Difputation.

ONSIDER what the learning of difputation is, and how they are employed for the advantage of themselves or others, whofe bufi

ness, is only the vain oftentation of founds. -LOCKE.

Diffimulation.

ISSIMULATION is but a faint kind of policy; for it afketh a ftrong wit, and a strong heart, to know when to tell truth and to

do it.-LORD BACON.

The Drama.

Y the dramatic art could the men of former times, as the living can now, learn the manifold changes of fortune, the great diverfities of character and the events of life. A living hiftorical image of all the virtues and of all

G

the vices was thus brought before the ancients, that they might ftrive after the one and avoid the other. The dramatist was a teacher of all the virtues, inasmuch as he brought the images of the bad upon the theatre, not that men might form their minds on such a model, but that they might learn to fhun them. He acted a feigned part, yet, as a teacher, he reprefented the truth. ·EUSTATHIUS, Archbishop of Theffalonica,

1190.

2. IN the Greek poets, as alfo in Plautus, the economy of poems is better observed than in Terence, who thought the fole grace and virtue of their fable, the fticking in of fentences, as ours do the forcing in of jefts. -BEN JONSON.

Dryden on Homer and Chaucer.

S CHAUCER is the father of English Poetry, fo I hold him in the fame degree of veneration as the Grecians held HOMER, or the

Romans VIRGIL.

Duelling.

O fight a duel is a thing that all governments are bound to restrain with the highest severity. It is a confociation of many the worst acts that a perfon, ordinarily, can be guilty of. It is a want of charity, of justice, of humility, of truft in God's providence; and is therefore pride and murder and injuftice and infinite unreasonableness; nothing of a Christian, nothing of excufe, nothing of honour in it, if GOD and wife men be admitted Judges of the Lift.-JEREMY TAYLOR.

2. DUELLING is a moft difhonourable practice; for when you have given the best proof of your fufficiency and killed your man, you are seized by the hands of Juftice, treated like an affaffin, and condemned to die with circumftances of ignominy. You are not indicted for acquitting yourselves like gentlemen, but for difturbing the peace and murdering the King's fubjects. Now the law never loads a man with reproaches, nor punishes him thus coarfely, for doing a handfome action.-JEREMY COLLIER.

Education.

DUCATION and inftruction are the means, the one by ufe, the other by precept, to make our natural faculties of reafon, both the better and the fooner to judge rightly between truth and error, good and evil. DR. HOOKER.

Emulation.

MULATION is a handfome paffion; it is enterprizing but just withal. It keeps a man within the terms of honour and makes the conteft for glory juft and generous. He ftrives to excel, but it is by raising himself, not by depreffing others. - JEREMY COL

LIER.

2. ARISTOTLE allows that fome emulation may be good and may be found in fome good men; yet envy he utterly condemns, as wicked in itself, and only to be found in wicked minds.-DR. SPRATT.

康

Ends of Language.

HE ends of language are, first, to make known one man's thoughts to another; fecondly, to do it with ease and quickness; and thirdly, thereby to convey the knowledge of things. When language fails in any of these requifites, it is abused or deficient. He who in conversation uses the words of any language without diftinct ideas in his mind to which he applies them, only utters founds without fignification, and is in reality no more advanced in knowledge than he would be in learning, who had in his library the catalogues of books, without poffeffing the books themselves. He who has complex ideas without particular names for them, is embarraffed in his conversation for want of proper terms to communicate his complex ideas, which he is therefore forced to make known by a detail of the simple ones which compose them and thus is frequently compelled to use twenty words to express what another more fluent and ready man fignifies