at every human creature, idiots and extraordinary cases excepted, is
endowed with talents, which, if rightly directed, would shew him to
be apt, adroit, intelligent and acute, in the walk for which his
organisation especially fitted him.

There is however a sort of phenomenon, by no means of rare occurrence,
which tends to place the human species under a less favourable point of
view. Many men, as has already appeared, are forced into situations and
pursuits ill assorted to their talents, and by that means are exhibited
to their contemporaries in a light both despicable and ludicrous.

But this is not all. Men are not only placed, by the absurd choice
of their parents, or an imperious concurrence of circumstances,
in destinations and employments in which they can never appear to
advantage: they frequently, without any external compulsion, select
for themselves objects of their industry, glaringly unadapted to their
powers, and in which all their efforts must necessarily terminate in
miscarriage.

I remember a young man, who had been bred a hair-dresser, but who
experienced, as he believed, the secret visitations of the Muse, and
became inspired. "With sad civility, and aching head," I perused no
fewer than six comedies from the pen of this aspiring genius, in no page
of which I could discern any glimmering of poetry or wit, or in reality
could form a guess what it was that the writer intended in his elaborate
effusions. Such are the persons enumerated by Pope in the Prologue to
his Satires,

a parson, much bemused in beer,
A maudlin poetess, a rhyming peer,
A clerk, foredoomed his father's sou to cross,
Who pens a stanza, when he should engross.

Every manager of a theatre, and every publishing bookseller of eminence,
can produce you in each revolving season whole reams, almost cartloads,
of blurred paper, testifying the frequent recurrence of this phenomenon.

The cause however of this painful mistake does not lie in the
circumstance, that each man has not from the hand of nature an
appropriate destination, a sphere assigned him, in which, if life
should be prolonged to him, he might be secure of the respect of his
neighbours, and might write upon his tomb, "I have filled an honourable
career; I have finished my course."

One of the most glaring infirmities of our nature is discontent. One of
the most unquestionable characteristics of the human mind is the love
of novelty. Omne igno