an Society has afforded them amusement.[D] Such
partial views have ceased to contract the understanding. Science yields a
new substance to literature; literature combines new associations for the
votaries of knowledge. There is no subject in nature, and in the history
of man, which will not associate with our feelings and our curiosity,
whenever genius extends its awakening hand. The antiquary, the naturalist,
the architect, the chemist, and even writers on medical topics, have in
our days asserted their claims, and discovered their long-interrupted
relationship with the great family of genius and literature.

[Footnote A: We have a Dictionary of "Ten Thousand living Authors" of our
own nation. The alphabet is fatal by its juxtapositions. In France, before
the Revolution, they counted about twenty thousand writers. When David
would have his people numbered, Joab asked, "Why doth my lord delight in
this?" In political economy, the population returns may be useful,
provided they be correct; but in the literary republic, its numerical
force diminishes the strength of the empire. "There you are numbered, we
had rather you were weighed." Put aside the puling infants of literature,
of whom such a mortality occurs in its nurseries; such as the writers of
the single sermon, the single law-tract, the single medical dissertation,
&c.; all writers whose subject is single, without being singular; count
for nothing the inefficient mob of mediocrists; and strike out our
literary _charlatans_; and then our alphabet of men of genius will not
consist, as it now does, of the four-and-twenty letters.]

[Footnote B: The cause is developed in the chapter on "Want of Mutual
Esteem."]

[Footnote C: See BUTLER, in his "Elephant in the Moon." SOUTH, in his
oration at the opening of the theatre at Oxford, passed this bitter
sarcasm on the naturalists,--"_Mirantur nihil nisi pulices, pediculos--et
se ipsos_;"--nothing they admire but fleas, lice, and themselves! The
illustrious SLOANE endured a long persecution from the bantering humour of
Dr. KING. One of the most amusing declaimers against what he calls _les
Sciences des faux Scavans_ is Father MALEBRANCHE; he is far more severe
than Cornelius Agrippa, and he long preceded ROUSSEAU, so famous for his
invective against the sciences. The seventh chapter of his fourth book is
an inimitable satire. "The principal excuse," says he, "which engages men
in _false studies_, is, that they have attached