PREFACE. 



a great opinion of their prodigious reading. Plutarch and 

 Cicero are slurred upon the public for as orthodox doctors as 

 St. Thomas or any of the Fathers. And then the method of 

 these moderns is so wonderfully agreeable and full of variety, 

 that they cannot fail to please. Now I want all these em- 

 bellishments and graces : I have neither marginal notes nor 

 critical remarks ; I do not so much as know what authors I fol- 

 low, and consequently can have no formal index * of them,' 

 as 'tis the fashion now, methodically strung on the letters of 

 the alphabet, beginning with Aristotle, and ending with Zeno- 

 phon, or Zoilus, or Zeuxis, which two last are commonly 

 crammed into the same piece, though one of them was a famous 

 painter and the other a saucy critic." Under which afflic- 

 tion Cervantes is thus consoled by his friend : " As to mar- 

 ginal notes and quotations from authors for your history, 'tis 

 but dropping here and there some scattered Latin sentences 

 that you have already by rote, or may have with little or no 

 pains. These scraps of Latin will gain you the credit of a 

 gjeat grammarian, which, I'll assure you, is no small accom- 

 plishment in this age. And for the citation of so many au- 

 thors, 'tis the easiest thing in nature : find out one of these 

 books with an alphabetical index, and, without any farther 

 ceremony, remove it verbatim into your own. There are 

 fools enough to be thus drawn into an opinion of your work ; 

 at least such a flourishing train of attendants will give your 

 book a fashionable air, and recommend it to sale."* 



Taking leave of the authority of the great philosophical 

 humourist, Cervantes, in objection to this plan of making 

 books out of books, 1 will add a plain reason or two of 

 my own ; to wit, that, except in those systems which profess 

 to comprise all that is already known on a subject, rather 

 than to make any additions to it, there is no great advan- 

 tage in multiplying the copies of books which have been 

 before read under different names ; that, generally speaking, 

 the object of a book of science is to make some addition 



* Vide Author's Preface to Dun Quixote. Ozell's edit. 



