It is affirmed by the angelic Doctor, St. Thomas Aquinas, that of corporeal things the quantity is in proportion to the quality, that which is best being always in the same degree the greatest. “Thus in this our universe,” he says “the water is more than the earth, the air more than the water, the fire more than the air: the first heaven larger than the sphere of fire, the second than the first, the third than the second; and so they proceed increasing to the tenth sphere, and to the empyrean, which is, _inestimabilis et incomparabilis magnitudinis_.” Upon the principle which this greatest of the schoolmen has assumed, I leave the reader to infer what would be the probable and proper extent of the present opus, were I to indulge my genius and render justice to the subject. To make it exceed in length the histories of Sir Charles Grandison and of Clarissa Harlowe, or the bulkier romances of Calprenede and the Scuderys, it would not be necessary to handle it in the manner of a lawyer who, having no more argument than would lie in a nut-shell, wire-draws it and hammers at it, and hammers at it and wire-draws it, and then wire-draws it and hammers at it again, like a lecturer who is exhibiting the infinite ductility of gold. “What a gift,” says Fuller, “had John Halsebach, Professor at Vienna, in tediousness, who being to expound the Prophet Isaiah to his auditors, read twenty-one years on the first chapter, and yet finished it not!” Mercator, in the description of Austria in his Atlas, has made mention of this Arch-Emperor of the Spintexts. If I had been in John Halsebach's place, my exposition of that first chapter would have been comprized in one lecture, of no hungry or sleepy duration. But if John Halsebach were in mine, he would have filled more volumes than Rees's Cyclopedia with his account of Daniel Dove. And yet Rabbi Chananiah may contest the palm with the Vienna Professor. It is recorded of him that when he undertook to write a commentary upon part of the Prophet Ezekiel, he required the Jews to supply him with three hundred tons of oil for the use of his lamp, while he should be engaged in it.