and the extraordinary events which were constantly befalling them.
When a clever man evinces this weakness, we must remember that
human nature is a weak and imperfect thing, and try to excuse the
silliness for the sake of the real merit. But there are few things
more irritating to witness than a stupid, ignorant dunce, wrapped
up in impenetrable conceit of his own abilities and acquirements.
It requires all the beauty, and all the listlessness too, of this
sweet summer day, to think, without the pulse quickening to an
indignant speed, of the half-dozen such persons whom each of us has
known. It would soothe and comfort us if we could be assured that
the blockhead knew that he was a blockhead: if we could be assured
that now and then there penetrated into the dense skull and reached
the stolid brain, even the suspicion of what his intellectual
calibre really is. I greatly fear that such a suspicion never is
known. If you witness the perfect confidence with which the man is
ready to express his opinion upon any subject, you will be quite
sure that the man has not the faintest notion of what his opinion is
worth. I remember a blockhead saying that certain lines of poetry
were nonsense. He said that they were unintelligible: that they
were rubbish. I suggested that it did not follow that they were
unintelligible because he could not understand them. I told him
that various competent judges thought them very noble lines indeed.
The blockhead stuck to his opinion with the utmost firmness. What
was the use of talking to him? If a blind man tells you he does
not see the sun, and does not believe there is any sun, you ought
to be sorry for him rather than angry with him. And when the
blockhead declared that he saw only rubbish in verses which I trust
every reader knows, and which begin with the line--

Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean,