Though we refuse to natural abilities the title of virtues, we must allow, that they procure the love and esteem of mankind; that they give a new lustre to the other virtues; and that a man possessed of them is much more entitled to our good will and services than one entirely void of them. It may indeed be pretended, that the sentiment of approbation which those qualities produce, besides its being _inferior_, is also somewhat _different_ from that which attends the other virtues. But this, in my opinion, is not a sufficient reason for excluding them from the catalogue of virtues. Each of the virtues, even benevolence, justice, gratitude, integrity, excites a different sentiment or feeling in the spectator. The characters of Cæsar and Cato, as drawn by Sallust, are both of them virtuous, in the strictest sense of the word, but in a different way: nor are the sentiments entirely the same which arise from them. The one produces love, the other esteem; the one is amiable, the other awful: we could wish to meet with the one character in a friend, the other character we would be ambitious of in ourselves. In like manner, the approbation which attends natural abilities, may be somewhat different to the feeling from that which arises from the other virtues, without making them entirely of a different species. And indeed we may observe, that the natural abilities, no more than the other virtues, produce not, all of them, the same kind of approbation. Good sense and genius beget esteem; wit and humour excite love.[6]