Bookseller.—­Why, Master Plutarch, you are talking Greek indeed.  That work which repaired the loss I sustained by the costly edition of your books was “The Lives of the Highwaymen;” but I should never have grown rich if it had not been by publishing “The Lives of Men that Never Lived.”  You must know that, though in all times it was possible to have a great deal of learning and very little wisdom, yet it is only by a modern improvement in the art of writing that a man may read all his life and have no learning or knowledge at all, which begins to be an advantage of the greatest importance.  There is as natural a war between your men of science and fools as between the cranes and the pigmies of old.  Most of our young men having deserted to the fools, the party of the learned is near being beaten out of the field; and I hope in a little while they will not dare to peep out of their forts and fastnesses at Oxford and Cambridge.  There let them stay and study old musty moralists till one falls in love with the Greek, another with the Roman virtue; but our men of the world should read our new books, which teach them to have no virtue at all.  No book is fit for a gentleman’s reading which is not void of facts and of doctrines, that he may not grow a pedant in his morals or conversation.  I look upon history (I mean real history) to be one of the worst kinds of study.  Whatever has happened may happen again, and a well-bred man may unwarily mention a parallel instance he had met with in history and be betrayed into the awkwardness of introducing into his discourse a Greek, a Roman, or even a Gothic name; but when a gentleman has spent his time in reading adventures that never occurred, exploits that never were achieved, and events that not only never did, but never can happen, it is impossible that in life or in discourse he should ever apply them.  A secret history, in which there is no secret and no history, cannot tempt indiscretion to blab or vanity to quote; and by this means modern conversation flows gentle and easy, unencumbered with matter and unburdened of instruction.  As the present studies throw no weight or gravity into discourse and manners, the women are not afraid to read our books, which not only dispose to gallantry and coquetry, but give rules for them.  Caesar’s “Commentaries,” and the “Account of Xenophon’s Expedition,” are not more studied by military commanders than our novels are by the fair—­to a different purpose, indeed; for their military maxims teach to conquer, ours to yield.  Those inflame the vain and idle love of glory:  these inculcate a noble contempt of reputation.  The women have greater obligations to our writers than the men.  By the commerce of the world men might learn much of what they get from books; but the poor women, who in their early youth are confined and restrained, if it were not for the friendly assistance of books, would remain long in an insipid purity of mind, with a discouraging reserve of behaviour.