Like the professional prophet, he learns to be glad of the harm that
keeps up his credit, and to be sorry for the good that contradicts him.
It is hard enough for any of us, amid the changing winds of fortune and
the hurly-burly of events, to keep quite clear of a gladness which is
another's calamity; but one may choose not to enter on a course which
will turn such gladness into a fixed habit of mind, committing ourselves
to be continually pleased that others should appear to be wrong in order
that we may have the air of being right.

In some cases, perhaps, it might be urged that Pepin has remained the
more self-contented because he has _not_ written everything he believed
himself capable of. He once asked me to read a sort of programme of the
species of romance which he should think it worth while to write--a
species which he contrasted in strong terms with the productions of
illustrious but overrated authors in this branch. Pepin's romance was to
present the splendours of the Roman Empire at the culmination of its
grandeur, when decadence was spiritually but not visibly imminent: it
was to show the workings of human passion in the most pregnant and
exalted of human circumstances, the designs of statesmen, the
interfusion of philosophies, the rural relaxation and converse of
immortal poets, the majestic triumphs of warriors, the mingling of the
quaint and sublime in religious ceremony, the gorgeous delirium of
gladiatorial shows, and under all the secretly working leaven of
Christianity. Such a romance would not call the attention of society to
the dialect of stable-boys, the low habits of rustics, the vulgarity of
small schoolmasters, the manners of men in livery, or to any other form
of uneducated talk and sentiments: its characters would have virtues and
vices alike on the grand scale, and would express themselves in an
English representing the discourse of the most powerful minds in the
best Latin, or possibly Greek, when there occurred a scene with a Greek