ers read for your own satisfaction, but not name
them." Now it happens that no writer names more authors, except
Prynne,[279] than the learned Selden. La Mothe le Vayer's curious works
consist of fifteen volumes; he is among the greatest quoters. Whoever
turns them over will perceive that he is an original thinker, and a
great wit; his style, indeed, is meagre, which, as much as his
quotations, may have proved fatal to him. But in both these cases it is
evident that even quoters who have abused the privilege of quotation are
not necessarily writers of a mean genius.

The Quoters who deserve the title, and it ought to be an honorary one,
are those who trust to no one but themselves. In borrowing a passage,
they carefully observe its connexion; they collect authorities to
reconcile any disparity in them before they furnish the one which they
adopt; they advance no fact without a witness, and they are not loose
and general in their references, as I have been told is our historian
Henry so frequently, that it is suspected he deals much in second-hand
ware. Bayle lets us into a mystery of author-craft. "Suppose an able man
is to prove that an ancient author entertained certain particular
opinions, which are only insinuated here and there through his works, I
am sure it will take him up more days to collect the passages which he
will have occasion for, than to _argue at random_ on those passages.
Having once found out his authorities and his quotations, which perhaps
will not fill six pages, and may have cost him a month's labour, he may
finish in two mornings' work twenty pages of arguments, objections, and
answers to objections; and consequently, _what proceeds from our own
genius sometimes costs much less time than what is requisite for
collecting_. Corneille would have required more time to defend a tragedy
by a great collection of authorities, than to write it; and I am
supposing the same number of pages in the tragedy and in the defence.
Heinsius perhaps bestowed more time in defending his _Herodes
infanticida_ against Balzac, than a Spanish (or a Scotch) metaphysician
bestows on a large volume of controversy, where he takes all from his
own stock." I am somewhat concerned in the truth of this principle.
There are articles in the present work occupying but a few pages, which
could never have been produced had not more time been allotted to the
researches which they contain than some would allow to a small volume,
which