d selection of all that is great and noble
in nature. The greatest natural genius cannot subsist on its own stock:
he who resolves never to ransack any mind but his own will be soon
reduced, from mere barrenness, to the poorest of all imitations; he will
be obliged to imitate himself, and to repeat what he has before often
repeated. When we know the subject designed by such men, it will never
be difficult to guess what kind of work is to be produced.

It is vain for painters or poets to endeavour to invent without materials
on which the mind may work, and from which invention must originate.
Nothing can come of nothing.

Homer is supposed to be possessed of all the learning of his time. And
we are certain that Michael Angelo and Raffaelle were equally possessed
of all knowledge in the art which was discoverable in the works of their
predecessors.

A mind enriched by an assemblage of all the treasures of ancient and
modern art will be more elevated and fruitful in resources in proportion
to the number of ideas which have been carefully collected and thoroughly
digested. There can be no doubt that he who has the most materials has
the greatest means of invention; and if he has not the power of using
them, it must proceed from a feebleness of intellect or from the confused
manner in which those collections have been laid up in his mind.

The addition of other men's judgment is so far from weakening, as is the
opinion of many, our own, that it will fashion and consolidate those
ideas of excellence which lay in their birth feeble, ill-shaped, and
confused, but which are finished and put in order by the authority and
practice of those whose works may be said to have been consecrated by
having stood the test of ages.

The mind, or genius, has been compared to a spark of fire which is
smothered by a heap of fuel and prevented from blazing into a flame. This
simile, which is made use of by the younger Pliny, may be easily mistaken
for argument or proof.

There is no danger of the mind's being over-burdened with knowledge, or
the genius extinguished by any addition of images; on the contrary, these
acquisitions may as well, perhaps better, be compared, if comparisons
signified anything in reasoning, to the supply of living embers, which
will contribute to strengthen the spark that without the association of
more would have died away.

The truth is, he whose feebleness is such as to make other men's thoughts
an incumb