ay nothing; nor must he exult
when the too-long enduring public at length kicks the pretender and the
quack into deserved oblivion. From many a door that will hereafter
gladly open for him, he must be content to be presently turned away.
Many a scanty meal, many a lonely and unfriended evening, in this vast
wilderness, must he pass in trying on his armour, and preparing himself
for the fight that he still believes _will_ come, and in which his
spirit, strong within him, tells him he must conquer. While the night
yet shrouds him he must labour, and with patient, and happily for him,
if, with religious hope, he watch the first faint glimmerings of the
dawning day; for his day, if he is worthy to behold it, will come, and
he will yet be recompensed "by that time and chance which happeneth to
all." And if his heart fails him, and his coward spirit turns to flee,
often as he sits, tearful, in the solitude of his chamber, will the
remembrance of the early struggles of the immortals shame that coward
spirit. The shade of the sturdy Johnson, hungering, dinnerless, will
mutely reproach him for sinking thus beneath the ills that the
"scholar's life assail." The kindly-hearted, amiable Goldsmith, pursued
to the gates of a prison by a mercenary wretch who fattened upon the
produce of that lovely mind, smiling upon him, will bid him be of good
cheer. A thousand names, that fondly live in the remembrance of our
hearts, will he conjure up, and all will tell the same story of early
want, and long neglect, and lonely friendlessness. Then will reproach
himself, saying, "What am I, that I should quail before the misery that
broke not minds like these? What am I, that I should be exempt from the
earthly fate of the immortals?"

Nor marvel, then, that men who have passed the fiery ordeal, whose power
has been tried and not found wanting, whose nights of probation,
difficulty, and despair are past, and with whom it is now noon, should
come forth, with deportment modest and subdued, exempt from the insolent
assumption of vulgar minds, and their yet more vulgar hostilities and
friendships: that such men as Campbell and Rogers, and a thousand others
in every department of life and letters, should partake of that quietude
of manner, that modesty of deportment, that compassion for the
unfortunate of their class, that unselfish admiration for men who,
successful, have deserved success, that abomination of cliques,
coteries, and _conversaziones_, a