s _facile princeps_ among the art critics of his day, that
with a line he can make or mar a reputation and by a word draw the
admiring crowd around an unknown canvas. While Rochefort toils and
ponders and hesitates, do you suppose a doubt as to his own astuteness
ever dims the self-complacency of White Waistcoat? Never!

There lies the strength of the feeble-minded. By a special dispensation
of Providence, they can never see but one side of a subject, so are
always convinced that they are right, and from the height of their
contentment, look down on those who chance to differ with them.

A lady who has gathered into her dainty salons the fruit of many years'
careful study and tireless "weeding" will ask anxiously if you are quite
sure you like the effect of her latest acquisition--some
eighteenth-century statuette or screen (flotsam, probably, from the great
shipwreck of Versailles), and listen earnestly to your verdict. The good
soul who has just furnished her house by contract, with the latest "Louis
Fourteenth Street" productions, conducts you complacently through her
chambers of horrors, wreathed in tranquil smiles, born of ignorance and
that smug assurance granted only to the--small.

When a small intellect goes in for cultivating itself and improving its
mind, you realize what the poet meant in asserting that a little learning
was a dangerous thing. For Mediocrity is apt, when it dines out, to get
up a subject beforehand, and announce to an astonished circle, as quite
new and personal discoveries, that the Renaissance was introduced into
France from Italy, or that Columbus in his day made important "finds."

When the incompetent advance another step and write or paint--which,
alas! is only too frequent--the world of art and literature is flooded
with their productions. When White Waistcoat, for example, takes to
painting, late in life, and comes to you, canvas in hand, for criticism
(read praise), he is apt to remark modestly:

"Corot never painted until he was fifty, and I am only forty-eight. So I
feel I should not let myself be discouraged."

The problem of life is said to be the finding of a happiness that is not
enjoyed at the expense of others, and surely this class have solved that
Sphinx's riddle, for they float through their days in a dream of
complacency disturbed neither by corroding doubt nor harassed by
jealousies.

Whole families of feeble-minded people, on the strength of an ancestor
w