For what though his head be empty, provided his commonplace book be
full? And if you will bate him but the circumstances of method, and
style, and grammar, and invention; allow him but the common
privileges of transcribing from others, and digressing from himself
as often as he shall see occasion, he will desire no more
ingredients towards fitting up a treatise that shall make a very
comely figure on a bookseller's shelf, there to be preserved neat
and clean for a long eternity, adorned with the heraldry of its
title fairly inscribed on a label, never to be thumbed or greased by
students, nor bound to everlasting chains of darkness in a library,
but when the fulness of time is come shall happily undergo the trial
of purgatory in order to ascend the sky.

Without these allowances how is it possible we modern wits should
ever have an opportunity to introduce our collections listed under
so many thousand heads of a different nature, for want of which the
learned world would be deprived of infinite delight as well as
instruction, and we ourselves buried beyond redress in an inglorious
and undistinguished oblivion?

From such elements as these I am alive to behold the day wherein the
corporation of authors can outvie all its brethren in the field--a
happiness derived to us, with a great many others, from our Scythian
ancestors, among whom the number of pens was so infinite that the
Grecian eloquence had no other way of expressing it than by saying
that in the regions far to the north it was hardly possible for a
man to travel, the very air was so replete with feathers.

The necessity of this digression will easily excuse the length, and
I have chosen for it as proper a place as I could readily find. If