trine by
seriousness and solemnity, or enliven it by sprightliness and gaiety: he
may deliver his sentiments in naked precepts, or illustrate them by
historical examples: he may detain the studious by the artful
concatenation of a continued discourse, or relieve the busy by short
strictures, and unconnected essays.

To excel in any of these forms of writing will require a particular
cultivation of the genius: whoever can attain to excellence, will be
certain to engage a set of readers, whom no other method would have
equally allured; and he that communicates truth with success, must be
numbered among the first benefactors to mankind.

The same observation may be extended likewise to the passions: their
influence is uniform, and their effects nearly the same in every human
breast: a man loves and hates, desires and avoids, exactly like his
neighbour; resentment and ambition, avarice and indolence, discover
themselves by the same symptoms in minds distant a thousand years from
one another.

Nothing, therefore, can be more unjust, than to charge an author with
plagiarism, merely because he assigns to every cause its natural effect;
and makes his personages act, as others in like circumstances have
always done. There are conceptions in which all men will agree, though
each derives them from his own observation: whoever has been in love,
will represent a lover impatient of every idea that interrupts his
meditations on his mistress, retiring to shades and solitude, that he
may muse without disturbance on his approaching happiness, or
associating himself with some friend that flatters his passion, and
talking away the hours of absence upon his darling subject. Whoever has
been so unhappy as to have felt the miseries of long-continued hatred,
will, without any assistance from ancient volumes, be able to relate how
the passions are kept in perpetual agitation, by the recollection of
injury and meditations of revenge; how the blood boils at the name of
the enemy, and life is worn away in contrivances of mischief.

Every other passion is alike simple and limited, if it be considered
only with regard to the breast which it inhabits; the anatomy of the
mind, as that of the body, must perpetually exhibit the same
appearances; and though by the continued industry of successive
inquirers, new movements will be from time to time discovered, they can
affect only the minuter parts, and are commonly of more curiosity than
importance.