laying them up in his memory; practice must settle the habit of doing without reflecting on the rule; and you may as well hope to make a good painter or musician, extempore, by a lecture and instruction in the arts of music and painting, as a coherent thinker, or strict reasoner, by a set of rules, shewing him wherein right reasoning consists.

This being so, that defects and weakness in men's understandings, as well as other faculties, come from want of a right use of their own minds, I am apt to think the fault is generally mislaid upon nature, and there is often a complaint of want of parts, when the fault lies in want of a due improvement of them. We see men frequently dexterous and sharp enough in making a bargain, who, if you reason with them about matters of religion, appear perfectly stupid.

Daniel Defoe: 1661-1731.

Incident during the Plague in London.-From History of the Plague.' It is said that it was a blind piper; but, as John told me, the fellow was not blind, but an ignorant, weak, poor man, and usually went his rounds about ten o'clock at night, and went piping along from door to door, and the people usually took him in at public-houses where they knew him, and would give him drink and victuals, and sometimes farthings; and he in return would pipe and sing, and talk simply, which diverted the people, and thus he lived. It was but a very bad time for this diversion, while things were as I have told, yet the poor fellow went about as usual, but was almost starved; and when anybody asked how he did, he would answer, the dead-cart had not taken him yet, but that they had promised to call for him next week.

It happened one night that this poor fellow, whether somebody had given him too much drink or no (John Hayward said he had not drink in his house, but that they had given him a little more victuals than ordinary at a public-house in Coleman Street), and the poor fellow having not usually had a bellyful, or, perhaps, not a good while, was laid all along upon the top of a bulk or stall, and fast asleep at a door, in the street near London-wall, towards Cripplegate, and that, upon the same bulk or stall, the people of some house, in the alley of which the house was a corner, hearing a bell, which they always rung before the cart came, had laid a body really dead of the plague just by him, thinking too that this poor fellow had been a dead body as the other was, and laid there by some of the neighbours.

Accordingly, when John Hayward with his bell and the cart came along, finding two dead bodies lie upon the stall, they took them up with

the instrument they used, and threw them into the cart; and all this while the piper slept soundly.

From hence they passed along, and took in other dead bodies, till, as honest John Hayward told me, they almost buried him alive in the cart, yet all this while he slept soundly; at length the cart came to the place where the bodies were to be thrown into the ground, which, as I do remember, was at Mountmill; and as the cart usually stopped some time before they were ready to shoot out the melancholy load they had in it, as soon as the cart stopped, the fellow awaked, and struggled a little to get his head out from among the dead bodies, when, raising himself up in the cart, he called out: 'Hey, where am I?'

This frighted the fellow that attended about the work, but, after some pause, John Hayward, recovering himself, said: 'Lord bless us ! there's somebody in the cart not quite dead!'

So another called to him, and said: 'Who are you?'

The fellow answered: 'I am the poor piper-where am I?'

'Where are you!' says Hayward; 'why, you are in the dead-cart, and we are going to bury you.'

'But I an't dead though, am I?' says the piper; which made them laugh a little, though, as John said, they were heartily frightened at first : so they helped the poor fellow down, and he went about his business.

I know the story goes, he set up his pipes in the cart, and frighted the bearers and others, so that they ran away; but John Hayward did not tell the story so, nor say anything of his piping at all; but that he was a poor piper, and that he was carried away as above, I am fully satisfied of the truth of.

Sir Richard Steele: 1675-1729.

Quack Advertisements.—From The Spectator?

It gives me much despair in the design of reforming the world by my speculations, when I find there always arise, from one generation to another, successive cheats and bubbles, as naturally as beasts of prey and those which are to be their food. There is hardly a man in the world, one would think, so ignorant as not to know that the ordinary quackdoctors, who publish their abilities in little brown billets, distributed to all who pass by, are to a man impostors and murderers; yet such is the credulity of the vulgar, and the impudence of these professors, that the affair still goes on, and new promises of what was never done before are made every day. What aggravates the jest is, that even this promise has been made as long as the memory of man can trace it, and yet nothing performed, and yet still prevails. As I was passing along to-day, a paper

given into my hand by a fellow without a nose, tells us as follows what good news is come to town:

'In Russel Court, over against the Cannon Ball, at the Surgeons' Arms, in Drury Lane, is lately come from his travels a surgeon, who hath practised surgery and physic, both by sea and land, these twenty-four years. He, by the blessing, cures the yellow jaundice, green-sickness, scurvy, dropsy, surfeits, long sea-voyages, campaigns, &c., as some people that has been lame these thirty years can testify; in short, he cureth all diseases incident to men, women, or children.'

If a man could be so indolent as to look upon this havoc of the human species which is made by vice and ignorance, it would be a good ridiculous work to comment upon the declaration of this accomplished traveller. There is something unaccountably taking among the vulgar in those who come from a great way off. Ignorant people of quality, as many there are of such, dote excessively this way; many instances of which every man will suggest to himself, without my enumeration of them. The ignorants of lower order, who cannot, like the upper ones, be profuse of their money to those recommended by coming from a distance, are no less complaisant than the others; for they venture their lives for the same admiration.

'The doctor is lately come from his travels, and has practised both by sea and land, and therefore cures the green-sickness, long sea-voyages, and 'campaigns.' Both by sea and land! I will not answer for the distempers called 'sea-voyages and campaigns,' but I daresay that of green-sickness might be as well taken care of if the doctor stayed ashore. But the art of managing mankind is only to make them stare a little to keep up their astonishment; to let nothing be familiar to them, but ever to have something in their sleeve, in which they must think you are deeper than they are. There is an ingenious fellow, a barber, of my acquaintance, who, besides his broken fiddle and a dried sea-monster, has a twine-cord, strained with two nails at each end, over his window, and the words 'rainy, dry, wet,' and so forth, written to denote the weather, according to the rising or falling of the cord. We very great scholars are not apt to wonder at this; but I observed a very honest fellow, a chance customer, who sat in the chair before me to be shaved, fix his eye upon this miraculous performance during the operation upon his chin and face. When those and his head also were cleared of all encumbrances and excrescences, he looked at the fish, then at the fiddle, still grubbing in his pockets, and casting his eye again at the twine, and the words writ on each side; then altered his mind as to farthings, and gave my friend a silver sixpence. The business, as I said, is to keep up the amazement; and if my friend had only the skeleton and kit, he must have been contented with a less payment. But the doctor we were talking of adds to his long voyages the testimony of some people 'that has been thirty years lame.' When I

success.

received my paper, a sagacious fellow took one at the same time, and read until he came to the thirty years' confinement of his friends, and went off very well convinced of the doctor's sufficiency. You have many of these prodigious persons, who have had some extraordinary accident at their birth, or a great disaster in some part of their lives. Anything, however foreign from the business the people want of you, will convince them of your ability in that you profess. There is a doctor in Mouse Alley, near Wapping, who sets up for curing cataracts upon the credit of having, as his bill sets forth, lost an eye in the emperor's service. His patients come in upon this, and he shews his muster-roll, which confirms that he was in his imperial majesty's troops; and he puts out their eyes with great Who would believe that a man should be a doctor for the cure of bursten children, by declaring that his father and grandfather were born bursten? But Charles Ingoltson, next door to the Harp in Barbican, has made a pretty penny by that asseveration. The generality go upon their first conception, and think no further; all the rest is granted. They take it that there is something uncommon in you, and give you credit for the rest. You may be sure it is upon that I go, when, sometimes, let it be to the purpose or not, I keep a Latin sentence in my front; and I was not a little pleased when I observed one of my readers say, casting his eye on my twentieth paper: 'More Latin still? What a prodigious scholar is this man!' But as I have here taken much liberty with this learned doctor, I must make up all I have said by repeating what he seems to be in earnest in, and honestly promise to those who will not receive him as a great man, to wit: 'That from eight to twelve, and from two till six, he attends for the good of the public to bleed for threepence.'

Joseph Addison: 1672–1719.

Meditations in Westminster Abbey.-From 'The Spectator.

When I am in a serious humour, I very often walk by myself in Westminster Abbey; where the gloominess of the place, and the use to which it is applied, with the solemnity of the building, and the condition of the people who lie in it, are apt to fill the mind with a kind of melancholy, or rather thoughtfulness, that is not disagreeable. I yesterday passed a whole afternoon in the churchyard, the cloisters, and the church, amusing myself with the tombstones and inscriptions that I met with in those several regions of the dead. Most of them recorded nothing else of the buried person, but that he was born upon one day, and died upon another; the whole history of his life being comprehended in those two circumstances that are common to all mankind. I could not but look

upon these registers of existence, whether of brass or marble, as a kind of satire upon the departed persons; who had left no other memorial of them, but that they were born, and that they died. They put me in mind of several persons mentioned in battles of heroic poems, who have sounding names given them, for no other reason but that they may be killed, and are celebrated for nothing but being knocked on the head.

The life of these men is finely described in Holy Writ by 'the path of an arrow,' which is immediately closed up and lost.

Upon my going into the church, I entertained myself with the digging of a grave; and saw in every shovelful of it that was thrown up, the fragment of a bone or skull intermixed with a kind of fresh mouldering earth, that some time or other had a place in the composition of a human body. Upon this I began to consider with myself, what innumerable multitudes of people lay confused together under the pavement of that ancient cathedral; how men and women, friends and enemies, priests and soldiers, monks and prebendaries, were crumbled amongst one another, and blended together in the same common mass; how beauty, strength, and youth, with old age, weakness, and deformity, lay undistinguished in the same promiscuous heap of matter.

After having thus surveyed this great magazine of mortality as it were in the lump, I examined it more particularly by the accounts which I found on several of the monuments which are raised in every quarter of that ancient fabric. Some of them were covered with such extravagant epitaphs, that if it were possible for the dead person to be acquainted with them, he would blush at the praises which his friends have bestowed upon him. There are others so excessively modest, that they deliver the character of the person departed in Greek or Hebrew, and by that means are not understood once in a twelvemonth. In the poetical quarter, I found there were poets who had no monuments, and monuments which had no poets. I observed, indeed, that the present war had filled the church with many of these uninhabited monuments, which had been erected to the memory of persons whose bodies were perhaps buried in the plains of Blenheim, or in the bosom of the ocean.

I could not but be very much delighted with several modern epitaphs, which are written with great elegance of expression and justness of thought, and therefore do honour to the living as well as the dead. As a foreigner is very apt to conceive an idea of the ignorance or politeness of a nation from the turn of their public monuments and inscriptions, they should be submitted to the perusal of men of learning and genius before they are put in execution. Sir Cloudesly Shovel's monument has very often given me great offence. Instead of the brave rough English admiral, which was the distinguishing character of that plain gallant man, he is represented on his tomb by the figure of a beau, dressed in a long periwig,