n
upon it; they canter over the corn, and curse the ridges and furrows.
All schools of philosophy, and almost all authors, are rather to be
frequented for exercise than for freight; but this exercise ought to
acquire us health and strength, spirits and good-humour. There is none
of them that does not supply some truth useful to every man, and some
untruth equally so to the few that are able to wrestle with it. If
there were no falsehood in the world, there would be no doubt; if
there were no doubt, there would be no inquiry; if no inquiry, no
wisdom, no knowledge, no genius: and Fancy herself would lie muffled
up in her robe, inactive, pale, and bloated. I wish we could
demonstrate the existence of utility in some other evils as easily as
in this.

_Leontion._ My remarks on the conduct and on the style of Theophrastus
are not confined to him solely. I have taken at last a general view of
our literature, and traced as far as I am able its deviation and
decline. In ancient works we sometimes see the mark of the chisel; in
modern we might almost suppose that no chisel was employed at all, and
that everything was done by grinding and rubbing. There is an
ordinariness, an indistinctness, a generalization, not even to be
found in a flock of sheep. As most reduce what is sand into dust, the
few that avoid it run to a contrary extreme, and would force us to
believe that what is original must be unpolished and uncouth.

_Epicurus._ There have been in all ages, and in all there will be,
sharp and slender heads made purposely and peculiarly for creeping
into the crevices of our nature. While we contemplate the magnificence
of the universe, and mensurate the fitness and adaptation of one part
to another, the small philosopher hangs upon a hair or creeps within a
wrinkle, and cries out shrilly from his elevation that we are blind
and superficial. He discovers a wart, he pries into a pore; and he
calls it knowledge of man. Poetry and criticism, and all the fine
arts, have generated such living things, which not only will be
co-existent with them but will (I fear) survive them. Hence history
takes alternately the form of reproval and of panegyric; and science
in its pulverized state, in its shapeless and colourless atoms,
assumes the name of metaphysics. We find no longer the rich succulence
of Herodotus, no longer the strong filament of Thucydides, but
thoughts fit only for the slave, and language for the rustic and the
robber. Th