The passages on Aristotle are in a similar vein of pleasantry. “Some writers,” he remarks, “say he was a Jew; others that he got all his information from a Jew, that he kept an apothecary’s shop, and was an Atheist; others say, on the contrary, that he did not keep an apothecary’s shop and that he was a Trinitarian.” Further on he adds, that Aristotle’s philosophy “had an exclusive monopoly granted to it by the Parliament of Paris, _who forbad the use of any other in France_;” and he goes on to compare the great Stagarite with Bacon, to the manifest disadvantage of the former. After speaking of the triumphs of the Baconian method, and the indebtedness of mankind to the vast understanding of its author, he proceeds to remark, that to “the understanding of Aristotle, equally vast, perhaps, and equally original, we are indebted for fifteen hundred years of quibbling and ignorance; in which the earth fell under the tyranny of words, and philosophers quarreled with one another, like drunken men in dark rooms, _who hate peace without knowing why they fight, or seeing how to take aim_.” Zeno, the founder of the sect of the Stoics, is represented as a Cyprus merchant, who had studied the writings of the most eminent Socratic philosophers, and who, in the course of his mercantile pursuits, “freighted a ship for Athens, with a very valuable cargo of Phœnician purple, which he completely lost by shipwreck, on the coast near the Piræus. A very acute man, who found himself in a state of sudden and complete poverty in Athens, would naturally enough think of turning philosopher, both as by its doctrines it inspired him with some consolation for the loss of his Phœnician purple, and by its profits afforded him some chance of subsistence without it.” Socrates, he says, was the great father and inventor of common sense, “as Ceres was of the plough and Bacchus of intoxication.” Two thousand years ago, he adds, “common sense was not invented. If Orpheus, or Linus, or any of those melodious moralists, sung, in bad verses, such advice as a grand-mamma would now give to a child of six years old, he was thought to be inspired by the gods, and statues and altars were erected to his memory. In Hesiod there is a very grave exhortation to mankind to wash their faces; and I have discovered a very strong analogy between the precepts of Pythagoras and Mrs. Trimmer—both think that a son ought to obey his father, and both are clear that a good man is better than a bad one.”