agreeable things to infringe. We are each the centre of our own world, and thus have a place in our own eyes which no one can give us. Something of this half-delusion is indispensable to carry us through our parts creditably, and the laws of politeness, on principle, support this degree of pretension. There is a tacit agreement in society that every individual in it fills his proper place, and that he and his belongings are what they go for-that all our externals fulfil their professions. There is no hypocrisy in assuming this of every one we meet. It is simply not obtruding our private judgment where its expression would be an impertinence. The disagreeable thing jars on this nice adjustment. The speaker has the unjustifiable aim of lowering this fancied elevation, whether moral or social; and he dispels illusions, not, as he supposes, in the interest of truth on any social or moral view, but really for selfish ends. He obeys an unamiable impulse to prove that he is knowing where we are ignorant, wise where we are foolish, strong where we are weak—that he sees into us and through us, and that it is, before all things, important that this should be declared and made evident.

ON BEING UNDERSTOOD.

IF modesty would allow men to confess it, we do not doubt that it is a very common matter of surprise -ingenuous surprise, and not a feeling really to be ashamed of-why more people do not like us, care for us, show interest in us. It is very clear that most people have only a very limited number of admirers, and—not to speak of admirers-very few sympathisers, very few who find much pleasure in their society, or to whom they can feel of real consequence apart from the substantial services they can render, and beyond the domestic hearth, with which such speculations as these had best have nothing to do. Perhaps we are conscious of some play of thought, some kindness and largeness of heart, some capacities for sympathy, some tenderness and delicacy of feeling, some readiness of perception, some spark of fancy or humour only waiting to be kindled, some good-nature. How is it that others do not pay homage to such an array of good qualities? Some men think they are liked-but they are not

liked in the degree they suppose themselves to be. They are the objects of an amount of cold, patronising goodwill, but they have not the sort of thing we are meaning, and which so many of us honestly wonder we don't get. It does not signify much-we do without it. We are not sure that violent appreciation would not be a bore, and entail a great deal of trouble. We would treat it as a scientific question rather than a want of the heart. It simply strikes us, one and all, when we come to think of it, as curious, how extremely few each man cares for, or gets to care for him-how very few hit it together.

As a

We have enumerated the good gifts of which every one is of course conscious; but we must in candour acknowledge that in mixed society we do not find them brought into play and exercised as we should beforehand expect them to be. Our wonder is not so much that men do not greatly care for what they see in us, but how it happens that, as all these fine qualities are there, they do not contrive to find them out. fact, we are not appreciated. How comes that about? Why, we may ask with a pardonable warmth and indignation, do people let us be so dull and uninteresting in their presence, when we have it in us to be so different? There must certainly be a fault somewhere. If society were so ordered as to meet our idiosyncrasy, we should make a different appearance. It is becoming a pretty general discovery-and, therefore, we give it expression that justice is not done. We are not brought out. We are suffered to smoulder. Our lamp

is dim for want of air,-when, if we know ourselves, we have it in us to assist an illumination. Most concourses of men are dull. We have each reason to think it need not be so. We have called this a "discovery," because this cry of the soul is a feature of modern civilisation. It seems clear that, in the days of our grandfathers, people used to meet and be entertained. without the necessities we here hint at. A certain rude jollity and robustness of powers kept under the finer sensibilities. We do not deny that even now there are people who find society a field, who are courted, who shine, who, as the phrase is, make themselves agreeable. But this scarcely affects our argument; for is not the best talker that ever possessed the ear of a dinner-table careful to let us know that we see but the outside, that his inner self is never reached, that he all the while languishes for real sympathy-that he has depths which a careless laughing world takes no pain to search into? We believe that, if Dr Johnson lived in our time, he would consider himself not understood — an idea, as far as we can see, that never once entered his head, after the world took him up; and we have no doubt that this conviction would have hampered his flow, and, so to say, shut him up in many a company where he made the grandest figure. And this probably explains why there are no Dr Johnsons now, and no anybodies of that sort. People were not in those days so dependent on somebody to draw them out. In another point, there is a difference. If our vanity is not less exacting than theirs, it is more fastidious. A

The

man in these days is jealous of being listened to and cared for merely as a lion, merely as an author. idea is that there is something beyond what shows itself in work achieved something more intensely the man's self than what comes out of him. When Cumberland intimated that he wanted to be treated, not as a writer of plays, but as a gentleman, the world of his day did not know what he was at, and thought he gave himself airs; but every successful author would say so now, and every one would take the feeling for granted. Not that our fathers were wholly without the notion of getting at a man, or unconscious that some had this gift more than others, but they still did not touch our modern strain. Thus it was said of Sir Walter Scott, that he could not travel with a man in a coach without learning something from him. No doubt he could have learnt something from us, but would he have understood us? There is the question. It is not what we know, but what we are, that is at the root of this sensitive aspiration. A desire to reveal our very inside of all-with, at the same time, a bashful recoil from the operation-characterises the modern mind, which, in despair of individual sympathy, often throws itself upon the public as the only true confidant; so that the more reserve prevails in society, each member of which we know just a little, the more we seem ready to reveal our secrets to our readers and hearers-if they are only in crowds enough-of whom individually we know nothing.

Some good souls, approaching this question, have