In time, happiness and
plenty give rise to curiosity, and the sciences are cultivated for ease
and pleasure; to the arts, which are now to be taught, emulation soon
adds the art of teaching; and the studious and ambitious contend not
only who shall think best, but who shall tell their thoughts in the most
pleasing manner.
Then begin the arts of rhetorick and poetry, the regulation of figures,
the selection of words, the modulation of periods, the graces of
transition, the complication of clauses, and all the delicacies of style
and subtilties of composition, useful while they advance perspicuity,
and laudable while they increase pleasure, but easy to be refined by
needless scrupulosity till they shall more embarrass the writer than
assist the reader or delight him.
The first state is commonly antecedent to the practice of writing; the
ignorant essays of imperfect diction pass away with the savage
generation that uttered them. No nation can trace their language beyond
the second period, and even of that it does not often happen that many
monuments remain.
The fate of the English tongue is like that of others.
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