And thus, by many a snare sophistic,
And enthymeme paralogistic,
Beguil❜d a maid, who could not give,
So save her life, a negative.*
In music, though he had no ears
Except for that among the spheres,
(Which most of all, as he averr'd it,
He dearly loved, 'cause no one heard it,
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 contriv'd by dint of throttle,
Where'er he went to crack a bottle!
Likewise to show his mighty knowledge, he,
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,

* Because the three propositions in the mood of Barbara are universal affirmatives.-The poet borrowed this equivoque upon Barbara from à curious Epigram which Venckenius gives in a note upon his Essays de Charlataneria Eruditorum. In the Nuptia Peripatetica of Caspar Barlæus, the reader will find some facetious applications of the terms of logic to matrimony. Crainbe's treatise on Syllogisms, in Martinus Scriblerus, is borrowed chiefly from the Nuptia Peripatetica of Barlæus.

+Or Glass-Breaker-Vorhofias has given an account of this extraordinary man, in a work published 1682. "De vitreo ceypho fracto," etc.

If boy the baby chance to be,
He cries OA!—if girl, OE !—
These are, says he, exceeding fair hints
Respecting their first sinful parents;
"Oh Eve!" exclaimeth little madam,
While little master cries " Oh Adam!"*
In point of science astronomical
It seem'd 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 dæmon play'd 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,
Where by the Doctors look'd, in common, on,
As a more rare and rich phenomenon!,
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;

*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.

For instance, when 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,†
Prose, which had been at learning's Fair,
And bought up all the trumpery there,

*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 the Scholars may be included. Yet Leibneitz found out the uses of incomprehensibility, when he was appointed secretary to a society of philosophers at Nuremberg, merely for his menit in writing a caballistical letter one word of which neither they nor himself could interpret. See the Eloge Historique de M. de Leibnitz, l'Europe Savante-People of 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. Nicholas Massa in Vit. Avicen.

The tatter'd rags of every vest,

In which the Greeks and Romans drest,
And o'er her figure swoln and antic
Scatter'd them all with airs so frantic,
That those, who saw the fits she so had,
Declar'd 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,
Nor the scribbling bard of Ptolemy,
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 !”

FROM FREDERICKSBURGH, VIRGINIA,† JUNE 2d.

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

* These fragments form but a small part of a ri diculous 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

I've had this week, over ruts and ridges,*

And bridges,

Made of a few uneasy planks,†

In open ranks,

Like old women's teeth, all loosely thrown
Over rivers of mud, whose names alone
Would make the knees of stoutest man knock
Rappahannock,

Occoquan-the heavens may barbour us!
Who ever heard of names so barbarous ?

particularly awakened my attention,) I sailed again in the Boston for Norfolk from whence I proceeded on my tour to the northward, through Williamsburgh, 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 lite 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.

* What Mr. Weld says of the continual necessity of balancing or trimming the stage, in passing over some of the wretched roads in America, is by no means exaggerated. "The driver frequently had to call to the passengers in the stage, to lean out of the carriage, first at one side then on the other, to pre vent it from oversetting in the deep ruts with which the road abounds! Now, gentlemen, to the right;' upon which the passengers all stretched their bodies half way out of the carriage, to ballance it on that side. Now, gentlemen to the left;' and so on Weld's Travels, Letter 3.

Before the stage can pass one of these bridges, the driver is obliged to stop and arrange the loose planks of which it is composed, in the manner that best suits his ideas of safety: and, as the planks are again disturbed by the passing of the coach, the next travellers who arrive have of cou se a new arrangement to make. Mahomet (as Sale tells us