hearing might have been restored. He caused a seton to be inserted in my neck; but this had no effect upon my deafness, although it seems to have acted beneficially upon the general health. Some years after, Mr. Snow Harris, with a spontaneous kindness for which I am happy to be able at this distant day to express my obligations, put my ears through a course of electrical operations. He persevered for more than a month, but no good came of it; and since then nothing further has been done or attempted. Indeed, I have not sought any relief, and have discouraged the suggestions of friends who would have had me apply to Dr. This and Dr. That. The condition in which twothirds of my life has been passed has become a habit to me-a part of my physical nature. I have learned to acquiesce in it, and to mould my habits of life according to the conditions which it imposes; and have hence been unwilling to give footing for hopes and expectations which I feel in my heart can never be realised.

It was some time before I could leave my bed, and much longer before I could quit my chamber. During this time I had no resource but reading; and the long and uninterrupted spell at it which I had now, went far to fix the habit of my future life. The book to which I have repeatedly referred was re-borrowed for me, and was read without restraint. I wish this book had been the Paradise Lost,' or some other great work: the reader would be better pleased, and the dignity of this record would have been much enhanced. But I still think it was Kirby's Wonderful Magazine;' and, on second thoughts, I do not know but that this was a very proper book for the time and 'the circumstances. The strange facts which it recorded were well calculated to draw my attention to books as a source of interest and a means of information; and this was precisely the sort of feeling proper for drawing me into the habits which have enabled me, under all my privations, to be of some use in my day and generation.

I had been so much in the habit, like others in my class of life, of regarding the Bible as a book specially appointed for reading upon Sundays, that I had never ventured to look into it on any other day. It seemed a sort of profanation to handle the sacred book with workday fingers; but the exhaustion of all other materials at length drove me to it, and then I read it quite through, Apocrypha and all. It is not in this place my business to trace the religious impressions which

resulted from the direction which my reading had thus taken; but as much of my attention has been in the course of my life devoted to sacred literature, with results which have long been before the public, it may be desirable to state the means by which this bent of study seems to have been created.

At the period to which my present recollections refer, the art of reading was by no means diffused among the class in which I then moved, in the same degree as at present. Many could read; but the acquirement was not in the same degree as now applied to practical purposes. It was regarded more in the light of an occult art,—a particular and by no means necessary attainment, specially destined for and appropriate to religious uses and Sunday occupations. Besides, books were then extravagantly dear, and those which were sold in numbers, to enable the poor to purchase them by instalments, were dearest of all. Hence men could not afford to procure any merely current or temporary literature, but desired to have something of substantial and of permanent worth for their money, something which might form a body of edifying Sunday reading to themselves and to their children. The range of books embraced by these considerations was very narrow: a folio Family Bible; Fox's Book of Martyrs; Life of Christ; Josephus's Antiquities of the Jews; Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress; Hervey's Meditations; Drelincourt on Death (with Defoe's Preface, containing the Ghost Story of Mrs. Veal); Baxter's Saint's Rest; Watts's World to Come; Gesner's Death of Abel; Sturm's Reflections, &c. Those who launched forth beyond this range into profane literature were for the most part content with Robinson Crusoe, Pamela, The Arabian Nights' Entertainments, and Henry, Earl of Moreland. This was a selection of books not to be despised. They were all good, and some of them immortal works. But the thing was that you could see no other books than these. The selection from these books varied, and it was rare to see the whole or a great part of them together; but whenever a book was to be seen it was sure to be some one of these. Periodical literature had not reached even the class of tradesmen in any other shape than that of religion. The only periodicals within their reach were of a religious kind, being the magazines of their respective denominations, which were sold at sixpence each. Tradesmen doubtless read the newspapers, but the use of them (except in public-houses) had not descended be

low their class; and I can declare that I never saw a newspaper, to read, till I was nearly twenty years of age, and after I had been, in fact, removed out of the position to which these first experiences apply.

From this account it will appear that my studies, founded upon the books to be found under these circumstances, could not but be of an essentially religious tone. At a later period I fell in with books of a different description in the same class, and was enabled to satiate myself with controversies on the five points, and to treasure up the out-of-the-way knowledge to be found in such books as Dupin's Ecclesiastical History. The day came when I plunged into the sea of general literature, and, being able to get nothing more to my mind, read poems, novels, histories, and magazines without end. A day came in which any remarkable fact that I met with was treasured up, in my tenacious mind, as a miser treasures gold; and when the great thoughts which I sometimes found filled my soul with raptures too mighty for utterance. Another day came, in which I was enabled to gratify a strange predilection for metaphysical books; and with all the novelists, poets, and historians, within the reach of my arm, gave my days to Locke, Hartley, Tucker, Reid, Stewart, and Brown. I think little of these things now, and my taste for them has gone by; but, although I now think that my time might have been more advantageously employed, my mind was doubtless thus carried through a very useful discipline, of which I have since reaped the benefit. But amid all this, the theological bias, given by my earlier reading and associations, remained; and the time eventually came, when I was enabled to return to it, and indulge it with redoubled ardour: and after that another time arrived, when I could turn to rich account whatever useful thing I had learned and whatever talent I had cultivated, however remote such acquirement or cultivation might have at first seemed removed from any definite pursuits. This point is one of some importance; and as I am anxious to inculcate upon my younger readers the instruction it involves, it may be mentioned, as an instance, that an acquaintance with the Hebrew language, which has eventually proved one of the most useful acquirements I ever made, was originally formed with no higher view than that of qualifying myself to teach that language to the sons of a friend, whose tuition I had undertaken.

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175. THE ACADEMY OF LAGADO.

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SWIFT. I HAD hitherto seen only one side of the academy, the other being appropriated to the advancers of speculative learning, of whom I shall say something, when I have mentioned one illustrious person more, who is called among them the universal artist." He told us "he had been thirty years employing his thoughts for the improvement of human life." He had two large rooms full of wonderful curiosities, and fifty men at work. Some were condensing air into a dry tangible substance, by extracting the nitre, and letting the aqueous or fluid particles percolate; others softening marble for pillows and pincushions; others petrifying the hoofs of a living horse to preserve them from foundering. The artist himself was at that time busy upon two great designs; the first to sow land with chaff, wherein he affirmed the true seminal virtue to be contained, as he demonstrated by several experiments, which I was not skilful enough to comprehend. The other was, by a certain composition of gums, minerals, and vegetables, outwardly applied, to prevent the growth of wool upon two young lambs; and he hoped in a reasonable time to propagate the breed of naked sheep all over the kingdom.

We crossed a walk to the other part of the academy, where, as I have already said, the projectors in speculative learning resided.

The first professor I saw was in a very large room, with forty pupils about him. After salutation, observing me to look earnestly upon a frame, which took up the greatest part of both the length and breadth of the room, he said, “Perhaps I might wonder to see him employed in a project for improving speculative knowledge by practical mechanical operations. But the world would soon be sensible of its usefulness; and he flattered himself, that a more noble, exalted thought never sprang in any other man's head. Every one knew how laborious the usual method is of attaining to arts and sciences; whereas, by his contrivance, the most ignorant person, at a reasonable charge, and with little bodily labour, might write books on philosophy, poetry, politics, laws, mathematics, and theology, without the least assistance from genius or study." He then led me to the frame, about the sides whereof all his pupils stood in ranks. It was twenty feet square, placed in the middle of the room. The superficies was composed of

several bits of wood, about the bigness of a die, but some larger than others. They were all linked together by slender wires. These bits of wood were covered on every square, with paper pasted on them; and on these papers were written all the words of their language, in their several moods, tenses, and declensions, but without any order. The professor then desired me "to observe, for he was going to set his engine at work." The pupils at his command took each of them hold of an iron handle, whereof there were forty, fixed round the edges of the frame, and giving them a sudden turn, the whole disposition of the words was entirely changed. He then commanded six-and-thirty of the lads to read the several lines softly, as they appeared upon the frame; and where they found three or four words together that might make part of a sentence, they dictated to the four remaining boys, who were scribes. This work was repeated three or four times, and at every turn the engine was so contrived that the words shifted into new places, as the square bits of wood moved upside down.

Six hours a day the young students were employed in this labour; and the professor showed me several volumes in large folio, already collected, of broken sentences, which he intended to piece together, and out of those rich materials to give the world a complete body of all arts and sciences; which, however, might be still improved, and much expedited, if the public would raise a fund for making and em ploying five hundred such frames in Lagado, and oblige the managers to contribute in common their several collections.

He assured me, "that this invention had employed all his thoughts from his youth; that he had emptied the whole vocabulary into his frame, and made the strictest computation of the general proportion there is in books between the number of particles, nouns, and verbs, and other parts of speech."

I made my humblest acknowledgment to this illustrious person for his great communicativeness; and promised, "if ever I had the good fortune to return to my native country, that I would do him justice, as the sole inventor of this wonderful machine;" the form and contrivance of which I desired leave to delineate on paper. I told him, although it were the custom of our learned in Europe to steal inventions from each other, who had thereby at least this advantage, that it became a controversy which was the right owner; yet I would

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