‘We break up tombs with sacrilegious hands, Old rubbish we remove. To walk in ruins like vain ghosts we love, And with fond divining wands We search among the dead For treasure burièd, Whilst still the liberal earth does hold So many virgin mines of undiscovered gold.’ Dryden in some remarkable lines addressed to Dr. Charleton expresses the same sense of the freedom with which Bacon had set free the study of nature, and the bondage from which he had delivered it: ‘The longest tyranny that ever swayed, Was that wherein our ancestors betrayed Their freeborn reason to the Stagirite, And made his torch their universal light. So truth, while only one supplied the State, Grew scarce and dear, and yet sophisticate; Still it was bought, like emp’ric wares or charms, Hard words, sealed up with Aristotle’s arms.’ l. 164-182: It ought not to be forgotten that this poem appeared first prefixed to Sprat’s _History of the Royal Society of London_, London, 1667. Though not published till the year 1667, the year of Cowley’s death, the book had in great part been printed, as Sprat informs us, two years before, which exactly agrees with Cowley’s statement here. The position which the poem thus occupied should be kept in mind, otherwise the encomium on Sprat’s _History_ might seem dragged in with no sufficient motive, and merely out of motives of private friendship. It may be added that the praise is not at all so exaggerated as those who know Addison’s ‘tuneful prelate’ only by his verse might suppose. The book has considerable merits, and Johnson speaks of it as in his day still keeping its place, and being read with pleasure. I only observed when it was too late to profit by the observation, that after l. 143, three lines occur, on this the first publication of the poem, which, by a strange heedlessness, have dropt out of all subsequent editions. They are as follows: ‘She with much stranger art than his that put All the Iliads in a nut, The numerous work of life does into atoms shut.’ P. 129, No. cix.--This chorus, or fragment of a chorus, from the _Thyestes_ of Seneca, beginning Me dulcis saturet quies, and ending with these remarkable lines, Illi mors gravis incubat, Qui notus nimis omnibus Ignotus moritur sibi, seems to have had much attraction for moralists and poets in the seventeenth century. Beside this paraphrase of it by Sir Matthew Hale, prefixed to one of his _Contemplations_, there is a translation by Cowley, and a third, the best of all, by Marvell, of which these are the concluding lines: ‘Who exposed to others’ eyes, Into his own heart never pries, Death’s to him a strange surprise.’