It is not, then, any wonder that De Quincy should account it 'one of the misfortunes of life that one must read thousands of books only to discover that one need not have read them'.... And I cannot doubt that Bishop Butler had observed the same phenomenon when he wrote, in 1729: 'The great number of books of amusement which daily come in one's way, have in part occasioned this idle way of considering things. By this means time, even in solitude, is happily got rid of without the pain of attention; neither is any part of it more put to the account of idleness, one can scarce forbear saying is spent with less thought, than great part of that which is spent in reading.'--MARK PATTISON. _Fortnightly Review: Books and Critics._ HOW VOLUMES SWELL The muse shall tell How science dwindles, and how volumes swell; How commentators each dark passage shun, And hold their farthing candles to the sun; How tortured texts to speak our sense are made, And every vice is to the scripture laid. E. YOUNG. _Love of Fame._ RECIPE FOR AN ANTHOLOGY Our modern wits are not to reckon upon the infinity of matter for a constant supply. What remains, therefore, but that our last recourse must be had to large indexes and little compendiums? Quotations must be plentifully gathered, and booked in alphabet; to this end, though authors need to be little consulted, yet critics, and commentators, and lexicons carefully must. But, above all, those judicious collectors of bright parts, and flowers, and _observandas_, are to be nicely dwelt on; by some called the sieves and coulters of learning, though it is left undetermined whether they dealt in pearls or meal, and consequently, whether we are more to value that which passed through, or what stayed behind. By these methods, in a few weeks, there starts up many a writer capable of managing the profoundest and most universal subjects. For what though his head be empty, provided his commonplace book be full? And if you will bate him but the circumstances of method, and style, and grammar, and invention; allow him but the common privileges of transcribing from others, and digressing from himself, as often as he shall see occasion; he will desire no more ingredients towards fitting up a treatise that shall make a very comely figure on a bookseller's shelf; there to be preserved neat and clean for a long eternity, adorned with the heraldry of its title fairly inscribed on a label; never to be thumbed or greased by students, nor bound to everlasting chains of darkness in a library.--J. SWIFT. _A Tale of a Tub._ His Invention is no more than the finding out of his papers, and his few gleanings there, and his disposition of them is just as the book-binder's, a setting or glueing of them together.--J. EARLE. _Microcosmographie._