Page:Johnson - The Rambler 1.djvu/19

N°2 not without some weak hope, that my preservatives may extend their virtues to others, whose employment exposes them to the same danger: ''Laudis amore tumes? Sunt certa piacula, quæ te'' Ter pure lecto poterunt recreare libello.

Is fame your passion? Wisdom's powerful charm, If thrice read over, shall its force disarm.

It is the sage advice of Epictetus, that a man should accustom himself often to think of what is most shocking and terrible, that by such reflections he may be preserved from too ardent wishes for seeming good, and from too much dejection in real evil.

There is nothing more dreadful to an author than neglect, compared with which reproach, hatred, and opposition, are names of happiness; yet this worst, this meanest fate, every one who dares to write has reason to fear. I nunc, et versus tecum meditare canoros. Go now, and meditate thy tuneful lays.

It may not be unfit for him who makes a new entrance into the lettered world, so far to suspect his own powers, as to believe that he possibly may deserve neglect; that nature may not have qualified him much to enlarge or embellish knowledge, nor sent him forth entitled by indisputable superiority to regulate the conduct of the rest of mankind; that, though the world must be granted to be yet in ignorance, he is not destined to dispel the cloud, nor to shine out as one of the luminaries of life. For this suspicion, every catalogue of a library will furnish sufficient reason; as he will find it crowded with names of men, who, though now forgotten, were once no less enterprising or confident than himself, Rh