on in return. I had no relations to the state, no duty to
perform, no ties to bind me to others: I had neither friend nor
mistress, wife or child. I lived in a world of contemplation, and not
of action.

This sort of dreaming existence is the best. He who quits it to go in
search of realities, generally barters repose for repeated
disappointments and vain regrets. His time, thoughts, and feelings are
no longer at his own disposal. From that instant he does not survey
the objects of nature as they are in themselves, but looks asquint at
them to see whether he cannot make them the instruments of his
ambition, interest, or pleasure; for a candid, undesigning,
undisguised simplicity of character, his views become jaundiced,
sinister, and double: he takes no farther interest in the great
changes of the world but as he has a paltry share in producing them:
instead of opening his senses, his understanding, and his heart to the
resplendent fabric of the universe, he holds a crooked mirror before
his face, in which he may admire his own person and pretensions, and
just glance his eye aside to see whether others are not admiring him
too. He no more exists in the impression which "the fair variety of
things" makes upon him, softened and subdued by habitual
contemplation, but in the feverish sense of his own upstart
self-importance. By aiming to fix, he is become the slave of opinion.
He is a tool, a part of a machine that never stands still, and is sick
and giddy with the ceaseless motion. He has no satisfaction but in the
reflection of his own image in the public gaze, but in the repetition
of his own name in the public ear. He himself is mixed up with, and
spoils every thing. I wonder Buonaparte was not tired of the N.N.'s
stuck all over the Louvre and throughout France. Goldsmith (as we all
know), when in Holland, went out into a balcony with some handsome
Englishwomen, and on their being applauded by the spectators, turned
round, and said peevishly--"There are places where I also am admired."
He could not give the craving appetite of an author's vanity one day's
respite. I have seen a celebrated talker of our own time turn pale and
go out of the room when a showy-looking girl has come into it, who for
a moment divided the attention of his hearers. Infinite are the
mortifications of the bare attempt to emerge from obscurity;
numberless the failures; and greater and more galling still the
vicissitudes and tormenting accompanime