95.
That energy which veils itself in mildness is most effective of its object.
Māgha.
96.
Our writings are like so many dishes, our readers, our guests, our books, like beauty—that which one admires another rejects; so we are approved as men’s fancies are inclined.... As apothecaries, we make new mixtures every day, pour out of one vessel into another; and as those old Romans robbed all cities of the world to set out their bad-cited Rome, we skim off the cream of other men’s wits, pick the choice flowers of their tilled gardens, to set out our own sterile plots. We weave the same web still, twist the same rope again and again; or, if it be a new invention, ’tis but some bauble or toy, which idle fellows write, for as idle fellows to read.*
Burton.
* Ferriar has pointed out, in his Illustrations of Sterne, how these passages from Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy have been boldly plagiarised in the introduction to the fragment on Whiskers in Tristram Shandy: “Shall we for ever make new books as apothecaries make new mixtures, by only pouring out of one vessel into another? Are we for ever to be twisting and untwisting the same rope?” And Dr. Johnson, who was a great admirer of Burton, adopts the illustration of the plundering Romans in his Rambler, No. 143.