who stand high in general estimation on the ground of what they might have done, if they had liked.  You will find students who took no honors at the university, but who endeavor to impress their friends with the notion, that, if they had chosen, they could have attained to unexampled eminence.  And sometimes, no doubt, there are great powers that run to waste.  There have been men whose doings, splendid as they were, were no more than a hint of how much more they could have done.  In such a case as that of Coleridge, you see how the lack of steady industry and of all sense of responsibility abated the tangible result of the noble intellect God gave him.  But as a general rule, and in the case of ordinary people, you need not give a man credit for the possession of any powers beyond those which he has actually exhibited.  If a boy is at the bottom of his class, it is probably because he could not attain its top.  My friend Mr. Snarling thinks he can write much better articles than those which appear in the “Atlantic Monthly”; but as he has not done so, I am not inclined to give him credit for the achievement.  But you can see that this principle of estimating people’s abilities, not by what they have done, but by what they think they could do, will be much approved by persons who are stupid and at the same time conceited.  It is a pleasing arrangement, that every man should fix his own mental mark, and hold by his estimate of himself.  And then, never measuring his strength with others, he can suppose that he could have beat them, if he had tried.

* * * * *

Yes, we are all mainly fashioned by circumstances; and had the circumstances been more propitious, they might have made a great deal more of us.  You sometimes think, middle-aged man, who never have passed the limits of Britain, what an effect might have been produced upon your views and character by foreign travel.  You think what an indefinite expansion of mind it might have caused,—­how many narrow prejudices it might have rubbed away,—­how much wiser and better a man it might have made you.  Or more society and wider reading in your early youth might have improved you,—­might have taken away the shyness and the intrusive individuality which you sometimes feel painfully,—­might have called out one cannot say what of greater confidence and larger sympathy.  How very little, you think to yourself, you have seen and known!  While others skim great libraries, you read the same few books over and over; while others come to know many lands and cities, and the faces and ways of many men, you look, year after year, on the same few square miles of this world, and you have to form your notion of human nature from the study of but few human beings, and these very commonplace.  Perhaps it is as well.  It is not so certain that more would have been made of you, if you had enjoyed what might seem greater advantages.  Perhaps you learned more, by studying the little field before you earnestly and long, than you would have learned, if you had bestowed a cursory glance upon fields more extensive by far.  Perhaps there was compensation for the fewness of the cases you had to observe in the keenness with which you were able to observe them.  Perhaps the Great Disposer saw that in your case the pebble got nearly all the polishing it would stand,—­the man nearly all the chances he could improve.