eater spirit for the relief, and look
forward to it with pleasure all the week. Sir Joshua Reynolds was never
comfortable out of his painting-room, and died of chagrin and regret
because he could not paint on to the last moment of his life. He used
to say that he could go on retouching a picture for ever, as long as it
stood on his easel; but as soon as it was once fairly out of the house,
he never wished to see it again. An ingenious artist of our own time has
been heard to declare, that if ever the Devil got him into his clutches,
he would set him to copy his own pictures. Thus secure, self-complacent
retrospect to what is done is nothing, while the anxious, uneasy looking
forward to what is to come is everything. We are afraid to dwell upon
the past, lest it should retard our future progress; the indulgence of
ease is fatal to excellence; and to succeed in life, we lose the ends of
being!

NOTES to ESSAY III

(1) If we take away from the _present_ the moment that Is just by and
the moment that is next to come, how much of it will be left for this
plain, practical theory to rest upon? Their solid basis of sense and
reality will reduce itself to a pin's point, a hair line, on which
our moral balance-masters will have some difficulty to maintain their
footing without falling over on either side.

(2) A treatise on the Millennium is dull; but who was ever weary of
reading the fables of the Golden Age? On my once observing I should like
to have been Claude, a person said, 'they should not, for that then
by this time it would have been all over with them.' As if it could
possibly signify when we live (save and excepting the present minute),
or as if the value of human life decreased or increased with successive
centuries. At that rate, we had better have our life still to come at
some future period, and so postpone our existence century after century
_ad infinitum_.

(3) In like manner, though we know that an event must have taken place
at a distance, long before we can hear the result, yet as long as we
remain in Ignorance of it, we irritate ourselves about it, and suffer
all the agonies of suspense, as if it was still to come; but as soon as
our uncertainty is removed, our fretful impatience vanishes, we resign
ourselves to fate, and make up our minds to what has happened as well as
we can.

ESSAY IV. ON GENIUS AND COMMON SENSE

We hear it maintained by people of more gravity than understanding, that