'There are men (says Dr Johnson) who claim the name of authors, merely to disgrace it, and fill the world with volumes, only to bury letters in their own rubbish. The traveller who tells, in a pompous Folio, that he saw the _Pantheon_ at _Rome_, and the _Medicean Venus_ at _Florence_; the natural historian, who, describing the productions of a narrow island, recounts all that it has in common with every other part of the world; the collector of antiquities, that accounts every thing a curiosity, which the ruins of Herculaneum happen to emit, though an instrument already shown in a thousand repositories, or a cup common to the antients, the moderns, and all mankind, may be justly censured as the persecutors of students, and the _thieves_ of that time, which never can be restored[151].' The traveller who visits Rome and Florence, and gives an account of what he saw to the world, without describing the Pantheon and the Medicean Venus, will, very properly, be censured as an ignorant and tasteless wanderer. The historian who describes an island, whether wide or narrow, ought to begin by telling if it produces water, grass, wood, and corn. A sword, a bow, and a dagger, are common to the antients, the moderns, and almost all mankind; yet, if any Roman military weapon were discovered in the ruins of Herculaneum, it would deservedly be the object of curiosity, and a collector of antiquities might describe it without being censured, in Dr Johnson's polite style, as a _thief of time_. Of this passage, however, the leading idea is just; and, had the Doctor been able to express himself with precision, it would have served, in an admirable manner, to delineate the character of the author of those passages which we have just now been reading from his Dictionary.