nts of success--

"Whose top to climb
Is certain falling, or so slippery, that
The fear's as bad as falling."

"Would to God," exclaimed Oliver Cromwell, when he was at any time
thwarted by the Parliament, "that I had remained by my wood-side to
tend a flock of sheep, rather than have been thrust on such a
government as this!" When Buonaparte got into his carriage to proceed
on his Russian expedition, carelessly twirling his glove, and singing
the air--"Malbrook to the wars is going"--he did not think of the
tumble he has got since, the shock of which no one could have stood
but himself. We see and hear chiefly of the favourites of Fortune and
the Muse, of great generals, of first-rate actors, of celebrated
poets. These are at the head; we are struck with the glittering
eminence on which they stand, and long to set out on the same tempting
career:--not thinking how many discontented half-pay lieutenants are
in vain seeking promotion all their lives, and obliged to put up with
"the insolence of office, and the spurns which patient merit of the
unworthy takes;" how many half-starved strolling-players are doomed to
penury and tattered robes in country-places, dreaming to the last of a
London engagement; how many wretched daubers shiver and shake in the
ague-fit of alternate hopes and fears, waste and pine away in the
atrophy of genius, or else turn drawing-masters, picture-cleaners, or
newspaper critics; how many hapless poets have sighed out their souls
to the Muse in vain, without ever getting their effusions farther
known than the Poets' Corner of a country newspaper, and looked and
looked with grudging, wistful eyes at the envious horizon that bounded
their provincial fame! Suppose an actor, for instance, "after the
heart-aches and the thousand natural pangs that flesh is heir to,"
_does_ get at the top of his profession, he can no longer bear a rival
near the throne; to be second or only equal to another, is to be
nothing: he starts at the prospect of a successor, and retains the
mimic sceptre with a convulsive grasp: perhaps as he is about to seize
the first place which he has long had in his eye, an unsuspected
competitor steps in before him, and carries off the prize, leaving him
to commence his irksome toil again: he is in a state of alarm at every
appearance or rumour of the appearance of a new actor: "a mouse that
takes up its lodging in a cat's ear"[29] has a mansion of peace to
him: he