to make a fuss about--when an impending calamity, an
irretrievable loss, would instantly bring it to its recollection, and
tame it in its preposterous career. A man may be in a great passion and
give himself strange airs at so simple a thing as a game at ball, for
instance; may rage like a wild beast, and be ready to dash his head
against the wall about nothing, or about that which he will laugh at the
next minute, and think no more of ten minutes after, at the same time
that a good smart blow from the ball, the effects of which he might feel
as a serious inconvenience for a month, would calm him directly--

Anon as patient as the female dove,
His silence will sit drooping.

The truth is, we pamper little griefs into great ones, and bear great
ones as well as we can. We can afford to dally and play tricks with
the one, but the others we have enough to do with, without any of the
wantonness and bombast of passion--without the swaggering of Pistol
or the insolence of King Cambyses' vein. To great evils we submit; we
resent little provocations. I have before now been disappointed of a
hundred pound job and lost half a crown at rackets on the same day, and
been more mortified at the latter than the former. That which is lasting
we share with the future, we defer the consideration of till to-morrow:
that which belongs to the moment we drink up in all its bitterness,
before the spirit evaporates. We probe minute mischiefs to the quick;
we lacerate, tear, and mangle our bosoms with misfortune's finest,
brittlest point, and wreak our vengeance on ourselves and it for good
and all. Small pains are more manageable, ore within our reach; we can
fret and worry ourselves about them, can turn them into any shape, can
twist and torture them how we please:--a grain of sand in the eye, a
thorn in the flesh, only irritates the part, and leaves us strength
enough to quarrel and get out of all patience with it: a heavy blow
stuns and takes away all power of sense as well as of resistance. The
great and mighty reverses of fortune, like the revolutions of nature,
may be said to carry their own weight and reason along with them: they
seem unavoidable and remediless, and we submit to them without murmuring
as to a fatal necessity. The magnitude of the events in which we may
happen to be concerned fills the mind, and carries it out of itself, as
it were, into the page of history. Our thoughts are expanded with the
scene on which we have to