Читать книгу The Book-Lovers' Anthology - Various - Страница 62

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Books were invented to take off the odium of immediate superiority and soften the rigour of duties prescribed by the teachers and censors of human kind—setting at least those who are acknowledged wiser than ourselves at a distance. When we recollect, however, that for this very reason they are seldom consulted and little obeyed, how much cause shall his contemporaries have to rejoice that their living Johnson forced them to feel the reproofs due to vice and folly—while Seneca and Tillotson were no longer able to make impression except on our shelves.—T. Percy.