Select British Classics (Volume 6) (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: meanness, impotence, and nakedness, may find all the delusion laid open in the chamber of disease: he will here find Vanity divested of her robes, Power deprived of her sceptre, and Hypocrisy without her mask. The friend whom I have lost, was a man eminent for genius, and like others of the same class, sufficiently pleased with acceptance and applause. Being caressed by those who have preferments and riches in their disposal, he considered himself as in the direct road of advancement, and had caught the flame of ambition by approaches to its object. But in the midst of his hopes, -his projects, and his gaieties, he was seized by a lingering disease, which, from its first stage, he knew to be incurable. Here was an end of all his visions of greatness and happiness; from the first hour that his health declined, all his former pleasures grew tasteless. His friends expected to please him by those accounts of the growth of his reputation, which were formerly certain of being well received; but they soon found how little he was now affected by compliments, and how vainly they attempted, by flattery, to exhilarate the languor of weakness, and to relieve the solicitude of approaching death. Whoever would know how much piety and virtue surpass'air external goods, might here have seenthem weighed against each other; where all that gives motion to the active, and elevation to the eminent, all that sparkles in the eye of Hope, and pants in the bosom of Suspicion, at once became dust in the balance, without weight and without regard. Riches, authority,, and praise, lose all their influence when they are considered as riches which to-morrow shall be bestowed upon another, authority, which shall this night expire for ever, and praise, which, however merited, or however sincere, shall, afte...