y interest adopted into the number of our quarrels.--What
pleasure can be received by talking of new fashions, buying and
selling of lands, advancement or ruin of favourites, victories
or defeats of strange princes, which is the ordinary subject of
ordinary conversation?--Most desire to frequent their
superiors, and these men must either suffer their raillery, or
must not be suffered to continue in their society; if we
converse with them who speak with more address than ourselves,
then we repine equally at our own dulness, and envy the
acuteness that accomplishes the speaker; or, if we converse
with duller animals than ourselves, then we are weary to draw
the yoke alone, and fret at our being in ill company; but if
chance blows us in amongst our equals, then we are so at guard
to catch all advantages, and so interested in point d'honneur,
that it rather cruciates than recreates us. How many make
themselves cheap by these occasions, whom we had valued highly
if they had frequented us less! And how many frequent persons
who laugh at that simplicity which the addresser admires in
himself as wit, and yet both recreate themselves with double
laughters!

In solitude, he addresses his friend:--"My dear Celador, enter
into your own breast, and there survey the several operations
of your own soul, the progress of your passions, the
strugglings of your appetite, the wanderings of your fancy, and
ye will find, I assure you, more variety in that one piece than
there is to be learned in all the courts of Christendom.
Represent to yourself the last age, all the actions and
interests in it, how much this person was infatuated with zeal,
that person with lust; how much one pursued honour, and another
riches; and in the next thought draw that scene, and represent
them all turned to dust and ashes!"

I cannot close this subject without the addition of some anecdotes,
which may be useful. A man of letters finds solitude necessary, and for
him solitude has its pleasures and its conveniences; but we shall find
that it also has a hundred things to be dreaded.

Solitude is indispensable for literary pursuits. No considerable work
has yet been composed, but its author, like an ancient magician, retired
first to the grove or the closet, to invocate his spirits. Every
production of genius must