again it forces its way out from the fulness with which it has taken
possession of the mind of the student. The imagination gives out what
it has first absorbed by congeniality of temperament, what it has
attracted and moulded into itself by elective affinity, as the loadstone
draws and impregnates iron. A little originality is more esteemed and
sought for than the greatest acquired talent, because it throws a new
light upon things, and is peculiar to the individual. The other is
common; and may be had for the asking, to any amount.

The value of any work is to be judged of by the quantity of originality
contained in it. A very little of this will go a great way. If
Goldsmith had never written anything but the two or three first chapters
of the _Vicar of Wakefield_ or the character of a Village Schoolmaster,
they would have stamped him a man of genius. The editors of
Encyclopedias are not usually reckoned the first literary characters of
the age. The works of which they have the management contain a great
deal of knowledge, like chests or warehouses, but the goods are not
their own. We should as soon think of admiring the shelves of a
library; but the shelves of a library are useful and respectable. I was
once applied to, in a delicate emergency, to write an article on a
difficult subject for an Encyclopedia, and was advised to take time and
give it a systematic and scientific form, to avail myself of all the
knowledge that was to be obtained on the subject, and arrange it with
clearness and method. I made answer that as to the first, I had taken
time to do all that I ever pretended to do, as I had thought incessantly
on different matters for twenty years of my life;[4] that I had no
particular knowledge of the subject in question, and no head for
arrangement; and that the utmost I could do in such a case would be,
when a systematic and scientific article was prepared, to write marginal
notes upon it, to insert a remark or illustration of my own (not to be