Montaigne adverts to this man, or that, having been a miracle to the world, in whom neither his wife nor his servant has ever seen anything remarkable: “Few men have been admired by their own domestics”—a sentence to which point and popularity have been given by the epigrammatic form of it, due to Marshal Catinat. “No one,” Montaigne continues, “has been a prophet, not merely in his own house, but in his own country, as the experience of history shows. It is the same in matters of no consequence.... In my country of Gascony they look upon it as very droll to see me in print. The farther off I am read from my own home, the better I am esteemed; I am fain to purchase printers in Guienne,—elsewhere they purchase me.” Ben Jonson takes note of the greater reverence paid to things remote or strange to us, than to much better, if these be nearer, and fall under our sense. “Men, and almost all sorts of creatures, have their reputation by distance. Rivers, the farther they run, and more from their spring, the broader they are, and greater. And where our original is known, we are the less confident; among strangers we trust fortune.” Lord Evandale, in Scott’s “Old Mortality,” discerns at once the “extraordinary qualities” of Henry Morton, which had escaped the notice of his kinsfolk and friends: “You have not been long in learning all his extraordinary qualities, my lord,” says old Major Bellenden. “I, who have known him from boyhood, could, before this affair, have said much of his good principles and good nature; but as to his high talents”—further on _that_ head deponent saith not. The opinions of relatives as to a man’s power, Dr. Wendell Holmes declares to be very commonly of little value; not so much because they sometimes over-rate their own flesh and blood, as some may suppose; as because, on the contrary, they are quite as likely to underrate those whom they have grown into the habit of considering like themselves. _Vile habetur quod domi est_, Seneca tersely says. Edmund Burke, in early life, was not happy at home—there being none among the household on Arran Quay to sympathise with his dreams and his aspirations. “He might think himself a genius,” says one of his many biographers, “but it was not to be expected that his own relations should yet think him one.” Describing his position and influence in Lord Rockingham’s administration, Mr. Macknight observes that it is, after all, a man’s own relations who generally look with the least confidence on his long wrestle with adversity, and are most astonished when the tide turns, and a great victory succeeds to what had seemed to them a mere hopeless toil. “To some of the Irish Nagles on the Blackwater, the news that Edmund had been taken into the confidence of the great Whig Lord Rockingham, ... must have seemed as extraordinary as it did to Joseph’s brethren that he should have become so great a man in hostile Egypt.”