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as often as he shall see occasion, he will desire no more
ingredients towards fitting up a treatise that shall make a very
comely figure on a bookseller's shelf, there to be preserved neat
and clean for a long eternity, adorned with the heraldry of its
title fairly inscribed on a label, never to be thumbed or greased by
students, nor bound to everlasting chains of darkness in a library,
but when the fulness of time is come shall happily undergo the trial
of purgatory in order to ascend the sky.
Without these allowances how is it possible we modern wits should
ever have an opportunity to introduce our collections listed under
so many thousand heads of a different nature, for want of which the
learned world would be deprived of infinite delight as well as
instruction, and we ourselves buried beyond redress in an inglorious
and undistinguished oblivion?
From such elements as these I am alive to behold the day wherein the
corporation of authors can outvie all its brethren in the field--a
happiness derived to us, with a great many others, from our Scythian
ancestors, among whom the number of pens was so infinite that the
Grecian eloquence had no other way of expressing it than by saying
that in the regions far to the north it was hardly possible for a
man to travel, the very air was so replete with feathers.
The necessity of this digression will easily excuse the length, and
I have chosen for it as proper a place as I could readily find. If
the judicious reader can assign a fitter, I do here empower him to
remove it into any other corner he please. And so I return with
great alacrity to pursue a more important concern.
SECTION VIII.--A TALE OF A TUB.
The learned AEolists maintain the original cause of all things to be
wind, from which principle this whole universe was at first
produced, and into which it must at last be resolved, that the same
breath which had kindled and blew up the flame of Nature should one
day blow it out.
"Quod procul a nobis flectat Fortuna gubernans."
This is what the Adepti understand by their anima mundi, that is to
say, the spirit, or breath, or wind of the world; or examine the
whole system by the particulars of Nature, and you will find it not
to be disputed. For whether you please to call the forma informans
of man by the name of spiritus, animus, afflatus, or anima, what are
all these but several appellations for wind, which is the ruling
element in every compound, and into which they all resolve upon
their corruption. Further, what is life itself but, as it is
commonly called, the breath of our nostrils, whence it is very
justly observed by naturalists that wind still continues of great
emolument in certain mysteries not to be named, giving occasion for
those happy epithets of turgidus and inflatus, applied either to the
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