t he was a fool, a good while ago.
Indeed, a tacit compliment to his present self is involved in the latter
confession: it suggests the reflection, what progress he has made, and
how vastly he has improved, since then. When a man informs us that he
was a very silly fellow in the year 1851, it is assumed that he is not a
very silly fellow in the year 1861. It is as when the merchant with ten
thousand a year, sitting at his sumptuous table, and sipping his '41
claret, tells you how, when he came as a raw lad from the country, he
used often to have to go without his dinner. He knows that the plate,
the wine, the massively elegant apartment, the silent servants, so
alert, yet so impassive, will appear to join in chorus with the obvious
suggestion, "You see he has not to go without his dinner now!" Did you
ever, when twenty years old, look back at the diary you kept when
you were sixteen,--or when twenty-five, at the diary you kept when
twenty,--or at thirty, at the diary you kept when twenty-five? Was not
your feeling a singular mixture of humiliation and self-complacency?
What extravagant, silly stuff it seemed that you had thus written five
years before! What Veal! and, oh, what a calf he must have been who
wrote it! It is a difficult question, to which the answer cannot be
elicited, Who is the greatest fool in this world? But every candid and
sensible man of middle age knows thoroughly well the answer to the
question, Who was the greatest fool that he himself ever knew? And after
all, it is your diary, especially if you were wont to introduce into it
poetical remarks and moral reflections, that will mainly help you to
the humiliating conclusion. Other things, some of which I have already
named, will point in the same direction. Look at the prize essays you
wrote when you were a boy at school; look even at your earlier prize
essays written at college (though of these last I have something to say
hereafter); look at the letters you wrote home when away at school or
even at college, especially if you were a clever boy, trying to write
in a graphic and witty fashion; and if you have reached sense at last,
(which some, it may be remarked, never do,) I think you will blush even
through the unblushing front of manhood, and think what a terrific,
unutterable, conceited, intolerable blockhead you were. It is not till
people attain somewhat mature years that they can rightly understand
the wonderful forbearance their parents must ha