tensions were continually called to
the bar of prejudice and party-spirit, and he had to plead not guilty to
the indictment. Some men have died unconscious of immortality, as others
have almost exhausted the sense of it in their lifetimes. Correggio
might be mentioned as an instance of the one, Voltaire of the other.

There is nothing that helps a man in his conduct through life more
than a knowledge of his own characteristic weaknesses (which, guarded
against, become his strength), as there is nothing that tends more
to the success of a man's talents than his knowing the limits of his
faculties, which are thus concentrated on some practicable object. One
man can do but one thing. Universal pretensions end in nothing. Or, as
Butler has it, too much wit requires

As much again to govern it.

There are those who have gone, for want of this self-knowledge,
strangely out of their way, and others who have never found it. We find
many who succeed in certain departments, and are yet melancholy and
dissatisfied, because they failed in the one to which they first
devoted themselves, like discarded lovers who pine after their scornful
mistress. I will conclude with observing that authors in general
overrate the extent and value of posthumous fame: for what (as it has
been asked) is the amount even of Shakespear's fame? That in that very
country which boasts his genius and his birth, perhaps, scarce one
person in ten has ever heard of his name or read a syllable of his
writings!

NOTES to ESSAY XV

(1) 'It is not a year or two shows us a man.'--AEmilia, in _Othello._

(2) The bones of the murdered man were dug up in an old hermitage. On
this, as one instance of the acuteness which he displayed all through
the occasion, Aram remarks, 'Where would you expect to find the bones of
a man sooner than in a hermit's cell, except you were to look for them
in a cemetery?'--See _Newgate Calendar_ for the year 1758 or 1759.

ESSAY XVI. ON THE PICTURESQUE AND IDEAL

(A Fragment)

The natural in visible objects is whatever is ordinarily presented to
the senses: the picturesque is that which stands out and catches the
attention by some striking peculiarity: the _ideal_ is that which
answers to the preconceived imagination and appetite in the mind for
love and beauty. The picturesque depends chiefly on the principle of
discrimination or contrast; the _ideal_ on harmony and continuity of
effect: the one surprises, the oth