Yet if he envies a fool who is elegantly dressed, he is also capable of enthusiasm over talent, and of genuine admiration for genius.

Such defects as these, when they have no root in the heart, prove only the exuberance of sap,--the richness of the youthful imagination.

That a lad of nineteen, an only child, kept severely at home by poverty, adored by a mother who put upon herself all privations for his sake, should be moved to envy by a young man of twenty-two in a frogged surtout-coat silk-lined, a waist-coat of fancy cashmere, and a cravat slipped through a ring of the worse taste, is nothing more than a peccadillo committed in all ranks of social life by inferiors who envy those that seem beyond them.

Men of genius themselves succumb to this primitive passion.

Did not Rousseau admire Ventura and Bacle?
But Oscar passed from peccadillo to evil feelings.