and creeping language, and to be so narrow in his critical judgments, as to speak scornfully of poems by Gray and Burns which had stirred men of the most exquisite taste like the sound of a trumpet. On the other hand, the vanity of Pope tempted him to stoop to the meanest artifices to catch applause, and condemned him to tortures from the pettiest literary insects that buzzed about his path, but at the same time it enabled him "to become within his own limits the most exquisite of artists in words, to increase in skill as he increased in years, and to coin phrases for posterity even out of the most trifling ebullitions of passing spite."

IT

SENSITIVENESS TO CRITICISM.

T has been often remarked that public station is a sort of pillory, and that every man who becomes a candidate for office voluntarily sets himself up as a target, at which everybody may fire off his bullets of abuse. In the moral world, as in the physical, elevation is exposure, and utter insignificance is a better coat of mail against the darts of slander than the noblest virtues of which human nature can boast. No man, therefore, should for a moment think of going into public life unless he is prepared to become "the best abused man in Christendom." Never, until he can smile with indifference while his finest sensibilities are scraped by satirical sandpaper and moral oystershells, should he regard himself as qualified for eminent station. The Indian calmly sings his death-song when tortured at the stake; but the politician should be able to fiddle when not only himself, but all his Rome, is burning. For this reason we cannot help regarding the sensitiveness to criticism manifested by our public men as one of the most unfortunate traits in their characters. Foreigners have often called us a thin-skinned people; but many of our public men seem to have no skin whatever. They are raw all over, and the meanest insect is able to sting them into a rage. They have a memory so sadly tenacious as never to allow a solitary line or word of censure that has been written against them to escape; and so overweening is their egotism, that the pettiest newspaper squib,

worthy only of contempt, must be answered with solemn comment and contradiction. The result is, that not a few spend a good portion of their lives in defending themselves from newspaper assaults. Can anything be more foolish than this? Is there a surer sign of weakness, of the lack of all weight and dignity of character?

If ever a man of respectable character engages in a losing game, it is when he suffers himself to be dragged into controversy, especially into a personal controversy, with a scurrilous enemy. In every fair controversy there is something like equality in the combatants, something like the same stake in the issue. But in warring with an unscrupulous foe, and especially with the editor of an unprincipled newspaper, an honorable, high-minded man is sure of being worsted; for while the former, reckless of all the laws of honorable hostility, and feeling not the least restraint from delicacy, either of taste or feeling, will use at once his sword and poisoned dagger, his hands and teeth, and his envenomed breath, and will not scruple, upon occasion, to discharge upon his adversary a shower of filth, from which neither courage nor dexterity can afford any protection; the latter, being not only unversed in the slang of the pot-house and the ribaldry of the brothel, but anxious to assert nothing that is not strictly true, will be temperate in his language, and will make use only of those polished sarcasms which pass in decent society, but whose edge is too fine to pierce the skin of a professional blackguard. Such a controversy, therefore, must necessarily be an unequal match. It would be like a well-dressed gentleman engaging in a mud-throwing combat with a filthy ragamuffin. The latter, from his long experience in the dirty

game, will throw a dozen handfuls of mud to the former's one, and in a few moments will beplaster him from head to foot; while the little which he can throw, even if he is willing to soil his hands, will never be perceived on his adversary's already nasty garments. It was justly said by Michael Angelo, when he was advised to resent the insolence of some obscure upstart, that "he who contends with the base loses all." You cannot scuffle with the filthy, even if victorious, without getting soiled.

Everybody who has been at school has noticed that if any boy is peculiarly irascible, or susceptible of irritation under the various annoyances and torments to which schoolboy life is exposed, he is doubly sure of being victimized, is pounced upon and worried at every opportunity. The world, in this respect, is a big school. It is a curious fact that the mass of men, either from instinctive malice and love of mischief, or from a fondness of exercising petty tyranny, take cruel but exquisite delight in teasing the sensitive and annoying the irritable; while he who, careless of their taunts and jeers, laughs with an air of unconcern at the shafts which malice or envy may hurl at him, soon ceases to be annoyed by them. A public man ought to have a hide as tough and thick as that of a rhinoceros. Not till his epidermis has been hardened to such a degree of impenetrability that rifleballs will be flattened by it, and his sensibility has become so blunted that the stab of a dagger will be mistaken for a mosquito-bite, is he fit for eminent station. No character is so exalted as to be above the audacity, none so sacred as to scare the rapaciousness, of those who are libellers by trade. A public man who escapes being assailed by censors and calumniators, generally owes his

safety to the thickness of his skull. The public themselves view the matter in the same light. They know that in an orchard a tree that bears poor fruit is left unmolested, while one that hangs down with delicious pears or apples is continually pelted with stones. Men of letters, being an irritabile genus, ought particularly to cultivate an indifference to the attacks of the press. Editors and critics are proverbially without bowels, and the more an author winces under their attacks, the more pertinaciously will they apply the literary lash. The young littérateur, who is confident of his power, should rush before the public as the warrior rushes into battle, resolved to hack and hew his way into eminence and influence; instead of whimpering like a schoolboy at every scratch, he should acknowledge only home-thrusts, deadly, life-destroying blows,and be determined to conquer or to die.

There is but one way to get rid of lampooners, and that is to let them alone; then their calumnies will die of themselves, or become perfectly harmless. No one likes to waste his powder; and there is nothing which men are sooner mortified at spending in vain than their abuse and ridicule. The only course for the public man is, like Sir Walter Scott, "to arm himself with the triple brass of indifference against all the roving warfare of satire, parody, and sarcasm; to laugh, if the jest be a good one, or, if otherwise, to let it hum and buzz itself to sleep." The contrary course, however successful for a time, is one of which he will, sooner or later, bitterly repent. To whimper, to chafe, and to fret,—to show that you are keenly nettled by some affront or incivility,— what a new sting it gives to grief! How it accomplishes the very object of your enemy! What a suicide it is!-for self-murder is the