Page:Biographical and critical miscellanies (IA biographicalcrit00presrich).pdf/37

Rh that Nature had not qualified me for an actor on this stage. The nature of my education only added to these disqualifications, and I experienced all those deviations from the centre which arise when all our lessons are taken from books, and the scholar makes his own character the comment A happy destiny, indeed, brought me to the knowledge of two or three minds which Nature had fashioned in the same mould with my own, but these are gone. And, O God! enable me to wait the moment when it is thy will that I should follow them." In another epistle he remarks, "I have not been deficient in the pursuit of that necessary branch of knowledge, the study of myself. I will not explain the result, for have I not already sufficiently endeavoured to make my friends unhappy by communications which, though they might easily be injurious, could not be of any possible advantage? I really, dear W., regret that period when your pity was first excited in my favour. I sincerely lament that I ever gave you reason to imagine that I was not so happy as a gay indifference with regard to the present, stubborn forgetfulness with respect to the uneasy past, and excursions into lightsome futurity could make me; for what end, what useful purposes were promoted by the discovery? It could not take away from the number of the unhappy, but only add to it, by making those who loved me participate in my uneasiness, which each participation, so far from tending to diminish, would, in reality, increase, by adding those regrets, of which I had been the author in