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Don't you make any mistake about that fellow Grant! The poorest kind of chap is the one who is always letting things slide. This is a tough, square-jawed, earnest chap, of the sort who put their hearts and souls into things, right or wrong. The man who has never felt or shown weakness is a contemptible egotist. The cocksure fools always have perfect faith in themselves.
An autobiographer, too, exposes himself to the charge of egotism, but I must run the risk of that, endeavouring to avoid the scathing criticism of him who wrote: "The egotist . . . . . . . Whose I's and Me's are scattered in his talk, Thick as the pebbles on a gravel walk."
He, poor egotist, talks bombast and nonsense by wholesale. I applaud and smile at his folly; while he imagines it is at his wit. The poor man is amused with fine speeches, unsubstantial flatteries, cringes, bows, and hypocritical tokens of servility; which are so many jests upon him. 'Thus is he mocked with the shadow, while I banquet upon the substance.
It may turn men into machines all clatter and monotony; or it may make them fussy nuisances. "A soulless activity," says Canon Ainger, "may save a man from vagrancy only by turning him into a thing; or it may keep him from idleness by making him an egotist." There is the man who, to use the common phrase, "sticks at it" with scarcely a competing thought or interest.
Hollister sat thinking. He did not like the implications of that furtive observance. A suspicious, watchful man is a jealous man. And a jealous man who has nothing to do but watch and suspect and nurse that mean passion was a dangerous adjunct to an unhappy woman. Hollister resolved to warn Myra, to emphasize that warning. No one could tell of what a dull egotist like Bland might be capable.
You accuse me of what? being attentive to a man whom it is impossible to hear without attention!" "There!" cried Walter passionately; "you confess it; and so for a stranger, a cold, vain, pedantic egotist, you can shut your ears and heart to those who have known and loved you all your life; and and " "Vain!" interrupted Madeline, unheeding the latter part of Walter's address.
One poem, almost terrible in its intensity of melancholy, is hardly explicable on the supposition that Shelley was quite happy in his home. He was not a spoiled child of fortune, a weak egotist, or a querulous complainer. But he was always seeking and never finding the satisfaction of some deeper craving.
The Lord have mercy then upon all establishments: legal, political, and ecclesiastic! 'Let me farther observe to you that the system of general enjoyment, which you propose, is something, if I may so call it, more than rational: it is dignified; it is sublime. I feel with you that he is a poor circumscribed egotist, who can enjoy nothing but that which he calls his own.
He sat still in prayer-meeting, and listened to the elders as a modest young man should. Your commonplace hypocrite boasts. Small never alluded to himself, and thus a consummate egotist got credit for modesty. It is but an indifferent trick for a hypocrite to make temperance speeches. Dr. Small did not even belong to a temperance society.
But his disagreement with the details of Palmerston's policy was in reality merely a symptom of the fundamental differences between the characters of the two men. In Albert's eyes Palmerston was a coarse, reckless egotist, whose combined arrogance and ignorance must inevitably have their issue in folly and disaster.
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