The
stage-boxes exist in contempt of the stage and common sense. The private
boxes, on the contrary, should be reserved as the receptacle for the
officers of state and great diplomatic characters, who wish to avoid,
rather than court popular notice!

NOTES to ESSAY XII

(1) Mr. Munden and Mr. Claremont went one Sunday to Windsor to see the
king. They passed with other spectators once or twice: at last, his late
majesty distinguished Munden in the crowd and called him to him. After
treating him with much cordial familiarity, the king said, 'And, pray,
who is that with you?' Munden, with many congees, and contortions
of face, replied, 'An please your majesty, it's Mr. Claremont of the
Theatre Royal Drury Lane.' 'Oh! yes,' said the king, 'I know him well--a
bad actor, a bad actor, a bad actor!' Why kings should repeat what they
say three times is odd: their saying it once is quite enough. I have
always liked Mr. Claremont's face since I heard this anecdote, and
perhaps the telling it may have the same effect on other people.

(2) The trunk-maker, I grant, in the _Spectator's_ time, sat in the
two-shilling gallery. But that was in the _Spectator's_ time, and not in
the days of Mr. Smirke and Mr. Wyatt.

ESSAY XIII. ON THE DISADVANTAGES OF INTELLECTUAL SUPERIORITY

The chief disadvantage of knowing more and seeing farther than others,
is not to be generally understood. A man is, in consequence of this,
liable to start paradoxes, which immediately transport him beyond the
reach of the common-place reader. A person speaking once in a slighting
manner of a very original-minded man, received for answer, "He strides
on so far before you that he dwindles in the distance!"

Petrarch complains that 'Nature had made him different from other
people'--_singular' d' altri genti._ The great happiness of life is, to
be neither better nor worse than the general run of those you meet with,
you soon find a mortifying level in their difference to what you
particularly pique yourself upon. What is the use of being moral in a
night-cellar, or wise in Bedlam? 'To be honest, as this world goes, is
to be one man picked out of ten thousand.' So says Shakespear; and the
commentators have not added that, under these circumstances, a man is
more likely to become the butt of slander than the mark of admiration
for being so. 'How now, thou particular fellow?'(1) is the common answer
to all such out-of-the-way pretensions. By not doi