“But why should a learned man make all this _Dirige_ for Columbus’s name? What matter is it how America be called? For Flavio of Malphi in Naples hath in great measure applied the virtues of the loadstone to the mariner’s compass in vain, the Portugals have found the length of Africa’s foot in vain, the Spaniards sent out the Italian dove in vain, Sir Francis Drake hath sailed round the world and made thorow lights to it in vain, and Hakluyt and Purchas have with endless labor acquainted Englishmen with these things in vain, if, after all, we go about to turn the American Euphrates into a Stygian Lake. The breaking of this one instrument spoils us of the long-expected and much-desired consort of music.”[320] Very soon thereafter he breaks forth in words printed in large Italic type and made prophetic:-- “_Lift up your heads, O ye Gates_ [of Columbina], _and be ye lift up, ye Everlasting Doors, and the KING of Glory shall come in_.”[321] MARQUIS D’ARGENSON, 1733. From the Puritan son of New England, pass now to a different character. René Louis de Voyer, Marquis d’Argenson, a French noble, was born 18th October, 1694, and died 26th January, 1757; so that his life lapped upon the prolonged reigns of Louis the Fourteenth and Louis the Fifteenth. At college the comrade of Voltaire, he was ever afterwards the friend and correspondent of this great writer. His own thoughts, commended by the style of the other, would have placed him among the most illustrious of French history. Notwithstanding strange eccentricities, he was often elevated, far-sighted, and prophetic, above any other Frenchman except Turgot. By the courtiers of Versailles he was called “the Stupid” (_la Bête_), while Voltaire hailed one of his productions, yet in manuscript, as the “work of Aristides,” and pronounced him “the best citizen who had ever reached the ministry,” and the Duc de Richelieu called him “Secretary of State for the Republic of Plato.”[322] Except a brief subordinate service and two years of the Cabinet as Minister of Foreign Affairs, his life was passed in meditation and composition, especially on subjects of government and human improvement. This was his great passion. “If I were in power,” he wrote, “and knew a capable man, I would go on all fours and seek him, to pray him to serve me as counsellor and tutor.”[323] Is not this a lesson to the heedless partisan?