Nor are there many of my own literary brethren (thin-skinned creatures though we are) so sensitively alive to the Public Opinion, wisely despised by Dr.Riccabocca, as that same peasant.

He can endure a good deal of contumely sometimes, it is true, from his superiors (though, thank Heaven! that he rarely meets with unjustly); but to be looked down upon and mocked and pointed at by his own equals--his own little world--cuts him to the soul.

And if you can succeed in breaking this pride and destroying this sensitiveness, then he is a lost being.

He can never recover his self-esteem, and you have chucked him half-way--a stolid, inert, sullen victim--to the perdition of the prison or the convict-ship.
Of this stuff was the nature both of the widow and her son.

Had the honey of Plato flowed from the tongue of Mrs.Hazeldean, it could not have turned into sweetness the bitter spirit upon which it descended.
But Mrs.Hazeldean, though an excellent woman, was rather a bluff, plain-spoken one; and after all she had some little feeling for the son of a gentleman, and a decayed, fallen gentleman, who, even by Lenny's account, had been assailed without any intelligible provocation; nor could she, with her strong common-sense, attach all the importance which Mrs.Fairfield did to the unmannerly impertinence of a few young cubs, which she said truly, "would soon die away if no notice was taken of it." The widow's mind was made up, and Mrs.Hazeldean departed,--with much chagrin and some displeasure.
Mrs.Fairfield, however, tacitly understood that the request she had made was granted, and early one morning her door was found locked, the key left at a neighbour's to be given to the steward; and, on further inquiry, it was ascertained that her furniture and effects had been removed by the errand cart in the dead of the night.