Francoise. For I know, in general, that there is such a thing as
physic, as jurisprudence; four parts in mathematics, and, roughly,
what all these aim and point at; and peradventure, I yet know farther,
what sciences in general pretend unto, in order to the service of
our life: but to dive farther than that, and to have cudgeled my
brains in the study of Aristotle, the monarch of all modern
learning, or particularly addicted myself to any one science, I have
done it; neither is there any one art of which I am able to draw the
first lineaments and dead color; insomuch that there is not a boy of
the lowest form in a school, that may not pretend to be wiser than
I, who am not able to examine him in his first lesson, which, if I
am at any time forced upon, I am necessitated, in my own defense, to
ask him, unaptly enough, some universal questions, such as may serve
to try his natural understanding; a lesson as strange and unknown to
him, as his is to me.

    I never seriously settled myself to the reading any book of
solid learning but Plutarch and Seneca; and there, like the
Danaides, I eternally fill, and it as constantly runs out; something
of which drops upon this paper, but little or nothing stays with me.
History is my particular game as to matter of reading, or else poetry,
for which I have particular kindness and esteem: for, as Cleanthes
said, as the voice, forced through the narrow passage of a trumpet,
comes out more forcible and shrill; so, methinks, a sentence pressed
within the harmony of verse, darts out more briskly upon the
understanding, and strikes my ear and apprehension with a smarter
and more pleasing effect. As to the natural parts I have, of which
this is the essay, I find them to bow under the burden; my fancy and
judgment do but grope in the dark, tripping and stumbling in the
way, and when I have gone as far as I can, I am in no degree
satisfied; I discover still a new and greater extent of land before
me, with a troubled and imperfect sight and wrapped up in clouds, that
I am not able to penetrate. And taking upon me to write
indifferently of whatever comes into my head, and therein making use
of nothing but my own proper and natural means, if it befall me, as
ofttimes it does, accidentally to meet in any good author, the same
heads and commonplaces upon which I have attempted to write (as I
did but just now in Plutarch's "Discourse of the Force of
Imagination"), to see myself so weak and so forlorn, so heavy and so
flat, in comparison of those better writers, I at once pity or despise
myself. Yet do I please myself with this, that my opinions have
often the honor and good fortune to jump with theirs, and that I go in
the same path, though at a very great distance, and can say, "Ah, that
is so." I am farther satisfied to find, that I have a quality, which
every one is not blessed withal, which is, to discern the vast
difference between them and me; and notwithstanding all that, suffer
my own inventions, low and feeble as they are, to run on in their
career, without mending or plastering up the defects that this
comparison has laid open to my own view. And, in plain truth, a man
had need of a good strong back to keep pace with these people. The
indiscreet scribblers of our times, who among their laborious
nothings, insert whole sections and pages out 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 humors: 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 contrary, in three hundred volumes that he left behind him,
has not so much as any one quotation.

    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 six first 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 any one 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 armor, 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 endeavor to conceal the theft, and to