With regard to self-consciousness, the worrier will generally realize that even as a child he was exceptionally sensitive to criticism, censure, ridicule and neglect. He was prone to brood over his wrongs, to play the martyr, and to suffer with peculiar keenness the "slings and arrows of outrageous fortune." I remember once leaving the table on account of some censure or careless remark. I fancied I had thrown the whole family into a panic of contrition. On the first opportunity, I asked what they had said about it, and was told that they had apparently not noticed my departure. This salutary lesson prevented repetition of the act. To the self-conscious person the mere entrance into a public vehicle may prove an ordeal. It is hard for him to realize that the general gaze has no peculiar relation to himself, and that if the gaze is prolonged this is due to no peculiarity of his beyond the blush or the trepidation that betrays his feeling. If he can acquire indifference to this feature of his case, through the reflection that to others it is only a passing incident, the blush and the trepidation will promptly disappear, and a step will have been taken towards gaining the self-control for which he aims. The usual cause of stage-fright is exaggerated self-consciousness. The sufferer from stage-fright can hardly fail to be a worrier. A certain shyness, it would seem, may also result from too acute a consciousness of one's audience, as in the case of Tennyson, whom Benson quotes thus: "I am never the least shy before great men. Each of them has a personality for which he or she is responsible; but before a crowd which consists of many personalities, of which I know nothing, I am infinitely shy. The great orator cares nothing about all this. I think of the good man, and the bad man, and the mad man, that may be among them, and can say nothing. _He_ takes them all as one man. _He_ sways them as one man." This, I take it, hardly spelled stage-fright. At the same time, it is improbable that one so sensitive to criticism meant to convey the impression that it was of his audience alone he thought in shrinking from the effort. It appears that Washington Irving suffered from actual stage-fright. In the Library edition of Irving's works appears the following anecdote from the reminiscences of Mrs. Julia Ward Howe, then a young woman of twenty-three: