s is an author
seldom read now, and nobody knows; if they did, nobody would care.

"Public opinion," he resumes, "is irresistible in England; and if it
once turn against a man, were he Messiah himself, he could do nothing.
It is not an intelligent public opinion: it confuses public and private
qualifications. A man may be a great statesman and yet dislike his wife
and like somebody else's. A man may be a great hero and yet may have an
unseemly passion or an unpaid tailor. But the British public does not
understand this. It invariably overlooks the man's greatness, and only
sees the lady or the tailor who compromises him. It thinks--unhappily or
happily, as you please to consider--that genius should keep the whole
ten commandments. Now, genius is conspicuous for breaking them."

Mr. Wootton here knocks a little ash off his cigar, and smiles like a
man who has said something neatly.

"It is the first time I ever heard you compliment genius," murmurs
Lawrence Hamilton.

"In Italy," pursues Mr. Wootton, "not very long ago a minister was
accused of buying a piano out of the public funds for his mistress.
Neither the piano nor the mistress hurt the gentleman in public
estimation in that soft and accommodating clime. But that piano, though
he might have paid for it with own money, would have ruined an English
politician. Though it had been the very smallest cottage piano
conceivable, it would have buried him forever under it if it had got
talked about; he would never have explained it away, or made it even
contingently endurable to the nation. You may, if you are a public man
in England, commit every conceivable blunder, add millions to the
national debt, eat your own words every evening in debate, and plunge
the country into an abyss of unmeasured and unmeasurable revolution, and
they will still have confidence in you if you read the lessons in church
and walk home with your wife; but if it is ever rumored that you admire
your neighbor's wife, down you go forever. And yet," continues Mr.
Wootton, pensively, "people _do_ admire their neighbor's wife in
England, and it seems a venial offence when one compares it with the
desertion of Gordon, or the encouragement of a hydra-headed greed for
the rich man's goods."

With which Mr. Wootton yawns, rises, and also declares his intention to
go to bed.

The young duke follows him and walks by his side down the corridor. He
is not at all like Disraeli's young duke: he is awkward,