UPON looking back from the end of the last chapter, and surveying the
texture of what has been wrote, it is necessary, that upon this page
and the three following, a good quantity of heterogeneous matter be
inserted to keep up that just balance betwixt wisdom and folly, without
which a book would not hold together a single year: nor is it a poor
creeping digression (which but for the name of, a man might continue as
well going on in the king’s highway) which will do the business——no; if
it is to be a digression, it must be a good frisky one, and upon a
frisky subject too, where neither the horse or his rider are to be
caught, but by rebound.
The only difficulty, is raising powers suitable to the nature of the
service: FANCY is capricious—WIT must not be searched for—and
PLEASANTRY (good-natured slut as she is) will not come in at a call,
was an empire to be laid at her feet.
——The best way for a man, is to say his prayers——
Only if it puts him in mind of his infirmities and defects as well
ghostly as bodily—for that purpose, he will find himself rather worse
after he has said them than before—for other purposes, better.
For my own part, there is not a way either moral or mechanical under
heaven that I could think of, which I have not taken with myself in
this case: sometimes by addressing myself directly to the soul herself,
and arguing the point over and over again with her upon the extent of
her own faculties——
——I never could make them an inch the wider——
Then by changing my system, and trying what could be made of it upon
the body, by temperance, soberness, and chastity: These are good, quoth
I, in themselves—they are good, absolutely;—they are good,
relatively;—they are good for health—they are good for happiness in
this world—they are good for happiness in the next——
In short, they were good for every thing but the thing wanted; and
there they were good for nothing, but to leave the soul just as heaven
made it: as for the theological virtues of faith and hope, they give it
courage; but then that snivelling virtue of Meekness (as my father
would always call it) takes it quite away again, so you are exactly
where you started.
Now in all common and ordinary cases, there is nothing which I have
found to answer so well as this——
——Certainly, if there is any dependence upon Logic, and that I am not
blinded by self-love, there must be something of true genius about me,
merely upon this symptom of it, that I do not know what envy is: for
never do I hit upon any invention or device which tendeth to the
furtherance of good writing, but I instantly make it public; willing
that all mankind should write as well as myself.
——Which they certainly will, when they think as little.