25. Deserve, but expect not, to be praised by your contemporaries, for any excellence which they may be jealous of being allowed to possess themselves; leave the dispensation of justice to posterity.
26. If wishes are the spawn of imbecility, precipitation is the bantling of fool-hardiness: legitimate will, investigates and acquires the means. Mistake not an itching finger for authentic will.
27. Some of the most genuine effusions of genius in art, some of the most estimable qualities in society, may be beholden for our homage to very disputable principles.
Coroll.—The admission of a master's humanity to his slave supposes the validity of an execrable right; and the courage shown in a duel cannot be applauded without submitting to the dictates of feudal barbarity. Had the poet's conception prepared us for the rashness of Lear, the ambition of Macbeth's wife, and the villany of Iago, by the usual gradations of nature, he could not have rushed on our heart with the irresistibility that now subdues it. Had the line of Correggio floated in a less expanse, he would have lost that spell of light and shade which has enthralled all eyes; and Rubens, had he not invigorated bodies to hills of flesh, and tinged his pencil in the rainbow, would not have been the painter of magnificence.
28. Genius has no imitator. Some can be poets and painters only at second-hand: deaf and blind to the tones and motions of Nature herself, they hear or see her only through some reflected medium of art; they are emboldened by prescription.