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I AM quite of Mr. Alderman's opinion; provide you have a very fair prospect of success (for I do not love repulses, though I believe in such cases they are not attended with any disgrace) such an employment must necessarily give countenance and name to one in your profession, not to mention the use it must be of in refreshing, and keeping alive the ideas of practice you have already got, and improving them by new observation. It cannot but lead to other business too, in a more natural way, than perhaps any other, for whatever lucky chance may have introduced into the world, here and there a Physician of great vogue, the same chance may hardly befall another in an age; and the indirect and by-ways that doubtless have succeeded with many, are rather too dirty for you to tread. As to the time it would take up, so much the better. Whenever it interferes with more advantageous practice, it is in your power to quit it. In the mean time it will prepare you for that trouble and constant attendance, which much business requires a much greater degree of. For you are not to dream of being your own master, till old-age, and a satiety of gain shall set you free. I tell you

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tained with Buffon, and edified with the divin Ashton. The first (they say) was a good man, a much as he has been abused; and we will hope th best of the two latter. Mr. [ ] who as [

the just, and animated portrait of Machiavel drawn by Mr Dugald Stewart, in his interesting Dissertation prefixed to the Supplement to the Encyclopædia Britannica, p. 32."The founder of this new Sect [the Machiavelian School] or to speak more correctly, the Systematizer and Apostle of its doctrines, was born as early as 1469, that is, about ten years before Luther. And, like that Reformer, acquired, by the commanding superiority of his genius, an astonishing ascendant (though of a very different nature) over the minds of his followers. No writer, certainly, either in ancient or in modern times, has ever united in a more remarkable degree a greater variety of the most dissimilar, and seemingly the most discordant gifts and attainments,-a profound acquaintance with all those arts of dissimulation and intrigue, which in the petty Cabinets of Italy were then universally confounded with political wisdom.-An imagination familiarized to the cool contemplation of whatever is perfidious or atrocious in the history of conspirators and of tyrants ;-combined with a graphical skill in holding up to laughter the comparative harmless follies of ordinary life. His dramatic humour has been often compared to that of Molière; but it resembles it rather in comic force, than a benevolent gaiety, or in chastened morality. Such as it is, however, it forms an extra, ordinary contrast to that strength of intellectual character, which, in one page, reminds us of the deep sense of Tacitus, and in the next of the dark and infernal policy of Cæsar Borgea. To all this must be superadded a purity of taste, which has enabled him as an historian to rival the severe simplicity of the Grecian masters; and a sagacity in combining historical facts, which was afterwards to afford lights to the school of Montesquieu." See also Note C. p. 152. of the same Work.-Ed.

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