[Footnote A: We have a Dictionary of "Ten Thousand living Authors" of our own nation. The alphabet is fatal by its juxtapositions. In France, before the Revolution, they counted about twenty thousand writers. When David would have his people numbered, Joab asked, "Why doth my lord delight in this?" In political economy, the population returns may be useful, provided they be correct; but in the literary republic, its numerical force diminishes the strength of the empire. "There you are numbered, we had rather you were weighed." Put aside the puling infants of literature, of whom such a mortality occurs in its nurseries; such as the writers of the single sermon, the single law-tract, the single medical dissertation, &c.; all writers whose subject is single, without being singular; count for nothing the inefficient mob of mediocrists; and strike out our literary _charlatans_; and then our alphabet of men of genius will not consist, as it now does, of the four-and-twenty letters.] [Footnote B: The cause is developed in the chapter on "Want of Mutual Esteem."] [Footnote C: See BUTLER, in his "Elephant in the Moon." SOUTH, in his oration at the opening of the theatre at Oxford, passed this bitter sarcasm on the naturalists,--"_Mirantur nihil nisi pulices, pediculos--et se ipsos_;"--nothing they admire but fleas, lice, and themselves! The illustrious SLOANE endured a long persecution from the bantering humour of Dr. KING. One of the most amusing declaimers against what he calls _les Sciences des faux Scavans_ is Father MALEBRANCHE; he is far more severe than Cornelius Agrippa, and he long preceded ROUSSEAU, so famous for his invective against the sciences. The seventh chapter of his fourth book is an inimitable satire. "The principal excuse," says he, "which engages men in _false studies_, is, that they have attached the _idea of learned_ where they should not." Astronomy, antiquarianism, history, ancient poetry, and natural history, are all mowed down by his metaphysical scythe. When we become acquainted with the _idea_ Father Malebranche attaches to the term _learned_, we understand him--and we smile.] [Footnote D: See the chapter on "Puck the Commentator," in the "Curiosities of Literature," vol. iii.; also p. 304 of the same volume.]