Success Quote by William Shenstone

A warning disguised as a compliment: the moment you put virtue on display, it starts to rot. Shenstone’s line works because it treats morality the way 18th-century readers treated perfume and flowers - desirable, delicate, and easily spoiled by air and handling. “Essences” signals both literal scent and the distilled, refined stuff of taste culture; “virtues” borrows that same economy of refinement. The metaphor flatters the virtuous as rare and costly, then undercuts them: rarity is also fragility.

The subtext is social, not merely spiritual. Shenstone is writing in a world of salons, patronage, and reputation management, where “goodness” could be currency and self-presentation could look suspiciously like self-advertisement. “Exposed” carries the double charge of publicity and vulnerability: virtue paraded for applause becomes performance, and performance invites scrutiny, envy, and doubt. The line takes aim at ostentation without needing to sermonize; it suggests that the very act of claiming moral credit contaminates the claim.

It also reflects a period obsession with sensibility - the idea that the finest feelings are the least shoutable. If virtue is most authentic when it’s least seen, then modesty isn’t an add-on; it’s the preservative. Read now, it lands as an early critique of virtue-signaling avant la lettre, but it’s sharper than that: Shenstone isn’t denying virtue’s existence, he’s describing its PR problem. Exposure doesn’t just reveal; it alters.