From
hence arises the complexional disposition of some of your guides to pull
everything in pieces. At this malicious game they display the whole of
their _quadrimanous_ activity. As to the rest, the paradoxes of eloquent
writers, brought forth purely as a sport of fancy, to try their talents,
to rouse attention, and excite surprise, are taken up by these
gentlemen, not in the spirit of the original authors, as means of
cultivating their taste and improving their style: these paradoxes
become with them serious grounds of action, upon which they proceed in
regulating the most important concerns of the state. Cicero ludicrously
describes Cato as endeavoring to act in the commonwealth upon the school
paradoxes which exercised the wits of the junior students in the Stoic
philosophy. If this was true of Cato, these gentlemen copy after him in
the manner of some persons who lived about his time,--_pede nudo
Catonem_. Mr. Hume told me that he had from Rousseau himself the secret
of his principles of composition. That acute, though eccentric observer,
had perceived, that, to strike and interest the public, the marvellous
must be produced; that the marvellous of the heathen mythology had long
since lost its effects; that giants, magicians, fairies, and heroes of
romance, which succeeded, had exhausted the portion of credulity which
belonged to their age; that now nothing was left to a writer but that
species of the marvellous, which might still be produced, and with as
great an effect as ever, though in another way,--that is, the marvellous
in life, in manners, in characters, and in extraordinary situations,
giving rise to new and unlooked-for strokes in politics and morals.
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