[Faraday was an enthusiastic reader of Johnson, as the index he compiled of numbers of The Rambler indicates. In CPB he frequently noted epigrams from Johnson; these include sentences from Boswell's Life of Johnson as well as from The Rambler. Johnson is a key authority in the Mental Exercises, as Table 4 (p. 33) shows; he is cited seven times, exceeded only by the Bible. Johnson stood with Addison at the pinnacle of the tradition of English essay-writing which the essay-circle members admired and attempted to emulate. Faraday's personal relish for Johnson—and for Addison and Pope—grounds his literary taste in classicism, though he was also very fond of contemporary writers, including Byron and Thomas Moore, lines from whose highly fashionable poem Lalla Rookh (1817) Faraday copied into CPB. Faraday, in fact, is an example of the early nineteenth-century common reader's ability to move comfortably between Augustan and Romantic literature without, perhaps, being aware of crossing any significant boundary between the two.

The essay excerpted here was one of Faraday's favourites: it is listed in his Rambler index and quoted in a note in CPB; further, the Locke allusion with which this extract opens was recorded twice by Faraday in CPB.]

The chief art of learning, as Locke has observed, is to attempt but little at a time. The widest excursions of the mind are made by short flights frequently repeated; the most lofty fabricks of science are formed by the continued accumulation of single propositions.

It often happens, whatever be the cause, that impatience of labour, or dread of miscarriage, seizes those who are most distinguished for quickness of apprehension; and that they who might with greatest reason promise themselves victory, are least willing to hazard the encounter. This diffidence, where the attention is not laid asleep by laziness, or dissipated by pleasures, can arise only from confused and general views, such as negligence snatches in haste, or from the disappointment of the first hopes formed by arrogance without reflection. To expect that the intricacies of science will be pierced by a careless glance, or the eminences of fame ascended without labour, is to expect a particular privilege, a power denied to the rest of mankind; but to suppose that the maze is inscrutable to diligence, or the heights inaccessible to perseverance, is to submit tamely to the tyranny of fancy, and enchain the mind in voluntary shackles.