has a real understanding, and one who has a little low cunning, to be just as great as that between a man who sees clearly and one who is purblind. The man to whom nature has been so kind as to enable him to extend his views afar off, often employs his thoughts and raises his imagination with a beautiful distant prospect, and perhaps he overlooks the shrubs and rubbish that lie just before him, which, notwithstanding, are capable of throwing him down and doing him an injury; whilst the man who is purblind, from the impossibility he finds of seeing farther, is in a manner forced to fix his eyes on nearer objects, and, by that means, often escapes the falls which those who neglect the little stumbling-blocks in their way are subject to. In this case I fancy it would be thought very ridiculous if the one who walked steadily, because he can only see what is just under his feet, should swear the other has no eyes, because he sometimes makes a false step while he is wandering over and delighting himself with the beauties of the creation.
"But let mankind divide understanding, or sense (or whatever they please to call it) into ever so many parts, or give it ten thousand different names, that every one may catch hold of something to flatter themselves with, and strut and look big in the fancied possession of; I can never believe but that he who has the quickest apprehension, and the greatest comprehension, will always judge best of everything he attends to. But the mind's eye (as Shakespeare calls it) is not formed to take in many ideas, no more than the body's many objects at once; and therefore I should not at all wonder to see a man who was admiring the beauties of the rising sun, and greedily devouring the various prospect of hills and valleys, woods and water, fall over a cabbage-stump which he thought unworthy his notice.
" But to return to my gentleman. I actually
