feelings and even mental
aberrations of virtuous distress strained beyond the power of human
endurance, nothing ever equalled this author. But he could not shape
out the image of a perfect gentleman, or of that winning gaiety of soul,
which may indeed be exemplified, but can never be defined, and never be
resisted. His profligate is a man without taste; and his coquettes are
insolent and profoundly revolting. He has no resemblance of the art,
so conspicuous in Fletcher and Farquhar, of presenting to the reader
or spectator an hilarity, bubbling and spreading forth from a perennial
spring, which we love as surely as we feel, which communicates its own
tone to the bystander, and makes our very hearts dance within us with
a responsive sportiveness. We are astonished however that the formal
pedant has acquitted himself of his uncongenial task with so great a
display of intellectual wealth; and, though he has not presented to us
the genuine picture of an intellectual profligate, or of that lovely
gaiety of the female spirit which we have all of us seen, but which it
is scarcely possible to fix and to copy, we almost admire the more the
astonishing talent, that, having undertaken a task for which it was so
eminently unfit, yet has been able to substitute for the substance so
amazing a mockery, and has treated with so much copiousness and power
what it was unfit ever to have attempted.

ESSAY IV. OF THE DURABILITY OF HUMAN ACHIEVEMENTS AND PRODUCTIONS.

There is a view of the character of man, calculated more perhaps than
any other to impress us with reverence and awe.

Man is the only creature we know, that, when the term of his natural
life is ended, leaves the memory of himself behind him.

All other animals have but one object in view in their more considerable
actions, the supply of the humbler accommodations of their nature. Man
has a power sufficient for the accomplishment of this object, and a
residue of power beyond, which he is able, and which he not unfrequently
feels himself prompted, to employ in consecutive efforts, and thus,
first by the application and arrangement of material substances, and
afterward by the faculty he is found to possess of giving a permanent
record to his thoughts, to realise the archetypes and conceptions which
previously existed only in his mind.

One method, calculated to place this fact strongly before us, is, to
suppose ourselves elevated, in a balloon or otherwise, so as to e