dreads every hint of an objection, and least of all can
forgive praise mingled with censure: to doubt is to insult, to
discriminate is to degrade: he dare hardly look into a criticism
unless some one has _tasted_ it for him, to see that there is no
offence in it: if he does not draw crowded houses every night, he can
neither eat nor sleep; or if all these terrible inflictions are
removed, and he can "eat his meal in peace," he then becomes surfeited
with applause and dissatisfied with his profession: he wants to be
something else, to be distinguished as an author, a collector, a
classical scholar, a man of sense and information, and weighs every
word he utters, and half retracts it before he utters it, lest if he
were to make the smallest slip of the tongue, it should get buzzed
abroad that _Mr. ---- was only clever as an actor_! If ever there was
a man who did not derive more pain than pleasure from his vanity, that
man, says Rousseau, was no other than a fool. A country gentleman near
Taunton spent his whole life in making some hundreds of wretched
copies of second-rate pictures, which were bought up at his death by a
neighbouring Baronet, to whom

"Some demon whisper'd, L----, have a taste!"

[Footnote 29: Webster's _Duchess of Malfy_.]

A little Wilson in an obscure corner escaped the man of _virtu_, and
was carried off by a Bristol picture-dealer for three guineas, while
the muddled copies of the owner of the mansion (with the frames)
fetched thirty, forty, sixty, a hundred ducats a piece. A friend of
mine found a very fine Canaletti in a state of strange disfigurement,
with the upper part of the sky smeared over and fantastically
variegated with English clouds; and on enquiring of the person to whom
it belonged whether something had not been done to it, received for
answer "that a gentleman, a great artist in the neighbourhood, had
retouched some parts of it." What infatuation! Yet this candidate for
the honours of the pencil might probably have made a jovial fox-hunter
or respectable justice of the peace, if he could only have stuck to
what nature and fortune intended him for. Miss ---- can by no means be
persuaded to quit the boards of the theatre at ----, a little country
town in the West of England. Her salary has been abridged, her person
ridiculed, her acting laughed at; nothing will serve--she is
determined to be an actress, and scorns to return to her former
business as a milliner. Shall I go on? A