therefore
I will attempt it. It is as well to do it at once as to have it to do
for a week to come.

If the writing on this subject is no easy task, the thing itself is a
harder one. It asks a troublesome effort to ensure the admiration
of others: it is a still greater one to be satisfied with one's own
thoughts. As I look from the window at the wide bare heath before me,
and through the misty moonlight air see the woods that wave over the top
of Winterslow,

While Heav'n's chancel-vault is blind with sleet,

my mind takes its flight through too long a series of years, supported
only by the patience of thought and secret yearnings after truth and
good, for me to be at a loss to understand the feeling I intend to write
about; but I do not know that this will enable me to convey it more
agreeably to the reader.

Lady Grandison, in a letter to Miss Harriet Byron, assures her that
'her brother Sir Charles lived to-himself'; and Lady L. soon after
(for Richardson was never tired of a good thing) repeats the same
observation; to which Miss Byron frequently returns in her answers
to both sisters, 'For you know Sir Charles lives to himself,' till at
length it passes into a proverb among the fair correspondents. This is
not, however, an example of what I understand by _living to one's-self_,
for Sir Charles Grandison was indeed always thinking of himself; but by
this phrase I mean never thinking at all about one's-self, any more than
if there was no such person in existence. The character I speak of is
as little of an egotist as possible: Richardson's great favourite was
as much of one as possible. Some satirical critic has represented him
in Elysium 'bowing over the _faded_ hand of Lady Grandison' (Miss Byron
that was)--he ought to have been represented bowing over his own hand,
for he never admired any one but himself, and was the God of his own
idolatry.--Neither do I call it living to one's-self to retire into
a desert (like the saints and martyrs of old) to be devoured by wild
beasts nor to descend into a cave to be considered as a hermit, nor to
got to the top of a pillar or rock to do fanatic penance and be seen of
all men. What I mean by living to one's-self is living in the world, as
in it, not of it: it is as if no one know there was such a person, and
you wished no one to know it: it is to be a silent spectator of the
mighty scene of things, not an object of attention or curiosity in it;
to take a thoughtful, a