more than it will fetch. It is a passport into society: but if other things will answer the same purpose, as beauty, birth, wit, learning, desert in art or arms, dress, behaviour, the want of wealth is not felt as a very severe privation. If a man, who, on whatever pretensions, is received into good company, behaves with propriety and converses rationally, it is not inquired after he is gone, nor once thought of while he is present, whether he is rich or poor. In the mixed intercourse of private society every one finds his level, in proportion as he can contribute to its amusement or information. It is even more so in the general intercourse of the world, where a poet and a man of genius (if extrinsic circumstances make any difference) is as much courted and run after for being a common ploughman, as for being a peer of the realm. Burns, had he been living, would have started fair with Lord Byron in the race of popularity, and would not have lost it.
The temptation to men in public life to swerve from the path of duty, less frequently arises from a sordid regard to their private interests, than from an undue deference to popular applause. A want of political principle is, in nine cases out of ten, a want of firmness of mind to differ with those around us, and to stand the brunt of their avowed hostility or secret calumnies.
"But still the world and its dread laugh prevails!"
An honest man is one whose sense of right and wrong is stronger than his anxiety that others should think or speak well of him. A man in the same sense forfeits his character for political integrity, whose love of truth truckles to his false shame and cringing complaisance, and who tampers with his own convictions, that he may stand well with the world. A man who sells his opinion merely to gain by his profligacy, is not a man without public principle, but common honesty. He ranks in the same class with a highwayman or a pickpocket.—It is true, interest and opinion are in general linked together; but opinion flies before, and interest comes limping after. As a woman first loses her virtue
