ishing; we anticipate the fruits of Autumn, and promise ourselves
an ample produce. But by and by the sun scorches, the frost nips, the
winds rise, the rains descend; our golden dreams are blasted, all our
fond expectations are no more. Our youthful efforts let it be supposed
have been successful; and we rise to wealth or eminence. A kind flexible
temper and popular manners have produced in us, as they are too apt, a
youth of easy social dissipation, and unproductive idleness; and we are
overtaken too late by the consciousness of having wasted that time which
cannot be recalled, and those opportunities which we cannot now recover.
We sink into disregard and obscurity when, there being a call for
qualities of more energy, indolent good nature must fall back. We are
thrust out of notice by accident or misfortunes. We are left behind by
those with whom we started on equal terms, and who, originally perhaps
having less pretensions and fewer advantages, have greatly outstripped
us in the race of honour: and their having got before us is often the
more galling, because it appears to us, and perhaps with reason, to have
been chiefly owing to a generous easy good-natured humour on our part,
which disposed us to allow them at first to pass by us without jealousy,
and led us to give place without a struggle to their more lofty
pretensions. Thus we suffered them quietly to occupy a station to which
originally we had as fair a claim as they; but, this station being once
tamely surrendered, we have forfeited it for ever. Our aukward and vain
endeavours meanwhile to recover it, while they shew that we want
self-knowledge and composure in our riper years, as much as in our
younger we had been destitute of exertion, serve only to make our
inferiority more manifest, and to bring our discontent into the fuller
notice of an ill-natured world, which however not unjustly condemns and
ridicules our misplaced ambition.

It may be sufficient to have hinted at a few of the vicissitudes and
changes of advancing life; let the reader's own mind fill up the
catalogue. Now the bosom is no longer cheerful and placid; and if the
countenance preserve its exterior character, this is no longer the
honest expression of the heart. Prosperity and luxury, gradually
extinguishing sympathy, and puffing up with pride, harden and debase the
soul. In other instances, shame secretly clouds, and remorse begins to
sting, and suspicion to corrode, and jealousy and env