they please, I take to be very injuriously struck at by the afore-mentioned heavy censure; and what greatly aggravates their grievance and my own is, that, were we deprived of those writings, we should be almost totally shut out from information and entertainment in the way of reading.

The first I shall take notice of, is a scheme proposed in Hill's Arithmetic for making Latin verses' by an arithmetical table. The whole treatise is a valuable work in every respect, but never enough to be admired for this stupendous invention, by which as many verses as would make an Iliad or an Eneid, might be told out in a few days, without the least labour of the brain, either in composing or reading them. Surprising author! Had he lived in the earlier ages of the world, when the gods were a making, he had certainly been deified. We should never have heard of Apollo, the Muses, Orpheus, Homer, or any of those other inventers of the old poetry, who taught the world a very tedious and painful method of making verses, by which the health and reason of the poet were frequently and sorely impaired, had the earlier times of literature been enriched with this admirable art.

And yet after all, there are not a few who take upon them to depreciate the invention, who cry down the thing itself as mean and mechanical, and the verses it produces, as destitute, in some measure, of sense and meaning. Those nice gentlemen, in particular, who affect the Belles Lettres, contrary to their usual attachment to sound, and contempt of sense, treat it with the utmost scorn, merely because the verses are generated mathematically. Surely, never any thing, say they, was so pedantic! What! Verses made by arithmetical rules! No doubt the thoughts must be very fine, and the diction vastly elegant. Poems produced this way must be tip-top, to be sure.

It is easy to see there is no reasoning in all this: but mere wit and raillery, though ever so keen, must not be allowed to decide this controversy. No human performance can be perfect in all respects. Homer, in the opinion of some critics, is irregular and inconsistent; Virgil too uniform and cold; Lucan hot and injudicious; Tasso weak and grovelling. In a word, there is no poet so happy in

every particular, as to please all. The only defect of the arithmetical species of poetry is, that it wants meaning. If, however, it is to be condemned on this account, what an infinity of poems must suffer with it! What a catalogue of names, celebrated among polite readers, and laureated at courts, must perish in oblivion! Is mere want of sense so great an objection to a poem? For my part, I should think it were much better to find no meaning in a poem, than a bad one. Considering how it fares with poetry at present, a performance of that kind, which can possibly do no hurt, may deservedly enough be called a good one. Besides, if there be numbers of readers, who do not at all look for meaning in a poem, surely the above mentioned objection can be none with them. And that there are such, I can very safely take upon me to affirm. How often have we heard a fine lady sing that beautiful song, called a* Love Song in the modern taste, to a company of raptured beaus, of whom we may truly say, that they are a little too selfish in the application of their applause, to lavish it away rashly on performances of no merit. Easy readers, among whom I may reckon some of the greatest personages now alive, should have easy writers, that they may not be forced to rack a delicate system of brains over a poem, as if they were straining at a mathematical problem.

Poetical performances are calculated primarily to please. Accordingly to this idea of poetry, it may be aptly divided into that, which pleases by infusing grateful fancies into a vacant mind, of which sort are the poems of Pope, Addison, and Swift, and into that which relieves the mind from the torture of its own uneasy thoughts, of which kind we may esteem the arithmetical poetry as chief. For this purpose I will take the liberty to recommend it as a sovereign opiate. Let the beau, whose heart palpitates with the terrors of a duel, which he must either fight tomorrow, or forfeit all his little stock of honour, read but a dozen pages in a poem of this kind, after he is gone to bed, and I will answer for it, at the hazard of my skill in criticism, he shall sleep, till his adversary hath quitted the field of battle. Let a belle, whose mind is chagrined with the loss of a lap-dog, a lover, or some guineas at quadrille, go im

* Vide Swift's Works, vol. II.

mediately to bed, and get her waiting woman to read her fifty lines in a poem of this kind, and she shall find it as consolatory as the first addresses of a new lover, and as soporific as her prayers. All her thoughts, if she had any, shall insensibly die away, she shall sweetly dissolve into a composure, which no dreams of her former losses shall ruffle.

The second author, whom I shall mention, as admired by me and many others, and censured by some, is lord Shaftsbury. The performances of this author, like the arithmetical verses, are of a very anodyne nature, but in a different way; for whereas, those verses are of sovereign use, in stupifying care; his lordship's writings are of most powerful efficacy in blunting the stings of conscience, one of the most terrible evils incident to this life. This noble person observing that most people are pestered with idle and superstitious fears about certain punishments, said to be inflicted on wicked livers, in a chimerical life after this, and that the conscience of a man, sometimes looking back at his crimes, and anon looking forward at those punishments, is apt to excite very terrible and distracting apprehensions, hath laboured, and that with great success, to dissipate those fears, and relieve the conscience from this heavy yoke, which priests and nurses, taking the advantage of our tender years, have thought fit to impose upon us. His method of doing this however is singular, and adapted to the humour and turn of a very particular class of men, that could not have been relieved by the plain and common expedients of others, who undertake the cure of consciences. To give the reader a clear idea of his lordship's manner, it will be necessary to characterize the set of patients, whom he chose for his province.

They are men of infinite sense and understanding, yet of little or no learning. It is from nature, and from within themselves, that they draw forth a fund of knowledge, in comparison of which the wisdom of the Greeks, Romans and Jews, is but stupidity and ignorance. Hence it cometh to pass, that they seldom read; and when they do, it is with great contempt for the writer, if he doth not recommend himself to them by two things, novelty and obscurity. As to the first, they say, and very justly, to what end a new

book, if the contents are old? The antiquity of an error cannot turn it into truth, and to tell us old truths is impertinence, because we know them already. It is certain, those truths which may be told us concerning ancient occurrences and transactions, are not to be known without reading; but then we are no way concerned in such truths, and besides, as length of time is perpetually weakening the authority of such relations, there is no depending on them. They have also another reason for liking novelty in an author; it supplies them with something to say, which as it is known to few or none, may be easily passed for their own, which trite notions and received opinions can never be.

As to obscurity, they admire it in a writer, for many reasons: First, because it is a great pleasure to them, that others, who have not so much penetration as they, are, by the fruitless perusal of an unintelligible performance, proved to be men of inferior understanding; Secondly, because they can almost as safely retail for their own the sentiments of an author, understood only by themselves, as if his performance had never been published. In the next place, they look upon themselves as sharing with the author in his honour, when they find out his recluse and hidden meaning. The sentiments seem to be generated between them; nay, the reader seems to invent the sentiments of the author, and ought, on many occasions, to have the whole credit to himself, inasmuch as he frequently draws out a shining sentiment from a passage, by which the author either meaned quite another matter, or nothing at all. Again, the gentlemen I am speaking of, have understandings framed, like the eye of the cat or the owl, to see in the dark, so that they can scarcely discern a very glaring sentiment. Hence it is, that of two books wrote against each other on any controverted point, they are always convinced by the more obscure. Had we an university made up of this sort of gentlemen, their public disputations, instead of being managed in the usual plain way, would be carried on like those of the ancient Eastern princes, by cramp questions, and every argument proposed would begin with riddle-myree. Alexander the Great had certainly the honour to be one of this species of men. When his preceptor Aristotle published his ethics, the hero chid the philosopher for having

revealed to the world that system of knowledge, which he had been instructed in, and hoped that nobody else would. But the stagyrite comforted his pupil with an assurance, that, although the book was made public, yet the contents of it were still a secret to every body but Alexander.

People may mince matters as they please; but after all, it is certain, that I and all other authors, like Aristotle, write in order to publish, and publish in order to be praised. It is also as certain, that all readers (I beg pardon of mine), from him with the fesque in his fingers, to him with the spectacles on his nose, do read to gratify their vanity, that is, to gather knowledge, which they intend to make a show of. The persons, whom I have been giving a character of, are readers of a more refined and exalted vanity, than others. They leave the fruit of a bramble or a thorn for meaner people, who can only look up with admiration at those delicious clusters, reserved on the tops of lofty trees, for the hands of such giants in understanding, as those who make the subject of this my panegyric. What is easily obtained, is generally little valued, and we are apt to rate knowledge, as we do other commodities, according to its rarity and the price we pay for it.

By these means it frequently so falleth out, that our gentlemen above mentioned, who carry this humour farther than others, do most admire that which they least understand, taking it for somewhat very sublime, which their towering understandings cannot reach to. They have been told, that philosophy is placed on a mountain difficult of access; and if this mountain should hide its summit in clouds, it strikes them with the greater awe and admiration. They imagine it higher than it is. They gaze at it with strange astonishment, and grow superstitious as they gaze. All things seem larger in the dark, and so do those writings, to which their artful authors give a kind of clouded majesty, by presenting them in fog and vapours to their readers. A reader hath no other way of shewing the force and keenness of his sagacity, as a reader, but by the difficulty of his author; and therefore our piercing wits can neither give themselves nor others a full proof of their penetrating capacities, without authors sufficiently abstruse and hard. All men are not to be pleased by one manner of writing. There is an endless