That of these two luminaries so much of their irradiations are suffered
from time to time to shine down upon us, as he, whose infinite wisdom
which dispenses everything in exact weight and measure, knows will just
serve to light us on our way in this night of our obscurity; so that
your reverences and worships now find out, nor is it a moment longer in
my power to conceal it from you, That the fervent wish in your behalf
with which I set out, was no more than the first insinuating _How d’ye_
of a caressing prefacer, stifling his reader, as a lover sometimes does
a coy mistress, into silence. For alas! could this effusion of light
have been as easily procured, as the exordium wished it --I tremble to
think how many thousands for it, of benighted travellers (in the learned
sciences at least) must have groped and blundered on in the dark, all
the nights of their lives----running their heads against posts, and
knocking out their brains without ever getting to their journies end;
----some falling with their noses perpendicularly into sinks----others
horizontally with their tails into kennels. Here one half of a learned
profession tilting full but against the other half of it, and then
tumbling and rolling one over the other in the dirt like hogs. --Here
the brethren of another profession, who should have run in opposition to
each other, flying on the contrary like a flock of wild geese, all in a
row the same way. --What confusion! --what mistakes! ----fiddlers and
painters judging by their eyes and ears--admirable! --trusting to the
passions excited--in an air sung, or a story painted to the
heart----instead of measuring them by a quadrant.
In the fore-ground of this picture, a _statesman_ turning the political
wheel, like a brute, the wrong way round----_against_ the stream of
corruption--by Heaven! ----instead of _with_ it.
In this corner, a son of the divine _Esculapius_, writing a book against
predestination; perhaps worse--feeling his patient’s pulse, instead of
his apothecary’s----a brother of the Faculty in the back-ground upon his
knees in tears--drawing the curtains of a mangled victim to beg his
forgiveness; --offering a fee--instead of taking one.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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