is flooded with their productions. When White Waistcoat, for
example, takes to painting, late in life, and comes to you, canvas
in hand, for criticism (read praise), he is apt to remark modestly:

"Corot never painted until he was fifty, and I am only forty-eight.
So I feel I should not let myself be discouraged."

The problem of life is said to be the finding of a happiness that
is not enjoyed at the expense of others, and surely this class have
solved that Sphinx's riddle, for they float through their days in a
dream of complacency disturbed neither by corroding doubt nor
harassed by jealousies.

Whole families of feeble-minded people, on the strength of an
ancestor who achieved distinction a hundred years ago, live in
constant thanksgiving that they "are not as other men." None of
the great man's descendants have done anything to be particularly
proud of since their remote progenitor signed the Declaration of
Independence or governed a colony. They have vegetated in small
provincial cities and inter-married into other equally fortunate
families, but the sense of superiority is ever present to sustain
them, under straitened circumstances and diminishing prestige. The
world may move on around them, but they never advance. Why should
they? They have reached perfection. The brains and enterprise
that have revolutionized our age knock in vain at their doors.
They belong to that vast "majority that is always in the wrong,"
being so pleased with themselves, their ways, and their feeble
little lines of thought, that any change or advancement gives their
system a shock.