at oratory, is known to have been guilty of a similar oversight; for, having invented a plan of universal science, designed for the relief of the human estate, he forgot the principal application of it. But this author says, _I_ have always avoided falling into this inconvenience, having always hated these promises and announcements, not only out of distrust of my memory, but also because this method relishes too much of the _artificial_. You will find no scientific plan _here_ ostentatiously exhibited; you will find such a plan elsewhere with all the works set down in it, but the works themselves will be missing; and you will find the works elsewhere, but it will be under the cover of a superficial and transitory show, where it would be ruinous to produce the plan, '_I_ have always _avoided_ falling into this inconvenience. _Simpliciora militares decent_.' But as he appears, after all, to have had no military weapon with which to sustain that straight-forwardness of speech which is becoming in a military power, and no dagger to pursue his points with, some artifice, though he professes not to like it, may be necessary, and the rule which he here specifies is, on the whole, perhaps, not altogether amiss. ''Tis enough that I have promised to myself never to take upon me to speak in a place where I owe respect; for as to that sort of speaking where a man _reads_ his speech, besides that it is very absurd, it is a mighty disadvantage to those who _naturally could give it a grace by action_, and to rely upon the mercy of the readiness of my invention, I will much less do it; 'tis heavy and perplexed, and such as would never furnish me in sudden and important necessities.' 'Speaking,' he says in another place, 'hurts and discomposes me,--my _voice_ is loud and high, so that when I have gone to whisper some great person about an affair of _consequence, they have often had to moderate my voice. This story deserves a place here_.