In the course of my experience, I have met with many who affect to despise the enthusiasm of literature. The thoughtless and insensible ridicule pleasures which they cannot relish; by sneer and ridicule they endeavour to console themselves for praises which provoke their envy, and thus endeavour to stifle that secret and uneasy feeling which is excited by a consciousness of their own imbecility. Men of sense often deny their applause to works of genius, because destitute of that truth and certainty, which they think alone entitled to their esteem. Philosophers I have seen guilty of the same injustice: those philosophers I mean, who, assuming, without really deserving that honourable title, mistake for a knowledge of human nature a cavilling disposition; who, incapable of deriving from philosophy the advantages it is able to produce, know neither how to praise nor to condemn with impartiality, ignorant as they are, that there are few objects which do not in some degree merit the attention of a sage. Politicians also have thought it their duty to condemn elegant learning as useless and injurious to society. More than one Plato, more than one Jean Jacques Rousseau, have wished to banish literature from their republic; though few have had the address to turn against the object of their proscriptions those burnished arms of rhetoric, which those celebrated writers received from the arsenal of those very arts which they affect to despise.
It would be a trespass upon your time to bestow on ignorance arguments intelligible only to candid minds. But since I venture to defend the study of literature, it will be proper to answer some objections offered
