It must, of course, be understood that I am speaking here of writers
who treat of great subjects; not of writers on the art of making
brandy.

Unless an author takes the material on which he writes out of his
own head, that is to say, from his own observation, he is not
worth reading. Book-manufacturers, compilers, the common run of
history-writers, and many others of the same class, take their
material immediately out of books; and the material goes straight
to their finger-tips without even paying freight or undergoing
examination as it passes through their heads, to say nothing of
elaboration or revision. How very learned many a man would be if he
knew everything that was in his own books! The consequence of this is
that these writers talk in such a loose and vague manner, that the
reader puzzles his brain in vain to understand what it is of which
they are really thinking. They are thinking of nothing. It may now and
then be the case that the book from which they copy has been composed
exactly in the same way: so that writing of this sort is like a
plaster cast of a cast; and in the end, the bare outline of the face,
and that, too, hardly recognizable, is all that is left to your
Antinous. Let compilations be read as seldom as possible. It is
difficult to avoid them altogether; since compilations also include
those text-books which contain in a small space the accumulated
knowledge of centuries.

There is no greater mistake than to suppose that the last work is
always the more correct; that what is written later on is in every
case an improvement on what was written before; and that change always
means progress. Real thinkers, men of right judgment, people who are