HYLEMA. SEVERAL writers, and they not of the first magnitude, have given the title of Sylva, wood, or forest, to their performances. This would be too magnificent an appellation for the following medley. It deserves no better name, than that of an underwood, copse, or shrubbery; wherein there is a mixture, without order, of plants, many of them wild, some higher, some lower; some of more, and some of less thickness; from a tree of middling growth, down to a weed or flower; some straight, some crooked, some stunted; many medicinal, none poisonous; briers, brambles, thorns; all thrown, just as chance, or nature gave them a root. Here, reader, you are not to expect a beam for the roof of a palace, nor a top-mast for a first-rate man of war; but you may be fitted for a walking staff, or switch, to a short ladder. Here you shall not find a tulip, a ranunculas, or a carnation. Such do not grow spontaneous in my soil or climate. But you may pick up, here and there, a daisy, a primrose, a hyacinth. Here is no quinquina, nor ginseng, nor balm of gilead; but valerian, camomile, and gladiolus, grow up and down in plenty. I have no grapes, nor peaches, nor oranges, nor pine-apples for you; if however you can be content with nuts, strawberries, and raspberries, you may have them here for pulling. Use your freedom. Take what you want. Though all is in confusion, you can hardly lose yourself, as few of the trees are higher than your own head. I only recommend it to you, to defend shins from the briers, and your eyes from the thorns. 1. Ignorance, knavery, diffidence, accidents, make business a crooked road. All that the most skilful can do towards expediting his affairs, is to keep the inside of the course, and turn the corners as short as safety will permit him. your 2. If digestion, when applied to memory and the acquisition of knowledge, is a metaphor, it is certainly one of the most just and beautiful metaphors ever made use of. But it seems to be more, and to express the thing intended directly and properly as it is in itself. To digest, signifies to set off and separate the several parts of a compound or aggregate, into distinct places or receptacles. To digest our food is to separate the nutritious from the useless part, to throw out this through the natural orifices of evacuation, and to send that through the lacteals, into the mass of blood, and from thence by subsequent strainers or concoctions, into the several parts of the body as new supplies are wanted. A regular appetite and digestions are necessary to health and strength; and so is wholesome food. A defect in these is, in proportion, the occasion of sickness or debility; an excess, of crudities, obesity, and of still more violent disorders. It is just in like manner that knowledge is brought in by reading, conversation, experience, reflection; and the ideas of which it consists, either discarded as useless, or stored in the memory for the farther purposes of the understanding. Distinction, which is but another word for digestion, is necessary in this first concoction, and afterward to the regular classing of our ideas in their repository, to their being easily and clearly recollected, and to their being brought without confusion before the judging faculty, in order to a right formation of propositions. A strong but regular appetite of knowledge, with a power of well digesting, and classing our ideas, produce sound judging, right reasoning, true wisdom, and even virtue, which constitute the health and vigour of the mind, provided the materials of our knowledge are of a proper and useful kind. A defect in these occasions ignorance, stupidity, absurdity, errors, and vice itself, wherein consists the state of a disorderly mind. There is an atrophy of mind, for want of curiosity and retention, or for want of that digestion which is necessary to retention. And there is a pingue ingenium, an obesity of understanding the result of much reading, and of little or no power or care to distinguish. Of the two it is better to disgorge our ideas as soon as received than retain them in huddled assemblages, which produce nothing but wild imaginations and false reasonings. It is better to be ignorant than to pervert the religion, philosophy, or politics of mankind, as these bloated and overgrown scholars hardly ever fail to do. A depraved appetite does not produce worse effects in the stomach than Continual an impertinent curiosity does in the memory. reading is to the mind, what gluttony is to the body. No glutton can possibly be long of a comely or wholesome constitution. No eternal reader or plodder was ever remarkable for good sense, ever thought, spoke, or wrote well. Distinction and exercise, particularly in conversation, or cool debate with men of understanding, will soon raise a man of moderate parts and of moderate reading in well chosen books, into a considerable degree of eminence as to knowledge. 3. I was once acquainted with a lady (reader, did you ever know such a one?) who having studied and practised all those particular airs, accents, gestures, which made her appear to the greatest advantage, carefully kept herself within her art of being pretty. She had the skill also to add a sweetness, easiness, modesty, tenderness of heart, which set in the esteem of her acquaintances considerably above the generality of her sex. Among others one very agreeable man made his addresses to her. She did not wholly discourage him. He took occasion however one day, as without design, to speak with esteem, approaching to admiration, of a rival beauty in the neighbourhood. This 'suddenly changed the amiable creature, I am speaking of, into a sort of monster, with features as harsh, and with a carriage as savage, as those of a Hottentot. Her expressions likewise were too rude to be repeated. Driven by this accident from all her arts of pleasing, she appeared no longer the same creature, and her admirer, whether dismissed by her or himself, eloped from the broken spell of her enchant ments. 4. No man can have any rational hope of living fifty years; yet should any one be perfectly well assured of his dying precisely fifty years hence, he would ten to one be more uneasy than under his former hazard of dying to-morrow, or protracting his life to a hundred years; so far do our wishes outrun our reason. 5. On meeting with ill treatment from our neighbours, by far the greatest part of our grievance arises not from the real harm sustained by the injury, but from our own indignation and resentment. To remove this additional disturbance, the best way will be, to consider that though the ill usage is from men, the affliction is from God, and intended for a correction, so that it is to be received as a benefit at the hand of Providence, rather than as an injury at that of the doer. If this is the case, how dare we be angry at it? How dare we retaliate? 6. There is always some love in esteem, and some esteem in love; some hatred in contempt, some contempt in hatred. These things are pretty plain; but it is not so obvious, though equally true, that hatred is never without a greater or less degree of esteem. We should have far less malice among mankind were every one convinced that his hatred aggrandizes its object, yet if it did not, how comes it to cease when we have humbled the man we hate by some signal act of revenge? 7. Young Bumphino was bred in a remote part of the country, and not as a person of much distinction, even there, till the age of twenty-one, when he came to the possession of a fine estate by the death of his father, who had been a noted miser. In this situation he saw nothing of the polite world, but had contracted all the rusticity of the homely folks with whom he had lived since his childhood. His aunt Citadella, at his first coming to town, was ever and anon setting him right in this or that point of behaviour, and employed a dancing-master to regulate his carriage and gestures. Bumphino told a country acquaintance whom he met in the street, that he did indeed hope in coming to town, to see many strange sights and wonders; yet that if he had never been told it he could not have been more amazed than he was, to find it agreed upon by every body, that he could neither eat nor drink, speak nor look, sit, stand, or walk, nor, in short, do any one of those common things, he had been doing all his days. Why, said he, when I was in the country, I could have eat twice as much, and twice as fast as another; aye, and drank too like a fish: yet here I am to learn the art of eating and drinking, just as if a morsel or drop had never gone into my head before. I was never a great sitter, it is true; but I have sat a thousand times in our house, the church, and elsewhere; and why must I now be frowned at by my aunt, and laughed at by the company, only for sitting? As for speaking, I give it up, and am resolved to be as dumb as my father's tobacco-box, for I find nobody knows what I say, nor I, what they say; so, though talk is cheap, I will hold my tongue. Although on foot, I have been often in at the death of a fox, when all my well mounted neighbours were left behind, yet here, I perceive, I cannot so much as walk, without a great deal of pains to learn the deep science of setting one foot before the other. My aunt, two days ago, told me I no more knew how to look, ay, look! (cannot I look?) than she to speak Hebrew, and hath given me a mouth to practise, which lays a grievous confinement, as bad as a double bridle, on my under lip. 8. The generality of great engrossers in conversation have a few topics, on which they have read a little, thought less, and talked a great deal. Into one or other of these they endeavour with great art, to draw the chat of every company they are in, and when they have brought it about to a subject of their own, instantly turn the company into an audience, to which they assume the province of dictating, till they have exhausted themselves; and then the conversation is suffered to recover its freedom, that entertaining and instructing freedom of varying the subject, ere people are tired with it, which gives every one an opportunity of contributing his quota to the general fund. I knew a story-teller, whose artifice, for this purpose was but clumsy, yet a little comical. In a mixed company, the prattle running high on somewhat, he affected a sudden start, and cried out, ha! did you not hear a gun go off? No, said every one. Well, quoth he, I thought I did; but now, that we are talking of a gun, I will tell you a story of a gun. The topic of a talker is his garrison; wherein, sensible that his forces are few, he fortifies himself, seldom venturing into the open field of subjects, touched on by others, more generally knowing than himself. If you happen to draw him from his fastness (for he will not sally), he hath a thousand arts of wheeling and retreating to his hold, and there engaging you under the cannon of a battery, which he hath some skill in pointing. All you have to do in this case, is to let him blow away his ammunition, and then say, Pray, sir, proceed, 9. The mind of man is a little intellectual monarchy in itself. Reason is the sovereign; and the passions, affec |