region as the parent of excellence; and however
an intercourse with the world might give us good sense, the poverty she granted
I supposed to be the nurse of genius! Big with these reflections, I sate down,
and finding that the best things remained to be said on the wrong side, I
resolved to write a book that should be wholly new. I therefore drest up three
paradoxes with some ingenuity. They were false, indeed, but they were new. The
jewels of truth have been so often imported by others, that nothing was left for
me to import but some splendid things that at a distance looked every bit as
well. Witness you powers what fancied importance sate perched upon my quill
while I was writing. The whole learned world, I made no doubt, would rise to
oppose my systems; but then I was prepared to oppose the whole learned world.
Like the porcupine I sate self collected, with a quill pointed against every
opposer.«
    »Well said, my boy,« cried I, »and what subject did you treat upon? I hope
you did not pass over the importance of Monogamy. But I interrupt, go on; you
published your paradoxes; well, and what did the learned world say to your
paradoxes?«
    »Sir,« replied my son, »the learned world said nothing to my paradoxes;
nothing at all, Sir. Every man of them was employed in praising his friends and
himself, or condemning his enemies; and unfortunately, as I had neither, I
suffered the cruellest mortification, neglect.
    As I was meditating one day in a coffee-house on the fate of my paradoxes, a
little man happening to enter the room, placed himself in the box before me, and
after some preliminary discourse, finding me to be a scholar, drew out a bundle
of proposals, begging me to subscribe to a new edition he was going to give the
world of Propertius, with notes. This demand necessarily produced a reply that I
had no money; and that concession led him to enquire into the nature of my
expectations. Finding that my expectations were just as great as my purse, I
see, cried he, you are unacquainted with the town, I'll teach you a part of it.
Look at these proposals, upon these very proposals I have subsisted very
comfortably for twelve years. The moment a nobleman returns from his travels, a
Creolian arrives from Jamaica, or a dowager from her country seat, I strike for
a subscription. I first besiege their hearts with flattery, and then pour in my
proposals