lly
presumptuous, may easily be led to suppose, that the happiness of our
world would be promoted by a different tendency of the human mind. It
appears, indeed, to a slight and superficial observer, that many things
impracticable in our present state, might be easily effected, if mankind
were better disposed to union and co-operation: but a little reflection
will discover, that if confederacies were easily formed, they would lose
their efficacy, since numbers would be opposed to numbers, and unanimity
to unanimity; and instead of the present petty competitions of
individuals or single families, multitudes would be supplanting
multitudes, and thousands plotting against thousands.

There is no class of the human species, of which the union seems to have
been more expected, than of the learned: the rest of the world have
almost always agreed to shut scholars up together in colleges and
cloisters; surely not without hope, that they would look for that
happiness in concord, which they were debarred from finding in variety;
and that such conjunctions of intellect would recompense the munificence
of founders and patrons, by performances above the reach of any single
mind.

But discord, who found means to roll her apple into the banqueting
chamber of the goddesses, has had the address to scatter her laurels in
the seminaries of learning. The friendship of students and of beauties
is for the most part equally sincere, and equally durable: as both
depend for happiness on the regard of others, on that of which the value
arises merely from comparison, they are both exposed to perpetual
jealousies, and both incessantly employed in schemes to intercept the
praises of each other.

I am, however, far from intending to inculcate that this confinement of
the studious to studious companions, has been wholly without advantage
to the publick: neighbourhood, where it does not conciliate friendship,
incites competition; and he that would contentedly rest in a lower
degree of excellence, where he had no rival to dread, will be urged by
his impatience of inferiority to incessant endeavours after great
attainments.

These stimulations of honest rivalry are, perhaps, the chief effects of
academies and societies; for whatever be the bulk of their joint
labours, every single piece is always the production of an individual,
that owes nothing to his colleagues but the contagion of diligence, a
resolution to write, because the rest are writing, a