same time with them: we can hold their works in our hands, or lay them
on our pillows, or put them to our lips. Scarcely a trace of what the
others did is left upon the earth, so as to be visible to common eyes.
The one, the dead authors, are living men, still breathing and moving
in their writings. The others, the conquerors of the world, are but the
ashes in an urn. The sympathy (so to speak) between thought and thought
is more intimate and vital than that between thought and action. Though
of admiration to the manes of departed heroism is like burning incense
in a marble monument. Words, ideas, feelings, with the progress of time
harden into substances: things, bodies, actions, moulder away, or melt
into a sound, into thin air!--Yet though the Schoolmen in the Middle
Ages disputed more about the texts of Aristotle than the battle of
Arbela, perhaps Alexander's Generals in his lifetime admired his pupil
as much and liked him better. For not only a man's actions are effaced
and vanish with him; his virtues and generous qualities die with him
also: his intellect only is immortal and bequeathed unimpaired to
posterity. Words are the only things that last for ever.

If, however, the empire of words and general knowledge is more durable
in proportion as it is abstracted and attenuated, it is less immediate
and dazzling: if authors are as good after they are dead as when they
were living, while living they might as well be dead: and moreover with
respect to actual ability, to write a book is not the only proof
of taste, sense, or spirit, as pedants would have us suppose. To do
anything well, to paint a picture, to fight a battle, to make a plough
or a threshing-machine, requires, one would think, as much skill and
judgment as to talk about or write a description of it when done. Words
are universal, intelligible signs, but they are not the only real,
existing things. Did not Julius Caesar show himself as much of a man in
conducting his campaigns as in composing his Commentaries? Or was the
Retreat of the Ten Thousand under Xenophon, or his work of that name,
the most consummate performance? Or would not Lovelace, supposing him to
have existed and to have conceived and executed all his fine stratagems
on the spur of the occasion, have been as clever a fellow as Richardson,
who invented them in cold blood? If to conceive and describe an heroic
character is the height of a literary ambition, we can hardly make it
out that to b