There were other members of this society--some, like myself, visitors merely to that neighbourhood; but those I have mentioned were the chief. Here I had an early opportunity of observing the natural character and tendencies of merely literary society--by which society I mean all such as, having no strong distinctions in power of thinking or in native force of character, are yet raised into circles of pretension and mark by the fact of having written a book, or of holding a notorious connexion with some department or other of the periodical press. No society is so vapid and uninteresting in its natural quality, none so cheerless and petrific in its influence upon others. Ordinary people, in such company, are in general repressed from uttering with cordiality the natural expression of their own minds or temperaments, under a vague feeling of some peculiar homage due, or at least customarily paid, to those lions: such people are no longer at their ease, or masters of their own natural motions in their own natural freedom; whilst indemnification of any sort is least of all to be looked for from the literary dons who have diffused this unpleasant atmosphere of constraint. They disable others, and yet do nothing themselves to fill up the void they have created. One and all--unless by accident people of unusual originality, power, and also nerve, so as to be able without trepidation to face the expectations of men--the literary class labour under two opposite disqualifications for a good tone of conversation. From causes visibly explained, they are either spoiled by the vices of reserve, and of over-consciousness directed upon themselves--this is one extreme; or, where manliness of mind has prevented this, beyond others of equal or inferior natural power, they are apt to be desperately commonplace. The first defect is an accident arising out of the rarity of literary pretensions, and would rapidly subside as the proportion became larger of practising literati to the mass of educated people. But the other is an adjunct scarcely separable from the ordinary prosecution of a literary career, and growing in fact out of literature _per se_, as literature is generally understood. That same day, says Homer, which makes a man a slave robs him of half his value. That same hour which first awakens a child to the consciousness of being observed, and to the sense of admiration, strips it of its freedom and unpremeditated graces of motion. Awkwardness at the least--and too probably, as a consequence of _that_, affectation and conceit--follow hard upon the consciousness of special notice or admiration. The very attempt to disguise embarrassment too often issues in a secondary and more marked embarrassment.