——‘Perseverance, dear my lord, Keeps honour bright. To have done, is to hang Quite out of fashion, like a rusty mail, In monumental mockery. Take the instant way; For honour travels in a strait so narrow, Where one but goes abreast. Keep then the path; For emulation hath a thousand sons, That one by one pursue. If you give way, Or hedge aside from the direct forth-right, Like to an enter’d tide, they all rush by, And leave you hindmost:— Or like a gallant horse, fall’n in first rank, Lie there for pavement to the abject rear, O’er-run and trampled. Then what they do in present, Though less than yours in past, must o’ertop yours: For time is like a fashionable host, That slightly shakes his parting guest by the hand, And with his arms outstretch’d as he would fly, Grasps in the comer. Welcome ever smiles, And farewell goes out sighing. O let not virtue seek Remuneration for the thing it was; for beauty, wit, High birth, vigour of bone, desert in service, Love, friendship, charity, are subjects all To envious and calumniating Time. One touch of nature makes the whole world kin, That all with one consent praise new-born gauds, Though they are made and moulded of things past; And give to dust that is a little gilt More laud than gilt o’er dusted. The present eye praises the present object.’ TROILUS AND CRESSIDA. I cannot very well conceive how it is that some writers (even of taste and genius) spend whole years in mere corrections for the press, as it were—in polishing a line or adjusting a comma. They take long to consider, exactly as there is nothing worth the trouble of a moment’s thought; and the more they deliberate, the farther they are from deciding: for their fastidiousness increases with the indulgence of it, nor is there any real ground for preference. They are in the situation of _Ned Softly_, in the TATLER, who was a whole morning debating whether a line of a poetical epistle should run— ‘You sing your song with so much art;’ or, ‘Your song you sing with so much art.’ These are points that it is impossible ever to come to a determination about; and it is only a proof of a little mind ever to have entertained the question at all.