ation of the greater
repression pardon the great expression. It is not the persons who sin
the least, but those who overcome the strongest temptations, who are the
most virtuous. People endowed by Nature with a sweet humility do not
deserve half the credit for their lovely character that those who are
naturally selfish and arrogant often deserve for being no more
disagreeable than they are. Yes, it must be confessed, you are right in
attributing arrogance,--though, after this meek confession and
repentance, if you do not forgive me freely and fully, for past and
future, your secondary will be a great deal worse than my original
sin;--but you never would accuse me of "an arrogance that disdains
docility," if you had seen the mean-spirited way in which I sit down by
the side of an editor and let him _ram-page_ over my manuscript. Out
fly my best thoughts, my finest figures, my sharpest epigrams,--without
chloroform,--and I give no sign. I have heard that successful authors
can always have everything their own way. I must be the greatest--or the
smallest--failure of the age.

"It will be much better to omit this," says the High Inquisitor, turning
the thumb-screw.

"No," I writhe. "Take everything else, but leave that."

"I am glad to see that you agree with me," he responds, with
Mephistophelian courtesy; and away it goes, and I say nothing, thankful
that enough is left to hobble in at all.

"Revealing somewhat of the arrogance of success," you comment, directed
by your Evil Genius, upon that especial chapter which was written in a
gully of the Valley of Humiliation, when I was gasping under an AEtna of
rejected manuscripts,--when there was not a respectable newspaper in the
country by which I had not been "declined with thanks,"--when, in the
desperation of my determination, I had recourse to bribery, and sent an
editor a dollar with the manuscript, to pay him for the fifteen minutes
it would take to read it. (_Mem._ I never heard from editor, manuscript,
or dollar.) No, it may be arrogance, but it is not the arrogance of
success. Whatever it was, it was in the grain. And, to look at it in
another light, I cannot have been "spoiled by the indulgent praise which
my early efforts received," because, on the other hand, I have always
been praised,--

"Like to the Pontic monarch of old days,
I fed on poisons, till they had no power,
But were a kind of nutriment."

The earliest event I remember is being pre