his neck, sacrificing whole nations to his ambition, his avarice, and even the wantonness of his cruelty. I might show, by a multitude of other examples, how history prepares us for experience, and guides us in it; and many of these would be both curious and important. I might likewise bring several other instances, wherein history serves to purge the mind of those national partialities and prejudices that we are apt to contract in our education, and that experience for the most part rather confirms than removes; because it is for the most part confined, like our education. But I apprehend growing too prolix, and shall therefore conclude this head by observing, that though an early and proper application to the study of history will contribute extremely to keep our minds free from a ridiculous partiality in favour of our own country, and a vicious prejudice against others, yet the same study will create in us a preference of affection to our own country. There is a story told of Abgarus. He brought several beasts taken in different places to Rome, they say, and let them loose before Augustus; every beast ran immediately to that part of the circus where a parcel of earth taken from his native soil had been laid. Credat Judæus Apella. This tale might pass on Josephus; for in him, I believe, I read it; but surely the love of our country is a lesson of reason, not an institution of nature. Education and habit, obligation and interest, attach us to it, not instinct. It is, however, so necessary to be cultivated, and the prosperity of all societies, as well as the grandeur of some, depends upon it so much, that orators by their eloquence, and poets by their enthusiasm, have endeavoured to work up this precept of morality into a principle of passion. But the examples which we find in history, improved by the lively descriptions and the just applauses or censures of historians, will have a much better and more permanent effect than declamation, or song, or the dry ethics of mere philosophy.

[Absurdity of Useless Learning.]

mory; and if he omitted anything, it was that very thing to which the sense of the whole question should have led him or confined him. To ask him a question was to wind up a spring in his memory, that rattled on with vast rapidity and confused noise, till the force of it was spent; and you went away with all the noise in your ears, stunned and uninformed. I never left him that I was not ready to say to him, Dieu vous fasse la grace de devenir moins savant!-[God grant you a decrease of learning !']—a wish that La Mothe le Vayer mentions upon some occasion or other, and that he would have done well to have applied to himself upon many.

He who reads with discernment and choice, will acquire less learning, but more knowledge; and as this knowledge is collected with design, and cultivated with art and method, it will be at all times of immediate and ready use to himself and others. Thus useful arms in magazines we place, All ranged in order, and disposed with grace; Nor thus alone the curious eye to please, But to be found, when need requires, with ease. You remember the verses, my lord, in our friend's Essay on Criticism, which was the work of his childhood almost; but is such a monument of good sense and poetry, as no other, that I know, has raised in his riper years.

He who reads without this discernment and choice, and, like Bodin's pupil, resolves to read all, will not have time, no, nor capacity neither, to do anything else. He will not be able to think, without which it is impertinent to read; nor to act, without which it is impertinent to think. He will assemble materials with much pains, and purchase them at much expense, and have neither leisure nor skill to frame them into proper scantlings, or to prepare them for use. To what purpose should he husband his time, or learn architecture? he has no design to build. But then, to what purpose all these quarries of stone, all these mountains of sand and lime, all these forests of oak and deal?

[Unreasonableness of Complaints of the Shortness of Human Life.]

Some [histories] are to be read, some are to be studied, and some may be neglected entirely, not only without detriment, but with advantage. Some are the proper objects of one man's curiosity, some of another's, and some of all men's; but all history is not I think very differently from most men, of the an object of curiosity for any man. He who impro- time we have to pass, and the business we have perly, wantonly, and absurdly makes it so, indulges a to do, in this world. I think we have more of one, sort of canine appetite; the curiosity of one, like the and less of the other, than is commonly supposed. hunger of the other, devours ravenously, and without Our want of time, and the shortness of human life, distinction, whatever falls in its way, but neither of are some of the principal commonplace complaints, them digests. They heap crudity upon crudity, and which we prefer against the established order of things; nourish and improve nothing but their distemper. they are the grumblings of the vulgar, and the patheSome such characters I have known, though it is not tic lamentations of the philosopher; but they are imthe most common extreme into which men are apt to pertinent and impious in both. The man of business fall. One of them I knew in this country. He joined despises the man of pleasure for squar dering his time to a more than athletic strength of body a prodigious away; the man of pleasure pities or laughs at the memory, and to both a prodigious industry. He had man of business for the same thing; and yet both conread almost constantly twelve or fourteen hours a-day cur superciliously and absurdly to find fault with the for five-and-twenty or thirty years, and had heaped Supreme Being for having given them so little time. together as much learning as could be crowded into a The philosopher, who mispends it very often as much head. In the course of my acquaintance with him, I as the others, joins in the same cry, and authorises consulted him once or twice, not oftener; for I found this impiety. Theophrastus thought it extremely hard this mass of learning of as little use to me as to the to die at ninety, and to go out of the world when he owner. The man was communicative enough; but had just learned how to live in it. His master Arisnothing was distinct in his mind. How could it be totle found fault with nature for treating man in this otherwise? he had never spared time to think; all was respect worse than several other animals; both very employed in reading. His reason had not the merit unphilosophically! and I love Seneca the better for of common mechanism. When you press a watch, or his quarrel with the Stagirite on this head. We see, pull a clock, they answer your question with precision; in so many instances, a just proportion of things, acfor they repeat exactly the hour of the day, and tell cording to their several relations to one another, that you neither more nor less than you desire to know. philosophy should lead us to conclude this proportion But when you asked this man a question, he over-preserved, even where we cannot discern it; instead whelmed you by pouring forth all that the several of leading us to conclude that it is not preserved where terms or words of your question recalled to his me- we do not discern it, or where we think that we see

the contrary. To conclude otherwise is shocking pre- life in order to reconcile you to his wisdom and goodsumption. It is to presume that the system of the ness? It is plain, at least highly probable, that a life universe would have been more wisely contrived, if as long as that of the most aged of the patriarchs creatures of our low rank among intellectual natures would be too short to answer your purposes; since had been called to the councils of the Most High; or the researches and disputes in which you are engaged that the Creator ought to mend his work by the ad- have been already for a much longer time the objects vice of the creature. That life which seems to our of learned inquiries, and remain still as imperfect and self-love so short, when we compare it with the ideas undetermined as they were at first. But let me ask we frame of eternity, or even with the duration of you again, and deceive neither yourself nor me, have some other beings, will appear sufficient, upon a less par-you, in the course of these forty years, once examined tial view, to all the ends of our creation, and of a just the first principles and the fundamental facts on proportion in the successive course of generations. which all those questions depend, with an absolute The term itself is long; we render it short; and the indifference of judgment, and with a scrupulous exactwant we complain of flows from our profusion, not ness? with the same that you have employed in exafrom our poverty. We are all arrant spendthrifts; mining the various consequences drawn from them, some of us dissipate our estates on the trifles, some on and the heterodox opinions about them? Have you the superfluities, and then we all complain that we not taken them for granted in the whole course of want the necessaries, of life. The much greatest part your studies? Or, if you have looked now and then never reclaim, but die bankrupts to God and man. on the state of the proofs brought to maintain them, Others reclaim late, and they are apt to imagine, have you not done it as a mathematician looks over a when they make up their accounts, and see how their demonstration formerly made to refresh his memory, fund is diminished, that they have not enough re- not to satisfy any doubt? If you have thus examined, maining to live upon, because they have not the whole. it may appear marvellous to some that you have But they deceive themselves; they were richer than spent so much time in many parts of those studies, they thought, and they are not yet poor. If they hus- which have reduced you to this hectic condition of so band well the remainder, it will be found sufficient much heat and weakness. But if you have not thus for all the necessaries, and for some of the superflui- examined, it must be evident to all, nay, to yourself ties, and trifles too, perhaps, of life; but then the on the least cool reflection, that you are still, notwithformer order of expense must be inverted, and the standing all your learning, in a state of ignorance. necessaries of life must be provided, before they put For knowledge can alone produce knowledge; and themselves to any cost for the trifles or superfluities. without such an examination of axioms and facts, you can have none about inferences.'

Let us leave the men of pleasure and of business, who are often candid enough to own that they throw away their time, and thereby to confess that they complain of the Supreme Being for no other reason than this, that he has not proportioned his bounty to their extravagance. Let us consider the scholar and philosopher, who, far from owning that he throws any time away, reproves others for doing it; that solemn mortal, who abstains from the pleasures, and declines the business of the world, that he may dedicate his whole time to the search of truth and the improvement of knowledge. When such a one complains of the shortness of human life in general, or of his remaining share in particular, might not a man, more reasonable, though less solemn, expostulate thus with him: Your complaint is indeed consistent with your practice; but you would not possibly renew your complaint if you reviewed your practice. Though reading makes a scholar, yet every scholar is not philosopher, nor every philosopher a wise man. It cost you twenty years to devour all the volumes on one side of your library; you came out a great critic in Latin and Greek, in the oriental tongues, in history and chronology; but you were not satisfied. You confessed that these were the litera nihil sanantes, and you wanted more time to acquire other knowledge. You have had this time; you have passed twenty years more on the other side of your library, among philosophers, rabbis, commentators, schoolmen, and whole legions of modern doctors. You are extremely well versed in all that has been written concerning the nature of God, and of the soul of man, about matter and form, body and spirit, and space and eternal essences, and incorporeal substances, and the rest of those profound speculations. You are a master of the controversies that have arisen about nature and grace, about predestination and free will, and all the other abstruse questions that have made so much noise in the schools, and done so much hurt in the world. You are going on, as fast as the infirmities you have contracted will permit, in the same course of study; but you begin to foresee that you shall want time, and you make grievous complaints of the shortness of human life. Give me leave now to ask you how many thousand years God must prolong your

In this manner one might expostulate very reasonably with many a great scholar, many a profound philosopher, many a dogmatical casuist. And it serves to set the complaints about want of time, and the shortness of human life, in a very ridiculous but a true light.

[Pleasures of a Patriot.]

Neither Montaigne in writing his essays, nor Descartes in building new worlds, nor Burnet in framing an antediluvian earth, no, nor Newton in discovering and establishing the true laws of nature on experiment and a sublimer geometry, felt more intellectual joys, than he feels who is a real patriot, who bends all the force of his understanding, and directs all his thoughts and actions, to the good of his country. When such a man forms a political scheme, and adjusts various and seemingly independent parts in it to one great and good design, he is transported by imagination, or absorbed in meditation, as much and as agreeably as they; and the satisfaction that arises from the different importance of these objects, in every step of the work, is vastly in his favour. It is here that the speculative philosopher's labour and pleasure end. But he who speculates in order to act, goes on and carries his scheme into execution. His labour continues, it varies, it increases; but so does his pleasure too. The execution, indeed, is often traversed, by unforeseen and untoward circumstances, by the perverseness or treachery of friends, and by the power or malice of enemies; but the first and the last of these animate, and the docility and fidelity of some men make amends for the perverseness and treachery of others. Whilst a great event is in suspense, the action warms, and the very suspense, made up of hope and fear, maintain no unpleasing agitation in the mind. If the event is decided successfully, such a man enjoys pleasure proportionable to the good he has done a pleasure like to that which is attributed to the Supreme Being on a survey of his works. If the event is decided otherwise, and usurping courts or overbearing parties prevail, such a man has still the testimony of his conscience, and a sense of the honour

MISCELLANEOUS WRITERS.

[To the Same-On Matrimonial Happiness.]

*

whence she corresponded freely and fully with her female friends and relatives. Mr Montagu died in If we marry, our happiness must consist in 1761, and Lady Mary was prevailed upon by her daughter, the Countess of Bute, to return to England. loving one another: 'tis principally my concern to She arrived in October 1761, but died in the follow-think of the most probable method of making that ing year. Her letters were first printed surrepti- love eternal. You object against living in London; tiously in 1763. A more complete edition of her I am not fond of it myself, and readily give it up to works was published in five volumes in 1803; and you, though I am assured there needs more art to There is one article absolutely another, edited by her great-grandson, Lord Wharn- keep a fondness alive in solitude, where it generally cliffe, with additional letters and information, in 1837. preys upon itself. The letters from Constantinople and France have necessary to be ever beloved, one must be ever been printed in various shapes. The wit and talent agreeable. There is no such thing as being agreeof Lady Mary are visible throughout the whole of able without a thorough good humour, a natural her correspondence, but there is often a want of sweetness of temper, enlivened by cheerfulness. Whatever natural funds of gaiety one is born with, 'tis feminine softness and delicacy. Her desire to convey scandal, or to paint graphically, leads her into necessary to be entertained with agreeable objects. offensive details, which the more decorous taste of Anybody capable of tasting pleasure, when they conthe present age can hardly tolerate. She described fine themselves to one place, should take care 'tis the what she saw and heard without being scrupulous; place in the world the most agreeable. Whatever and her strong masculine understanding, and care- you may now think (now, perhaps, you have some lessness as to refinement in habits or expressions, fondness for me), though your love should continue render her sometimes apparently unamiable and un-in its full force, there are hours when the most beloved feeling. As models of the epistolary style, easy, mistress would be troublesome. People are not for familiar, and elegant, no less than as pictures of ever (nor is it in human nature that they should be) foreign scenery and manners, and fashionable gossip, disposed to be fond; you would be glad to find in me the letters of Lady Mary must, however, ever main- the friend and the companion. To be agreeably the tain a high place in our national literature. They last, it is necessary to be gay and entertaining. A are truly letters, not critical or didactic essays, en- perpetual solitude, in a place where you see nothing conversation insensibly falls into dull and insipid. livened by formal compliment and elaborate wit, like to raise your spirits, at length wears them out, and When I have no more to say to you, you will like me the correspondence of Pope. no longer. How dreadful is that view! You will reflect, for my sake you have abandoned the conversation of a friend that you liked, and your situation in a country where all things would have contributed to make your life pass in (the true volupté) a smooth tranquillity. I shall lose the vivacity which should entertain you, and you will have nothing to recompense you for what you have lost. Very few people that have settled entirely in the country, but have grown at length weary of one another. The lady's conversation generally falls into a thousand impertinent effects of idleness; and the gentleman falls in love with his dogs and his horses, and out of love with everything else. I am not now arguing in favour of the town; you have answered me as to that point. In respect of your health, 'tis the first thing to be considered, and I shall never ask you to do anything injurious to that. But 'tis my opinion, 'tis necessary to be happy, that we neither of us think any place more agreeable than that where we are.

[To E. W. Montagu, Esq.—In prospect of Marriage.] One part of my character is not so good, nor t'other so bad, as you fancy it. Should we ever live together, you would be disappointed both ways; you would find an easy equality of temper you do not expect, and a thousand faults you do not imagine. You think if you married me I should be passionately fond of you one month, and of somebody else the next. Neither would happen. I can esteem, I can be a friend; but I don't know whether I can love. Expect all that is complaisant and easy, but never what is fond, in me. You judge very wrong of my heart, when you suppose me capable of views of interest, and that anything could oblige me to flatter anybody. Was I the most indigent creature in the world, I should answer you as I do now, without adding or diminishing. I am incapable of art, and 'tis because I will not be capable of it. Could I deceive one minute, I should never regain my own good opinion; and who could bear to live with one they despised!

If you can resolve to live with a companion that will have all the deference due to your superiority of good sense, and that your proposals can be agreeable to those on whom I depend, I have nothing to say against them.

As to travelling, 'tis what I should do with great pleasure, and could easily quit London upon your account; but a retirement in the country is not so disagreeable to me, as I know a few months would make it tiresome to you. Where people are tied for life, 'tis their mutual interest not to grow weary of one another. If I had all the personal charms that I want, a face is too slight a foundation for happiness. You would be soon tired with seeing every day the same thing. Where you saw nothing else, you would have leisure to remark all the defects: which would increase in proportion as the novelty lessened, which is always a great charm. I should have the displeasure of seeing a coldness, which, though I could not reasonably blame you for, being involuntary, yet it would render me uneasy; and the more, because I know a love may be revived, which absence, inconstancy, or even infidelity, has extinguished; but there is no returning from a degoût given by satiety.

*

[To Mr Pope-Eastern Manners and Language.] ADRIANOPLE, April 1, O. S., 1717.

I no longer look upon Theocritus as a romantic writer; he has only given a plain image of the way of life amongst the peasants of his country, who, before oppression had reduced them to want, I don't doubt, had he been born a were, I suppose, all employed as the better sort of them are now. Briton, but his Idylliums had been filled with descriptions of thrashing and churning, both which are unknown here, the corn being all trodden out by oxen; the butter (I speak it with sorrow) unheard of.

I read over your Homer here with an infinite pleasure, and find several little passages explained that I did not before entirely comprehend the beauty of; many of the customs, and much of the dress then in fashion, being yet retained. I don't wonder to find more remains here of an age so distant, than is to be found in any other country; the Turks not taking that pains to introduce their own manners, as has been generally practised by other nations, that imagine themselves more polite. It would be too tedious to you to point out all the passages that relate to pre

651

Rent customs.

But I can assure you that the princesses and great ladies pass their time at their looms, embroidering veils and robes, surrounded by their maids, which are always very numerous, in the same manner as we find Andromache and Helen described. The description of the belt of Menelaus exactly resembles those that are now worn by the great men, fastened before with broad golden clasps, and embroidered round with rich work. The snowy veil that Helen throws over her face is still fashionable; and I never see half-a-dozen of old bashaws (as I do very often) with their reverend beards, sitting basking in the sun, but I recollect good king Priam and his counsellors. Their manner of dancing is certainly the same that Diana is sung to have danced on the banks of Eurotas. The great lady still leads the dance, and is followed by a troop of young girls, who imitate her steps, and, if she sings, make up the chorus. The tunes are extremely gay and lively, yet with something in them wonderfully soft. The steps are varied according to the pleasure of her that leads the dance, but always in exact time, and infinitely more agreeable than any of our dances, at least in my opinion. I sometimes make one in the train, but am not skilful enough to lead; these are the Grecian dances, the Turkish being very different.

The wretched Ibrahim sighs in these verses:
One dart from your eyes has pierced through my
heart.

Ah! when will the hour of possession arrive?
Must I yet wait a long time?
The sweetness of your charms has ravished my soul.
Ah, sultana! stag-eyed-an angel amongst angels!
I desire, and my desire remains unsatisfied.
Can you take delight to prey upon my heart?
My cries pierce the heavens !
My eyes are without sleep!
Turn to me, sultana-let me gaze on thy beauty.
Adieu-I go down to the grave.
If you call me, I return.

My heart is-hot as sulphur; sigh, and it will flame.
Crown of my life!-fair light of my eyes!
My sultana!-my princess!

I rub my face against the earth-I am drowned in
scalding tears-I rave!

Have you no compassion? Will you not turn to look upon me?

I have taken abundance of pains to get these verses in a literal translation; and if you were acquainted of assuring you, that they have received no poetical with my interpreters, I might spare myself the trouble touches from their hands."

[To Mrs S. C.-Inoculation for the Small-pox.]

I should have told you, in the first place, that the eastern manners give a great light into many Scripture passages that appear odd to us, their phrases being commonly what we should call Scripture language. The vulgar Turk is very different from what is spoken at court, or amongst the people of figure, ADRIANOPLE, April 1, O. S., 1717. who always mix so much Arabic and Persian in their Apropos of distempers, I am going to tell discourse, that it may very well be called another you a thing that will make you wish yourself here. language. And 'tis as ridiculous to make use of the The small-pox, so fatal and so general amongst us, expressions commonly used, in speaking to a great is here entirely harmless, by the invention of ingraftman or lady, as it would be to speak broad York-ing, which is the term they give it. There is a set of shire or Somersetshire in the drawing-room. Besides this distinction, they have what they call the sublime, that is, a style proper for poetry, and which is the exact Scripture style. I believe you will be pleased to see a genuine example of this; and I am very glad I have it in my power to satisfy your curiosity, by sending you a faithful copy of the verses that Ibrahim Pasha, the reigning favourite, has made for the young princess, his contracted wife, whom he is not yet permitted to visit without witnesses, though she is gone home to his house. He is a man of wit and learning; and whether or no he is capable of writing good verse, you may be sure that on such an occasion he would not want the assistance of the best poets in the empire. Thus the verses may be looked upon as a sample of their finest poetry; and I don't doubt you'll be of my mind, that it is most wonderfully resembling the Song of Solomon, which was also addressed to a royal bride.

The nightingale now wanders in the vines:
Her passion is to seek roses.

I went down to admire the beauty of the vines:
The sweetness of your charms has ravished my soul.
Your eyes are black and lovely,

But wild and disdainful as those of a stag.1
The wished possession is delayed from day to day;
The cruel sultan Achmet will not permit me
To see those cheeks, more vermilion than roses.
I dare not snatch one of your kisses;
The sweetness of your charms has ravished my soul.
Your eyes are black and lovely,

But wild and disdainful as those of a stag.

1 Sir W. Jones, in the Preface to his Persian Grammar, objects to this translation. The expression is merely analogous to the Boopis of Homer.

old women who make it their business to perform the operation every autumn, in the month of September, when the great heat is abated. People send to one another to know if any of their family has a mind to have the small-pox; they make parties for this purpose, and when they are met (commonly fifteen or sixteen together), the old woman comes with a nutshell full of the matter of the best sort of small-pox, and asks what vein you please to have opened. She immediately rips open that you offer to her with a large needle (which gives you no more pain than a common scratch), and puts into the vein as much matter as can lie upon the head of her needle, and after that binds up the little wound with a hollow bit of shell; and in this manner opens four or five veins. The Grecians have commonly the superstition of opening one in the middle of the forehead, one in each arm, and one on the breast, to mark the sign of the cross; but this has a very ill effect, all these wounds leaving little scars, and is not done by those that are not superstitious, who choose to have them in the legs, or that part of the arm that is concealed. The children or young patients play together all the rest of the day, and are in perfect health to the eighth. Then the fever begins to seize them, and they keep their beds two days, very seldom three. They have very rarely above twenty or thirty in their faces, which never mark; and in eight days' time, they are as well as before their illness. Where they are wounded, there remain running sores during the distemper, which I don't doubt is a great relief to it. Every year thousands undergo this operation; and the French ambassador says pleasantly, that they take the small-pox here by way of diversion, as they take the waters in other countries. There is no example of any one that has died in it; and you may believe I am well satisfied of the safety of this experiment, since I intend to try it on my dear little

son.