palimpsests: beneath the rhymes or the fiction one can almost always
spell out the characters which betray the writer's self. Take these
passages from the story just referred to:

"'Ah! flattery is a sweet and intoxicating potion, whether we drink
it from an earthen ewer or a golden chalice. . . . Flattery from
man to woman is expected: it is a part of the courtesy of society;
but when the divinity descends from the altar to burn incense to the
priest, what wonder if the idolater should feel himself transformed
into a god!'

"He had run the risk of being spoiled, but he had a safeguard in his
aspirations.

"'My ambitious anticipations,' says Morton, in the story, were as
boundless as they were various and conflicting. There was not a
path which leads to glory in which I was not destined to gather
laurels. As a warrior, I would conquer and overrun the world; as a
statesman, I would reorganize and govern it; as a historian, I would
consign it all to immortality; and, in my leisure moments, I would
be a great poet and a man of the world.'

"Who can doubt that in this passage of his story he is picturing his
own visions, one of the fairest of which was destined to become
reality?

"But there was another element in his character, which those who
knew him best recognized as one with which he had to struggle hard,
--that is, a modesty which sometimes tended to collapse into self-
distrust. This, too, betrays itself in the sentences which follow