(curiously) the most distinguished and clever boy in that particular school is rewarded with the seventh prize.  I dare say you may have met with families in which there existed the most absurd and preposterous belief as to their superiority, social, intellectual, and moral, above other families which were as good or better.  And it is to be admitted, that if you are happy enough to have a friend whose virtues and qualifications are really high, your primary tendency will probably be to fancy him a great deal cleverer, wiser, and better than, he really is, and to imagine that he possesses no faults at all.  The over-estimate of his good qualities will be the result of your seeing them constantly, and having their excellence much pressed on your attention, while from not knowing so well other men who are quite as good, you are led to think that those good qualities are more rare and excellent than in fact they are.  And you may possibly regard it as a duty to shut your eyes to the faults of those who are dear to you, and to persuade yourself, against your judgment, that they have no faults or none worth thinking of.  One can imagine a child painfully struggling to be blind to a parent’s errors, and thinking it undutiful and wicked to admit the existence of that:  which is too evident.  And if you know well a really good and able man, you will very naturally think his goodness and his ability to be relatively much greater than they are.  For goodness and ability are in truth very noble things:  the more you look at them the more you will feel this:  and it is natural to judge that what is so noble cannot be very common; whereas in fact there is much more good in this world than we are ready to believe.  If you find an intelligent person who believes that some particular author is by far the best in the language, or that some particular composer’s music is by far the finest, or that some particular preacher is by far the most eloquent and useful, or that some particular river has by far the finest scenery, or that some particular sea-side place has by far the most bracing and exhilarating air, or that some particular magazine is ten thousand miles ahead of all competitors, the simple explanation in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred is this—­that the honest individual who holds these overstrained opinions knows a great deal better than he knows any others, that author, that music, that preacher, that river, that sea-side place, that magazine.  He knows how good they are:  and not having much studied the merits of competing things, he does not know that these are very nearly as good.