imagination can come into play, our desires outrun their accomplishment. Persons of this extravagant humour should addict themselves to eloquence or poetry, where the thought ‘leaps at once to its effect,’ and is wafted, in a metaphor or an apostrophe, ‘from Indus to the Pole;’ though even there we should find enough, in the preparatory and mechanical parts of those arts, to try our patience and mortify our vanity! The first and strongest impulse of the mind is to achieve any object, on which it is set, at once, and by the shortest and most decisive means; but, as this cannot always be done, we ought not to neglect other more indirect and subordinate aids; nor should we be tempted to do so, but that the delusions of the will interfere with the convictions of the understanding, and what we ardently wish, we fancy to be both possible and true. Let us take the instance of copying a fine picture. We are full of the effect we intend to produce; and so powerfully does this prepossession affect us, that we imagine we have produced it, in spite of the evidence of our senses and the suggestions of friends. In truth, after a number of violent and anxious efforts to strike off a resemblance which we passionately long for, it seems an injustice not to have succeeded; it is too late to retrace our steps, and begin over again in a different method; we prefer even failure to arriving at our end by petty, mechanical tricks and rules; we have copied Titian or Rubens in the spirit in which they ought to be copied; though the likeness may not be perfect, there is a look, a tone, a _something_, which we chiefly aimed at, and which we persuade ourselves, seeing the copy only through the dazzled, hectic flush of feverish imagination, we have really given; and thus we persist, and make fifty excuses, sooner than own our error, which would imply its abandonment; or, if the light breaks in upon us, through all the disguises of sophistry and self-love, it is so painful that we shut our eyes to it. The more evident our failure, the more desperate the struggles we make to conceal it from ourselves, to stick to our original determination, and end where we began.