That the professors of literature generally reside in the highest stories, has been immemorially observed. The wisdom of the ancients was well acquainted with the intellectual advantages of an elevated situation: why else were the Muses stationed on Olympus or Parnassus, by those who could with equal right have raised them bowers in the vale of Tempe, or erected their altars among the flexures of Meander? Why was Jove himself nursed upon a mountain? or why did the goddesses, when the prize of beauty was contested, try the cause upon the top of Ida? Such were the fictions by which the great masters of the earlier ages endeavoured to inculcate to posterity the importance of a garret, which, though they had been long obscured by the negligence and ignorance of succeeding times, were well enforced by the celebrated symbol of Pythagoras, [Greek: anemon pneonton taen aecho proskunei]; "when the wind blows, worship its echo." This could not but be understood by his disciples as an inviolable injunction to live in a garret, which I have found frequently visited by the echo and the wind. Nor was the tradition wholly obliterated in the age of Augustus, for Tibullus evidently congratulates himself upon his garret, not without some allusion to the Pythagorean precept: _Quam juvat immites ventos audire cubantem-- Aut, gelidas hibernus aquas quum fuderit Auster, Securum somnos imbre juvante sequi_! Lib. i. El. i. 45. How sweet in sleep to pass the careless hours, Lull'd by the beating winds and dashing show'rs! And it is impossible not to discover the fondness of Lucretius, an earlier writer, for a garret, in his description of the lofty towers of serene learning, and of the pleasure with which a wise man looks down upon the confused and erratick state of the world moving below him: _Sed nil dulcius est, bene quam munita tenere Edita doctrina Sapientum templa serena; Despicere unde queas alios, passimque videre Errare, atque viam palanteis quaerere vitae_. Lib. ii. 7. --'Tis sweet thy lab'ring steps to guide To virtue's heights, with wisdom well supplied, And all the magazines of learning fortified: From thence to look below on human kind, Bewilder'd in the maze of life, and blind. DRYDEN. The institution has, indeed, continued to our own time; the garret is still the usual receptacle of the philosopher and poet; but this, like many ancient customs, is perpetuated only by an accidental imitation, without knowledge of the original reason for which it was established. _Causa latet; res est notissima_. The cause is secret, but th' effect is known. ADDISON.