soe there's scarce any creature but hath that emunctorye
            somewhere.« -
                                                              Sir Thomas Browne.
 
Fancy what a game at chess would be if all the chessmen had passions and
intellects, more or less small and cunning: if you were not only uncertain about
your adversary's men, but a little uncertain also about your own; if your knight
could shuffle himself on to a new square by the sly; if your bishop, in disgust
at your castling, could wheedle your pawns out of their places; and if your
pawns, hating you because they are pawns, could make away from their appointed
posts that you might get checkmate on a sudden. You might be the longest-headed
of deductive reasoners, and yet you might be beaten by your own pawns. You would
be especially likely to be beaten, if you depended arrogantly on your
mathematical imagination, and regarded your passionate pieces with contempt.
    Yet this imaginary chess is easy compared with the game a man has to play
against his fellow-men with other fellow-men for his instruments. He thinks
himself sagacious, perhaps, because he trusts no bond except that of
self-interest; but the only self-interest he can safely rely on is what seems to
be such to the mind he would use or govern. Can he ever be sure of knowing this?
    Matthew Jermyn was under no misgivings as to the fealty of Johnson. He had
been the making of Johnson; and this seems to many men a reason for expecting
devotion, in spite of the fact that they themselves, though very fond of their
own persons and lives, are not at all devoted to the Maker they believe in.
Johnson was a most serviceable subordinate. Being a man who aimed at
respectability, a family man, who had a good church-pew, subscribed for
engravings of banquet pictures where there were portraits of political
celebrities, and wished his children to be more unquestionably genteel than
their father, he presented all the more numerous handles of worldly motive by
which a judicious superior might keep a hold on him. But this useful regard to
respectability had its inconvenience in relation to such a superior: it was a
mark of some vanity and some pride, which, if they were not touched just in the
right handling-place, were liable to become raw and sensitive. Jermyn was aware
of Johnson's weaknesses, and thought he had flattered them sufficiently. But on
the point of knowing when we are disagreeable, our human nature is fallible. Our
lavender-water, our smiles, our compliments, and other polite falsities, are
constantly