I recognise you as belonging to the large tough family of the human cocksures. _Sal Blivvens_ belonged to it--dead-sure, dead-right, every time. We have many of the cocksures in England, you must have many of them in the United States. The cocksures are people who have no dim borderland around their minds, no twilight between day and darkness. They see everything as they see a highly coloured rug on a well-lighted floor. There is either rug or no rug, either floor or no floor. No part of the floor could possibly be rug and no part of the rug could possibly be floor. A cocksure, as a lawyer, is the natural prosecuting attorney of human nature's natural misgivings and wiser doubts and nobler errors. How the American cocksures of their day despised the man Washington, who often prayed for guidance; with what contempt they blasted the character of your Abraham Lincoln, whose patient soul inhabited the border of a divine disquietude and whose public life was the patient study of hesitation. I have taken notice of the peculiarly American character of your cocksureness: it magnifies and qualifies a man to step by the mile, to sit down by the acre, to utter things by the ton. Do you happen to know Michael Angelo's _Moses_? I always think of an American cocksure as looking like Michael Angelo's _Moses_--colossal law-giver, a hyper-stupendous fellow. And I have often thought that a regiment of American cocksures would be the most terrific spectacle on a battlefield that the rest of the human race could ever face. Just now it has occurred to me that it was your great Emerson who spoke best on the weakness of the superlative--the cocksure is the human superlative. As to your letter: You declare you know nothing about novels, but your arraignment of the novelist is exact. You are dead-sure that you are perfectly right about me. Your arraignment of me is exact. You are conscious of no more moral perturbation as to justice than exists in a monkey wrench. But that is the nature of the cocksure--his conclusions have to him the validity of a hardware store.