s superiority in matters of
equipage and furniture; and the egotism is offensive, because it runs
counter to and jostles your self-complacency. The egotism which rises
no higher than the grave is of a solitary and a hermit kind--it crosses
no man's path, it disturbs no man's _amour propre_. You may offend a
man if you say you are as rich as he, as wise as he, as handsome as he.
You offend no man if you tell him that, like him, you have to die. The
king, in his crown and coronation robes, will allow the beggar to claim
that relationship with him. To have to die is a distinction of which
no man is proud. The speaking about one's self is not necessarily
offensive. A modest, truthful man speaks better about himself than
about anything else, and on that subject his speech is likely to be
most profitable to his hearers. Certainly, there is no subject with
which he is better acquainted, and on which he has a better title to be
heard. And it is this egotism, this perpetual reference to self, in
which the charm of the essayist resides. If a man is worth knowing at
all, he is worth knowing well. The essayist gives you his thoughts,
and lets you know, in addition, how he came by them. He has nothing to
conceal; he throws open his doors and windows, and lets him enter who
will. You like to walk round peculiar or important men as you like to
walk round a building, to view it from different points, and in
different lights. Of the essayist, when his mood is communicative, you
obtain a full picture. You are made his contemporary and familiar
friend. You enter into his humours and his seriousness. You are made
heir of his whims, prejudices, and playfulness. You walk through the
whole nature of him, as you walk through the streets of Pompeii,
looking into the interior of stately mansions, reading the satirical
scribblings on the walls. And the essayist's habit of not only giving
you his thoughts, but telling you how he came by them, is interesting,
because it shows you by what alchemy the ruder world becomes transmuted
into the finer. We like to know the lineage of ideas, just as we like
to know the lineage of great earls and swift race-horses. We like to
know that the discovery of the law of gravitation was born of the fall
of an apple in an English garden on a summer afternoon. Essays written
after this fashion are racy of the soil in which they grow, as you
taste the larva in the vines grown on the slopes of Etna, t