in imagination, content themselves with believing, that
another year will transport them to rural tranquillity, and die while
they talk of doing what, if they had lived longer, they would never have
done. But many likewise there are, either of greater resolution or more
credulity, who in earnest try the state which they have been taught to
think thus secure from cares and dangers; and retire to privacy, either
that they may improve their happiness, increase their knowledge, or
exalt their virtue.

The greater part of the admirers of solitude, as of all other classes of
mankind, have no higher or remoter view, than the present gratification
of their passions. Of these, some, haughty and impetuous, fly from
society only because they cannot bear to repay to others the regard
which themselves exact; and think no state of life eligible, but that
which places them out of the reach of censure or control, and affords
them opportunities of living in a perpetual compliance with their own
inclinations, without the necessity of regulating their actions by any
other man's convenience or opinion.

There are others, of minds more delicate and tender, easily offended by
every deviation from rectitude, soon disgusted by ignorance or
impertinence, and always expecting from the conversation of mankind more
elegance, purity and truth, than the mingled mass of life will easily
afford. Such men are in haste to retire from grossness, falsehood and
brutality; and hope to find in private habitations at least a negative
felicity, an exemption from the shocks and perturbations with which
publick scenes are continually distressing them.

To neither of these votaries will solitude afford that content, which
she has been taught so lavishly to promise. The man of arrogance will
quickly discover, that by escaping from his opponents he has lost his
flatterers, that greatness is nothing where it is not seen, and power
nothing where it cannot be felt: and he, whose faculties are employed in
too close an observation of failings and defects, will find his
condition very little mended by transferring his attention from others
to himself: he will probably soon come back in quest of new objects, and
be glad to keep his captiousness employed on any character rather than
his own.

Others are seduced into solitude merely by the authority of great names,
and expect to find those charms in tranquillity which have allured
statesmen and conquerors to the shades