In concluding this Essay I desire to warn young readers against a very common mistake. It is very generally believed that literature and the fine arts can be happily practised as amusements. I believe this to be an error due to the vulgar notion that artists and literal people do not work but only display talent, as if anybody could display talent without toil. Literary and artistic pursuits are in fact _studies_ and not amusements. Too arduous to have the refreshing quality of recreation, they put too severe a strain upon the faculties, they are too troublesome in their processes, and too unsatisfactory in their results, unless a natural gift has been developed by earnest and long-continued labor. It does indeed occasionally happen that an artist who has acquired skill by persistent study will amuse himself by exercising it in sport. A painter may make idle sketches as Byron sometimes broke out into careless rhymes, or as a scholar will playfully compose doggerel in Greek, but these gambols of accomplished men are not to be confounded with the painful efforts of amateurs who fancy that they are going to dance in the Palace of Art and shortly discover that the muse who presides there is not a smiling hostess but a severe and exigent schoolmistress. An able French painter, Louis Leloir, wrote thus to a friend about another art that he felt tempted to practise:-- "Etching tempts me much. I am making experiments and hope to show you something soon. Unhappily life is too short; we do a little of everything and then perceive that each branch of art would of itself consume the life of a man, to practise it very imperfectly after all.... We get angry with ourselves and struggle, but too late. It was at the beginning that we ought to have put on blinkers to hide from ourselves everything that is not art." If we mean to amuse ourselves let us avoid the painful wrestling against insuperable difficulties, and the humiliation of imperfect results. Let us shun all ostentation, either of wealth or talent, and take our pleasures happily like poor children, or like the idle angler who stands in his old clothes by the purling stream and watches the bobbing of his float, or the glancing of the fly that his guileful industry has made. INDEX. Absinthe, French use, 273. Absurdity, in languages, 157. Academies, in a university, 275. Accidents, Divine connection with (Essay XV.), 218-222. Acquaintances: new and humble, 21, 22; chance, 23-26; met in travelling (Essay XVII.), 239-252 _passim_. Adaptability: a mystery, 9; in life's journey, 44; to unrefined people, 72. Adultery, overlooked in princes, 168. Affection: not blinding to faults, 10; how to obtain filial, 98; in the beginning of letters, 316. Affinities, mysterious, 288.