is;--it was found
out by another man, at least a century and a half after him: Then
again,--that this copious store-house of original materials, is the true
and natural cause that our Comedies are so much better than those
of France, or any others that either have, or can be wrote upon the
Continent:--that discovery was not fully made till about the middle of
King William's reign,--when the great Dryden, in writing one of his long
prefaces, (if I mistake not) most fortunately hit upon it. Indeed toward
the latter end of queen Anne, the great Addison began to patronize the
notion, and more fully explained it to the world in one or two of his
Spectators;--but the discovery was not his.--Then, fourthly and lastly,
that this strange irregularity in our climate, producing so strange an
irregularity in our characters,--doth thereby, in some sort, make us
amends, by giving us somewhat to make us merry with when the weather
will not suffer us to go out of doors,--that observation is my own;--and
was struck out by me this very rainy day, March 26, 1759, and betwixt
the hours of nine and ten in the morning.

Thus--thus, my fellow-labourers and associates in this great harvest of
our learning, now ripening before our eyes; thus it is, by slow steps
of casual increase, that our knowledge physical, metaphysical,
physiological, polemical, nautical, mathematical, aenigmatical,
technical, biographical, romantical, chemical, and obstetrical, with
fifty other branches of it, (most of 'em ending as these do, in ical)
have for these two last centuries and more, gradually been creeping
upwards towards that Akme of their perfections, from which, if we may
form a conjecture from the advances of these last seven years, we cannot
possibly be far off.

When that happens, it is to be hoped, it will put an end to all kind of
writings whatsoever;--the want of all kind of writing will put an end to
all kind of reading;--and that in time, As war begets poverty; poverty
peace,--must, in course, put an end to all kind of knowledge,--and
then--we shall have all to begin over again; or, in other words, be
exactly where we started.

--Happy! Thrice happy times! I only wish that the aera of my begetting,
as well as the mode and manner of it, had been a little alter'd,--or
that it could have been put off, with any convenience to my father or
mother, for some twenty or five-and-twenty years longer, when a man in
the literary world might have stood some ch