Essays in Application

describes, which is, in fact, a sort of mongrel madness. It has some kinship with the Roman Grandio's passion for celebrity which Seneca satirized, and not a little likeness to the petty ostentation of Beau Tibbs at which Goldsmith laughed kindly in London a century ago. But in our own day the disease has developed a new symptom. It is not enough to be pointed out with the forefinger of notoriety: the finger which points must be stained with printer's ink. The craving for publicity is not satisfied with anything but a paragraph in the newspapers; then it wants a column; and finally it demands a whole page with illustrations. The delusion consists in the idea that a sufficient quantity of this kind of notoriety amounts to fame. It is astonishing to observe how much time, ingenuity, money, and vital energy, people who are otherwise quite sane, will spend for the sake of having their names and unimportant doings chronicled, in a form of print which can be preserved only in private and very inconvenient scrap-books. In England, where they have a hereditary aristocracyand a Court Journal, the mania seems less difficult to understand. But in this country, where the limits of the "smart set" are confessedly undefined and indefinable, changing with the fluctuations of the stock-market and the rise and fall of real estate, it is impossible to conceive what benefit or satisfaction reasonable beings can derive from a temporary enrolment among the assistants at fashion...