74 SAMUEL JOHNSON

is he that remembers of both, that they can be safe and happy only by virtue.

DIFFIDENCE is never more reasonable than in the perusal of the authors of antiquity; of those whose works have been the delight of ages, and transmitted as the great inheritance of mankind from one generation to another : surely, no man can, without the utmost arrogance, imagine that he brings any super- iority of understanding to the perusal of those books which have been preserved in the de- vastation of cities, and snatched up from the wreck of nations ; which those who fled before barbarians have been careful to carry off in the hurry of migration, and of which bar- barians have repented the destruction. If in books thus made venerable by the uniform attestation of successive ages, any passages shall appear unworthy of that praise which they have formerly received, let us not im- mediately determine that they owed their reputation to dulness or bigotry; but suspect at least that our ancestors had some reasons for their opinions, and that our ignorance of those reasons makes us differ from them.

��WHEN I look round upon those who are . . . variously exerting their qualifications, I

�� �