446 Aphorisms on Man. f OCT. 



sound ; and the effeminate in this way can no more live without the 

 incense of applause, than the effeminate in another can live without 

 perfumes or any other customary indulgence of the senses. Such people 

 would rather have the applause of fools than the approbation of the 

 wise. It is a low and shallow ambition. 



IV. 



It was said of some one who had contrived to make himself popular 

 abroad by getting into hot water, but who proved very troublesome and 

 ungrateful when he came home " We thought him a very persecuted 

 man in India" the proper answer to which is, that there are some 

 people who are good for nothing else but to be persecuted. They want 

 some check to keep them in order. 



V. 



It is a sort of gratuitous error in high life, that the poor are natu- 

 rally thieves and beggars, just as the latter conceive that the rich are 

 naturally proud and hard-hearted. Give a man who is starving a 

 thousand a-year, and he will be no longer under a temptation to get 

 himself hanged by stealing a leg of mutton for his dinner ; he may still 

 spend it in gaming, drinking, and the other vices of a gentleman, and 

 not in charity, about which he before made such an outcry. 



VI. 



Do not confer benefits in the expectation of meeting with gratitude ; 

 and do not cease to confer them because you find those whom you have 

 served ungrateful. Do what you think fit and right to please yourself; 

 the generosity is not the less real, because it does not meet with a cor- 

 respondent return. A man should study to get through the world as 

 he gets through St. Giles's with as little annoyance and interruption as 

 possible from the shabbiness around him. 



VII. 



Common-place advisers and men of the world, are always pestering 

 you to conform to their maxims and modes, just like the barkers in 

 Monmouth-street, who stop the passengers by entreating them to turn 

 in and refit at their second-hand repositories. 



VIII. 



The word gentility is constantly in the mouths of vulgar people ; as 

 quacks and pretenders are always talking of genius. Those who possess 

 any real excellence, think and say the least about it. 



IX. 



Taste is often envy in disguise : it turns into the art of reducing 

 excellence within the smallest possible compass, or of finding out the 

 minimum of pleasure. Some people admire only what is new and fashion- 

 able the work of the day, of some popular author the last and 

 frothiest bubble that glitters on the surface of fashion. All the rest is 

 gone by, " in the deep bosom of the ocean buried ;" to allude to it is 

 Gothic, to insist upon it odious. We have only to wait a week to 

 be relieved of the hot-pressed page, of the vignette- title ; and in 

 the interim can look with sovereign contempt on the wide range of 

 science, learning, art, and on those musty old writers who lived before 

 the present age of novels. Peace be with their manes ! There are 

 others, on the contrary, to whom all the modern publications are 



