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losopher. He does not enter at all into disputed articles of faith, and preserves a quiet and argumentative tone throughout. In his discourse against customary swearing, written when he was very young, he shows a little of the vein which distinguishes his letters: but the very great prolixity which he falls into renders him almost unreadable. He was, as he informs us in his youth, a writer of verses; and one fancy-piece in prose, 'The Martyrdom of Theodora,' has been preserved, wherein his hero and heroine make set speeches to each other, of a kind somewhat like those in Cicero de Oratore, with a little dash of Amadis de Gaule, until the executioner relieves the reader. The treatises on Seraphic Love,' 'Considerations on the Style of the Scriptures,' and 'on the great Veneration that Man's Intellect owes to God,' have a place in the Index librorum prohibitorum of the Roman Church. (Kippis, 'Biog. Brit.') His Occasional Reflections' have fallen under the lash of the two greatest satirists in our language, Swift and Butler, in the 'Pious Meditation upon a Broomstick' of the former, and an 'Occasional Reflection on Dr. Charlton's feeling a Dog's Pulse at Gresham College,' published with the posthumous writings of the latter. We are induced to give an extract from his now little known Reflections, as at once a specimen of his style and as affording a standard to judge of the merits of his better known satirists :

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Reflection VI.-Sitting at ease in a Coach that went very fast.-As fast as this coach goes, I sit in it so much at ease, that whilst its rapid motion makes others suspect that I am running for a wager, this lazy posture, and this soft seat, do almost as much invite me to rest, as if I were a-bed. The hasty wheels strike fire out of the flints they happen to run over, and yet this self-same swiftness of these wheels, which, were I under them, would make them crush my bones themselves into splinters, if not into a jelly, now I am seated over them, and above their reach, serves but to carry me the faster towards my journey's end. Just so it is with outward accidents, and conditions, whose restless vicissitudes but too justly and too

fitly resemble them to wheels: when they meet with a spirit that lies prostrate on the ground, and falls groveling beneath them, they disorder and oppress it; but he, whose high reason and exalted piety, has, by a noble and steady contempt of them, placed him above them, may enjoy a happy and a settled quiet, in spite of all these busy agitations, and be so far from resenting any prejudicial discomposure from their inferior revolutions, that all those changes, that are taken for the giddy turns of fortune's wheel, shall serve to approach him the faster to the blest mansion he would arrive at."

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The Boylean Lectures' were instituted by him in his last will, and endowed with the proceeds of certain property, as a salary for a "divine or preaching minister," on condition of preaching eight sermons in the year for proving the Christian religion against notorious infidels, viz. atheists, theists, pagans, Jews, and Mahometans, not descending lower to any controversies that are among Christians themselves. The minister is also required to promote the propagation of Christianity, and answer the scruples of all who apply to him. The stipend was made perpetual by Archbishop Tennison. Dr. Bentley was appointed the first Boyle lecturer. We shall not give a detailed list of all the titles of Boyle's works, which would occupy much room to little purpose, as a complete set of the original editions is very rarely met with, and the two collected editions have their own indexes. During his lifetime, in 1677, a very imperfect and incorrect edition was published at Geneva. The first complete edition was published in 1744 by Dr. Birch, as already noticed. It is in five volumes folio, and contains the life which has furnished all succeeding writers with authorities, besides a very copious index. The collection of letters in the fifth volume is highly interesting. The second complete edition was published in 1772. But previously to either of these, in 1780, Dr. Shaw, the editor of Bacon, deserved well of the scientific world by publishing an edition of Boyle in three volumes quarto, "abridged, methodized, and disposed under general heads." The second edition was published in 1738. As

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far as may be, the various and scattered experiments are brought together, and a good index added, but we cannot find any references to the originals. There is a list of Boyle's works in Hutton's mathematical dictionary, and another in Moreri. There is a copious life, taken mostly from Dr. Birch, in the 'Biog. Brit.,' and the same with some additions in Dr. Kippis's unfinished reprint.

It will be useful to remember as to contemporary chro nology, that Boyle was born in the year in which Bacon died, and Newton in that in which Galileo died; Boyle being fifteen years older than Newton.

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