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They degrade by reducing you to their own standard of merit; for the qualifications they deny you, or the faults they object, are so very insignificant, that to prove yourself possessed of the one or free from the other is to make yourself doubly ridiculous. Littleness is their element, and they give a character of meanness to whatever they touch. They creep, buzz, and fly-blow.
"You're the best-hearted foreigner I ever fell in with," said the old man; "so let us make full sail for the Oliver's Head, and settle the matter there; perhaps you'll give us a taste of your calling," touching as he spoke the cracked gittern with the point of his stick. "My eyes! how Ned Purcell will stare at this glass! His own! why his own an't a fly-blow to it."
Such a man I do not think even diamonds could hurt, although, where breathes no wind of life, those very crystals of light are amongst the worst in Beelzebub's army to fly-blow a soul into a thing of hate and horror. Things in the castle went on in the same quiet way as before for some time. Cosmo settled himself in his father's room, and read and wrote, and pondered and aspired.
As Sappho's diamonds with her dirty smock; Or Sappho at her toilet's greasy task With Sappho fragrant at an evening mask; So morning insects, that in muck begun, Shine, buzz, and fly-blow in the evening sun. His relations with his contemporaries were too often begun in compliments only to end in abuse of this kind. Even while he was on good terms with them, he was frequently doing them ill turns.
Quite a failure, one cannot even stare, and you know, Granville, the object of all these strange speeches is merely to make fools stare. To be the wonder of the London world for a single day, is the great ambition of these ephemeral fame- hunters 'insects that shine, buzz, and fly-blow in the setting sun."
But a man may sneer and cavil and puzzle and fly-blow every question that comes before him be despised and feared by others, and admired by no one but himself. He who thinks first of himself, either in the world or in a popular assembly, will be sure to turn attention away from his claims, instead of fixing it there. He must make common cause with his hearers.
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