and find them concur in the experience that great men are
over-estimated and small men are insupportable; that if you would love a woman
without ever looking back on your love as a folly, she must die while you are
courting her; and if you would maintain the slightest belief in human heroism,
you must never make a pilgrimage to see the hero. I confess I have often meanly
shrunk from confessing to these accomplished and acute gentlemen what my own
experience has been. I am afraid I have often smiled with hypocritical assent,
and gratified them with an epigram on the fleeting nature of our illusions,
which any one moderately acquainted with French literature can command at a
moment's notice. Human converse, I think some wise man has remarked, is not
rigidly sincere. But I herewith discharge my conscience, and declare, that I
have had quite enthusiastic movements of admiration towards old gentlemen who
spoke the worst English, who were occasionally fretful in their temper, and who
had never moved in a higher sphere of influence than that of parish overseer;
and that the way in which I have come to the conclusion that human nature is
lovable - the way I have learnt something of its deep pathos, its sublime
mysteries - has been by living a great deal among people more or less
commonplace and vulgar, of whom you would perhaps hear nothing very surprising
if you were to inquire about them in the neighbourhoods where they dwelt. Ten to
one most of the small shopkeepers in their vicinity saw nothing at all in them.
For I have observed this remarkable coincidence, that the select natures who
pant after the ideal, and find nothing in pantaloons or petticoats great enough
to command their reverence and love, are curiously in unison with the narrowest
and pettiest. For example, I have often heard Mr. Gedge, the landlord of the
Royal Oak, who used to turn a bloodshot eye on his neighbours in the village of
Shepperton, sum up his opinion of the people in his own parish - and they were
all the people he knew - in these emphatic words: »Ay, sir, I've said it often,
and I'll say it again, they're a poor lot i' this parish - a poor lot, sir, big
and little.« I think he had a dim idea that if he could migrate to a distant
parish, he might find neighbours worthy of him; and indeed he did subsequently
transfer himself to the Saracen's Head, which was doing a thriving business in
the back street of a neighbouring market-town. But, oddly enough,