Particular customs and manners alter the usefulness of qualities:
they also alter their merit. Particular situations and accidents
have, in some degree, the same influence. He will always be more
esteemed, who possesses those talents and accomplishments, which
suit his station and profession, than he whom fortune has
misplaced in the part which she has assigned him. The private or
selfish virtues are, in this respect, more arbitrary than the
public and social. In other respects they are, perhaps, less
liable to doubt and controversy.

In this kingdom, such continued ostentation, of late years, has
prevailed among men in ACTIVE life with regard to PUBLIC SPIRIT,
and among those in SPECULATIVE with regard to BENEVOLENCE; and so
many false pretensions to each have been, no doubt, detected,
that men of the world are apt, without any bad intention, to
discover a sullen incredulity on the head of those moral
endowments, and even sometimes absolutely to deny their existence
and reality. In like manner I find, that, of old, the perpetual
cant of the STOICS and CYNICS concerning VIRTUE, their
magnificent professions and slender performances, bred a disgust
in mankind; and Lucian, who, though licentious with regard to
pleasure, is yet in other respects a very moral writer, cannot
sometimes talk of virtue, so much boasted without betraying
symptoms of spleen and irony. But surely this peevish delicacy,
whence-ever it arises can never be carried so far as to make us
deny the existence of every species of merit, and all distinction
of manners and behaviour. Besides DISCRETION, CAUTION,
ENTERPRISE, INDUSTRY, ASSIDUITY, FRUGALITY, ECONOMY, GOOD-SENSE,
PRUDENCE, DISCERNMENT; besides these endowments, I say, whose
very names force an avowal of their merit, there are many others,