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rence to all great writers: but our reverence to one would be injustice to another, unless we collated and compared their merits.

Newton. Some are so dissimilar to others, that I know not how it can be done.

of the sun may produce effeminacy and sloth in many constitutions, and contrary effects in many: but I suspect that dryness and moisture are more efficient on the human body than heat and cold. Some races, as in dogs and horses, and cattle of every kind, are better than others, and do not Barrow. Liquids and solids are dissimilar, yet lose their qualities for many ages, nor, unless may be weighed in the same scales. All things others cross them, without the confluence of are composed of portions; and all things bear many causes. There may be as much courage proportions relatively; mind to mind, matter to in hot climates as in cold. The inhabitants of matter. Archimedes and Homer are susceptible Madagascar and Malacca are braver than the of comparison: but the process would be long and Laplanders, and perhaps not less brave than the tedious, the principles must be sought from afar, Londoners. The fact is this: people in warm nor is the man perhaps at the next door who climates are in the full enjoyment of all the must be called for the operation. Bacon and pleasures that animal life affords, and are dis- Milton, Bacon and Shakspeare, may be compared inclined to toil after that which no toil could with little difficulty, wide asunder as they appear produce or increase: while the native of the north to stand. However, since the cogitative and is condemned by climate to a life of labour, which imaginative parts of mind are exercised by both, oftentimes can procure for him but a scanty in broad daylight and in open spaces, the degrees portion of what his vehement and exasperated in which they are exercised are within our caleuappetite demands. Therefore he cuts it short lation. Until we bring together the weightiest with his sword, and reaps the field sown by the works of genius from the remotest distances, we southern. shall display no admirable power of criticism. None such hath been hitherto exhibited in the world, which stands, in relation to criticism, as it stood in relation to metaphysics until the time of Aristoteles. He left them imperfect; and they have lain little better ever since. The good sense of Cicero led him to clearer studies and wholesomer exercise; and where he could not pluck fruit he would not pluck brambles. In Plato we find only arbours and grottoes, with moss and shellwork all misplaced. Aristoteles hath built a solider edifice, but hath built it across our road: we must throw it down again, and use what we can of the materials elsewhere.

Bacon seems to me just in his opinion, if not that ordnance, at least that inflammable powder, and annoyance by its means, perhaps in rockets, was known among the ancients. He instances the Oxydraces in India. The remark is, I imagine, equally applicable to the priests of Delphi, who repelled the Gauls with it from the temple of Apollo. This is the more remarkable, as the Persians too encountered the same resistance, and experienced the double force of thunderbolts and earthquake. Whence we may surmise, that not only missiles, propelled by the combustion of powder, were aimed against them, but likewise that mines exploded. And perhaps other priests, the only people in most places who formerly had leisure for experiments, were equally acquainted with it, and used it, for their own defence only, and only in cases of extremity. Etruscan soothsayers were appointed to blast the army of Alaric with lightning, and the Pope acceded to the proposal: but his Holiness, on reflection, was of opinion, that aurum fulminans was more effectual.

I wish the Essay On Fame had been completed and even then its chief effect on me, perhaps, would be to excite another wish; as gratification usually does. It would have made me sigh for the recovery of Cicero On Glory, that the two greatest of philosophers might be compared on the same ground.

Barrow. Let us look up at Fame without a desire or a repining; and let us pardon all her falsehoods and delays, in remembrance that the best verse in Homer, and the best in Virgil, are on her. Virgil's is indeed but a feather from the wing of Homer.

Newton. You show a very forgiving mind, sir, and I hope she will be grateful to you. I do not know what these lines are worth, as they give me no equations.

Barrow. Nothing should be considered quite independently of everything else. We owe reve

Newton. Bacon, seen only in his Essays would have appeared to me (fresh as I come from the study of the ancients, and captivated as I confess I am by the graces of their language) the wisest and most instructive of writers.

Barrow. In calling him the wisest of writers, you must except those who wrote from inspiration. Newton. Ha! that is quite another thing.

Barrow. Henceforward I would advise you to follow the bent of your genius, in examining those matters principally which are susceptible of demonstration. Every young man should have some proposed end for his studies: let yours be philo sophy: and principally those parts of it in which the ancients have done little, and the moderns less. And never be dejected, my dear Isaac, i though it should enable you to throw but a scarcity of light on the Revelations, The Rape of Helen, and The Golden Fleece.

Newton. I hope by my labours I may find a clue to them in the process of time. But perhaps my conjectures may turn out wrong, as those on the book before me have.

Barrow. How?

Newton. I should always have imagined, if you had not taught me the contrary, that there is more of genius and philosophy in Bacon's Essays than in all Cicero's works, however less

there be of the scholastic and oratorical. Perhaps and attention, the same moderation and respect. I, by being no estimator of style...

and dishonest men of every description push themselves into his service, and often acquire his confidence, not only to the injury of his fortune, but likewise of his credit and respectability. Let a gentleman be known to have been cheated of twenty pounds, and it costs him forty a-year for the remainder of his life. Therefore, if you detect the cheat, the wisest thing is to conceal it; both for fear of the rogues about your sideboard, and of those more dexterous ones round the green cloth, under the judge, in your county assize-room.

The objections of your friend and visitor are not Barrow. Peace, peace! my modest Newton! altogether frivolous: take care however lest he, Perhaps I, by being too much an estimator of it, by his disceptations, move you from your faith. have overvalued the clearest head and the purest If you hold the faith, the faith will support you; tongue of antiquity. My Lord Justice Coke, and as, if you make your bed warm by lying in it, probably the more learned Selden, would have your bed will keep you so never mind what the ridiculed or reproved us, had we dared entertain ticking or the wadding may be made of. There in their presence a doubt of Cicero's superiority are few things against which I see need to warn over Bacon. No very great man ever reached you, and not many on which you want advice. the standard of his greatness in the crowd of his You are not profuse in your expenditure: yet as contemporaries. This hath always been reserved you, like most of the studious, are inattentive to for the secondary. There must either be some- money-affairs, let me guard you against evils folthing of the vulgar, something in which the com-lowing on this negligence, worse than the neglimonalty can recognise their own features, or there gence itself. Whenever a young man is remarked must be a laxity, a jealousy, an excitement stimu- | for it, a higher price is fixed on what he purchases; lating a false appetite. Your brief review of the Essays hath brought back to my recollection so much of shrewd judgment, so much of rich imagery, such a profusion of truths so plain, as (without his manner of exhibiting them) to appear almost unimportant, that, in the various high qualities of the human mind, I must acknowledge not only Cicero, but every prose writer among the Greeks, to stand far below him. Cicero is least valued for his highest merits, his fulness and his perspicuity. Bad judges (and how few are not so!) desire in composition the concise and the obscure, not knowing that the one most frequently arises from paucity of materials, and the other from inability to manage and dispose them. Have you never observed that, among the ignorant in painting, dark pictures are usually called the finest in the collection, and grey-bearded heads, fit only for the garret, are preferred to the radiance of light and beauty? Have you yourself never thought, before you could well measure and calculate, that books and furniture thrown about a room, appeared to be in much greater quantities than when they were arranged? At every step we take to gain the approbation of the wise, we lose something in the estimation of the vulgar. Look within: can not we afford it?

The minds of few can take in the whole of a great author, and fewer can draw him close enough to another for just commensuration. A fine passage may strike us less forcibly than one beneath it in beauty, from less sensibility in us at the moment; whence less enthusiasm, less quickness of perception, less capacity, less hold. You have omitted to remark some of the noblest things in Bacon, often, I believe, because there is no power of judgment to be shown in the expression of admiration, and perhaps too sometimes from the repetition and intensity of delight.

Newton. Sir, I forbore to lift up my hands, as *a mark of admiration. You ordered me to demonstrate, if I could, the defects of this wonderful man, unnoticed hitherto.

Barrow. You have done it to my satisfaction. Cicero disdained not, in the latter days of his life, when he was highest in reputation and dignity, to perform a similar office in regard to Epicurus: and I wish he had exhibited the same accuracy

The dialogues of

You will become an author ere long; and every author must attend to the means of conveying his information. The plainness of your style is suitable to your manners and your studies. Avoid, which many grave men have not done, words taken from sacred subjects and from elevated poetry: these we have seen vilely prostituted. Avoid too the society of the barbarians who misemploy them: they are vain, irreverent, and irreclaimable to right feelings. Galileo, which you have been studying, are written with much propriety and precision. I do not urge you to write in dialogue, although the best writers of every age have done it: the best parts of Homer and Milton are speeches and replies, the best parts of every great historian are the same: the wisest men of Athens and of Rome converse together in this manner, as they are shown to us by Xenophon, by Plato, and by Cicero. Whether you adopt such a form of com position, which, if your opinions are new, will protect you in part from the hostility all novelty (unless it is vicious) excites; or whether you choose to go along the unbroken surface of the didactic; never look abroad for any kind of ornament. Apollo, either as the God of day or the slayer of Python, had nothing about him to obscure his clearness or to impede his strength. To one of your mild manners, it would be superfluous to recommend equanimity in competition, and calmness in controversy. How easy is it for the plainest things to be misinterpreted by men not unwise, which a calm disquisition sets right ! and how fortunate and opportune is it to find in ourselves that calmness which almost the wisest have wanted, on urgent and grave occasions! If others for a time are preferred to you, let your

heart lie sacredly still! and you will hear from it, proper occasions you may defend them against the true and plain oracle, that not for ever will the malevolent, which is a duty. And this duty the magistracy of letters allow the rancid trans- can not be well and satisfactorily performed with parencies of coarse colourmen to stand before an imperfect knowledge or with an inadequate your propylæa. It is time that Philosophy should esteem. Habits of respect to our superiors are have her share in our literature; that the combi- among the best we can attain, if we only remove nations and appearances of matter be scientifically from our bosom the importunate desire of unworconsidered and luminously displayed. Frigid thy advantages from them. They belong to the conceits on theological questions, heaps of snow higher department of justice, and will procure for on barren crags, compose at present the greater us in due time our portion of it. Beside, O part of our domain: volcanoes of politics burst Isaac! in this affair our humanity is deeply conforth from time to time, and vary, without en- cerned. Think, how gratifying, how consolatory, livening, the scene. how all-sufficient, are the regards and attentions Do not fear to be less rich in the productions of such wise and worthy men as you, to those of your mind at one season than at another. whom inferior but more powerful ones, some in Marshes are always marshes, and pools are pools; scarlet, some in purple, some (it may be) in but the sea, in those places where we admire it ermine, vilify or neglect. Many are there to whom most, is sometimes sea and sometimes dry land; we are now indifferent, or nearly, whom, if we sometimes it brings ships into port, and some- had approached them as we ought to have done, times it leaves them where they can be refitted we should have cherished, loved, and honoured. and equipt. The capacious mind neither rises Let not this reflection, which on rude and unnor sinks, neither labours nor rests, in vain. equal minds may fall without form and features, Even in those intervals when it loses the con- and pass away like the idlest cloud-shadow, be sciousness of its powers, when it swims as it were lost on you. Old literary men, beside age and in vacuity, and feels not what is external nor in- experience, have another quality in common with ternal, it acquires or recovers strength, as the Nestor: they, in the literature of the country, are body does by sleep. Never try to say things ad-praisers of times past, partly from moroseness, mirably; try only to say them plainly; for your and partly from custom and conviction. The illibusiness is with the considerate philosopher, and terate, on the contrary, raise higher than the not with the polemical assembly. If a thing can steeples, and dress up in the gaudiest trim, a be demonstrated two ways, demonstrate it in maypole of their own, and dance round it while both one will please this man best, the other any rag flutters. So tenacious are Englishmen of that; and pleasure, if obvious and unsought, is their opinions, that they would rather lose their never to be neglected by those appointed from franchises and almost their lives. And this tena above to lead us into knowledge. Many will city hath not its hold upon letters only, but likereadily mount stiles and gates to walk along a wise upon whatever is public. I have witnessed footpath in a field, whom the very sight of a bare it in men guilty of ingratitude, of fraud, of pecupublic road would disincline and weary; and yet lation, of prevarication, of treachery to friends, of the place whereto they travel lies at the end of insolence to patrons, of misleading of colleagues, each. Your studies are of a nature unsusceptible of abandonment of party, of renunciation of prinof much decoration: otherwise it would be my ciples, of arrogance to honester men and wiser, of duty and my care to warn you against it, not humiliation to strumpets for the obtainment of merely as idle and unnecessary, but as obstructing place and profit, of every villany in short which your intent. The fond of wine are little fond of unfits not only for the honours of public, but the sweet or of the new: the fond of learning are rejects from the confidence of private life. And no fonder of its must than of its dregs. Some- there have been people so maddened by faction, thing of the severe hath always been appertaining that they would almost have erected a monument to order and to grace and the beauty that is not to such persons, hoping to spite and irritate their too liberal is sought the most ardently and loved adversaries, and unconscious or heedless that the the longest. The Graces have their zones, and inscription must be their own condemnation. Venus her cestus. In the writings of the philo- Those who have acted in this manner will repent sopher are the frivolities of ornament the most of it; but they will hate you for ever if you fore¦ ill-placed; in you would they be particularly, who, tell them of their repentance. It is not the fact promising to lay open before us an infinity of nor the consequence, it is the motive that turns worlds, should turn aside to display the petals of and pinches them; and they would think it! a double pink. straightforward and natural to cry out against It is dangerous to have any intercourse or deal-you, and a violence and a malady to cry out ing with small authors. They are as troublesome to handle, as easy to discompose, as difficult to pacify, and leave as unpleasant marks on you, as small children. Cultivate on the other hand the society and friendship of the higher; first that you may learn to reverence them, which of itself is both a pleasure and a virtue, and then that on

against themselves. The praises they have given they will maintain, and more firmly than if they were due; as perjurers stick to perjury more hotly than the veracious to truth. Supposing there should be any day of your life unoccupied by study, there will not be one without an argument why parties, literary or political, should be

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Newton. Better and more decorous would it be perhaps, if I filled up your pause with my reflections: but you always have permitted me to ask you questions; and now, unless my gratitude misleads me, you invite it.

avoided. You are too great to be gregarious; think the milling pays for the alloy. Greatly and were you to attempt it, the gregarious in a favoured and blest by Providence will you be, if mass would turn their heads against you. The you should in your lifetime be known for what greater who enter into public life are disposed at you are: the contrary, if you should be translast to quit it: retirement with dignity is their formed. device: the meaning of which is, retirement with as much of the public property as can be amassed and carried away. This race of great people is very numerous. I want before I die to see one or two ready to believe, and to act on the belief, that there is as much dignity in retiring soon as late, with little as with loads, with quiet minds and consciences as with ulcerated or discomposed. I have already seen some hundred sectaries of that pugnacious pope, who, being reminded that Christ commanded Peter to put up his sword, replied, "Yes, when he had cut the ear off."

To be in right harmony, the soul not only must be never out of time, but must never lose sight of the theme its Creator's hand hath noted.

Why are you peeping over your forefinger into those pages near the beginning of the volume? Newton. I have omitted the notice of several Essays.

Barrow. There are many that require no observation for peculiarities; though perhaps there is not one that any other man could have written. Newton. I had something more, sir, to say. or rather.. I had something more, sir, to ask. about Friendship.

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Barrow. All men, but the studious above all, must beware in the formation of it. Advice or caution on this subject comes immaturely and ungracefully from the young, exhibiting a proof either of temerity or suspicion: but when you hear it from a man of my age, who has been singularly fortunate in the past, and foresees the same felicity in those springing up before him, you may accept it as the direction of a calm observer, telling you all he has remarked, on the greater part of a road which he has nearly gone through, and which you have but just entered. Never take into your confidence, or admit often into your company, any man who does not know, on some important subject, more than you do. Be his rank, be his virtues, what they may, he will be a hindrance to your pursuits, and an obstruction to your greatness. If indeed the greatness were such as courts can bestow, and such as can be laid on the shoulders of a groom, and make him look like the rest of the company, my advice would be misplaced: but since all transcendent, all true and genuine greatness, must be of a man's own raising, and only on the foundation that the hand of God has laid, do not let any touch it keep them off civilly, but keep them off. Affect no stoicism; display no indifference let their coin pass current; but do not you exchange for it the purer ore you carry, nor

Barrow. Ask me anything: I will answer it, if I can; and I will pardon you, as I have often done, if you puzzle me.

Newton. Is it not a difficult and a painful thing to repulse, or to receive ungraciously, the advances of friendship?

Barrow. It withers the heart, if indeed his heart were ever sound who doth it. Love, serve, run into danger, venture life, for him who would cherish you give him everything but your time and your glory. Morning recreations, convivial meals, evening walks, thoughts, questions, wishes, wants, partake with him. Yes, Isaac there are men born for friendship; men to whom the cultivation of it is nature, is necessity; as the making of honey is to bees. Do not let them suffer for the sweets they would gather; but do not think to live upon those sweets. Our corrupted state requires robuster food, or must grow more and more unsound.

Newton. I would yet say something; a few words; on this subject. . or one next to it.

Barrow. On Expense then: that is the next : I have given you some warning about it, and hardly know what else to say. Can not you find the place?

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Newton. I had it under my hand. If. that is, provided your time, sir! . . .

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Barrow. Speak it out, man! Are you in a ship of Marcellus under the mirror of Archimedes, that you fume and redden so? Cry to him that you are his scholar, and went out only to parley.

Newton. Sir! in a word. . ought a studious man to think of matrimony?

Barrow. Painters, poets, mathematicians, never ought: other studious men, after reflecting for twenty years upon it, may. Had I a son of your age, I would not leave him in a grazing country. Many a man hath been safe among corn-fields, who falls a victim on the grass under an elm. There are lightnings very fatal in such places.

Newton. Supposing me no mathematician, I must reflect then for twenty years!

Barrow. Begin to reflect on it after the twenty: and continue to reflect on it all the remainder; I mean at intervals, and quite leisurely. It will save to you many prayers, and may suggest to you one thanksgiving.

THE KING OF AVA AND RAO-GONG-FAO.

Prime Chamberlain. Lord of light! behold the created of thy golden foot, him whom we in our language of men do call Rao-Gong-Fao.

King. Who is the slave that, in the posture | anciently performed amid the funeral honours of so becoming a mortal, draweth his brow and his Egyptian kings; being the last and greatest the knees together on the pavement of this my heaven, survivors could offer to their defunct masters. pointing with the centre of his circumference to They call it in their language a strait-waistcoat: that cloudier one, of which my brother the Sun and none are permitted to wear it in the streets. is rajah? Far is thy servant, O mountain of myrrh! from ascribing to himself the desert. It was a token of what the rajah thought due unto thee, O oil of camphor! And when I informed him that, in return for this benefit of warmth, your Celestitude wished only the restitution of the few cities your soldiers and counsellors had entrusted to his people, and the remission of some lacs of rupees, which it was thought reasonable to promise them | because they cried for the same, he was overjoyed. King. What lacs? what rupees? I never heard about them.

King. The Sun our brother permits the tender blade of rice to lift its head under him, after many moons. We likewise, but greater in our clemency, allow the creature of our beneficence to unfold himself by just degrees in the space of one hour. Meanwhile let him answer the words of wisdom, as they flow from the imperturbable fountain of eternal truth.

Rao-Gong-Fao!

Rao. Tiger-crushing elephant! crocodile of chrysolite river of milk and honey!

King. In our condescension of majesty, we command thee to leave untold, at present, the remainder of the seven thousand names, wherewith the languages of the universal earth, having exhausted themselves, would enrich us. Rao-Gong-Fao!

Rao. The dust obeys the wind. King. Answer thou the questions of our all searching Intelligence.

Hath our slave, the rajah of those two little islets drawn by white bears, accepted our conditions? or must we, in our indignation, submerge him and his islets and his white bears, throwing one of our jewels at them?

Rao. Have mercy! Forbear yet a little while, O right hand of Omnipotence! Let neither a jewel from thy armlet plunge him into the abyss, nor an irresistible ray from thy incensed eye transfix him. Verily he hath heard reason and truth. He hath accepted thy gifts, O disposer of empire! When I informed him that, in consideration of the cold wherewith his people are afflicted, my king consented to use his interest with his brother, not only not to withhold his light, but to increase it; and would graciously order a whole grove of high trees to be levelled with the earth, in order that they might not intercept his warmth from the two bear-borne islets of the western sea, he appeared much gratified. And whereas the noblest of his people wear a garter on the outside of that dress which covers the knee, while others can only wear it on the inside, the rajah gave orders that one should be drawn closely round me, higher than any man present ever wore it; and that it should surround not my knee nor my buttock, but my whole body and arms together, with many folds; not unlike the ceremony which the Persian and Arabian poets, if our learned men understand them, relate as

Rao. Tortoise of adamant! Earth-sustainer! When the natives of the two islets, together with some vagabonds they had collected from certain plains near the Ganges, lost themselves in our country, they were constrained by hunger to take several necessaries of life from the slaves of your Divine Majesty. The said slaves were angry, and called some soldiers to their aid, and disturbance ensued, in which a soldier of the Celestial empire was slain, and three wounded. The servants of your Divine Majesty then sent other soldiers against them, with orders to bring them into your serene presence, or at least as far as the first court. They, hearing of this order, were coming forward in great haste and perturbation. But certain wise generals then bethought themselves that these unbelievers, in their ignorance of polished customs, might peradventure be inconvenient and indecorous; and chose rather to provide for their necessities with a few pieces of silver | to each man, and a few cities to lodge them in. The cannon was left on the walls, with plenty of powder and shot, that they might defend themselves against the jackals and hyenas, when no longer under the protection of your Celestial army. It is wonderful how this plain simple story was changed in the country of the ungodly. The rajah of the two isles was undeceived by me; finally he was persuaded that your Divine Majesty had acted with no other feeling than that of hospitality; and he displayed as serene a countenance as if it had been irradiated by a beam of light from your Divine Majesty's.

King. Show me a copy of the orders he gave, for the remission of the money his servants would obtain from mine.

Rao. Unapproachable Excelsitude! He told me he did not interfere in the quarrels of his servants.

King. He said it before: I pardoned him. Proceed.

Rao. He was happy to hear from me, that your

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