ht,
That there is nothing lighter than vain praise;
Know what I list, this all cannot me move,
But that, alas! I both must write and love!

Thus, like all poets, who, as Goldsmith observes, "are fond of
enjoying the present, careless of the future," he talks like a man of
sense, and acts like a fool.

This wonderful susceptibility of praise, to which poets seem more
liable than any other class of authors, is indeed their common food;
and they could not keep life in them without this nourishment. NAT.
LEE, a true poet in all the excesses of poetical feelings--for he was
in such raptures at times as to lose his senses--expresses himself in
very energetic language on the effects of the praise necessary for
poets:--

"Praise," says Lee, "is the greatest encouragement we chamelions can
pretend to, or rather the manna that keeps soul and body together; we
devour it as if it were angels' food, and vainly think we grow
immortal. There is nothing transports a poet, next to love, like
commending in the right place."

This, no doubt, is a rare enjoyment, and serves to strengthen his
illusions. But the same fervid genius elsewhere confesses, when
reproached for his ungoverned fancy, that it brings with itself its
own punishment:--

"I cannot be," says this great and unfortunate poet, "so ridiculous a
creature to any man as I am to myself; for who should know the house
so well as the good man at home? who, when his neighbour comes to see
him, still sets the best rooms to view; and, if he be not a wilful
ass, keeps the rubbish and lumber in some dark hole, where nobody
comes but himself, to mortify at melancholy hours."

Study the admirable preface of POPE, composed at that matured period
of life when the fever of fame had passed away, and experience had
corrected fancy. It is a calm statement between authors and readers;
there is no imagination that colours by a single metaphor, or conceals
the real feeling which moved the author on that solemn occasion, of
collecting his works for the last time. It is on a full review of the
past that this great poet delivers this remarkable sentence:--

"_I believe, if any one, early in his life, should contemplate the
dangerous fate of AUTHORS, he would scarce be of their number on any
consideration._ The life of a wit is a warfare upon earth; and to
pretend to serve the learned world in any way, one must have the
constancy of a martyr, and a resolution to suffer for its sake.