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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, Letters on England, by Voltaire, Edited by
+Henry Morley
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: Letters on England
+
+
+Author: Voltaire
+
+Release Date: April 22, 2005  [eBook #2445]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LETTERS ON ENGLAND***
+
+
+
+
+
+Transcribed from the 1894 Cassell & Co. edition by David Price, email
+ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
+
+
+
+
+
+LETTERS ON ENGLAND
+by Voltaire
+
+
+INTRODUCTION
+
+
+Francois Marie Arouet, who called himself Voltaire, was the son of
+Francois Arouet of Poitou, who lived in Paris, had given up his office of
+notary two years before the birth of this his third son, and obtained
+some years afterwards a treasurer's office in the Chambre des Comptes.
+Voltaire was born in the year 1694.  He lived until within ten or eleven
+years of the outbreak of the Great French Revolution, and was a chief
+leader in the movement of thought that preceded the Revolution.  Though
+he lived to his eighty-fourth year, Voltaire was born with a weak body.
+His brother Armand, eight years his senior, became a Jansenist.  Voltaire
+when ten years old was placed with the Jesuits in the College Louis-le-
+Grand.  There he was taught during seven years, and his genius was
+encouraged in its bent for literature; skill in speaking and in writing
+being especially fostered in the system of education which the Jesuits
+had planned to produce capable men who by voice and pen could give a
+reason for the faith they held.  Verses written for an invalid soldier at
+the age of eleven won for young Voltaire the friendship of Ninon
+l'Enclos, who encouraged him to go on writing verses.  She died soon
+afterwards, and remembered him with a legacy of two thousand livres for
+purchase of books.  He wrote in his lively school-days a tragedy that
+afterwards he burnt.  At the age of seventeen he left the College Louis-
+le-Grand, where he said afterwards that he had been taught nothing but
+Latin and the Stupidities.  He was then sent to the law schools, and saw
+life in Paris as a gay young poet who, with all his brilliant liveliness,
+had an aptitude for looking on the tragic side of things, and one of
+whose first poems was an "Ode on the Misfortunes of Life."  His mother
+died when he was twenty.  Voltaire's father thought him a fool for his
+versifying, and attached him as secretary to the Marquis of Chateauneuf;
+when he went as ambassador to the Hague.  In December, 1713, he was
+dismissed for his irregularities.  In Paris his unsteadiness and his
+addiction to literature caused his father to rejoice in getting him
+housed in a country chateau with M. de Caumartin.  M. de Caumartin's
+father talked with such enthusiasm of Henri IV. and Sully that Voltaire
+planned the writing of what became his _Henriade_, and his "History of
+the Age of Louis XIV.," who died on the 1st of September, 1715.
+
+Under the regency that followed, Voltaire got into trouble again and
+again through the sharpness of his pen, and at last, accused of verse
+that satirised the Regent, he was locked up--on the 17th of May, 1717--in
+the Bastille.  There he wrote the first two books of his _Henriade_, and
+finished a play on OEdipus, which he had begun at the age of eighteen.  He
+did not obtain full liberty until the 12th of April, 1718, and it was at
+this time--with a clearly formed design to associate the name he took
+with work of high attempt in literature--that Francois Marie Arouet, aged
+twenty-four, first called himself Voltaire.
+
+Voltaire's _OEdipe_ was played with success in November, 1718.  A few
+months later he was again banished from Paris, and finished the
+_Henriade_ in his retirement, as well as another play, _Artemise_, that
+was acted in February, 1720.  Other plays followed.  In December, 1721,
+Voltaire visited Lord Bolingbroke, who was then an exile from England, at
+the Chateau of La Source.  There was now constant literary activity.  From
+July to October, 1722, Voltaire visited Holland with Madame de
+Rupelmonde.  After a serious attack of small-pox in November, 1723,
+Voltaire was active as a poet about the Court.  He was then in receipt of
+a pension of two thousand livres from the king, and had inherited more
+than twice as much by the death of his father in January, 1722.  But in
+December, 1725, a quarrel, fastened upon him by the Chevalier de Rohan,
+who had him waylaid and beaten, caused him to send a challenge.  For this
+he was arrested and lodged once more, in April, 1726, in the Bastille.
+There he was detained a month; and his first act when he was released was
+to ask for a passport to England.
+
+Voltaire left France, reached London in August, 1726, went as guest to
+the house of a rich merchant at Wandsworth, and remained three years in
+this country, from the age of thirty-two to the age of thirty-five.  He
+was here when George I. died, and George II. became king.  He published
+here his _Henriade_.  He wrote here his "History of Charles XII."  He
+read "Gulliver's Travels" as a new book, and might have been present at
+the first night of _The Beggar's Opera_.  He was here whet Sir Isaac
+Newton died.
+
+In 1731 he published at Rouen the _Lettres sur les Anglais_, which
+appeared in England in 1733 in the volume from which they are here
+reprinted.
+
+H.M.
+
+
+
+
+LETTERS ON ENGLAND
+
+
+LETTER I.--ON THE QUAKERS
+
+
+I was of opinion that the doctrine and history of so extraordinary a
+people were worthy the attention of the curious.  To acquaint myself with
+them I made a visit to one of the most eminent Quakers in England, who,
+after having traded thirty years, had the wisdom to prescribe limits to
+his fortune and to his desires, and was settled in a little solitude not
+far from London.  Being come into it, I perceived a small but regularly
+built house, vastly neat, but without the least pomp of furniture.  The
+Quaker who owned it was a hale, ruddy-complexioned old man, who had never
+been afflicted with sickness because he had always been insensible to
+passions, and a perfect stranger to intemperance.  I never in my life saw
+a more noble or a more engaging aspect than his.  He was dressed like
+those of his persuasion, in a plain coat without pleats in the sides, or
+buttons on the pockets and sleeves; and had on a beaver, the brims of
+which were horizontal like those of our clergy.  He did not uncover
+himself when I appeared, and advanced towards me without once stooping
+his body; but there appeared more politeness in the open, humane air of
+his countenance, than in the custom of drawing one leg behind the other,
+and taking that from the head which is made to cover it.  "Friend," says
+he to me, "I perceive thou art a stranger, but if I can do anything for
+thee, only tell me."  "Sir," said I to him, bending forwards and
+advancing, as is usual with us, one leg towards him, "I flatter myself
+that my just curiosity will not give you the least offence, and that
+you'll do me the honour to inform me of the particulars of your
+religion."  "The people of thy country," replied the Quaker, "are too
+full of their bows and compliments, but I never yet met with one of them
+who had so much curiosity as thyself.  Come in, and let us first dine
+together."  I still continued to make some very unseasonable ceremonies,
+it not being easy to disengage one's self at once from habits we have
+been long used to; and after taking part in a frugal meal, which began
+and ended with a prayer to God, I began to question my courteous host.  I
+opened with that which good Catholics have more than once made to
+Huguenots.  "My dear sir," said I, "were you ever baptised?"  "I never
+was," replied the Quaker, "nor any of my brethren."  "Zounds!" say I to
+him, "you are not Christians, then."  "Friend," replies the old man in a
+soft tone of voice, "swear not; we are Christians, and endeavour to be
+good Christians, but we are not of opinion that the sprinkling water on a
+child's head makes him a Christian."  "Heavens!" say I, shocked at his
+impiety, "you have then forgot that Christ was baptised by St. John."
+"Friend," replies the mild Quaker once again, "swear not; Christ indeed
+was baptised by John, but He himself never baptised anyone.  We are the
+disciples of Christ, not of John."  I pitied very much the sincerity of
+my worthy Quaker, and was absolutely for forcing him to get himself
+christened.  "Were that all," replied he very gravely, "we would submit
+cheerfully to baptism, purely in compliance with thy weakness, for we
+don't condemn any person who uses it; but then we think that those who
+profess a religion of so holy, so spiritual a nature as that of Christ,
+ought to abstain to the utmost of their power from the Jewish
+ceremonies."  "O unaccountable!" say I: "what! baptism a Jewish
+ceremony?"  "Yes, my friend," says he, "so truly Jewish, that a great
+many Jews use the baptism of John to this day.  Look into ancient
+authors, and thou wilt find that John only revived this practice; and
+that it had been used by the Hebrews, long before his time, in like
+manner as the Mahometans imitated the Ishmaelites in their pilgrimages to
+Mecca.  Jesus indeed submitted to the baptism of John, as He had suffered
+Himself to be circumcised; but circumcision and the washing with water
+ought to be abolished by the baptism of Christ, that baptism of the
+Spirit, that ablution of the soul, which is the salvation of mankind.
+Thus the forerunner said, 'I indeed baptise you with water unto
+repentance; but He that cometh after me is mightier than I, whose shoes I
+am not worthy to bear: he shall baptise you with the Holy Ghost and with
+fire.'  Likewise Paul, the great apostle of the Gentiles, writes as
+follows to the Corinthians, 'Christ sent me not to baptise, but to preach
+the Gospel;' and indeed Paul never baptised but two persons with water,
+and that very much against his inclinations.  He circumcised his disciple
+Timothy, and the other disciples likewise circumcised all who were
+willing to submit to that carnal ordinance.  But art thou circumcised?"
+added he.  "I have not the honour to be so," say I.  "Well, friend,"
+continues the Quaker, "thou art a Christian without being circumcised,
+and I am one without being baptised."  Thus did this pious man make a
+wrong but very specious application of four or five texts of Scripture
+which seemed to favour the tenets of his sect; but at the same time
+forgot very sincerely an hundred texts which made directly against them.
+I had more sense than to contest with him, since there is no possibility
+of convincing an enthusiast.  A man should never pretend to inform a
+lover of his mistress's faults, no more than one who is at law, of the
+badness of his cause; nor attempt to win over a fanatic by strength of
+reasoning.  Accordingly I waived the subject.
+
+"Well," said I to him, "what sort of a communion have you?"  "We have
+none like that thou hintest at among us," replied he.  "How! no
+communion?" said I.  "Only that spiritual one," replied he, "of hearts."
+He then began again to throw out his texts of Scripture; and preached a
+most eloquent sermon against that ordinance.  He harangued in a tone as
+though he had been inspired, to prove that the sacraments were merely of
+human invention, and that the word "sacrament" was not once mentioned in
+the Gospel.  "Excuse," said he, "my ignorance, for I have not employed a
+hundredth part of the arguments which might be brought to prove the truth
+of our religion, but these thou thyself mayest peruse in the Exposition
+of our Faith written by Robert Barclay.  It is one of the best pieces
+that ever was penned by man; and as our adversaries confess it to be of
+dangerous tendency, the arguments in it must necessarily be very
+convincing."  I promised to peruse this piece, and my Quaker imagined he
+had already made a convert of me.  He afterwards gave me an account in
+few words of some singularities which make this sect the contempt of
+others.  "Confess," said he, "that it was very difficult for thee to
+refrain from laughter, when I answered all thy civilities without
+uncovering my head, and at the same time said 'thee' and 'thou' to thee.
+However, thou appearest to me too well read not to know that in Christ's
+time no nation was so ridiculous as to put the plural number for the
+singular.  Augustus Caesar himself was spoken to in such phrases as
+these: 'I love thee,' 'I beseech thee,' 'I thank thee;' but he did not
+allow any person to call him 'Domine,' sir.  It was not till many ages
+after that men would have the word 'you,' as though they were double,
+instead of 'thou' employed in speaking to them; and usurped the
+flattering titles of lordship, of eminence, and of holiness, which mere
+worms bestow on other worms by assuring them that they are with a most
+profound respect, and an infamous falsehood, their most obedient humble
+servants.  It is to secure ourselves more strongly from such a shameless
+traffic of lies and flattery, that we 'thee' and 'thou' a king with the
+same freedom as we do a beggar, and salute no person; we owing nothing to
+mankind but charity, and to the laws respect and obedience.
+
+"Our apparel is also somewhat different from that of others, and this
+purely, that it may be a perpetual warning to us not to imitate them.
+Others wear the badges and marks of their several dignities, and we those
+of Christian humility.  We fly from all assemblies of pleasure, from
+diversions of every kind, and from places where gaming is practised; and
+indeed our case would be very deplorable, should we fill with such
+levities as those I have mentioned the heart which ought to be the
+habitation of God.  We never swear, not even in a court of justice, being
+of opinion that the most holy name of God ought not to be prostituted in
+the miserable contests betwixt man and man.  When we are obliged to
+appear before a magistrate upon other people's account (for law-suits are
+unknown among the Friends), we give evidence to the truth by sealing it
+with our yea or nay; and the judges believe us on our bare affirmation,
+whilst so many other Christians forswear themselves on the holy Gospels.
+We never war or fight in any case; but it is not that we are afraid, for
+so far from shuddering at the thoughts of death, we on the contrary bless
+the moment which unites us with the Being of Beings; but the reason of
+our not using the outward sword is, that we are neither wolves, tigers,
+nor mastiffs, but men and Christians.  Our God, who has commanded us to
+love our enemies, and to suffer without repining, would certainly not
+permit us to cross the seas, merely because murderers clothed in scarlet,
+and wearing caps two foot high, enlist citizens by a noise made with two
+little sticks on an ass's skin extended.  And when, after a victory is
+gained, the whole city of London is illuminated; when the sky is in a
+blaze with fireworks, and a noise is heard in the air, of thanksgivings,
+of bells, of organs, and of the cannon, we groan in silence, and are
+deeply affected with sadness of spirit and brokenness of heart, for the
+sad havoc which is the occasion of those public rejoicings."
+
+
+
+LETTER II.--ON THE QUAKERS
+
+
+Such was the substance of the conversation I had with this very singular
+person; but I was greatly surprised to see him come the Sunday following
+and take me with him to the Quakers' meeting.  There are several of these
+in London, but that which he carried me to stands near the famous pillar
+called The Monument.  The brethren were already assembled at my entering
+it with my guide.  There might be about four hundred men and three
+hundred women in the meeting.  The women hid their faces behind their
+fans, and the men were covered with their broad-brimmed hats.  All were
+seated, and the silence was universal.  I passed through them, but did
+not perceive so much as one lift up his eyes to look at me.  This silence
+lasted a quarter of an hour, when at last one of them rose up, took off
+his hat, and, after making a variety of wry faces and groaning in a most
+lamentable manner, he, partly from his nose and partly from his mouth,
+threw out a strange, confused jumble of words (borrowed, as he imagined,
+from the Gospel) which neither himself nor any of his hearers understood.
+When this distorter had ended his beautiful soliloquy, and that the
+stupid, but greatly edified, congregation were separated, I asked my
+friend how it was possible for the judicious part of their assembly to
+suffer such a babbling?  "We are obliged," says he, "to suffer it,
+because no one knows when a man rises up to hold forth whether he will be
+moved by the Spirit or by folly.  In this doubt and uncertainty we listen
+patiently to everyone; we even allow our women to hold forth.  Two or
+three of these are often inspired at one and the same time, and it is
+then that a most charming noise is heard in the Lord's house."  "You
+have, then, no priests?" say I to him.  "No, no, friend," replies the
+Quaker, "to our great happiness."  Then opening one of the Friends'
+books, as he called it, he read the following words in an emphatic
+tone:--"'God forbid we should presume to ordain anyone to receive the
+Holy Spirit on the Lord's Day to the prejudice of the rest of the
+brethren.'  Thanks to the Almighty, we are the only people upon earth
+that have no priests.  Wouldst thou deprive us of so happy a distinction?
+Why should we abandon our babe to mercenary nurses, when we ourselves
+have milk enough for it?  These mercenary creatures would soon domineer
+in our houses and destroy both the mother and the babe.  God has said,
+'Freely you have received, freely give.'  Shall we, after these words,
+cheapen, as it were, the Gospel, sell the Holy Ghost, and make of an
+assembly of Christians a mere shop of traders?  We don't pay a set of men
+clothed in black to assist our poor, to bury our dead, or to preach to
+the brethren.  These offices are all of too tender a nature for us ever
+to entrust them to others."  "But how is it possible for you," said I,
+with some warmth, "to know whether your discourse is really inspired by
+the Almighty?"  "Whosoever," says he, "shall implore Christ to enlighten
+him, and shall publish the Gospel truths he may feel inwardly, such an
+one may be assured that he is inspired by the Lord."  He then poured
+forth a numberless multitude of Scripture texts which proved, as he
+imagined, that there is no such thing as Christianity without an
+immediate revelation, and added these remarkable words: "When thou movest
+one of thy limbs, is it moved by thy own power?  Certainly not; for this
+limb is often sensible to involuntary motions.  Consequently he who
+created thy body gives motion to this earthly tabernacle.  And are the
+several ideas of which thy soul receives the impression formed by
+thyself?  Much less are they, since these pour in upon thy mind whether
+thou wilt or no; consequently thou receivest thy ideas from Him who
+created thy soul.  But as He leaves thy affections at full liberty, He
+gives thy mind such ideas as thy affections may deserve; if thou livest
+in God, thou actest, thou thinkest in God.  After this thou needest only
+but open thine eyes to that light which enlightens all mankind, and it is
+then thou wilt perceive the truth, and make others perceive it."  "Why,
+this," said I, "is Malebranche's doctrine to a tittle."  "I am acquainted
+with thy Malebranche," said he; "he had something of the Friend in him,
+but was not enough so."  These are the most considerable particulars I
+learnt concerning the doctrine of the Quakers.  In my next letter I shall
+acquaint you with their history, which you will find more singular than
+their opinions.
+
+
+
+LETTER III.--ON THE QUAKERS
+
+
+You have already heard that the Quakers date from Christ, who, according
+to them, was the first Quaker.  Religion, say these, was corrupted a
+little after His death, and remained in that state of corruption about
+sixteen hundred years.  But there were always a few Quakers concealed in
+the world, who carefully preserved the sacred fire, which was
+extinguished in all but themselves, until at last this light spread
+itself in England in 1642.
+
+It was at the time when Great Britain was torn to pieces by the intestine
+wars which three or four sects had raised in the name of God, that one
+George Fox, born in Leicestershire, and son to a silk-weaver, took it
+into his head to preach, and, as he pretended, with all the requisites of
+a true apostle--that is, without being able either to read or write.  He
+was about twenty-five years of age, irreproachable in his life and
+conduct, and a holy madman.  He was equipped in leather from head to
+foot, and travelled from one village to another, exclaiming against war
+and the clergy.  Had his invectives been levelled against the soldiery
+only he would have been safe enough, but he inveighed against
+ecclesiastics.  Fox was seized at Derby, and being carried before a
+justice of peace, he did not once offer to pull off his leathern hat,
+upon which an officer gave him a great box of the ear, and cried to him,
+"Don't you know you are to appear uncovered before his worship?"  Fox
+presented his other cheek to the officer, and begged him to give him
+another box for God's sake.  The justice would have had him sworn before
+he asked him any questions.  "Know, friend," says Fox to him, "that I
+never swear."  The justice, observing he "thee'd" and "thou'd" him, sent
+him to the House of Correction, in Derby, with orders that he should be
+whipped there.  Fox praised the Lord all the way he went to the House of
+Correction, where the justice's order was executed with the utmost
+severity.  The men who whipped this enthusiast were greatly surprised to
+hear him beseech them to give him a few more lashes for the good of his
+soul.  There was no need of entreating these people; the lashes were
+repeated, for which Fox thanked them very cordially, and began to preach.
+At first the spectators fell a-laughing, but they afterwards listened to
+him; and as enthusiasm is an epidemical distemper, many were persuaded,
+and those who scourged him became his first disciples.  Being set at
+liberty, he ran up and down the country with a dozen proselytes at his
+heels, still declaiming against the clergy, and was whipped from time to
+time.  Being one day set in the pillory, he harangued the crowd in so
+strong and moving a manner, that fifty of the auditors became his
+converts, and he won the rest so much in his favour that, his head being
+freed tumultuously from the hole where it was fastened, the populace went
+and searched for the Church of England clergyman who had been chiefly
+instrumental in bringing him to this punishment, and set him on the same
+pillory where Fox had stood.
+
+Fox was bold enough to convert some of Oliver Cromwell's soldiers, who
+thereupon quitted the service and refused to take the oaths.  Oliver,
+having as great a contempt for a sect which would not allow its members
+to fight, as Sixtus Quintus had for another sect, _Dove non si chiamava_,
+began to persecute these new converts.  The prisons were crowded with
+them, but persecution seldom has any other effect than to increase the
+number of proselytes.  These came, therefore, from their confinement more
+strongly confirmed in the principles they had imbibed, and followed by
+their gaolers, whom they had brought over to their belief.  But the
+circumstances which contributed chiefly to the spreading of this sect
+were as follows:--Fox thought himself inspired, and consequently was of
+opinion that he must speak in a manner different from the rest of
+mankind.  He thereupon began to writhe his body, to screw up his face, to
+hold in his breath, and to exhale it in a forcible manner, insomuch that
+the priestess of the Pythian god at Delphos could not have acted her part
+to better advantage.  Inspiration soon became so habitual to him that he
+could scarce deliver himself in any other manner.  This was the first
+gift he communicated to his disciples.  These aped very sincerely their
+master's several grimaces, and shook in every limb the instant the fit of
+inspiration came upon them, whence they were called Quakers.  The vulgar
+attempted to mimic them; they trembled, they spake through the nose, they
+quaked and fancied themselves inspired by the Holy Ghost.  The only thing
+now wanting was a few miracles, and accordingly they wrought some.
+
+Fox, this modern patriarch, spoke thus to a justice of peace before a
+large assembly of people: "Friend, take care what thou dost; God will
+soon punish thee for persecuting His saints."  This magistrate, being one
+who besotted himself every day with bad beer and brandy, died of an
+apoplexy two days after, the moment he had signed a _mittimus_ for
+imprisoning some Quakers.  The sudden death with which this justice was
+seized was not ascribed to his intemperance, but was universally looked
+upon as the effect of the holy man's predictions; so that this accident
+made more converts to Quakerism than a thousand sermons and as many
+shaking fits could have done.  Oliver, finding them increase daily, was
+desirous of bringing them over to his party, and for that purpose
+attempted to bribe them by money.  However, they were incorruptible,
+which made him one day declare that this religion was the only one he had
+ever met with that had resisted the charms of gold.
+
+The Quakers were several times persecuted under Charles II.; not upon a
+religious account, but for refusing to pay the tithes, for "theeing" and
+"thouing" the magistrates, and for refusing to take the oaths enacted by
+the laws.
+
+At last Robert Barclay, a native of Scotland, presented to the King, in
+1675, his "Apology for the Quakers," a work as well drawn up as the
+subject could possibly admit.  The dedication to Charles II. is not
+filled with mean, flattering encomiums, but abounds with bold touches in
+favour of truth and with the wisest counsels.  "Thou hast tasted," says
+he to the King at the close of his epistle dedicatory, "of prosperity and
+adversity; thou knowest what it is to be banished thy native country; to
+be overruled as well as to rule and sit upon the throne; and, being
+oppressed, thou hast reason to know how hateful the Oppressor is both to
+God and man.  If, after all these warnings and advertisements, thou dost
+not turn unto the Lord with all thy heart, but forget Him who remembered
+thee in thy distress, and give up thyself to follow lust and vanity,
+surely great will be thy condemnation.
+
+"Against which snare, as well as the temptation of those that may or do
+feed thee and prompt thee to evil, the most excellent and prevalent
+remedy will be, to apply thyself to that light of Christ which shineth in
+thy conscience, which neither can nor will flatter thee nor suffer thee
+to be at ease in thy sins, but doth and will deal plainly and faithfully
+with thee, as those that are followers thereof have plainly done.--Thy
+faithful friend and subject, Robert Barclay."
+
+A more surprising circumstance is, that this epistle, written by a
+private man of no figure, was so happy in its effects, as to put a stop
+to the persecution.
+
+
+
+LETTER IV.--ON THE QUAKERS
+
+
+About this time arose the illustrious William Penn, who established the
+power of the Quakers in America, and would have made them appear
+venerable in the eyes of the Europeans, were it possible for mankind to
+respect virtue when revealed in a ridiculous light.  He was the only son
+of Vice-Admiral Penn, favourite of the Duke of York, afterwards King
+James II.
+
+William Penn, at twenty years of age, happening to meet with a Quaker in
+Cork, whom he had known at Oxford, this man made a proselyte of him; and
+William being a sprightly youth, and naturally eloquent, having a winning
+aspect, and a very engaging carriage, he soon gained over some of his
+intimates.  He carried matters so far, that he formed by insensible
+degrees a society of young Quakers, who met at his house; so that he was
+at the head of a sect when a little above twenty.
+
+Being returned, after his leaving Cork, to the Vice-Admiral his father,
+instead of falling upon his knees to ask his blessing, he went up to him
+with his hat on, and said, "Friend, I am very glad to see thee in good
+health."  The Vice-Admiral imagined his son to be crazy, but soon finding
+he was turned Quaker, he employed all the methods that prudence could
+suggest to engage him to behave and act like other people.  The youth
+made no other answer to his father, than by exhorting him to turn Quaker
+also.  At last his father confined himself to this single request, viz.,
+"that he should wait upon the King and the Duke of York with his hat
+under his arm, and should not 'thee' and 'thou' them."  William answered,
+"that he could not do these things, for conscience' sake," which
+exasperated his father to such a degree, that he turned him out of doors.
+Young Pen gave God thanks for permitting him to suffer so early in His
+cause, after which he went into the city, where he held forth, and made a
+great number of converts.
+
+The Church of England clergy found their congregations dwindle away
+daily; and Penn being young, handsome, and of a graceful stature, the
+court as well as the city ladies flocked very devoutly to his meeting.
+The patriarch, George Fox, hearing of his great reputation, came to
+London (though the journey was very long) purely to see and converse with
+him.  Both resolved to go upon missions into foreign countries, and
+accordingly they embarked for Holland, after having left labourers
+sufficient to take care of the London vineyard.
+
+Their labours were crowned with success in Amsterdam, but a circumstance
+which reflected the greatest honour on them, and at the same time put
+their humility to the greatest trial, was the reception they met with
+from Elizabeth, the Princess Palatine, aunt to George I. of Great
+Britain, a lady conspicuous for her genius and knowledge, and to whom
+Descartes had dedicated his Philosophical Romance.
+
+She was then retired to the Hague, where she received these Friends, for
+so the Quakers were at that time called in Holland.  This princess had
+several conferences with them in her palace, and she at last entertained
+so favourable an opinion of Quakerism, that they confessed she was not
+far from the kingdom of heaven.  The Friends sowed likewise the good seed
+in Germany, but reaped very little fruit; for the mode of "theeing" and
+"thouing" was not approved of in a country where a man is perpetually
+obliged to employ the titles of "highness" and "excellency."  William
+Penn returned soon to England upon hearing of his father's sickness, in
+order to see him before he died.  The Vice-Admiral was reconciled to his
+son, and though of a different persuasion, embraced him tenderly.  William
+made a fruitless exhortation to his father not to receive the sacrament,
+but to die a Quaker, and the good old man entreated his son William to
+wear buttons on his sleeves, and a crape hatband in his beaver, but all
+to no purpose.
+
+William Penn inherited very large possessions, part of which consisted in
+Crown debts due to the Vice-Admiral for sums he had advanced for the sea
+service.  No moneys were at that time more insecure than those owing from
+the king.  Penn was obliged to go more than once, and "thee" and "thou"
+King Charles and his Ministers, in order to recover the debt; and at
+last, instead of specie, the Government invested him with the right and
+sovereignty of a province of America, to the south of Maryland.  Thus was
+a Quaker raised to sovereign power.  Penn set sail for his new dominions
+with two ships freighted with Quakers, who followed his fortune.  The
+country was then called Pennsylvania from William Penn, who there founded
+Philadelphia, now the most flourishing city in that country.  The first
+step he took was to enter into an alliance with his American neighbours,
+and this is the only treaty between those people and the Christians that
+was not ratified by an oath, and was never infringed.  The new sovereign
+was at the same time the legislator of Pennsylvania, and enacted very
+wise and prudent laws, none of which have ever been changed since his
+time.  The first is, to injure no person upon a religious account, and to
+consider as brethren all those who believe in one God.
+
+He had no sooner settled his government, but several American merchants
+came and peopled this colony.  The natives of the country, instead of
+flying into the woods, cultivated by insensible degrees a friendship with
+the peaceable Quakers.  They loved these foreigners as much as they
+detested the other Christians who had conquered and laid waste America.
+In a little time a great number of these savages (falsely so called),
+charmed with the mild and gentle disposition of their neighbours, came in
+crowds to William Penn, and besought him to admit them into the number of
+his vassals.  It was very rare and uncommon for a sovereign to be
+"thee'd" and "thou'd" by the meanest of his subjects, who never took
+their hats off when they came into his presence; and as singular for a
+Government to be without one priest in it, and for a people to be without
+arms, either offensive or defensive; for a body of citizens to be
+absolutely undistinguished but by the public employments, and for
+neighbours not to entertain the least jealousy one against the other.
+
+William Penn might glory in having brought down upon earth the so much
+boasted golden age, which in all probability never existed but in
+Pennsylvania.  He returned to England to settle some affairs relating to
+his new dominions.  After the death of King Charles II., King James, who
+had loved the father, indulged the same affection to the son, and no
+longer considered him as an obscure sectary, but as a very great man.  The
+king's politics on this occasion agreed with his inclinations.  He was
+desirous of pleasing the Quakers by annulling the laws made against
+Nonconformists, in order to have an opportunity, by this universal
+toleration, of establishing the Romish religion.  All the sectarists in
+England saw the snare that was laid for them, but did not give into it;
+they never failing to unite when the Romish religion, their common enemy,
+is to be opposed.  But Penn did not think himself bound in any manner to
+renounce his principles, merely to favour Protestants to whom he was
+odious, in opposition to a king who loved him.  He had established a
+universal toleration with regard to conscience in America, and would not
+have it thought that he intended to destroy it in Europe, for which
+reason he adhered so inviolably to King James, that a report prevailed
+universally of his being a Jesuit.  This calumny affected him very
+strongly, and he was obliged to justify himself in print.  However, the
+unfortunate King James II., in whom, as in most princes of the Stuart
+family, grandeur and weakness were equally blended, and who, like them,
+as much overdid some things as he was short in others, lost his kingdom
+in a manner that is hardly to be accounted for.
+
+All the English sectarists accepted from William III, and his Parliament
+the toleration and indulgence which they had refused when offered by King
+James.  It was then the Quakers began to enjoy, by virtue of the laws,
+the several privileges they possess at this time.  Penn having at last
+seen Quakerism firmly established in his native country, went back to
+Pennsylvania.  His own people and the Americans received him with tears
+of joy, as though he had been a father who was returned to visit his
+children.  All the laws had been religiously observed in his absence, a
+circumstance in which no legislator had ever been happy but himself.
+After having resided some years in Pennsylvania he left it, but with
+great reluctance, in order to return to England, there to solicit some
+matters in favour of the commerce of Pennsylvania.  But he never saw it
+again, he dying in Ruscombe, in Berkshire, in 1718.
+
+I am not able to guess what fate Quakerism may have in America, but I
+perceive it dwindles away daily in England.  In all countries where
+liberty of conscience is allowed, the established religion will at last
+swallow up all the rest.  Quakers are disqualified from being members of
+Parliament; nor can they enjoy any post or preferment, because an oath
+must always be taken on these occasions, and they never swear.  They are
+therefore reduced to the necessity of subsisting upon traffic.  Their
+children, whom the industry of their parents has enriched, are desirous
+of enjoying honours, of wearing buttons and ruffles; and quite ashamed of
+being called Quakers they become converts to the Church of England,
+merely to be in the fashion.
+
+
+
+LETTER V.--ON THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND
+
+
+England is properly the country of sectarists.  _Multae sunt mansiones in
+domo patris mei_ (in my Father's house are many mansions).  An
+Englishman, as one to whom liberty is natural, may go to heaven his own
+way.
+
+Nevertheless, though every one is permitted to serve God in whatever mode
+or fashion he thinks proper, yet their true religion, that in which a man
+makes his fortune, is the sect of Episcopalians or Churchmen, called the
+Church of England, or simply the Church, by way of eminence.  No person
+can possess an employment either in England or Ireland unless he be
+ranked among the faithful, that is, professes himself a member of the
+Church of England.  This reason (which carries mathematical evidence with
+it) has converted such numbers of Dissenters of all persuasions, that not
+a twentieth part of the nation is out of the pale of the Established
+Church.  The English clergy have retained a great number of the Romish
+ceremonies, and especially that of receiving, with a most scrupulous
+attention, their tithes.  They also have the pious ambition to aim at
+superiority.
+
+Moreover, they inspire very religiously their flock with a holy zeal
+against Dissenters of all denominations.  This zeal was pretty violent
+under the Tories in the four last years of Queen Anne; but was productive
+of no greater mischief than the breaking the windows of some
+meeting-houses and the demolishing of a few of them.  For religious rage
+ceased in England with the civil wars, and was no more under Queen Anne
+than the hollow noise of a sea whose billows still heaved, though so long
+after the storm when the Whigs and Tories laid waste their native
+country, in the same manner as the Guelphs and Ghibelins formerly did
+theirs.  It was absolutely necessary for both parties to call in religion
+on this occasion; the Tories declared for Episcopacy, and the Whigs, as
+some imagined, were for abolishing it; however, after these had got the
+upper hand, they contented themselves with only abridging it.
+
+At the time when the Earl of Oxford and the Lord Bolingbroke used to
+drink healths to the Tories, the Church of England considered those
+noblemen as the defenders of its holy privileges.  The lower House of
+Convocation (a kind of House of Commons) composed wholly of the clergy,
+was in some credit at that time; at least the members of it had the
+liberty to meet, to dispute on ecclesiastical matters, to sentence
+impious books from time to time to the flames, that is, books written
+against themselves.  The Ministry which is now composed of Whigs does not
+so much as allow those gentlemen to assemble, so that they are at this
+time reduced (in the obscurity of their respective parishes) to the
+melancholy occupation of praying for the prosperity of the Government
+whose tranquillity they would willingly disturb.  With regard to the
+bishops, who are twenty-six in all, they still have seats in the House of
+Lords in spite of the Whigs, because the ancient abuse of considering
+them as barons subsists to this day.  There is a clause, however, in the
+oath which the Government requires from these gentlemen, that puts their
+Christian patience to a very great trial, viz., that they shall be of the
+Church of England as by law established.  There are few bishops, deans,
+or other dignitaries, but imagine they are so _jure divino_; it is
+consequently a great mortification to them to be obliged to confess that
+they owe their dignity to a pitiful law enacted by a set of profane
+laymen.  A learned monk (Father Courayer) wrote a book lately to prove
+the validity and succession of English ordinations.  This book was forbid
+in France, but do you believe that the English Ministry were pleased with
+it?  Far from it.  Those wicked Whigs don't care a straw whether the
+episcopal succession among them hath been interrupted or not, or whether
+Bishop Parker was consecrated (as it is pretended) in a tavern or a
+church; for these Whigs are much better pleased that the Bishops should
+derive their authority from the Parliament than from the Apostles.  The
+Lord Bolingbroke observed that this notion of divine right would only
+make so many tyrants in lawn sleeves, but that the laws made so many
+citizens.
+
+With regard to the morals of the English clergy, they are more regular
+than those of France, and for this reason.  All the clergy (a very few
+excepted) are educated in the Universities of Oxford or Cambridge, far
+from the depravity and corruption which reign in the capital.  They are
+not called to dignities till very late, at a time of life when men are
+sensible of no other passion but avarice, that is, when their ambition
+craves a supply.  Employments are here bestowed both in the Church and
+the army, as a reward for long services; and we never see youngsters made
+bishops or colonels immediately upon their laying aside the academical
+gown; and besides most of the clergy are married.  The stiff and awkward
+air contracted by them at the University, and the little familiarity the
+men of this country have with the ladies, commonly oblige a bishop to
+confine himself to, and rest contented with, his own.  Clergymen
+sometimes take a glass at the tavern, custom giving them a sanction on
+this occasion; and if they fuddle themselves it is in a very serious
+manner, and without giving the least scandal.
+
+That fable-mixed kind of mortal (not to be defined), who is neither of
+the clergy nor of the laity; in a word, the thing called _Abbe_ in
+France; is a species quite unknown in England.  All the clergy here are
+very much upon the reserve, and most of them pedants.  When these are
+told that in France young fellows famous for their dissoluteness, and
+raised to the highest dignities of the Church by female intrigues,
+address the fair publicly in an amorous way, amuse themselves in writing
+tender love songs, entertain their friends very splendidly every night at
+their own houses, and after the banquet is ended withdraw to invoke the
+assistance of the Holy Ghost, and call themselves boldly the successors
+of the Apostles, they bless God for their being Protestants.  But these
+are shameless heretics, who deserve to be blown hence through the flames
+to old Nick, as Rabelais says, and for this reason I do not trouble
+myself about them.
+
+
+
+LETTER VI.--ON THE PRESBYTERIANS
+
+
+The Church of England is confined almost to the kingdom whence it
+received its name, and to Ireland, for Presbyterianism is the established
+religion in Scotland.  This Presbyterianism is directly the same with
+Calvinism, as it was established in France, and is now professed at
+Geneva.  As the priests of this sect receive but very inconsiderable
+stipends from their churches, and consequently cannot emulate the
+splendid luxury of bishops, they exclaim very naturally against honours
+which they can never attain to.  Figure to yourself the haughty Diogenes
+trampling under foot the pride of Plato.  The Scotch Presbyterians are
+not very unlike that proud though tattered reasoner.  Diogenes did not
+use Alexander half so impertinently as these treated King Charles II.;
+for when they took up arms in his cause in opposition to Oliver, who had
+deceived them, they forced that poor monarch to undergo the hearing of
+three or four sermons every day, would not suffer him to play, reduced
+him to a state of penitence and mortification, so that Charles soon grew
+sick of these pedants, and accordingly eloped from them with as much joy
+as a youth does from school.
+
+A Church of England minister appears as another Cato in presence of a
+juvenile, sprightly French graduate, who bawls for a whole morning
+together in the divinity schools, and hums a song in chorus with ladies
+in the evening; but this Cato is a very spark when before a Scotch
+Presbyterian.  The latter affects a serious gait, puts on a sour look,
+wears a vastly broad-brimmed hat and a long cloak over a very short coat,
+preaches through the nose, and gives the name of the whore of Babylon to
+all churches where the ministers are so fortunate as to enjoy an annual
+revenue of five or six thousand pounds, and where the people are weak
+enough to suffer this, and to give them the titles of my lord, your
+lordship, or your eminence.
+
+These gentlemen, who have also some churches in England, introduced there
+the mode of grave and severe exhortations.  To them is owing the
+sanctification of Sunday in the three kingdoms.  People are there
+forbidden to work or take any recreation on that day, in which the
+severity is twice as great as that of the Romish Church.  No operas,
+plays, or concerts are allowed in London on Sundays, and even cards are
+so expressly forbidden that none but persons of quality, and those we
+call the genteel, play on that day; the rest of the nation go either to
+church, to the tavern, or to see their mistresses.
+
+Though the Episcopal and Presbyterian sects are the two prevailing ones
+in Great Britain, yet all others are very welcome to come and settle in
+it, and live very sociably together, though most of their preachers hate
+one another almost as cordially as a Jansenist damns a Jesuit.
+
+Take a view of the Royal Exchange in London, a place more venerable than
+many courts of justice, where the representatives of all nations meet for
+the benefit of mankind.  There the Jew, the Mahometan, and the Christian
+transact together, as though they all professed the same religion, and
+give the name of infidel to none but bankrupts.  There the Presbyterian
+confides in the Anabaptist, and the Churchman depends on the Quaker's
+word.
+
+If one religion only were allowed in England, the Government would very
+possibly become arbitrary; if there were but two, the people would cut
+one another's throats; but as there are such a multitude, they all live
+happy and in peace.
+
+
+
+LETTER VII.--ON THE SOCINIANS, OR ARIANS, OR ANTITRINITARIANS
+
+
+There is a little sect here composed of clergymen, and of a few very
+learned persons among the laity, who, though they do not call themselves
+Arians or Socinians, do yet dissent entirely from St. Athanasius with
+regard to their notions of the Trinity, and declare very frankly that the
+Father is greater than the Son.
+
+Do you remember what is related of a certain orthodox bishop, who, in
+order to convince an emperor of the reality of consubstantiation, put his
+hand under the chin of the monarch's son, and took him by the nose in
+presence of his sacred majesty?  The emperor was going to order his
+attendants to throw the bishop out of the window, when the good old man
+gave him this handsome and convincing reason: "Since your majesty," says
+he, "is angry when your son has not due respect shown him, what
+punishment do you think will God the Father inflict on those who refuse
+His Son Jesus the titles due to Him?"  The persons I just now mentioned
+declare that the holy bishop took a very wrong step, that his argument
+was inconclusive, and that the emperor should have answered him thus:
+"Know that there are two ways by which men may be wanting in respect to
+me--first, in not doing honour sufficient to my son; and, secondly, in
+paying him the same honour as to me."
+
+Be this as it will, the principles of Arius begin to revive, not only in
+England, but in Holland and Poland.  The celebrated Sir Isaac Newton
+honoured this opinion so far as to countenance it.  This philosopher
+thought that the Unitarians argued more mathematically than we do.  But
+the most sanguine stickler for Arianism is the illustrious Dr. Clark.
+This man is rigidly virtuous, and of a mild disposition, is more fond of
+his tenets than desirous of propagating them, and absorbed so entirely in
+problems and calculations that he is a mere reasoning machine.
+
+It is he who wrote a book which is much esteemed and little understood,
+on the existence of God, and another, more intelligible, but pretty much
+contemned, on the truth of the Christian religion.
+
+He never engaged in scholastic disputes, which our friend calls venerable
+trifles.  He only published a work containing all the testimonies of the
+primitive ages for and against the Unitarians, and leaves to the reader
+the counting of the voices and the liberty of forming a judgment.  This
+book won the doctor a great number of partisans, and lost him the See of
+Canterbury; but, in my humble opinion, he was out in his calculation, and
+had better have been Primate of all England than merely an Arian parson.
+
+You see that opinions are subject to revolutions as well as empires.
+Arianism, after having triumphed during three centuries, and been forgot
+twelve, rises at last out of its own ashes; but it has chosen a very
+improper season to make its appearance in, the present age being quite
+cloyed with disputes and sects.  The members of this sect are, besides,
+too few to be indulged the liberty of holding public assemblies, which,
+however, they will, doubtless, be permitted to do in case they spread
+considerably.  But people are now so very cold with respect to all things
+of this kind, that there is little probability any new religion, or old
+one, that may be revived, will meet with favour.  Is it not whimsical
+enough that Luther, Calvin, and Zuinglius, all of them wretched authors,
+should have founded sects which are now spread over a great part of
+Europe, that Mahomet, though so ignorant, should have given a religion to
+Asia and Africa, and that Sir Isaac Newton, Dr. Clark, Mr. Locke, Mr. Le
+Clerc, etc., the greatest philosophers, as well as the ablest writers of
+their ages, should scarcely have been able to raise a little flock, which
+even decreases daily.
+
+This it is to be born at a proper period of time.  Were Cardinal de Retz
+to return again into the world, neither his eloquence nor his intrigues
+would draw together ten women in Paris.
+
+Were Oliver Cromwell, he who beheaded his sovereign, and seized upon the
+kingly dignity, to rise from the dead, he would be a wealthy City trader,
+and no more.
+
+
+
+LETTER VIII.--ON THE PARLIAMENT
+
+
+The members of the English Parliament are fond of comparing themselves to
+the old Romans.
+
+Not long since Mr. Shippen opened a speech in the House of Commons with
+these words, "The majesty of the people of England would be wounded."  The
+singularity of the expression occasioned a loud laugh; but this
+gentleman, so far from being disconcerted, repeated the same words with a
+resolute tone of voice, and the laugh ceased.  In my opinion, the majesty
+of the people of England has nothing in common with that of the people of
+Rome, much less is there any affinity between their Governments.  There
+is in London a senate, some of the members whereof are accused (doubtless
+very unjustly) of selling their voices on certain occasions, as was done
+in Rome; this is the only resemblance.  Besides, the two nations appear
+to me quite opposite in character, with regard both to good and evil.  The
+Romans never knew the dreadful folly of religious wars, an abomination
+reserved for devout preachers of patience and humility.  Marius and
+Sylla, Caesar and Pompey, Anthony and Augustus, did not draw their swords
+and set the world in a blaze merely to determine whether the flamen
+should wear his shirt over his robe, or his robe over his shirt, or
+whether the sacred chickens should eat and drink, or eat only, in order
+to take the augury.  The English have hanged one another by law, and cut
+one another to pieces in pitched battles, for quarrels of as trifling a
+nature.  The sects of the Episcopalians and Presbyterians quite
+distracted these very serious heads for a time.  But I fancy they will
+hardly ever be so silly again, they seeming to be grown wiser at their
+own expense; and I do not perceive the least inclination in them to
+murder one another merely about syllogisms, as some zealots among them
+once did.
+
+But here follows a more essential difference between Rome and England,
+which gives the advantage entirely to the latter--viz., that the civil
+wars of Rome ended in slavery, and those of the English in liberty.  The
+English are the only people upon earth who have been able to prescribe
+limits to the power of kings by resisting them; and who, by a series of
+struggles, have at last established that wise Government where the Prince
+is all-powerful to do good, and, at the same time, is restrained from
+committing evil; where the nobles are great without insolence, though
+there are no vassals; and where the people share in the Government
+without confusion.
+
+The House of Lords and that of the Commons divide the legislative power
+under the king, but the Romans had no such balance.  The patricians and
+plebeians in Rome were perpetually at variance, and there was no
+intermediate power to reconcile them.  The Roman senate, who were so
+unjustly, so criminally proud as not to suffer the plebeians to share
+with them in anything, could find no other artifice to keep the latter
+out of the administration than by employing them in foreign wars.  They
+considered the plebeians as a wild beast, whom it behoved them to let
+loose upon their neighbours, for fear they should devour their masters.
+Thus the greatest defect in the Government of the Romans raised them to
+be conquerors.  By being unhappy at home, they triumphed over and
+possessed themselves of the world, till at last their divisions sunk them
+to slavery.
+
+The Government of England will never rise to so exalted a pitch of glory,
+nor will its end be so fatal.  The English are not fired with the
+splendid folly of making conquests, but would only prevent their
+neighbours from conquering.  They are not only jealous of their own
+liberty, but even of that of other nations.  The English were exasperated
+against Louis XIV. for no other reason but because he was ambitious, and
+declared war against him merely out of levity, not from any interested
+motives.
+
+The English have doubtless purchased their liberties at a very high
+price, and waded through seas of blood to drown the idol of arbitrary
+power.  Other nations have been involved in as great calamities, and have
+shed as much blood; but then the blood they spilt in defence of their
+liberties only enslaved them the more.
+
+That which rises to a revolution in England is no more than a sedition in
+other countries.  A city in Spain, in Barbary, or in Turkey, takes up
+arms in defence of its privileges, when immediately it is stormed by
+mercenary troops, it is punished by executioners, and the rest of the
+nation kiss the chains they are loaded with.  The French are of opinion
+that the government of this island is more tempestuous than the sea which
+surrounds it, which indeed is true; but then it is never so but when the
+king raises the storm--when he attempts to seize the ship of which he is
+only the chief pilot.  The civil wars of France lasted longer, were more
+cruel, and productive of greater evils than those of England; but none of
+these civil wars had a wise and prudent liberty for their object.
+
+In the detestable reigns of Charles IX. and Henry III. the whole affair
+was only whether the people should be slaves to the Guises.  With regard
+to the last war of Paris, it deserves only to be hooted at.  Methinks I
+see a crowd of schoolboys rising up in arms against their master, and
+afterwards whipped for it.  Cardinal de Retz, who was witty and brave
+(but to no purpose), rebellious without a cause, factious without design,
+and head of a defenceless party, caballed for caballing sake, and seemed
+to foment the civil war merely out of diversion.  The Parliament did not
+know what he intended, nor what he did not intend.  He levied troops by
+Act of Parliament, and the next moment cashiered them.  He threatened, he
+begged pardon; he set a price upon Cardinal Mazarin's head, and
+afterwards congratulated him in a public manner.  Our civil wars under
+Charles VI. were bloody and cruel, those of the League execrable, and
+that of the Frondeurs ridiculous.
+
+That for which the French chiefly reproach the English nation is the
+murder of King Charles I., whom his subjects treated exactly as he would
+have treated them had his reign been prosperous.  After all, consider on
+one side Charles I., defeated in a pitched battle, imprisoned, tried,
+sentenced to die in Westminster Hall, and then beheaded.  And on the
+other, the Emperor Henry VII., poisoned by his chaplain at his receiving
+the Sacrament; Henry III. stabbed by a monk; thirty assassinations
+projected against Henry IV., several of them put in execution, and the
+last bereaving that great monarch of his life.  Weigh, I say, all these
+wicked attempts, and then judge.
+
+
+
+LETTER IX.--ON THE GOVERNMENT
+
+
+That mixture in the English Government, that harmony between King, Lords,
+and commons, did not always subsist.  England was enslaved for a long
+series of years by the Romans, the Saxons, the Danes, and the French
+successively.  William the Conqueror particularly, ruled them with a rod
+of iron.  He disposed as absolutely of the lives and fortunes of his
+conquered subjects as an eastern monarch; and forbade, upon pain of
+death, the English either fire or candle in their houses after eight
+o'clock; whether was this to prevent their nocturnal meetings, or only to
+try, by an odd and whimsical prohibition, how far it was possible for one
+man to extend his power over his fellow-creatures.  It is true, indeed,
+that the English had Parliaments before and after William the Conqueror,
+and they boast of them, as though these assemblies then called
+Parliaments, composed of ecclesiastical tyrants and of plunderers
+entitled barons, had been the guardians of the public liberty and
+happiness.
+
+The barbarians who came from the shores of the Baltic, and settled in the
+rest of Europe, brought with them the form of government called States or
+Parliaments, about which so much noise is made, and which are so little
+understood.  Kings, indeed, were not absolute in those days; but then the
+people were more wretched upon that very account, and more completely
+enslaved.  The chiefs of these savages, who had laid waste France, Italy,
+Spain, and England, made themselves monarchs.  Their generals divided
+among themselves the several countries they had conquered, whence sprung
+those margraves, those peers, those barons, those petty tyrants, who
+often contested with their sovereigns for the spoils of whole nations.
+These were birds of prey fighting with an eagle for doves whose blood the
+victorious was to suck.  Every nation, instead of being governed by one
+master, was trampled upon by a hundred tyrants.  The priests soon played
+a part among them.  Before this it had been the fate of the Gauls, the
+Germans, and the Britons, to be always governed by their Druids and the
+chiefs of their villages, an ancient kind of barons, not so tyrannical as
+their successors.  These Druids pretended to be mediators between God and
+man.  They enacted laws, they fulminated their excommunications, and
+sentenced to death.  The bishops succeeded, by insensible degrees, to
+their temporal authority in the Goth and Vandal government.  The popes
+set themselves at their head, and armed with their briefs, their bulls,
+and reinforced by monks, they made even kings tremble, deposed and
+assassinated them at pleasure, and employed every artifice to draw into
+their own purses moneys from all parts of Europe.  The weak Ina, one of
+the tyrants of the Saxon Heptarchy in England, was the first monarch who
+submitted, in his pilgrimage to Rome, to pay St. Peter's penny
+(equivalent very near to a French crown) for every house in his
+dominions.  The whole island soon followed his example; England became
+insensibly one of the Pope's provinces, and the Holy Father used to send
+from time to time his legates thither to levy exorbitant taxes.  At last
+King John delivered up by a public instrument the kingdom of England to
+the Pope, who had excommunicated him; but the barons, not finding their
+account in this resignation, dethroned the wretched King John and seated
+Louis, father to St. Louis, King of France, in his place.  However, they
+were soon weary of their new monarch, and accordingly obliged him to
+return to France.
+
+Whilst that the barons, the bishops, and the popes, all laid waste
+England, where all were for ruling the most numerous, the most useful,
+even the most virtuous, and consequently the most venerable part of
+mankind, consisting of those who study the laws and the sciences, of
+traders, of artificers, in a word, of all who were not tyrants--that is,
+those who are called the people: these, I say, were by them looked upon
+as so many animals beneath the dignity of the human species.  The Commons
+in those ages were far from sharing in the government, they being
+villains or peasants, whose labour, whose blood, were the property of
+their masters who entitled themselves the nobility.  The major part of
+men in Europe were at that time what they are to this day in several
+parts of the world--they were villains or bondsmen of lords--that is, a
+kind of cattle bought and sold with the land.  Many ages passed away
+before justice could be done to human nature--before mankind were
+conscious that it was abominable for many to sow, and but few reap.  And
+was not France very happy, when the power and authority of those petty
+robbers was abolished by the lawful authority of kings and of the people?
+
+Happily, in the violent shocks which the divisions between kings and the
+nobles gave to empires, the chains of nations were more or less heavy.
+Liberty in England sprang from the quarrels of tyrants.  The barons
+forced King John and King Henry III. to grant the famous Magna Charta,
+the chief design of which was indeed to make kings dependent on the
+Lords; but then the rest of the nation were a little favoured in it, in
+order that they might join on proper occasions with their pretended
+masters.  This great Charter, which is considered as the sacred origin of
+the English liberties, shows in itself how little liberty was known.
+
+The title alone proves that the king thought he had a just right to be
+absolute; and that the barons, and even the clergy, forced him to give up
+the pretended right, for no other reason but because they were the most
+powerful.
+
+Magna Charta begins in this style: "We grant, of our own free will, the
+following privileges to the archbishops, bishops, priors, and barons of
+our kingdom," etc.
+
+The House of Commons is not once mentioned in the articles of this
+Charter--a proof that it did not yet exist, or that it existed without
+power.  Mention is therein made, by name, of the freemen of England--a
+melancholy proof that some were not so.  It appears, by Article XXXII.,
+that these pretended freemen owed service to their lords.  Such a liberty
+as this was not many removes from slavery.
+
+By Article XXI., the king ordains that his officers shall not
+henceforward seize upon, unless they pay for them, the horses and carts
+of freemen.  The people considered this ordinance as a real liberty,
+though it was a greater tyranny.  Henry VII., that happy usurper and
+great politician, who pretended to love the barons, though he in reality
+hated and feared them, got their lands alienated.  By this means the
+villains, afterwards acquiring riches by their industry, purchased the
+estates and country seats of the illustrious peers who had ruined
+themselves by their folly and extravagance, and all the lands got by
+insensible degrees into other hands.
+
+The power of the House of Commons increased every day.  The families of
+the ancient peers were at last extinct; and as peers only are properly
+noble in England, there would be no such thing in strictness of law as
+nobility in that island, had not the kings created new barons from time
+to time, and preserved the body of peers, once a terror to them, to
+oppose them to the Commons, since become so formidable.
+
+All these new peers who compose the Higher House receive nothing but
+their titles from the king, and very few of them have estates in those
+places whence they take their titles.  One shall be Duke of D-, though he
+has not a foot of land in Dorsetshire; and another is Earl of a village,
+though he scarce knows where it is situated.  The peers have power, but
+it is only in the Parliament House.
+
+There is no such thing here as _haute_, _moyenne_, and _basse
+justice_--that is, a power to judge in all matters civil and criminal;
+nor a right or privilege of hunting in the grounds of a citizen, who at
+the same time is not permitted to fire a gun in his own field.
+
+No one is exempted in this country from paying certain taxes because he
+is a nobleman or a priest.  All duties and taxes are settled by the House
+of Commons, whose power is greater than that of the Peers, though
+inferior to it in dignity.  The spiritual as well as temporal Lords have
+the liberty to reject a Money Bill brought in by the Commons; but they
+are not allowed to alter anything in it, and must either pass or throw it
+out without restriction.  When the Bill has passed the Lords and is
+signed by the king, then the whole nation pays, every man in proportion
+to his revenue or estate, not according to his title, which would be
+absurd.  There is no such thing as an arbitrary subsidy or poll-tax, but
+a real tax on the lands, of all which an estimate was made in the reign
+of the famous King William III.
+
+The land-tax continues still upon the same foot, though the revenue of
+the lands is increased.  Thus no one is tyrannised over, and every one is
+easy.  The feet of the peasants are not bruised by wooden shoes; they eat
+white bread, are well clothed, and are not afraid of increasing their
+stock of cattle, nor of tiling their houses, from any apprehension that
+their taxes will be raised the year following.  The annual income of the
+estates of a great many commoners in England amounts to two hundred
+thousand livres, and yet these do not think it beneath them to plough the
+lands which enrich them, and on which they enjoy their liberty.
+
+
+
+LETTER X.--ON TRADE
+
+
+As trade enriched the citizens in England, so it contributed to their
+freedom, and this freedom on the other side extended their commerce,
+whence arose the grandeur of the State.  Trade raised by insensible
+degrees the naval power, which gives the English a superiority over the
+seas, and they now are masters of very near two hundred ships of war.
+Posterity will very probably be surprised to hear that an island whose
+only produce is a little lead, tin, fuller's-earth, and coarse wool,
+should become so powerful by its commerce, as to be able to send, in
+1723, three fleets at the same time to three different and far distanced
+parts of the globe.  One before Gibraltar, conquered and still possessed
+by the English; a second to Portobello, to dispossess the King of Spain
+of the treasures of the West Indies; and a third into the Baltic, to
+prevent the Northern Powers from coming to an engagement.
+
+At the time when Louis XIV. made all Italy tremble, and that his armies,
+which had already possessed themselves of Savoy and Piedmont, were upon
+the point of taking Turin; Prince Eugene was obliged to march from the
+middle of Germany in order to succour Savoy.  Having no money, without
+which cities cannot be either taken or defended, he addressed himself to
+some English merchants.  These, at an hour and half's warning, lent him
+five millions, whereby he was enabled to deliver Turin, and to beat the
+French; after which he wrote the following short letter to the persons
+who had disbursed him the above-mentioned sums: "Gentlemen, I have
+received your money, and flatter myself that I have laid it out to your
+satisfaction."  Such a circumstance as this raises a just pride in an
+English merchant, and makes him presume (not without some reason) to
+compare himself to a Roman citizen; and, indeed, a peer's brother does
+not think traffic beneath him.  When the Lord Townshend was Minister of
+State, a brother of his was content to be a City merchant; and at the
+time that the Earl of Oxford governed Great Britain, a younger brother
+was no more than a factor in Aleppo, where he chose to live, and where he
+died.  This custom, which begins, however, to be laid aside, appears
+monstrous to Germans, vainly puffed up with their extraction.  These
+think it morally impossible that the son of an English peer should be no
+more than a rich and powerful citizen, for all are princes in Germany.
+There have been thirty highnesses of the same name, all whose patrimony
+consisted only in their escutcheons and their pride.
+
+In France the title of marquis is given gratis to any one who will accept
+of it; and whosoever arrives at Paris from the midst of the most remote
+provinces with money in his purse, and a name terminating in _ac_ or
+_ille_, may strut about, and cry, "Such a man as I!  A man of my rank and
+figure!" and may look down upon a trader with sovereign contempt; whilst
+the trader on the other side, by thus often hearing his profession
+treated so disdainfully, is fool enough to blush at it.  However, I need
+not say which is most useful to a nation; a lord, powdered in the tip of
+the mode, who knows exactly at what o'clock the king rises and goes to
+bed, and who gives himself airs of grandeur and state, at the same time
+that he is acting the slave in the ante-chamber of a prime minister; or a
+merchant, who enriches his country, despatches orders from his counting-
+house to Surat and Grand Cairo, and contributes to the well-being of the
+world.
+
+
+
+LETTER XI.--ON INOCULATION
+
+
+It is inadvertently affirmed in the Christian countries of Europe that
+the English are fools and madmen.  Fools, because they give their
+children the small-pox to prevent their catching it; and madmen, because
+they wantonly communicate a certain and dreadful distemper to their
+children, merely to prevent an uncertain evil.  The English, on the other
+side, call the rest of the Europeans cowardly and unnatural.  Cowardly,
+because they are afraid of putting their children to a little pain;
+unnatural, because they expose them to die one time or other of the small-
+pox.  But that the reader may be able to judge whether the English or
+those who differ from them in opinion are in the right, here follows the
+history of the famed inoculation, which is mentioned with so much dread
+in France.
+
+The Circassian women have, from time immemorial, communicated the small-
+pox to their children when not above six months old by making an incision
+in the arm, and by putting into this incision a pustule, taken carefully
+from the body of another child.  This pustule produces the same effect in
+the arm it is laid in as yeast in a piece of dough; it ferments, and
+diffuses through the whole mass of blood the qualities with which it is
+impregnated.  The pustules of the child in whom the artificial small-pox
+has been thus inoculated are employed to communicate the same distemper
+to others.  There is an almost perpetual circulation of it in Circassia;
+and when unhappily the small-pox has quite left the country, the
+inhabitants of it are in as great trouble and perplexity as other nations
+when their harvest has fallen short.
+
+The circumstance that introduced a custom in Circassia, which appears so
+singular to others, is nevertheless a cause common to all nations, I mean
+maternal tenderness and interest.
+
+The Circassians are poor, and their daughters are beautiful, and indeed,
+it is in them they chiefly trade.  They furnish with beauties the
+seraglios of the Turkish Sultan, of the Persian Sophy, and of all those
+who are wealthy enough to purchase and maintain such precious
+merchandise.  These maidens are very honourably and virtuously instructed
+to fondle and caress men; are taught dances of a very polite and
+effeminate kind; and how to heighten by the most voluptuous artifices the
+pleasures of their disdainful masters for whom they are designed.  These
+unhappy creatures repeat their lesson to their mothers, in the same
+manner as little girls among us repeat their catechism without
+understanding one word they say.
+
+Now it often happened that, after a father and mother had taken the
+utmost care of the education of their children, they were frustrated of
+all their hopes in an instant.  The small-pox getting into the family,
+one daughter died of it, another lost an eye, a third had a great nose at
+her recovery, and the unhappy parents were completely ruined.  Even,
+frequently, when the small-pox became epidemical, trade was suspended for
+several years, which thinned very considerably the seraglios of Persia
+and Turkey.
+
+A trading nation is always watchful over its own interests, and grasps at
+every discovery that may be of advantage to its commerce.  The
+Circassians observed that scarce one person in a thousand was ever
+attacked by a small-pox of a violent kind.  That some, indeed, had this
+distemper very favourably three or four times, but never twice so as to
+prove fatal; in a word, that no one ever had it in a violent degree twice
+in his life.  They observed farther, that when the small-pox is of the
+milder sort, and the pustules have only a tender, delicate skin to break
+through, they never leave the least scar in the face.  From these natural
+observations they concluded, that in case an infant of six months or a
+year old should have a milder sort of small-pox, he would not die of it,
+would not be marked, nor be ever afflicted with it again.
+
+In order, therefore, to preserve the life and beauty of their children,
+the only thing remaining was to give them the small-pox in their infant
+years.  This they did by inoculating in the body of a child a pustule
+taken from the most regular and at the same time the most favourable sort
+of small-pox that could be procured.
+
+The experiment could not possibly fail.  The Turks, who are people of
+good sense, soon adopted this custom, insomuch that at this time there is
+not a bassa in Constantinople but communicates the small-pox to his
+children of both sexes immediately upon their being weaned.
+
+Some pretend that the Circassians borrowed this custom anciently from the
+Arabians; but we shall leave the clearing up of this point of history to
+some learned Benedictine, who will not fail to compile a great many
+folios on this subject, with the several proofs or authorities.  All I
+have to say upon it is that, in the beginning of the reign of King George
+I., the Lady Wortley Montague, a woman of as fine a genius, and endued
+with as great a strength of mind, as any of her sex in the British
+Kingdoms, being with her husband, who was ambassador at the Porte, made
+no scruple to communicate the small-pox to an infant of which she was
+delivered in Constantinople.  The chaplain represented to his lady, but
+to no purpose, that this was an unchristian operation, and therefore that
+it could succeed with none but infidels.  However, it had the most happy
+effect upon the son of the Lady Wortley Montague, who, at her return to
+England, communicated the experiment to the Princess of Wales, now Queen
+of England.  It must be confessed that this princess, abstracted from her
+crown and titles, was born to encourage the whole circle of arts, and to
+do good to mankind.  She appears as an amiable philosopher on the throne,
+having never let slip one opportunity of improving the great talents she
+received from Nature, nor of exerting her beneficence.  It is she who,
+being informed that a daughter of Milton was living, but in miserable
+circumstances, immediately sent her a considerable present.  It is she
+who protects the learned Father Courayer.  It is she who condescended to
+attempt a reconciliation between Dr. Clark and Mr. Leibnitz.  The moment
+this princess heard of inoculation, she caused an experiment of it to be
+made on four criminals sentenced to die, and by that means preserved
+their lives doubly; for she not only saved them from the gallows, but by
+means of this artificial small-pox prevented their ever having that
+distemper in a natural way, with which they would very probably have been
+attacked one time or other, and might have died of in a more advanced
+age.
+
+The princess being assured of the usefulness of this operation, caused
+her own children to be inoculated.  A great part of the kingdom followed
+her example, and since that time ten thousand children, at least, of
+persons of condition owe in this manner their lives to her Majesty and to
+the Lady Wortley Montague; and as many of the fair sex are obliged to
+them for their beauty.
+
+Upon a general calculation, threescore persons in every hundred have the
+small-pox.  Of these threescore, twenty die of it in the most favourable
+season of life, and as many more wear the disagreeable remains of it in
+their faces so long as they live.  Thus, a fifth part of mankind either
+die or are disfigured by this distemper.  But it does not prove fatal to
+so much as one among those who are inoculated in Turkey or in England,
+unless the patient be infirm, or would have died had not the experiment
+been made upon him.  Besides, no one is disfigured, no one has the small-
+pox a second time, if the inoculation was perfect.  It is therefore
+certain, that had the lady of some French ambassador brought this secret
+from Constantinople to Paris, the nation would have been for ever obliged
+to her.  Then the Duke de Villequier, father to the Duke d'Aumont, who
+enjoys the most vigorous constitution, and is the healthiest man in
+France, would not have been cut off in the flower of his age.
+
+The Prince of Soubise, happy in the finest flush of health, would not
+have been snatched away at five-and-twenty, nor the Dauphin, grandfather
+to Louis XV., have been laid in his grave in his fiftieth year.  Twenty
+thousand persons whom the small-pox swept away at Paris in 1723 would
+have been alive at this time.  But are not the French fond of life, and
+is beauty so inconsiderable an advantage as to be disregarded by the
+ladies?  It must be confessed that we are an odd kind of people.  Perhaps
+our nation will imitate ten years hence this practice of the English, if
+the clergy and the physicians will but give them leave to do it; or
+possibly our countrymen may introduce inoculation three months hence in
+France out of mere whim, in case the English should discontinue it
+through fickleness.
+
+I am informed that the Chinese have practised inoculation these hundred
+years, a circumstance that argues very much in its favour, since they are
+thought to be the wisest and best governed people in the world.  The
+Chinese, indeed, do not communicate this distemper by inoculation, but at
+the nose, in the same manner as we take snuff.  This is a more agreeable
+way, but then it produces the like effects; and proves at the same time
+that had inoculation been practised in France it would have saved the
+lives of thousands.
+
+
+
+LETTER XII.--ON THE LORD BACON
+
+
+Not long since the trite and frivolous question following was debated in
+a very polite and learned company, viz., Who was the greatest man, Caesar,
+Alexander, Tamerlane, Cromwell, &c.?
+
+Somebody answered that Sir Isaac Newton excelled them all.  The
+gentleman's assertion was very just; for if true greatness consists in
+having received from heaven a mighty genius, and in having employed it to
+enlighten our own mind and that of others, a man like Sir Isaac Newton,
+whose equal is hardly found in a thousand years, is the truly great man.
+And those politicians and conquerors (and all ages produce some) were
+generally so many illustrious wicked men.  That man claims our respect
+who commands over the minds of the rest of the world by the force of
+truth, not those who enslave their fellow-creatures: he who is acquainted
+with the universe, not they who deface it.
+
+Since, therefore, you desire me to give you an account of the famous
+personages whom England has given birth to, I shall begin with Lord
+Bacon, Mr. Locke, Sir Isaac Newton, &c.  Afterwards the warriors and
+Ministers of State shall come in their order.
+
+I must begin with the celebrated Viscount Verulam, known in Europe by the
+name of Bacon, which was that of his family.  His father had been Lord
+Keeper, and himself was a great many years Lord Chancellor under King
+James I.  Nevertheless, amidst the intrigues of a Court, and the affairs
+of his exalted employment, which alone were enough to engross his whole
+time, he yet found so much leisure for study as to make himself a great
+philosopher, a good historian, and an elegant writer; and a still more
+surprising circumstance is that he lived in an age in which the art of
+writing justly and elegantly was little known, much less true philosophy.
+Lord Bacon, as is the fate of man, was more esteemed after his death than
+in his lifetime.  His enemies were in the British Court, and his admirers
+were foreigners.
+
+When the Marquis d'Effiat attended in England upon the Princess Henrietta
+Maria, daughter to Henry IV., whom King Charles I. had married, that
+Minister went and visited the Lord Bacon, who, being at that time sick in
+his bed, received him with the curtains shut close.  "You resemble the
+angels," says the Marquis to him; "we hear those beings spoken of
+perpetually, and we believe them superior to men, but are never allowed
+the consolation to see them."
+
+You know that this great man was accused of a crime very unbecoming a
+philosopher: I mean bribery and extortion.  You know that he was
+sentenced by the House of Lords to pay a fine of about four hundred
+thousand French livres, to lose his peerage and his dignity of
+Chancellor; but in the present age the English revere his memory to such
+a degree, that they will scarce allow him to have been guilty.  In case
+you should ask what are my thoughts on this head, I shall answer you in
+the words which I heard the Lord Bolingbroke use on another occasion.
+Several gentlemen were speaking, in his company, of the avarice with
+which the late Duke of Marlborough had been charged, some examples
+whereof being given, the Lord Bolingbroke was appealed to (who, having
+been in the opposite party, might perhaps, without the imputation of
+indecency, have been allowed to clear up that matter): "He was so great a
+man," replied his lordship, "that I have forgot his vices."
+
+I shall therefore confine myself to those things which so justly gained
+Lord Bacon the esteem of all Europe.
+
+The most singular and the best of all his pieces is that which, at this
+time, is the most useless and the least read, I mean his _Novum
+Scientiarum Organum_.  This is the scaffold with which the new philosophy
+was raised; and when the edifice was built, part of it at least, the
+scaffold was no longer of service.
+
+The Lord Bacon was not yet acquainted with Nature, but then he knew, and
+pointed out, the several paths that lead to it.  He had despised in his
+younger years the thing called philosophy in the Universities, and did
+all that lay in his power to prevent those societies of men instituted to
+improve human reason from depraving it by their quiddities, their horrors
+of the vacuum, their substantial forms, and all those impertinent terms
+which not only ignorance had rendered venerable, but which had been made
+sacred by their being ridiculously blended with religion.
+
+He is the father of experimental philosophy.  It must, indeed, be
+confessed that very surprising secrets had been found out before his
+time--the sea-compass, printing, engraving on copper plates,
+oil-painting, looking-glasses; the art of restoring, in some measure, old
+men to their sight by spectacles; gunpowder, &c., had been discovered.  A
+new world had been fought for, found, and conquered.  Would not one
+suppose that these sublime discoveries had been made by the greatest
+philosophers, and in ages much more enlightened than the present?  But it
+was far otherwise; all these great changes happened in the most stupid
+and barbarous times.  Chance only gave birth to most of those inventions;
+and it is very probable that what is called chance contributed very much
+to the discovery of America; at least, it has been always thought that
+Christopher Columbus undertook his voyage merely on the relation of a
+captain of a ship which a storm had driven as far westward as the
+Caribbean Islands.  Be this as it will, men had sailed round the world,
+and could destroy cities by an artificial thunder more dreadful than the
+real one; but, then, they were not acquainted with the circulation of the
+blood, the weight of the air, the laws of motion, light, the number of
+our planets, &c.  And a man who maintained a thesis on Aristotle's
+"Categories," on the universals _a parte rei_, or such-like nonsense, was
+looked upon as a prodigy.
+
+The most astonishing, the most useful inventions, are not those which
+reflect the greatest honour on the human mind.  It is to a mechanical
+instinct, which is found in many men, and not to true philosophy, that
+most arts owe their origin.
+
+The discovery of fire, the art of making bread, of melting and preparing
+metals, of building houses, and the invention of the shuttle, are
+infinitely more beneficial to mankind than printing or the sea-compass:
+and yet these arts were invented by uncultivated, savage men.
+
+What a prodigious use the Greeks and Romans made afterwards of mechanics!
+Nevertheless, they believed that there were crystal heavens, that the
+stars were small lamps which sometimes fell into the sea, and one of
+their greatest philosophers, after long researches, found that the stars
+were so many flints which had been detached from the earth.
+
+In a word, no one before the Lord Bacon was acquainted with experimental
+philosophy, nor with the several physical experiments which have been
+made since his time.  Scarce one of them but is hinted at in his work,
+and he himself had made several.  He made a kind of pneumatic engine, by
+which he guessed the elasticity of the air.  He approached, on all sides
+as it were, to the discovery of its weight, and had very near attained
+it, but some time after Torricelli seized upon this truth.  In a little
+time experimental philosophy began to be cultivated on a sudden in most
+parts of Europe.  It was a hidden treasure which the Lord Bacon had some
+notion of, and which all the philosophers, encouraged by his promises,
+endeavoured to dig up.
+
+But that which surprised me most was to read in his work, in express
+terms, the new attraction, the invention of which is ascribed to Sir
+Isaac Newton.
+
+We must search, says Lord Bacon, whether there may not be a kind of
+magnetic power which operates between the earth and heavy bodies, between
+the moon and the ocean, between the planets, &c.  In another place he
+says either heavy bodies must be carried towards the centre of the earth,
+or must be reciprocally attracted by it; and in the latter case it is
+evident that the nearer bodies, in their falling, draw towards the earth,
+the stronger they will attract one another.  We must, says he, make an
+experiment to see whether the same clock will go faster on the top of a
+mountain or at the bottom of a mine; whether the strength of the weights
+decreases on the mountain and increases in the mine.  It is probable that
+the earth has a true attractive power.
+
+This forerunner in philosophy was also an elegant writer, an historian,
+and a wit.
+
+His moral essays are greatly esteemed, but they were drawn up in the view
+of instructing rather than of pleasing; and, as they are not a satire
+upon mankind, like Rochefoucauld's "Maxims," nor written upon a sceptical
+plan, like Montaigne's "Essays," they are not so much read as those two
+ingenious authors.
+
+His History of Henry VII. was looked upon as a masterpiece, but how is it
+possible that some persons can presume to compare so little a work with
+the history of our illustrious Thuanus?
+
+Speaking about the famous impostor Perkin, son to a converted Jew, who
+assumed boldly the name and title of Richard IV., King of England, at the
+instigation of the Duchess of Burgundy, and who disputed the crown with
+Henry VII., the Lord Bacon writes as follows:--
+
+"At this time the King began again to be haunted with sprites, by the
+magic and curious arts of the Lady Margaret, who raised up the ghost of
+Richard, Duke of York, second son to King Edward IV., to walk and vex the
+King.
+
+"After such time as she (Margaret of Burgundy) thought he (Perkin
+Warbeck) was perfect in his lesson, she began to cast with herself from
+what coast this blazing star should first appear, and at what time it
+must be upon the horizon of Ireland; for there had the like meteor strong
+influence before."
+
+Methinks our sagacious Thuanus does not give in to such fustian, which
+formerly was looked upon as sublime, but in this age is justly called
+nonsense.
+
+
+
+LETTER XIII.--ON MR. LOCKE
+
+
+Perhaps no man ever had a more judicious or more methodical genius, or
+was a more acute logician than Mr. Locke, and yet he was not deeply
+skilled in the mathematics.  This great man could never subject himself
+to the tedious fatigue of calculations, nor to the dry pursuit of
+mathematical truths, which do not at first present any sensible objects
+to the mind; and no one has given better proofs than he, that it is
+possible for a man to have a geometrical head without the assistance of
+geometry.  Before his time, several great philosophers had declared, in
+the most positive terms, what the soul of man is; but as these absolutely
+knew nothing about it, they might very well be allowed to differ entirely
+in opinion from one another.
+
+In Greece, the infant seat of arts and of errors, and where the grandeur
+as well as folly of the human mind went such prodigious lengths, the
+people used to reason about the soul in the very same manner as we do.
+
+The divine Anaxagoras, in whose honour an altar was erected for his
+having taught mankind that the sun was greater than Peloponnesus, that
+snow was black, and that the heavens were of stone, affirmed that the
+soul was an aerial spirit, but at the same time immortal.  Diogenes (not
+he who was a cynical philosopher after having coined base money) declared
+that the soul was a portion of the substance of God: an idea which we
+must confess was very sublime.  Epicurus maintained that it was composed
+of parts in the same manner as the body.
+
+Aristotle, who has been explained a thousand ways, because he is
+unintelligible, was of opinion, according to some of his disciples, that
+the understanding in all men is one and the same substance.
+
+The divine Plato, master of the divine Aristotle,--and the divine
+Socrates, master of the divine Plato--used to say that the soul was
+corporeal and eternal.  No doubt but the demon of Socrates had instructed
+him in the nature of it.  Some people, indeed, pretend that a man who
+boasted his being attended by a familiar genius must infallibly be either
+a knave or a madman, but this kind of people are seldom satisfied with
+anything but reason.
+
+With regard to the Fathers of the Church, several in the primitive ages
+believed that the soul was human, and the angels and God corporeal.  Men
+naturally improve upon every system.  St. Bernard, as Father Mabillon
+confesses, taught that the soul after death does not see God in the
+celestial regions, but converses with Christ's human nature only.
+However, he was not believed this time on his bare word; the adventure of
+the crusade having a little sunk the credit of his oracles.  Afterwards a
+thousand schoolmen arose, such as the Irrefragable Doctor, the Subtile
+Doctor, the Angelic Doctor, the Seraphic Doctor, and the Cherubic Doctor,
+who were all sure that they had a very clear and distinct idea of the
+soul, and yet wrote in such a manner, that one would conclude they were
+resolved no one should understand a word in their writings.  Our
+Descartes, born to discover the errors of antiquity, and at the same time
+to substitute his own, and hurried away by that systematic spirit which
+throws a cloud over the minds of the greatest men, thought he had
+demonstrated that the soul is the same thing as thought, in the same
+manner as matter, in his opinion, is the same as extension.  He asserted,
+that man thinks eternally, and that the soul, at its coming into the
+body, is informed with the whole series of metaphysical notions: knowing
+God, infinite space, possessing all abstract ideas--in a word, completely
+endued with the most sublime lights, which it unhappily forgets at its
+issuing from the womb.
+
+Father Malebranche, in his sublime illusions, not only admitted innate
+ideas, but did not doubt of our living wholly in God, and that God is, as
+it were, our soul.
+
+Such a multitude of reasoners having written the romance of the soul, a
+sage at last arose, who gave, with an air of the greatest modesty, the
+history of it.  Mr. Locke has displayed the human soul in the same manner
+as an excellent anatomist explains the springs of the human body.  He
+everywhere takes the light of physics for his guide.  He sometimes
+presumes to speak affirmatively, but then he presumes also to doubt.
+Instead of concluding at once what we know not, he examines gradually
+what we would know.  He takes an infant at the instant of his birth; he
+traces, step by step, the progress of his understanding; examines what
+things he has in common with beasts, and what he possesses above them.
+Above all, he consults himself: the being conscious that he himself
+thinks.
+
+"I shall leave," says he, "to those who know more of this matter than
+myself, the examining whether the soul exists before or after the
+organisation of our bodies.  But I confess that it is my lot to be
+animated with one of those heavy souls which do not think always; and I
+am even so unhappy as not to conceive that it is more necessary the soul
+should think perpetually than that bodies should be for ever in motion."
+
+With regard to myself, I shall boast that I have the honour to be as
+stupid in this particular as Mr. Locke.  No one shall ever make me
+believe that I think always: and I am as little inclined as he could be
+to fancy that some weeks after I was conceived I was a very learned soul;
+knowing at that time a thousand things which I forgot at my birth; and
+possessing when in the womb (though to no manner of purpose) knowledge
+which I lost the instant I had occasion for it; and which I have never
+since been able to recover perfectly.
+
+Mr. Locke, after having destroyed innate ideas; after having fully
+renounced the vanity of believing that we think always; after having laid
+down, from the most solid principles, that ideas enter the mind through
+the senses; having examined our simple and complex ideas; having traced
+the human mind through its several operations; having shown that all the
+languages in the world are imperfect, and the great abuse that is made of
+words every moment, he at last comes to consider the extent or rather the
+narrow limits of human knowledge.  It was in this chapter he presumed to
+advance, but very modestly, the following words: "We shall, perhaps,
+never be capable of knowing whether a being, purely material, thinks or
+not."  This sage assertion was, by more divines than one, looked upon as
+a scandalous declaration that the soul is material and mortal.  Some
+Englishmen, devout after their way, sounded an alarm.  The superstitious
+are the same in society as cowards in an army; they themselves are seized
+with a panic fear, and communicate it to others.  It was loudly exclaimed
+that Mr. Locke intended to destroy religion; nevertheless, religion had
+nothing to do in the affair, it being a question purely philosophical,
+altogether independent of faith and revelation.  Mr. Locke's opponents
+needed but to examine, calmly and impartially, whether the declaring that
+matter can think, implies a contradiction; and whether God is able to
+communicate thought to matter.  But divines are too apt to begin their
+declarations with saying that God is offended when people differ from
+them in opinion; in which they too much resemble the bad poets, who used
+to declare publicly that Boileau spake irreverently of Louis XIV.,
+because he ridiculed their stupid productions.  Bishop Stillingfleet got
+the reputation of a calm and unprejudiced divine because he did not
+expressly make use of injurious terms in his dispute with Mr. Locke.  That
+divine entered the lists against him, but was defeated; for he argued as
+a schoolman, and Locke as a philosopher, who was perfectly acquainted
+with the strong as well as the weak side of the human mind, and who
+fought with weapons whose temper he knew.  If I might presume to give my
+opinion on so delicate a subject after Mr. Locke, I would say, that men
+have long disputed on the nature and the immortality of the soul.  With
+regard to its immortality, it is impossible to give a demonstration of
+it, since its nature is still the subject of controversy; which, however,
+must be thoroughly understood before a person can be able to determine
+whether it be immortal or not.  Human reason is so little able, merely by
+its own strength, to demonstrate the immortality of the soul, that it was
+absolutely necessary religion should reveal it to us.  It is of advantage
+to society in general, that mankind should believe the soul to be
+immortal; faith commands us to do this; nothing more is required, and the
+matter is cleared up at once.  But it is otherwise with respect to its
+nature; it is of little importance to religion, which only requires the
+soul to be virtuous, whatever substance it may be made of.  It is a clock
+which is given us to regulate, but the artist has not told us of what
+materials the spring of this chock is composed.
+
+I am a body, and, I think, that's all I know of the matter.  Shall I
+ascribe to an unknown cause, what I can so easily impute to the only
+second cause I am acquainted with?  Here all the school philosophers
+interrupt me with their arguments, and declare that there is only
+extension and solidity in bodies, and that there they can have nothing
+but motion and figure.  Now motion, figure, extension and solidity cannot
+form a thought, and consequently the soul cannot be matter.  All this so
+often repeated mighty series of reasoning, amounts to no more than this:
+I am absolutely ignorant what matter is; I guess, but imperfectly, some
+properties of it; now I absolutely cannot tell whether these properties
+may be joined to thought.  As I therefore know nothing, I maintain
+positively that matter cannot think.  In this manner do the schools
+reason.
+
+Mr. Locke addressed these gentlemen in the candid, sincere manner
+following: At least confess yourselves to be as ignorant as I.  Neither
+your imaginations nor mine are able to comprehend in what manner a body
+is susceptible of ideas; and do you conceive better in what manner a
+substance, of what kind soever, is susceptible of them?  As you cannot
+comprehend either matter or spirit, why will you presume to assert
+anything?
+
+The superstitious man comes afterwards and declares, that all those must
+be burnt for the good of their souls, who so much as suspect that it is
+possible for the body to think without any foreign assistance.  But what
+would these people say should they themselves be proved irreligious?  And
+indeed, what man can presume to assert, without being guilty at the same
+time of the greatest impiety, that it is impossible for the Creator to
+form matter with thought and sensation?  Consider only, I beg you, what a
+dilemma you bring yourselves into, you who confine in this manner the
+power of the Creator.  Beasts have the same organs, the same sensations,
+the same perceptions as we; they have memory, and combine certain ideas.
+In case it was not in the power of God to animate matter, and inform it
+with sensation, the consequence would be, either that beasts are mere
+machines, or that they have a spiritual soul.
+
+Methinks it is clearly evident that beasts cannot be mere machines, which
+I prove thus.  God has given to them the very same organs of sensation as
+to us: if therefore they have no sensation, God has created a useless
+thing; now according to your own confession God does nothing in vain; He
+therefore did not create so many organs of sensation, merely for them to
+be uninformed with this faculty; consequently beasts are not mere
+machines.  Beasts, according to your assertion, cannot be animated with a
+spiritual soul; you will, therefore, in spite of yourself, be reduced to
+this only assertion, viz., that God has endued the organs of beasts, who
+are mere matter, with the faculties of sensation and perception, which
+you call instinct in them.  But why may not God, if He pleases,
+communicate to our more delicate organs, that faculty of feeling,
+perceiving, and thinking, which we call human reason?  To whatever side
+you turn, you are forced to acknowledge your own ignorance, and the
+boundless power of the Creator.  Exclaim therefore no more against the
+sage, the modest philosophy of Mr. Locke, which so far from interfering
+with religion, would be of use to demonstrate the truth of it, in case
+religion wanted any such support.  For what philosophy can be of a more
+religious nature than that, which affirming nothing but what it conceives
+clearly, and conscious of its own weakness, declares that we must always
+have recourse to God in our examining of the first principles?
+
+Besides, we must not be apprehensive that any philosophical opinion will
+ever prejudice the religion of a country.  Though our demonstrations
+clash directly with our mysteries, that is nothing to the purpose, for
+the latter are not less revered upon that account by our Christian
+philosophers, who know very well that the objects of reason and those of
+faith are of a very different nature.  Philosophers will never form a
+religious sect, the reason of which is, their writings are not calculated
+for the vulgar, and they themselves are free from enthusiasm.  If we
+divide mankind into twenty parts, it will be found that nineteen of these
+consist of persons employed in manual labour, who will never know that
+such a man as Mr. Locke existed.  In the remaining twentieth part how few
+are readers?  And among such as are so, twenty amuse themselves with
+romances to one who studies philosophy.  The thinking part of mankind is
+confined to a very small number, and these will never disturb the peace
+and tranquillity of the world.
+
+Neither Montaigne, Locke, Bayle, Spinoza, Hobbes, the Lord Shaftesbury,
+Collins, nor Toland lighted up the firebrand of discord in their
+countries; this has generally been the work of divines, who being at
+first puffed up with the ambition of becoming chiefs of a sect, soon grew
+very desirous of being at the head of a party.  But what do I say?  All
+the works of the modern philosophers put together will never make so much
+noise as even the dispute which arose among the Franciscans, merely about
+the fashion of their sleeves and of their cowls.
+
+
+
+LETTER XIV.--ON DESCARTES AND SIR ISAAC NEWTON
+
+
+A Frenchman who arrives in London, will find philosophy, like everything
+else, very much changed there.  He had left the world a plenum, and he
+now finds it a vacuum.  At Paris the universe is seen composed of
+vortices of subtile matter; but nothing like it is seen in London.  In
+France, it is the pressure of the moon that causes the tides; but in
+England it is the sea that gravitates towards the moon; so that when you
+think that the moon should make it flood with us, those gentlemen fancy
+it should be ebb, which very unluckily cannot be proved.  For to be able
+to do this, it is necessary the moon and the tides should have been
+inquired into at the very instant of the creation.
+
+You will observe farther, that the sun, which in France is said to have
+nothing to do in the affair, comes in here for very near a quarter of its
+assistance.  According to your Cartesians, everything is performed by an
+impulsion, of which we have very little notion; and according to Sir
+Isaac Newton, it is by an attraction, the cause of which is as much
+unknown to us.  At Paris you imagine that the earth is shaped like a
+melon, or of an oblique figure; at London it has an oblate one.  A
+Cartesian declares that light exists in the air; but a Newtonian asserts
+that it comes from the sun in six minutes and a half.  The several
+operations of your chemistry are performed by acids, alkalies and subtile
+matter; but attraction prevails even in chemistry among the English.
+
+The very essence of things is totally changed.  You neither are agreed
+upon the definition of the soul, nor on that of matter.  Descartes, as I
+observed in my last, maintains that the soul is the same thing with
+thought, and Mr. Locke has given a pretty good proof of the contrary.
+
+Descartes asserts farther, that extension alone constitutes matter, but
+Sir Isaac adds solidity to it.
+
+How furiously contradictory are these opinions!
+
+   "Non nostrum inter vos tantas componere lites."
+
+   VIRGIL, Eclog. III.
+
+   "'Tis not for us to end such great disputes."
+
+This famous Newton, this destroyer of the Cartesian system, died in
+March, anno 1727.  His countrymen honoured him in his lifetime, and
+interred him as though he had been a king who had made his people happy.
+
+The English read with the highest satisfaction, and translated into their
+tongue, the Elogium of Sir Isaac Newton, which M. de Fontenelle spoke in
+the Academy of Sciences.  M. de Fontenelle presides as judge over
+philosophers; and the English expected his decision, as a solemn
+declaration of the superiority of the English philosophy over that of the
+French.  But when it was found that this gentleman had compared Descartes
+to Sir Isaac, the whole Royal Society in London rose up in arms.  So far
+from acquiescing with M. Fontenelle's judgment, they criticised his
+discourse.  And even several (who, however, were not the ablest
+philosophers in that body) were offended at the comparison; and for no
+other reason but because Descartes was a Frenchman.
+
+It must be confessed that these two great men differed very much in
+conduct, in fortune, and in philosophy.
+
+Nature had indulged Descartes with a shining and strong imagination,
+whence he became a very singular person both in private life and in his
+manner of reasoning.  This imagination could not conceal itself even in
+his philosophical works, which are everywhere adorned with very shining,
+ingenious metaphors and figures.  Nature had almost made him a poet; and
+indeed he wrote a piece of poetry for the entertainment of Christina,
+Queen of Sweden, which however was suppressed in honour to his memory.
+
+He embraced a military life for some time, and afterwards becoming a
+complete philosopher, he did not think the passion of love derogatory to
+his character.  He had by his mistress a daughter called Froncine, who
+died young, and was very much regretted by him.  Thus he experienced
+every passion incident to mankind.
+
+He was a long time of opinion that it would be necessary for him to fly
+from the society of his fellow creatures, and especially from his native
+country, in order to enjoy the happiness of cultivating his philosophical
+studies in full liberty.
+
+Descartes was very right, for his contemporaries were not knowing enough
+to improve and enlighten his understanding, and were capable of little
+else than of giving him uneasiness.
+
+He left France purely to go in search of truth, which was then persecuted
+by the wretched philosophy of the schools.  However, he found that reason
+was as much disguised and depraved in the universities of Holland, into
+which he withdrew, as in his own country.  For at the time that the
+French condemned the only propositions of his philosophy which were true,
+he was persecuted by the pretended philosophers of Holland, who
+understood him no better; and who, having a nearer view of his glory,
+hated his person the more, so that he was obliged to leave Utrecht.
+Descartes was injuriously accused of being an atheist, the last refuge of
+religious scandal: and he who had employed all the sagacity and
+penetration of his genius, in searching for new proofs of the existence
+of a God, was suspected to believe there was no such Being.
+
+Such a persecution from all sides, must necessarily suppose a most
+exalted merit as well as a very distinguished reputation, and indeed he
+possessed both.  Reason at that time darted a ray upon the world through
+the gloom of the schools, and the prejudices of popular superstition.  At
+last his name spread so universally, that the French were desirous of
+bringing him back into his native country by rewards, and accordingly
+offered him an annual pension of a thousand crowns.  Upon these hopes
+Descartes returned to France; paid the fees of his patent, which was sold
+at that time, but no pension was settled upon him.  Thus disappointed, he
+returned to his solitude in North Holland, where he again pursued the
+study of philosophy, whilst the great Galileo, at fourscore years of age,
+was groaning in the prisons of the Inquisition, only for having
+demonstrated the earth's motion.
+
+At last Descartes was snatched from the world in the flower of his age at
+Stockholm.  His death was owing to a bad regimen, and he expired in the
+midst of some literati who were his enemies, and under the hands of a
+physician to whom he was odious.
+
+The progress of Sir Isaac Newton's life was quite different.  He lived
+happy, and very much honoured in his native country, to the age of
+fourscore and five years.
+
+It was his peculiar felicity, not only to be born in a country of
+liberty, but in an age when all scholastic impertinences were banished
+from the world.  Reason alone was cultivated, and mankind could only be
+his pupil, not his enemy.
+
+One very singular difference in the lives of these two great men is, that
+Sir Isaac, during the long course of years he enjoyed, was never sensible
+to any passion, was not subject to the common frailties of mankind, nor
+ever had any commerce with women--a circumstance which was assured me by
+the physician and surgeon who attended him in his last moments.
+
+We may admire Sir Isaac Newton on this occasion, but then we must not
+censure Descartes.
+
+The opinion that generally prevails in England with regard to these new
+philosophers is, that the latter was a dreamer, and the former a sage.
+
+Very few people in England read Descartes, whose works indeed are now
+useless.  On the other side, but a small number peruse those of Sir
+Isaac, because to do this the student must be deeply skilled in the
+mathematics, otherwise those works will be unintelligible to him.  But
+notwithstanding this, these great men are the subject of everyone's
+discourse.  Sir Isaac Newton is allowed every advantage, whilst Descartes
+is not indulged a single one.  According to some, it is to the former
+that we owe the discovery of a vacuum, that the air is a heavy body, and
+the invention of telescopes.  In a word, Sir Isaac Newton is here as the
+Hercules of fabulous story, to whom the ignorant ascribed all the feats
+of ancient heroes.
+
+In a critique that was made in London on Mr. de Fontenelle's discourse,
+the writer presumed to assert that Descartes was not a great
+geometrician.  Those who make such a declaration may justly be reproached
+with flying in their master's face.  Descartes extended the limits of
+geometry as far beyond the place where he found them, as Sir Isaac did
+after him.  The former first taught the method of expressing curves by
+equations.  This geometry which, thanks to him for it, is now grown
+common, was so abstruse in his time, that not so much as one professor
+would undertake to explain it; and Schotten in Holland, and Format in
+France, were the only men who understood it.
+
+He applied this geometrical and inventive genius to dioptrics, which,
+when treated of by him, became a new art.  And if he was mistaken in some
+things, the reason of that is, a man who discovers a new tract of land
+cannot at once know all the properties of the soil.  Those who come after
+him, and make these lands fruitful, are at least obliged to him for the
+discovery.  I will not deny but that there are innumerable errors in the
+rest of Descartes' works.
+
+Geometry was a guide he himself had in some measure fashioned, which
+would have conducted him safely through the several paths of natural
+philosophy.  Nevertheless, he at last abandoned this guide, and gave
+entirely into the humour of forming hypotheses; and then philosophy was
+no more than an ingenious romance, fit only to amuse the ignorant.  He
+was mistaken in the nature of the soul, in the proofs of the existence of
+a God, in matter, in the laws of motion, and in the nature of light.  He
+admitted innate ideas, he invented new elements, he created a world; he
+made man according to his own fancy; and it is justly said, that the man
+of Descartes is, in fact, that of Descartes only, very different from the
+real one.
+
+He pushed his metaphysical errors so far, as to declare that two and two
+make four for no other reason but because God would have it so.  However,
+it will not be making him too great a compliment if we affirm that he was
+valuable even in his mistakes.  He deceived himself; but then it was at
+least in a methodical way.  He destroyed all the absurd chimeras with
+which youth had been infatuated for two thousand years.  He taught his
+contemporaries how to reason, and enabled them to employ his own weapons
+against himself.  If Descartes did not pay in good money, he however did
+great service in crying down that of a base alloy.
+
+I indeed believe that very few will presume to compare his philosophy in
+any respect with that of Sir Isaac Newton.  The former is an essay, the
+latter a masterpiece.  But then the man who first brought us to the path
+of truth, was perhaps as great a genius as he who afterwards conducted us
+through it.
+
+Descartes gave sight to the blind.  These saw the errors of antiquity and
+of the sciences.  The path he struck out is since become boundless.
+Rohault's little work was, during some years, a complete system of
+physics; but now all the Transactions of the several academies in Europe
+put together do not form so much as the beginning of a system.  In
+fathoming this abyss no bottom has been found.  We are now to examine
+what discoveries Sir Isaac Newton has made in it.
+
+
+
+LETTER XV.--ON ATTRACTION
+
+
+The discoveries which gained Sir Isaac Newton so universal a reputation,
+relate to the system of the world, to light, to geometrical infinities;
+and, lastly, to chronology, with which he used to amuse himself after the
+fatigue of his severer studies.
+
+I will now acquaint you (without prolixity if possible) with the few
+things I have been able to comprehend of all these sublime ideas.  With
+regard to the system of our world, disputes were a long time maintained,
+on the cause that turns the planets, and keeps them in their orbits: and
+on those causes which make all bodies here below descend towards the
+surface of the earth.
+
+The system of Descartes, explained and improved since his time, seemed to
+give a plausible reason for all those phenomena; and this reason seemed
+more just, as it is simple and intelligible to all capacities.  But in
+philosophy, a student ought to doubt of the things he fancies he
+understands too easily, as much as of those he does not understand.
+
+Gravity, the falling of accelerated bodies on the earth, the revolution
+of the planets in their orbits, their rotations round their axis, all
+this is mere motion.  Now motion cannot perhaps be conceived any
+otherwise than by impulsion; therefore all those bodies must be impelled.
+But by what are they impelled?  All space is full, it therefore is filled
+with a very subtile matter, since this is imperceptible to us; this
+matter goes from west to east, since all the planets are carried from
+west to east.  Thus from hypothesis to hypothesis, from one appearance to
+another, philosophers have imagined a vast whirlpool of subtile matter,
+in which the planets are carried round the sun: they also have created
+another particular vortex which floats in the great one, and which turns
+daily round the planets.  When all this is done, it is pretended that
+gravity depends on this diurnal motion; for, say these, the velocity of
+the subtile matter that turns round our little vortex, must be seventeen
+times more rapid than that of the earth; or, in case its velocity is
+seventeen times greater than that of the earth, its centrifugal force
+must be vastly greater, and consequently impel all bodies towards the
+earth.  This is the cause of gravity, according to the Cartesian system.
+But the theorist, before he calculated the centrifugal force and velocity
+of the subtile matter, should first have been certain that it existed.
+
+Sir Isaac Newton, seems to have destroyed all these great and little
+vortices, both that which carries the planets round the sun, as well as
+the other which supposes every planet to turn on its own axis.
+
+First, with regard to the pretended little vortex of the earth, it is
+demonstrated that it must lose its motion by insensible degrees; it is
+demonstrated, that if the earth swims in a fluid, its density must be
+equal to that of the earth; and in case its density be the same, all the
+bodies we endeavour to move must meet with an insuperable resistance.
+
+With regard to the great vortices, they are still more chimerical, and it
+is impossible to make them agree with Kepler's law, the truth of which
+has been demonstrated.  Sir Isaac shows, that the revolution of the fluid
+in which Jupiter is supposed to be carried, is not the same with regard
+to the revolution of the fluid of the earth, as the revolution of Jupiter
+with respect to that of the earth.  He proves, that as the planets make
+their revolutions in ellipses, and consequently being at a much greater
+distance one from the other in their Aphelia, and a little nearer in
+their Perihelia; the earth's velocity, for instance, ought to be greater
+when it is nearer Venus and Mars, because the fluid that carries it
+along, being then more pressed, ought to have a greater motion; and yet
+it is even then that the earth's motion is slower.
+
+He proves that there is no such thing as a celestial matter which goes
+from west to east since the comets traverse those spaces, sometimes from
+east to west, and at other times from north to south.
+
+In fine, the better to resolve, if possible, every difficulty, he proves,
+and even by experiments, that it is impossible there should be a plenum;
+and brings back the vacuum, which Aristotle and Descartes had banished
+from the world.
+
+Having by these and several other arguments destroyed the Cartesian
+vortices, he despaired of ever being able to discover whether there is a
+secret principle in nature which, at the same time, is the cause of the
+motion of all celestial bodies, and that of gravity on the earth.  But
+being retired in 1666, upon account of the Plague, to a solitude near
+Cambridge; as he was walking one day in his garden, and saw some fruits
+fall from a tree, he fell into a profound meditation on that gravity, the
+cause of which had so long been sought, but in vain, by all the
+philosophers, whilst the vulgar think there is nothing mysterious in it.
+He said to himself; that from what height soever in our hemisphere, those
+bodies might descend, their fall would certainly be in the progression
+discovered by Galileo; and the spaces they run through would be as the
+square of the times.  Why may not this power which causes heavy bodies to
+descend, and is the same without any sensible diminution at the remotest
+distance from the centre of the earth, or on the summits of the highest
+mountains, why, said Sir Isaac, may not this power extend as high as the
+moon?  And in case its influence reaches so far, is it not very probable
+that this power retains it in its orbit, and determines its motion?  But
+in case the moon obeys this principle (whatever it be) may we not
+conclude very naturally that the rest of the planets are equally subject
+to it?  In case this power exists (which besides is proved) it must
+increase in an inverse ratio of the squares of the distances.  All,
+therefore, that remains is, to examine how far a heavy body, which should
+fall upon the earth from a moderate height, would go; and how far in the
+same time, a body which should fall from the orbit of the moon, would
+descend.  To find this, nothing is wanted but the measure of the earth,
+and the distance of the moon from it.
+
+Thus Sir Isaac Newton reasoned.  But at that time the English had but a
+very imperfect measure of our globe, and depended on the uncertain
+supposition of mariners, who computed a degree to contain but sixty
+English miles, whereas it consists in reality of near seventy.  As this
+false computation did not agree with the conclusions which Sir Isaac
+intended to draw from them, he laid aside this pursuit.  A half-learned
+philosopher, remarkable only for his vanity, would have made the measure
+of the earth agree, anyhow, with his system.  Sir Isaac, however, chose
+rather to quit the researches he was then engaged in.  But after Mr.
+Picard had measured the earth exactly, by tracing that meridian which
+redounds so much to the honour of the French, Sir Isaac Newton resumed
+his former reflections, and found his account in Mr. Picard's
+calculation.
+
+A circumstance which has always appeared wonderful to me, is that such
+sublime discoveries should have been made by the sole assistance of a
+quadrant and a little arithmetic.
+
+The circumference of the earth is 123,249,600 feet.  This, among other
+things, is necessary to prove the system of attraction.
+
+The instant we know the earth's circumference, and the distance of the
+moon, we know that of the moon's orbit, and the diameter of this orbit.
+The moon performs its revolution in that orbit in twenty-seven days,
+seven hours, forty-three minutes.  It is demonstrated, that the moon in
+its mean motion makes an hundred and fourscore and seven thousand nine
+hundred and sixty feet (of Paris) in a minute.  It is likewise
+demonstrated, by a known theorem, that the central force which should
+make a body fall from the height of the moon, would make its velocity no
+more than fifteen Paris feet in a minute of time.  Now, if the law by
+which bodies gravitate and attract one another in an inverse ratio to the
+squares of the distances be true, if the same power acts according to
+that law throughout all nature, it is evident that as the earth is sixty
+semi-diameters distant from the moon, a heavy body must necessarily fall
+(on the earth) fifteen feet in the first second, and fifty-four thousand
+feet in the first minute.
+
+Now a heavy body falls, in reality, fifteen feet in the first second, and
+goes in the first minute fifty-four thousand feet, which number is the
+square of sixty multiplied by fifteen.  Bodies, therefore, gravitate in
+an inverse ratio of the squares of the distances; consequently, what
+causes gravity on earth, and keeps the moon in its orbit, is one and the
+same power; it being demonstrated that the moon gravitates on the earth,
+which is the centre of its particular motion, it is demonstrated that the
+earth and the moon gravitate on the sun which is the centre of their
+annual motion.
+
+The rest of the planets must be subject to this general law; and if this
+law exists, these planets must follow the laws which Kepler discovered.
+All these laws, all these relations are indeed observed by the planets
+with the utmost exactness; therefore, the power of attraction causes all
+the planets to gravitate towards the sun, in like manner as the moon
+gravitates towards our globe.
+
+Finally, as in all bodies re-action is equal to action, it is certain
+that the earth gravitates also towards the moon; and that the sun
+gravitates towards both.  That every one of the satellites of Saturn
+gravitates towards the other four, and the other four towards it; all
+five towards Saturn, and Saturn towards all.  That it is the same with
+regard to Jupiter; and that all these globes are attracted by the sun,
+which is reciprocally attracted by them.
+
+This power of gravitation acts proportionably to the quantity of matter
+in bodies, a truth which Sir Isaac has demonstrated by experiments.  This
+new discovery has been of use to show that the sun (the centre of the
+planetary system) attracts them all in a direct ratio of their quantity
+of matter combined with their nearness.  From hence Sir Isaac, rising by
+degrees to discoveries which seemed not to be formed for the human mind,
+is bold enough to compute the quantity of matter contained in the sun and
+in every planet; and in this manner shows, from the simple laws of
+mechanics, that every celestial globe ought necessarily to be where it is
+placed.
+
+His bare principle of the laws of gravitation accounts for all the
+apparent inequalities in the course of the celestial globes.  The
+variations of the moon are a necessary consequence of those laws.
+Moreover, the reason is evidently seen why the nodes of the moon perform
+their revolutions in nineteen years, and those of the earth in about
+twenty-six thousand.  The several appearances observed in the tides are
+also a very simple effect of this attraction.  The proximity of the moon,
+when at the full, and when it is new, and its distance in the quadratures
+or quarters, combined with the action of the sun, exhibit a sensible
+reason why the ocean swells and sinks.
+
+After having shown by his sublime theory the course and inequalities of
+the planets, he subjects comets to the same law.  The orbit of these
+fires (unknown for so great a series of years), which was the terror of
+mankind and the rock against which philosophy split, placed by Aristotle
+below the moon, and sent back by Descartes above the sphere of Saturn, is
+at last placed in its proper seat by Sir Isaac Newton.
+
+He proves that comets are solid bodies which move in the sphere of the
+sun's activity, and that they describe an ellipsis so very eccentric, and
+so near to parabolas, that certain comets must take up above five hundred
+years in their revolution.
+
+The learned Dr. Halley is of opinion that the comet seen in 1680 is the
+same which appeared in Julius Caesar's time.  This shows more than any
+other that comets are hard, opaque bodies; for it descended so near to
+the sun, as to come within a sixth part of the diameter of this planet
+from it, and consequently might have contracted a degree of heat two
+thousand times stronger than that of red-hot iron; and would have been
+soon dispersed in vapour, had it not been a firm, dense body.  The
+guessing the course of comets began then to be very much in vogue.  The
+celebrated Bernoulli concluded by his system that the famous comet of
+1680 would appear again the 17th of May, 1719.  Not a single astronomer
+in Europe went to bed that night.  However, they needed not to have broke
+their rest, for the famous comet never appeared.  There is at least more
+cunning, if not more certainty, in fixing its return to so remote a
+distance as five hundred and seventy-five years.  As to Mr. Whiston, he
+affirmed very seriously that in the time of the Deluge a comet overflowed
+the terrestrial globe.  And he was so unreasonable as to wonder that
+people laughed at him for making such an assertion.  The ancients were
+almost in the same way of thinking with Mr. Whiston, and fancied that
+comets were always the forerunners of some great calamity which was to
+befall mankind.  Sir Isaac Newton, on the contrary, suspected that they
+are very beneficent, and that vapours exhale from them merely to nourish
+and vivify the planets, which imbibe in their course the several
+particles the sun has detached from the comets, an opinion which, at
+least, is more probable than the former.  But this is not all.  If this
+power of gravitation or attraction acts on all the celestial globes, it
+acts undoubtedly on the several parts of these globes.  For in case
+bodies attract one another in proportion to the quantity of matter
+contained in them, it can only be in proportion to the quantity of their
+parts; and if this power is found in the whole, it is undoubtedly in the
+half; in the quarters in the eighth part, and so on in _infinitum_.
+
+This is attraction, the great spring by which all Nature is moved.  Sir
+Isaac Newton, after having demonstrated the existence of this principle,
+plainly foresaw that its very name would offend; and, therefore, this
+philosopher, in more places than one of his books, gives the reader some
+caution about it.  He bids him beware of confounding this name with what
+the ancients called occult qualities, but to be satisfied with knowing
+that there is in all bodies a central force, which acts to the utmost
+limits of the universe, according to the invariable laws of mechanics.
+
+It is surprising, after the solemn protestations Sir Isaac made, that
+such eminent men as Mr. Sorin and Mr. de Fontenelle should have imputed
+to this great philosopher the verbal and chimerical way of reasoning of
+the Aristotelians; Mr. Sorin in the Memoirs of the Academy of 1709, and
+Mr. de Fontenelle in the very eulogium of Sir Isaac Newton.
+
+Most of the French (the learned and others) have repeated this reproach.
+These are for ever crying out, "Why did he not employ the word
+_impulsion_, which is so well understood, rather than that of
+_attraction_, which is unintelligible?"
+
+Sir Isaac might have answered these critics thus:--"First, you have as
+imperfect an idea of the word impulsion as of that of attraction; and in
+case you cannot conceive how one body tends towards the centre of another
+body, neither can you conceive by what power one body can impel another.
+
+"Secondly, I could not admit of impulsion; for to do this I must have
+known that a celestial matter was the agent.  But so far from knowing
+that there is any such matter, I have proved it to be merely imaginary.
+
+"Thirdly, I use the word attraction for no other reason but to express an
+effect which I discovered in Nature--a certain and indisputable effect of
+an unknown principle--a quality inherent in matter, the cause of which
+persons of greater abilities than I can pretend to may, if they can, find
+out."
+
+"What have you, then, taught us?" will these people say further; "and to
+what purpose are so many calculations to tell us what you yourself do not
+comprehend?"
+
+"I have taught you," may Sir Isaac rejoin, "that all bodies gravitate
+towards one another in proportion to their quantity of matter; that these
+central forces alone keep the planets and comets in their orbits, and
+cause them to move in the proportion before set down.  I demonstrate to
+you that it is impossible there should be any other cause which keeps the
+planets in their orbits than that general phenomenon of gravity.  For
+heavy bodies fall on the earth according to the proportion demonstrated
+of central forces; and the planets finishing their course according to
+these same proportions, in case there were another power that acted upon
+all those bodies, it would either increase their velocity or change their
+direction.  Now, not one of those bodies ever has a single degree of
+motion or velocity, or has any direction but what is demonstrated to be
+the effect of the central forces.  Consequently it is impossible there
+should be any other principle."
+
+Give me leave once more to introduce Sir Isaac speaking.  Shall he not be
+allowed to say? "My case and that of the ancients is very different.
+These saw, for instance, water ascend in pumps, and said, 'The water
+rises because it abhors a vacuum.'  But with regard to myself; I am in
+the case of a man who should have first observed that water ascends in
+pumps, but should leave others to explain the cause of this effect.  The
+anatomist, who first declared that the motion of the arm is owing to the
+contraction of the muscles, taught mankind an indisputable truth.  But
+are they less obliged to him because he did not know the reason why the
+muscles contract?  The cause of the elasticity of the air is unknown, but
+he who first discovered this spring performed a very signal service to
+natural philosophy.  The spring that I discovered was more hidden and
+more universal, and for that very reason mankind ought to thank me the
+more.  I have discovered a new property of matter--one of the secrets of
+the Creator--and have calculated and discovered the effects of it.  After
+this, shall people quarrel with me about the name I give it?"
+
+Vortices may be called an occult quality, because their existence was
+never proved.  Attraction, on the contrary, is a real thing, because its
+effects are demonstrated, and the proportions of it are calculated.  The
+cause of this cause is among the _Arcana_ of the Almighty.
+
+   "Precedes huc, et non amplius."
+
+(Thus far shalt thou go, and no farther.)
+
+
+
+LETTER XVI.--ON SIR ISAAC NEWTON'S OPTICS
+
+
+The philosophers of the last age found out a new universe; and a
+circumstance which made its discovery more difficult was that no one had
+so much as suspected its existence.  The most sage and judicious were of
+opinion that it was a frantic rashness to dare so much as to imagine that
+it was possible to guess the laws by which the celestial bodies move and
+the manner how light acts.  Galileo, by his astronomical discoveries,
+Kepler, by his calculation, Descartes (at least, in his dioptrics), and
+Sir Isaac Newton, in all his works, severally saw the mechanism of the
+springs of the world.  The geometricians have subjected infinity to the
+laws of calculation.  The circulation of the blood in animals, and of the
+sap in vegetables, have changed the face of Nature with regard to us.  A
+new kind of existence has been given to bodies in the air-pump.  By the
+assistance of telescopes bodies have been brought nearer to one another.
+Finally, the several discoveries which Sir Isaac Newton has made on light
+are equal to the boldest things which the curiosity of man could expect
+after so many philosophical novelties.
+
+Till Antonio de Dominis the rainbow was considered as an inexplicable
+miracle.  This philosopher guessed that it was a necessary effect of the
+sun and rain.  Descartes gained immortal fame by his mathematical
+explication of this so natural a phenomenon.  He calculated the
+reflections and refractions of light in drops of rain.  And his sagacity
+on this occasion was at that time looked upon as next to divine.
+
+But what would he have said had it been proved to him that he was
+mistaken in the nature of light; that he had not the least reason to
+maintain that it is a globular body?  That it is false to assert that
+this matter, spreading itself through the whole, waits only to be
+projected forward by the sun, in order to be put in action, in like
+manner as a long staff acts at one end when pushed forward by the other.
+That light is certainly darted by the sun; in fine, that light is
+transmitted from the sun to the earth in about seven minutes, though a
+cannonball, which were not to lose any of its velocity, could not go that
+distance in less than twenty-five years.  How great would have been his
+astonishment had he been told that light does not reflect directly by
+impinging against the solid parts of bodies, that bodies are not
+transparent when they have large pores, and that a man should arise who
+would demonstrate all these paradoxes, and anatomise a single ray of
+light with more dexterity than the ablest artist dissects a human body.
+This man is come.  Sir Isaac Newton has demonstrated to the eye, by the
+bare assistance of the prism, that light is a composition of coloured
+rays, which, being united, form white colour.  A single ray is by him
+divided into seven, which all fall upon a piece of linen, or a sheet of
+white paper, in their order, one above the other, and at unequal
+distances.  The first is red, the second orange, the third yellow, the
+fourth green, the fifth blue, the sixth indigo, the seventh a
+violet-purple.  Each of these rays, transmitted afterwards by a hundred
+other prisms, will never change the colour it bears; in like manner, as
+gold, when completely purged from its dross, will never change afterwards
+in the crucible.  As a superabundant proof that each of these elementary
+rays has inherently in itself that which forms its colour to the eye,
+take a small piece of yellow wood, for instance, and set it in the ray of
+a red colour; this wood will instantly be tinged red.  But set it in the
+ray of a green colour, it assumes a green colour, and so of all the rest.
+
+From what cause, therefore, do colours arise in Nature?  It is nothing
+but the disposition of bodies to reflect the rays of a certain order and
+to absorb all the rest.
+
+What, then, is this secret disposition?  Sir Isaac Newton demonstrates
+that it is nothing more than the density of the small constituent
+particles of which a body is composed.  And how is this reflection
+performed?  It was supposed to arise from the rebounding of the rays, in
+the same manner as a ball on the surface of a solid body.  But this is a
+mistake, for Sir Isaac taught the astonished philosophers that bodies are
+opaque for no other reason but because their pores are large, that light
+reflects on our eyes from the very bosom of those pores, that the smaller
+the pores of a body are the more such a body is transparent.  Thus paper,
+which reflects the light when dry, transmits it when oiled, because the
+oil, by filling its pores, makes them much smaller.
+
+It is there that examining the vast porosity of bodies, every particle
+having its pores, and every particle of those particles having its own,
+he shows we are not certain that there is a cubic inch of solid matter in
+the universe, so far are we from conceiving what matter is.  Having thus
+divided, as it were, light into its elements, and carried the sagacity of
+his discoveries so far as to prove the method of distinguishing compound
+colours from such as are primitive, he shows that these elementary rays,
+separated by the prism, are ranged in their order for no other reason but
+because they are refracted in that very order; and it is this property
+(unknown till he discovered it) of breaking or splitting in this
+proportion; it is this unequal refraction of rays, this power of
+refracting the red less than the orange colour, &c., which he calls the
+different refrangibility.  The most reflexible rays are the most
+refrangible, and from hence he evinces that the same power is the cause
+both of the reflection and refraction of light.
+
+But all these wonders are merely but the opening of his discoveries.  He
+found out the secret to see the vibrations or fits of light which come
+and go incessantly, and which either transmit light or reflect it,
+according to the density of the parts they meet with.  He has presumed to
+calculate the density of the particles of air necessary between two
+glasses, the one flat, the other convex on one side, set one upon the
+other, in order to operate such a transmission or reflection, or to form
+such and such a colour.
+
+From all these combinations he discovers the proportion in which light
+acts on bodies and bodies act on light.
+
+He saw light so perfectly, that he has determined to what degree of
+perfection the art of increasing it, and of assisting our eyes by
+telescopes, can be carried.
+
+Descartes, from a noble confidence that was very excusable, considering
+how strongly he was fired at the first discoveries he made in an art
+which he almost first found out; Descartes, I say, hoped to discover in
+the stars, by the assistance of telescopes, objects as small as those we
+discern upon the earth.
+
+But Sir Isaac has shown that dioptric telescopes cannot be brought to a
+greater perfection, because of that refraction, and of that very
+refrangibility, which at the same time that they bring objects nearer to
+us, scatter too much the elementary rays.  He has calculated in these
+glasses the proportion of the scattering of the red and of the blue rays;
+and proceeding so far as to demonstrate things which were not supposed
+even to exist, he examines the inequalities which arise from the shape or
+figure of the glass, and that which arises from the refrangibility.  He
+finds that the object glass of the telescope being convex on one side and
+flat on the other, in case the flat side be turned towards the object,
+the error which arises from the construction and position of the glass is
+above five thousand times less than the error which arises from the
+refrangibility; and, therefore, that the shape or figure of the glasses
+is not the cause why telescopes cannot be carried to a greater
+perfection, but arises wholly from the nature of light.
+
+For this reason he invented a telescope, which discovers objects by
+reflection, and not by refraction.  Telescopes of this new kind are very
+hard to make, and their use is not easy; but, according to the English, a
+reflective telescope of but five feet has the same effect as another of a
+hundred feet in length.
+
+
+
+LETTER XVII.--ON INFINITES IN GEOMETRY, AND SIR ISAAC NEWTON'S CHRONOLOGY
+
+
+The labyrinth and abyss of infinity is also a new course Sir Isaac Newton
+has gone through, and we are obliged to him for the clue, by whose
+assistance we are enabled to trace its various windings.
+
+Descartes got the start of him also in this astonishing invention.  He
+advanced with mighty steps in his geometry, and was arrived at the very
+borders of infinity, but went no farther.  Dr. Wallis, about the middle
+of the last century, was the first who reduced a fraction by a perpetual
+division to an infinite series.
+
+The Lord Brouncker employed this series to square the hyperbola.
+
+Mercator published a demonstration of this quadrature; much about which
+time Sir Isaac Newton, being then twenty-three years of age, had invented
+a general method, to perform on all geometrical curves what had just
+before been tried on the hyperbola.
+
+It is to this method of subjecting everywhere infinity to algebraical
+calculations, that the name is given of differential calculations or of
+fluxions and integral calculation.  It is the art of numbering and
+measuring exactly a thing whose existence cannot be conceived.
+
+And, indeed, would you not imagine that a man laughed at you who should
+declare that there are lines infinitely great which form an angle
+infinitely little?
+
+That a right line, which is a right line so long as it is finite, by
+changing infinitely little its direction, becomes an infinite curve; and
+that a curve may become infinitely less than another curve?
+
+That there are infinite squares, infinite cubes, and infinites of
+infinites, all greater than one another, and the last but one of which is
+nothing in comparison of the last?
+
+All these things, which at first appear to be the utmost excess of
+frenzy, are in reality an effort of the subtlety and extent of the human
+mind, and the art of finding truths which till then had been unknown.
+
+This so bold edifice is even founded on simple ideas.  The business is to
+measure the diagonal of a square, to give the area of a curve, to find
+the square root of a number, which has none in common arithmetic.  After
+all, the imagination ought not to be startled any more at so many orders
+of infinites than at the so well-known proposition, viz., that curve
+lines may always be made to pass between a circle and a tangent; or at
+that other, namely, that matter is divisible in _infinitum_.  These two
+truths have been demonstrated many years, and are no less
+incomprehensible than the things we have been speaking of.
+
+For many years the invention of this famous calculation was denied to Sir
+Isaac Newton.  In Germany Mr. Leibnitz was considered as the inventor of
+the differences or moments, called fluxions, and Mr. Bernouilli claimed
+the integral calculus.  However, Sir Isaac is now thought to have first
+made the discovery, and the other two have the glory of having once made
+the world doubt whether it was to be ascribed to him or them.  Thus some
+contested with Dr. Harvey the invention of the circulation of the blood,
+as others disputed with Mr. Perrault that of the circulation of the sap.
+
+Hartsocher and Leuwenhoek disputed with each other the honour of having
+first seen the _vermiculi_ of which mankind are formed.  This Hartsocher
+also contested with Huygens the invention of a new method of calculating
+the distance of a fixed star.  It is not yet known to what philosopher we
+owe the invention of the cycloid.
+
+Be this as it will, it is by the help of this geometry of infinites that
+Sir Isaac Newton attained to the most sublime discoveries.  I am now to
+speak of another work, which, though more adapted to the capacity of the
+human mind, does nevertheless display some marks of that creative genius
+with which Sir Isaac Newton was informed in all his researches.  The work
+I mean is a chronology of a new kind, for what province soever he
+undertook he was sure to change the ideas and opinions received by the
+rest of men.
+
+Accustomed to unravel and disentangle chaos, he was resolved to convey at
+least some light into that of the fables of antiquity which are blended
+and confounded with history, and fix an uncertain chronology.  It is true
+that there is no family, city, or nation, but endeavours to remove its
+original as far backward as possible.  Besides, the first historians were
+the most negligent in setting down the eras: books were infinitely less
+common than they are at this time, and, consequently, authors being not
+so obnoxious to censure, they therefore imposed upon the world with
+greater impunity; and, as it is evident that these have related a great
+number of fictitious particulars, it is probable enough that they also
+gave us several false eras.
+
+It appeared in general to Sir Isaac that the world was five hundred years
+younger than chronologers declare it to be.  He grounds his opinion on
+the ordinary course of Nature, and on the observations which astronomers
+have made.
+
+By the course of Nature we here understand the time that every generation
+of men lives upon the earth.  The Egyptians first employed this vague and
+uncertain method of calculating when they began to write the beginning of
+their history.  These computed three hundred and forty-one generations
+from Menes to Sethon; and, having no fixed era, they supposed three
+generations to consist of a hundred years.  In this manner they computed
+eleven thousand three hundred and forty years from Menes's reign to that
+of Sethon.
+
+The Greeks before they counted by Olympiads followed the method of the
+Egyptians, and even gave a little more extent to generations, making each
+to consist of forty years.
+
+Now, here, both the Egyptians and the Greeks made an erroneous
+computation.  It is true, indeed, that, according to the usual course of
+Nature, three generations last about a hundred and twenty years; but
+three reigns are far from taking up so many.  It is very evident that
+mankind in general live longer than kings are found to reign, so that an
+author who should write a history in which there were no dates fixed, and
+should know that nine kings had reigned over a nation; such an historian
+would commit a great error should he allow three hundred years to these
+nine monarchs.  Every generation takes about thirty-six years; every
+reign is, one with the other, about twenty.  Thirty kings of England have
+swayed the sceptre from William the Conqueror to George I., the years of
+whose reigns added together amount to six hundred and forty-eight years;
+which, being divided equally among the thirty kings, give to every one a
+reign of twenty-one years and a half very near.  Sixty-three kings of
+France have sat upon the throne; these have, one with another, reigned
+about twenty years each.  This is the usual course of Nature.  The
+ancients, therefore, were mistaken when they supposed the durations in
+general of reigns to equal that of generations.  They, therefore, allowed
+too great a number of years, and consequently some years must be
+subtracted from their computation.
+
+Astronomical observations seem to have lent a still greater assistance to
+our philosopher.  He appears to us stronger when he fights upon his own
+ground.
+
+You know that the earth, besides its annual motion which carries it round
+the sun from west to east in the space of a year, has also a singular
+revolution which was quite unknown till within these late years.  Its
+poles have a very slow retrograde motion from east to west, whence it
+happens that their position every day does not correspond exactly with
+the same point of the heavens.  This difference, which is so insensible
+in a year, becomes pretty considerable in time; and in threescore and
+twelve years the difference is found to be of one degree, that is to say,
+the three hundred and sixtieth part of the circumference of the whole
+heaven.  Thus after seventy-two years the colure of the vernal equinox
+which passed through a fixed star, corresponds with another fixed star.
+Hence it is that the sun, instead of being in that part of the heavens in
+which the Ram was situated in the time of Hipparchus, is found to
+correspond with that part of the heavens in which the Bull was situated;
+and the Twins are placed where the Bull then stood.  All the signs have
+changed their situation, and yet we still retain the same manner of
+speaking as the ancients did.  In this age we say that the sun is in the
+Ram in the spring, from the same principle of condescension that we say
+that the sun turns round.
+
+Hipparchus was the first among the Greeks who observed some change in the
+constellations with regard to the equinoxes, or rather who learnt it from
+the Egyptians.  Philosophers ascribed this motion to the stars; for in
+those ages people were far from imagining such a revolution in the earth,
+which was supposed to be immovable in every respect.  They therefore
+created a heaven in which they fixed the several stars, and gave this
+heaven a particular motion by which it was carried towards the east,
+whilst that all the stars seemed to perform their diurnal revolution from
+east to west.  To this error they added a second of much greater
+consequence, by imagining that the pretended heaven of the fixed stars
+advanced one degree eastward every hundred years.  In this manner they
+were no less mistaken in their astronomical calculation than in their
+system of natural philosophy.  As for instance, an astronomer in that age
+would have said that the vernal equinox was in the time of such and such
+an observation, in such a sign, and in such a star.  It has advanced two
+degrees of each since the time that observation was made to the present.
+Now two degrees are equivalent to two hundred years; consequently the
+astronomer who made that observation lived just so many years before me.
+It is certain that an astronomer who had argued in this manner would have
+mistook just fifty-four years; hence it is that the ancients, who were
+doubly deceived, made their great year of the world, that is, the
+revolution of the whole heavens, to consist of thirty-six thousand years.
+But the moderns are sensible that this imaginary revolution of the heaven
+of the stars is nothing else than the revolution of the poles of the
+earth, which is performed in twenty-five thousand nine hundred years.  It
+may be proper to observe transiently in this place, that Sir Isaac, by
+determining the figure of the earth, has very happily explained the cause
+of this revolution.
+
+All this being laid down, the only thing remaining to settle chronology
+is to see through what star the colure of the equinoxes passes, and where
+it intersects at this time the ecliptic in the spring; and to discover
+whether some ancient writer does not tell us in what point the ecliptic
+was intersected in his time, by the same colure of the equinoxes.
+
+Clemens Alexandrinus informs us, that Chiron, who went with the
+Argonauts, observed the constellations at the time of that famous
+expedition, and fixed the vernal equinox to the middle of the Ram; the
+autumnal equinox to the middle of Libra; our summer solstice to the
+middle of Cancer, and our winter solstice to the middle of Capricorn.
+
+A long time after the expedition of the Argonauts, and a year before the
+Peloponnesian war, Methon observed that the point of the summer solstice
+passed through the eighth degree of Cancer.
+
+Now every sign of the zodiac contains thirty degrees.  In Chiron's time,
+the solstice was arrived at the middle of the sign, that is to say to the
+fifteenth degree.  A year before the Peloponnesian war it was at the
+eighth, and therefore it had retarded seven degrees.  A degree is
+equivalent to seventy-two years; consequently, from the beginning of the
+Peloponnesian war to the expedition of the Argonauts, there is no more
+than an interval of seven times seventy-two years, which make five
+hundred and four years, and not seven hundred years as the Greeks
+computed.  Thus in comparing the position of the heavens at this time
+with their position in that age, we find that the expedition of the
+Argonauts ought to be placed about nine hundred years before Christ, and
+not about fourteen hundred; and consequently that the world is not so old
+by five hundred years as it was generally supposed to be.  By this
+calculation all the eras are drawn nearer, and the several events are
+found to have happened later than is computed.  I do not know whether
+this ingenious system will be favourably received; and whether these
+notions will prevail so far with the learned, as to prompt them to reform
+the chronology of the world.  Perhaps these gentlemen would think it too
+great a condescension to allow one and the same man the glory of having
+improved natural philosophy, geometry, and history.  This would be a kind
+of universal monarchy, with which the principle of self-love that is in
+man will scarce suffer him to indulge his fellow-creature; and, indeed,
+at the same time that some very great philosophers attacked Sir Isaac
+Newton's attractive principle, others fell upon his chronological system.
+Time that should discover to which of these the victory is due, may
+perhaps only leave the dispute still more undetermined.
+
+
+
+LETTER XVIII.--ON TRAGEDY
+
+
+The English as well as the Spaniards were possessed of theatres at a time
+when the French had no more than moving, itinerant stages.  Shakspeare,
+who was considered as the Corneille of the first-mentioned nation, was
+pretty nearly contemporary with Lopez de Vega, and he created, as it
+were, the English theatre.  Shakspeare boasted a strong fruitful genius.
+He was natural and sublime, but had not so much as a single spark of good
+taste, or knew one rule of the drama.  I will now hazard a random, but,
+at the same time, true reflection, which is, that the great merit of this
+dramatic poet has been the ruin of the English stage.  There are such
+beautiful, such noble, such dreadful scenes in this writer's monstrous
+farces, to which the name of tragedy is given, that they have always been
+exhibited with great success.  Time, which alone gives reputation to
+writers, at last makes their very faults venerable.  Most of the
+whimsical gigantic images of this poet, have, through length of time (it
+being a hundred and fifty years since they were first drawn) acquired a
+right of passing for sublime.  Most of the modern dramatic writers have
+copied him; but the touches and descriptions which are applauded in
+Shakspeare, are hissed at in these writers; and you will easily believe
+that the veneration in which this author is held, increases in proportion
+to the contempt which is shown to the moderns.  Dramatic writers don't
+consider that they should not imitate him; and the ill-success of
+Shakspeare's imitators produces no other effect, than to make him be
+considered as inimitable.  You remember that in the tragedy of _Othello,
+Moor of Venice_, a most tender piece, a man strangles his wife on the
+stage, and that the poor woman, whilst she is strangling, cries aloud
+that she dies very unjustly.  You know that in _Hamlet, Prince of
+Denmark_, two grave-diggers make a grave, and are all the time drinking,
+singing ballads, and making humorous reflections (natural indeed enough
+to persons of their profession) on the several skulls they throw up with
+their spades; but a circumstance which will surprise you is, that this
+ridiculous incident has been imitated.  In the reign of King Charles II.,
+which was that of politeness, and the Golden Age of the liberal arts;
+Otway, in his _Venice Preserved_, introduces Antonio the senator, and
+Naki, his courtesan, in the midst of the horrors of the Marquis of
+Bedemar's conspiracy.  Antonio, the superannuated senator plays, in his
+mistress's presence, all the apish tricks of a lewd, impotent debauchee,
+who is quite frantic and out of his senses.  He mimics a bull and a dog,
+and bites his mistress's legs, who kicks and whips him.  However, the
+players have struck these buffooneries (which indeed were calculated
+merely for the dregs of the people) out of Otway's tragedy; but they have
+still left in Shakspeare's _Julius Caesar_ the jokes of the Roman
+shoemakers and cobblers, who are introduced in the same scene with Brutus
+and Cassius.  You will undoubtedly complain, that those who have hitherto
+discoursed with you on the English stage, and especially on the
+celebrated Shakspeare, have taken notice only of his errors; and that no
+one has translated any of those strong, those forcible passages which
+atone for all his faults.  But to this I will answer, that nothing is
+easier than to exhibit in prose all the silly impertinences which a poet
+may have thrown out; but that it is a very difficult task to translate
+his fine verses.  All your junior academical sophs, who set up for
+censors of the eminent writers, compile whole volumes; but methinks two
+pages which display some of the beauties of great geniuses, are of
+infinitely more value than all the idle rhapsodies of those commentators;
+and I will join in opinion with all persons of good taste in declaring,
+that greater advantage may be reaped from a dozen verses of Homer of
+Virgil, than from all the critiques put together which have been made on
+those two great poets.
+
+I have ventured to translate some passages of the most celebrated English
+poets, and shall now give you one from Shakspeare.  Pardon the blemishes
+of the translation for the sake of the original; and remember always that
+when you see a version, you see merely a faint print of a beautiful
+picture.  I have made choice of part of the celebrated soliloquy in
+_Hamlet_, which you may remember is as follows:--
+
+   "To be, or not to be? that is the question!
+   Whether 't is nobler in the mind to suffer
+   The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
+   Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
+   And by opposing, end them?  To die! to sleep!
+   No more! and by a sleep to say we end
+   The heart-ache, and the thousand natural shocks
+   That flesh is heir to!  'Tis a consummation
+   Devoutly to be wished.  To die! to sleep!
+   To sleep; perchance to dream!  O, there's the rub;
+   For in that sleep of death, what dreams may come
+   When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
+   Must give us pause.  There's the respect
+   That makes calamity of so long life:
+   For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
+   The oppressor's wrong, the poor man's contumely,
+   The pangs of despised love, the law's delay,
+   The insolence of office, and the spurns
+   That patient merit of the unworthy takes,
+   When he himself might his quietus make
+   With a bare bodkin.  Who would fardels bear
+   To groan and sweat under a weary life,
+   But that the dread of something after death,
+   The undiscovered country, from whose bourn
+   No traveller returns, puzzles the will,
+   And makes us rather bear those ills we have,
+   Than fly to others that we know not of?
+   Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;
+   And thus the native hue of resolution
+   Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought:
+   And enterprises of great weight and moment
+   With this regard their currents turn awry,
+   And lose the name of action--"
+
+My version of it runs thus:--
+
+   "Demeure, il faut choisir et passer a l'instant
+   De la vie, a la mort, ou de l'etre au neant.
+   Dieux cruels, s'il en est, eclairez mon courage.
+   Faut-il vieillir courbe sous la main qui m'outrage,
+   Supporter, ou finir mon malheur et mon sort?
+   Qui suis je?  Qui m'arrete! et qu'est-ce que la mort?
+   C'est la fin de nos maux, c'est mon unique asile
+   Apres de longs transports, c'est un sommeil tranquile.
+   On s'endort, et tout meurt, mais un affreux reveil
+   Doit succeder peut etre aux douceurs du sommeil!
+   On nous menace, on dit que cette courte vie,
+   De tourmens eternels est aussi-tot suivie.
+   O mort! moment fatal! affreuse eternite!
+   Tout coeur a ton seul nom se glace epouvante.
+   Eh! qui pourroit sans toi supporter cette vie,
+   De nos pretres menteurs benir l'hypocrisie:
+   D'une indigne maitresse encenser les erreurs,
+   Ramper sous un ministre, adorer ses hauteurs;
+   Et montrer les langueurs de son ame abattue,
+   A des amis ingrats qui detournent la vue?
+   La mort seroit trop douce en ces extremitez,
+   Mais le scrupule parle, et nous crie, arretez;
+   Il defend a nos mains cet heureux homicide
+   Et d'un heros guerrier, fait un Chretien timide," &c.
+
+Do not imagine that I have translated Shakspeare in a servile manner.  Woe
+to the writer who gives a literal version; who by rendering every word of
+his original, by that very means enervates the sense, and extinguishes
+all the fire of it.  It is on such an occasion one may justly affirm,
+that the letter kills, but the Spirit quickens.
+
+Here follows another passage copied from a celebrated tragic writer among
+the English.  It is Dryden, a poet in the reign of Charles II.--a writer
+whose genius was too exuberant, and not accompanied with judgment enough.
+Had he written only a tenth part of the works he left behind him, his
+character would have been conspicuous in every part; but his great fault
+is his having endeavoured to be universal.
+
+The passage in question is as follows:--
+
+   "When I consider life, 't is all a cheat,
+   Yet fooled by hope, men favour the deceit;
+   Trust on and think, to-morrow will repay;
+   To-morrow's falser than the former day;
+   Lies more; and whilst it says we shall be blest
+   With some new joy, cuts off what we possessed;
+   Strange cozenage! none would live past years again,
+   Yet all hope pleasure in what yet remain,
+   And from the dregs of life think to receive
+   What the first sprightly running could not give.
+   I'm tired with waiting for this chymic gold,
+   Which fools us young, and beggars us when old."
+
+I shall now give you my translation:--
+
+   "De desseins en regrets et d'erreurs en desirs
+   Les mortals insenses promenent leur folie.
+   Dans des malheurs presents, dans l'espoir des plaisirs
+   Nous ne vivons jamais, nous attendons la vie.
+   Demain, demain, dit-on, va combler tous nos voeux.
+   Demain vient, et nous laisse encore plus malheureux.
+   Quelle est l'erreur, helas! du soin qui nous devore,
+   Nul de nous ne voudroit recommencer son cours.
+   De nos premiers momens nous maudissons l'aurore,
+   Et de la nuit qui vient nous attendons encore,
+   Ce qu'ont en vain promis les plus beaux de nos jours," &c.
+
+It is in these detached passages that the English have hitherto excelled.
+Their dramatic pieces, most of which are barbarous and without decorum,
+order, or verisimilitude, dart such resplendent flashes through this
+gleam, as amaze and astonish.  The style is too much inflated, too
+unnatural, too closely copied from the Hebrew writers, who abound so much
+with the Asiatic fustian.  But then it must be also confessed that the
+stilts of the figurative style, on which the English tongue is lifted up,
+raises the genius at the same time very far aloft, though with an
+irregular pace.  The first English writer who composed a regular tragedy,
+and infused a spirit of elegance through every part of it, was the
+illustrious Mr. Addison.  His "Cato" is a masterpiece, both with regard
+to the diction and to the beauty and harmony of the numbers.  The
+character of Cato is, in my opinion, vastly superior to that of Cornelia
+in the "Pompey" of Corneille, for Cato is great without anything like
+fustian, and Cornelia, who besides is not a necessary character, tends
+sometimes to bombast.  Mr. Addison's Cato appears to me the greatest
+character that was ever brought upon any stage, but then the rest of them
+do not correspond to the dignity of it, and this dramatic piece, so
+excellently well writ, is disfigured by a dull love plot, which spreads a
+certain languor over the whole, that quite murders it.
+
+The custom of introducing love at random and at any rate in the drama
+passed from Paris to London about 1660, with our ribbons and our
+perruques.  The ladies who adorn the theatrical circle there, in like
+manner as in this city, will suffer love only to be the theme of every
+conversation.  The judicious Mr. Addison had the effeminate complaisance
+to soften the severity of his dramatic character, so as to adapt it to
+the manners of the age, and, from an endeavour to please, quite ruined a
+masterpiece in its kind.  Since his time the drama is become more
+regular, the audience more difficult to be pleased, and writers more
+correct and less bold.  I have seen some new pieces that were written
+with great regularity, but which, at the same time, were very flat and
+insipid.  One would think that the English had been hitherto formed to
+produce irregular beauties only.  The shining monsters of Shakspeare give
+infinite more delight than the judicious images of the moderns.  Hitherto
+the poetical genius of the English resembles a tufted tree planted by the
+hand of Nature, that throws out a thousand branches at random, and
+spreads unequally, but with great vigour.  It dies if you attempt to
+force its nature, and to lop and dress it in the same manner as the trees
+of the Garden of Marli.
+
+
+
+LETTER XIX.--ON COMEDY
+
+
+I am surprised that the judicious and ingenious Mr. de Muralt, who has
+published some letters on the English and French nations, should have
+confined himself; in treating of comedy, merely to censure Shadwell the
+comic writer.  This author was had in pretty great contempt in Mr. de
+Muralt's time, and was not the poet of the polite part of the nation.  His
+dramatic pieces, which pleased some time in acting, were despised by all
+persons of taste, and might be compared to many plays which I have seen
+in France, that drew crowds to the playhouse, at the same time that they
+were intolerable to read; and of which it might be said, that the whole
+city of Paris exploded them, and yet all flocked to see them represented
+on the stage.  Methinks Mr. de Muralt should have mentioned an excellent
+comic writer (living when he was in England), I mean Mr. Wycherley, who
+was a long time known publicly to be happy in the good graces of the most
+celebrated mistress of King Charles II.  This gentleman, who passed his
+life among persons of the highest distinction, was perfectly well
+acquainted with their lives and their follies, and painted them with the
+strongest pencil, and in the truest colours.  He has drawn a misanthrope
+or man-hater, in imitation of that of Moliere.  All Wycherley's strokes
+are stronger and bolder than those of our misanthrope, but then they are
+less delicate, and the rules of decorum are not so well observed in this
+play.  The English writer has corrected the only defect that is in
+Moliere's comedy, the thinness of the plot, which also is so disposed
+that the characters in it do not enough raise our concern.  The English
+comedy affects us, and the contrivance of the plot is very ingenious, but
+at the same time it is too bold for the French manners.  The fable is
+this:--A captain of a man-of-war, who is very brave, open-hearted, and
+inflamed with a spirit of contempt for all mankind, has a prudent,
+sincere friend, whom he yet is suspicious of; and a mistress that loves
+him with the utmost excess of passion.  The captain so far from returning
+her love, will not even condescend to look upon her, but confides
+entirely in a false friend, who is the most worthless wretch living.  At
+the same time he has given his heart to a creature, who is the greatest
+coquette and the most perfidious of her sex, and he is so credulous as to
+be confident she is a Penelope, and his false friend a Cato.  He embarks
+on board his ship in order to go and fight the Dutch, having left all his
+money, his jewels, and everything he had in the world to this virtuous
+creature, whom at the same time he recommends to the care of his supposed
+faithful friend.  Nevertheless the real man of honour, whom he suspects
+so unaccountably, goes on board the ship with him, and the mistress, on
+whom he would not bestow so much as one glance, disguises herself in the
+habit of a page, and is with him the whole voyage, without his once
+knowing that she is of a sex different from that she attempts to pass
+for, which, by the way, is not over natural.
+
+The captain having blown up his own ship in an engagement, returns to
+England abandoned and undone, accompanied by his page and his friend,
+without knowing the friendship of the one or the tender passion of the
+other.  Immediately he goes to the jewel among women, who he expected had
+preserved her fidelity to him and the treasure he had left in her hands.
+He meets with her indeed, but married to the honest knave in whom he had
+reposed so much confidence, and finds she had acted as treacherously with
+regard to the casket he had entrusted her with.  The captain can scarce
+think it possible that a woman of virtue and honour can act so vile a
+part; but to convince him still more of the reality of it, this very
+worthy lady falls in love with the little page, and will force him to her
+embraces.  But as it is requisite justice should be done, and that in a
+dramatic piece virtue ought to be rewarded and vice punished, it is at
+last found that the captain takes his page's place, and lies with his
+faithless mistress, cuckolds his treacherous friend, thrusts his sword
+through his body, recovers his casket, and marries his page.  You will
+observe that this play is also larded with a petulant, litigious old
+woman (a relation of the captain), who is the most comical character that
+was ever brought upon the stage.
+
+Wycherley has also copied from Moliere another play, of as singular and
+bold a cast, which is a kind of _Ecole des Femmes_, or, _School for
+Married Women_.
+
+The principal character in this comedy is one Homer, a sly fortune
+hunter, and the terror of all the City husbands.  This fellow, in order
+to play a surer game, causes a report to be spread, that in his last
+illness, the surgeons had found it necessary to have him made a eunuch.
+Upon his appearing in this noble character, all the husbands in town
+flock to him with their wives, and now poor Homer is only puzzled about
+his choice.  However, he gives the preference particularly to a little
+female peasant, a very harmless, innocent creature, who enjoys a fine
+flush of health, and cuckolds her husband with a simplicity that has
+infinitely more merit than the witty malice of the most experienced
+ladies.  This play cannot indeed be called the school of good morals, but
+it is certainly the school of wit and true humour.
+
+Sir John Vanbrugh has written several comedies, which are more humorous
+than those of Mr. Wycherley, but not so ingenious.  Sir John was a man of
+pleasure, and likewise a poet and an architect.  The general opinion is,
+that he is as sprightly in his writings as he is heavy in his buildings.
+It is he who raised the famous Castle of Blenheim, a ponderous and
+lasting monument of our unfortunate Battle of Hochstet.  Were the
+apartments but as spacious as the walls are thick, this castle would be
+commodious enough.  Some wag, in an epitaph he made on Sir John Vanbrugh,
+has these lines:--
+
+   "Earth lie light on him, for he
+   Laid many a heavy load on thee."
+
+Sir John having taken a tour into France before the glorious war that
+broke out in 1701, was thrown into the Bastille, and detained there for
+some time, without being ever able to discover the motive which had
+prompted our ministry to indulge him with this mark of their distinction.
+He wrote a comedy during his confinement; and a circumstance which
+appears to me very extraordinary is, that we don't meet with so much as a
+single satirical stroke against the country in which he had been so
+injuriously treated.
+
+The late Mr. Congreve raised the glory of comedy to a greater height than
+any English writer before or since his time.  He wrote only a few plays,
+but they are all excellent in their kind.  The laws of the drama are
+strictly observed in them; they abound with characters all which are
+shadowed with the utmost delicacy, and we don't meet with so much as one
+low or coarse jest.  The language is everywhere that of men of honour,
+but their actions are those of knaves--a proof that he was perfectly well
+acquainted with human nature, and frequented what we call polite company.
+He was infirm and come to the verge of life when I knew him.  Mr.
+Congreve had one defect, which was his entertaining too mean an idea of
+his first profession (that of a writer), though it was to this he owed
+his fame and fortune.  He spoke of his works as of trifles that were
+beneath him; and hinted to me, in our first conversation, that I should
+visit him upon no other footing than that of a gentleman who led a life
+of plainness and simplicity.  I answered, that had he been so unfortunate
+as to be a mere gentleman, I should never have come to see him; and I was
+very much disgusted at so unseasonable a piece of vanity.
+
+Mr. Congreve's comedies are the most witty and regular, those of Sir John
+Vanbrugh most gay and humorous, and those of Mr. Wycherley have the
+greatest force and spirit.  It may be proper to observe that these fine
+geniuses never spoke disadvantageously of Moliere; and that none but the
+contemptible writers among the English have endeavoured to lessen the
+character of that great comic poet.  Such Italian musicians as despise
+Lully are themselves persons of no character or ability; but a Buononcini
+esteems that great artist, and does justice to his merit.
+
+The English have some other good comic writers living, such as Sir
+Richard Steele and Mr. Cibber, who is an excellent player, and also Poet
+Laureate--a title which, how ridiculous soever it may be thought, is yet
+worth a thousand crowns a year (besides some considerable privileges) to
+the person who enjoys it.  Our illustrious Corneille had not so much.
+
+To conclude.  Don't desire me to descend to particulars with regard to
+these English comedies, which I am so fond of applauding; nor to give you
+a single smart saying or humorous stroke from Wycherley or Congreve.  We
+don't laugh in rending a translation.  If you have a mind to understand
+the English comedy, the only way to do this will be for you to go to
+England, to spend three years in London, to make yourself master of the
+English tongue, and to frequent the playhouse every night.  I receive but
+little pleasure from the perusal of Aristophanes and Plautus, and for
+this reason, because I am neither a Greek nor a Roman.  The delicacy of
+the humour, the allusion, the _a propos_--all these are lost to a
+foreigner.
+
+But it is different with respect to tragedy, this treating only of
+exalted passions and heroical follies, which the antiquated errors of
+fable or history have made sacred.  OEdipus, Electra, and such-like
+characters, may with as much propriety be treated of by the Spaniards,
+the English, or us, as by the Greeks.  But true comedy is the speaking
+picture of the follies and ridiculous foibles of a nation; so that he
+only is able to judge of the painting who is perfectly acquainted with
+the people it represents.
+
+
+
+LETTER XX.--ON SUCH OF THE NOBILITY AS CULTIVATE THE BELLES LETTRES
+
+
+There once was a time in France when the polite arts were cultivated by
+persons of the highest rank in the state.  The courtiers particularly
+were conversant in them, although indolence, a taste for trifles, and a
+passion for intrigue, were the divinities of the country.  The Court
+methinks at this time seems to have given into a taste quite opposite to
+that of polite literature, but perhaps the mode of thinking may be
+revived in a little time.  The French are of so flexible a disposition,
+may be moulded into such a variety of shapes, that the monarch needs but
+command and he is immediately obeyed.  The English generally think, and
+learning is had in greater honour among them than in our country--an
+advantage that results naturally from the form of their government.  There
+are about eight hundred persons in England who have a right to speak in
+public, and to support the interest of the kingdom; and near five or six
+thousand may in their turns aspire to the same honour.  The whole nation
+set themselves up as judges over these, and every man has the liberty of
+publishing his thoughts with regard to public affairs, which shows that
+all the people in general are indispensably obliged to cultivate their
+understandings.  In England the governments of Greece and Rome are the
+subject of every conversation, so that every man is under a necessity of
+perusing such authors as treat of them, how disagreeable soever it may be
+to him; and this study leads naturally to that of polite literature.
+Mankind in general speak well in their respective professions.  What is
+the reason why our magistrates, our lawyers, our physicians, and a great
+number of the clergy, are abler scholars, have a finer taste, and more
+wit, than persons of all other professions?  The reason is, because their
+condition of life requires a cultivated and enlightened mind, in the same
+manner as a merchant is obliged to be acquainted with his traffic.  Not
+long since an English nobleman, who was very young, came to see me at
+Paris on his return from Italy.  He had written a poetical description of
+that country, which, for delicacy and politeness, may vie with anything
+we meet with in the Earl of Rochester, or in our Chaulieu, our Sarrasin,
+or Chapelle.  The translation I have given of it is so inexpressive of
+the strength and delicate humour of the original, that I am obliged
+seriously to ask pardon of the author and of all who understand English.
+However, as this is the only method I have to make his lordship's verses
+known, I shall here present you with them in our tongue:--
+
+   "Qu'ay je donc vu dans l'Italie?
+   Orgueil, astuce, et pauvrete,
+   Grands complimens, peu de bonte
+   Et beaucoup de ceremonie.
+
+   "L'extravagante comedie
+   Que souvent l'Inquisition
+   Vent qu'on nomme religion
+   Mais qu'ici nous nommons folie.
+
+   "La Nature en vain bienfaisante
+   Vent enricher ses lieux charmans,
+   Des pretres la main desolante
+   Etouffe ses plus beaux presens.
+
+   "Les monsignors, soy disant Grands,
+   Seuls dans leurs palais magnifiques
+   Y sont d'illustres faineants,
+   Sans argent, et sans domestiques.
+
+   "Pour les petits, sans liberte,
+   Martyrs du joug qui les domine,
+   Ils ont fait voeu de pauvrete,
+   Priant Dieu par oisivete
+   Et toujours jeunant par famine.
+
+   "Ces beaux lieux du Pape benis
+   Semblent habitez par les diables;
+   Et les habitans miserables
+   Sont damnes dans le Paradis."
+
+
+
+LETTER XXI.--ON THE EARL OF ROCHESTER AND MR. WALLER
+
+
+The Earl of Rochester's name is universally known.  Mr. de St. Evremont
+has made very frequent mention of him, but then he has represented this
+famous nobleman in no other light than as the man of pleasure, as one who
+was the idol of the fair; but, with regard to myself, I would willingly
+describe in him the man of genius, the great poet.  Among other pieces
+which display the shining imagination, his lordship only could boast he
+wrote some satires on the same subjects as those our celebrated Boileau
+made choice of.  I do not know any better method of improving the taste
+than to compare the productions of such great geniuses as have exercised
+their talent on the same subject.  Boileau declaims as follows against
+human reason in his "Satire on Man:"
+
+   "Cependant a le voir plein de vapeurs legeres,
+   Soi-meme se bercer de ses propres chimeres,
+   Lui seul de la nature est la baze et l'appui,
+   Et le dixieme ciel ne tourne que pour lui.
+   De tous les animaux il est ici le maitre;
+   Qui pourroit le nier, poursuis tu?  Moi peut-etre.
+   Ce maitre pretendu qui leur donne des loix,
+   Ce roi des animaux, combien a-t'il de rois?"
+
+   "Yet, pleased with idle whimsies of his brain,
+   And puffed with pride, this haughty thing would fain
+   Be think himself the only stay and prop
+   That holds the mighty frame of Nature up.
+   The skies and stars his properties must seem,
+   * * *
+   Of all the creatures he's the lord, he cries.
+   * * *
+   And who is there, say you, that dares deny
+   So owned a truth?  That may be, sir, do I.
+   * * *
+   This boasted monarch of the world who awes
+   The creatures here, and with his nod gives laws
+   This self-named king, who thus pretends to be
+   The lord of all, how many lords has he?"
+
+   OLDHAM, _a little altered_.
+
+The Lord Rochester expresses himself, in his "Satire against Man," in
+pretty near the following manner.  But I must first desire you always to
+remember that the versions I give you from the English poets are written
+with freedom and latitude, and that the restraint of our versification,
+and the delicacies of the French tongue, will not allow a translator to
+convey into it the licentious impetuosity and fire of the English
+numbers:--
+
+   "Cet esprit que je hais, cet esprit plein d'erreur,
+   Ce n'est pas ma raison, c'est la tienne, docteur.
+   C'est la raison frivole, inquiete, orgueilleuse
+   Des sages animaux, rivale dedaigneuse,
+   Qui croit entr'eux et l'Ange, occuper le milieu,
+   Et pense etre ici bas l'image de son Dieu.
+   Vil atome imparfait, qui croit, doute, dispute
+   Rampe, s'eleve, tombe, et nie encore sa chute,
+   Qui nous dit je suis libre, en nous montrant ses fers,
+   Et dont l'oeil trouble et faux, croit percer l'univers.
+   Allez, reverends fous, bienheureux fanatiques,
+   Compilez bien l'amas de vos riens scholastiques,
+   Peres de visions, et d'enigmes sacres,
+   Auteurs du labirinthe, ou vous vous egarez.
+   Allez obscurement eclaircir vos misteres,
+   Et courez dans l'ecole adorer vos chimeres.
+   Il est d'autres erreurs, il est de ces devots
+   Condamne par eux memes a l'ennui du repos.
+   Ce mystique encloitre, fier de son indolence
+   Tranquille, au sein de Dieu.  Que peut il faire?  Il pense.
+   Non, tu ne penses point, miserable, tu dors:
+   Inutile a la terre, et mis au rang des morts.
+   Ton esprit enerve croupit dans la molesse.
+   Reveille toi, sois homme, et sors de ton ivresse.
+   L'homme est ne pour agir, et tu pretens penser?"  &c.
+
+The original runs thus:--
+
+   "Hold mighty man, I cry all this we know,
+   And 'tis this very reason I despise,
+   This supernatural gift that makes a mite
+   Think he's the image of the Infinite;
+   Comparing his short life, void of all rest,
+   To the eternal and the ever blest.
+   This busy, puzzling stirrer up of doubt,
+   That frames deep mysteries, then finds them out,
+   Filling, with frantic crowds of thinking fools,
+   Those reverend bedlams, colleges, and schools;
+   Borne on whose wings each heavy sot can pierce
+   The limits of the boundless universe.
+   So charming ointments make an old witch fly,
+   And bear a crippled carcase through the sky.
+   'Tis this exalted power, whose business lies
+   In nonsense and impossibilities.
+   This made a whimsical philosopher
+   Before the spacious world his tub prefer;
+   And we have modern cloistered coxcombs, who
+   Retire to think, 'cause they have naught to do.
+   But thoughts are given for action's government,
+   Where action ceases, thought's impertinent."
+
+Whether these ideas are true or false, it is certain they are expressed
+with an energy and fire which form the poet.  I shall be very far from
+attempting to examine philosophically into these verses, to lay down the
+pencil, and take up the rule and compass on this occasion; my only design
+in this letter being to display the genius of the English poets, and
+therefore I shall continue in the same view.
+
+The celebrated Mr. Waller has been very much talked of in France, and Mr.
+De la Fontaine, St. Evremont, and Bayle have written his eulogium, but
+still his name only is known.  He had much the same reputation in London
+as Voiture had in Paris, and in my opinion deserved it better.  Voiture
+was born in an age that was just emerging from barbarity; an age that was
+still rude and ignorant, the people of which aimed at wit, though they
+had not the least pretensions to it, and sought for points and conceits
+instead of sentiments.  Bristol stones are more easily found than
+diamonds.  Voiture, born with an easy and frivolous, genius, was the
+first who shone in this aurora of French literature.  Had he come into
+the world after those great geniuses who spread such a glory over the age
+of Louis XIV., he would either have been unknown, would have been
+despised, or would have corrected his style.  Boileau applauded him, but
+it was in his first satires, at a time when the taste of that great poet
+was not yet formed.  He was young, and in an age when persons form a
+judgment of men from their reputation, and not from their writings.
+Besides, Boileau was very partial both in his encomiums and his censures.
+He applauded Segrais, whose works nobody reads; he abused Quinault, whose
+poetical pieces every one has got by heart; and is wholly silent upon La
+Fontaine.  Waller, though a better poet than Voiture, was not yet a
+finished poet.  The graces breathe in such of Waller's works as are writ
+in a tender strain; but then they are languid through negligence, and
+often disfigured with false thoughts.  The English had not in his time
+attained the art of correct writing.  But his serious compositions
+exhibit a strength and vigour which could not have been expected from the
+softness and effeminacy of his other pieces.  He wrote an elegy on Oliver
+Cromwell, which, with all its faults, is nevertheless looked upon as a
+masterpiece.  To understand this copy of verses you are to know that the
+day Oliver died was remarkable for a great storm.  His poem begins in
+this manner:--
+
+   "Il n'est plus, s'en est fait, soumettons nous au sort,
+   Le ciel a signale ce jour par des tempetes,
+   Et la voix des tonnerres eclatant sur nos tetes
+   Vient d'annoncer sa mort.
+
+   "Par ses derniers soupirs il ebranle cet ile;
+   Cet ile que son bras fit trembler tant de fois,
+   Quand dans le cours de ses exploits,
+   Il brisoit la tete des Rois,
+   Et soumettoit un peuple a son joug seul docile.
+
+   "Mer tu t'en es trouble; O mer tes flots emus
+   Semblent dire en grondant aux plus lointains rivages
+   Que l'effroi de la terre et ton maitre n'est plus.
+
+   "Tel au ciel autrefois s'envola Romulus,
+   Tel il quitta la Terre, au milieu des orages,
+   Tel d'un peuple guerrier il recut les homages;
+   Obei dans sa vie, sa mort adore,
+   Son palais fut un Temple," &c.
+
+* * * * *
+
+   "We must resign! heaven his great soul does claim
+   In storms as loud as his immortal fame;
+   His dying groans, his last breath shakes our isle,
+   And trees uncut fall for his funeral pile:
+   About his palace their broad roots are tost
+   Into the air; so Romulus was lost!
+   New Rome in such a tempest missed her king,
+   And from obeying fell to worshipping.
+   On OEta's top thus Hercules lay dead,
+   With ruined oaks and pines about him spread.
+   Nature herself took notice of his death,
+   And, sighing, swelled the sea with such a breath,
+   That to remotest shores the billows rolled,
+   Th' approaching fate of his great ruler told."
+
+   WALLER.
+
+It was this elogium that gave occasion to the reply (taken notice of in
+Bayle's Dictionary), which Waller made to King Charles II.  This king, to
+whom Waller had a little before (as is usual with bards and monarchs)
+presented a copy of verses embroidered with praises, reproached the poet
+for not writing with so much energy and fire as when he had applauded the
+Usurper (meaning Oliver).  "Sir," replied Waller to the king, "we poets
+succeed better in fiction than in truth."  This answer was not so sincere
+as that which a Dutch ambassador made, who, when the same monarch
+complained that his masters paid less regard to him than they had done to
+Cromwell.  "Ah, sir!" says the Ambassador, "Oliver was quite another
+man--"  It is not my intent to give a commentary on Waller's character,
+nor on that of any other person; for I consider men after their death in
+no other light than as they were writers, and wholly disregard everything
+else.  I shall only observe that Waller, though born in a court, and to
+an estate of five or six thousand pounds sterling a year, was never so
+proud or so indolent as to lay aside the happy talent which Nature had
+indulged him.  The Earls of Dorset and Roscommon, the two Dukes of
+Buckingham, the Lord Halifax, and so many other noblemen, did not think
+the reputation they obtained of very great poets and illustrious writers,
+any way derogatory to their quality.  They are more glorious for their
+works than for their titles.  These cultivated the polite arts with as
+much assiduity as though they had been their whole dependence.
+
+They also have made learning appear venerable in the eyes of the vulgar,
+who have need to be led in all things by the great; and who,
+nevertheless, fashion their manners less after those of the nobility (in
+England I mean) than in any other country in the world.
+
+
+
+LETTER XXII.--ON MR. POPE AND SOME OTHER FAMOUS POETS
+
+
+I intended to treat of Mr. Prior, one of the most amiable English poets,
+whom you saw Plenipotentiary and Envoy Extraordinary at Paris in 1712.  I
+also designed to have given you some idea of the Lord Roscommon's and the
+Lord Dorset's muse; but I find that to do this I should be obliged to
+write a large volume, and that, after much pains and trouble, you would
+have but an imperfect idea of all those works.  Poetry is a kind of music
+in which a man should have some knowledge before he pretends to judge of
+it.  When I give you a translation of some passages from those foreign
+poets, I only prick down, and that imperfectly, their music; but then I
+cannot express the taste of their harmony.
+
+There is one English poem especially which I should despair of ever
+making you understand, the title whereof is "Hudibras."  The subject of
+it is the Civil War in the time of the grand rebellion, and the
+principles and practice of the Puritans are therein ridiculed.  It is Don
+Quixote, it is our "Satire Menippee" blended together.  I never found so
+much wit in one single book as in that, which at the same time is the
+most difficult to be translated.  Who would believe that a work which
+paints in such lively and natural colours the several foibles and follies
+of mankind, and where we meet with more sentiments than words, should
+baffle the endeavours of the ablest translator?  But the reason of this
+is, almost every part of it alludes to particular incidents.  The clergy
+are there made the principal object of ridicule, which is understood but
+by few among the laity.  To explain this a commentary would be requisite,
+and humour when explained is no longer humour.  Whoever sets up for a
+commentator of smart sayings and repartees is himself a blockhead.  This
+is the reason why the works of the ingenious Dean Swift, who has been
+called the English Rabelais, will never be well understood in France.
+This gentleman has the honour (in common with Rabelais) of being a
+priest, and, like him, laughs at everything; but, in my humble opinion,
+the title of the English Rabelais which is given the dean is highly
+derogatory to his genius.  The former has interspersed his unaccountably-
+fantastic and unintelligible book with the most gay strokes of humour;
+but which, at the same time, has a greater proportion of impertinence.  He
+has been vastly lavish of erudition, of smut, and insipid raillery.  An
+agreeable tale of two pages is purchased at the expense of whole volumes
+of nonsense.  There are but few persons, and those of a grotesque taste,
+who pretend to understand and to esteem this work; for, as to the rest of
+the nation, they laugh at the pleasant and diverting touches which are
+found in Rabelais and despise his book.  He is looked upon as the prince
+of buffoons.  The readers are vexed to think that a man who was master of
+so much wit should have made so wretched a use of it; he is an
+intoxicated philosopher who never wrote but when he was in liquor.
+
+Dean Swift is Rabelais in his senses, and frequenting the politest
+company.  The former, indeed, is not so gay as the latter, but then he
+possesses all the delicacy, the justness, the choice, the good taste, in
+all which particulars our giggling rural Vicar Rabelais is wanting.  The
+poetical numbers of Dean Swift are of a singular and almost inimitable
+taste; true humour, whether in prose or verse, seems to be his peculiar
+talent; but whoever is desirous of understanding him perfectly must visit
+the island in which he was born.
+
+It will be much easier for you to form an idea of Mr. Pope's works.  He
+is, in my opinion, the most elegant, the most correct poet; and, at the
+same time, the most harmonious (a circumstance which redounds very much
+to the honour of this muse) that England ever gave birth to.  He has
+mellowed the harsh sounds of the English trumpet to the soft accents of
+the flute.  His compositions may be easily translated, because they are
+vastly clear and perspicuous; besides, most of his subjects are general,
+and relative to all nations.
+
+His "Essay on Criticism" will soon be known in France by the translation
+which l'Abbe de Resnel has made of it.
+
+Here is an extract from his poem entitled the "Rape of the Lock," which I
+just now translated with the latitude I usually take on these occasions;
+for, once again, nothing can be more ridiculous than to translate a poet
+literally:--
+
+   "Umbriel, a l'instant, vieil gnome rechigne,
+   Va d'une aile pesante et d'un air renfrogne
+   Chercher en murmurant la caverne profonde,
+   Ou loin des doux raions que repand l'oeil du monde
+   La Deesse aux Vapeurs a choisi son sejour,
+   Les Tristes Aquilons y sifflent a l'entour,
+   Et le souffle mal sain de leur aride haleine
+   Y porte aux environs la fievre et la migraine.
+   Sur un riche sofa derriere un paravent
+   Loin des flambeaux, du bruit, des parleurs et du vent,
+   La quinteuse deesse incessamment repose,
+   Le coeur gros de chagrin, sans en savoir la cause.
+   N'aiant pense jamais, l'esprit toujours trouble,
+   L'oeil charge, le teint pale, et l'hypocondre enfle.
+   La medisante Envie, est assise aupres d'elle,
+   Vieil spectre feminin, decrepite pucelle,
+   Avec un air devot dechirant son prochain,
+   Et chansonnant les Gens l'Evangile a la main.
+   Sur un lit plein de fleurs negligemment panchee
+   Une jeune beaute non loin d'elle est couchee,
+   C'est l'Affectation qui grassaie en parlant,
+   Ecoute sans entendre, et lorgne en regardant.
+   Qui rougit sans pudeur, et rit de tout sans joie,
+   De cent maux differens pretend qu'elle est la proie;
+   Et pleine de sante sous le rouge et le fard,
+   Se plaint avec molesse, et se pame avec art."
+
+   "Umbriel, a dusky, melancholy sprite
+   As ever sullied the fair face of light,
+   Down to the central earth, his proper scene,
+   Repairs to search the gloomy cave of Spleen.
+   Swift on his sooty pinions flits the gnome,
+   And in a vapour reached the dismal dome.
+   No cheerful breeze this sullen region knows,
+   The dreaded east is all the wind that blows.
+   Here, in a grotto, sheltered close from air,
+   And screened in shades from day's detested glare,
+   She sighs for ever on her pensive bed,
+   Pain at her side, and Megrim at her head,
+   Two handmaids wait the throne.  Alike in place,
+   But differing far in figure and in face,
+   Here stood Ill-nature, like an ancient maid,
+   Her wrinkled form in black and white arrayed;
+   With store of prayers for mornings, nights, and noons,
+   Her hand is filled; her bosom with lampoons.
+   There Affectation, with a sickly mien,
+   Shows in her cheek the roses of eighteen,
+   Practised to lisp, and hang the head aside,
+   Faints into airs, and languishes with pride;
+   On the rich quilt sinks with becoming woe,
+   Wrapt in a gown, for sickness and for show."
+
+This extract, in the original (not in the faint translation I have given
+you of it), may be compared to the description of _la Molesse_ (softness
+or effeminacy), in Boileau's "Lutrin."
+
+Methinks I now have given you specimens enough from the English poets.  I
+have made some transient mention of their philosophers, but as for good
+historians among them, I don't know of any; and, indeed, a Frenchman was
+forced to write their history.  Possibly the English genius, which is
+either languid or impetuous, has not yet acquired that unaffected
+eloquence, that plain but majestic air which history requires.  Possibly
+too, the spirit of party which exhibits objects in a dim and confused
+light may have sunk the credit of their historians.  One half of the
+nation is always at variance with the other half.  I have met with people
+who assured me that the Duke of Marlborough was a coward, and that Mr.
+Pope was a fool; just as some Jesuits in France declare Pascal to have
+been a man of little or no genius, and some Jansenists affirm Father
+Bourdaloue to have been a mere babbler.  The Jacobites consider Mary
+Queen of Scots as a pious heroine, but those of an opposite party look
+upon her as a prostitute, an adulteress, a murderer.  Thus the English
+have memorials of the several reigns, but no such thing as a history.
+There is, indeed, now living, one Mr. Gordon (the public are obliged to
+him for a translation of Tacitus), who is very capable of writing the
+history of his own country, but Rapin de Thoyras got the start of him.  To
+conclude, in my opinion the English have not such good historians as the
+French have no such thing as a real tragedy, have several delightful
+comedies, some wonderful passages in certain of their poems, and boast of
+philosophers that are worthy of instructing mankind.  The English have
+reaped very great benefit from the writers of our nation, and therefore
+we ought (since they have not scrupled to be in our debt) to borrow from
+them.  Both the English and we came after the Italians, who have been our
+instructors in all the arts, and whom we have surpassed in some.  I
+cannot determine which of the three nations ought to be honoured with the
+palm; but happy the writer who could display their various merits.
+
+
+
+LETTER XXIII.--ON THE REGARD THAT OUGHT TO BE SHOWN TO MEN OF LETTERS
+
+
+Neither the English nor any other people have foundations established in
+favour of the polite arts like those in France.  There are Universities
+in most countries, but it is in France only that we meet with so
+beneficial an encouragement for astronomy and all parts of the
+mathematics, for physic, for researches into antiquity, for painting,
+sculpture, and architecture.  Louis XIV. has immortalised his name by
+these several foundations, and this immortality did not cost him two
+hundred thousand livres a year.
+
+I must confess that one of the things I very much wonder at is, that as
+the Parliament of Great Britain have promised a reward of 20,000 pounds
+sterling to any person who may discover the longitude, they should never
+have once thought to imitate Louis XIV. in his munificence with regard to
+the arts and sciences.
+
+Merit, indeed, meets in England with rewards of another kind, which
+redound more to the honour of the nation.  The English have so great a
+veneration for exalted talents, that a man of merit in their country is
+always sure of making his fortune.  Mr. Addison in France would have been
+elected a member of one of the academies, and, by the credit of some
+women, might have obtained a yearly pension of twelve hundred livres, or
+else might have been imprisoned in the Bastile, upon pretence that
+certain strokes in his tragedy of _Cato_ had been discovered which
+glanced at the porter of some man in power.  Mr. Addison was raised to
+the post of Secretary of State in England.  Sir Isaac Newton was made
+Master of the Royal Mint.  Mr. Congreve had a considerable employment.
+Mr. Prior was Plenipotentiary.  Dr. Swift is Dean of St. Patrick in
+Dublin, and is more revered in Ireland than the Primate himself.  The
+religion which Mr. Pope professes excludes him, indeed, from preferments
+of every kind, but then it did not prevent his gaining two hundred
+thousand livres by his excellent translation of Homer.  I myself saw a
+long time in France the author of _Rhadamistus_ ready to perish for
+hunger.  And the son of one of the greatest men our country ever gave
+birth to, and who was beginning to run the noble career which his father
+had set him, would have been reduced to the extremes of misery had he not
+been patronised by Monsieur Fagon.
+
+But the circumstance which mostly encourages the arts in England is the
+great veneration which is paid them.  The picture of the Prime Minister
+hangs over the chimney of his own closet, but I have seen that of Mr.
+Pope in twenty noblemen's houses.  Sir Isaac Newton was revered in his
+lifetime, and had a due respect paid to him after his death; the greatest
+men in the nation disputing who should have the honour of holding up his
+pall.  Go into Westminster Abbey, and you will find that what raises the
+admiration of the spectator is not the mausoleums of the English kings,
+but the monuments which the gratitude of the nation has erected to
+perpetuate the memory of those illustrious men who contributed to its
+glory.  We view their statues in that abbey in the same manner as those
+of Sophocles, Plato, and other immortal personages were viewed in Athens;
+and I am persuaded that the bare sight of those glorious monuments has
+fired more than one breast, and been the occasion of their becoming great
+men.
+
+The English have even been reproached with paying too extravagant honours
+to mere merit, and censured for interring the celebrated actress Mrs.
+Oldfield in Westminster Abbey, with almost the same pomp as Sir Isaac
+Newton.  Some pretend that the English had paid her these great funeral
+honours, purposely to make us more strongly sensible of the barbarity and
+injustice which they object to us, for having buried Mademoiselle Le
+Couvreur ignominiously in the fields.
+
+But be assured from me, that the English were prompted by no other
+principle in burying Mrs. Oldfield in Westminster Abbey than their good
+sense.  They are far from being so ridiculous as to brand with infamy an
+art which has immortalised a Euripides and a Sophocles; or to exclude
+from the body of their citizens a set of people whose business is to set
+off with the utmost grace of speech and action those pieces which the
+nation is proud of.
+
+Under the reign of Charles I. and in the beginning of the civil wars
+raised by a number of rigid fanatics, who at last were the victims to it;
+a great many pieces were published against theatrical and other shows,
+which were attacked with the greater virulence because that monarch and
+his queen, daughter to Henry I. of France, were passionately fond of
+them.
+
+One Mr. Prynne, a man of most furiously scrupulous principles, who would
+have thought himself damned had he worn a cassock instead of a short
+cloak, and have been glad to see one-half of mankind cut the other to
+pieces for the glory of God, and the _Propaganda Fide_; took it into his
+head to write a most wretched satire against some pretty good comedies,
+which were exhibited very innocently every night before their majesties.
+He quoted the authority of the Rabbis, and some passages from St.
+Bonaventure, to prove that the OEdipus of Sophocles was the work of the
+evil spirit; that Terence was excommunicated _ipso facto_; and added,
+that doubtless Brutus, who was a very severe Jansenist, assassinated
+Julius Caesar for no other reason but because he, who was Pontifex
+Maximus, presumed to write a tragedy the subject of which was OEdipus.
+Lastly, he declared that all who frequented the theatre were
+excommunicated, as they thereby renounced their baptism.  This was
+casting the highest insult on the king and all the royal family; and as
+the English loved their prince at that time, they could not bear to hear
+a writer talk of excommunicating him, though they themselves afterwards
+cut his head off.  Prynne was summoned to appear before the Star Chamber;
+his wonderful book, from which Father Le Brun stole his, was sentenced to
+be burnt by the common hangman, and himself to lose his ears.  His trial
+is now extant.
+
+The Italians are far from attempting to cast a blemish on the opera, or
+to excommunicate Signor Senesino or Signora Cuzzoni.  With regard to
+myself, I could presume to wish that the magistrates would suppress I
+know not what contemptible pieces written against the stage.  For when
+the English and Italians hear that we brand with the greatest mark of
+infamy an art in which we excel; that we excommunicate persons who
+receive salaries from the king; that we condemn as impious a spectacle
+exhibited in convents and monasteries; that we dishonour sports in which
+Louis XIV. and Louis XV., performed as actors; that we give the title of
+the devil's works to pieces which are received by magistrates of the most
+severe character, and represented before a virtuous queen; when, I say,
+foreigners are told of this insolent conduct, this contempt for the royal
+authority, and this Gothic rusticity which some presume to call Christian
+severity, what an idea must they entertain of our nation?  And how will
+it be possible for them to conceive, either that our laws give a sanction
+to an art which is declared infamous, or that some persons dare to stamp
+with infamy an art which receives a sanction from the laws, is rewarded
+by kings, cultivated and encouraged by the greatest men, and admired by
+whole nations?  And that Father Le Brun's impertinent libel against the
+stage is seen in a bookseller's shop, standing the very next to the
+immortal labours of Racine, of Corneille, of Moliere, &c.
+
+
+
+LETTER XXIV.--ON THE ROYAL SOCIETY AND OTHER ACADEMIES
+
+
+The English had an Academy of Sciences many years before us, but then it
+is not under such prudent regulations as ours, the only reason of which
+very possibly is, because it was founded before the Academy of Paris; for
+had it been founded after, it would very probably have adopted some of
+the sage laws of the former and improved upon others.
+
+Two things, and those the most essential to man, are wanting in the Royal
+Society of London, I mean rewards and laws.  A seat in the Academy at
+Paris is a small but secure fortune to a geometrician or a chemist; but
+this is so far from being the case at London, that the several members of
+the Royal Society are at a continual, though indeed small expense.  Any
+man in England who declares himself a lover of the mathematics and
+natural philosophy, and expresses an inclination to be a member of the
+Royal Society, is immediately elected into it.  But in France it is not
+enough that a man who aspires to the honour of being a member of the
+Academy, and of receiving the royal stipend, has a love for the sciences;
+he must at the same time be deeply skilled in them; and is obliged to
+dispute the seat with competitors who are so much the more formidable as
+they are fired by a principle of glory, by interest, by the difficulty
+itself; and by that inflexibility of mind which is generally found in
+those who devote themselves to that pertinacious study, the mathematics.
+
+The Academy of Sciences is prudently confined to the study of Nature,
+and, indeed, this is a field spacious enough for fifty or threescore
+persons to range in.  That of London mixes indiscriminately literature
+with physics; but methinks the founding an academy merely for the polite
+arts is more judicious, as it prevents confusion, and the joining, in
+some measure, of heterogeneals, such as a dissertation on the
+head-dresses of the Roman ladies with a hundred or more new curves.
+
+As there is very little order and regularity in the Royal Society, and
+not the least encouragement; and that the Academy of Paris is on a quite
+different foot, it is no wonder that our transactions are drawn up in a
+more just and beautiful manner than those of the English.  Soldiers who
+are under a regular discipline, and besides well paid, must necessarily
+at last perform more glorious achievements than others who are mere
+volunteers.  It must indeed be confessed that the Royal Society boast
+their Newton, but then he did not owe his knowledge and discoveries to
+that body; so far from it, that the latter were intelligible to very few
+of his fellow members.  A genius like that of Sir Isaac belonged to all
+the academies in the world, because all had a thousand things to learn of
+him.
+
+The celebrated Dean Swift formed a design, in the latter end of the late
+Queen's reign, to found an academy for the English tongue upon the model
+of that of the French.  This project was promoted by the late Earl of
+Oxford, Lord High Treasurer, and much more by the Lord Bolingbroke,
+Secretary of State, who had the happy talent of speaking without
+premeditation in the Parliament House with as much purity as Dean Swift
+wrote in his closet, and who would have been the ornament and protector
+of that academy.  Those only would have been chosen members of it whose
+works will last as long as the English tongue, such as Dean Swift, Mr.
+Prior, whom we saw here invested with a public character, and whose fame
+in England is equal to that of La Fontaine in France; Mr. Pope, the
+English Boileau, Mr. Congreve, who may be called their Moliere, and
+several other eminent persons whose names I have forgot; all these would
+have raised the glory of that body to a great height even in its infancy.
+But Queen Anne being snatched suddenly from the world, the Whigs were
+resolved to ruin the protectors of the intended academy, a circumstance
+that was of the most fatal consequence to polite literature.  The members
+of this academy would have had a very great advantage over those who
+first formed that of the French, for Swift, Prior, Congreve, Dryden,
+Pope, Addison, &c. had fixed the English tongue by their writings;
+whereas Chapelain, Colletet, Cassaigne, Faret, Perrin, Cotin, our first
+academicians, were a disgrace to their country; and so much ridicule is
+now attached to their very names, that if an author of some genius in
+this age had the misfortune to be called Chapelain or Cotin, he would be
+under a necessity of changing his name.
+
+One circumstance, to which the English Academy should especially have
+attended, is to have prescribed to themselves occupations of a quite
+different kind from those with which our academicians amuse themselves.  A
+wit of this country asked me for the memoirs of the French Academy.  I
+answered, they have no memoirs, but have printed threescore or fourscore
+volumes in quarto of compliments.  The gentleman perused one or two of
+them, but without being able to understand the style in which they were
+written, though he understood all our good authors perfectly.  "All,"
+says he, "I see in these elegant discourses is, that the member elect
+having assured the audience that his predecessor was a great man, that
+Cardinal Richelieu was a very great man, that the Chancellor Seguier was
+a pretty great man, that Louis XIV. was a more than great man, the
+director answers in the very same strain, and adds, that the member elect
+may also be a sort of great man, and that himself, in quality of
+director, must also have some share in this greatness."
+
+The cause why all these academical discourses have unhappily done so
+little honour to this body is evident enough.  _Vitium est temporis
+potius quam hominis_ (the fault is owing to the age rather than to
+particular persons).  It grew up insensibly into a custom for every
+academician to repeat these elogiums at his reception; it was laid down
+as a kind of law that the public should be indulged from time to time the
+sullen satisfaction of yawning over these productions.  If the reason
+should afterwards be sought, why the greatest geniuses who have been
+incorporated into that body have sometimes made the worst speeches, I
+answer, that it is wholly owing to a strong propension, the gentlemen in
+question had to shine, and to display a thread-bare, worn-out subject in
+a new and uncommon light.  The necessity of saying something, the
+perplexity of having nothing to say, and a desire of being witty, are
+three circumstances which alone are capable of making even the greatest
+writer ridiculous.  These gentlemen, not being able to strike out any new
+thoughts, hunted after a new play of words, and delivered themselves
+without thinking at all: in like manner as people who should seem to chew
+with great eagerness, and make as though they were eating, at the same
+time that they were just starved.
+
+It is a law in the French Academy, to publish all those discourses by
+which only they are known, but they should rather make a law never to
+print any of them.
+
+But the Academy of the _Belles Lettres_ have a more prudent and more
+useful object, which is, to present the public with a collection of
+transactions that abound with curious researches and critiques.  These
+transactions are already esteemed by foreigners; and it were only to be
+wished that some subjects in them had been more thoroughly examined, and
+that others had not been treated at all.  As, for instance, we should
+have been very well satisfied, had they omitted I know not what
+dissertation on the prerogative of the right hand over the left; and some
+others, which, though not published under so ridiculous a title, are yet
+written on subjects that are almost as frivolous and silly.
+
+The Academy of Sciences, in such of their researches as are of a more
+difficult kind and a more sensible use, embrace the knowledge of nature
+and the improvements of the arts.  We may presume that such profound,
+such uninterrupted pursuits as these, such exact calculations, such
+refined discoveries, such extensive and exalted views, will, at last,
+produce something that may prove of advantage to the universe.  Hitherto,
+as we have observed together, the most useful discoveries have been made
+in the most barbarous times.  One would conclude that the business of the
+most enlightened ages and the most learned bodies, is, to argue and
+debate on things which were invented by ignorant people.  We know exactly
+the angle which the sail of a ship is to make with the keel in order to
+its sailing better; and yet Columbus discovered America without having
+the least idea of the property of this angle: however, I am far from
+inferring from hence that we are to confine ourselves merely to a blind
+practice, but happy it were, would naturalists and geometricians unite,
+as much as possible, the practice with the theory.
+
+Strange, but so it is, that those things which reflect the greatest
+honour on the human mind are frequently of the least benefit to it!  A
+man who understands the four fundamental rules of arithmetic, aided by a
+little good sense, shall amass prodigious wealth in trade, shall become a
+Sir Peter Delme, a Sir Richard Hopkins, a Sir Gilbert Heathcote, whilst a
+poor algebraist spends his whole life in searching for astonishing
+properties and relations in numbers, which at the same time are of no
+manner of use, and will not acquaint him with the nature of exchanges.
+This is very nearly the case with most of the arts: there is a certain
+point beyond which all researches serve to no other purpose than merely
+to delight an inquisitive mind.  Those ingenious and useless truths may
+be compared to stars which, by being placed at too great a distance,
+cannot afford us the least light.
+
+With regard to the French Academy, how great a service would they do to
+literature, to the language, and the nation, if, instead of publishing a
+set of compliments annually, they would give us new editions of the
+valuable works written in the age of Louis XIV., purged from the several
+errors of diction which are crept into them.  There are many of these
+errors in Corneille and Moliere, but those in La Fontaine are very
+numerous.  Such as could not be corrected might at least be pointed out.
+By this means, as all the Europeans read those works, they would teach
+them our language in its utmost purity--which, by that means, would be
+fixed to a lasting standard; and valuable French books being then printed
+at the King's expense, would prove one of the most glorious monuments the
+nation could boast.  I have been told that Boileau formerly made this
+proposal, and that it has since been revived by a gentleman eminent for
+his genius, his fine sense, and just taste for criticism; but this
+thought has met with the fate of many other useful projects, of being
+applauded and neglected.
+
+
+
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