side will be more easily pardoned, as it is better to be hungry
than surfeited; and to miss your dessert at the table of a man
whose gardens abound with the choicest fruits, than to have your
taste affronted with every sort of trash that can be picked up at
the green-stall or the wheel-barrow. If we should carry on the
analogy between the traveler and the commentator, it is
impossible to keep one's eye a moment off from the laborious
much-read doctor Zachary Gray, of whose redundant notes on
Hudibras I shall only say that it is, I am confident, the single
book extant in which above five hundred authors are quoted, not
one of which could be found in the collection of the late doctor Mead.

As there are few things which a traveler is to record, there are
fewer on which he is to offer his observations: this is the
office of the reader; and it is so pleasant a one, that he seldom
chooses to have it taken from him, under the pretense of lending
him assistance. Some occasions, indeed, there are, when proper
observations are pertinent, and others when they are necessary;
but good sense alone must point them out. I shall lay down only
one general rule; which I believe to be of universal truth
between relator and hearer, as it is between author and reader;
this is, that the latter never forgive any observation of the
former which doth not convey some knowledge that they are
sensible they could not possibly have attained of themselves.

But all his pains in collecting knowledge, all his judgment in
selecting, and all his art in communicating it, will not suffice,
unless he can make himself, in some degree, an agreeable as well
as an instructive companion. The highest instruction we can
derive from the tedious tale of a dull fellow scarce ever pays us