If the reader fairly considers the strength of what I have advanced in
the foregoing section, I am convinced it will produce a wonderful
revolution in his notions and opinions, and he will be abundantly better
prepared to receive and to relish the concluding part of this miraculous
treatise. Readers may be divided into three classes—the superficial, the
ignorant, and the learned, and I have with much felicity fitted my pen to
the genius and advantage of each. The superficial reader will be
strangely provoked to laughter, which clears the breast and the lungs, is
sovereign against the spleen, and the most innocent of all diuretics.
The ignorant reader (between whom and the former the distinction is
extremely nice) will find himself disposed to stare, which is an
admirable remedy for ill eyes, serves to raise and enliven the spirits,
and wonderfully helps perspiration. But the reader truly learned,
chiefly for whose benefit I wake when others sleep, and sleep when others
wake, will here find sufficient matter to employ his speculations for the
rest of his life. It were much to be wished, and I do here humbly
propose for an experiment, that every prince in Christendom will take
seven of the deepest scholars in his dominions and shut them up close for
seven years in seven chambers, with a command to write seven ample
commentaries on this comprehensive discourse. I shall venture to affirm
that, whatever difference may be found in their several conjectures, they
will be all, without the least distortion, manifestly deducible from the
text. Meantime it is my earnest request that so useful an undertaking
may be entered upon (if their Majesties please) with all convenient
speed, because I have a strong inclination before I leave the world to
taste a blessing which we mysterious writers can seldom reach till we
have got into our graves, whether it is that fame being a fruit grafted
on the body, can hardly grow and much less ripen till the stock is in the
earth, or whether she be a bird of prey, and is lured among the rest to
pursue after the scent of a carcass, or whether she conceives her trumpet
sounds best and farthest when she stands on a tomb, by the advantage of a
rising ground and the echo of a hollow vault.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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