urn, endeavour
to give it. Thus will recommendations sometimes prevail, which were
purchased by money, or by the more destructive bribery of flattery and
servility.

"He that has much to do will do something wrong, and, of that wrong must
suffer the consequences; and, if it were possible that he should always
act rightly, yet, when such numbers are to judge of his conduct, the bad
will censure and obstruct him by malevolence, and the good sometimes by
mistake.

"The highest stations cannot, therefore, hope to be the abodes of
happiness, which I would willingly believe to have fled from thrones and
palaces to seats of humble privacy, and placid obscurity. For what can
hinder the satisfaction, or intercept the expectations of him, whose
abilities are adequate to his employments; who sees, with his own eyes,
the whole circuit of his influence; who chooses, by his own knowledge,
all whom he trusts; and whom none are tempted to deceive by hope or
fear? Surely he has nothing to do, but to love and to be loved, to be
virtuous and to be happy."

"Whether perfect happiness would be procured by perfect goodness," said
Nekayah, "this world will never afford an opportunity of deciding. But
this, at least, may be maintained, that we do not always find visible
happiness, in proportion to visible virtue. All natural, and almost all
political evils, are incident alike to the bad and good; they are
confounded in the misery of a famine, and not much distinguished in the
fury of a faction; they sink together in a tempest, and are driven
together from their country by invaders. All that virtue can afford is
quietness of conscience, a steady prospect of a happier state; this may
enable us to endure calamity with patience; but remember, that patience
must suppose pain.

CHAP. XXVIII.

RASSELAS AND NEKAYAH CONTINUE THEIR CONVERSATION.

"Dear princess," said Rasselas, "you fall into the common errours of
exaggeratory declamation, by producing, in a familiar disquisition,
examples of national calamities, and scenes of extensive misery, which
are found in books, rather than in the world, and which, as they are
horrid, are ordained to be rare. Let us not imagine evils which we do
not feel, nor injure life by misrepresentations; I cannot bear that
querulous eloquence, which threatens every city with a siege, like that
of Jerusalem, that makes famine attend on every flight of locusts, and
suspends pestilence on the wing of every blast that