he next I shall mention are in
one a little higher; in the form of those who grow neither wiser nor
better by study themselves, but who enable others to study with
greater ease, and to purposes more useful; who make fair copies of
foul manuscripts, give the signification of hard words, and take a
great deal of other grammatical pains. The obligation to these men
would be great indeed, if they were in general able to do anything
better, and submitted to this drudgery for the sake of the public; as
some of them, it must be owned with gratitude, have done, but not
later, I think, than about the time of the resurrection of letters.
When works of importance are pressing, generals themselves may take
up the pickax and the spade; but in the ordinary course of things,
when that pressing necessity is over, such tools are left in the hands
destined to use them, the hands of common soldiers and peasants. I
approve, therefore, very much the devotion of a studious man at Christ
Church, who was overheard in his oratory entering into a detail with
God, acknowledging the divine goodness in furnishing the world with
makers of dictionaries! These men court fame, as well as their
letters, by such means as God has given them to acquire it; and
Littleton exerted all the genius he had when he made a dictionary, tho
Stephens did not. They deserve encouragement, however, while they
continue to compile, and neither affect wit, nor presume to reason.

There is a fourth class, of much less use than these, but of much
greater name. Men of the first rank in learning, and to whom the whole
tribe of scholars bow with reverence. A man must be as indifferent as
I am to common censure or approbation, to avow a thorough contempt for
the whole business of these learned lives; for all the researches into
antiquity, for all the systems of chronology and history, that we owe
to the immense labors of a Scaliger, a Bochart, a Petavius, an Usher,
and even a Marsham. The same materials are common to them all; but
these materials are few, and there is a moral impossibility that they
should ever have more. They have combined these into every form that
can be given to them; they have supposed, they have guessed, they have
joined disjointed passages of different authors, and broken traditions
of uncertain originals, of various people, and of centuries remote
from one another as well as from ours. In short, that they might leave
no liberty untaken, even a wild fantas