Alexander, get out of my sunshine with your bugbear of a Charles Lamb!
"I have heard you for some time with patience. I have been cool,--quite
cool; but don't put me in a frenzy!"

Well, friend, when you have satisfied yourself with the limiting, you
begin on the descriptive adjectives, and pronounce me egotistical.
Certainly. I should be unlike all others of my race, if I were not. It
is a wise and merciful arrangement of Providence, that every one is to
himself the centre of the universe. What a fatal world would this be, if
it were otherwise! When one thinks what a collection of insignificances
we are, how dispensable the most useful of us is to everybody, how
little there is in any of us to make any one care about us, and of how
small importance it is to others what becomes of us,--when one thinks
that even this round earth is so small, that, if it should fall into the
arms of the sun, the sun would just open his mouth and swallow it whole,
and nobody ever suspect it, (_vide_ Tyndall on Heat,) one must see that
this self-love, self-care, and self-interest play a most important part
in the Divine Economy. If one did not keep himself afloat, he would
surely go under. As it is, no matter how disagreeable a person is, he
likes himself,--no matter how uninteresting, he is interested in
himself. Everybody, you, my critic, as well, likes to talk about
himself, if he can get other people to listen; and so long as I can get
several thousand people to listen to me, I shall keep talking, you may
be sure, and so would you,--and if you don't, it is only because you
can't! You are just as egotistical as I am, only you won't own it
frankly, as I do. True, I might escape censure by using such
circumlocutions as "the writer," "the author," or still more cumbrously
by dressing out some lay figure, calling it Frederic or Frederika, and
then, like the Delphic priestesses, uttering my sentiments through its
mouth, for the space of a folio novel; but at bottom it would be my own
self all the while; and besides, in order to get at the thing I wanted
to say, I should have to detain you on a thousand things that I did not
care about, but which would be necessary as links, because, when you
have made a man or a woman, you must do, something with him. You can't
leave him standing, without any visible means of support. One person
writes a novel of four hundred pages to convince you in a roundabout
way, through thirty different characters, that