dred verses, between Apollo and Daphne, which pleased me as much as anything of his I ever read.-P. There are, also, four dialogues in prose, between persons of characters very strongly opposed to one another, which I thought very good. One of them was between Charles the Fifth and his tutor, Adrian the Sixth; to show the different turns of a person who had studied human nature only in his closet, and of one who had rambled all over Europe. Another between Montaigne and Locke, on a most regular and a very loose way of thinking. A third, between Oliver Cromwell and his mad Porter: and the fourth, between Sir Thomas More and the Vicar of Bray.-P. Prior left most of his effects to the poor woman he kept company with, his Chloé; everybody knows what a wretch I think she had been a little alehouse-keeper's she was. wife.*-P, Mr. Addison wrote very fluently: but he was sometimes very slow and scrupulous in correcting. He would show his verses to several friends; and would alter almost everything that any of them hinted at as wrong. He seemed to be too diffident of himself; and too much concerned about his character as a poet: or (as he worded it) too solicitous for that kind of praise, which, God knows, is but a very little matter after all!" I wonder then why his letter to Sacheverel was published?"—That was not published till after his death, and I dare say he would not have suffered it to have been printed had he been living; for he himself used to speak of it as a poor thing. He wrote it when he was very young; and as such, gave the characters of some of our best poets in it, only by hearsay. Thus his character * This celebrated lady is now married to a cobbler at Note by Mr. Spence. of Chaucer is diametrically opposite to the truth; he blames him for want of humour. The character he gives of Spenser is false too; and I have heard him say, that he never read Spenser till fifteen years after he wrote it.-P. Many of his Spectators he wrote very fast; and sent them to the press as soon as they were written. It seems to have been best for him not to have had too much time to correct.-P. Addison was perfect good company with intimates; and had something more charming in his conversation than I ever knew in any other man: but with any mixture of strangers, and sometimes only with one, he seemed to preserve his dignity much; with a stiff sort of silence.-P. Lord Dorset used to say of a very good-natured dull fellow," "Tis a thousand pities that man is not ill-natured! that one might kick him out of company.”—P. . When Clement the Eleventh had declared in one of his decrees," that any one who held that grace might not be had out of the pale of the church, should be accursed;" one of the cardinals who was complimenting his holiness on that head, said, he could have wished it had run thus ; "whoever holds that persons out of the church cannot be saved, let him be accursed." The pope answered, “ that would have been better, had it been time for it yet; and that it might be hoped to come to that, about a hundred years hence."-Ramsay. It was a common saying with the Archbishop of Cambray, "We Catholics go too slow, and our brothers the Protestants go too fast."-R. Ramsay was but a little above twenty, when he first went to the Archbishop of Cambray's. That good prelate gave him the liberty of his library; and favoured him with instructions in his studies. He had, in particular, the use of all the fathers, in which the most material passages were marked out by the archbishop in his own hand, and found those particular directions of very great use to him.-R. The archbishop gave him this for his great rule, in studying their religion; "ever to distinguish what doctrines and conclusions are bottomed on councils, and what on the schoolmen only, or their interpreters. The latter, said he, we have nothing to do with."-R. The Abbé des Fontaines endeavoured as much as he could to irritate the Princess de Conti against Ramsay. "I had a little before been obliged to decline the offer of being governor to one of her sons: that had given some disgust; and the abbé heightened it, by insinuating that a known amour between that princess and the Count of Genoa, was disguised under the story of Striangeus and Zarina." That Count proposed their joining to write a criticism of Cyrus; the princess, half in jest and half in earnest, complied with the proposal. It was she who formed the plan, and wrote the dedication; and the count and the abbé wrote the rest. The countess is one of the most polite and learned ladies in Europe, she reads Horace and Homer in a masterly manner, and has a hundred other excellencies. After all, the character of Zarina does not agree with that of the princess, in the main article; for Zarina refuses the last favour to her gallant: and indeed the whole story was so far from being invented to represent that princess, or any other lady living; that 'tis an old one, and borrowed from one of the later Roman historians.-R. ["Archbishop Tillotson's Sermon against Transubstan tiation, would convince me of the truth of transubstantiation."-Hooke.-How differently do we judge of things when we come to them strongly prepossessed by party! I thought it was one of the finest things that could be written against it: and perhaps both of us are in the wrong.—R. Lord Bolingbroke is one of the politest as well as greatest men in the world. He appeared careless in his talk of religion. In this he differed from Fenelon: Lord Bolingbroke outshines you, but then holds himself in, and reflects some of his own light, so as to make you appear the less inferior to him.-The archbishop never outshone; but would lead you into truths in such a manner, that you thought you discovered them yourself.*—R.] Sir Isaac Newton does not look on attraction as a cause, but as an effect; and probably as an effect of the ethereal fluid. The ancients had a notion much of the same kind, which I have some thoughts of proving in a memorial to the Academy of Sciences at Paris, in order to incline those gentlemen to come into that truth of Sir Isaac's; and not only to allow him (which they already do) to be the greatest geometrician that ever was.—R. Sir Isaac Newton, a little before he died, said: "I don't know what I may seem to the world, but, as to myself, I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.' ."+—R. * Additions from MS. B. This interesting anecdote of our great philosopher's modest opinion of himself and his discoveries, is only another proof of his consummate wisdom. It will recall to the memory of the poetical reader the following beautiful passage from the Paradise Regained of our great poet. Who reads Incessantly, and to his reading brings not A spirit and judgment equal or superior, (And what he brings, what need he elsewhere seek) Deep vers❜d in books, and shallow in himself, Crude or intoxicate, collecting toys, And trifles for choice matters, worth a sponge, END OF SECTION I. EDITOR. |