their lives by
the barometer, with inconvenience only to themselves; but to fill the
world with accounts of intellects subject to ebb and flow, of one genius
that awakened in the spring, and another that ripened in the autumn, of
one mind expanded in the summer, and of another concentrated in the
winter, is no less dangerous than to tell children of bugbears and
goblins. Fear will find every house haunted; and idleness will wait for
ever for the moment of illumination.

This distinction of seasons is produced only by imagination operating on
luxury. To temperance every day is bright, and every hour is propitious
to diligence. He that shall resolutely excite his faculties, or exert
his virtues, will soon make himself superior to the seasons, and may set
at defiance the morning mist, and the evening damp, the blasts of the
east, and the clouds of the south.

It was the boast of the Stoick philosophy, to make man unshaken by
calamity, and unelated by success, incorruptible by pleasure, and
invulnerable by pain; these are heights of wisdom which none ever
attained, and to which few can aspire; but there are lower degrees of
constancy necessary to common virtue; and every man, however he may
distrust himself in the extremes of good or evil, might at least
struggle against the tyranny of the climate, and refuse to enslave his
virtue or his reason to the most variable of all variations, the changes
of the weather.

No. 12. SATURDAY, JULY 1, 1758.

That every man is important in his own eyes, is a position of which we
all either voluntarily or unwarily at least once an hour confess the
truth; and it will unavoidably follow, that every man believes himself
important to the publick. The right which this importance gives us to
general notice and visible distinction, is one of those disputable
privileges which we have not always courage to assert; and which we
therefore suffer to lie dormant till some elation of mind, or
vicissitude of fortune, incites us to declare our pretensions and
enforce our demands. And hopeless as the claim of vulgar characters may
seem to the supercilious and severe, there are few who do not at one
time or other endeavour to step forward beyond their rank; who do not
make some struggles for fame, and show that they think all other
conveniencies and delights imperfectly enjoyed without a name.

To get a name, can happen but to few. A name, even in the most
commercial nation, is one of the few th