ve less in the poetical stores, and to infer that the line
of Lentulus lay rather in the rational criticism of our beliefs and in
systematic construction. In this case I did not figure to myself the
existence of formidable manuscripts ready for the press; for great
thinkers are known to carry their theories growing within their minds
long before committing them to paper, and the ideas which made a new
passion for them when their locks were jet or auburn, remain perilously
unwritten, an inwardly developing condition of their successive selves,
until the locks are grey or scanty. I only meditated improvingly on the
way in which a man of exceptional faculties, and even carrying within
him some of that fierce refiner's fire which is to purge away the dross
of human error, may move about in society totally unrecognised, regarded
as a person whose opinion is superfluous, and only rising into a power
in emergencies of threatened black-balling. Imagine a Descartes or a
Locke being recognised for nothing more than a good fellow and a
perfect gentleman--what a painful view does such a picture suggest of
impenetrable dulness in the society around them!

I would at all times rather be reduced to a cheaper estimate of a
particular person, if by that means I can get a more cheerful view of my
fellow-men generally; and I confess that in a certain curiosity which
led me to cultivate Lentulus's acquaintance, my hope leaned to the
discovery that he was a less remarkable man than he had seemed to imply.
It would have been a grief to discover that he was bitter or malicious,
but by finding him to be neither a mighty poet, nor a revolutionary
poetical critic, nor an epoch-making philosopher, my admiration for the
poets and thinkers whom he rated so low would recover all its buoyancy,
and I should not be left to trust to that very suspicious sort of merit
which constitutes an exception in the history of mankind, and recommends
itself as the total abolitionist of all previous claims on our
confidence. You are not greatly surprised at the infirm logic of the
coachman who would persuade you to engage him by insisting that any
other would be sure to rob you in the matter of hay and corn, thus
demanding a difficult belief in him as the sole exception from the
frailties of his calling; but it is rather astonishing that the
wholesale decriers of mankind and its performances should be even more
unwary in their reasoning than the coachman, since each