rn writers; a subject, you must confess, very aptly and
naturally introduced. I am going to be very serious, you will trace a
resemblance between me and Sir William Temple,[47] or perhaps David
Hume, Esq.

[Footnote 47: Temple wrote "An Essay upon Ancient and Modern
Learning."--ED.]

A modern writer must content himself with gleaning a few thoughts here
and there, and binding them together without order or regularity, that
the variety may please; the ancients have reaped the full of the
harvest, and killed the noblest of the game: in vain do we beat about
the once plenteous fields, the dews are exhaled, no scent remains. How
glorious was the fate of the early writers![48] born in the infancy of
letters; their task was to reject thoughts more than to seek after them,
and to select out of a number, the most shining, the most striking, and
the most susceptible of ornament. The poet saw in his walks every
pleasing object of nature undescribed; his heart danced with the gale,
and his spirits shone with the invigorating sun, his works breathed
nothing but rapture and enthusiasm. Love then spoke with its genuine
voice, the breast was melted down with woe, the whole soul was dissolved
into pity with its tender complaints; free from the conceits and
quibbles which, since that time, have rendered the very name of it
ridiculous; real passion heaved the sigh; real passion uttered the most
prevailing language. Music too reigned in its full force; that soft
deluding art, whose pathetic strains so gently steal into our very
souls, and involve us in the sweetest confusion; or whose animating
strains fire us even to madness: how has the shore of Greece echoed with
the wildest sounds; the delicious warblings of the Lyre charmed and
astonished every ear. The blaze of rhetoric then burst forth; the
ancients sought not by false thoughts, and glittering diction, to
captivate the ear, but by manly and energetic modes of expression, to
rule the heart and sway the passions.

[Footnote 48: "The most ancient poets are considered as the best ...
whether the first writers took possession of the most striking objects
for description, and the most probable occurrences for fiction, and left
nothing to those that followed them but transcription of the same
events, and new combinations of the same images."--"Rasselas," chapter
x.--ED.]

There, Boswell, there are periods for you. Did you not imagine that you
was reading "The Rambler" of Mr. Samuel J