Eugene Sue,[163] who was born in luxury, and who need never have written for support, would sit down to write only in full dress, even wearing, as we have seen, kid gloves,--an evidence of vanity which has a precedent in Buffon, who when found engaged in literary work was always curled, powdered, ruffled, and perfumed. N. P. Willis was as dainty in his dress as in his style of writing; and Emerson's remark relative to Nature would well apply to him, when he says, "She is never found in undress." Ruskin, who lives in a glass house as it regards the matter of self esteem, charges Goethe with self-complacency, and at the same time adds that this quality marks a second-rate character. The reader will not be long in determining which of the two was the more amenable to such criticism. Before we dismiss Mr. Ruskin let us quote a letter of his published not long since, and written so late as 1881, addressed to Alexander Mitchell. "What in the devil's name," he writes, "have you to do with either Mr. Disraeli or Mr. Gladstone? You are a student at the university, and have no more business with politics than you have with rat-catching. Had you ever read ten words of mine with understanding, you would have known that I care no more for Mr. Disraeli or Mr. Gladstone than for two old bagpipes with their drones going by steam; but that I hate all Liberalism as I do Beelzebub, and that, with Carlyle, I stand--we two alone now in England--for God and the Queen!" So much for the vanity and conceit of Mr. John Ruskin.