as to produce all the wonderful appearances we now observe in empire, philosophy, and religion.  To proceed; at the beginning of the game, each of the globes being struck forward with a vast violence, ran out of sight, and wandered in a straight line through the infinite spaces.  The nimble deities pursue, breathless almost, and spent in the eager chase; each of them caught hold of one, and stamped it with his name; as, Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, and so of the rest.  To prevent this inconvenience for the future, the seven are condemned to a precipitation, which in our inferior style we call ‘gravity.’  Thus the tangential and centripetal forces, by their counter-struggle, make the celestial bodies describe an exact ellipsis.”

There will be added to this an appendix, in defence of the first day of the term according to the Oxford Almanac,[420] by a learned knight of this realm, with an apology for the said knight’s manner of dress; proving, that his habit, according to this hypothesis, is the true modern and fashionable; and that buckles are not to be worn, by this system, till the 10th of March, in the year 1714, which, according to the computation of some of our greatest divines, is to be the first year of the Millennium[421]; in which blessed age, all habits will be reduced to a primitive simplicity; and whoever shall be found to have persevered in a constancy of dress, in spite of all the allurements of profane and heathen habits, shall be rewarded with a never-fading doublet of a thousand years.  All points in the system which are doubted, shall be attested by the knight’s extemporary oath, for the satisfaction of his readers.

Will’s Coffee-house, July 18.

We were upon the heroic strain this evening, and the question was, What is the True Sublime?  Many very good discourses happened thereupon; after which a gentleman at the table, who is, it seems, writing on that subject, assumed the argument; and though he ran through many instances of sublimity from the ancient writers, said, he had hardly known an occasion wherein the true greatness of soul, which animates a general in action, is so well represented, with regard to the person of whom it was spoken, and the time in which it was writ, as in a few lines in a modern poem:  “there is,” continued he, “nothing so forced and constrained, as what we frequently meet with in tragedies; to make a man under the weight of a great sorrow, or full of meditation upon what he is soon to execute, cast about for a simile to what he himself is, or the thing which he is going to act:  but there is nothing more proper and natural than for a poet, whose business is to describe, and who is spectator of one in that circumstance when his mind is working upon a great image, and that the ideas hurry upon his imagination—­I say, there is nothing so natural, as for a poet to relieve and clear himself from the burthen of thought at that time, by uttering his conception in simile and metaphor.