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KING PELLINORE’S LITERARY MAGAZINE

your time and blurs the impression of your character. If
you maintain a dead church, contribute to a dead Bible-
society, vote with a great party either for the government
or against it, spread your table like base housekeepers, —
under all these screens I have difficulty to detect the
precise man you are. And, of course, so much force is
withdrawn from your proper life. But do your work, and I
shall know you. Do your work, and you shall reinforce
yourself. A man must consider what a blindman's-buff is
this game of conformity. If I know your sect, I anticipate
your argument. I hear a preacher announce for his text
and topic the expediency of one of the institutions of his
church. Do I not know beforehand that not possibly can
he say a new and spontaneous word? Do I not know that,
with all this ostentation of examining the grounds of the
institution, he will do no such thing? Do I not know that
he is pledged to himself not to look but at one side, — the
permitted side, not as a man, but as a parish minister? He
is a retained attorney, and these airs of the bench are the
emptiest affectation. Well, most men have bound their
eyes with one or another handkerchief, and attached
themselves to some one of these communities of opinion.
This conformity makes them not false in a few particulars,
authors of a few lies, but false in all particulars. Their
every truth is not quite true. Their two is not the real two,
their four not the real four; so that every word they say
chagrins us, and we know not where to begin to set them
right. Meantime nature is not slow to equip us in the
prison-uniform of the party to which we adhere. We come
to wear one cut of face and figure, and acquire by degrees
the gentlest asinine expression. There is a mortifying
experience in particular, which does not fail to wreak itself
also in the general history; I mean "the foolish face of
praise," the forced smile which we put on in company
where we do not feel at ease in answer to conversation
which does not interest us. The muscles, not
spontaneously moved, but moved by a low usurping

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