1829.] Maxinis on Mankind. Ifj 



I'omahtic. Our sympathy with, and consequent belief in, the folly and 

 perversity of others, lag far behind the reality. INIounted on their 

 hobby-horsical humours, they outstrip the wind ; and we lose sight of 

 them before they get half way to the devil. A metaphysical theory, a 

 paradox, an hyperbole hobbles lamely after them : no tricks of style are 

 a match for the tricks which the mind plays with itself: the passions 

 draw distinctions and conclusions finer than the subtlest reason can 

 detect. 



VIII. 



There is a habitual helplessness and sense of weakness that is not 

 merely averse to bold and rash enterprises, but only feels secure when it 

 is entangled with difficulties and hemmed in with doubts, and will not 

 walk out of the prison-house of its fears, even when the doors are thrown 

 open to it. It is not danger alone that frights the timid soul — the very 

 imagination of success often chills it. It turns in haste and with appre- 

 hension from a prospect and a state so unnatural to it. While there is 

 no hope, there is something to complain of; while there is uncertainty, 

 there is something to be uneasy about ; but to come to a termination of 

 toil and trouble, is like coming to the edge of a precipice with nothing 

 but an idle void beyond. It has fed on the disagreeable all its former 

 time. How acquire a new sense late in life ? Prosperity sounds like 

 insolence — encomium like insult. 



IX. 



We may understand from this the contradiction which often appears 

 in the character of notorious or reputed misers. To those who have 

 scraped an immense fortune together by little and little, and have been 

 accustomed, all their lives, to the most thrifty modes of subsistence, the 

 launching out into luxury and expence must not only seem a sacrilegious 

 waste of hard-earned gains, but, independently of this, must repel and 

 shock all their early and most rooted prejudices and feelings. A man 

 born to a fortune of half a million, and who has been used to dine on 

 plate and have a dozen livery-servants standing behind his chair, cannot 

 do without these necessary appendages of his wealth and of his imagina- 

 tion : but a man who has amassed that sum from nothing, must deem all 

 this parade and ostentation mere folly, and almost a burlesque upon 

 himself. The miser (as he is called) is therefore precluded by old asso- 

 ciations and almost a natural instinct, from laying out his riches upon 

 himself: they are either an incumbrance or a golden dream. 



X. 



It has been sometimes asked, "Why should not West be equal to 

 Raphael?" There are three answers to this question. First, it is a 

 million to one against any man's being so. Secondly, if it were the fact, 

 it is impossible that you who assume it, should know that it is so, unless 

 you could be alive three hundred years hence to see whether West's 

 works are then regarded as having made the same addition and given 

 the same impulse to the art as Raphael's, three hundred years after his 

 death. Could this be the case, and you then found that West's name, 

 surviving the waves of opinion and the wrecks of time, still shone 

 co-equal with Raphael's, a " mighty land-mark to the latter times," 

 would you not say that this grand and disinterested result confirmed and 

 added weight to your first rasli judgment .'' Thirdly, if you knew that it 



