the most esteemed by the fons of men: if it cannot create genius, it begets the next of all things to it; it animates a common foul to moments of fuperior conception, and paffages of exalted understanding. That the English nation, has richly deserved encouragement from their princes, is furely indifputable; yet to this hour there is not an establishment in their favour. The ministry seem to fhun men of great fenfe, and liberality has fled the land. No man of letters is acceptable to the great, they look on him as a kind of fatire on their actions, and feeling within their own vacuity, are by no means pleased with beholding in another what they want themselves.

THIS is not the practice of other nations: men of letters are received with peculiar honors in France and Italy by the nobility; and by that means the liberal behaviour begets an authority over the man of fcience, which makes him the dependant of that perfon,. and unites his knowledge with the other's power and interest.

THIS management is well understood inFrance, where minifters, and other great men, apply the talents

J.

talents of men of letters to their use and the public advantage; and thus liberality begets authority, and every idea of arbitrary power is loft. From this it is that those who live in France, tho' their government is more defpotic than the English, have more apparent freedom and ease than is to be feen in this ifland.

THE exertion of power is feen there in nothing but in cafes of much ill behaviour; and all that which might be carried by the fuperiority of one man above another, by a kind of force which would make it arbitrary, is converted by politeness into that fenfe of authority and dependance, which is natural for men to have over and from one another: this being the cuf tom universally in ufe in that country, whatever may be the establishment, it is really and in fact liberty and after all the examination which I can make, from the fecurity of property, ease of mind, and gaiety of temper of the two people, taking into the account the defire which almost all Englishmen have of poffeffing power by fear or force, and Frenchmen of obtaining authority by politeness and liberality; I affure you that I think the citizens of Paris as free as the citizens of London,

1

London, and the French as happy in that respect as the Britons.

Ar least men of letters are happier in that city than in this; and tho' the lamp of learning is near expiring in England, yet no one stretches his hand to recruit it with fresh oil: the flame, I believe, quivers already; I fhall fee its total extinction before I leave England; after which, I fhall only tarry to attend its remains and behold it quietly inurned, make a small epitaph, institute a mass to be faid for its repose, and fly to your arms in Rome; and thus end my life where it began. Adieu, I am

Yours moft fincerely.

LET

LETTER XXIX.

To the Reverend Father LORENZO FRANCIOSINI at Rome.

Dear Sir,

ESTERDAY amufing myself with a

YES

walk in that church where the monuments of illuftrious men of this nation are mostly placed, amongst others I remarked that of the great Newton, where, in a bas-relief, the other orbs of this folar fyftem are weighed by boys against the fun, on a stillyard.

THIS naturally led me to think on the fate of those philofophies, which from the earliest account of times have come down to us thro' Ariftotle to Descartes, and Newton; each of the former exploded by all living writers, unless you except Monfr. Fontenelle; and the latter attacked by the late Mr. Hutchinfon and his followers, a fect of enthufiaftic philofophers, who fanfying they have found in the history of Mofes, the best system of the heavens and natural philofophy, decry all others as delufive.

VOL. II.

C

THIS

THIS reflection led me naturally to confider the unstable state of truth, as well as that of fashion, and thence the feeble condition of the human mind, as it is generally found to exist in moft beings of our fpecies. The fyftem of Ptolomy, and the natural history of Aristotle and Pliny, were followed and received as undoubted truth for many ages. Copernicus and Defcartes driving these from the opinions of mankind, won the whole world to their manner of conceiving things; the first of these remains generally received, and the philofophy of the latter, which was defigned to explain the revolutions of the planets, is, as I have already said, almoft totally exploded. Fontenelle alone, at ninety-fix, like a fepulchral lamp, remains quivering over the dead body.

If we fhould fcrutinize too feverely into the minds of men, how contemptibly muft we think of their capacities; they have followed the different profeffors of each philofophy by thou fands; embracing error, not under the idea of an object of belief, but of reafon; dignifyingthat with the name of abfolute truth, which at pre