ESSAY XIII.
ON THE DISADVANTAGES OF INTELLECTUAL SUPERIORITY.
The chief disadvantage of knowing more and seeing farther than others, is not to be generally understood. A man is, in consequence of this, liable to start paradoxes, which immediately transport him beyond the reach of the common-place reader. A person speaking once in a slighting manner of a very original-minded man, received for answer—“He strides on so far before you that he dwindles in the distance!”
Petrarch complains that “Nature had made him different from other people”—singular’ d’ altri genti. The great happiness of life is, to be neither better nor worse than the general run of those you meet with, you soon find a mortifying level in their difference to what you particularly pique yourself upon. What is the use of being moral in a night-cellar, or wise in Bedlam? “To be honest, as this
