sion must
engage them, or because it requires such diversity of knowledge, and
such extent of curiosity, as is scarcely to be found in any single
intellect: or perhaps others foresaw the tumults which would be raised
against them, and confined their knowledge to their own breasts, and
abandoned prejudice and folly to the direction of chance.

That the professors of literature generally reside in the highest
stories, has been immemorially observed. The wisdom of the ancients was
well acquainted with the intellectual advantages of an elevated
situation: why else were the Muses stationed on Olympus or Parnassus, by
those who could with equal right have raised them bowers in the vale of
Tempe, or erected their altars among the flexures of Meander? Why was
Jove himself nursed upon a mountain? or why did the goddesses, when the
prize of beauty was contested, try the cause upon the top of Ida? Such
were the fictions by which the great masters of the earlier ages
endeavoured to inculcate to posterity the importance of a garret, which,
though they had been long obscured by the negligence and ignorance of
succeeding times, were well enforced by the celebrated symbol of
Pythagoras, [Greek: anemon pneonton taen aecho proskunei]; "when the
wind blows, worship its echo." This could not but be understood by his
disciples as an inviolable injunction to live in a garret, which I have
found frequently visited by the echo and the wind. Nor was the tradition
wholly obliterated in the age of Augustus, for Tibullus evidently
congratulates himself upon his garret, not without some allusion to the
Pythagorean precept:

_Quam juvat immites ventos audire cubantem--
Aut, gelidas hibernus aquas quum fuderit Auster,
Securum somnos imbre juvante sequi_! Lib. i. El. i. 45.

How sweet in sleep to pass the careless hours,
Lull'd by the beating winds and dashing show'rs!

And it is impossible not to discover the fondness of Lucretius, an
earlier writer, for a garret, in his description of the lofty towers of
serene learning, and of the pleasure with which a wise man looks down
upon the confused and erratick state of the world moving below him:

_Sed nil dulcius est, bene quam munita tenere
Edita doctrina Sapientum templa serena;
Despicere unde queas alios, passimque videre
Errare, atque viam palanteis quaerere vitae_. Lib. ii. 7.

--'Tis sweet thy lab'ring steps to guide
To virtue's heights, with wisdom well supplied,