and modern art will be more elevated and fruitful in resources in

proportion to the number of ideas which have been carefully

collected and thoroughly digested. There can be no doubt that he

who has the most materials has the greatest means of invention; and

if he has not the power of using them, it must proceed from a

feebleness of intellect or from the confused manner in which those

collections have been laid up in his mind.

The addition of other men's judgment is so far from weakening, as

is the opinion of many, our own, that it will fashion and

consolidate those ideas of excellence which lay in their birth

feeble, ill-shaped, and confused, but which are finished and put in

order by the authority and practice of those whose works may be

said to have been consecrated by having stood the test of ages.

The mind, or genius, has been compared to a spark of fire which is

smothered by a heap of fuel and prevented from blazing into a

flame. This simile, which is made use of by the younger Pliny, may

be easily mistaken for argument or proof.

There is no danger of the mind's being over-burdened with

knowledge, or the genius extinguished by any addition of images; on

the contrary, these acquisitions may as well, perhaps better, be

compared, if comparisons signified anything in reasoning, to the

supply of living embers, which will contribute to strengthen the

spark that without the association of more would have died away.

The truth is, he whose feebleness is such as to make other men's

thoughts an incumbrance to him can have no very great strength of

mind or genius of his own to be destroyed, so that not much harm

will be done at worst.

We may oppose to Pliny the greater authority of Cicero, who is

continually enforcing the necessity of this method of study. In