know you have the same affection for every composition of mine as you have for the author." "A modern instance" occurs to us here. When a certain distinguished lady asked Lord Brougham, the great English orator and author, who was the _best_ debater in the House of Lords, his lordship modestly replied, "Lord Stanley is the _second_ best, madam." That some people who despise flatterers do not hesitate to flatter themselves, is an axiom to the truth of which we must all subscribe. In contradistinction to these, Whittier, the Quaker poet, wrote recently to a correspondent in that gentle, modest manner which is so characteristic of everything relating to him: "I have never thought of myself as a poet in the sense in which we use the word when we speak of the great poets. I have just said from time to time the things I had to say, and it has been a series of surprises to me that people should pay so much attention to them, and remember them so long." Voltaire betrayed his conceit when he attempted to criticise Shakespeare. Balzac and Victor Hugo were two egotists. "There are only three writers of the French language," said Balzac,--"Victor Hugo, Théophile Gautier, and myself." Southey, Young, Pope, Dryden, and Wordsworth betrayed their vanity in an egregious manner. Goldsmith was conspicuously vain at times. Landor had a supreme estimate of his own productions, and wrote to Wordsworth, concerning his "Imaginary Conversations," as follows: "In two thousand years there have not been five volumes in prose equal in their contents to these."[160] Voltaire's remark upon Dante served only to illustrate his own spleen and jealousy. "His reputation," said the sarcastic Frenchman, "will continually be growing greater, because there is now nobody who reads him." As for Voltaire's tragedies, De Tocqueville said he could not even read them through, and he doubted if anybody else could. Scott said he read the "Henriade" through, and _lived_, but it was when he was a young man, and then he read everything. Dr. Johnson once acknowledged that he never read Milton through until he was obliged to do so in compiling his dictionary. Southey said he had read Spenser through about _thirty_ times, and that he could not read Pope once. It was perhaps singular, but Southey, Coleridge, and Wordsworth all failed to appreciate Virgil.