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In the morning mail arrived Max Hempel's contract as Miss Clay had promised. Tony regarded it with superstitious awe. It was the first contract she had ever seen in her life, much less had offered for her signature. The terms were, generous appallingly so it seemed to the girl who knew little of such things and was not inclined to over-rate her powers financially speaking.
Our personal affinities, likings, and circumstances, have great power to sway our estimate of this or that poet's work, and to make us attach more importance to it as poetry than in itself it really possesses, because to us it is, or has been, of high importance. Here also we over-rate the object of our interest, and apply to it a language of praise which is quite exaggerated.
If I am ever the father of a boy I will teach him to work, to cut down trees, to dig ditches, to do anything rather than to wait on another man." "But you don't regret having made the sacrifice to get the education, do you?" "You over-rate my learning. I don't know anything thoroughly. I sailed through with the class and put myself in a position to learn, that's about all.
But we continually over-rate the perfection of the geological record, and falsely infer, because certain genera or families have not been found beneath a certain stage, that they did not exist before that stage.
The course of development of a nation's language, thought, and poetry, is profoundly interesting; and by regarding a poet's work as a stage in this course of development we may easily bring ourselves to make it of more importance as poetry than in itself it really is, we may come to use a language of quite exaggerated praise in criticising it; in short, to over-rate it.
"Fair patriot," said the Cardinal, "your words encourage my hope, yet they half damp my ambition; for fain would I desire that love and not service should alone give me the treasure that I ask. But hear me, sweet lady; you over-rate my power: I cannot deliver Rienzi he is accused of rebellion, he is excommunicated for heresy. His acquittal rests with himself." "You can procure his trial?"
He ought to enjoy the true classic all the better for his investigations; he often is distracted from the enjoyment of the best, and with the less good he overbusies himself, and is prone to over-rate it in proportion to the trouble which it has cost him. The idea of tracing historic origins and historical relationships cannot be absent from a compilation like the present.
But though the external effects may vary, the internal principle is the same; a disposition in each individual to make self the grand center and end of his desires and enjoyments; to over-rate his own merits and importance, and of course to magnify his claims on others, and in return to under-rate their's on him; a disposition to undervalue the advantages, and over-state the disadvantages, of his condition in life.
Hall in his usual spirit of enthusiasm, in order to remove this antagonist of his, has recourse to a miracle: He tells us, he went up to London and died of the Plague, which he would have us to understand was by the immediate interpolition of God, as if it were not ridiculous to suppose our author of so great importance, as that the Supreme Being should work a miracle in his favour; but as it is with natural so is it with spiritual pride, those who are possessed by either, never fail to over-rate their own significance, and justly expose themselves to the contempt of the sober part of mankind.
Benjamin confessed in manhood, that his vanity was inflated by the sale of his ballads, and he might have been puffed up to his future injury, had not his father thus unceremoniously taken the wind out of his sails. That removed the danger. After such a severe handling he was not inclined to over-rate his poetical talents.
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