The Essays, vol 5 | Page 5

of ancient
authors, with a design, by that means, to illustrate their own writings,
do quite contrary; for this infinite dissimilitude of ornaments renders
the complexion of their own compositions so sallow and deformed, that
they lose much more than they get.
The philosophers, Chrysippus and Epicurus, were in this of two quite
contrary humours: the first not only in his books mixed passages and
sayings of other authors, but entire pieces, and, in one, the whole
Medea of Euripides; which gave Apollodorus occasion to say, that
should a man pick out of his writings all that was none of his, he would
leave him nothing but blank paper: whereas the latter, quite on the
contrary, in three hundred volumes that he left behind him, has not so
much as one quotation.--[Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Chyysippus, vii.
181, and Epicurus, x. 26.]
I happened the other day upon this piece of fortune; I was reading a
French book, where after I had a long time run dreaming over a great
many words, so dull, so insipid, so void of all wit or common sense,
that indeed they were only French words: after a long and tedious travel,
I came at last to meet with a piece that was lofty, rich, and elevated to
the very clouds; of which, had I found either the declivity easy or the
ascent gradual, there had been some excuse; but it was so perpendicular
a precipice, and so wholly cut off from the rest of the work, that by the
first six words, I found myself flying into the other world, and thence
discovered the vale whence I came so deep and low, that I have never
had since the heart to descend into it any more. If I should set out one
of my discourses with such rich spoils as these, it would but too
evidently manifest the imperfection of my own writing. To reprehend
the fault in others that I am guilty of myself, appears to me no more
unreasonable, than to condemn, as I often do, those of others in myself:
they are to be everywhere reproved, and ought to have no sanctuary
allowed them. I know very well how audaciously I myself, at every
turn, attempt to equal myself to my thefts, and to make my style go
hand in hand with them, not without a temerarious hope of deceiving
the eyes of my reader from discerning the difference; but withal it is as
much by the benefit of my application, that I hope to do it, as by that of

my invention or any force of my own. Besides, I do not offer to
contend with the whole body of these champions, nor hand to hand
with anyone of them: 'tis only by flights and little light attempts that I
engage them; I do not grapple with them, but try their strength only,
and never engage so far as I make a show to do. If I could hold them in
play, I were a brave fellow; for I never attack them; but where they are
most sinewy and strong. To cover a man's self (as I have seen some do)
with another man's armour, so as not to discover so much as his fingers'
ends; to carry on a design (as it is not hard for a man that has anything
of a scholar in him, in an ordinary subject to do) under old inventions
patched up here and there with his own trumpery, and then to
endeavour to conceal the theft, and to make it pass for his own, is first
injustice and meanness of spirit in those who do it, who having nothing
in them of their own fit to procure them a reputation, endeavour to do it
by attempting to impose things upon the world in their own name,
which they have no manner of title to; and next, a ridiculous folly to
content themselves with acquiring the ignorant approbation of the
vulgar by such a pitiful cheat, at the price at the same time of degrading
themselves in the eyes of men of understanding, who turn up their
noses at all this borrowed incrustation, yet whose praise alone is worth
the having. For my own part, there is nothing I would not sooner do
than that, neither have I said so much of others, but to get a better
opportunity to explain myself. Nor in this do I glance at the composers
of centos, who declare themselves for such; of which sort of writers I
have in my time known many very ingenious, and particularly one
under the name of Capilupus, besides the ancients. These are really
men of wit, and that make it appear they are so, both by that and other
ways of writing;