"I am working on SPIRITUAL GRAVITATION"

"There are two things I admire in Sir Walter (*Hazlitt to Northcote) his capacity and his simplicity, which indeed I am apt to think are much the same. The more ideas a man has of other things the less he is taken up with things of himself."

Sir Walter [Scott] went to Paris no one knew he was there. Fenimore Cooper came to Paris "strutted thru streets with a consequential air, held up his head, screwed up his features" nor wished it to be forgotten that he was the American Sir Walter. "The real one never troubled himself about the matter. Why should he?" (Hazlitt)

"Recollect that you must be a seaman to be an officer; and also you cannot be a good officer without being a gentleman." Southey's Life of Nelson

"There were gentlemen and there were seamen in the navy of Chas the Second but the seamen were not gentlemen, and the gentlemen were not seaman."

I am working on SPIRITUAL GRAVITATION (or Their Own Company) (Elective Affinity--says Morrison) Acts 4:23 "And being let go, they went  . . . " (Disciples verdict on Judas--to his own place) James Hillhouse has a poem describing Last Judgment--myriads of earth coming up before Great White Throne; no word uttered, a shifting and automatic dividing right and left. (Woe to them that call good evil and evil good.)

*First printed in The Schoolmaster & Edinburgh Weekly Magazine, 1832, p. 285. Collected in "Northcote's Conversations . Characteristics" from The Round Table: A Collection of Essays on Literature, Men, and Manner by William Hazlitt; London, 1871.