Who shall partake of our perfections,
And live and act by our directions
(For the chief bliss of any station
Is nought without communication),
Let therefore every godhead give
What this new being should receive; ·
But care important must be had
To mingle well of good and bad,
That, by the’allaying mixture, he
May not approach to deity.'

The sovereign spake, the gods agree,
And each began in his degree:
Behind the throne of Jove there stood
Two vessels of celestial wood,
Containing just two equal measures;
One filld with pain, and one with pleasures;
The gods drew out from both of these,
And mix'd them with their essences
(Which essences are heavenly still,
When undisturb’d by natural ill,
And man to moral good is prone,
Let but the moral powers alone,
And not pervert them by tuition,
Or conjure them by superstition),
Hence man partakes an equal share
Of pleasing thoughts and gloomy care,
And Pain and Pleasure e'er shall be,
As Plato'

in

Will surely find the mental treasure
Of Virtue, only real pleasure:
Follow the pleasurable road,
That fatal siren reckons good,
'Twill lead thee to the gloomy cell,
Where Pain and Melancholy dwell.
Health is the child of Abstinence,
Disease, of a luxurious sense;
Despair, that hellish fiend, proceeds
From loosen'd thoughts and impious deeds;
And the sweet offspring of Content
Flows from the mind's calm government.
Thus, man, thy state is free from woe,
If thou wouldst choose to make it so.
Murmur not then at Heaven's decree,
The gods have given thee liberty,
And placed within thy conscious breast,
Reason, as an unerring test,
And shouldst thou fix on misery,
The fault is not in them, but thee.

THE

LIFE

OF

NATHANIEL COTTON, M. D.

BY

R. A. DAVENPORT, Esq,

Of the Life of Cotton so few particulars have been transmitted to us by his relations and friends that we are left in ignorance even as to the family whence he descended, and the place and time of his birth, That, however, he was born about the year 1707 is rendered almost certain by a passage in one of his letters. His medical studies he completed at Leyden, under the celebrated Boerhaave, and he is believed to have taken his degree at that university.

When he returned to England, it was his intention to practise as a general physician. But this plan he was induced to relinquish, in consequence of a favourable opportunity being offered to him of exercising his skill in a separate and important branch of the healing art, A Dr. Crawley, of Dunstable, who received ipsane persons under his care, was on the point of retiring from his professional labours; and, as Cotton had studied all the varieties of mental disease, he resolved to become the successor of Dr,