except Sir Francis, Sir Stephen 3, and the Bank, will take epigrams and epistles as value received for their notes; and the East India company accept of heroic poems for their sealed bonds. Upon which bottom our publishers have full power to treat with the city in behalf of us authors, to enable traders to become patrons and fellows of the Royal Society, as well as to receive certain degrees of skill in the Latin and Greek tongues, according to the quantity of the commodities which they take off their hands. Grecian Coffee-house, July 184. THE learned have so long laboured under the imputation of dryness and dulness in their accounts of the phænomena, that an ingenious gentleman of our society has resolved to write a system of philosophy in a more lively method, both as to the matter and language, than has been hitherto attempted. He read to us the plan upon which he intends to proceed. I thought his account, by way of fable, of the worlds about us, had so much vivacity in it, that I could not forbear transcribing his hypothesis, to give the reader a taste of my friend's treatise, which is now in the press 5. < The inferior deities, having designed on a day to play a game at football, kneaded together a numberless collection of dancing atoms into the form of seven 3 Probably Sir Francis Child, and Sir Stephen Evance, the two most eminent bankers of that day. 4 This by Addison. 5 Apparently a banter on Mr. Whiston's book, entitled Prælectiones Physicæ Mathematicæ, sive Philosophia clarissimi Newtoni Mathematica illustrata, 1710; wherein he explained the Newtonian philosophy. blessed age all habits will be reduced to a primitive simplicity; and whoever shall be found to have persevered in a constancy of dress, in spite of all the allurements of prophane and heathen habits, shall be rewarded with a never-fading doublet of a thousand years. All points in the system, which are doubted, shall be attested by the knight's extemporary oath, for the satisfaction of his readers.' Will's Coffee-house, July 18. WE were upon the heroic strain this evening; and the question was, 'What is the true sublime? Many very good discourses happened thereupon; after which a gentleman at the table, who is, it seems, writing on that subject, assumed the argument; and, though he ran through many instances of sublimity from the ancient writers, said, he had hardly known an occa sion wherein the true greatness of soul, which animates a general in action, is so well represented, with regard to the person of whom it was spoken, and the time in which it was writ, as in a few lines in a modern poem. There is,' continued he, 'nothing so forced and constrained, as what we frequently meet with in tragedies; to make a man, under the weight of great sorrow, or full of meditation upon what he is soon to execute, cast about for a simile to what he himself is, or the thing which he is going to act: but there is nothing more proper and natural for a poet, whose business it is to describe, and who is Spectator of one in that circumstance, when his mind is working upon a great image, and that the ideas hurry his imagination-I say, there is nothing so na upon * Probably Mr. Welsted, who about this time published a translation of Longinus. tural as for a poet to relieve and clear himself from the burden of thought at that time, by uttering his conception in simile and metaphor. The highest act of the mind of man is to possess itself with tranquillity in imminent danger, and to have its thoughts so free, as to act at that time without perplexity. The ancient authors have compared this sedate courage to a rock that remains immoveable amidst the rage of winds and waves; but that is too stupid and inanimate a similitude, and could do no credit to the hero. At other times they are all of them wonderfully obliged to a Lybian lion, which may give indeed very agreeable terrors to a description, but is no compliment to the person to whom it is applied: eagles, tigers, and wolves, are made use of on the same occasion, and very often with much beauty; but this is still an honour done to the brute rather than the hero. Mars, Pallas, Bacchus, and Hercules, have each of them furnished very good similies in their time, and made, doubtless, a greater impression on the mind of a heathen than they have on that of a modern reader. But the sublime image that I am talking of, and which I really think as great as ever entered into the thought of man, is in the poem called The Campaign; where the simile of a ministering angel sets forth the most sedate and the most active courage, engaged in an uproar of nature, a confusion of elements, and a scene of divine vengeance. Add to all, that these lines compliment the general and his queen at the same time, and have all the natural horrors heightened by the image that was still fresh in the mind of every reader 1o: 9 By Addison. 10 A dreadful storm, which happened in England and on the coast, about midnight, on the 26th November 1703. " "Twas then great Marlbro's mighty soul was prov'd, And taught the doubtful battle where to rage. The whole poem is so exquisitely noble and poetic, that I think it an honour to our nation and language.' The gentleman concluded his critique on this work, by saying that he esteemed it wholly new, and a wonderful attempt, to keep up the ordinary ideas of a march of an army, just as they happened, in so warm and great a style, and yet be at once familiar and heroic. Such a performance is a chronicle as well as a poem, and will preserve the memory of our hero, when all the edifices and statues erected to his honour are blended with common dust. |