'
The Duke,--our Duke,--on reading this letter was by no means pleased
by its contents. He could ill bear to be reminded either of his
pride or of his diffidence. And yet the accusations which others
made against him were as nothing to those which he charged
himself. He would do this till at last he was forced to defend
himself against himself by asking himself whether he could be
other than as God had made him. It is the last and poorest
makeshift of a defence to which a man can be brought in his own
court! Was it his fault that he was so thin-skinned that all
things hurt him? When some coarse man said to him that which ought
not to have been said, was it his fault that at every word a
penknife had stabbed him? Other men had borne these buffets
without shrinking, and had shown themselves thereby to be more
useful, much more efficacious; but he could no more imitate them
than he could procure for himself the skin of a rhinoceros, or the
tusk of an elephant. And this shrinking was what man called
pride,--was the pride of which his old friend wrote! 'Have I ever
been haughty, unless in my own defence?' he asked himself,
remembering certain passages of humility in his life,--and certain
passages of haughtiness also.
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