He looks back
and beholds the early authors of his country, once the favorites
of their day, supplanted by modern writers. A few short ages have
covered them with obscurity, and their merits can only be
relished by the quaint taste of the bookworm. And such, he
anticipates, will be the fate of his own work, which, however it
may be admired in its day and held up as a model of purity, will
in the course of years grow antiquated and obsolete, until it
shall become almost as unintelligible in its native land as an
Egyptian obelisk or one of those Runic inscriptions said to exist
in the deserts of Tartary. "I declare," added I, with some
emotion, "when I contemplate a modern library, filled with new
works in all the bravery of rich gilding and binding, I feel
disposed to sit down and weep, like the good Xerxes, when he
surveyed his army, pranked out in all the splendor of military
array, and reflected that in one hundred years not one of them
would be in existence."
* "In Latin and French hath many soueraine wittes had great
delyte to endite, and have many noble thinges fulfilde, but
certes there ben some that speaken their poisye in French, of
which speche the Frenchmen have as good a fantasye as w ave in
hearying of Frenchmen's Englishe.
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