nothing.”[120] The little miseries of existence were tortures for Carlyle; to have to pack his portmanteau was a grave affair of state; the idea of ordering coats or buying gloves crushed him. “I have long renounced the omnibus,” wrote Renan in his _Souvenirs de Jeunesse_, “the conductors refuse to regard me as a serious traveller. At the railway station, unless I have the protection of an inspector, I always obtain the worst place.... I see too well that to do a good turn to one, is usually to do a bad one to another. The vision of the unknown person I am injuring stops short my zeal.” Renan, indeed, is a most singular instance of these characteristics in connection with genius, from his earliest years. At mass his childish eye wandered over the roof of the chapel, and he thought of the great men told of in books. It was his dream to write books. “My gentleness,” he writes, “which often arises from indifference, my indulgence, which is very sincere and which depends on a clear perception of the injustice of men to each other, the conscientious habits which are a pleasure to me, the indefinite endurance of _ennui_ which I possess--having, perhaps, been inoculated in my youth--may be explained by my surroundings, and the deep impressions I have received. The paradoxical vow to preserve the clerical virtues without the faith which serves as basis for them, and in a world for which they are not made, produced, so far as I am concerned, the most amusing incidents. If ever a comic writer wishes to amuse the public at my expense, he needs but my collaboration; I could tell him things far more amusing than he could invent.” A layman and a sceptic he preserved, involuntarily, the vow of poverty. “My dream would be to be housed, fed, clothed, and warmed, without having to think about it, by someone who would take charge of me and leave me free. The competence which I possess came late, and in spite of myself.... I always thought about writing; it did not occur to me it could bring me any money. What was my astonishment when I saw a gentleman of agreeable and intelligent appearance enter my garret, compliment me on some articles I had published, and offer to collect them in a volume. He brought a stamped paper stipulating conditions I thought astonishingly generous, so that when he asked me to include all my future writings in the same contract, I consented. The idea came to me to make some observations, but I paused at sight of the document; the thought that that beautiful sheet of paper would be lost stopped me. I did well to stop.” The politeness which he wrongly believes he learnt at the seminary is not the raw and cold politeness of the priest, but the special and excessive timidity of genius. He could not, he says, treat even a dog with an air of authority. But authority is the chief characteristic of priests. To imagine as he does that men are always good and deserving could only be, as he himself justly notes, a continual danger.