always
trying to lay violent hands on reputation, will not secure the best and
most lasting. If the restless candidate for praise takes no pleasure, no
sincere and heartfelt delight in his works, but as they are admired and
applauded by others, what should others see in them to admire or
applaud? They cannot be expected to admire them because they are _his_;
but for the truth and nature contained in them, which must first be inly
felt and copied with severe delight, from the love of truth and nature,
before it can ever appear there. Was Raphael, think you, when he painted
his pictures of the Virgin and Child in all their inconceivable truth
and beauty of expression, thinking most of his subject or of himself? Do
you suppose that Titian, when he painted a landscape, was pluming
himself on being thought the finest colourist in the world, or making
himself so by looking at nature? Do you imagine that Shakspeare, when he
wrote Lear or Othello, was thinking of any thing but Lear and Othello?
Or that Mr. Kean, when he plays these characters, is thinking of the
audience?--No: he who would be great in the eyes of others, must first
learn to be nothing in his own. The love of fame, as it enters at times
into his mind, is only another name for the love of excellence; or it is
the ambition to attain the highest excellence, sanctioned by the highest
authority--that of time.

Those minds, then, which are the most entitled to expect it, can best
put up with the postponement of their claims to lasting fame. They can
afford to wait. They are not afraid that truth and nature will ever wear
out; will lose their gloss with novelty, or their effect with fashion.
If their works have the seeds of immortality in them, they will live; if
they have not, they care little about them as theirs. They do not
complain of the start which others have got of them in the race of
everlasting renown, or of the impossibility of attaining the honours
which time alone can give, during the term of their natural lives. They
know that no applause, however loud and violent, can anticipate or
over-rule the judgment of posterity; that the opinion of no one
individual, nor of any one generation, can have the weight, the
authority (to say nothing of the force of sympathy and prejudice), which
must belong to that of successive generations. The brightest living
reputation cannot be equally imposing to the imagination, with that
which is covered and rendered ven