h and given notice of quitting, and the whole
establishment would have gone to pieces at the end of No. 1, if you had
not looked so very good-natured about it that it was impossible to give
up such amiable acquaintance.

The above acknowledgments and personal revelations are preliminary to
the following more general statement, which will show how they must be
qualified.

Every man of sense has two ways of looking at himself. The first is an
everyday working view, in which he makes the most of his gifts and
accomplishments. It is the superficial stratum in which praise and blame
find their sphere of action,--the region of comparisons,--the habitat
where envy and jealousy are to be looked for, if they have not been
weeded out and flung into the compost-heap of dead vices, with which, if
we understand moral husbandry, we fertilize our living virtues. It is
quite foolish to abuse this thin upper layer of our mental soil. The
grasses do not strike their roots deep in towards the centre, like the
oaks, but they are the more useful and necessary vegetable of the two.
The cheap, but perpetual activities of life grow out of this upper
stratum of our being. How silly to try to be wiser than Providence!
Don't tell me about the vain illusions of self-love. There is nothing so
real in this world as Illusion. All other things may desert a man, but
this fair angel never leaves him. She holds a star a billion miles over
a baby's head, and laughs to see him clawing and batting himself as he
tries to reach it. She glides before the hoary sinner down the path
which leads to the inexorable gate, jingling the keys of heaven at her
girdle.

Underneath this surface-soil lies another stratum of thought, where the
tap-roots of the larger mental growths penetrate and find their
nourishment. Out of this comes heroism in all its shapes; here the
enterprises that overshadow half the planet, when full grown, lie,
tender, in their cotyledons. Here there is neither praise nor blame,
nothing but a passionless self-estimate, quite as willing to undervalue
as to rate too highly. The less clay and straw the task-master has given
his servant, the smaller the tale of bricks he will be required to
furnish. Many a man not remarkable for conceit has shuddered as some
effort or accident has revealed to him a depth of power of which he
never thought himself the possessor and broken his peace with the fatal
words, "Sleep no more!"

This deeper self-appreciat