Page:The Works of the Rev. Jonathan Swift, Volume 2.djvu/203

Rh By these methods, in a few weeks, there starts up many a writer, capable of managing the profoundest, and most universal subjects. For, what though his head be empty, provided his commonplace book be full; and if you will bate him but the circumstances of method, and style, and grammar, and invention; allow him but the common privileges of transcribing from others, and digressing from himself, as often as he shall see occasion; he will desire no more ingredients towards fitting up a treatise, that shall make a very comely figure on a bookseller's shelf; there to be preserved neat and clean for a long eternity, adorned with the heraldry of its title fairly inscribed on a label; never to be thumbed or greased by students, nor bound to everlasting chains of darkness in a library: but, when the fulness of time is come, shall happily undergo the trial of Purgatory, in order to ascend the sky.

Without these allowances, how is it possible, we modern wits should ever have an opportunity to introduce our collections, listed under so many thousand heads of a different nature; for want of which, the learned world would be deprived of infinite delight, as well as instruction, and we ourselves buried beyond redress, in an inglorious and undistinguished oblivion? From such elements as these, I am alive to behold the day, wherein the corporation of authors, can outvie all its brethren in the guild. A happiness derived to us, with a great many others, from our Scythian ancestors; among whom the number of pens was so infinite, that the Grecian eloquence had no other way of expressing it, than by saying, Rh