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unequal conflict into silence and obscurity: the pedant swells into self-importance, and renders himself conspicuous' by pompous arrogance and absurdity!

It is hard upon those who have ever taken pains or done any thing to distinguish themselves, that they are seldom the trumpeters of their own achievements; and I believe it may be laid down as a rule, that we receive just as much homage from others as we exact from them by our own declarations, looks, and manner. But no one who has performed any thing great looks big upon it: those who have any thing to boast of are generally silent on that head, and altogether shy of the subject. With Coriolanus, they "will not have their nothings monster'd." From familiarity, his own acquirements do not appear so extraordinary to the individual as to others; and there is a natural want of sympathy in this respect. No one who is really capable of great things is proud or vain of his success; for he thinks more of what he had hoped or has failed to do, than of what he has done. A habit of extreme exertion, or of anxious suspense, is not one of buoyant, overweening self-complacency: those who have all their lives tasked their faculties to the utmost, may be supposed to have quite enough to do without having much disposition left to anticipate their success with confidence, or to glory in it afterwards. The labors of the mind, like the drudgery of the body, depress and take away the usual alacrity of the spirits. Nor can such persons be lifted up with the event; for the impression of the consequences to result from any arduous undertaking must be light and vain, compared with the toil and anxiety accompanying it. It is only those who have done nothing, who fancy they can do every thing; or who have leisure and inclination to admire themselves. To sit before a glass and smile delighted at our own image, is merely a tax on our egotism and self-conceit; and these are resources not easily exhausted in some persons; or if they are, the deficiency is supplied by flatterers who surround the vain, like a natural atmosphere. Fools who take all their opinions at second-hand cannot resist the coxcomb's delight in himself; or it might be said that folly is the natural mirror of vanity.

The greatest heroes, it has often been observed, do not show it in their faces; nor do philosophers affect to be thought wise. Little minds triumph on small occasions, or over puny competitors: the loftiest wish for higher opportunities of signalising themselves, or compare themselves with those models that leave them no room for flippant exultation. Either great things are accomplished with labor and pains, which stamp their impression on the general character and tone of feeling; or if this should not be the case (as sometimes happens), and they are the effect of genius and a happiness of nature, then they cost too little to be much thought of, and we rather wonder at others for admiring them, than at ourselves for having performed them. "Vix ea nostra voco"-is the motto of spontaneous talent; and in neither case is conceit the exuberant growth of great original power or of great attainments.

In one particular, the uneducated man carries it hollow against the man of thought and refinement: the first can shoot in the long bow, which the last cannot for the life of him. He who has spent the best part of his time and wasted his best powers in endeavoring to answer the question"What is truth ?"-scorns a lie, and every thing making the smallest approach to one. His mind by habit has become tenacious of, devoted to

the truth. The grossness and vulgarity of falsehood shock the delicacy of his perceptions, as much as it would shock the finest artist to be obliged to daub in a sign-post, or scrawl a caricature. He cannot make up his mind to derive any benefit from so pitiful and disgusting a source. Tell, me that a man is a metaphysician, and at the same time that he is given to shallow and sordid boasting, and I will not believe you. After striving to raise himself to an equality with truth and nature by patient investigation and refined distinctions (which few can make)-whether he succeed or fail, he cannot stoop to acquire a spurious reputation, or to advance himself or lessen others by paltry artifice and idle rhodomontade, which are in every one's power who has never known the value or undergone the labor of discovering a single truth. Gross personal and local interests bear the principal sway with the ignorant or mere man of the world, who considers not what things are in themselves, but what they are to him: the man of science attaches a higher importance to, because he finds a more constant pleasure in the contemplation and pursuit of general and abstracted truths. Philosophy also teaches self-knowledge; and self-know ledges trikes equally at the root of any inordinate opinion of ourselves, or wish to impress others with idle admiration. Mathematicians have been remarked for persons of strict probity and a conscientious and somewhat literal turn of mind.* But are poets and romance-writers equally scrupulous and severe judges of themselves, and martyrs to right principle?' I cannot acquit them of the charge of vanity, and a wish to aggrandise themselves in the eyes. of the world, at the expense of a little false complaisance (what wonder when the world are so prone to admire, and they are so spoiled by indulgence in self-pleasing fancies?)--but in general they are too much taken up with their ideal creations, which have also a truth and keeping of their own, to misrepresent or exaggerate matters of fact, or to trouble their heads about them. The poet's waking thoughts are dreams: the liar has all his wits and senses about him, and thinks only of astonishing his hearers by some worthless assertion, a mixture of impudence and cunning. But what shall we say of the clergy and the priests of all countries? Are they not men of learning? And are they not, with few exceptions, noted for imposture and time-serving, much more than for a love of truth and candor? They are good subjects, it is true; bound to keep the peace, and hired to maintain certain opinions, not to inquire into them. So this is an exception to the rule, such as might be expected. I speak of the natural tendencies of things, and not of the false bias that may be given to them by their forced combination with other principles. The worst effect of this depression of spirits, or of the "scholar's melancholy," here spoken of, is when it leads a man, from a distrust of himself, to seek for low company, or to forget it by matching below himself. Gray is to be pitied, whose extra diffidence or fastidiousness was such as to prevent his associating with his fellow collegians, or mingling with the herd, till at length, like the owl, shutting himself up from society and daylight, he was hunted and hooted at like the owl whenever he chanced to appear, and was even assailed and disturbed in the haunts in which “he held his solitary reign." He was driven from college to college, and sub

I have heard it said that carpenters, who do every thing by the square and line are honest men, and I am willing to suppose it. Shakspeare, in the Midsummer Night's Dream," makes Snug the Joiner the moral man of the piece.

jected to a persecution the more harrassing to a person of his indolent and retired habits. But he only shrunk the more within himself in consequence--read over his favorite authors-corresponded with his distant friends-was terrified out of his wits at the bare idea of having his portrait prefixed to his works; and probably died from nervous agitation at the publicity into which his name had been forced by his learning, taste, and genius. This monastic seclusion and reserve is, however, better than a career such as Porson's; who from not liking the restraints, or not possessing the exterior recommendations of good society, addicted himself to 1 the lowest indulgences, spent his days and nights in cider-cellars and pothouses, cared not with whom or where he was, so that he had somebody to talk to and something to drink, "from humble porter to imperial tokay" (a liquid, according to his own pun), and fell a martyr in all likelihood, to what in the first instance was pure mauvaise honte. Nothing could overcome this propensity to low society and sotting, but the having something to do, which required his whole attention and faculties; and then he shut himself up for weeks together in his chambers, or at the University, to collate old manuscripts, or edite a Greek tragedy, or expose a grave pedant, without seeing a single boon-companion, or touching a glass of wine. I saw him once at the London Institution with a large patch of coarse brown paper on his nose, the skirts of his rusty black coat hung with cobwebs, and talking in a tone of suavity, approaching to condescension, to one of the managers.

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It is a pity that men should so lose themselves from a certain awkwardness and rusticity at the outset. But did not Sheridan make the same melancholy ending, and run the same fatal career, though in a higher and more brilliant circle? He did; and though not from exactly the same cause (for no one could accuse Sheridan's purple nose and flashing eye of a bashfulness-"modest as morning when she coldly eyes the youthful Phoebus !")-yet it was perhaps from one nearly allied to it, namely, the want of that noble independence and confidence in its own resources which should distinguish genius, and the dangerous ambition to get sponsors and vouchers for it in persons of rank and fashion. The affectation of the society of lords is as mean and low-minded as the love of that of coblers and tapsters. It is that coblers and tapsters may admire, that we wish to be seen in company of their betters. The tone of literary patronage is better than it was a hundred or a hundred and fifty years ago. What dramatic author would think now of getting a lady of quality to take a box at the first night of a play to prevent its being damned by the pit? Do we not read the account of Parson Adams taking his ale in Squire Booby's kitchen with mingled incredulity and shame? At present literature has, to a considerable degree, found its level, and is hardly in danger, "deprived of its natural patrons and protectors, the great and noble, of being trodden in the mire, and trampled under the hoofs of a swinish multitude” -though it can never again hope, to be what learning once was in the persons of the priesthood, the lord and sovereign of principalities and powers. Fool that it was ever to forego its privileges, and loosen the strong hold it had on opinion in bigotry and superstition!

I remember hearing a lady of great sense and acuteness speak of it as a painful consequence of the natural shyness of scholars, that from the want of a certain address, or an acquaintance with the common forms of

society, they despair of making themselves agreeable to women of education and a certain rank in life, and throw away their fine sentiments and romantic tenderness on chambermaids and mantua-makers. Not daring to hope for success where it would be most desirable, yet anxious to realize in some way the dream of books and of their youth, they are willing to accept a return of affection which they count upon as a tribute of gratitude in those of lower circumstances (as if gratitude were ever bought by interest) and take up with the first Dulcinea del Toboso that they meet with, when, would they only try the experiment, they might do much better. Perhaps so but there is here also a mixture of pride as well as modesty. The scholar is not only apprehensive of not meeting with a return of fondness where it might be most advantageous to him, but he is afraid of subjecting his self-love to the mortification of a repulse, and to the reproach of aiming at a prize far beyond his deserts. Besides, living (as he does) in an ideal world, he has it in his option to clothe his Goddess (be she who or what she may), with all the perfections his heart doats on; and he works up a dowdy of this ambiguous description a son gre, as an artist does a piece of dull clay, or the poet the sketch of some unrivalled heroine. The contrast is also the greater (and not the less gratifying as being his own discovery) between his favorite figure and the back-ground of her original circumstances; and he likes her the better, inasmuch as, like himself, she owes all to her own merit-and his notice! Possibly, the best cure for this false modesty, and for the uneasiness and extravagances it occasions, would be, for the retired and abstracted student to consider that he properly belongs to another sphere of action, remote from the scenes of ordinary life, and may plead the excuse of ignorance, and the privilege granted to strangers and to those who do not speak the same language. If any one is traveling in a foreign diligence, he is not expected to shine nor to put himself forward, nor need he be out of countenance because he cannot: he has only to conform as well as he can to his new and temporary situation, and to study common propriety and simplicity of manners. Every thing has its own limits, a little centre of its own, round which it moves; so that our true wisdom lies in keeping to our own walk in life, however humble or obscure, and being satisfied if we can succeed in it. The best of us can do no more, and we shall only become ridiculous or unhappy by attempting it. ashamed, because we are at a loss in things to which we have no pretensions, and try to remedy our mistakes by committing greater. overweening vanity or self-opinion is, in truth, often at the bottom of this weakness; and we shall be most likely to conquer the one by eradicating the other, of restricting it within due and moderate bounds.

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ESSAY XXI.

THE VATICAN.

L. The Vatican did not quite answer your expectation?

To

H. To say the truth, it was not such a blow as the Louvre; but then it came after it, and what is more, at the distance of twenty years. have made the same impression, it should have been twenty times as fine; though that was scarcely possible, since all that there is fine in the Vatican, in Italy, or in the world, was in the Louvre when I first saw it, except the frescoes of Raphael and Michael Angelo, which could not be transported, without taking the walls of the building across the Alps.

L. And what, may I ask, (for I am curious to hear,) did you think of these same frescoes?

H. Much the same as before I saw them. As far as I could judge, they are very like the prints. I do not think the spectator's idea of them is enhanced beyond this. The Raphaels, of which you have a distinct and admirable view, are somewhat faded-I do not mean in color, but the outline is injured-and the Sybils and Prophets in the Sistine Chapel are painted on the ceiling at too great a height for the eye to distinguish the faces as accurately as one would wish. The features and expressions of the figures near the bottom of the 'Last Judgment' are sufficiently plain, and horrible enough they are.

Last Judgment' itself?

L. What was your opinion of the H. It is literally too big to be seen. It is like an immense field of battle, or charnel-house strewed with carcases and naked bodies: or it is a shambles of Art. You have huge limbs apparently torn from their bodies and stuck against the wall: anatomical dissections, backs and diaphragms, tumbling "with hideous ruin and combustion down," neither intelligible groups, nor perspective, nor color; you distinguish the principle figure, that of Christ, only from its standing in the centre of the picture, on a sort of island of earth, separated from the rest of the subject by an inlet of sky. The whole is a scene of enormous, ghastly confusion, in which you can only make out quantity and number, and vast, uncouth masses of bones and muscles. It has the incoherence and distortion of a troubled dream, without the shadowiness; every thing is here corporeal and of solid dimensions.

L. But surely there must be something fine in the Sybils and Prophets, from the copies we have of them; justifying the high encomiums of Sir Joshua Reynolds, and of so many others?

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