------For in the account which _Hafen Slawkenbergius_ gives the world of
his motives and occasions for writing, and spending so many years of his
life upon this one work--towards the end of his prolegomena, which by
the bye should have come first----but the bookbinder has most
injudiciously placed it betwixt the analytical contents of the book, and
the book itself--he informs his reader, that ever since he had arrived
at the age of discernment, and was able to sit down coolly, and consider
within himself the true state and condition of man, and distinguish the
main end and design of his being; ----or--to shorten my translation, for
_Slawkenbergius’s_ book is in _Latin_, and not a little prolix in this
passage--ever since I understood, quoth _Slawkenbergius_, any
thing----or rather _what was what_----and could perceive that the point
of long noses had been too loosely handled by all who had gone before;
----have I, _Slawkenbergius_, felt a strong impulse, with a mighty and
unresistible call within me, to gird up myself to this undertaking.
And to do justice to _Slawkenbergius_, he has entered the list with a
stronger lance, and taken a much larger career in it than any one man
who had ever entered it before him----and indeed, in many respects,
deserves to be _en-nich’d_ as a prototype for all writers, of voluminous
works at least, to model their books by----for he has taken in, Sir, the
whole subject--examined every part of it _dialectically_------then
brought it into full day; dilucidating it with all the light which
either the collision of his own natural parts could strike--or the
profoundest knowledge of the sciences had impowered him to cast upon
it--collating, collecting, and compiling------begging, borrowing, and
stealing, as he went along, all that had been wrote or wrangled
thereupon in the schools and porticos of the learned: so that
_Slawkenbergius_ his book may properly be considered, not only as a
model--but as a thorough-stitched DIGEST and regular institute of
_noses_, comprehending in it all that is or can be needful to be known
about them.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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