n gradually improved up to
his present state of enlightenment and perfection. But each state
has also its own troubles as well as its pleasures; and, though
the former are a price which no decent fellow would boggle at for
a moment, it is useless to pretend that paying them is pleasant.

Now, at Commemoration, as elsewhere, where men do congregate, if
your lady-visitors are not pretty or agreeable enough to make
your friends and acquaintances eager to know them, and to cater
for their enjoyment, and try in all ways to win their favor and
cut you out, you have the sat isfaction at any rate of keeping
them to yourself, though you lose the pleasures which arise from
being sought after, and made much of for their sakes, and feeling
raised above the ruck of your neighbors. On the other hand, if
they are all like this, you might as well try to keep the
sunshine and air to yourself. Universal human nature rises up
against you; and besides, they will not stand it themselves. And,
indeed, why should they? Women, to be very attractive to all
sorts of different people, must have great readiness of sympathy.
Many have it naturally, and many work hard in acquiring a good
imitation of it. In the first case it is against the nature of
such persons to be monopolized for more than a very short time;
in the second, all their trouble would be thrown away if they
allowed themselves to be monopolized. Once in their lives,
indeed, they will be, and ought to be, and that monopoly lasts,
or should last, forever; but instead of destroying in them that
which was their great charm, it only deepens and widens it, and
the sympathy which was before fitful, and, perhaps, wayward,
flows on in a calm and healthy stream, blessing and cheering all
who come within reach of its exhilarating and life-giving waters.

But man of all ages is a selfish animal, and unreasonable in his
selfishness. It takes every one of us in turn many a shrewd fall
in our wrestlings with the world, to convince us that we are not
to have everything our own way. We are conscious in our inmost
souls that man is the rightful lord of creation; and, starting
from this eternal principle, and ignoring, each man-child of us
in turn, the qualifying truth that it is to man in general,
including women, and not to Thomas Brown in particular, that the
earth has been given, we set about asserting our kingships each
in his own way, and proclaiming ourselves kings from our little
ant-hills o