Now say, where virtue stops, and vice begins?

AS any action or posture, long continued, will
distort and disfigure the limbs; so the mind
likewise is crippled and contracted by perpetual
application to the same set of ideas. It is easy to guess
the trade of an artizan by his knees, his fingers, or
his shoulders: and there are few among men of
the more liberal professions, whose minds do not
carry the brand of their calling, or whose conversation
does not quickly discover to what class of the
community they belong.

These peculiarities have been of great use, in the
general hostility which every part of mankind exercises
against the rest, to furnish insults and sarcasms.
Every art has its dialect, uncouth and ungrateful to
all whom custom has not reconciled to its sound, and
which therefore becomes ridiculous by a slight
misapplication, or unnecessary repetition.

The general reproach with which ignorance
revenges the superciliousness of learning, is that of
pedantry; a censure which every man incurs, who
has at any time the misfortune to talk to those who
cannot understand him, and by which the modest
and timorous are sometimes frighted from the display
of their acquisitions, and the exertion of their
powers.