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Updated: May 3, 2025
It is much easier to say what does not please us then than what is exactly right. The book must be, anyhow, something benedictory by a sinning fellow-man. Cleverness would be repellent at such an hour. Cleverness, anyhow, is the level of mediocrity today; we are all too infernally clever. The first witty and perverse paradox blows out the candle.
Mulgrave wrote verses which scarcely ever rose above absolute mediocrity: but, as he was a man of high note in the political and fashionable world, these verses found admirers. Time dissolved the charm, but, unfortunately for him, not until his lines had acquired a prescriptive right to a place in all collections of the works of English poets.
As we have brilliant astronomers and poor astronomers, as we have correct mathematicians and incorrect ones, so we may have phrenologists whose discoveries and whose workmanship may command the admiration of the world, those whose talents are of the order of mediocrity, and those who blunder on all occasions.
Of any generous outlook on the wider possibilities of human life there is scarcely a trace. His essay is the apotheosis of social mediocrity. By Procrustean methods he would have forced mankind back to the dull levels of Sparta: the opalescent glow of Athenian life was beyond his ken. But perhaps the most curious passage is that in which he preaches against the sin and folly of ambition.
That is the reason I would not make friends with white people till I found Michigan, for we have heard that people in this State are friendly to us, and that it is next to Canada." As this man was above mediocrity as to intelligence, his two days stay with us had a salutary influence over our school.
GIBBON observed of himself "Perhaps the golden mediocrity of my fortune has contributed to fortify my application." The state of poverty, then, desirable in the domestic life of genius, is one in which the cares of property never intrude, and the want of wealth is never perceived.
But I was unqualified for a profession where mere industry alone was to ensure success. I could not suppress my lurking passion for applause; but usually consumed that time in efforts after excellence which takes up but little room, when it should have been more advantageously employed in the diffusive productions of fruitful mediocrity.
He had been afflicted during that period with a chronic itch or leprosy, which had undermined his strength, but which had almost entirely disappeared as he advanced in life. He was below mediocrity in mind, and had received scarcely any education.
His samples were returned on his hands, as "done in too severe and terse a style." Some Grub-Street hack a nineteenth-century Tom Brown or Mr. Dash succeeded in composing these popular and ingenious productions; but the man who wrote the Essays of Elia could not write a successful lottery-puff. At this exult, O mediocrity! and take courage, man of genius!
The trouble between his parents which had always been much of a mystery to him had forced him at a tender age to go out into the world and fight for existence. It had toughened him; it had trained his mind through experience; it had given him poise, persistence, tenacity those rare mental qualities without which man seldom rises above mediocrity.
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