down superciliously with eyes half closed, and pretending to be unaware of the panting wretch toiling up the weary rungs beneath. Some swarm up this ladder as boys up a pole, hand over hand, a good grip with the knees, a confident, saucy, upward look. Others stop in medio, look round, sigh, or are satisfied, and gravely descend to refresh themselves with bread and cheese for life. Some stagger up, wildly, and tumbling off, are borne, mutilated, to the hospital accident-ward to die. Others there are who indeed obtain the ladder's summit, but are doomed to crawl perpetually up and down the degrees. These are the unfortunates who carry hods to those master bricklayers who have bounded up the ladder with airy strides, or better still, have been born at the top of the ladder. Poor hodmen! they make dictionaries, draw acts of parliament, cram the boy-senator for his maiden speech, form Phidias' rough clay-sketch into a shapely, polished marble bust, shade with Indian ink Archimedes' rough draught for the new pump or the tubular bridge, and fill in Sir Joshua's backgrounds. Some there are who go to sleep at the ladder's foot, and some, the few, the felicitous, who reach the summit, breathless but triumphant, boldly bidding Fame blow her loudest blast. Forthwith the venal quean makes the clarion to sound, and all the world is amazed. Lowliness, our Shakspeare says, is "young ambition's ladder:"
"Whereto the climber upward turns his face; But when he once attains the upmost round, He then unto the ladder turns his back, Looks in the clouds, scorning the base degrees By which he did ascend: so Cæsar may. Then"
But so did not William Hogarth. He was self-confident and self-conscious enough,[*] when, after many years of toilsome struggling he turned up the trump-card, and his name was bruited about with loud fanfares to the
- To me there is something candid, naïve, and often something noble in this personal
consciousness and confidence, this moderate self-trumpeting. "Questi sono miri!" cried Napoleon, when, at the sack of Milan, the MS. treatises of Leonardo da Vinci were discovered; and he bore them in triumph to his hotel, suffering no meaner hand to touch them. He knew—the Conquering Thinker—that he alone was worthy to possess those priceless papers. So too, Honoré de Balzac calmly remarking that there were only three men in France who could speak French correctly: himself, Victor Hugo, and "Théophile" (T. Gautier). So, too, Elliston, when the little ballet-girl complained of having been hissed: "They have hissed me," said the awful manager, and the dancing girl was dumb. Who can forget the words that Milton wrote concerning things of his "that posteritie would not willingly let die?" and that Bacon left, commending his fame to "foreign nations and to the next age?" And Turner, simply directing in his will that he should be buried in St. Paul's Cathedral? That sepulchre, the painter knew, was his of right. And innocent Gainsborough, dying: "We are all going to heaven, and Vandyke is of the company." And Fontenelle, calmly expiring at a hundred years of age: "Je n'ai jamais dit la moindre chose centre la plus petite vertu." 'Tis true, that my specious little argument falls dolefully to the ground when I remember that which the wisest man who ever lived said concerning a child gathering shells and pebbles on the sea-shore, when the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before him.
