_ouvrages de
longue haleine_," and it has often happened that the _haleine_ has closed
before the work.

Works of literary history have been particularly subject to this
mortifying check on intellectual enterprise, and human life has not
yielded a sufficient portion for the communication of extensive
acquirement! After years of reading and writing, the literary historian,
who in his innumerable researches is critical as well as erudite, has
still to arbitrate between conflicting opinions; to resolve on the
doubtful, to clear up the obscure, and to grasp at remote researches:--but
he dies, and leaves his favourite volumes little more than a project!

Feelingly the antiquary Hearne laments this general forgetfulness of the
nature of all human concerns in the mind of the antiquary, who is so
busied with other times and so interested for other persons than those
about him. "It is the business of a good antiquary, as of a good man, to
have mortality always before him."

A few illustrious scholars have indeed escaped the fate reserved for most
of their brothers. A long life, and the art of multiplying that life not
only by an early attachment to study, but by that order and arrangement
which shortens our researches, have sufficed for a MURATORI. With such a
student time was a great capital, which he knew to put out at compound
interest; and this Varro of the Italians, who performed an infinite number
of things in the circumscribed period of ordinary life, appears not to
have felt any dread of leaving his voluminous labours unfinished, but
rather of wanting one to begin. This literary Alexander thought he might
want a world to conquer! Muratori was never perfectly happy unless
employed in two large works at the same time, and so much dreaded the
state of literary inaction, that he was incessantly importuning his
friends to suggest to him objects worthy of his future composition. The
flame kindled in his youth burned clear in his old age; and it was in his
senility that he produced the twelve quartos of his _Annali d'Italia_
as an addition to his twenty-nine folios of his _Rerum Italicarum
Scriptores_, and the six folios of the _Antiquitates Medii AEvi_! Yet
these vast edifices of history are not all which this illustrious Italian
has raised for his fatherland. Gibbon in his Miscellaneous Works has drawn
an admirable character of Muratori.

But such a fortunate result has rarely accompanied the labours of the
literary worth