Page:Montesquieu - The spirit of laws.djvu/31

Rh the asperity of the expressions, the disagreeableness of matter.

"When a person writes on great subjects, it is not sufficient that he consults his zeal; he should also consult his abilities; and if heaven has not granted us great talents, we may supply them by a distrust of ourselves, by accuracy, labour, and reflection.

"That art of finding, in what has naturally a good meaning, all the bad meanings, which a mind accustomed to false reasoning can give, is of no service to mankind; those who practise it referable the ravens who shun living bodies, and fly on all sides in search of carcasses.

"This conduct, when observed in criticism, produces two very great inconveniences: the first is, that it spoils the minds of the readers, by a mixture of true and false, good and bad: they accustom themselves to search for a bad sense in things that naturally have a very good one; from whence it becomes easy to pass to a disposition to search for a good sense in things that have naturally a bad one; it makes them lose the ability of reasoning justly, by Rh