be
doubted, whether our complaints are not sometimes inconsiderate, and
whether we do not imagine more evil than we feel. Of the ancients,
enough remains to excite our emulation and direct our endeavours. Many
of the works which time has left us, we know to have been these that
were most esteemed, and which antiquity itself considered as models; so
that, having the originals, we may without much regret lose the
imitations. The obscurity which the want of contemporary writers often
produces, only darkens single passages, and those commonly of slight
importance. The general tendency of every piece may be known; and though
that diligence deserves praise which leaves nothing unexamined, yet its
miscarriages are not much to be lamented; for the most useful truths are
always universal, and unconnected with accidents and customs.

Such is the general conspiracy of human nature against contemporary
merit, that, if we had inherited from antiquity enough to afford
employment for the laborious, and amusement for the idle, I know not
what room would have been left for modern genius or modern industry;
almost every subject would have been pre-occupied, and every style would
have been fixed by a precedent from which few would have ventured to
depart. Every writer would have had a rival, whose superiority was
already acknowledged, and to whose fame his work would, even before it
was seen, be marked out for a sacrifice.

We see how little the united experience of mankind hath been able to add
to the heroick characters displayed by Homer, and how few incidents the
fertile imagination of modern Italy has yet produced, which may not be
found in the Iliad and Odyssey. It is likely, that if all the works of
the Athenian philosophers had been extant, Malbranche and Locke would
have been condemned to be silent readers of the ancient metaphysicians;
and it is apparent, that, if the old writers had all remained, the Idler
could not have written a disquisition on the loss[1].

[1] There was a weighty meaning in that fiction of the Stoics, of a
grand periodic year, in which all events should be re-acted in the same
mode and order as before. There is nothing new under the sun. Whatever
is, or shall be, is only an imitation, or, at best, a re-production of
something that has been. The moralist who speculates on the
contingencies of human conduct can only divine the future from what has
already been acted on the earth. The philosopher, leaning on