case.  He confined the knowledge of governing within very narrow bounds, to common sense and reason, to justice and lenity, to the speedy determination of civil and criminal causes, with some other obvious topics, which are not worth considering.  And he gave it for his opinion, that whoever could make two ears of corn, or two blades of grass to grow upon a spot of ground, where only one grew before, would deserve better of mankind, and do more essential service to his country, than the whole race of politicians put together.

The learning of this people is very defective, consisting only in morality, history, poetry, and mathematics, wherein they must be allowed to excel.  But the last of these is wholly applied to what may be useful in life, to the improvement of agriculture, and all mechanical arts; so that among us it would be little esteemed.  And as to ideas, entities, abstractions, and transcendentals,[80] I could never drive the least conception into their heads.

No law of that country must exceed in words the number of letters in their alphabet, which consists only in two-and-twenty.  But indeed few of them extend even to that length.  They are expressed in the most plain and simple terms, wherein those people are not mercurial[81] enough to discover above one interpretation; and to write a comment upon any law is a capital crime.  As to the decision of civil causes, or proceedings against criminals, their precedents are so few, that they have little reason to boast of any extraordinary skill in either.

They have had the art of printing, as well as the Chinese, time out of mind:  but their libraries are not very large; for that of the king, which is reckoned the largest, doth not amount to above a thousand volumes, placed in a gallery of twelve hundred feet long, from whence I had liberty to borrow what books I pleased.  The queen’s joiner had contrived in one of Glumdalclitch’s rooms, a kind of wooden machine, five-and-twenty feet high, formed like a standing ladder; the steps were each fifty feet long:  it was indeed a movable pair of stairs, the lowest end placed at ten feet distance from the wall of the chamber.  The book I had a mind to read was put up leaning against the wall:  I first mounted to the upper step of the ladder, and turning my face towards the book began at the top of the page, and so walking to the right and left about eight or ten paces, according to the length of the lines, till I had gotten a little below the level of mine eyes, and then descending gradually, till I came to the bottom:  after which I mounted again, and began the other page in the same manner, and so turned over the leaf, which I could easily do with both my hands, for it was as thick and stiff as a paste-board, and in the largest folios not above eighteen or twenty feet long.