to witness than a stupid, ignorant dunce, wrapped up in impenetrable conceit of his own abilities and acquirements.  It requires all the beauty, and all the listlessness too, of this sweet summer day, to think, without the pulse quickening to an indignant speed, of the half-dozen such persons whom each of us has known.  It would soothe and comfort us if we could be assured that the blockhead knew that he was a blockhead:  if we could be assured that now and then there penetrated into the dense skull and reached the stolid brain, even the suspicion of what his intellectual calibre really is.  I greatly fear that such a suspicion never is known.  If you witness the perfect confidence with which the man is ready to express his opinion upon any subject, you will be quite sure that the man has not the faintest notion of what his opinion is worth.  I remember a blockhead saying that certain lines of poetry were nonsense.  He said that they were unintelligible:  that they were rubbish.  I suggested that it did not follow that they were unintelligible because he could not understand them.  I told him that various competent judges thought them very noble lines indeed.  The blockhead stuck to his opinion with the utmost firmness.  What was the use of talking to him?  If a blind man tells you he does not see the sun, and does not believe there is any sun, you ought to be sorry for him rather than angry with him.  And when the blockhead declared that he saw only rubbish in verses which I trust every reader knows, and which begin with the line—­

    Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean,

his declaration merely showed that he lacked the power to appreciate Mr. Tennyson.  But I think, my thoughtful friend, you would have found it hard to pity him when you saw plainly that the poor blockhead despised and pitied you.

The conceit of the stolid dunce is bad, but the conceit of the brisk and lively dunce is worse.  The stolid dunce is comparatively quiet; his crass mind works slowly; his vacant face wears an aspect of repose; his talk is merely dull and twaddling.  But the talk of the brisk dunce is ambitiously absurd:  he lays down broad principles:  he announces important discoveries which lie has made:  he has heard able and thoughtful men talk, and he tries to do that kind of thing.  There is an indescribable jauntiness about him apparent in every word and gesture.  As for the stolid dunce, you would be content if the usages of society permitted your telling him that he is a dunce.  As for the brisk dunce, you would like to take him by the ears and shake him.