As he grew older, Schopenhauer learned to express his good opinion of himself and his works with serenest equanimity. No more _naïf_ expressions of self-complacency have perhaps ever been penned than this gentleman’s eulogiums on his own productions; as, for example, when he writes to the publisher of his work that its “worth and importance are so great that _I do not venture to express it_ even toward you, because you could not believe me,” and proceeds to quote a review “which speaks of me with the highest praise, and says that I am plainly the greatest philosopher of the age, which is really _saying much less than the good man thinks_.” “Sir,” he said to an unoffending stranger who watched him across a _table d’hôte_ (where he habitually acted the part of local “lion”), “sir, you are astonished at my appetite. True, I eat three times as much as you, but, then, _I have three times as much mind_!” (p. 159.) The reader who thinks that this speech could never have been spoken except in jest and to produce a good-humored laugh has not yet studied Schopenhauer’s saturnine temperament, to which a joke at his own expense must have been quite inconceivable. To others, perhaps, such barbarous intellectual insolence may seem a pardonable reaction from the tone of self-depreciation (often exceedingly insincere) which modern manners have enforced. But the old classic pride was a very different thing from Schopenhauer’s aggressive arrogance, wherewith he managed to blend gross and egregious vanity in quite a novel combination. _On a les défauts de ses qualités_, but not usually together two apparently contradictory defects. In our simplicity, we should have anticipated that the man who considered himself the greatest philosopher of his age, and talked about the “loneliness of the heights” of intellectual grandeur, would have disdained to trouble himself about such miserable things as common newspaper reviews. We should have been, however, much mistaken in such a guess. “Schopenhauer (we are told) began to read German newspapers, now that they wrote about him. He caused the veriest trifle that contained his name to be sent to him. He looked through all philosophical works for a mention of himself. His intense contempt for women wavered, when he saw they could feel interest in his works.” What would Aristotle’s “Magnanimous Man” have said to this kind of littleness? “Honor, from any other person” (than the good), “or on the score of trifles, he will utterly despise, and likewise he will despise dishonor.”[16]