It must however be confessed on this head, that, as our air blows hot and cold—wet and dry, ten times in a day, we have them in no regular and settled way;—so that sometimes for near half a century together, there shall be very little wit or judgment either to be seen or heard of amongst us:⸺the small channels of them shall seem quite dried up⸺then all of a sudden the sluices shall break out, and take a fit of running again like fury⸺you would think they would never stop:⸺and then it is, that in writing, and fighting, and twenty other gallant things, we drive all the world before us.
It is by these observations, and a wary reasoning by analogy in that kind of argumentative process, which Suidas calls dialectick induction ⸻that I draw and set up this position as most true and veritable;
That of these two luminaries so much of their irradiations are suffered from time to time to shine down upon us, as he, whose infinite wisdom which dispenses everything in exact weight and measure, knows will just serve to light us on our way in this night of our obscurity; so that your reverences and worships now find out, nor is it a moment longer in my power to conceal it from you, That the fervent wish in your behalf with which I set out, was no more than the first insinuating How d’ye of a caressing prefacer, stifling his reader, as a lover sometimes does a coy mistress, into silence. For alas! could this effusion of light have been as easily procured, as the exordium wished it—I tremble to think how many thousands for it, of benighted travellers (in the learned sciences at least) must have groped and blundered on in the dark, all the nights of their lives⸺running their heads against posts, and knocking out their brains without ever getting to their journies end;⸺some falling with their noses perpendicularly into sinks⸺others horizontally with their tails into kennels. Here one half of a learned profession tilting full but