terature, which is surely the best
use they can be put to. If a man had all sorts of instruments in his
shop and wanted one, he would rather have that one than be supplied with
a double set of all the others. If he had them twice over, he could only
do what he can do as it is, whereas without that one he perhaps cannot
finish any one work he has in hand. So if a man can do one thing better
than anybody else, the value of this one thing is what he must stand
or fall by, and his being able to do a hundred other things merely
_as well_ as anybody else would not alter the sentence or add to his
respectability; on the contrary, his being able to do so many other
things well would probably interfere with and encumber him in the
execution of the only thing that others cannot do as well as he, and so
far be a drawback and a disadvantage. More people, in fact, fail from a
multiplicity of talents and pretensions than from an absolute poverty
of resources. I have given instances of this elsewhere. Perhaps
Shakespear's tragedies would in some respects have been better if he had
never written comedies at all; and in that case his comedies might well
have been spared, though they must have cost us some regret. Racine,
it is said, might have rivalled Moliere in comedy; but he gave up the
cultivation of his comic talents to devote himself wholly to the tragic
Muse. If, as the French tell us, he in consequence attained to the
perfection of tragic composition, this was better than writing comedies
as well as Moliere and tragedies as well as Crebillon. Yet I count those
persons fools who think it a pity Hogarth did not succeed better in
serious subjects. The division of labour is an excellent principle in
taste as well as in mechanics. Without this, I find from Adam Smith, we
could not have a pin made to the degree of perfection it is. We do not,
on any rational scheme of criticism, inquire into the variety of a man's
excellences, or the number of his works, or his facility of production.
_Venice Preserved_ is sufficient for Otway's fame. I hate all those
nonsensical stories about Lope de Vega and his writing a play in a
morning before breakfast. He had time enough to do it after. If a man
leaves behind him any work which is a model in its kind, we have no
right to ask whether he could do anything else, or how he did it, or
how long he was about it. All that talent which is not necessary to the
actual quantity of excellence existing in the