may be excused them; but, for the most part, they come with doggedness, wrong-headedness, and dense stupidity.  And any pretext that they are exhibited with an honest intention to do right, ought to be regarded as a transparently false pretext.