AMBITION.

country where they live, and of growing considerable with those with whom they converse. There is a kind of grandeur and respect which the meanest and most insignificant part of mankind endeavour to procure in the little circle of their friends and acquaintance. The poorest mechanic, nay, the man who lives upon common alms, gets him his set of admirers, and delights in that superiority which he enjoys over those who are in some respects beneath him. This ambition, which is natural to the soul of man, might, methinks, receive a very happy turn; and, if it were rightly directed, contribute as much to a person's advantage as it generally does to his uneasiness and disquiet.

AMBITION-Disappointed.

Addison.

The same sun which gilds all nature, and exhilarates the whole creation, does not shine upon disappointed ambition. It is something that rays out of darkness, and inspires nothing but gloom and melancholy. Men in this deplorable state of mind find a comfort in spreading the contagion of their spleen. They find an advantage, too; for it is a general popular error to imagine the loudest complainers for the public to be the most anxious for its welfare. If such persons can answer the ends of relief and profit to themselves, they are apt to be careless enough about either the means or the consequences. Burke.

We must distinguish between felicity and prosperity; for prosperity leads often to ambition, and ambition to disappointment: the course is then over, the wheel turns round but once, while the reaction of goodness and happiness is perpetual.

AMBITION-Doings of.

Landor.

Ambition, that high and glorious passion, which makes such havoc among the sons of men, arises from a proud desire of honour and distinction; and when the splendid trappings in which it is usually caparisoned are removed, will be found to consist of the mean materials of envy, pride, and covetousness. It is described by different authors as a gallant madness, a pleasant poison, a hidden plague, a secret poison, a caustic of the soul, the moth of holiness, the mother of hypocrisy, and, by crucifying and disquieting all it takes hold of, the cause of melancholy and madness.

AMBITION-Fate of.

Burton.

AMBITION-End of.

Sir Walter Scott.

Ambition's like a circle on the water,
Which never ceases to enlarge itself,
Till by broad spreading it disperse to nought.
Shakspeare.

AMBITION-Ennobling.

The true ambition there alone resides,
Where justice vindicates, and wisdom guides;
Where inward dignity joins outward state,
Our purpose good, as our achievement great;
Where public blessings, public praise attend,
Where glory is our motive, not our end:
Wouldst thou be famed? have those high acts
in view,

Brave men would act, though scandal would
Young.

ensue.

To the very end of time.

AMBITION-Impulses of.

Mitford.

Ambition! the desire of active souls,
That pushes them beyond the bounds of nature,
That can inform the souls of beardless boys,
And elevates the hero to the gods;
And ripen 'em to men in spite of nature. Rowe.

AMBITION-Incurable.

Where ambition can be so happy as to cover its enterprises even to the person himself, under the appearance of principle, it is the most incurable and inflexible of all human passions. Hume.

AMBITION-Lowliness the Ladder of. Lowliness is young Ambition's ladder, Whereto the climber upward turns his face;

But when he once obtains the utmost round,
He then unto the ladder turns his back,
Looks in the clouds, scorning the base degrees
By which he did ascend.
Shakspeare.

AMBITION-has many Masters.

A slave has but one master; the ambitious man has as many masters as there are persons whose aid may contribute to the advancement of his future. La Bruyère. AMBITION-a Rebel against Reason. Ambition, like a torrent, ne'er looks back; It is a swelling, and the last affection A high mind can put off. It is a rebel Both to soul and reason, and enforces All laws, all conscience; treads upon religion,

And offers violence to Nature's self.

AMBITION-Spirit of.

Ben Jonson.

Ambition is the most troublesome and

men.

vexatious passion that can afflict the sons of Virtue hath not half so much trouble in it, for it sleeps quietly, without startings and affrighted fancies: it looks cheerfully, smiles with much serenity, and though it laughs not often, yet it is ever delightful in the apprehension of some faculty. It fears no man, nor no thing, nor is it ever discomposed, and hath no concernments in the great alterations of the world, and entertains death like a friend, and reckons the issues of it as the greatest of its hopes. But ambition is full of distractions; it teems with stratagems, and is swelled with expectations as with a tympany. It sleeps sometimes as the wind in a storm, still and quiet for a minute, that it may burst out into an impetuous blast till the cordage It fears when none of his heart-strings crack.

is nigh, and prevents things that never had intention, and falls under the inevitability of such incidents, which either could not be foreseen or not prevented. It is an infinite labour to make a man's self miserable, and the utmost acquist is so goodly a purchase, that he makes his days full of sorrow to enjoy the troubles of a three years' reign. Therefore there is no greater unreasonableness in the world than in the designs of ambition; for it makes the present certainly miserable, unsatisfied, troublesome, and discontented, for the uncertain acquisition of an honour, which nothing can secure; and besides a thousand possibilities of miscarrying, it relies upon no greater certainty than our life; and when we are dead, all the world sees who was the fool.

Jeremy Taylor. AMBITION-Temptations of.

Yet true renown is still with virtue join'd,
But lust of power lets loose the bridled mind;

The blast which his ambitious spirit swell'd,
See by how weak a tenure it was held.
If glory was a bait that angels swallow'd,
How then should souls allied to sense resist it?
Dryden.
AMBITION-Torments of.

Ambition sufficiently plagues her proselytes, by keeping themselves always in shew, like the statue of a public place. Montaigne. AMBITION-Unfruitfulness of.

I have often been astonished at the softness in which other minds seem to have passed their day the ripened pasture and clustering vineyards of imagination: the mental Arcadia in which they describe themselves as having loitered from year to year. Yet, can I have faith in this perpetual Claude Lorraine pencil -this undying verdure of the soil-this gold and purple suffusion of the sky-those pomps of the palace and the pencil with their pageants and nymphs, giving life to their landscape; while mine was a continual encounter with difficulty, a continual summons to self-control?-A march, not unlike that of the climber up the side of Etna; every step through ruins, the vestiges of former conflagrations; the ground trode, rocks that had once been flame; every advance a new trial of my feelings or my fortitude; every stage of the ascent leading me, like the traveller, into a higher region, of sand or ashes; until, at the highest, I stood in a circle of eternal frost, with all the rich and human landscape below fading away in distance, and looked down only on a gulf of fire.

AMUSEMENT-Abuse of.

Marston.

The habit of dissipating every serious thought by a succession of agreeable sensations, is as fatal to happiness as to virtue; for when amusement is uniformly substituted for objects of moral and mental interest, we lose all that elevates our enjoyments above the scale of childish pleasures. Anna Maria Porter. AMUSEMENTS-Necessity for.

The mind ought sometimes to be amused, that it may the better return to thought, and to itself. Phaedrus.

ANARCHY-Digest of.

Burke talked of "that digest of anarchy called the Rights of Man." Alison. ANATHEMA.

If she must teem, Create her child of spleen, that it may live, And be a thwart disnatured torment to her. Let it stamp wrinkles in her brow of youth;