features in her landscape; titles and the castles are seen at a smaller
angle. Neither lady will admire the proportions of her neighbor's
drawing, should they chance to discover themselves in each other's
conversation. She, again--whether rich or poor--whose world is her own
domesticity, sees nothing so prominent as the affairs of her nursery or
her household; and perceives not that, in the eyes of others, her
children are a set of diminutives, undistinguishable in the mass of
humanity, in which that they ever existed, or that they cease to exist,
is matter of equal indifference.

It is thus, that each one attributes to the objects around him, not
their true and actual proportion, but a magnitude proportioned to their
nearness to himself. We say not that he draws ill who does so: for, to
each one, things are important, more or less, in proportion to his own
interest in them. But hence is the mischief. We forget that every one
has a self of his own; and that the constant setting forth of ours is,
to others, preposterous, obtrusive, and ridiculous. The painter who
draws a folio in the front of his picture, and a castle in the distance,
properly draws the book the larger of the two: but he must be a fool, if
he therefore thinks the folio is the larger, and expects every body else
to think so too. Yet, nothing wiser are we, when we suffer ourselves to
be perpetually pointing to ourselves, our affairs, and our possessions,
as if they were as interesting to others as they are important to us.




GENTLENESS.