r error than to suppose that you avoid the envy,
malice, and uncharitableness, so common in the world, by going among
people without pretensions. There are no people who have no pretensions;
or the fewer their pretensions, the less they can afford to acknowledge
yours without some sort of value received. The more information
individuals possess, or the more they have refined upon any subject, the
more readily can they conceive and admit the same kind of superiority
to themselves that they feel over others. But from the low, dull, level
sink of ignorance and vulgarity, no idea or love of excellence can
arise. You think you are doing mighty well with them; that you are
laying aside the buckram of pedantry and pretence, and getting the
character of a plain, unassuming, good sort of fellow. It will not do.
All the while that you are making these familiar advances, and wanting
to be at your ease, they are trying to recover the wind of you. You
may forget that you are an author, an artist, or what not--they do not
forget that they are nothing, nor bate one jot of their desire to prove
you in the same predicament. They take hold of some circumstance in your
dress; your manner of entering a room is different from that of other
people; you do not eat vegetables--that's odd; you have a particular
phrase, which they repeat, and this becomes a sort of standing joke; you
look grave, or ill; you talk, or are more silent than usual; you are
in or out of pocket: all these petty, inconsiderable circumstances, in
which you resemble, or are unlike other people, form so many counts in
the indictment which is going on in their imaginations against you, and
are so many contradictions in your character. In any one else they would
pass unnoticed, but in a person of whom they had heard so much they
cannot make them out at all. Meanwhile, those things in which you may
really excel go for nothing, because they cannot judge of them. They
speak highly of some book which you do not like, and therefore you make
no answer. You recommend them to go and see some Picture in which they
do not find much to admire. How are you to convince them that you are
right? Can you make them perceive that the fault is in them, and not
in the picture, unless you could give them your knowledge? They hardly
distinguish the difference between a Correggio and a common daub. Does
this bring you any nearer to an understanding? The more you know of the
difference, the more deep