The second half of the second volume should be
a history of poetry and romances, everywhere interspersed with
biography, but more flowing, more consecutive, more bibliographical,
chronological, and complete. The third volume I would have dedicated to
English prose, considered as to style, as to eloquence, as to general
impressiveness; a history of styles and manners, their causes, their
birth-places and parentage, their analysis.
These three volumes would be so generally interesting, so exceedingly
entertaining, that you might bid fair for a sale of the work at large.
Then let the fourth volume take up the history of metaphysics, theology,
medicine, alchemy, common, canon, and Roman law, from Alfred to Henry
VII.; in other words, a history of the dark ages in Great Britain. The
fifth volume--carry on metaphysics and ethics to the present day in the
first half; the second half, comprise the theology of all the reformers.
In the fourth volume there would be a grand article on the philosophy of
the theology of the Roman Catholic religion. In this (fifth volume),
under different names,--Hooker, Baxter, Biddle, and Fox,--the spirit of
the theology of all the other parts of Christianity. The sixth and
seventh volumes must comprise all the articles you can get, on all the
separate arts and sciences that have been treated of in books since the
Reformation; and, by this time, the book, if it answered at all, would
have gained so high a reputation, that you need not fear having whom you
liked to write the different articles--medicine, surgery, chemistry,
etc.
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