eclipsed the gaiety of nations. Johnson: "I could not have said more,
nor less. It is the truth. His death did eclipse, it was like a storm."
Boswell: "But why nations? Did his gaiety extend further than his own
nation?" Johnson: "Why, sir, some exaggeration must be allowed. Besides,
'nations' may be said--if we allow the Scotch to be a nation, and to have
gaiety,--which they have not."

But there is more in this matter of proportion than at first meets the
eye. How often do we converse with a man whose language we wonder at and
cannot quite make out. It is somehow unsatisfactory. We do not quite
like it, yet there is nothing particular to dislike. Suddenly we
perceive that there is a want of perspective, or perhaps a want of what
artists call value. His mountains are mole-hills, and his mole-hills are
mountains. His colouring is so badly managed that the effect of
distance, light, and shade are lost. Thus a man will so insist upon the
use of difficult words by George Elliot that a person unacquainted with
her writings would think that the whole merit or demerit of that author
lay in her vocabulary. A man will so exalt the pathos of Dickens or
Thackeray that he will throw their wit and humour into the background.
Some person's only remark on seeing Turner's Modern Italy will be that
the colours are cracked, or, upon reading Sterne, that he always wrote
"you was" instead of "you were." "Did it ever strike you," said a friend
of mine, "that whenever you hear of a young woman found drowned she
always is described as having worn elastic boots?" Such persons look at
all things through a distorting medium. Important things become
unimportant and _vice versa_. The foreground is thrust back, the
distance brought forward, and the middle distance is nowhere. The effect
of an exaggerated praise generally is that an unfair reaction sets in.
Mr. Justin M'Carthy, in his _History of Our Own Times_, points out how
much the character of Lord Stratford de Redcliffe has suffered from the