Rambler CLXIII p1

  No. CLXIII, Tuesday, October 8.

  Mitte superba pati fastidia, spemque caducam

  Despice, vive tibi, nam mortere tibi. Seneca

  Bow to no patron’s insolence; rely

  On no frail hopes; in freedom live and die.

  F. Lewis.

None of the cruelties exercised by wealth and power upon indigence and dependance is more mischievous

in its consequences, or more frequently practised with wanton negligence, than the encouragement of

expectations which are never to be gratified, and the elation and depression of the heart by needless

vicissitudes of hope and disappointment.

Every man is rich or poor, according to the proportion between his desires and enjoyments; any

enlargement of wishes is therefore equally destructive to happiness with the diminution of possession; and

he that teaches another to long for what he never shall obtain, is no less an enemy to his quiet, than if he had

robbed him of part of his patrimony.

But representations thus refined, exhibit no adequate idea of the guilt of pretended friendship; of

artifices by which followers are attracted only to decorate the retinue of pomp, and swell the shout of

popularity, and to be dismissed with contempt and ignominy, when their leader has succeeded or

miscarried, when he is sick of show, and weary of noise. While a man, infatuated with the promises of

greatness, wastes his hours and days in attendance and solicitation, the honest opportunities of improving

his condition pass by without his notice; he neglects to cultivate his own barren soil, because he expects

every moment to be placed in regions of spontaneous fertility; and is seldom roused from his delusion but

by the gripe of distress, which he cannot resist, and the sense of evils which cannot be remedied.

The punishment of Tantalus in the infernal regions affords a just image of hungry festivity, flattered

with the approach of advantage, doomed to lose it before it comes into his reach, always within a few days

of felicity, and always sinking abck to his former wants.

  (11 lines of ancient Greek)

‘I saw,’ say’s Homer’s Ulysses, ‘the severe punishment of Tantalus. In a lake whose waters approached to

his lips, he stood burning with thirst, without the power to drink. Whenever he inclined his head to the

stream, some deity commanded it to be dry, and the dark earth appeared at his feet. Around him lofty trees

spread their fruits to view; the pear, the pomegranate and the apple, the green olive, and the luscious fig,

quivered before him, which whenever he extended his hand to seize them, were snatched by winds into

clouds and obscurity.’

This image of misery was perhaps originally suggested to some poet by the conduct of his patron, by the

daily contemplation of splendor which he never must partake, by fruitless attempts to catch at interdicted

happiness, and by the sudden evanescence of his reward, when he thought his labours almost at an end.