means, every man that
does himself any real service, does me a kindness. I come in for my
share in all the good that happens to a man of merit and virtue, and
partake of many gifts of fortune and power that I was never born to.
There is nothing in particular in which I so much rejoice, as the
deliverance of good and generous spirits out of dangers, difficulties,
and distresses. And because the world does not supply instances of this
kind to furnish out sufficient entertainments for such a humanity and
benevolence of temper, I have ever delighted in reading the history of
ages past, which draws together into a narrow compass the great
occurrences and events that are but thinly sown in those tracts of time
which lie within our own knowledge and observation. When I see the life
of a great man, who has deserved well of his country, after having
struggled through all the oppositions of prejudice and envy, breaking
out with lustre, and shining forth in all the splendour of success, I
close my book, and am a happy man for a whole evening.

But since in history events are of a mixed nature, and often happen
alike to the worthless and the deserving, insomuch that we frequently
see a virtuous man dying in the midst of disappointments and calamities,
and the vicious ending their days in prosperity and peace, I love to
amuse myself with the accounts I meet with in fabulous histories and
fictions: for in this kind of writings we have always the pleasure of
seeing vice punished, and virtue rewarded. Indeed, were we able to view
a man in the whole circle of his existence, we should have the
satisfaction of seeing it close with happiness or misery, according to
his proper merit: but though our view of him is interrupted by death
before the finishing of his adventures (if I may so speak), we may be
sure that the conclusion and catastrophe is altogether suitable to his
behaviour. On the contrary, the whole being of a man, considered as a
hero, or a knight-errant, is comprehended within the limits of a poem or
romance, and therefore always ends to our satisfaction; so that
inventions of this kind are like food and exercise to a good-natured
disposition, which they please and gratify at the same time that they
nourish and strengthen. The greater the affliction is in which we see
our favourites in these relations engaged, the greater is the pleasure
we take in seeing them relieved.

Among the many feigned histories which I have met with in