of cliques and parties, yet in that great body of the people who were
ever the audience and tribunal to which, in letters or in politics,
Maltravers appealed, there was silently growing up, and spreading wide,
a belief in his upright intentions, his unpurchasable honour, and his
correct and well-considered views. He felt that his name was safely
invested, though the return for the capital was slow and moderate. He
was contented to abide his time.

Every day he grew more attached to that true philosophy which makes a
man, as far as the world will permit, a world to himself; and from the
height of a tranquil and serene self-esteem, he felt the sun shine above
him, when malignant clouds spread sullen and ungenial below. He did not
despise or wilfully shock opinion, neither did he fawn upon and flatter
it. Where he thought the world should be humoured, he humoured--where
contemned, he contemned it. There are many cases in which an honest,
well-educated, high-hearted individual is a much better judge than the
multitude of what is right and what is wrong; and in these matters he is
not worth three straws if he suffer the multitude to bully or coax him
out of his judgment. The Public, if you indulge it, is a most damnable
gossip, thrusting its nose into people's concerns, where it has no right
to make or meddle; and in those things, where the Public is impertinent,
Maltravers scorned and resisted its interference as haughtily as he
would the interference of any insolent member of the insolent whole. It
was this mixture of deep love and profound respect for the eternal
PEOPLE, and of calm, passionless disdain for that capricious charlatan,
the momentary PUBLIC, which made Ernest Maltravers an original and
solitary thinker; and an actor, in reality modest and benevolent, in
appearance arrogant and unsocial. "Pauperism, in contradistinction to
poverty," he was wont to say, "is the dependence upon other people for
existence, not on our own exertions; there is a moral pauperism in the