but the profit less, than hope had pictured it. Youth enters the world
with very happy prejudices in her own favour. She imagines herself not
only certain of accomplishing every adventure, but of obtaining those
rewards which the accomplishment may deserve. She is not easily
persuaded to believe that the force of merit can be resisted by
obstinacy and avarice, or its lustre darkened by envy and malignity. She
has not yet learned that the most evident claims to praise or preferment
may be rejected by malice against conviction, or by indolence without
examination; that they may be sometimes defeated by artifices, and
sometimes overborne by clamour; that, in the mingled numbers of mankind,
many need no other provocation to enmity than that they find themselves
excelled; that others have ceased their curiosity, and consider every
man who fills the mouth of report with a new name, as an intruder upon
their retreat, and disturber of their repose; that some are engaged in
complications of interest which they imagine endangered by every
innovation; that many yield themselves up implicitly to every report
which hatred disseminates or folly scatters; and that whoever aspires to
the notice of the publick, has in almost every man an enemy and a rival;
and must struggle with the opposition of the daring, and elude the
stratagems of the timorous, must quicken the frigid and soften the
obdurate, must reclaim perverseness and inform stupidity.

It is no wonder that when the prospect of reward has vanished, the zeal
of enterprize should cease; for who would persevere to cultivate the
soil which he has, after long labour, discovered to be barren? He who
hath pleased himself with anticipated praises, and expected that he
should meet in every place with patronage or friendship, will soon remit
his vigour, when he finds that, from those who desire to be considered
as his admirers, nothing can be hoped but cold civility, and that many
refuse to own his excellence, lest they should be too justly expected to
reward it.

A man, thus cut off from the prospect of that port to which his address
and fortitude had been employed to steer him, often abandons himself to
chance and to the wind, and glides careless and idle down the current of
life, without resolution to make another effort, till he is swallowed up
by the gulph of mortality.

Others are betrayed to the same desertion of themselves by a contrary
fallacy. It was said of Hannibal, that