unintelligible embarrassment. It is a delightful
and a ravishing sight, to observe another man come after him, and
tell, without complexity, and in the simplicity of self-possession,
unconscious that there was any difficulty, all that his predecessor had
fruitlessly exerted himself to unfold.

There are a multitude of causes that will produce a miscarriage of this
sort, where the richest soil, impregnated with the choicest seeds of
learning and observation, shall entirely fail to present us with such
a crop as might rationally have been anticipated. Many such men waste
their lives in indolence and irresolution. They attempt many things,
sketch out plans, which, if properly filled up, might illustrate the
literature of a nation, and extend the empire of the human mind, but
which yet they desert as soon as begun, affording us the promise of a
beautiful day, that, ere it is noon, is enveloped in darkest tempests
and the clouds of midnight. They skim away from one flower in the
parterre of literature to another, like the bee, without, like the bee,
gathering sweetness from each, to increase the public stock, and
enrich the magazine of thought. The cause of this phenomenon is an
unsteadiness, ever seduced by the newness of appearances, and never
settling with firmness and determination upon what had been chosen.

Others there are that are turned aside from the career they might have
accomplished, by a visionary and impracticable fastidiousness. They can
find nothing that possesses all the requisites that should fix their
choice, nothing so good that should authorise them to present it to
public observation, and enable them to offer it to their contemporaries
as something that we should "not willingly let die." They begin often;
but nothing they produce appears to them such as that they should say of
it, "Let this stand." Or they never begin, none of their thoughts being
judged by them to be altogether such as to merit the being preserved.
They have a microscopic eye, and discern faults unworthy to be
tolerated, in that in which the critic himself might perceive nothing
but beauty.

These phenomena have introduced a maxim which is current with many,
that the men who write nothing, and bequeath no record of themselves
to posterity, are not unfrequently of larger calibre, and more gigantic
standard of soul, than such as have inscribed their names upon the
columns of the temple of Fame. And certain it is, that there are
extra