Had Stubbe's death not occurred, this warfare had probably continued. He insisted on a complete victory. He had forced the Royal Society to disclaim their own works, by an announcement that they were not answerable, as a body, for the various contributions which they gave the world: an advertisement which has been more than once found necessary to be renewed. As for their historian Sprat, our intrepid Stubbe very unexpectedly offered to manifest to the parliament that this courtly adulator, by his book, was chargeable with high treason; if they believed that the Royal Society were really engaged so deeply as he averred in the portentous Cæsarean Popery of Campanella. Glanvill, who had "insulted all university learning," had been immolated at the pedestal of Aristotle. "I have done enough," he adds, " since my animadversions contain more than they all knew; and that these have shown that the virtuosi are very great impostors, or men of little reading;" alluding to the various discoveries which they promulgated as novelties, but which Stubbe had asserted were known to the ancients and others of a later period. This forms a perpetual accusation against the inventors and discoverers, who may often exclaim, " Perish those who have done our good works before us!" "The Discoveries of the Ancients and Moderns" by Dutens, had this book been then published, might have assisted our keen investigator; but our combatant ever proudly met his adversaries single-handed.

The "Philosophical Transactions" were afterwards accused of another kind of high treason, against grammar and common sense. It was long before the collectors of facts practised the art of writing on them; still later before they could philosophise, as well as observe: Bacon and Boyle were at first only imitated in their patient industry. When Sir HANS SLOANE was the secretary of the Royal Society, he, and most of his correspondents, wrote in the most confused manner imaginable. A wit of a very original cast, the facetious Dr. KING,* took advantage of their perplexed and often

* Dr. King was allied to the families of Clarendon and Rochester; he took a degree as Doctor of Civil Law, and soon got into great practice. "He afterwards went with the Earl of Pembroke, Lord-Lieutenant, to Ireland, where he became Judge Advocate, Sole Commissioner of the Prizes, Keeper of the Records, Vicar-General to the Lord Primate of Ireland; was countenanced by persons of the highest rank, and might have made a fortune. But so far was he from heaping up riches, that he returned to England with no other treasure than a few merry poems and humorous

unintelligible descriptions; of the meanness of their style, which humbled even the great objects of nature; of their credulity that heaped up marvels, and their vanity that prided itself on petty discoveries, and invented a new species of satire. SLOANE, a name endeared to posterity, whose life was that of an enthusiast of science, and who was the founder of a national collection; and his numerous friends, many of whose names have descended with the regard due to the votaries of knowledge, fell the victims. Wit is an unsparing leveller.

The new species of literary burlesque which King seems to have invented, consists in selecting the very expressions and absurd passages from the original he ridiculed, and framing out of them a droll dialogue or a grotesque narrative, he adroitly inserted his own remarks, replete with the keenest irony, or the driest sarcasm. ** Our arch wag says, "The bulls and blunders which Sloane and his friends so naturally essays, and returned to his student's place in Christ Church.”—Enc. Brit. He was assisted by Bolingbroke; but when his patronage failed, Swift procured him the situation of editor to "Barber's Gazette." He ultimately took to drinking; Lintot the bookseller, told Pope, "I remember Dr. King could write verses in a tavern three hours after he could not speak." His last patron was Lord Clarendon, and he died in apartments he had provided for him in London, Dec. 25, 1712, and was buried in the cloisters of Westininster Abbey at the expense of his lordship.-ED. * Sloane describes Clark, the famous posture-master, "Phil. Trans." No. 242, certainly with the wildest grammar, but with many curious particulars; the gentleman in one of Dr. King's Dialogues inquires the secretary's opinion of the causes of this man's wonderful pliability of limbs; a question which Sloane had thus solved, with colloquial ease: it depended upon "bringing the body to it, by using himself to it."

In giving an account of "a child born without a brain"-" Had it lived long enough," said King, "it would have made an excellent publisher of Philosophical Transactions!"

Sloane presented the Royal Society with "a figure of a Chinese, representing one of that nation using an ear-picker, and expressing great satisfaction therein.”- "Whatever pleasure," said that learned physician, "the Chinese may take in thus picking their ears, I am certain most people in these parts, who have had their hearing impaired, have had snch misfortune first come to them by picking their ears too much."-He is so curious, says King, that the secretary took as much satisfaction in looking upon the ear-picker, as the Chinese could do in picking heir ears ¡

But "What drowning is"-that Hanging is only apoplexy!" that "Men cannot swallow when they are dead !" that "No fish die of fevers !" that " 'Hogs s-t soap, and cows s-t fire" that the secretary had "Shells, called Blackmoor's-teeth, I suppose from their whiteness!" and the learned RAY's, that grave naturalist, incredible description of " a very curious little instrument !" I leave to the reader and Dr. King.

pour forth cannot be misrepresented, so careful I am in producing them." King still moves the risible muscles of his readers. "The Voyage to Cajamai," a travestie of Sloane's valuable "History of Jamaica," is still a peculiar piece of humour; and it has been rightly distinguished as "one of the severest and merriest satires that was ever written in prose.' ."* The author might indeed have blushed at the labour bestowed on these drolleries; he might have dreaded that humour so voluminous might grow tedious; but King often with a LUCIANIC spirit, with flashes of RABELAIS, and not seldom with the causticity of his friend Swift, dissipated life in literary idleness, with parodies and travesties on most of his contemporaries; and he made these little things often more exquisite at the cost of consuming on them a genius capable of better. A parodist or a burlesquer is a wit who is perpetually on the watch to catch up or to disguise an author's words, to swell out his defects, and pick up his blunders to amuse the public! King was a wit, who lived on the highway of literature, appropriating, for his own purpose, the property of the most eminent passengers, by a dextrous mode no other had hit on. What an important lesson the labours of King offer to real genius! Their temporary humour lost with their prototypes becomes like a paralytic limb, which, refusing to do its office, impedes the action of the vital members.

WOTTON, in summing up his "Reflections upon Ancient and Modern Learning," was doubtful whether knowledge would improve in the next age proportionably as it had done in his own. "The humour of the age is visibly altered," he says, "from what it had been thirty years ago. Though the

Sir Hans Sloane was unhappily not insensible to these ludicrous assaults, and in the preface to his "History of Jamaica," 1707, a work so highly prized for its botanical researches, absolutely anticipated this fatal facetiousness, for thus he delivers himself:-"Those who strive to make ridiculous anything of this kind, and think themselves great wits, but are very ignorant, and understand nothing of the argument, these, if one were afraid of them, and consulted his own ease, might possibly hinder the publication of any such work, the efforts to be expected from them, making possibly some impression upon persons of equal dispositions; but considering that I have the approbation of others, whose judgment, knowledge, &c., I have great reason to value; and considering that these sorts of men have been in all ages ready to do the like, not only to ordinary persons and their equals, but even to abuse their prince and blaspheme their Maker, I shall, as I have ever since I seriously considered this matter, think of and treat them with the greatest contempt."

Royal Society has weathered the rude attacks of Stubbe," yet "the sly insinuations of the Men of Wit," with "the public ridiculing of all who spend their time and fortunes in scientific or curious researches, have so taken off the edge of those who have opulent fortunes and a love to learning, that these studies begin to be contracted amongst physicians and mechanics." He treats King with good-humour. "A man is got but a very little way (in philosophy) that is concerned as often as such a merry gentleman as Dr. King shall think fit to make himself sport.'

So.

Dr. King's dispersed works have fortunately been collected by Mr. Nichols, with ample illustrations, in three vols. 8vo, 1776. The "Useful Transactions in Philosophy and other sorts of Learning," form a collection of ludicrous dissertations of Antiquarianism, Natural Philosophy, Criticism, &c., where his own peculiar humour combines with his curious reading. [In this he burlesqued the proceedings of the Royal and Antiquarian Societies with some degree of spirit and humour. By turning vulgar lines into Greek, Latin, and Anglo-Saxon, a learned air is given to some papers on childish subjects. One learned doctor communicates to another "an Essay proving, by arguments philosophical, that millers, falsely so reputed, are not thieves, with an interesting argument that taylors likewise are not A Welsh schoolmaster sends some "natural observations" made in Wales, in direct imitation of the " 'Philosophical Transactions" for 1707, and with humorous love for genealogy, reckons that in his school, "since the flood, there have been 466, and I am the 467th master: before the flood, they living long, there were but two-Rice ap Evan Dha the good, and Davie ap Shones Gonnah the naught, in whose time the flood came.' The first paper of the collection is an evident jest on John Bagford and his gatherings for the history of printing, now preserved among the manuscripts of the British Museum. It purports to be "an Essay on the invention of samplers, communicated by Mrs. Judith Bagford, with an account of her collections for the same:" and written in burlesque of a paper in the "Philosophical Transactions" for April, 1697. It is a most elaborate performance, deducing with mock-seriousness the origin of samplers from the ancient tales of Arachne, who "set forth the whole story of her wrongs in needlework, and sent it to her sister;" and our author adds, with much humour, "it is very remarkable that the memory of this story does at present continue, for there are no samplers, which proceed in any measure beyond the first rudiments, but have a tree and a nightingale sitting on it." Such were the jests of the day against the Royal philosophers.] He also invented satirical and humorous indexes, not the least facetious parts of his volumes. King had made notes on more than 20,000 books and MSS., and his Adversaria, of which a portion has been preserved, is not inferior in curiosity to the literary journals of Gibbon, though it wants the investigating spirit of the modern philosopher.

SIR JOHN HILL,

WITH

THE ROYAL SOCIETY, FIELDING, SMART, &c.

A Parallel between Orator HENLEY and Sir JOHN HILL-his love of the

Science of Botany, with the fate of his " Vegetable System"-ridicules scientific Collectors; his "Dissertation on Royal Societies," and his "Review of the Works of the Royal Society"-compliments himself that he is NOT a Member-successful in his attacks on the Experimentalists, but loses his spirit in encountering the Wits-"The Inspector" a paper war with FIELDING-a literary stratagem-battles with SMART and WOODWARD-HILL appeals to the Nation for the Office of Keeper of the Sloane Collection-closes his life by turning Empiric -Some Epigrams on HILL-his Miscellaneous Writings.

IN the history of literature we discover some who have opened their career with noble designs, and with no deficient powers, yet unblest with stoic virtues, having missed, in their honourable labours, those rewards they had anticipated, they have exhibited a sudden transition of character, and have left only a name proverbial for its disgrace.

Our own literature exhibits two extraordinary characters, indelibly marked by the same traditional odium. The wit and acuteness of Orator HENLEY, and the science and vivacity of the versatile Sir JOHN HILL, must separate them from those who plead the same motives for abjuring all moral restraint, without having ever furnished the world with a single instance that they were capable of forming nobler views.

This orator and this knight would admit of a close parallel ;* both as modest in their youth as afterwards remarkable for their effrontery. Their youth witnessed the same devotedness to study, with the same inventive and enterprising genius. Hill projected and pursued a plan of botanical travels, to form a collection of rare plants: the patronage he received was too

*The moral and literary character of Henley has been developed in "Calamities of Authors."