Persons in high situations must particularly guard themselves against selfishness and vanity.

An individual in a high and important situation will easily see a great many persons eager to please the first, and to flatter and encourage the last.

Selfishness, however, makes the individual itself miserable, and is the cause of constant disappointment, besides being the surest means of being disliked by everybody.
Vanity, on the other hand, is generally artfully used by ambitious and interested people to make one a tool for purposes of their own, but too often in opposition with one's own happiness and destruction of it.
To learn to know oneself, to judge oneself with truth and impartiality, must be the great objects of one's exertion; they are only attainable by constant and cool self-examination.
The position of what is generally called great people has of late become extremely difficult.

They are more attacked and calumniated, and judged with less indulgence than private individuals.

What they have lost in this way, they have not by any means regained in any other.