And these storms, by some mysterious process or other, were
incessantly casting up on the shore of political popularity and
making heroes of men whose virtues were not weighty enough to keep
them at the bottom. "Be an humble citizen, my son," said he: "learn
to value a quiet life. You are not given to loud and boisterous
talking, to lying, or to slandering; which things, at this day, are
essential to political success. Worthy and well disposed persons are
too much afraid of being drowned in the violence of the storm
politicians with shallow brains and empty pockets create, by their
anxiety to take the affairs of the nation into their own keeping.
Remember, too, that if you fail in the object of your ambition (and
you are not vagabond enough to succeed), the remotest desert will
not hide you from the evil designs of your enemies. You may seek
some crystal stream; you may let your tears flow with its waters;
but such will not lighten your disappointment, for the persecuted
heart is no peace-offering to the political victor. Politically
vanquished; and you are like an unhappy lover who seeks him a rural
deity and sings his complaints to the winds. Your eye will become
jealous at the fortunes of others, but your sighs over the cruelty
of what you are pleased to call human imperfections will not bring
back your own. Stay quietly at home, my son, and if you cannot be a
schoolmaster, chance may one day turn you up President of these
United States. Let your insanity for writing books not beguile you
into crime; and above all, I would enjoin you, my son, never to
write the 'Life and Character' of an in-going President, for then,
to follow the fashion of the day, and make for him a life that would
apply with equal truth to King Mancho, or any one of his sable
subjects, will be necessary that you write him down the hero of
adventures he never dreamed of, and leave out the score of
delinquincies his real life is blemished with. If you do this, wise