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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