appears to have been as extravagantly attached to his three wives, as Raphael was to his Fornarina; but their faces were not so classical. The three greatest egotists that we know of, that is, the three writers who felt their own being most powerfully and exclusively, are Rousseau, Wordsworth, and Benvenuto Cellini. As Swift somewhere says, we defy the world to furnish out a fourth. W. H. NO. 25.] ON DIFFERENT SORTS OF FAME [APRIL 21, 1816. There is a half serious, half ironical argument in Melmoth’s _Fitz-Osborn’s Letters_, to shew the futility of posthumous fame, which runs thus: ‘The object of any one who is inspired with this passion is to be remembered by posterity with admiration and delight, as having been possessed of certain powers and excellences which distinguished him above his contemporaries. But posterity, it is said, can know nothing of the individual but from the memory of these qualities which he has left behind him. All that we know of Julius Cæsar, for instance, is that he was the person who performed certain actions, and wrote a book called his _Commentaries_. When, therefore, we extol Julius Cæsar for his actions or his writings, what do we say but that the person who performed certain things did perform them; that the author of such a work was the person who wrote it; or, in short, that Julius Cæsar was Julius Cæsar? Now this is a mere truism, and the desire to be the subject of such an identical proposition must, therefore, be an evident absurdity.’ The sophism is a tolerably ingenious one, but it is a sophism, nevertheless. It would go equally to prove the nullity, not only of posthumous fame, but of living reputation; for the good or the bad opinion which my next-door neighbour may entertain of me is nothing more than his conviction that such and such a person having certain good or bad qualities is possessed of them; nor is the figure, which a Lord-Mayor elect, a prating demagogue, or popular preacher, makes in the eyes of the admiring multitude—_himself_, but an image of him reflected in the minds of others, in connection with certain feelings of respect and wonder. In fact, whether the admiration we seek is to last for a day or for eternity, whether we are to have it while living or after we are dead, whether it is to be expressed by our contemporaries or by future generations, the principle of it is the same—_sympathy with the feelings of others_, and the necessary tendency which the idea or consciousness of the approbation of others has to strengthen the suggestions of our self-love.[58] We are all inclined to think well of ourselves, of our sense and capacity in whatever we undertake; but from this very desire to think well of ourselves, we are (as _Mrs. Peachum_ says) ‘_bitter_ bad judges’ of our own pretensions; and when our vanity flatters us most, we ought in general to suspect it most. We are, therefore, glad to