Page:An Enquiry into the Present State of Polite Learning in Europe.djvu/129

 ful ballast of stupidity. By such means, the enormous mass heavily makes its way among the public, and to borrow a bookseller's phrase, the whole impression moves off. These great collections of learning, may serve to make us inwardly repine at our own ignorance, may serve when gilt and lettered, to adorn the lower shelves of a regular library; but woe to the reader, who not daunted at the immense distance between one great pasteboard and the other, opens the volume and explores his way through a region so extensive, but barren of entertainment. No unexpected landschape there to delight the imagination; no diversity of prospect to cheat the painful journey; he sees the wide extended desart lie before him; what is past only encreases his terror of what is to come.