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themselves, but had grown shy of confessing. [As George Eliot wrote of him, “I never before met with so many of my own feelings expressed just as I should like them.”] And he told it in such a way that, as men looked in one another’s faces and read confession, this inveterate shame fell from them. “Hullo!” said Smith in effect, “here are Brown and Jones guilty of recollections just as frantic as those I have been hiding under my tall hat! Let us all own up.”
Rome, however, was not built in a day: and shy, conventional men and women, after a shock, must be given a rest and a pause or two before they shed all their humbug. It was a great feat of Wordsworth’s to force out of our great-grandfathers an admission that they had been even celestially minded in24
