Volume 3 - Electric Scotland

NORTH RON A. 307
buscar un libro que les acode todos ; " if you could find
one. You know also, I doubt not, the great man who has
told us so. It is certainly an omission to be apologized
for where it has happened ; since, " quando no serva de
otra cosa, por lo menos servira aquel largo catalogo de
autores adar de improvise autoridad al libro ; " particu-
larly in this instance of the islands of spirits and mists.
As to the reasons on the opposite side, you must be
satisfied, for the present, with those which he has given
himself; as he is an authority which you, among all men,
ought not to contest.
After all, which is the most idle pursuit; seeking for
allegories in the puerile fables of Greece, or hunting-
after true history in the fictions and tales of infant na-
tions. The chase has not even the merit of novelty. The
innumerable offspring of (Edipus and Hermes, the Cabiri
and the Bryants of our own day, are only the followers
antl imitators of the Platonists who have just gone before
them ; of Vossius, and Le Compte, and Kircher, and
Bochart, and Marsham, and manj^ more, themselves imi-
tators of Philo and Eusebius, long ago. Nor is it only
on these objects that fruitless and idle persons have ex-
erted their fruitless talents, for want of better pursuits,
and with fruitless results. The mysteries of Aristotle,
of Pythagoras, Plato, Zoroaster, and Orpheus, the de-
signed obscurities of those to whom mystery was a pro-
fitable trade, among whom it was the alchemy of the day,
have equally found employment for ingenuity that might
have been better occupied ; and every man has dis-
covered in them, as in the fables and mythologies of
barbarism, precisely what he wished to find. The Re-
velations have not been a more fertile source for endless
application among dreaming mystics. We may find
whatever we choose ; in etymology, as in every thing else.
As historians discover history, so theologians have found
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