“Your easiness of humour, or rather your harmonious disposition, is so admirably mixed with your composure, that the rugged cares and disturbance that public affairs brings with it, which does so vexatiously affect the heads of other great men of business, &c. does scarce ever ruffle your unclouded brow so much as with a frown.  And what above all is praiseworthy, you are so far from thinking yourself better than others, that a flourishing and opulent fortune, which by a certain natural corruption in its quality, seldom fails to infect other possessors with pride, seems in this case as if only providentially disposed to enlarge your humility.

“But I find, sir, I am now got into a very large field, where though I could with great ease raise a number of plants in relation to your merit of this plauditory nature; yet for fear of an author’s general vice, and that the plain justice I have done you should, by my proceeding and others’ mistaken judgment, be imagined flattery, a thing the bluntness of my nature does not care to be concerned with, and which I also know you abominate.”

It is wonderful to see how many judges of these fine things spring up every day by the rise of stocks, and other elegant methods of abridging the way to learning and criticism.  But I do hereby forbid all dedications to any persons within the city of London, except Sir Francis, Sir Stephen,[418] and the Bank, will take epigrams and epistles as value received for their notes; and the East India Companies accept of heroic poems for their sealed bonds.  Upon which bottom, our publishers have full power to treat with the city in behalf of us authors, to enable traders to become patrons and Fellows of the Royal Society, as well as receive certain degrees of skill in the Latin and Greek tongues, according to the quantity of the commodities which they take off our hands.

Grecian Coffee-house, July 18.

The learned have so long laboured under the imputation of dryness and dulness in their accounts of their phenomena, that an ingenious gentleman of our society has resolved to write a system of philosophy in a more lively method, both as to the matter and language, than has been hitherto attempted.  He read to us the plan upon which he intends to proceed.  I thought his account, by way of fable of the worlds about us, had so much vivacity in it, that I could not forbear transcribing his hypothesis, to give the reader a taste of my friend’s treatise, which is now in the press.[419]

“The inferior deities having designed on a day to play a game at football, knead together a numberless collection of dancing atoms into the form of seven rolling globes:  and that nature might be kept from a dull inactivity, each separate particle is endued with a principle of motion, or a power of attraction, whereby all the several parcels of matter draw each other proportionately to their magnitudes and distances, into such a remarkable variety of different forms,