wkward, bashful man, always struggling against his own
ignorance of society, and only sustained by a proud consciousness that
whispered the "sterling stuff that was inside,"--qualities which appeal
to large audiences, and are intelligible to the many. Ay, there was
indeed his grand secret. Genius wounds deeply, talent and ability offend
widely, but the man of mere commonplace faculties, using common gifts
with common opportunities, trading rather upon negative than positive
properties, succeeding because he is not this, that, and t' other,
plodding along the causeway of life steadily and unobtrusively, seen
by all, patched and noticed in every successive stage of his upward
progress, so that each may say, "I remember him a barefooted boy,
running errands in the street,--a poor clerk at forty pounds a year,--I
knew him when he lived in such an alley, up so many pair of stairs!"
Strange enough, the world likes all this; there is a smack of
self-gratulation in it that seems to say, "If I liked it, I could have
done as well as he." Success in life won, these men rise into another
atmosphere, and acquire another appreciation. They are then used to
point the moral of that pleasant fallacy we are all so fond of repeating
to each other, when we assert, amongst the blessings of our glorious
Constitution, that there is no dignity too great, no station too high,
for the Englishman who combines industry and integrity with zeal and
perseverance. Shame on us, that we dare to call fallacy that which
great Lord Chancellors and Chief Justices have verified from their own
confessions; nay, we have even heard a Lord Mayor declare that he was,
once upon a time, like that "poor" publican! The moral of it all is that
with regard to the Davenport Dunns of this world, we pity them in their
first struggles, we are proud of them in their last successes, and we
are about as much right in the one sentiment as in the other.

The world--the great wide world of man--is marvellously identical with
the small ingredient of humanity of whose aggregate it consists. It has
its moods of generosity, distrust, liberality, narrowness, candor, and
suspicion,--its fevers of noble impulse, and its cold fits of petty
meanness,--its high moments of self-devotion, and its dark hours of
persecution and hate. Men are judged differently in different ages,
just as in every-day life we hear a different opinion from the same
individual, when crossed by the cares of the mor