ts consequences, or more frequently
practised with wanton negligence, than the encouragement of expectations
which are never to be gratified, and the elation and depression of the
heart by needless vicissitudes of hope and disappointment.

Every man is rich or poor, according to the proportion between his
desires and enjoyments; any enlargement of wishes is therefore equally
destructive to happiness with the diminution of possession; and he that
teaches another to long for what he never shall obtain, is no less an
enemy to his quiet, than if he had robbed him of part of his patrimony.

But representations thus refined exhibit no adequate idea of the guilt
of pretended friendship; of artifices by which followers are attracted
only to decorate the retinue of pomp, and swell the shout of popularity,
and to be dismissed with contempt and ignominy, when their leader has
succeeded or miscarried, when he is sick of show, and weary of noise.
While a man infatuated with the promises of greatness, wastes his hours
and days in attendance and solicitation, the honest opportunities of
improving his condition pass by without his notice; he neglects to
cultivate his own barren soil, because he expects every moment to be
placed in regions of spontaneous fertility, and is seldom roused from
his delusion, but by the gripe of distress which he cannot resist, and
the sense of evils which cannot be remedied.

The punishment of Tantalus in the infernal regions affords a just image
of hungry servility, flattered with the approach of advantage, doomed to
lose it before it comes into his reach, always within a few days of
felicity, and always sinking back to his former wants:

[Greek:
Kai maen Tantalon eiseidon, chalep alge echonta,
Estaot en limnae hae de proseplaze geneio.
Steuto de dipsaon, pieein d ouk eichen elesthai.
Ossaki gar kupsei ho geron pieein meneainon,
Tossach hudor apolesket anabrochen. amphi de possi
Gaia melaina phaneske katazaenaske de daimon,
Dendrea d hupsipeteala katakoeathen chee kaopon
Onchnai, kai roiai, kai maeleai aglaokarpoi,
Sukai te glukeoai, kai elaiai taelethoosai.
Ton opot ithusei o geoon epi cheosi masasthai,
Tasd anemos riptaske poti nephea skioenta.]
HOM. Od. [Greek: A'.] 581.

"I saw," says Homer's Ulysses, "the severe punishment of Tantalus. In a
lake, whose waters approached to his lips, he stood burning with thirst,
without the power to drink. Whenever he inclined his head