Tom Lofty in _The Good-Natured Man_ was when his imposture was found
out. "You ought to have your head stuck in a pillory," said Mr. Croaker.
"Stick it where you will," said Mr. Lofty, "for by the lord, it cuts a poor
figure where it sticks at present." Mr. Sutherland Bangs would feel like
that.
But if making our own acquaintance would give some of us a good deal of
surprise and even pain, it would also do most of us a useful turn as well.
Burns put the case quite clearly in his familiar lines:
O wad some pow'r the giftie gie us
To see oursels as others see us:
It wad frae monie a blunder free us
An' foolish notion.
We should all make discoveries to our advantage as well as our
discomfiture. You, sir, might find that the talent for argument on which
you pride yourself is to me only irritating wrong-headedness, and I might
find that the bright wit that I fancy I flash around makes you feel tired.
Jones's eyeglass would drop out of his eye because he would know it only
made him look foolish, Brown would see the ugliness of his cant, and
Robinson would sorry that he had been born a bully and as prickly as a
hedgehog.
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