In public life this is especially requisite. A statesman is seldom profound unless he be somewhat of a scholar; an orator is seldom eloquent unless he have familiarised himself with the world of the poets. But he will never be a statesman of commanding influence, and never an orator of lasting renown, if, in action or advice on the practical affairs of nations, he be more scholar or poet than orator or statesman. Pitt and Fox are memorable instances of the discriminating self-abnegation with which minds of masculine power can abstain from the display of riches unsuited to place and occasion. In the Mr Fox of St Stephen’s, the nervous reasoner from premises the broadest and most popular, there is no trace of the Mr Fox of St Anne’s, the refining verbal critic, with an almost feminine delight in the filigree and trinkets of literature. At rural leisure, under his apple-blossoms, his predilection in scholarship is for its daintiest subtleties; his happiest remarks are on writers very little read. But place the great Tribune on the floor of the House of Commons, and not a vestige of the fine verbal critic is visible. His classical allusions are then taken from passages the most popularly known. And, indeed, it was a saying of Fox’s, “That no young member should hazard in Parliament a Latin quotation not found in the Eton Grammar.” Pitt was yet more sparing than Fox in the exhibition of his scholarship, which, if less various than his rival’s, was probably quite as deep. And one of the friends who knew him best said, that Pitt rigidly subdued his native faculty of _wit_, not because he did not appreciate and admire its sparkles in orators unrestrained by the responsibilities of office, but because he considered that a man in the position of First Minister impaired influence and authority by the cheers that transferred his reputation from his rank of Minister to his renown as Wit. He was right. Grave situations are not only dignified but strengthened by that gravity of demeanour which is not the hypocrisy of the would-be wise, but the genuine token of the earnest sense of responsibility. Self-control thus necessitates, first, Self-Knowledge—the consciousness and the calculation of our own resources and our own defects. Every man has his strong point—every man has his weak ones. To know both the strong point and the weak ones is the first object of the man who means to extract from himself the highest degree of usefulness with the least alloy of mischief. His next task is yet more to strengthen his strong points by counterbalancing them with weights thrown into the scale of the weak ones; for force is increased by resistance. Remedy your deficiencies, and your merits will take care of themselves. Every man has in him good and evil. His good is his valiant army, his evil is his corrupt commissariat; reform the commissariat, and the army will do its duty.