34.  Fame does not depend on the will of any man, but Reputation may be given or taken away.  Fame is the sympathy of kindred intellects, and sympathy is not a subject of willing; while Reputation, having its source in the popular voice, is a sentence which may either be uttered or suppressed at pleasure.  Reputation, being essentially contemporaneous, is always at the mercy of the envious and the ignorant; but Fame, whose very birth is posthumous, and which is only known to exist by the echo of its footsteps through congenial minds, can neither be increased nor diminished by any degree of will.

35.  What light is in the natural world, such is fame in the intellectual; both requiring an atmosphere in order to become perceptible.  Hence the fame of Michael Angelo is, to some minds, a nonentity; even as the sun itself would be invisible in vacuo.

36.  Fame has no necessary conjunction with Praise:  it may exist without the breath of a word; it is a recognition of excellence, which must be felt, but need not be spoken.  Even the envious must feel it,—­feel it, and hate it, in silence.

37.  I cannot believe that any man who deserved fame ever labored for it; that is, directly.  For, as fame is but the contingent of excellence, it would be like an attempt to project a shadow, before its substance was obtained.  Many, however, have so fancied.  “I write, I paint, for fame,” has often been repeated:  it should have been, “I write, I paint, for reputation.”  All anxiety, therefore, about Fame should be placed to the account of Reputation.

38.  A man may be pretty sure that he has not attained excellence, when it is not all in all to him.  Nay, I may add, that, if he looks beyond it, he has not reached it.  This is not the less true for being good Irish.

39.  An original mind is rarely understood, until it has been reflected from some half-dozen congenial with it, so averse are men to admitting the true in an unusual form; whilst any novelty, however fantastic, however false, is greedily swallowed.  Nor is this to be wondered at; for all truth demands a response, and few people care to think, yet they must have something to supply the place of thought.  Every mind would appear original, if every man had the power of projecting his own into the mind of others.

40.  All effort at originality must end either in the quaint or the monstrous.  For no man knows himself as an original; he can only believe it on the report of others to whom he is made known, as he is by the projecting power before spoken of.