remember what others teach. Even
those to whom Providence hath allotted greater strength of
understanding, can expect only to improve a single science. In every
other part of learning, they must be content to follow opinions, which
they are not able to examine; and, even in that which they claim as
peculiarly their own, can seldom add more than some small particle of
knowledge, to the hereditary stock devolved to them from ancient times,
the collective labour of a thousand intellects.

In science, which, being fixed and limited, admits of no other variety
than such as arises from new methods of distribution, or new arts of
illustration, the necessity of following the traces of our predecessors
is indisputably evident; but there appears no reason, why imagination
should be subject to the same restraint. It might be conceived, that of
those who profess to forsake the narrow paths of truth, every one may
deviate towards a different point, since, though rectitude is uniform
and fixed, obliquity may be infinitely diversified. The roads of science
are narrow, so that they who travel them, must either follow or meet one
another; but in the boundless regions of possibility, which fiction
claims for her dominion, there are surely a thousand recesses
unexplored, a thousand flowers unplucked, a thousand fountains
unexhausted, combinations of imagery yet unobserved, and races of ideal
inhabitants not hitherto described.

Yet, whatever hope may persuade, or reason evince, experience can boast
of very few additions to ancient fable. The wars of Troy, and the
travels of Ulysses, have furnished almost all succeeding poets with
incidents, characters, and sentiments. The Romans are confessed to have
attempted little more than to display in their own tongue the inventions
of the Greeks. There is, in all their writings, such a perpetual
recurrence of allusions to the tales of the fabulous age, that they must
be confessed often to want that power of giving pleasure which novelty
supplies; nor can we wonder that they excelled so much in the graces of
diction, when we consider how rarely they were employed in search of new
thoughts.

The warmest admirers of the great Mantuan poet can extol him for little
more than the skill with which he has, by making his hero both a
traveller and a warrior, united the beauties of the Iliad and the
Odyssey in one composition: yet his judgment was perhaps sometimes
overborne by his avarice of the Homeric