the
community.

There is therefore little room for wonder, if we find the same
individual, whom we once knew a sheepish and irresolute schoolboy, that
hung his head, that replied with inarticulated monotony, and stammered
out his meaning, metamorphosed into a thoroughly manly character, who
may take his place on the bench with senators, and deliver a grave and
matured opinion as well as the best. It appears then that the trial and
review of full-grown men is not altogether so disadvantageous to the
reckoning of our common nature, as that of boys at school.

It is not however, that the full-grown man is not liable to be checked,
reprimanded and rebuked, even as the schoolboy is. He has his wife
to read him lectures, and rap his knuckles; he has his master, his
landlord, or the mayor of his village, to tell him of his duty in an
imperious style, and in measured sentences; if he is a member of a
legislature, even there he receives his lessons, and is told, either
in phrases of well-conceived irony, or by the exhibition of facts and
reasonings which take him by surprise, that he is not altogether the
person he deemed himself to be. But he does not mind it. Like Iago in
the play, he "knows his price, and, by the faith of man, that he is
worth no worse a place" than that which he occupies. He finds out the
value of the check he receives, and lets it "pass by him like the idle
wind"--a mastery, which the schoolboy, however he may affect it, never
thoroughly attains to.

But it unfortunately happens, that, before he has arrived at that degree
of independence, the fate of the individual is too often decided for
ever. How are the majority of men trampled in the mire, made "hewers
of wood, and drawers of water," long, very long, before there was an
opportunity of ascertaining what it was of which they were capable! Thus
almost every one is put in the place which by nature he was least fit
for: and, while perhaps a sufficient quantity of talent is extant in
each successive generation, yet, for want of each man's being duly
estimated, and assigned his appropriate duty, the very reverse may
appear to be the case. By the time that they have attained to that sober
self-confidence that might enable them to assert themselves, they are
already chained to a fate, or thrust down to a condition, from which no
internal energies they possess can ever empower them to escape.

SECTION II.

EQUALITY OF MAN WITH MAN.--TALENTS EXTENSIVELY