abstracts, in which the modern fathers of learning, like prudent
usurers, spent their sweat for the ease of us their children. For
labour is the seed of idleness, and it is the peculiar happiness of
our noble age to gather the fruit.

Now the method of growing wise, learned, and sublime having become
so regular an affair, and so established in all its forms, the
number of writers must needs have increased accordingly, and to a
pitch that has made it of absolute necessity for them to interfere
continually with each other. Besides, it is reckoned that there is
not at this present a sufficient quantity of new matter left in
Nature to furnish and adorn any one particular subject to the extent
of a volume. This I am told by a very skilful computer, who hath
given a full demonstration of it from rules of arithmetic.

This perhaps may be objected against by those who maintain the
infinity of matter, and therefore will not allow that any species of
it can be exhausted. For answer to which, let us examine the
noblest branch of modern wit or invention planted and cultivated by
the present age, and which of all others hath borne the most and the
fairest fruit. For though some remains of it were left us by the
ancients, yet have not any of those, as I remember, been translated
or compiled into systems for modern use. Therefore we may affirm,
to our own honour, that it has in some sort been both invented and
brought to a perfection by the same hands. What I mean is, that
highly celebrated talent among the modern wits of deducing
similitudes, allusions, and applications, very surprising,
agreeable, and apposite, from the signs of either sex, together with
their proper uses. And truly, having observed how little invention
bears any vogue besides what is derived into these channels, I have