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, 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 Atheism— disappointments 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 he betrayed too many symptoms of mere 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. In the first place, the new experimental philosophy, full of inventions and operations, proposed to supplant the old scholastic philosophy, which still retained an obscure jargon of terms, the most frivolous subtilties, and all those empty and artificial methods by which it pretended to decide 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, 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 of Spenser, stung to madness by the predominant powers, to their utter dismay set up their idol on the school-gates, with his heels upwards, and ass's ears on his head. But at this later period, when the Royal Society was established, the war was more open, and both parties more inveterate. 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 Some may be curious to have these monkish terms defined. Causes are distinguished, by Aristotle, into four kinds : - The material cause, ex qua, out of which things are made; the formal cause, per quam, by which a thing is that which it is, and nothing else; the efficient cause, a qua, by the agency of which anything is produced; and the final cause, propter quam, the end for which it is produced. Such are his notions in his Phys. l. ii. c. iii. referred to by Brucker and Formey, in their Histories of Philosophy. Of the Scholastic Metaphysics, Sprat, the historian of the Royal Society, observes, "that the lovers of that cloudy knowledge boast that it is an excellent instrument to refine and 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," 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 of the late Revolution were still hot: they were panic-struck, that the advocates of popery and arbitrary power were returning on them, disguised as natural philosophers. This new terror had a very ludicrous origin :—it arose from some casual expressions, in which the Royal Society at first delighted, and by which an air of mystery was thrown over its secret movements: such was that Universal Correspondence" which it affected to boast of; and the vaunt to foreigners of its “Ten Secretaries," when, in truth, all these magnificent declarations were only objects of their wishes. Another fond but singular expression, which the illustrious BOYLE had frequently applied to it in its earliest state, when only composed of a few friends, calling it "The Invisible College," all 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 faitht!" 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 Royal Society," to show that experimental philosophy was neither designed for the extinction of History of the 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 t?” 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 1 ; 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 tempt between the parties, which students of opposite pursuits and tastes so liberally bestow on each other. The researches of the Antiquarian Society were sneered at by the Royal, and the antiquaries avenged themselves by their obstinate incredulity at the prodigies of the naturalists; the student of classical literature was equally slighted early inquirers. In a Memorial in Sprat's History, by the new philosophers; who, leaving the study entitled, "Answers returned by Sir Philliberto of words and the elegances of rhetoric, for the study Vernatti to certain Inquiries sent by order of the merely of things, declared as the cynical ancient Royal Society;" among some of the most extra- did of metaphors, " poterimus vivere sine illis "— ordinary questions and descriptions of non-entities, We can do very well without them!-The everwhich must have fatigued Sir Philliberto, who witty South, in his oration at Oxford, made this then resided in Batavia, I find the present:-"Qy. poignant reflection on the Royal Society: :8. What ground there may be for that relation" Mirantur nihil nisi pulices, pediculos, et seipsos" concerning horns taking root, and growing about They can admire nothing except fleas, lice, and God?" It seems the question might as well have themselves!—And even Hobbes so little comprebeen asked at London, and answered by some of hended the utility of these new pursuits, that he the members themselves; for Sir Philliberto considered the Royal Society merely as so many gravely replied "Inquiring about this, a friend labourers, who, when they had washed their hands laughed, and told me it was a jeer put upon the after their work, should leave to others the polishPortuguese, because the women of Goa are counted ing of their discourses. He classed them, in the none of the chastest." Inquiries of this nature, way they were proceeding, with apothecaries, and often the most trivial objects set off with a and gardeners, and mechanics, who might now "all singular minuteness of description, tempted the put in for, and get the prize." Even at a later laugh of the scoffers. Their great adversary period, Sir William Temple imagined the virtuosi Stubbe, ridiculing their mode of giving instructions to be only so many Sir Nicholas Gimcracks; and for inquiries, regrets that the paper he received contemptuously called them, from the place of from them had been lost, otherwise he would have their first meeting, "the Men of Gresham!" published it. "The great Mr. Boyle, when he doubtless considering them as wise as "the Men brought it, tendered it with blushing and disorder," of Gotham!" Even now, men of other tempers at the simplicity of the Royal Society! And and other studies, are too apt to refuse the palm of indeed the royal founder himself, who, if he was philosophy to the patient race of naturalists. something of a philosopher, was much more of a Wotton, who wrote so zealously at the commencewit, set the example. The Royal Society, on the ment of the last century in favour of modern day of its creation, was the whetstone of the wit of knowledge, is alarmed lest the effusions of wit, in their patron. When Charles II. dined with the his time, should "deaden the industry of the members on the occasion of constituting them a philosophers of the next age; for," he adds, Royal Society, towards the close of the evening "nothing wounds so effectually as a jest; and he expressed his satisfaction in being the first when men once become ridiculous, their labours English monarch who had laid a foundation for a will be slighted, and they will find few imitators." society who proposed that their sole studies should The alarm shows his zeal, but not his discernment: be directed to the investigation of the arcana of since curiosity in hidden causes is a passion which nature; and added, with that peculiar gravity of endures with human nature. "The philosophers countenance he usually wore on such occasions, of the next age" have shown themselves as perthat among such learned men he now hoped for a severing as their predecessors, and the wits as solution to a question which had long perplexed malicious. The contest between men of meditahim. The case he thus stated: "Suppose two tion and men of experiment, is a very ancient pails of water were fixed in two different scales quarrel; and the "divine" Socrates was no friend that were equally poised, and which weighed to, and even a ridiculer of, those very pursuits for equally alike, and that two live bream, or small which the Royal Society was established ". fish, were put into either of these pails, he wanted to know the reason why that pail, with such addition, should not weigh more than the other pail which stood against it."—Every one was ready to set at quiet the royal curiosity; but it appeared that every one was giving a different opinion. One, at length, offered so ridiculous a solution, that another of the members could not refrain from a loud laugh; when the King, turning to him, insisted, that he should give his sentiments as well as the rest. This he did without hesitation; and told his Majesty, in plain terms, that he denied the fact !-On which the King, in high mirth, exclaimed, "Odds fish, brother, you are in the right!"-The jest was not ill designed. The story was often useful, to cool the enthusiasm of the scientific visionary, who is apt often to account for what never has existed. * Evelyn, who could himself be a wit occasionally, |