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"Having said it, he was screwed up to feel it as nearly as possible, such virtue is there in uttered words."

Edward Blancove is visited by the facile compunction that attacks Arthur Donnithorne and others of the kind:

"He closed, as it were, a black volume, and opened a new and bright one. Young men easily fancy that they may do this, and that when the black volume is shut the tide is stopped. Saying 'I was a fool,' they believe they have put an end to the foolishness."

Outside of Eliot and Meredith, the best examples of the youthful sentimental egoist are Thackeray's George Osborne, and Trollope's Crosbie. The latter argues himself into a state of innocence over his desertion of Lily Dale by soliloquizing that he did not deserve her, could not make her happy, and was bound to tell the truth, which, however painful, was always best.

A word might be vouchsafed for this trait in low life, usually brushed lightly by the novelist. Dale of Allington is a great man in the market town, "laying down the law as to barley and oxen among men who usually knew more about barley and oxen than he did." Squire Cass, a person of some importance, "had a tenant or two, who complained of the game to him quite as if he had been a lord." Craig looks to Mrs. Poyser "like a cock as thinks the sun's rose o' purpose to hear him crow." And Robert