am tempted to remonstrate when the physical points I have mentioned are
apparently taken to warrant unfavourable inferences concerning my mental
quickness. With all the increasing uncertainty which modern progress has
thrown over the relations of mind and body, it seems tolerably clear
that wit cannot be seated in the upper lip, and that the balance of the
haunches in walking has nothing to do with the subtle discrimination of
ideas. Yet strangers evidently do not expect me to make a clever
observation, and my good things are as unnoticed as if they were
anonymous pictures. I have indeed had the mixed satisfaction of finding
that when they were appropriated by some one else they were found
remarkable and even brilliant. It is to be borne in mind that I am not
rich, have neither stud nor cellar, and no very high connections such as
give to a look of imbecility a certain prestige of inheritance through a
titled line; just as "the Austrian lip" confers a grandeur of historical
associations on a kind of feature which might make us reject an
advertising footman. I have now and then done harm to a good cause by
speaking for it in public, and have discovered too late that my attitude
on the occasion would more suitably have been that of negative
beneficence. Is it really to the advantage of an opinion that I should
be known to hold it? And as to the force of my arguments, that is a
secondary consideration with audiences who have given a new scope to the
_ex pede Herculem_ principle, and from awkward feet infer awkward
fallacies. Once, when zeal lifted me on my legs, I distinctly heard an
enlightened artisan remark, "Here's a rum cut!"--and doubtless he
reasoned in the same way as the elegant Glycera when she politely puts
on an air of listening to me, but elevates her eyebrows and chills her
glance in sign of predetermined neutrality: both have their reasons for
judging the quality of my speech beforehand.

This sort of reception to a man of affectionate disposition, who has