If in books thus made venerable by
the uniform attestation of successive ages, any
passages shall appear unworthy of that praise which they
have formerly received, let us not immediately
determine, that they owed their reputation to dulness
or bigotry; but suspect at least that our ancestors
had some reasons for their opinions, and that our
ignorance of those reasons makes us differ from them.
It often happens that an author's reputation is
endangered in succeeding times, by that which
raised the loudest applause among his contemporaries:
nothing is read with greater pleasure than allusions
to recent facts, reigning opinions, or present
controversies; but when facts are forgotten, and
controversies extinguished, these favourite touches
lose all their graces; and the author in his descent
to posterity must be left to the mercy of chance,
without any power of ascertaining the memory of
those things, to which he owed his luckiest thoughts
and his kindest reception.
On such occasions, every reader should remember
the diffidence of Socrates, and repair by his candour
the injuries of time: he should impute the seeming
defects of his author to some chasm of intelligence,
and suppose that the sense which is now weak was
once forcible, and the expression which is now dubious
formerly determinate.
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