In these assassinations of princes and statesmen, there is nothing to excite our wonder; important changes often depend on their deaths; and, from the eminence on which they stand, they are peculiarly exposed to the aim of every artist who happens to be possessed by the craving for scenical effect.  But there is another class of assassinations, which has prevailed from an early period of the seventeenth century, that really does surprise me; I mean the assassination of philosophers.  For, gentlemen, it is a fact, that every philosopher of eminence for the two last centuries has either been murdered, or, at the least, been very near it; insomuch, that if a man calls himself a philosopher, and never had his life attempted, rest assured there is nothing in him; and against Locke’s philosophy in particular, I think it an unanswerable objection (if we needed any), that, although he carried his throat about with him in this world for seventy-two years, no man ever condescended to cut it.  As these cases of philosophers are not much known, and are generally good and well composed in their circumstances, I shall here read an excursus on that subject, chiefly by way of showing my own learning.

The first great philosopher of the seventeenth century (if we except Galileo) was Des Cartes; and if ever one could say of a man that he was all but murdered—­murdered within an inch—­one must say it of him.  The case was this, as reported by Baillet in his Vie De M. Des Cartes, tom.  I. p. 102-3.  In the year 1621, when Des Cartes might be about twenty-six years old, he was touring about as usual, (for he was as restless as a hyaena,) and, coming to the Elbe, either at Gluckstadt or at Hamburgh, he took shipping for East Friezland:  what he could want in East Friezland no man has ever discovered; and perhaps he took this into consideration himself; for, on reaching Embden, he resolved to sail instantly for West Friezland; and being very impatient of delay, he hired a bark, with a few mariners to navigate it.  No sooner had he got out to sea than he made a pleasing discovery, viz. that he had shut himself up in a den of murderers.  His crew, says M. Baillet, he soon found out to be “des scelerats,”—­not amateurs, gentlemen, as we are, but professional men—­the height of whose ambition at that moment was to cut his throat.  But the story is too pleasing to be abridged; I shall give it, therefore, accurately, from the French of his biographer:  “M.  Des Cartes had no company but that of his servant, with whom he was conversing in French.  The sailors, who took him for a foreign merchant, rather than a cavalier, concluded that he must have money about him.  Accordingly they came to a resolution by no means advantageous to his purse.  There is this difference, however, between sea-robbers and the robbers in forests, that the latter may, without hazard, spare the lives of their victims; whereas the other cannot put a passenger on shore in such a case