Truth! thou fascinating, but severe mistress, thy adorers are often broken down in thy servitude, performing a thousand unregarded task-works! Now winding thee through thy labyrinth with a single thread, often unravelling--now feeling their way in darkness, doubtful if it be thyself they are touching.

How much of the real labour of genius and erudition must remain concealed from the world, and never be reached by their penetration! MONTESQUIEU has described this feeling after its agony: "I thought I should have killed myself these three months to finish a _morceau_ (for his great work), which I wished to insert, on the origin and revolutions of the civil laws in France.

You will read it in three hours; but I do assure you that it cost me so much labour that it has whitened my hair." Mr.Hallam, stopping to admire the genius of GIBBON, exclaims, "In this, as in many other places, the masterly boldness and precision of his outline, which astonish those who have trodden parts of the same field, is apt to escape an uninformed reader." Thrice has my learned friend, SHARON TURNER, recomposed, with renewed researches, the history of our ancestors, of which Milton and Hume had despaired--thrice, amidst the self-contests of ill-health and professional duties! The man of erudition in closing his elaborate work is still exposed to the fatal omissions of wearied vigilance, or the accidental knowledge of some inferior mind, and always to the reigning taste, whatever it chance to be, of the public.

Burnet criticised VARILLAS unsparingly;[A] but when he wrote history himself, Harmer's "Specimen of Errors in Burnet's History," returned Burnet the pangs which he had inflicted on another.

NEWTON'S favourite work was his "Chronology," which he had written over fifteen times, yet he desisted from its publication during his life-time, from the ill-usage of which he complained.