them, it must proceed from a feebleness of intellect or from the confused
manner in which those collections have been laid up in his mind.

The addition of other men's judgment is so far from weakening, as is the
opinion of many, our own, that it will fashion and consolidate those
ideas of excellence which lay in their birth feeble, ill-shaped, and
confused, but which are finished and put in order by the authority and
practice of those whose works may be said to have been consecrated by
having stood the test of ages.

The mind, or genius, has been compared to a spark of fire which is
smothered by a heap of fuel and prevented from blazing into a flame. This
simile, which is made use of by the younger Pliny, may be easily mistaken
for argument or proof.

There is no danger of the mind's being over-burdened with knowledge, or
the genius extinguished by any addition of images; on the contrary, these
acquisitions may as well, perhaps better, be compared, if comparisons
signified anything in reasoning, to the supply of living embers, which
will contribute to strengthen the spark that without the association of
more would have died away.

The truth is, he whose feebleness is such as to make other men's thoughts
an incumbrance to him can have no very great strength of mind or genius
of his own to be destroyed, so that not much harm will be done at worst.

We may oppose to Pliny the greater authority of Cicero, who is
continually enforcing the necessity of this method of study. In his
dialogue on Oratory he makes Crassus say, that one of the first and most
important precepts is to choose a proper model for our imitation. _Hoc