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 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 boulters 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,
but when the fulness of time is come shall happily undergo the trial
of purgatory in order to ascend the sky.
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