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They are divided into Devotional, Moral, and Entertaining, thus comprehending the three great duties of life,that which we owe to God, to our neighbour, and to ourselves.

In the first part, it must be confessed, our English poets have not very much excelled. In that department, namely, the praise of our Maker, by which poetry began, and from which it deviated by time, we are most faultily deficient. There are one or two, however, particularly the Deity, by Mr Boyse; a poem, when it first came out, that lay for some time neglected, till introduced to public notice by Mr Hervey and Mr Fielding. In it the reader will perceive many striking pictures, and perhaps glow with a part of that gratitude which seems to have inspired the writer.

In the Moral part I am more copious, from the same reason, because our language contains a large number of the kind. Voltaire, talking of our poets, gives them the preference in moral pieces to those of any other nation; and indeed no poets have better settled the bounds of duty, or more precisely determined the rules for conduct in life, than ours. In this department the fair reader will find the Muse has been solicitous to guide her, not with the allurements of a syren, but the integrity of a friend.

In the Entertaining part my greatest difficulty was what to reject. The materials lay in such plenty that I was bewildered in my choice; in this case, then, I was solely determined by the tendency of the poem; and where I found one, however well executed, that seemed in the least tending to distort the judgment, or inflame the imagination, it was excluded without mercy. I have here and there, indeed, when one of particular beauty offered with a few blemishes, lopped off the defects, and thus, like the tyrant,* who fitted all strangers to the bed he had prepared for them, I have inserted some, by first adapting them to my plan: we only differ in this, that he mutilated with a bad design, I from motives of a contrary nature.

It will be easier to condemn a compilation of this kind, than to prove its inutility. While young ladies are readers, and while their guardians are solicitous that they shall only read the best books, there can be no danger of a work of this kind being disagreeable. It offers, in a very small

* Procrustes.-B.

COLLECTION OF POEMS FOR YOUNG LADIES.

299

compass, the very flowers of our poetry, and that of a kind adapted to the sex supposed to be its readers. Poetry is an art, which no young lady can, or ought to be wholly ignorant of. The pleasure which it gives, and indeed the necessity of knowing enough of it to mix in modern conversation, will evince the usefulness of my design, which is to supply the highest and the most innocent entertainment at the smallest expense; as the poems in this collection, if sold singly, would amount to ten times the price of what I am able to afford the present.

INTRODUCTION TO A SURVEY

OF

EXPERIMENTAL PHILOSOPHY.

[This Introduction is here printed for the first time with Goldsmith's Prefaces, a distinction which it certainly merits on account of its excellence. The work to which it properly belongs is little known :it is, indeed, superficial; but the author displays in it his usual art of communicating his knowledge in a pleasing manner; and the Survey of Experimental Philosophy may still be consulted with advantage by those whose acquaintance with science is too limited to enable them to understand more scientific works.-B.

In order to explain all the appearances of nature, the ancients usually considered man as a being newly introduced into the world, ignorant of all he saw, and astonished with every object around him. In this great variety, the first efforts of such a being would be to procure subsistence, and, careless of the causes of things, to rest contented with their enjoyment.

The next endeavour of such a creature would be to know by what means he became blest with such a luxuriance of possession; he feels the grateful vicissitudes of day and night-perceives the difference of seasons-he finds some things noxious to his health, and others grateful to his appetite: he would therefore eagerly desire to be informed how these things assumed such qualities, and would himself, from want of experience, form some wild conjecture concerning them. He would, for instance, assert, as the primeval ancients have done, that the sun was made of red-hot iron, that at night it sunk into the sea to rest

from its journey; that summer issued through a chasm made in the skies for that purpose and in this manner he would account for every other appearance that excited his curiosity.

Succeeding observations would, however, soon contradict his first prejudices, and he would begin to treasure up a history of the changes, that every object served to work either upon himself or upon each other. Thus his mind would become stored with the appearances of natural bodies, and with useful observations upon their effects. The number of these observations would in time arise to a considerable amount, and this would once more induce him to reduce them into form; and, by combining them, to arrive at their causes. From hence new systems would be erected, more plausible indeed than those already made by savage man, but still, from a want of a sufficient number of materials, extremely defective so that fancy would be obliged to supply the greatest share of the fabric.

At length, after frequently experiencing the futility of system, man would be obliged to acknowledge his ignorance of the causes of most appearances, and now, grown more modest, would set himself down, not only to collect new observations, in order to enlarge his history of nature, but in a manner to torture nature by experiments, and oblige her to give up those secrets, which she had hitherto kept concealed. Several of these newly acquired observations being thus added to the former obvious amount, would at length form the groundwork of a system; and, by comparing each part, and uniting the whole, man would at last begin to discover the simplicity of nature under all her seeming variety.

Such is the progress of natural philosophy in the human mind, which, from enjoyment, proceeds to conjecture; from thence to observation of facts, which, from their paucity, give birth to hypothetical system, which is succeeded by experimental investigation, and this at length gives rise to the true experimental system, which, though still defective, is yet built upon the surest foundation.

Experimental philosophers, therefore, or those who endeavour to discover the hidden operations of nature, and find out new properties by trials made upon her, are the only sect from whom any expectations are to be had of advancing this science, and making us intimately acquainted

with whatever we see. We should leave to the Platonists their properties of number and geometrical figures; to the Peripatetics their privations, elementary virtues, occult qualities, sympathies, antipathies, and faculties; to the Mechanists their matter, motion, subtle particles, and actions of effluvia, and only follow where experience shall guide us.

The ancients seem to have been but little acquainted with the arts of making experiments for the investigation of natural knowledge. It is true, they treasured up numberless observations, which nature offered to their view, or which chance might have given them an opportunity of seeing; but they seldom went farther than barely the natural history of every object: they seldom laboured, by variously combining natural bodies, if I may so express it, to create new appearances, in order to afford matter for speculation.

They were but little employed in thus diving into the secret recesses of nature they read the book as it lay before them; but then they read with great assiduity. Many facts which they have advanced, and which had at first been denied by the moderns, have been afterwards found to be true. They only sought for such qualities in nature as might be useful to the arts. Little concerned as to satisfying mere curiosity, they considered it as an intellectual pleasure, and only sought to gratify it by mere intellectual speculations.

But whatever assistance they might have given to real philosophy, the obscure ages, which succeeded theirs, seemed not disposed to avail themselves of their researches. In these times of darkness, they rested perfectly satisfied with words instead of things,-adopted the vain speculations of antiquity, and added many more of their own. Yet, in the midst of this barbarous period, there arose a man, who seemed formed to enlighten his contemporaries, if the darkness had not been too great for any single luminary to dispel. Roger Bacon, an Englishman and a monk of the twelfth century, pursued the true method of investigating nature he even ventured to ridicule the unmeaning philosophy of Aristotle, or rather of his commentators; made several experiments in optics, chemistry, and every part of natural knowledge; and, even at that early period, found out the use of gunpowder. The only recompense he had from his ignorant contemporaries was to be accused

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