No fictitious character of his is a live one to-day; you can hardly recall one if you try.[92] No couplet or verselet of his is so freighted with a serene or hopeful philosophy as to make our march the blither by reason of it down the corridors of time. No blast of all his fanfaron of trumpets sounds the opening of the gates upon any Delectable Mountains. A great, clever, literary worker! I think that is all we can say of him. And when you or I pass under his monument in the corner of Westminster Abbey, we will stand bowed respectfully, but not with any such veneration, I think, as we expect to carry to the tomb of Milton or of Chaucer; and if one falls on Pope--what then? I think we might pause--waver; more polish here--more power there--the humanities not radiant in either; and so we might safely sidle away to warm ourselves before the cenotaph of Goldsmith. _John Locke._ Another man who grew up in these times in England, and who from his study-window at Oxford (where he had been Lecturer on Rhetoric) saw the Great Fire of London in the shape of a vast, yellow, sulphurous-looking cloud, of portentous aspect, rolling toward the zenith, and covering half the sky, was Mr. John Locke.[93] We are too apt, I think, to dismiss this author from our thoughts as a man full only of dreary metaphysic subtleties; and support the belief with the story that our Jonathan Edwards read his treatise on the _Human Understanding_ with great delight at the age of fourteen. Yet Locke, although a man of the keenest and rarest intellect--which almost etherialized his looks--was possessed of a wonderful deal of what he would have called “hard, round-about sense;” indeed it would be quite possible to fill a whole calendar with bits of his printed talk that would be as pitpat and common-sensical as anything in _Poor Richard’s Almanac_. Moreover, he could, on occasions, tell a neat and droll story, which would set the “table in a roar.”