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crumble into dust, and mix with the mass of inaniinate beings, that it equally deserves our admiration and pity. The mystery of such men's unbelief is not hard to be penetrated; and indeed amounts to nothing more than a sordid hope that they shall not be immortal, because they dare not be so.

This brings me back to my first observation, and gives me occasion to say further, that as worthy actions spring from worthy thoughts, so worthy thoughts are likewise the consequence of worthy actions. But the wretch who has degraded himself below the character of immortality, is very willing to resign his pretensions to it, and to substitute in its room a dark negative happiness in the extinction of his being.

The admirable Shakspeare has given us a strong image of the unsupported condition of such a person in his last minutes, in the second part of King Henry the Sixth, where Cardinal Beaufort, who had been concerned in the murder of the good Duke Humphry, is represented on his death-bed. After some short confused speeches which shew an imagination disturbed with guilt, just as he was expiring, King Henry, standing by him full of compassion, says,

"Lord Cardinal! if thou think'st on heaven's bliss, Hold up thy hand, make signal of that hope !—

He dies, and makes no sign!

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"The despair which is here shewn, without a word or action on the part of the dying person, is beyond what could be painted by the most forcible expressions whatever.

I shall not pursue this thought farther, but only add, that as annihilation is not to be had with a wish, so it is the most abject thing in the world to wish it. What are honour, fame, wealth, or power, when compared with the generous expectation of a being without end, and a happiness adequate to that being?

I shall trouble you no farther; but with a certain gravity which these thoughts have given me, I

reflect upon some things people say of you, as they will of men who distinguish themselves, which I hope are not true; and wish you as good a man as you are an author.

I am, SIR,

• Your most obedient humble servant,

BUCHES..

'T. D.'

N° 211. THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 1, 1711.

Fictis meminerit nos jocari fabulis.

PHÆDR. 1. 1. Prol. Let it be remembered, that we sport in fabled stories.

HAVING

AVING lately translated the fragment of an old poett, which describes woman-kind under several characters, and supposes them to have drawn their different manners and dispositions from those animals and elements out of which he tells us they were compounded; I had some thoughts of giving the sex their revenge, by laying together in another paper the many vicious characters which prevail in the male world, and shewing the different ingredients that go to the making up of such different humours and constitutions. Horace has a thought which is something akin to this, when, in order to excuse himself to his mistress for an invective which he had written against her, and to account for that unreasonable fury with which the heart of man is often transported, he tells us, that when Prometheus made his man of clay, in the kneading up of the heart, he seasoned it with some furious particles of the lion. But upon turning this plan to and fro in my thoughts, I observed so many unaccountable humours in man, that I did not know out of what animals to fetch them. Male souls are diversified with so many characters, that the world has not variety of + Simonides.

*N° 209.

Lib. i. ode xVÂ.

materials sufficient to furnish out their different tempers and inclinations. The creation, with all its animals and elements, would not be large enough to supply their several extravagancies.

Instead therefore of pursuing the thought of Simonides, I shall observe, that as he has exposed the vicious part of women from the doctrine of preexistence, some of the ancient philosophers have, in a manner, satyrized the vicious part of the human species in general, from a notion of the soul's post-existence, if I may so call it; and that as Simonides describes brutes entering into the composition of women, others have represented human souls as entering into brutes. This is commonly termed the doctrine of transmigration, which supposes that human souls, upon their leaving the body, become the souls of such kinds of brutes as they most resemble in their manners; or to give an account of it, as Mr. Dryden has described it in his translation of Pythagoras's speech in the fifteenth book of Ovid, where that philosopher dissuades his hearers from eating flesh :

Thus all things are but alter'd, nothing dies,
And here and there th' unbodied spirit flies:
By time, or force, or sickness dispossess'd,
And lodges where it lights, in bird or beast;
Or hunts without till ready limbs it find,
And actuates those according to their kind:
From tenement to tenement is toss'd,
The soul is still the same, the figure only lost.
Then let not piety be put to flight,

To please the taste of glutton appetite;
But suffer inmate souls secure to dwell,
Lest from their seats your parents you expel;
With rapid hunger feed upon your kind,
Or from a beast dislodge a brother's mind.'

Plato, in the vision of Erus the Armenian, which I may possibly make the subject of a future speculation, records some beautiful transmigrations; as that the soul of Orpheus, who was musical, melancholy, and a woman-hater, entered into a swan;

the soul of Ajax, which was all wrath and fierceness, into a lion; the soul of Agamemnon, that was rapacious and imperial, into an eagle; and the soul of Thersites, who was a mimic and a buffoon, into a monkey.

Mr. Congreve, in a prologue* to one of his comedies, has touched upon this doctrine with great humour:

Thus Aristotle's soul of old that was,
May now be damn'd to animate an ass;
Or in this very house, for aught we know,
Is doing painful penance in some beau.'

I shall fill up this paper with some letters which my last Tuesday's speculation + has produced. My following correspondents will shew, what I there observed, that the speculation of that day affects only the lower part of the sex.

From my house in the Strand, October 30, 1711. < MR. SPECTATOR,

UPON reading your Tuesday's paper, I find by several symptoms in my constitution that I am a bee. My shop, or if you please to call it so, my cell, is in that great hive of females which goes by the name of the New-Exchange; where I am daily employed in gathering together a little stock of gain from the finest flowers about the town, I mean the ladies and the beaux. I have a numerous swarm of children, to whom I give the best education I ́am able. But, Sir, it is my misfortune to be married to a drone, who lives upon what I get, without bringing any thing into the common stock. Now, Sir, as on the one hand I take care not to behave myself towards him like a wasp, so likewise I would not have him look upon me as an humble bee; for which reason I do all I can to put him upon laying up provisions for a bad day, and frequently represent to him the fatal effects his sloth and negligence

*This is a mistake: it is in the Epilogue to "Love for Love." No 209.

may bring upon us in our old age. I must beg that you will join with me in your good advice upon this occasion, and you will for ever oblige your humble

servant,

· SIR,

MELISSA.*

Piccadilly, October 31, 1711. I AM joined in wedlock for my sins to one of those fillies who are described in the old poet with that hard name you gave us the other day. She has a flowing mane, and a skin as soft as silk. But, Sir, she passes half her life at her glass, and almost ruins me in ribands. For my own part, I am a plain handicraft man, and in danger of breaking by her laziness and expensiveness. Pray, master, tell me in your next paper, whether I may not expect of her so much drudgery as to take care of her family, and to curry her hide in case of refusal.

"Your loving friend,

'BARNABY BRITTLE.'

66 MR SPECTATOR,

Cheapside, October 30,

I AM mightily pleased with the humour of the cat ; be so kind as to enlarge upon that subject.

Yours till death,

"JOSIAH HENPECK.

P. S. You must know I am married to a Gri

malkin.'

'SIR,

Wapping, October 31, 1711. EVER since your Spectator of Tuesday last came into our family, my husband is pleased to call me his Oceana, because the foolish old poet that you have translated says, that the souls of some woinen are made of sea-water. This it seems has encouraged my saucebox to be witty upon me. When I am angry, he cries, "Pr'ythee, my dear, be ealm;" when I chide one of my servants, "Pr'ythee, child, do not bluster." He had the impudence about an hour ago to tell me, that he was a seafaring man,

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