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remark, however, has certainly greater latitude than Johnson would have given it if published by himself. It is true that some of Temple's productions are eminently distinguished by harmony and cadence; but that he was the first who introduced the latter, will not be admitted by any one who is familiar with the prose of Drummond, Cowley, Dryden, and Sprat.

[Against Excessive Grief.*]

The honour which I received by a letter from your ladyship was too great not to be acknowledged; yet I doubted whether that occasion could bear me out in the confidence of giving your ladyship any further trouble. But I can no longer forbear, on account of the sensible wounds that have so often of late been given your friends here, by the desperate expressions in several of your letters, respecting your temper of mind, your health, and your life; in all which you must allow them to be extremely concerned. Perhaps none can be, at heart, more partial than I am to whatever regards your ladyship, nor more inclined to defend you on this very occasion, how unjust and unkind soever you are to yourself. But when you throw away your health, or your life, so great a remainder of your own family, and so great hopes of that into which you are entered, and all by a desperate melancholy, upon an event past remedy, and to which all the mortal race is perpetually subject, give me leave to tell you, madam, that what you do is not at all consistent either with so good a Christian, or so reasonable and great a person, as your ladyship appears to the world in all other lights.

I know no duty in religion more generally agreed on, nor more justly required by God Almighty, than a perfect submission to his will in all things; nor do I think any disposition of mind can either please him more, or becomes us better, than that of being satisfied with all he gives, and contented with all he takes away. None, I am sure, can be of more honour to God, nor of more ease to ourselves. For, if we consider him as our Maker, we cannot contend with him; if as our Father, we ought not to distrust him; so that we may be confident, whatever he does is intended for good; and whatever happens that we interpret otherwise, yet we can get nothing by repining, nor save anything by resisting.

But if it were fit for us to reason with God Almighty, and your ladyship's loss were acknowledged as great as it could have been to any one, yet, I doubt, you would have but ill grace to complain at the rate you have done, or rather as you do; for the first emotions or passions may be pardoned; it is only the continuance of them which makes them inexcusable. In this world, madam, there is nothing perfectly good; and whatever is called so, is but either comparatively with other things of its kind, or else with the evil that is mingled in its composition; so he is a good man who is better than men commonly are, or in whom the good qualities are more than the bad; so, in the course of life, his condition is esteemed good, which is better than that of most other men, or in which the good circumstances are more than the evil. By this measure, I doubt, madam, your complaints ought to be turned into acknowledgments, and your friends would have cause to rejoice rather than to condole with you. When your ladyship has fairly considered how God Almighty has dealt with you in what he has given, you may be left to judge yourself how you have dealt with him in your complaints for what he has taken away. If you look about you, and consider other lives as well as your own, and what your lot

* Addressed to the Countess of Essex in 1674, after the death

of her only daughter.

is, in comparison with those that have been drawn in the circle of your knowledge; if you think how few are born with honour, how many die without name or children, how little beauty we see, how few friends we hear of, how much poverty, and how many diseases there are in the world, you will fall down upon your knees, and, instead of repining at one affliction, will admire so many blessings as you have received at the hand of God.

To put your ladyship in mind of what you are, and of the advantages which you have, would look like s design to flatter you. But this I may say, that we will pity you as much as you please, if you will tell us who they are whom you think, upon all circumstances, you have reason to envy. Now, if I had a master who gave me all I could ask, but thought fit to take one thing from me again, either because I used it ill, or gave myself so much over to it as to neglect what I owed to him, or to the world; or, perhaps, because he would show his power, and put me in mind from whom I held all the rest, would you think I had much reason to complain of hard usage, and never to remember any more what was left me, never to forget what was taken away!

It is true you have lost a child, and all that could be lost in a child of that age; but you have kept one child, and you are likely to do so long; you have the assurance of another, and the hopes of many more. You have kept a husband, great in employment, in fortune, and in the esteem of good men. You hare kept your beauty and your health, unless you hare destroyed them yourself, or discouraged them to stay with you by using them ill. You have friends who are as kind to you as you can wish, or as you can give them leave to be. You have honour and esteem from all who know you; or if ever it fails in any degree, it is only upon that point of your seeming to be fallen out with God and the whole world, and neither to care for yourself, nor anything else, after what you have lost.

all

You will say, perhaps, that one thing was all to you, and your fondness of it made you indifferent to everything else. But this, I doubt, will be so far from justifying you, that it will prove to be your fault as well as your misfortune. God Almighty gave you the blessings of life, and you set your heart wholly upon one, and despise or undervalue all the rest: is this his fault or yours? Nay, is it not to be very unthankful to Heaven, as well as very scornful to the rest of the world? is it not to say, because you have lost one thing God has given, you thank him for nothing he has left, and care not what he takes away! | is it not to say, since that one thing is gone out of the world, there is nothing left in it which you think can deserve your kindness or esteem? A friend makes me a feast, and places before me all that his care or kindness could provide: but I set my heart upon one dish alone, and, if that happens to be thrown down, I scor all the rest; and though he sends for another of the same kind, yet I rise from the table in a rage, and say, 'My friend is become my enemy, and he has done me the greatest wrong in the world.' Have I reason, madam, or good grace in what I do? or would it be come me better to eat of the rest that is before me, and think no more of what had happened, and could not be remedied?

Christianity teaches and commands us to moderate our passions; to temper our affections towards all things below; to be thankful for the possession, and patient under the loss, whenever HE who gave shall see fit to take away. Your extreme fondness was perhaps s displeasing to God before as now your extreme affic tion is; and your loss may have been a punishment for your faults in the manner of enjoying what you had. It is at least pious to ascribe all the ill that befalls us to our own demerits, rather than to injus

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tice in God. And it becomes us better to adore the issues of his providence in the effects, than to inquire into the causes; for submission is the only way of reasoning between a creature and its Maker; and contentment in his will is the greatest duty we can pretend to, and the best remedy we can apply to all our misfortunes.

But, madam, though religion were no party in your case, and for so violent and injurious a grief you had nothing to answer to God, but only to the world and yourself, yet I very much doubt how you would be acquitted. We bring into the world with us a poor, needy, uncertain life; short at the longest, and unquiet at the best. All the imaginations of the witty and the wise have been perpetually busied to find out the ways to revive it with pleasures, or to relieve it with diversions; to compose it with ease, and settle it with safety. To these ends have been employed the institutions of lawgivers, the reasonings of philosophers, the inventions of poets, the pains of labouring, and the extravagances of voluptuous men. All the world is perpetually at work that our poor mortal lives may pass the easier and happier for that little time we possess them, or else end the better when we lose them. On this account riches and honours are coveted, friendship and love pursued, and the virtues themselves admired in the world. Now, madam, is it not to bid defiance to all mankind, to condemn their universal opinions and designs, if, instead of passing your life as well and easily, you resolve to pass it as ill and as miserably as you can? You grow insensible to the conveniences of riches, the delights of honour and praise, the charms of kindness or friendship; nay, to the observance or applause of virtues themselves; for who can you expect, in these excesses of passions, will allow that you show either temperance or fortitude, either prudence or justice? And as for your friends, I suppose you reckon upon losing their kindness, when you have sufficiently convinced them they can never hope for any of yours, since you have left none for yourself, or anything else.

Passions are perhaps the stings without which, it is said, no honey is made. Yet I think all sorts of men have ever agreed, they ought to be our servants and not our masters; to give us some agitation for entertainment or exercise, but never to throw our reason out of its seat. It is better to have no passions at all, than to have them too violent; or such alone as, instead of heightening our pleasures, afford us nothing but vexation and pain.

In all such losses as your ladyship's has been, there is something that common nature cannot be denied; there is a great deal that good nature may be allowed. But all excessive and outrageous grief or lamentation for the dead was accounted, among the ancient Christians, to have something heathenish; and, among the civil nations of old, to have something barbarous and therefore it has been the care of the first to moderate it by their precepts, and of the latter to restrain it by their laws. When young children are taken away, we are sure they are well, and escape much ill, which would, in all appearance, have befallen them if they had stayed longer with us. Our kindness to them is deemed to proceed from common opinions or fond imaginations, not friendship or esteem; and to be grounded upon entertainment rather than use in the many offices of life. Nor would it pass from any person besides your ladyship, to say you lost a companion and a friend of nine years old; though you lost one, indeed, who gave the fairest hopes that could be of being both in time and everything else that is estimable and good. But yet that itself is very uncertain, considering the chances of time, the infection of company, the snares of the world, and the passions of youth: so that the most excellent and agreeable creature of that tender age

might, by the course of years and accidents, become the most miserable herself; and a greater trouble to her friends by living long, than she could have been by dying young.

Yet after all, madam, I think your loss so great, and some measure of your grief so deserved, that, would all your passionate complaints, all the anguish of your heart, do anything to retrieve it; could tears water the lovely plant, so as to make it grow again after once it is cut down; could sighs furnish new breath, or could it draw life and spirits from the wasting of yours, I am sure your friends would be so far from accusing your passion, that they would encourage it as much, and share it as deeply, as they could. But alas! the eternal laws of the creation extinguish all such hopes, forbid all such designs; nature gives us many children and friends to take them away, but takes none away to give them to us again. And this makes the excesses of grief to be universally condemned as unnatural, because so much in vain; whereas nature does nothing in vain: as unreasonable, because so contrary to our own designs; for we all design to be well and at ease, and by grief we make ourselves troubles most properly out of the dust, whilst our ravings and complaints are but like arrows shot up into the air at no mark, and so to no purpose, but only to fall back upon our own heads and destroy ourselves.

Perhaps, madam, you will say this is your design, or, if not, your desire; but I hope you are not yet so far gone or so desperately bent. Your ladyship knows very well your life is not your own, but His who lent it you to manage and preserve in the best way you can, and not to throw it away, as if it came from some common hand. Our life belongs, in a great measure, to our country and our family: therefore, by all human laws, as well as divine, self-murder has ever been agreed upon as the greatest crime; and it is punished here with the utmost shame, which is all that can be inflicted upon the dead. But is the crime much less to kill ourselves by a slow poison than by a sudden wound? Now, if we do it, and know we do it, by a long and continual grief, can we think ourselves innocent? What great difference is there, if we break our hearts or consume them, if we pierce them or bruise them; since all terminates in the same death, as all arises from the same despair? But what if it does not go so far; it is not, indeed, so bad as it might be, but that does not excuse it. Though I do not kill my neighbour, is it no hurt to wound him, or to spoil him of the conveniences of life? The greatest crime is for a man to kill himself: is it a small one to wound himself by anguish of heart, by grief, or despair; to ruin his health, to shorten his age, to deprive himself of all the pleasure, ease, and enjoyment of life?

Next to the mischiefs which we do ourselves, are those which we do our children and our friends, who deserve best of us, or at least deserve no ill. The child you carry about you, what has it done that you should endeavour to deprive it of life almost as soon as you bestow it ?-or, if you suffer it to be born, that you should, by your ill-usage of yourself, so much impair the strength of its body, and perhaps the very temper of its mind, by giving it such an infusion of melancholy as may serve to discolour the objects and disrelish the accidents it may meet with in the common train of life? Would it be a small injury to my lord Capell to deprive him of a mother, from whose prudence and kindness he may justly expect the care of his health and education, the forming of his body, and the cultivating of his mind; the seeds of honour and virtue, and the true principles of a happy life! How has Lord Essex deserved that you should deprive him of a wife whom he loves with so much passion, and, which is more, with so much reason; who

is so great an honour and support to his family, so great a hope to his fortune, and comfort to his life! Are there so many left of your own great family that you should desire in a manner wholly to reduce it, by suffering almost the last branch of it to wither away before its time! or is your country, in this age, so stored with great persons, that you should envy it those whom we may justly expect from so noble a

race!

Whilst I had any hopes that your tears would ease you, or that your grief would consume itself by liberty and time, your ladyship knows very well I never accused it, nor ever increased it by the common formal ways of attempting to assuage it: and this, I am sure, is the first office of the kind I ever performed, otherwise than in the most ordinary forms. I was in hopes what was so violent could not be long; but when I observed it to grow stronger with age, and increase like a stream the further it ran; when I saw it draw out to such unhappy consequences, and threaten not less than your child, your health, and your life, I could no longer forbear this endeavour. Nor can I end it without begging of your ladyship, for God's sake, for your own, for that of your children and your friends, your country and your family, that you would no longer abandon yourself to so disconsolate a passion; but that you would at length awaken your piety, give way to your prudence, or, at least, rouse up the invincible spirit of the Percies, which never yet shrunk at any disaster; that you would sometimes remember the great honours and fortunes of your family, not always the losses; cherish those veins of good humour that are so natural to you, and sear up those of ill, that would make you so unkind to your children and to yourself; and, above all, that you would enter upon the cares of your health and your life. For my part, I know nothing that could be so great an honour and a satisfaction to me, as if your ladyship would own me to have contributed towards this cure; but, however, none can perhaps more justly pretend to your pardon for the attempt, since there is none, I am sure, who has always had at heart a greater honour for your ladyship's family, nor can have more esteem for you, than, madam, your most obedient and most humble servant.

[Right of Private Judgment in Religion.] Whosoever designs the change of religion in a country or government, by any other means than that of a general conversion of the people, or the greatest part of them, designs all the mischiefs to a nation that use to usher in, or attend, the two greatest distempers of a state, civil war or tyranny; which are violence, oppression, cruelty, rapine, intemperance, injustice; and, in short, the miserable effusion of human blood, and the confusion of all laws, orders, and virtues among men.

Such consequences as these, I doubt, are something more than the disputed opinions of any man, or any particular assembly of men, can be worth; since the great and general end of all religion, next to men's happiness hereafter, is their happiness here; as appears by the commandments of God being the best and greatest moral and civil, as well as divine precepts, that have been given to a nation; and by the rewards proposed to the piety of the Jews, throughout the Old Testament, which were the blessings of this life, as health, length of age, number of children, plenty, peace, or victory.

Now, the way to our future happiness has been perpetually disputed throughout the world, and must be left at last to the impressions made upon every man's belief and conscience, either by natural or supernatural arguments and means; which impressions men may disguise or dissemble, but no man can

resist. For belief is no more in a man's power than his stature or his feature; and he that tells me I must change my opinion for his, because 'tis the truer and the better, without other arguments that have to me the force of conviction, may as well tell me I must change my gray eyes for others like his that are black, because these are lovelier or more in esteem. He that tells me I must inform myself, has reason, if I do it not; but if I endeavour it all that I can, and perhaps more than ever he did, and yet still differ from him; and he that, it may be, is idle, will have me study on, and inform myself better, and so to the end of my life, then I easily understand what he means by informing, which is, in short, that I must do it till I come to be of his opinion.

If he that, perhaps, pursues his pleasures or interests as much or more than I do, and allows me to have as good sense as he has in all other matters, tells me I should be of his opinion, but that passion or interest blinds me; unless he can convince me how or where this lies, he is but where he was; only pretends to know me better than I do myself, who cannot imagine why I should not have as much care of my soul as he has of his.

A man that tells me my opinions are absurd or ridiculous, impertinent or unreasonable, because they differ from his, seems to intend a quarrel instead of a dispute, and calls me fool, or madman, with a little more circumstance; though, perhaps, I pass for one as well in my senses as he, as pertinent in talk, and as prudent in life: yet these are the common civilities, in religious argument, of sufficient and conceited men, who talk much of right reason, and mean always their own, and make their private imagination the measure of general truth. But such language determines all between us, and the dispute comes to end in three words at last, which it might as well have ended in at first, That he is in the right, and I am in the wrong.

The other great end of religion, which is our happiness here, has been generally agreed on by all mankind, as appears in the records of all their laws, a well as all their religions, which come to be established by the concurrence of men's customs and opinions; though in the latter, that concurrence may have been produced by divine impressions or inspirations. For all agree in teaching and commanding, in planting and improving, not only those moral virtues which conduce to the felicity and tranquillity of every private man's life, but also those manners and dis positions that tend to the peace, order, and safety of all civil societies and governments among men. Nor could I ever understand how those who call themselves, and the world usually calls, religious men, come to put so great weight upon those points of belief which men never have agreed in, and so little upon those of virtue and morality, in which they have hardly ever disagreed. Nor why a state should venture the subversion of their peace, and their order, which are certain goods, and so universally esteemed, for the propagation of uncertain or contested opinions.

[Poetical Genius.]

The more true and natural source of poetry may be discovered by observing to what god this inspiration was ascribed by the ancients, which was Apollo, or the sun, esteemed among them the god of learning in general, but more particularly of music and of poetry. The mystery of this fable means, I suppose, that a certain noble and vital heat of temper, but especially of the brain, is the true spring of these two parts or sciences: this was that celestial fire which gave such a pleasing motion and agitation to the minds of those men that have been so much admired in the world, that raises such infinite images of things so agreeable

and delightful to mankind; by the influence of this sun are produced those golden and inexhausted mines of invention, which has furnished the world with treasures so highly esteemed, and so universally known and used, in all the regions that have yet been discovered. From this arises that elevation of genius which can never be produced by any art or study, by pains or by industry, which cannot be taught by precepts or examples; and therefore is agreed by all to be the pure and free gift of heaven or of nature, and to be a fire kindled out of some hidden spark of the very first conception.

But though invention be the mother of poetry, yet this child is, like all others, born naked, and must be nourished with care, clothed with exactness and elegance, educated with industry, instructed with art, improved by application, corrected with severity, and accomplished with labour and with time, before it arrives at any great perfection or growth: 'tis certain that no composition requires so many several ingredients, or of more different sorts than this; nor that, to excel in any qualities, there are necessary so many gifts of nature, and so many improvements of learning and of art. For there must be a universal genius, of great compass as well as great elevation. There must be a sprightly imagination or fancy, fertile in a thousand productions, ranging over infinite ground, piercing into every corner, and, by the light of that true poetical fire, discovering a thousand little bodies or images in the world, and similitudes among them, unseen to common eyes, and which could not be discovered without the rays of that sun.

Besides the heat of invention and liveliness of wit, there must be the coldness of good sense and soundness of judgment, to distinguish between things and conceptions, which, at first sight, or upon short glances, seem alike; to choose, among infinite productions of wit and fancy, which are worth preserving and cultivating, and which are better stifled in the birth, or thrown away when they are born, as not worth bringing up. Without the forces of wit, all poetry is flat and languishing; without the succours of judgment, 'tis wild and extravagant. The true wit of poesy is, that such contraries must meet to compose it; a genius both penetrating and solid; in expression both delicacy and force; and the frame or fabric of a true poem must have something both sublime and just, amazing and agreeable. There must be a great agitation of mind to invent, a great calm to judge and correct; there must be upon the same tree, and at the same time, both flower and fruit. To work up this metal into exquisite figure, there must be employed the fire, the hammer, the chisel, and the file. There must be a general knowledge both of nature and of arts, and, to go the lowest that can be, there are required genius, judgment, and application; for, without this last, all the rest will not serve turn, and none ever was a great poet that applied himself much to anything else.

When I speak of poetry, I mean not an ode or an elegy, a song or a satire; nor by a poet the composer of any of these, but of a just poem; and after all I have said, 'tis no wonder there should be so few that appeared in any parts or any ages of the world, or that such as have should be so much admired, and have almost divinity ascribed to them and to their works. *

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I do not here intend to make a further critic upon poetry, which were too great a labour; nor to give rules for it, which were as great a presumption: besides, there has been so much paper blotted upon these subjects, in this curious and censuring age, that 'tis all grown tedious, or repetition. The modern French wits (or pretenders) have been very severe in their censures, and exact in their rules, I think to very little purpose; for I know not why they might not

have contented themselves with those given by Aristotle and Horace, and have translated them rather than commented upon them; for all they have done has been no more; so as they seem, by their writings of this kind, rather to have valued themselves, than improved anybody else. The truth is, there is something in the genius of poetry too libertine to be confined to so many rules; and whoever goes about to subject it to such constraints, loses both its spirit and grace, which are ever native, and never learned, even of the best masters. "Tis as if, to make excellent honey, you should cut off the wings of your bees, confine them to their hive or their stands, and lay flowers before them such as you think the sweetest, and like to yield the finest extraction; you had as good pull out their stings, and make arrant drones of them. They must range through fields, as well as gardens, choose such flowers as they please, and by proprieties and scents they only know and distinguish: they must work up their cells with admirable art, extract their honey with infinite labour, and sever it from the wax with such distinction and choice, as belongs to none but themselves to perform or to judge.

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Sir William Temple's Essay upon the Ancient and Modern Learning gave occasion to one of the most celebrated literary controversies which have occurred in England. The composition of it was suggested to him principally by a French work of Charles Perrault, on The Age of Louis the Great,' in which, with the view of flattering the pride of the grand monarque, it was affirmed that the writers of antiquity had been excelled by those of modern times. This doctrine excited a warm controversy in France, where the poet Boileau was among those by whom it was strenuously opposed. It was in behalf of the ancients that Sir William Temple also took the field. The first of the enemy's arguments which he controverts, is the allegation, that we must have more knowledge than the ancients, because we have the advantage both of theirs and our own; just as a dwarf standing upon a giant's shoulders sees more and farther than he.' To this he replies, that the ancients may have derived vast stores of knowledge from their predecessors, namely, the Chinese, Egyptians, Chaldeans, Persians, Syrians, and Jews. Among these nations, says he, 'were planted and cultivated mighty growths of astronomy, astrology, magic, geometry, natural philosophy, and ancient story; and from these sources Orpheus, Homer, Lycurgus, Pythagoras, Plato, and others of those depths of knowledge or learning which have the ancients, are acknowledged to have drawn all made them so renowned in all succeeding ages.' Here Temple manifests wonderful ignorance and credulity in assuming as facts the veriest fables of the ancients, particularly with respect to Orpheus, of whom he afterwards speaks in conjunction with that equally authentic personage, Arion, and in reference to whose musical powers he asks triumphantly, 'What are become of the charms of music, by which men and beasts, fishes, fowls, and serpents, were so frequently enchanted, and their very natures changed; by which the passions of men were raised to the greatest height and violence, and then as suddenly appeased, so that they might be justly said to be turned into lions or lambs, into wolves or into harts, by the powers and charms of this admirable music?' In the same credulous spirit, he affirms that 'The more ancient sages of Greece appear, by the characters remaining of them, to have been much greater men than Hippocrates, Plato, and Xenophon. They were generally princes or lawgivers of their countries, or at least offered or invited to be so, either of their own or of others, that desired

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them to frame or reform their several institutions of man deeply versed in Greek literature; on whom he civil government. They were commonly excellent inserted a bitter reflection in his preface. Bentley, poets and great physicians: they were so learned in revenge, demonstrated the Epistles to be a forgery, in natural philosophy, that they foretold not only taking occasion at the same time to speak someeclipses in the heavens, but earthquakes at land, what irreverently of Sir William Temple. Boyle, and storms at sea, great droughts, and great plagues, with the assistance of Aldrich, Atterbury, and much plenty or much scarcity of certain sorts of other Christ-church doctors (who, indeed, were the fruits or grain; not to mention the magical powers real combatants), sent forth a reply, the plausibility attributed to several of them to allay storms, to of which seemed to give him the advantage; till raise gales, to appease commotions of the people, to Bentley, in a most triumphant rejoinder, exposed the make plagues cease; which qualities, whether upon gross ignorance which lay concealed under the wit any ground of truth or no, yet, if well believed, must and assumption of his opponents. To these parties, have raised them to that strange height they were however, the controversy was not confined. Boyle at, of common esteem and honour, in their own and and his friends were backed by the sarcastic powers, succeeding ages.' The objection occurs to him, as one if not by the learning, of Pope, Swift, Garth, Middlelikely to be set up by the admirers of modern learn- ton, and others. Swift, who came into the field on ing, that there is no evidence of the existence of behalf of his patron Sir William Temple, published books before those now either extant or on record. on this occasion his famous Battle of the Books' This, however, gives him no alarm: for it is very and to the end of his life continued to speak of Bentdoubtful, he tells us, whether books, though they ley in the language of hatred and contempt. In the may be helps to knowledge, and serviceable in dif- work just mentioned, Swift has ridiculed not only fusing it, are necessary ones, or much advance any that scholar, but also his friend the Rev. William other science beyond the particular records of Wotton, who had opposed Temple in a treatise actions or registers of time-as if any example entitled Reflections upon Ancient and Modern could be adduced of science having flourished where Learning,' published in 1694. To some parts of tradition was the only mode of handing it down! that treatise Sir William wrote a reply, the fol- || His notice of astronomy is equally ludicrous: "There lowing passage in which suggested, we doubt not, is nothing new in astronomy,' says he, to vie with the satirical account given long afterwards by Swift | the ancients, unless it be the Copernican system'-a in 'Gulliver's Travels,' of the experimental researches system which overturns the whole fabric of ancient of the projectors at Lagoda. What has been proastronomical science, though Temple declares with duced for the use, benefit, or pleasure of mankind, great simplicity that it has made no change in by all the airy speculations of those who have passed the conclusions of astronomy.' In comparing the for the great advancers of knowledge and learning great wits among the moderns' with the authors of these last fifty years (which is the date of our || antiquity, he mentions no Englishmen except Sir modern pretenders), I confess I am yet to seek, and Philip Sidney, Bacon, and Selden, leaving Shak- | should be very glad to find. I have indeed heard of speare and Milton altogether out of view. How wondrous pretensions and visions of men possessed little he was qualified to judge of the comparative with notions of the strange advancement of learning merits of ancient and modern authors, is evident not and sciences, on foot in this age, and the progress only from his total ignorance of the Greek language, they are like to make in the next; as the universal but from the very limited knowledge of English lite- medicine, which will certainly cure all that have it; rature evinced by his esteeming Sir Philip Sidney the philosopher's stone, which will be found out by to be both the greatest poet and the noblest genius men that care not for riches; the transfusion of of any that have left writings behind them, and young blood into old men's veins, which will make published in ours or any other modern language.' them as gamesome as the lambs from which 'tis He farther declares, that after Ariosto, Tasso, and to be derived; a universal language, which may Spenser, he knows none of the moderns that have serve all men's turn when they have forgot their made any achievements in heroic poetry worth re- own; the knowledge of one another's thoughts cording. Descartes and Hobbes are the only new without the grievous trouble of speaking; the art philosophers that have made entries upon the noble of flying, till a man happens to fall down and break stage of the sciences for fifteen hundred years past,' his neck; double-bottomed ships, whereof none can and these have by no means eclipsed the lustre of ever be cast away besides the first that was made; Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, and others of the ancients.' the admirable virtues of that noble and necessary Bacon, Newton, and Boyle, are not regarded as phi-juice called spittle, which will come to be sold, and losophers at all. But the most unlucky blunder committed by Temple on this occasion was his adducing the Greek Epistles of Phalaris in support of the proposition, that the oldest books we have are still in their kind the best.' These Epistles, says he, 'I think to have more grace, more spirit, more force of wit and genius, than any others I have seen, either ancient or modern.' Some critics, he admits, have asserted that they are not the production of Phalaris (who lived in Sicily more than five centuries before Christ), but of some writer in the declining age of Greek literature. In reply to these sceptics, he enumerates such transcendent excellences of the Epistles, that any man, he thinks, ⚫must have little skill in painting that cannot find out this to be an original. The celebrity given to these Epistles by the publication of Temple's Essay, led to the appearance of a new edition of them at Oxford, under the name of Charles Boyle as editor. Boyle, while preparing it for the press, got into a quarrel with the celebrated critic Richard Bentley, a

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very cheap, in the apothecaries' shops; discoveries of new worlds in the planets, and voyages between this and that in the moon to be made as frequently as between York and London: which such poor mortals as I am think as wild as those of Arioste, but without half so much wit, or so much instruc tion; for there, these modern sages may know where they may hope in time to find their lost senses, preserved in vials, with those of Orlando'

WILLIAM WOTTON.

WILLIAM WOTTON (1666-1726), a clergyman in Buckinghamshire, whom we have mentioned as the author of a reply to Sir William Temple, wrote various other works, of which none deserves to be specified except his condemnatory remarks on Swift's Tale of a Tub.' In childhood, his talent for languages was so extraordinary and precocious, that when five years old he was able to read Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, almost as well as English. At the age of

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