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I am in at present, twould be as much as my life was worth, to deject and contrist myself with so bad and melancholy an accountand therefore tis safer to draw a curtain across, and hasten from it, as fast as I can, to the main and principal point I have undertaken to clear upand that is, How it comes to pass, that your men of least wit are reported to be men of most judgment.But markI say, reported to befor it is no more, my dear Sirs, than a report, and which, like twenty others taken up every day upon trust, I maintain to be a vile and a malicious report into the bargain. This by the help of the observation already premised, and I hope already weighed and perpended by your reverences and worships, I shall forthwith make appear. I hate set dissertationsand above all things in the world, tis one of the silliest things in one of them, to darken your hypothesis by placing a number of tall, opake words, one before another, in a right line, betwixt your own and your readers conceptionwhen in all likelihood, if you had looked about, you might have seen something standing, or hanging up, which would have cleared the point at oncefor what hindrance, hurt, or harm doth the laudable desire of knowledge bring to any man, if even from a sot, a pot, a fool, a stool, a winter-mittain, a truckle for a pully, the lid of a goldsmiths crucible, an oil bottle, an old slipper, or a cane chair?I am this moment sitting upon one. Will you give me leave to illustrate this affair of wit and judgment, by the two knobs on the top of the back of it?- -they are fastened on, you see, with two pegs stuck slightly into two gimlet-holes, and will place what I have to say in so clear a light, as to let you see through the drift and meaning of my whole preface, as plainly as if every point and particle of it was made up of sun-beams. I enter now directly upon the point. Here stands witand there stands judgment, close beside it, just like the two knobs Im speaking of, upon the back of this self-same chair on which I am sitting. You see, they are the highest and most ornamental parts of its frameas wit and judgment are of oursand like them too, indubitably both made and fitted to go together, in order, as we say in all such cases of duplicated embellishmentsto answer one another. Now for the sake of an experiment, and for the clearer illustrating this matterlet us for a moment take off one of these two curious ornaments (I care not which) from the point or pinnacle of the chair it now stands on nay, dont laugh at it,but did you ever see, in the whole course of your lives, such a ridiculous business as this has made of it?Why, tis as miserable a sight as a sow with one ear; and there is just as much sense and symmetry in the one as in the other:dopray, get off your seats only to take a view of it,Now would any man who valued his character a straw, have turned a piece of work out of his hand in such a condition?nay, lay your hands upon your hearts, and answer this plain question, Whether this one single knob, which now stands here like a blockhead by itself, can serve any purpose upon earth, but to put one in mind of the want of the other?and let me farther ask, in case the chair was your own, if you would not in your consciences think, rather than be as it is, that it would be ten times better without any knob at all? Now these two knobsor top ornaments of the mind of man, which crown the whole entablaturebeing, as I said, wit and judgment, which of all others, as I have proved it, are the most needfulthe most prizdthe most calamitous to be without, and consequently the hardest to come atfor all these reasons put together, there is not a mortal among us, so destitute of a love of good fame or feedingor so ignorant of what will do him good thereinwho does not wish and stedfastly resolve in his own mind, to be, or to be thought at least, master of the one or the other, and indeed of both of them, if the thing seems any way feasible, or likely to be brought to pass. Now your graver gentry having little or no kind of chance in aiming at the oneunless they laid hold of the other,pray what do you think would become of them?Why, Sirs, in spite of all their gravities, they must een have been contented to have gone with their insides nakedthis was not to be borne, but by an effort of philosophy not to be supposed in the case we are uponso that no one could well |
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