though they deserve the praises due to unwearied pains and industry, yet they would, perhaps, have gained a more shining reputation, if they had contributed to beautify and enlighten the vast temple of learning, instead of spending their lives in adorning only its porticos and avenues.
There is nothing which has tended more to bring polite letters into discredit, than the total insensibility of commentators and critics to the beauties of the authors whom they profess to illustrate; few of them seem to have received the smallest pleasure from the most elegant compositions, unless they found some mistake of a transcriber to be corrected, or some established reading to be changed; some obscure expression to be explained, or some clear passage to be made obscure by their notes. It is a circumstance equally unfortunate that men of the most refined taste and the brightest parts, are apt to look upon a close application to the study of languages as inconsistent with their spirit and genius: so that the state of letters seems to be divided into two classes, men of learning who have no taste, and men of taste who have no learning.
M. de Voltaire, who excels all writers of his age and country in the elegance of his style, and the wonderful variety of his talents, acknowledges the beauty of the Persian images and sentiments, and has versified a fine passage from Sadi, whom he compares to Petrarch: if that extraordinary man had added a knowledge of the Asiatic languages to his other acquisitions, we should by this time have seen the poems and histories of Persia in an European dress, and any other recommendation of them would have been unnecessary.
But there is yet another cause which has operated more strongly than any before mentioned towards preventing the rise of Oriental literature; I mean the small encouragement which the princes and nobles of Europe
