fifteen or sixteen hours in study: for by some of whom this is reported
it has never been done; others have done it for a short time only; and
of the rest it appears, that they employed their minds in such
operations as required neither celerity nor strength, in the low
drudgery of collating copies, comparing authorities, digesting
dictionaries, or accumulating compilations.

Men of study and imagination are frequently upbraided by the industrious
and plodding sons of care, with passing too great a part of their life
in a state of inaction. But these defiers of sleep seem not to remember
that though it must be granted them that they are crawling about before
the break of day, it can seldom be said that they are perfectly awake;
they exhaust no spirits, and require no repairs; but lie torpid as a
toad in marble, or at least are known to live only by an inert and
sluggish locomotive faculty, and may be said, like a wounded snake, to
"drag their slow length along."

Man has been long known among philosophers by the appellation of the
microcosm, or epitome of the world: the resemblance between the great
and little world might, by a rational observer, be detailed to many
particulars; and to many more by a fanciful speculatist. I know not in
which of these two classes I shall be ranged for observing, that as the
total quantity of light and darkness allotted in the course of the year
to every region of the earth is the same, though distributed at various
times and in different portions; so, perhaps, to each individual of the
human species, nature has ordained the same quantity of wakefulness and
sleep; though divided by some into a total quiescence and vigorous
exertion of their faculties, and, blended by others in a kind of
twilight of existence, in a state between dreaming and reasoning, in
which they either think without action, or act without thought.