having few ideas to vend of their own growth, ftore their minds with crude unruminated facts and fentences; and hope to fupply, by bare memory, the want of imagination and judgment.

BUT these are in the two lowest forms. The next I fhall mention are in one a little higher; in the form of thofe who grow neither wifer nor better by study themselves, but who enable others to study with greater ease, and to purposes more ufeful; who make fair copies of foul manufcripts, give the fignification of hard words, and take a great deal of other grammatical pains. The obligation to thefe men would be great indeed, if they were in general able to do any thing better, and fubmitted to this drudgery for the fake of the public; as fome of them, it must be owned with gratitude, have done, but not later, I think, than about the time of the refurrection of letters. When works of importance are preffing, generals themselves may take up the pick-axe and the spade; but in the ordinary course of things, when that preffing neceffity is over, fuch tools are left in the hands destined to use them, the hands of common foldiers and peasants. I approve therefore very much the devotion of a studious man at Chrift Church, who was over-heard in his oratory en tering into a detail with GOD, as devout perfons are apt to do, and, amongst other particular thankf givings, acknowledging the divine goodness in furnishing the world with makers of Dictionaries! These men court fame as well as their betters, by fuch means as GOD has given them to acquire it:

and LITTLETON exerted all the genius he had, when he made a dictionary, though STEPHENS did not. They deserve encouragement, however, whilst they continue to compile, and neither affect wit, nor prefume to reason.

THERE is a fourth class, of much less use than thefe, but of much greater name. Men of the first rank in learning, and to whom the whole tribe of fcholars bow with reverence. A man must be as indifferent as I am to common cenfure or approbation, to avow a thorough contempt for the whole business of these learned lives; for all the researches into antiquity, for all the fyftems of chronology and history, that we owe to the immenfe labors of a SCALIGER, a BOCHART, a PETAVIUS, an USHER, and even a MARSHAM. The fame materials are common to them all; but thefe materials are few, and there is a moral impoffibility that they should ever have more. They have combined thefe into every form that can be given to them: they have fuppofed, they have gueffed, they have joined disjointed paffages of different authors, and broken traditions of uncertain originals, of various people, and of centuries remote from one another as well as from ours. In short, that they might leave no liberty untaken, even a wild, fantastical fimilitude of founds has ferved to prop up a system. As the materials they have are few, fo are the very best, and fuch as pafs for authentic, extremely precarious; as fome of thefe learned perfons themselves confess.

JULIUS AFRICANUS, EUSEBIUS, and GEORGE the monk opened the principal fources of all this science; but they corrupted the waters. Their point of view was to make profane hiftory and chronology agree with facred; though the latter chronology is very far from being established with the clearness and certainty neceffary to make it a rule. For this purpose, the ancient monuments, that thefe writers conveyed to pofterity, were digefted by them according to the fyftem they were to maintain: and none of these monuments were delivered down in their original form, and genuine purity. The Dynafties of MANETHO, for inftance, are broken to pieces by EUSEBIUS; and fuch fragments of them as fuited his defign, are ftruck into his work. We have, we know, no more of them. The Codex Alexandrinus we owe to GEORGE the monk. We

have no other authority for it: and one cannot fee without amazement fuch a man as Sir JOHN MARSHAM undervaluing this authority in one page, and building his fyftem upon it in the next. He feems even by the lightness of his expreffions, if I remember well, for it is long fince I looked into his canon, not to be much concerned what foundation his fyftem had, though he showed his skill in forming one, and in reducing the immenfe antiquity of the Egyptians within the limits of the Hebraic calculation. In fhort, my lord, all these systems are so many enchanted caftles; they appear to be fomething, they are nothing but appearances: like them too, diffolve the charm, and they vanish from the fight. To diffolve the charm, we must

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begin at the beginning of them: the expreffion may be odd, but it is fignificant. We muft examine fcrupulously and indifferently the foundations on which they lean and when we find thefe either faintly probable, or grofsly improbable, it would be foolish to expect any thing better in the fuperftructure. This fcience is one of thofe that are "a limine falutandæ. To do thus much may be neceffary, that grave authority may not impofe on our ignorance: to do more, would be to affift this very authority in impofing falfe fcience upon us. I had rather take the DARIUS whom ALEXANDER conquered, for the fon of HYSTASPES, and make as many anachronisms as a Jewish chronologer, than facrifice half my life to collect all the learned lumber that fills the head of an antiquary.

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STUDY of HISTORY.

LETTER II.

Concerning the true ufe and advantages of it.

LET me fay fomething of history in general,

before I defcend into the confideration of particular parts of it, or of the various methods of study, or of the different views of those that apply themselves to it, as I had begun to do in my former letter.

THE love of history feems infeparable from human nature, because it seems infeparable from felf-love. The fame principle in this inftance carries us forward and backward, to future and to past ages. We imagine that the things, which affect us, must affect pofterity: this fentiment runs through mankind, from CAESAR down to the parish clerk in POPE's mifcellany. We are fond of preferving, as far as it is in our frail power, the memory of our own adventures, of thofe of our own time, and of thofe that preceded it. Rude heaps of ftones have been raised, and ruder hymns have been compofed, for this purpose, by nations who had not yet the ufe of arts and letters. To go no farther back, the triumphs of ODIN were celebrated in runic fongs, and the feats of our