a The history of plays appears here somewhat curious:-tragedies, then the fashionable dramas, obtained considerable price; for though Dennis's luckier one reached only to 211, Dr. Young's "Busiris" acquired 847. Smith's "Phædra and Hippolytus," 50%.; Rowe's “Jane Shore," 507. 15s.; and "Jane Gray," 751. 5s. Cibber's "Nonjuror" obtained 1051. for the copyright. Is it not a little mortifying to observe, that among all these customers of genius whose names enrich the ledger of the bookseller, Jacob, that POPE'S EARLIEST SATIRE. We find by the first edition of Lintot's "Miscellaneous Poems," that the anonymous lines "To the Author of a Poem called Successio," was a literary satire by Pope, written when he had scarcely attained his fourteenth year. This satire, the first probably he wrote for the press, and in which he has succeeded so well, that it might have induced him to pursue the bent of his genius, merits preservation. The juvenile composition bears the marks of his future excellences: it has the tune of his verse, and the images of his wit. Thirty years afterwards, when occupied by the Dunciad, he transplanted and pruned again some of the original images. The hero of this satire is Elkanah Settle. The subject is one of those Whig poems, designed to celebrate the happiness of an uninterrupted “Succession" in the Crown, at the time the Act. of Settlement passed, which transferred it to the Hanoverian line. The rhymer and his theme were equally contemptible to the juvenile Jacobite poet. The hoarse and voluminous Codrus of Juvenal aptly designates this eternal verse-maker;—one who has written with such constant copiousness, that no bibliographer has presumed to form a complete list of his works *. When Settle had outlived his temporary rival *The fullest account we have of Settle, a busy scribe in his day, is in Mr. Nichols's Lit. Anec. voi. i. p. 41. What though no bees around your cradle flew, ship with Dryden, and was reduced to mere Settle, he published party-poems, in folio, composed in Latin, accompanied by his own translations. These folio poems, uniformly bound, except that the arms of his patrons, or rather his purchasers, richly gilt, emblazon the black morocco, may still be found. These presentationcopies were sent round to the chiefs of the party, with a mendicant's petition, of which some still exist. To have a clear conception of the present views of some politicians, it is necessary to read their history backwards. In 1702, when Settle published "Successio," he must have been a Whig. In 1685 he was a Tory, commemorating, So, forced from engines, lead itself can fly, by an heroic poem, the coronation of James II., And pond'rous slugs move nimbly through the and writing periodically against the Whigs. In 1680, he had left the Tories for the Whigs, and conducted the whole management of burning the pope, then a very solemn national ceremony. A Whig, a pope-burner, and a Codrus, afforded a full draught of inspiration to the nascent genius of our youthful satirist. Settle, in his latter state of wretchedness, had one standard elegy and epithalamium printed off with blanks. By the ingenious contrivance of inserting the name of any considerable person who died or was married, no one, who had gone out of the world, or was entering into it, but was equally welcome to this dinnerless livery-man of the draggled-tailed Muses. I have elsewhere noticed his last exit from this state of poetry and of pauperism; when, leaping into a green dragon, which his own creative genius had invented, in a theatrical booth, Codrus, in hissing flames and terrifying-morocco folds, discovered "the fate of talents misapplied!" TO THE AUTHOR OF A POEM ENTITLED Begone, ye critics, and restrain your spite ; *Thus altered in the Dunciad, book i., ver. 183. "As clocks to weight their nimble motions owe, The wheels above urged by the load below." sky +. Sure Bavius copied Mævius to the full, †This original image a late caustic wit (Horne Tooke), who probably had never read this poem, had then distinguished himself by his genius and employed on a certain occasion. Godwin, who by some hardy paradoxes, was pleading for them as hardily, by showing that they did not originate in him that they were to be found in Helvetius, in Rousseau, and in other modern philosophers. Ay," retorted the cynical wit; "so you eat at my table venison and turtle, but from you the after all, is in Donne, long afterwards versified same things come quite changed!" The original, by our poet. See Warton's edition, vol. iv., p. 257. Pope must have been an early reader of Donne. Thus altered in the Dunciad, book i. ver. 181. "As, forced from wind-guns, lead itself can fly, And pond'rous slugs cut swiftly through the sky." § Perhaps, by Charilus, the juvenile satirist designed Flecknoe, or Shadwell, who had received their immortality of dulness from his master, catholic in poetry and opinions, Dryden. THE ROYAL SOCIETY. THE ROYAL SOCIETY at first opposed from various quarters their Experimental Philosophy supplants the Aristotelian Methods-suspected of being the concealed Advocates of Popery, Arbitrary Power, and Atheismdisappointments incurred by their promises-the simplicity of the early Inquirers ridiculed by the Wits and others-Narrative of a quarrel between a Member of the Royal Society and an Aristotelian-Glanvill writes his "Plus Ultra," to show the Improvements of Modern Knowledge- Character of Stubbe of Warwick-his Apology, from himself-opposes the "Plus Ultra" by the "Plus Ultra reduced to a Nonplus"-his " Campanella revived”— the Political Projects of Campanella-Stubbe persecuted, and menaced to be publicly whipped; his Roman spirit— his "Legends no Histories"-his "Censure on some Passages of the History of the Royal Society"-Harvey's ambition to be considered the Discoverer of the Circulation of the Blood, which he demonstrated-Stubbe describes the Philosophy of Science-attacks Sprat's Dedication to the King-The Philosophical Transactions published by Sir Hans Sloane ridiculed by Dr. King-his new Species of Literary Burlesque-King's character-these attacks not ineffectually renewed by Sir John Hill. THE ROYAL SOCIETY, on its first establishment, and others were kindling their torches at his at the era of the Restoration, encountered fierce flame. When the great usurper of the human hostilities; nor, even at later periods, has it understanding was once fairly opposed to Nature, escaped many wanton attacks. A great revolution in the human mind was opening with that establishment; for the spirit which had appeared in the recent political concussion, and which had given freedom to opinion, and a bolder scope to enterprise, had now reached the literary and philosophical world; but causes of the most opposite natures operated against this institution of infant science. he betrayed too many symptoms of mere humanity. Yet this great triumph was not obtained without severe contention; and upon the Continent, even blood has been shed in the cause of words. In our country, the University of Cambridge was divided by a party who called themselves Trojans, from their antipathy to the Greeks, or the Aristotelians; and once the learned Richard Harvey, the brother of Gabriel, the friend In the first place, the new experimental philo- of Spenser, stung to madness by the predominant sophy, full of inventions and operations, proposed powers, to their utter dismay set up their idol on to supplant the old scholastic philosophy, which the school-gates, with his heels upwards, and ass's still retained an obscure jargon of terms, the most ears on his head. But at this later period, when frivolous subtilties, and all those empty and the Royal Society was established, the war was artificial methods by which it pretended to decide | more open, and both parties more inveterate. on all topics. Too long it had filled the ear with airy speculation, while it starved the mind that languished for sense and knowledge. But this emancipation menaced the power of the followers of Aristotle, who were still slumbering in their undisputed authority, enthroned in our Universities. For centuries, the world had been taught that the philosopher of Stagira had thought on every subject: Aristotle was quoted as equal authority with St. Paul, and his very image has been profanely looked on with the reverence paid to Christ. BACON had fixed a new light in Europe, Now the world seemed to think, so violent is the re-action of public opinion, that they could reason better without Aristotle than with him: that he had often taught them nothing more than selfevident propositions, or had promoted that dangerous idleness of maintaining paradoxes, by quibbles, and other captious subtilties. The days had closed of the "illuminated," the "profound," and the "irrefragable," titles, which the scholastic heroes had obtained; and the Aristotelian four modes, by which all things in nature must exist, of materialiter, formaliter, fundamentaliter, and eminenter, were now considered as nothing more than the noisy rattles, or chains of cherry-stones, which had too long detained us in the nursery of the human mind. The world had been cheated with words instead of things; and the new experimental philosophy insisted that men should be less loquacious, but more laborious. Some there were, in that unsettled state of politics and religion, in whose breasts the embers * Some may be curious to have these monkish of the late Revolution were still hot: they were terms defined. Causes are distinguished, by panic-struck, that the advocates of popery and Aristotle, into four kinds : The material arbitrary power were returning on them, disguised cause, ex qua, out of which things are made; as natural philosophers. This new terror had the formal cause, per quam, by which a thing is a very ludicrous origin :-it arose from some casual that which it is, and nothing else; the efficient expressions, in which the Royal Society at first cause, a qua, by the agency of which anything is delighted, and by which an air of mystery was produced; and the final cause, propter quam, the thrown over its secret movements: such was that end for which it is produced. Such are his Universal Correspondence" which it affected to notions in his Phys. 1. ii. c. iii. referred to by boast of; and the vaunt to foreigners of its "Ten Brucker and Formey, in their Histories of Secretaries," when, in truth, all these magnificent Philosophy. Of the Scholastic Metaphysics, declarations were only objects of their wishes. Sprat, the historian of the Royal Society, observes, Another fond but singular expression, which the "that the lovers of that cloudy knowledge boast | illustrious BOYLE had frequently applied to it in that it is an excellent instrument to refine and its earliest state, when only composed of a few make subtle the minds of men. But there may be a greater excess in the subtlety of men's wits than in their thickness; as we see those threads, which are of too fine a spinning, are found to be more useless than those which are homespun and gross." Hist. of the Royal Soc. p. 326. In the history of human folly, often so closely connected with that of human knowledge, some of the schoolmen (the commentators on Aquinas and others) prided themselves, and were even admired for their impenetrable obscurity! One of them, and our countryman, is singularly commended by Cardan, for that "only one of his arguments was enough to puzzle all posterity; and that, when he had grown old, he wept because he could not understand his own books." Baker, in his Reflections upon Learning, who had examined this schoolman, declares his obscurity is such, as if he never meant to be understood. The extravagances of the schoolmen are, however, not always those of Aristotle. Pope, and the wits of that day, like these early members of the Royal Society, decried Aristotle, who did not probably fall in the way of their studies. His great imperfections are in natural philosophy; but he still preserves his eminence for his noble treatises of Ethics and Politics, and Poetics, notwithstanding the imperfect state in which these have reached us. Dr. Copleston and Dr. Gillies have given an energetic testimony to their perpetual value. Pope, in satirising the University as a nest of dunces, considered the followers of Aristotle as so many stalled oxen, "fat bulls of Basan," friends, calling it "The Invisible College," ail concurred to make the Royal Society wear the appearance of a conspiracy against the political freedom of the nation. At a time too, when, according to the historian of the Royal Society, "almost every family was widely disagreed among themselves on matters of religion," they believed that this "new experimental philosophy was subversive of the Christian faith!" and many mortally hated the newly-invented optical glasses, the telescope and the microscope, as atheistical inventions, which perverted our sight, and made everything appear in a new and false light! Sprat wrote his celebrated History of the Royal Society," to show that experimental philosophy was neither designed for the extinction of 44 works. "He stooped much, and made use of a staff; his visage was meagre, his hair lank and thin, and his voice hollow;" descriptive of his abrupt conciseness, his harsh style, the obscurities of his dilapidated text, and the deficiency of feeling, which his studied compression, his deep sagacity, and his analytical genius, so frequently exhibit. + Sprat makes an ingenious observation on the notion of those who declared that "the most learned ages are still the most atheistical, and the ignorant the most devout." He says this had become almost proverbial, but he shows that piety is little beholden to those who make this distinction. "The Jewish law forbids us to offer up to God a sacrifice that has a blemish; but these men bestow the most excellent of men on the devil, and only assign to religion those men and those times which have the greatest blemish of human nature. even a defect in their knowledge and underSwift has drawn an allegorical personage of standing."-History of the Royal Society, p. Aristotle, by which he describes the nature of his 356. "A hundred head of Aristotle's friends." DUNCIAD. P the Universities, nor of the Christian religion, which were really imagined to be in danger. Others, again, were impatient for romantic discoveries; miracles were required, some were hinted at, while some were promised. In the ecstacy of imagination, they lost their soberness, forgetting they were but the historians of nature, and not her prophets*. But amid these dreams of hope and Science, at its birth, is as much the child of imagination as curiosity; and, in rapture at the new instrument it has discovered, it impatiently magnifies its power. To the infant, all improvements are wonders; it chronicles even its dreams, and has often described what it never has seen, delightfully deceived; the cold insults of the cynics, the wits, the dull, and the idle, maliciously mortify the infant in its sports, till it returns to slow labour and patient observation. It is rather curious, however, that when science obtains a certain state of maturity, it is liable to be attacked by the same fits of the marvellous which affected its infancy; and the following extract from one of the enthusiastic Virtuosi in the infancy of science, rivals the visions of "the perfectibility of man," of which we hear so much at this late period. Some, perhaps, may consider these strong tendencies of the imagination, breaking out at these different periods in the history of science, to indicate results, of which the mind feels a consciousness, which the philosopher should neither indulge nor check. "Should these heroes go on (the Royal Society) as they have happily begun, they will fill the world with wonders; and posterity will find many things that are now but rumours, verified into practical realities. It may be, some ages hence, a voyage to the southern unknown tracts, yea, possibly the Moon, will not be more strange than one to America. To them that come after us, it may be as ordinary to buy a pair of wings to fly into remotest regions, as now a pair of boots to ride a journey. And to confer at the distance of the Indies, by sympathetic conveyances, may be as usual to future times, as to us in a literary correspondence. The restoration of grey hairs to juvenility, and renewing the exhausted marrow, may at length be effected without a miracle; and the turning the now comparative desert world into a paradise, may not improbably be expected from late agriculture. "Those that judge by the narrowness of former principles and successes, will smile at these paradoxical expectations. But the great inventions of latter ages, which altered the face of all things, in their naked proposals and mere suppositions, were to former times as ridiculous. To have talked of a new earth to have been discovered, had been a fancy, the creeping experimentalist was still left boasting of improvements, so slow that they were not perceived, and of novelties so absurd that they too often raised the laugh against their grave and unlucky discoverers. The philosophers themselves seemed to have been fretted into the impatient humour which they attempted to correct; and the amiable Evelyn becomes an irritated satirist, when he attempts to reply to the repeated question of that day, "What have they done +?" But a source of the ridicule which was perpetually flowing against the Royal Society, was the almost infantine simplicity of its earliest members, led on by their honest zeal; and the absence of all discernment in many trifling and ludicrous researches, which called down the malice of the wits; there was, too, much of that unjust con romance to antiquity; and to sail without sight of stars or shores, by the guidance of a mineral, a story more absurd than the flight of Dædalus. That men should speak after their tongues were ashes, or communicate with each other in differing hemispheres, before the invention of letters, could not but have been thought a fiction. Antiquity would not have believed the almost incredible force of our cannons, and would as coldly have entertained the wonders of the telescope."-GLANVILL, Scepsis Scientifica, p. 133. + Evelyn, whose elegant mind, one would have imagined, had been little susceptible of such vehement anger, in the preface to his " Sylva," scolds at no common rate: "Well-meaning people are led away by the noise of a few ignorant and comical buffoons, who, with an insolence suitable to their understanding, are still crying out, What have the Society done ?" He attributes all the opposition and ridicule the Society encountered, to a personage, not usual to introduce into a philosophical controversy-" the Enemy of Mankind." But it was well to denounce the devil himself, as the Society had nearly lost the credit of fearing him. Evelyn insists that "next to the propagation of our most holy faith," that of the new philosophy was desirable both for the king and the nation; 'for," he adds, "it will survive the triumphs of the proudest conquerors; since, when all their pomp and noise is ended, they are those little things in black, whom now in scorn they term philosophers and fops, to whom they must be obliged for making their names outlast the pyramids, whose founders are as unknown as the heads of Nile."-Why Evelyn designates the philosophers as little things in black, requires explanation. Did they affect a dress of this colour in the reign of Charles II., or does he allude to the dingy appearance of the chemists? It is not easy to credit the simplicity of these |