are often measured by the number of his treats; his constituents assemble, eat upon him, and lend their applause, not to his integrity or sense, but to the quantities of his beef and brandy.

XXXVIII.

I thus give the reader some slight abstraction of my oriental dreams, which always filled me with such amazement at the monstrous scenery, that horror seemed absorbed for a while in sheer astonishment. Sooner or later came a reflux of feeling that swallowed up the astonishment, and left me, not so much in terror, as in hatred and abomination of what I saw. Over every form and threat, and punishment, and dim, sightless incarceration, brooded a sense of eternity and infinity that drove me into an oppression as of madness. Into these dreams only it was, with one or two slight exceptions, that any circumstances of physical horror entered. All before had been moral and spiritual terrors. But here the main agents were ugly birds, or snakes, or crocodiles, especially the last. The cursed crocodile became to me the object of more horror than almost all the rest. I was compelled to live with him; and that for centuries. All the feet of the tables, sofas, &c., soon became instinct with life; the abominable head of the crocodile, and his leering eyes, looked out at me, multiplied into a thousand repetitions; and I stood loathing and fascinated. And so often did this hideous reptile haunt my dreams that many times the very same dream was broken up in the very same way; I heard gentle voices speaking to me and instantly I awoke it was broad noon, and my children were standing hand in hand at my bedside, come to show me their coloured shoes or new frocks, or to let me see them dressed for going out. I protest that so awful was the transition from the foul crocodile and the other unutterable monsters and abortions of my dreams, to the sight of innocent human natures and of infancy, that in the mighty and sudden revulsion of mind, I wept, and could not forbear it, as I kissed their faces.

XXXIX.

The cause of obscurity in simple ideas seems to be either dull organs, or very slight and transient impressions made by the objects, or else a weakness in the memory, not able to retain them as received. Another default which makes our ideas confused is, when though the particulars that make up any idea are in number enough, yet they are so jumbled together that it is not easily discernible whether it belongs more to the name that is given it than to any other. There is nothing more proper to make us conceive this confusion than a sort of pictures usually shown, as surprising pieces of art, wherein the colours, as they are laid by the pencil on the table itself, mark out very odd and unusual figures, and have no discernible order in their position. This draught, thus made up of parts wherein no symmetry nor order appears, is, in itself, no more a confused thing than the picture of a cloudy sky, wherein though there be as little order of colours or figures to be found, yet nobody thinks it is a confused picture. What is it then that makes it to be thought confused, since the want of symmetry does not? As it is plain it does not; for another draught made barely in imitation of this could not be called confused. I answer, that which makes it to be thought confused is, the applying to it some name to which it does no more discernibly belong than to some others.

XL.

The same year was written the 'Essay on Criticism.' It was commented by Dr. Warburton, who has discovered in it such order and connection as was not perceived by Addison, nor, as is said, intended by the author. Almost every poem, consisting of precepts, is so far arbitrary and immethodical, that many of the paragraphs may change places with no apparent inconvenience; for of two or more positions, depending upon some remote and general

principle, there is seldom any cogent reason why one should precede the other. But for the order in which they stand, whatever it be, a little ingenuity may easily give a reason. It is possible, says Hooker, that by long circumduction, from any one truth all truth may be inferred. Of all homogeneous truths at least, of all truths respecting the same general end, in whatever series they may be produced, a concatenation by intermediate ideas may be formed, such as when once it is shown shall appear natural; but if this order be reversed, another mode of connection equally specious may be found or made. Aristotle is praised for naming Fortitude first of the cardinal virtues, as that without which no other virtue can be steadily practised; but he might, with equal propriety, have placed Prudence and Justice before it, since without Prudence, Fortitude is mad; without Justice, it is mischievous. As the end of method is perspicuity, that series is sufficiently regular that avoids obscurity; and where there is no obscurity, it will not be difficult to discover method.

XLI.

As in the first assault; whether from wounds or accident, no general entered the place until long after the breach had been won, the battalion officers were embarrassed for want of orders, and a thunderstorm, coming down the mountains with unbounded fury just as the place was carried, added to the confusion of the fight-the opportunity was lost. This storm seemed to be a signal from hell for the perpetration of villany which would have shamed the most ferocious barbarians of antiquity. At Ciudad Rodrigo intoxication and plunder had been the principal objects; at Badajos lust and murder were joined to rapine and drunkenness; at San Sebastian, the direst and most revolting cruelty was added to the catalogue of crimes; one atrocity of which a girl of seventeen was the victim, staggers the mind by its enormous, incredible, indescribable barbarity. Some order was at first maintained, but the resolution to throw off dis

cipline was quickly made manifest. A British staff-officer was pursued with a volley of small-arms and escaped with difficulty from men who mistook him for a provost-marshal; a Portuguese adjutant, striving to prevent some ruffianism, was put to death in the market-place, not with sudden violence but deliberately. Many officers exerted themselves to preserve order, many men were well-conducted, yet the rapine and violence commenced by villains soon spread, the camp-followers crowded into the place, and the disorder continued until fire, following the steps of the plunderer, put an end to his ferocity by destroying the whole town.

XLII.

As the materials of stratified rocks are in great measure derived, directly or indirectly, from those which are unstratified, it will be premature to enter upon the consideration of derivative strata, until we have considered briefly the history of the primitive formations. We therefore commence our inquiry at that most ancient period, when there is much evidence to render it probable that the entire materials of the globe were in a fluid state, and that the cause of this fluidity was heat. The form of the earth being that of an oblate spheroid, compressed at the poles, and enlarged at the equator, is that which a fluid mass would assume from revolution round its axis. The further fact, that the shortest diameter coincides with the existing axis of rotation, shows that this axis has been the same ever since the crust of the earth attained its present solid form. Assuming that the whole materials of the globe may have once been in a fluid or even a nebular state, from the presence of intense heat, the passage of the first consolidated portion of this fluid or nebulous matter to a solid state may have been produced by the radiation of heat from its surface into space; the gradual abstraction of such heat would allow the particles of matter to approximate and crystallise, and the first result of this crystallisation might have been the formation of a shell or

crust, composed of oxidated metals and metalloids, constituting various rocks of the granitic series, around an incandescent nucleus of melted matter, heavier than granite; such as forms the more weighty substance of basalt and compact lava.

XLIII.

For this cause it is that I forbear to speak of so many (otherwise) valuable books and treatises of my father's collecting, wrote either plump upon noses or collaterally touching them; such, for instance, as Prignitz, now lying upon the table before me, who, with infinite learning, and from the most candid and scholar-like examination of above four thousand different skulls in upwards of twenty charnelhouses of Silesia, which he had rummaged, has informed us that the mensuration and configuration of the osseous or bony parts of human noses, in any given tract of country, except Crim Tartary, where they are all crushed down by the thumb, so that no judgment can be formed upon them, are much nearer alike than the world imagines; the difference amongst them being, says he, a mere trifle not worth taking notice of; but that the size and jollity of every individual nose, and by which one nose ranks above another, and bears a higher price, is owing to the cartilaginous and muscular parts of it, into whose ducts and sinuses the blood and animal spirits being impelled and driven by the warmth and force of the imagination, which is but a step from it (bating the case of idiots, whom Prignitz, who had lived many years in Turkey, supposes under the more immediate tutelage of Heaven), it so happens, and ever must, says he, that the excellency of the nose is in a direct arithmetical proportion to the excellency of the wearer's fancy.

XLIV.

When truths are once known to us, though by tradition, we are apt to be favourable to our own parts, and to ascribe to our own understandings the discovery of what in reality