igation to any
favorer of learning, I shall not be disappointed tho I should conclude
it, if less be possible, with less; for I have been long wakened from
that dream of hope in which I once boasted myself with so much
exultation, my lord,

Your Lordship's most humble, most obedient servant,

SAM. JOHNSON.

IV

ON THE ADVANTAGES OF LIVING IN A GARRET[27]

Nothing has more retarded the advancement of learning than the
disposition of vulgar minds to ridicule and vilify what they can not
comprehend. All industry must be excited by hope; and as the student
often proposes no other reward to himself than praise, he is easily
discouraged by contempt and insult. He who brings with him into a
clamorous multitude the timidity of recluse speculation, and has never
hardened his front in public life, or accustomed his passions to the
vicissitudes and accidents, the triumphs and defeats of mixt
conversation, will blush at the stare of petulant incredulity, and
suffer himself to be driven, by a burst of laughter, from the
fortresses of demonstration. The mechanist will be afraid to assert
before hardy contradictions the possibility of tearing down bulwarks
with a silkworm's thread; and the astronomer of relating the rapidity
of light, the distance of the fixt stars, and the height of the lunar
mountains.

If I could by any efforts have shaken off this cowardice, I had not
sheltered myself under a borrowed name, nor applied to you for the
means of communicating to the public the theory of a garret; a subject
which, except some slight and transient strictures, has been hitherto
neglected by those who were best qualified to adorn it, either for
want of leisure to prosecute the various researches in which a nice
discussion must engage them, or because it requires such diversity of
knowledge, and such extent of curiosity, as is scarcely to be found in
any single intellect; or perhaps others foresaw the tumults which
would be raised against them, and confined their knowledge to their
own breasts, and abandoned prejudice and folly to the direction of
chance.

That the professors of literature generally reside in the highest
stories has been immemorially observed. The wisdom of the ancients was
well acquainted with the intellectual advantages of an elevated
situation; why else were the Muses stationed on Olympus, or Parnassus,
by those who could with equal right have raised them bowers in the
vale of Tempe, or erected their