Here I shall inform the small critic, what it is, “a thousand pounds to one penny,” as the nursery song says, or as the newspaper reporters of the Ring have it, Lombard Street to a China Orange,—no small critic already knows, whether he be diurnal, hebdomadal, monthly or trimestral,—that a notion of progressive Life is mentioned in Bishop Berkeley's Minute Philosopher, not as derived from any old system of philosophy or religion, but as the original speculation of one who belonged to a club of Freethinkers. Another member of that worshipful society explains the system of his acquaintance, thus: “He made a threefold partition of the human species into Birds, Beasts and Fishes, being of opinion that the Road of Life lies upwards in a perpetual ascent, through the scale of Being: in such sort, that the souls of insects after death make their second appearance in the shape of perfect animals, Birds, Beasts or Fishes; which upon their death are preferred into human bodies, and in the next stage into Beings of a higher and more perfect kind. This man we considered at first as a sort of heretic, because his scheme seemed not to consist with our fundamental tenet, the Mortality of the Soul: but he justified the notion to be innocent, inasmuch as it included nothing of reward or punishment, and was not proved by any argument which supposed, or implied either incorporeal spirit, or Providence, being only inferred, by way of analogy, from what he had observed in human affairs, the Court, the Church, and the Army, wherein the tendency is always upwards, from lower posts to higher. According to this system, the Fishes are those men who swim in pleasure, such as _petits maitres_, _bons vivans_, and honest fellows. The Beasts are dry, drudging, covetous, rapacious folk, and all those addicted to care and business like oxen, and other dry land animals, which spend their lives in labour and fatigue. The Birds are airy, notional men, Enthusiasts, Projectors, Philosophers, and such like; in each species every individual retaining a tincture of his former state, which constitutes what is called genius.” The quiet reader who sometimes lifts his eyes from the page (and closes them perhaps) to meditate upon what he has been reading, will perhaps ask himself wherefore I consider it to be as certain that no small critic should have read the Minute Philosopher, as that children can not be drowned while “sliding on dry ground?”—My reason for so thinking is, that small critics never read any thing so good. Like town ducks they dabble in the gutter, but never purify themselves in clear streams, nor take to the deep waters. CHAPTER CCXI. SOMETHING IN HONOUR OF BISHOP WATSON.—CUDWORTH.—JACKSON OF OXFORD AND NEWCASTLE.—A BAXTERIAN SCRUPLE. _S'il y a des lecteurs qui se soucient peu de cela, on les prie de se souvenir qu'un auteur n'est pas obligé à ne rien dire que ce qui est de leur goût._ BAYLE.