all the remaining chapters
might indifferently be reversed or transposed. The obscure passages
is often affected, brevis esse laboro, obscurus fio; the desire of
expressing perhaps a common idea with sententious and oracular brevity:
alas! how fatal has been the imitation of Montesquieu! But this
obscurity sometimes proceeds from a mixture of light and darkness in the
author's mind; from a partial ray which strikes upon an angle, instead
of spreading itself over the surface of an object. After this fair
confession I shall presume to say, that the Essay does credit to a young
writer of two and twenty years of age, who had read with taste, who
thinks with freedom, and who writes in a foreign language with spirit
and elegance. The defence of the early History of Rome and the new
Chronology of Sir Isaac Newton form a specious argument. The patriotic
and political design of the Georgics is happily conceived; and any
probable conjecture, which tends to raise the dignity of the poet
and the poem, deserves to be adopted, without a rigid scrutiny. Some
dawnings of a philosophic spirit enlighten the general remarks on the
study of history and of man. I am not displeased with the inquiry into
the origin and nature of the gods of polytheism, which might deserve
the illustration of a riper judgment. Upon the whole, I may apply to
the first labour of my pen the speech of a far superior artist, when
he surveyed the first productions of his pencil. After viewing some
portraits which he had painted in his youth, my friend Sir Joshua
Reynolds acknowledged to me, that he was rather humbled than flattered
by the comparison with his present works; and that after so much time
and study, he had conceived his improvement to be much greater than he
found it to have been.

At Lausanne I composed the first chapters of my Essay in French, the
familiar language of my conversation and studies, in which it was easier
for me to write than in my mother tongue. After my return to England
I continued the same practice, without any affectation, or design of
repudiating (as Dr. Bentley would say) my vernacular idiom. But I should
have escaped some Anti-gallican clamour, had I been content with the
more natural character of an English author. I should have been more
consistent had I rejected Mallet's advice, of prefixing an English
dedication to a French book; a confusion of tongues that seemed to
accuse the ignorance of my patron. The use of a foreign dial