CHAPTER X.
THE GENIUS AND HIS ENVIRONMENT.
The facts concerning the genius seem to indicate that he is a being somewhat exceptional and apart.

Common mortals stand about him with expressions of awe.

The literature of him is embodied in the alcoves of our libraries most accessible to the public, and even the wayfaring man, to whom life is a weary round, and his conquests over nature and his fellows only the division of honours on a field that usually witnesses drawn battles or bloody defeats, loves to stimulate his courage by hearing of the lives of those who put nature and society so utterly to rout.

He hears of men who swayed the destinies of Europe, who taught society by outraging her conventions, whose morality even was reached sometimes by scorn of the peccadilloes which condemn the ordinary man.

Every man has in him in some degree the hero worshipper, and gets inflamed somewhat by reading Carlyle's Frederick the Great.
Of course, this popular sense can not be wholly wrong.