But, with others of this class, study has usually served as the instrument, not as the object, of their ascent; it was the ladder which they once climbed, but it was not the eastern star which guided and inspired.

Such literary characters were WARBURTON,[A] WATSON, and WILKES, who abandoned their studies when their studies had served a purpose.
[Footnote A: For a full disquisition of the character and career of Warburton, see the essay in "Quarrels of Authors."] WATSON gave up his pursuits in chemistry the instant he obtained their limited reward, and the laboratory closed when the professorship was instituted.

Such was the penurious love he bore for the science which he had adopted, that the extraordinary discoveries of thirty years subsequent to his own first essays could never excite even an idle inquiry.

He tells us that he preferred "his larches to his laurels:" the wretched jingle expressed the mere worldliness that dictated it.

In the same spirit of calculation with which he had at first embraced science and literature, he abandoned them; and his ingenuous confession is a memorable example of that egotistic pride which betrayed in the literary character the creature of selfism and political ambition.
We are accustomed to consider WILKES merely as a political adventurer, and it may surprise to find this "city chamberlain" ranked among professed literary characters: yet in his variable life there was a period when he cherished the aspirations of a votary.