XXX. The same kind of excellence may be observed to prevail in different arts at the same period of time, as characteristic of the spirit of the age. Fielding and Hogarth were cotemporaries.
XXXI. There is an analogy in the style of certain authors to certain professions. One writes like a lawyer: it seems as if another would have made an eminent physician. Mandeville said of Addison that he was ‘a parson in a tye-wig:’ and there is something in The Spectator to justify this description of him.
XXXII. Salvator Rosa paints like a soldier; Nicholas Poussin like a professor at a University; Guido like a finished gentleman; Parmegiano with something of the air of a dancing master. Alas! Guido was a gamester and a madman; and Parmegiano a searcher after the philosopher’s stone. One of the happiest ideas in modern criticism was that of designating different living poets by the cups Apollo gives them to drink out of: thus Wordsworth is made to drink out of a wooden bowl, Lord Byron out of a skull chased with silver, &c.
XXXIII. Extreme impatience and irritability are often combined with a corresponding degree of indifference and indolence. When the eagerness of pursuit or the violence of opposition ceases, nothing is left to interest the mind, that has been once accustomed to a state of morbid excitement.
XXXIV. Artists and other studious professions are not happy, for this reason: they cannot enjoy mental repose. A state of lassitude and languor succeeds to that of overstrained, anxious exertion.
XXXV. It is the custom at present to exclude all but Scientific and Mechanical subjects from our fashionable Public Institutions, lest any allusions to popular sentiments or the cause of humanity should by chance creep in, to the great annoyance of the polite and well-informed part of the audience.
XXXVI. People had much rather be thought to look ill than old: because it is possible to recover from sickness, but there is no recovering from age.
XXXVII. I never knew but one person who had a passion for truth—and only one who had the same regard to the distinction between right and wrong, that others have to their own interest.
XXXVIII. Women are the sport of caprice, the slaves of custom.
XXXIX. When men are not favourites with women, it is either from habits of vulgar debauchery, or from constitutional indifference, or from an overstrained and pedantic idea of the sex, taken from books, and answering to nothing in real life.