likeness of himself, though an unfavourable likeness, to a daub at once insipid and unnatural. "Paint me as I am," said Oliver Cromwell, while sitting to young Lely. "If you leave out the scars and wrinkles, I will not pay you a shilling." And Macaulay contends that if men truly knew their own interest, it is thus they would wish their minds to be portrayed. We should choose, it has been said, in reference to friends, that they should see one's failings, know their scope, and yet think little of them when weighed in the balance with one's recommending qualities. As the writer of an essay on Appreciation puts it, an author or an artist who demands that every admirer shall be an adulator, unconscious of this or that defect in the clay of which his idol is composed, unconscious that the idol is other indeed than supernaturally refined gold, may be very sure that his vanity will rob him of the kind of friends who are best worth having.

Lord Grenville declared it to have been his fate all through life to be more injured by the press in his favour than by that which had been pretty unsparingly employed against him. A biographer of Lord St. Vincent says of Nelson, that to his truly noble and generous nature nothing was ever more disgustful than the attempts of that tribe, the worst kind of enemies (pessimum inimicorum genus, laudatores)—the mean parasites who would pay their court to himself by overrating his services at St. Vincent in 1797, and ascribing to him, instead of to Jervis, the glory of that memorable day.

De Quincey contends that in the case of the first appearance of a man of really splendid attainments, it is a mistaken policy which would deprecate the raising of great expectations. On the contrary he maintains them to be of real service, pushed even to the verge of extravagance, as tending to make people imagine the splendour of the actual success even greater than it was. 66 Many a man is read by the light of his previous reputation. Such a result happened to Bentley." The same author enforces the same doctrine in one of those characteristic novelettes which he wrote for Blackwood. He there again assails the commonplace maxim-that it is dangerous to raise

expectations too high; a maxim true only conditionally, on his contention; which is, that in any case where the merit is transcendent of its kind, it is always useful to rack the expectation up to the highest point; in anything which partakes of the infinite, the most unlimited expectations will find ample room for gratification; while it is certain that ordinary observers, possessing little sensibility, unless where they have been warned. to expect, will often fail to see what exists in the most conspicuous splendour.

But the commonplace maxim holds its own as a rule, which exceptions but help to prove. Boileau prefaces his tenth Satire by a deprecation of the mischief done him by friends who preluded its appearance with a flourish of trumpets too blaring by half. Says Leatherhead to Littlewit, in Ben Jonson's Bartholomew Fair, "Sir, do not you breed too great an expectation of your play among your friends; that's the hurter of these things." After telling us that F. Bayham's criticisms on Clive Newcome's first portrait-paintings were tremendous, so that you would have thought there had never been such drawings since the days of Michael Angelo, Mr. Thackeray adds that, in fact, F. B., as some other critics do, clapped his friends so boisterously on the back, and trumpeted their merits with such prodigious energy, as to make his friends themselves sometimes uneasy. If, observes Mr. Slick, you want a son not to fall in love with any "splendiferous gal, praise her up to the skies, call her angel, say she is a whole team and a horse to spare, and all that: the moment the crittur sees her, he is a little grain disappointed, and says, 'Well, she is handsome, that's a fact; but she is not so very very everlastin' pretty arter all.' Then he criticizes her ; . . and the more you oppose him, the more he abuses her, till he swears she is misreported, and ain't handsome at all." Mrs. Thrale was cut short in her high praise of Mr. Dudley North, by Johnson's summary disparagement of him. The Doctor told her he knew nobody who blasted by praise as she did; for wherever there is exaggerated praise, everybody is set against a character, and is provoked to attack it. There was Weller Pepys, for instance: she praised that man with such

disproportion, that Johnson was avowedly incited to lessen him more than he deserved. "His blood be upon your head," said the Doctor to the dame. We are suggestively told at the close of the first of the Tales of a Wayside Inn, that,

"Soon as the story reached its end,

One, over-eager to commend,
Crowned it with injudicious praise;

And then the voice of blame found vent,

And fanned the embers of dissent

Into a somewhat lively blaze."

He that, as South puts it, should celebrate a captain that had the good fortune to worst the enemy in a skirmish, to the degree of a Cæsar or an Alexander, would render the poor man ridiculous instead of glorious; and every one that measures his actions by the superlatives of the panegyrist, sets his reputation upon stilts, which is not the surest way of standing. The flatterer "greatens and advances everything beyond the bounds of its real worth; describing all in hyperboles, high strains, and words of wonder, till he has puffed up the little thing that he commends, as we see men do a bladder, which owes all its bulk only to air and wind, upon the letting out of which, it returns and shrinks into a pitiful nothing." Windbags are a standing text with Mr. Carlyle; and what they mean is, collapse.

Pope warned the inconsiderate of the possibility of some kinds of work being not impaired by storms alone, but feeling the approaches of too warm a sun :

"For Fame, impatient of extremes, decays

Not more by envy than excess of praise.”

Scott told Miss Seward, then engaged on a life of Dr. Darwin, that to himself, biography, the most interesting perhaps of every species of composition, lost all its interest when the lights and shades of character were not accurately and faithfully detailed; and he took that opportunity of expressing his want of patience with such "exaggerated daubing as Mr. Hayley has bestowed upon poor Cowper. I can no more sympathize with a mere eulogist, than I can with a ranting

hero upon the stage; and it unfortunately happens that some of our disrespect is apt, rather unjustly, to be transferred to thesubject of the panegyric in the one case, and to poor Cato in the other." Cowper, le pauvre homme in this instance, had long before, with emphasis and discretion, penned his protest against profuse panegyric, in lines designedly imitative of Shakspeare:

"Trust me, the meed of praise, dealt thriftily

From the nice scale of judgment, honours more
Than does the lavish and o'erbearing tide
Of profuse courtesy. Not all the gems
Of India's richest soil at random spread
O'er the gay vesture of some glittering dame,
Give such alluring vantage to the person,
As the scant lustre of a few, with choice
And comely guise of ornament disposed."

XXVIII.

COUNTING HEADS AND WEIGHING BRAINS.

THE

against it.

ECCLESIASTES ix. 15, 16.

HERE came a great king, once upon a time, against a little city, and besieged it, and built great bulwarks "Now there was found in it a poor wise man, and he by his wisdom delivered the city; yet no man remembered that same poor man.' Is it not written in the words of the Preacher, the son of David, king of Jerusalem? "Then said I, Wisdom is better than strength; nevertheless the poor man's wisdom is despised." Little city or big, the story is of constant application. Wisdom is better than strength; but then again majorities are strong; and the unwise majority take small account of the wise unit. He has more brains than they all; and if influence were recognized and merit appraised by the weighing of brains, one man's against a multitude's, the one man would weigh down the scale, and the multitude would kick the beam. But counting heads is a more popular

arithmetic, and an easier, than weighing brains; and so numbers are apt to have it all their own way.

As in casting account, says Sir Thomas Browne in his Religio Medici, "three or four men together come short in account of one man placed by himself below them, so neither are a troop of these ignorant Doradoes [gilt-heads] of that true esteem and value as many a forlorn person whose condition doth place him below their feet." A troop of them? nay, say with Young, albeit not in his sense,

"Ten thousand add; add twice ten thousand more;

Then weigh the whole; one soul outweighs them all.”

Mr. Carlyle tells us, in his plainest spoken fashion, that a million blockheads looking authoritatively into one man of what is called genius, or noble sense, will make nothing but nonsense out of him and his qualities, if they look to the end of time. "He understands them, sees what they are; but that they should understand him, and see with rounded outline what his limits are, this, which would mean that they are bigger than he, is for ever denied them." Then again, the mass of men consulted at hustings, upon any high matter whatsoever, our Latter-day Pamphleteer pronounces as ugly an exhibition of human stupidity as this world sees. What though there be such things as multitudes all full of beer and nonsense, who by hypothesis cannot be wrong? He sees no safety in "a thousand or ten thousand brawling potwallopers, or blockheads of any rank whatever," (such, for instance, as the Doradoes, or gilt-heads, of old Sir Thomas Browne,) if the Fact be against them. Prompt is he to answer the objection, Are not two men stronger than one; must not two votes carry it over one? Prompt, with a plump No, nor two thousand, nor two million. 'Many men vote; but in the end, you will infallibly find, none counts except the few who were in the right. Unit of that class, against as many zeros as you like!” Simple addition enough! exclaims old Bartle Massey, in Adam Bede, scornfully and shrewdly, in deprecation of a scheme. that affronts his philosophy of life: "Add one fool to another fool, and in six years' time six fools more-they're all of the

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