34. Fame does not depend on the _will_ of any man, but Reputation may be given or taken away. Fame is the sympathy of kindred intellects, and sympathy is not a subject of _willing_; while Reputation, having its source in the popular voice, is a sentence which may either be uttered or suppressed at pleasure. Reputation, being essentially contemporaneous, is always at the mercy of the envious and the ignorant; but Fame, whose very birth is _posthumous_, and which is only known _to exist by the echo of its footsteps through congenial minds_, can neither be increased nor diminished by any degree of will. 35. What _light_ is in the natural world, such is _fame_ in the intellectual; both requiring an _atmosphere_ in order to become perceptible. Hence the fame of Michael Angelo is, to some minds, a nonentity; even as the sun itself would be invisible _in vacuo_. 36. Fame has no necessary conjunction with Praise: it may exist without the breath of a word; it is a _recognition of excellence_, which _must be felt_, but need not be _spoken_. Even the envious must feel it,--feel it, and hate it, in silence. 37. I cannot believe that any man who deserved fame ever labored for it; that is, _directly_. For, as fame is but the contingent of excellence, it would be like an attempt to project a shadow, before its substance was obtained. Many, however, have so fancied. "I write, I paint, for fame," has often been repeated: it should have been, "I write, I paint, for reputation." All anxiety, therefore, about Fame should be placed to the account of Reputation. 38. A man may be pretty sure that he has not attained _excellence_, when it is not all in all to him. Nay, I may add, that, if he looks beyond it, he has not reached it. This is not the less true for being good _Irish_. 39. An original mind is rarely understood, until it has been _reflected_ from some half-dozen congenial with it, so averse are men to admitting the _true_ in an unusual form; whilst any novelty, however fantastic, however false, is greedily swallowed. Nor is this to be wondered at; for all truth demands a response, and few people care to _think_, yet they must have something to supply the place of thought. Every mind would appear original, if every man had the power of _projecting_ his own into the mind of others. 40. All effort at originality must end either in the quaint or the monstrous. For no man knows himself as an original; he can only believe it on the report of others to whom _he is made known_, as he is by the projecting power before spoken of.