To excel in any of these forms of writing will
require a particular cultivation of the genius: whoever
can attain to excellence, will be certain to engage
a set of readers, whom no other method would have
equally allured; and he that communicates truth
with success, must be numbered among the first
benefactors to mankind.
The same observation may be extended likewise
to the passions: their influence is uniform, and their
effects nearly the same in every human breast: a man
loves and hates, desires and avoids, exactly like his
neighbour; resentment and ambition, avarice and
indolence, discover themselves by the same symptoms
in minds distant a thousand years from one another.
Nothing, therefore, can be more unjust, than to
charge an author with plagiarism, merely because he
assigns to every cause its natural effect; and makes
his personages act, as others in like circumstances
have always done. There are conceptions in which
all men will agree, though each derives them from
his own observation: whoever has been in love, will
represent a lover impatient of every idea that
interrupts his meditations on his mistress, retiring to
shades and solitude, that he may muse without
disturbance on his approaching happiness, or associating
himself with some friend that flatters his passion,
and talking away the hours of absence upon his darling
subject.
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