He is
for taking the whole responsibility upon himself. He would be thought to
understand the subject better than others, or indeed would show that
nobody else knows anything about it. There are always three or four
points on which the literary novice at his first outset in life fancies
he can enlighten every company, and bear down all opposition: but he is
cured of this quixotic and pugnacious spirit, as he goes more into the
world, where he finds that there are other opinions and other
pretensions to be adjusted besides his own. When this asperity wears
off, and a certain scholastic precocity is mellowed down, the
conversation of men of letters becomes both interesting and instructive.
Men of the world have no fixed principles, no groundwork of thought:
mere scholars have too much an object, a theory always in view, to which
they wrest everything, and not unfrequently, common sense itself. By
mixing with society, they rub off their hardness of manner, and
impracticable, offensive singularity, while they retain a greater depth
and coherence of understanding. There is more to be learnt from them
than from their books.
--_Hazlitt._
* * * * *
There are some people whose good manners will not suffer them to
interrupt you, but, what is almost as bad, will discover abundance of
impatience, and lie upon the watch until you have done, because they
have started something in their own thoughts, which they long to be
delivered of.
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