I am, Sir, your humble servant,

Viator.

[1] Johnson has made impressive allusion to the immortal work of
    Cervantes in his second Rambler.  Every reflecting man must arise
    from its perusal with feelings of the deepest melancholy, with the
    most tender commiseration for the weakness and lot of humanity.  To
    such a man its moral must ever be “profoundly sad.”  Vulgar minds
    cannot know it.  Hence it has ever been the favorite with the
    intellectual class, while Gil Blas has more generally won the
    applause of men of the world.  An amusing anecdote of the almost
    universal admiration for the chef d’oeuvre of Le Sage may be found
    in Butler’s Reminiscences.

That bigotted, yet extraordinary man, Alva, predicted, with prophetic precision, the effects which the satire on Chivalry would produce in Spain. See Broad Stone of Honour; or Rules for the Gentlemen of England.

No. 85 TUESDAY, AUGUST 28, 1753.

  Qui studet optatam cursu contingere metam,
  Multa tulit fecitque puer. HOR.  De Ar.  Poet. 412.

  The youth, who hopes th’ Olympic prize to gain,
  All arts must try, and every toil sustain.  FRANCIS.

It is observed by Bacon, that “reading makes a full man, conversation a ready man, and writing an exact man.”

As Bacon attained to degrees of knowledge scarcely ever reached by any other man, the directions which he gives for study have certainly a just claim to our regard; for who can teach an art with so great authority, as he that has practised it with undisputed success?

Under the protection of so great a name, I shall, therefore, venture to inculcate to my ingenious contemporaries, the necessity of reading, the fitness of consulting other understandings than their own, and of considering the sentiments and opinions of those who, however neglected in the present age, had in their own times, and many of them a long time afterwards, such reputation for knowledge and acuteness as will scarcely ever be attained by those that despise them.

An opinion has of late been, I know not how, propagated among us, that libraries are filled only with useless lumber; that men of parts stand in need of no assistance; and that to spend life in poring upon books, is only to imbibe prejudices, to obstruct and embarrass the powers of nature, to cultivate memory at the expense of judgment, and to bury reason under a chaos of indigested learning.

Such is the talk of many who think themselves wise, and of some who are thought wise by others; of whom part probably believe their own tenets, and part may be justly suspected of endeavouring to shelter their ignorance in multitudes, and of wishing to destroy that reputation which they have no hopes to share.  It will, I believe, be found invariably true, that learning was never decried by any learned man; and what credit can be given to those who venture to condemn that which they do not know?