be reverenced; and the excellence which we cannot obscure, may
be set at such a distance as not to overpower our fainter lustre.

This accusation is dangerous, because, even when it is false, it may be
sometimes urged with probability. Bruyere declares, that we are come
into the world too late to produce any thing new, that nature and life
are preoccupied, and that description and sentiment have been long
exhausted. It is indeed certain, that whoever attempts any common
topick, will find unexpected coincidences of his thoughts with those of
other writers; nor can the nicest judgment always distinguish accidental
similitude from artful imitation. There is likewise a common stock of
images, a settled mode of arrangement, and a beaten track of transition,
which all authors suppose themselves at liberty to use, and which
produce the resemblance generally observable among contemporaries. So
that in books which best deserve the name of originals, there is little
new beyond the disposition of materials already provided; the same ideas
and combinations of ideas have been long in the possession of other
hands; and, by restoring to every man his own, as the Romans must have
returned to their cots from the possession of the world, so the most
inventive and fertile genius would reduce his folios to a few pages. Yet
the author who imitates his predecessors only by furnishing himself with
thoughts and elegancies out of the same general magazine of literature,
can with little more propriety be reproached as a plagiary, than the
architect can be censured as a mean copier of Angelo or Wren, because he
digs his marble from the same quarry, squares his stones by the same
art, and unites them in the columns of the same orders.

Many subjects fall under the consideration of an author, which, being
limited by nature, can admit only of slight and accidental diversities.
All definitions of the same thing must be nearly the same; and
descriptions, which are definitions of a more lax and fanciful kind,
must always have in some degree that resemblance to each other which
they all have to their object. Different poets describing the spring or
the sea would mention the zephyrs and the flowers, the billows and the
rocks; reflecting on human life, they would, without any communication
of opinions, lament the deceitfulness of hope, the fugacity of pleasure,
the fragility of beauty, and the frequency of calamity; and for
palliatives of these incurable