innocent pleasures, your improving pursuits, and favourite companions,
has this indulgence of their selfishness really added to their
happiness? Has it not rather been unobserved, except so far to increase
the unreasonableness of their expectations from you, to make them angry
when it at last becomes necessary to resist their advanced
encroachments? On your own side, too, has it not rather tended to
irritate you against people whom you formerly liked, because you are
suffering from the daily and hourly pressure of the sacrifices you have
imprudently made for them? Believe me, there can be no peace or
happiness in domestic life without a _bien entendu_ self-love, which
will be found by intelligent experience to be a preservative from
selfishness, instead of a manifestation of it.

From all that I have already said, you will, I hope, infer that I am not
likely to recommend any extravagant social sacrifices, or to bring you
in guilty of selfishness for actions not really deserving of the name.
Indeed, I have said so much on the other side, that I may now have some
difficulty in proving that, while defending self-love, I have not been
defending you. We must therefore go back to my former definition of
selfishness--namely, a seeking for ourselves that which is not our real
good, to the neglect of all consideration for that which is the real
good of others. This is viewing the subject _an grand_,--a very general
definition, indeed, but not a vague one, for all the following
illustrations from the minor details of life may clearly be referred
under this head.

These are the sort of illustrations I always prefer--they come home so
much more readily to the heart and mind. Will not some of the following
come home to you? The indulgence of your indolence by sending a tired
person on a message when you are very well able to go yourself--sending