altars among the flexures of Meander?
Why was Jove himself nursed upon a mountain? or why did the goddesses,
when the prize of beauty was contested, try the cause upon the top of
Ida? Such were the fictions by which the great masters of the earlier
ages endeavored to inculcate to posterity the importance of a garret,
which, tho they had been long obscured by the negligence and ignorance
of succeeding times, were well enforced by the celebrated symbol of
Pythagoras, "when the wind blows, worship its echo." This could not
but be understood by his disciples as an inviolable injunction to live
in a garret, which I have found frequently visited by the echo and the
wind. Nor was the tradition wholly obliterated in the age of Augustus,
for Tibullus evidently congratulates himself upon his garret, not
without some allusion to the Pythagorean precept:

How sweet in sleep to pass the careless hours,
Lull'd by the beating winds and dashing showers!

And it is impossible not to discover the fondness of Lucretius, an
early writer, for a garret, in his description of the lofty towers of
serene learning, and of the pleasure with which a wise man looks down
upon the confused and erratic state of the world moving below him:

... 'Tis sweet thy laboring steps to guide
To virtue's heights, with wisdom well supplied,
And all the magazines of learning fortified:
From thence to look below on human kind,
Bewilder'd in the maze of life, and blind.[28]

The institution has, indeed, continued to our own time; the garret is
still the usual receptacle of the philosopher and poet; but this, like
many ancient customs, is perpetuated only by an accidental imitation,
without knowledge of the original reason for which it was established:

The cause is secret, but th' effect is known.

Conjectures have, indeed, been advanced concerning these habitations
of literature, but without much satisfaction to the judicious
inquirer. Some have imagined that the garret is generally chosen by
the wits as most easily rented; and concluded that no man rejoices in
his aerial abode, but on the days of payment. Others suspect that a
garret is chiefly convenient, as it is remoter than any other part of
the house from the outer door, which is often observed to be infested
by visitants, who talk incessantly of beer, or linen, or a coat, and
repeat the same sounds every morning, and sometimes again in the
afternoon, without any varia