How we
Track a livelong day, great heaven, and watch our shadows!
What our shadows seem, forsooth, we will ourselves be.
Do I look like that? You think me that: then I AM that.

What writers are expected to write, they write; or else they do not
write at all; but, like the writer of these lines, stop discouraged,
live disheartened, and die leaving fragments which their friends
treasure, but which a rushing world never heeds. The Nonconformist
writers are neglected, the Conformist writers are encouraged, until
perhaps on a sudden the fashion shifts. And as with the writers, so
in a less degree with readers. Many men--most men--get to like or
think they like that which is ever before them, and which those
around them like, and which received opinion says they ought to
like; or if their minds are too marked and oddly made to get into
the mould, they give up reading altogether, or read old books and
foreign books, formed under another code and appealing to a
different taste. The principle of 'elimination,' the 'use and
disuse' of organs which naturalists speak of, works here. What is
used strengthens; what is disused weakens: 'to those who have, more
is given;' and so a sort of style settles upon an age, and
imprinting itself more than anything else in men's memories becomes
all that is thought of about it.

I believe that what we call national character arose in very much
the same way. At first a sort of 'chance predominance' made a model,
and then invincible attraction, the necessity which rules all but
the strongest men to imitate what is before their eyes, and to be
what they are expected to be, moulded men by that model. This is, I
think, the very process by which new national characters are being