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Even when you are fully justified in praising yourself, you should never be seduced into doing so. For vanity is so very common, and merit so very uncommon, that even if a man appears to be praising himself, though very indirectly, people will be ready to lay a hundred to one that he is talking out of pure vanity, and that he has not sense enough to see what a fool he is making of himself.
It will now be easy to draw this whole reasoning to a paint, and to prove, that when riches produce any pride or vanity in their possessors, as they never fail so do, it is only by means of a double relation of impressions and ideas. The very essence of riches consists in the power of procuring the pleasures and conveniences of life.
Then presently, as though by an effort, he added with a bravura note in his voice: "The world has been full of trouble for a long time, but there have always been men to say to trouble, 'I am master, I have the mind to get above it all. Well, I am one of them." There was no note of vanity or bombast in his voice as he said this, and in his eyes that new underglow deepened and shone.
Perhaps no greater monument of human vanity exists than the medal which Napoleon, madly prophesying, caused to be struck in commemoration of the conquest of England. Perhaps no pages of all the pages of history are more splendid than those which record the triumphs and the glories of the English fleet in the mortal struggle with France.
But whatsoever Shakespeare did, he did thoroughly, and if he were weary, if man delighted him not, nor woman either, he may have written the whole piece, in which love perishes for the whim of "a daughter of the game," and the knightly Hector is butchered to sate the vanity of his cowardly Achilles.
You have spent your time not in that practical work of the Church that work which is done silently by those of her priests who are desirous of doing their duty; you have spent your time, not in this work, but in theorizing, in inventing vain sophistries to put in a book, and so cause people to talk about you; whether they talk well or ill of you, you care not so long as they talk; you have been doing this to gratify your own vanity, instead of doing your duty as a clergyman on behalf of the souls which have been intrusted to your keeping.
It was the first time he had seen Peggy lose her self-possession, and if he connected the fact with his own sudden appearance, it was no more than was to be expected from masculine vanity.
He was doing it to save a man's life, an' that man at Bindon was good to his little gal, an' she's dead." He moved his head from side to side with the air of a sentimental philosopher. He had all the vanity of a man who had been a success in a small, shrewd, culpable way had he not evaded the law for thirty years with his whiskey-still? "I know how he felt," he continued.
Like most people remarkable for good looks, General d'Orsay is reported to have been wholly free from vanity; to which, perhaps, may be attributed the general assent accorded to his personal attractions which, while universally admitted, excited none of the envy and ill-will which such advantages but too often draw on their possessor.
Here is a part of it: "The king's scholars," so Napoleon wrote to the minister, "could only learn in this school, in place of qualities of the heart, feelings of vanity and self-satisfaction to such an extent, that, on returning to their own homes, they would be far from sharing gladly in the simple comfort of their families, and would perhaps blush for their fathers and mothers, and despise their modest country surroundings.
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