Yet aptly he, at sight, could read
Each tuneful diagram in Bede,
And find, by Euclid's corollaria,
The ratios of a jig or aria.

But, as for all your warbling Delias,
Orpheuses and Saint Cecilias,

He own'd he thought them much surpass'd

By that redoubted Hyaloclast,

*

Who still contrived, by dint of throttle,
Where'er he went to crack a bottle!

Likewise to show his mighty knowledge, le,
On things unknown in physiology,
Wrote many a chapter to divert us,
Like that great little man Albertus,
Wherein he show'd the reason why,
When children first are heard to cry,
If boy the baby chance to be,

He cries OA!-if girl, OE!—
They are, says he, exceeding fair hints
Respecting their first sinful parents;

* Or Glass-Breaker.-MORHOFIUS has given an account of this extraordinary man, in a work published 1682. "De vitreo csypho fracto," étc.

While little master cries "Oh Adam!"*

In point of science astronomical,
It seemed to him extremely comical
That, once a year, the frolic sun
Should call at Virgo's house for fun,

And stop a month and blaze around her,
Yet leave her Virgo, as he found her!
But, 'twas in Optics and Dioptrics,

Our demon played his first and top tricks:
He held that sunshine passes quicker
Through wine than any other liquor ;
That glasses are the best utensils
To catch the eye's bewilder'd pencils;
And, though he saw no great objection
To steady light and pure reflection,
He thought the aberrating rays
Which play about a bumper's blaze,
Were by the Doctors looked, in common, on,
As a more rare and rich phenomenon!

* This is translated almost literally from a passage in Albertus de Secretis, etc.-I have not the book by me, or I would transcribe the words.

He wisely said that the sensorium
Is for the eyes a great emporium,

To which these noted picture stealers
Send all they can and meet with dealers.
In many an optical proceeding,

The brain, he said, show'd great good breeding; For instance, when we ogle women

(A trick which Barbara tutor❜d him in),

Although the dears are apt to get in a
Strange position on the retina,
Yet instantly the modest brain

Doth set them on their legs again ! *

Our doctor thus with "stuff'd sufficiency"
Of all omnigenous omnisciency,

Began (as who would not begin

That had, like him, so much within?)
To let it out in books of all sorts,
Folios, quartos, large and small sorts;
Poems, so very deep and sensible,

That they were quite incomprehensible; †

* Alluding to that habitual act of the judgment, by which, notwithstanding the inversion of the image upon the retina, a correct impression of the object is conveyed to the sensorium. + Under this description, I believe," the Devil among

Prose which had been at learning's Fair,
And bought up all the trumpery there,
The tatter'd rags of every vest,

In which the Greeks and Romans dress'd,
And o'er her figure, swoln and antic,
Scatter'd them all with airs so frantic,
That those, who saw the fits she had,
Declared unhappy Prose was mad!
Epics he wrote and scores of rebusses,
All as neat as old Turnebus's ;
Eggs and altars, cyclopædias,

Grammars, prayer-books-oh! 'twere tedious,
Did I but tell the half, to follow me;
Not the scribbling bard of Ptolemy,

the Scholars" may be included. Yet Leibnitz found out the uses of incomprehensibility, when he was appointed secretary to a society of philosophers at Nuremberg, merely for his merit in writing a cabalistical letter, one word of which neither they nor himself could interpret.-See the Éloge Historique de M. De Leibnitz, l'Europe Savante. People in all ages have loved to be puzzled. We find CICERO thanking Atticus for having sent him a work of Serapion, ex quo (says he) quidem ego (quod inter nos liceat dicere) millesimam partem vix intelligo."-Lib. 2. epist. 4. And we know that Avicen, the learned Arabian, read ARISTOTLE'S Metaphysics forty times over, for the supreme pleasure of being able to inform the world that he could not comprehend one syllable throughout them.-NICOLAS MOSSA in Vit. Avicen.

66

No-nor the hoary Trismegistus

(Whose writings all, thank Heaven! have miss'd us),

E'er fill'd with lumber such a ware-room

As this great" porcus literarum !”

FRAGMENTS OF A JOURNAL.*
TO G. M. ESQ.

FROM FREDERICKSBURGH, VIRGINIA,† JUNE 2ND.

DEAR George! though every bone is aching,
After the shaking

* These fragments form but a small part of a ridiculous medley of prose and doggerel, into which, for my amusement, I threw some of the incidents of my journey. If it were even in a more rational form, there is yet much of it too allusive and too personal for publication.

+ Having remained about a week at New York, where I saw Madame Jerome Bonaparte, and felt a slight shock of an earthquake (the only things that particularly awakened my attention), I sailed again in the Boston for Norfolk, from whence I proceeded on my tour to the northward, through Williamsburgh, Richmond, etc. At Richmond there are a few men of considerable talents. Mr. Wickham, one of their celebrated legal characters, is a gentleman whose manners and mode of life would do honour to the most cultivated societies. Judge Marshall, the author of Washington's Life, is another very distinguished ornament of Richmond. These gentlemen, I must observe, are of that respectable, but at present unpopular, party, the Federalists.