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denly to be removed from Palmyra hither, and should take a view of no other city, in how glorious a light would the antient architecture appear to him? and what desolation and destruction of arts and sciences would he conclude had happened between the several æras of these cities?

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I had now waited full three hours upon deck for the return of my man, whom I had sent to bespeak a good dinner (a thing which had been long unknown to me) on shore, and then to bring a Lisbon chaise with him to the sea-shore; but, it seems, the impertinence of the providore was not yet brought to a conclusion. At three o'clock, when I was, from emptiness, rather faint than hungry, my man returned, and told me, there was a new law lately made that no passenger should set his foot on shore without a special order from the providore; and that he himself would have been sent to prison for disobeying it, had he not been protected as the servant of the captain. He informed me likewise, that the captain had been very industrious to get this order, but that it was then the providore's hour of sleep, a time when no man, except the king himself, durst disturb him.

To avoid prolixity, though in a part of my narrative which may be more agreeable to my reader than it was to me, the providore, having at last finished his nap, dispatched this absurd matter of form, and gave me leave to come, or rather to bę carried, on shore.

What it was that gave the first hint of this strange law is not easy to guess. Possibly, in the infancy of their defection, and before their government could be well established, they were willing to guard against the bare possibility of surprise, of the success of which bare possibility the Trojan horse will remain for ever on record, as a great and memorable example. Now the Portuguese have no walls to secure them, and a vessel of two or three

hundred tuns will contain a much larger body of troops than could be concealed in that famous machine, though Virgil tells us (somewhat hyperbolically, I believe) that it was as big as a mountain.

About seven in the evening I got into a chaise on shore, and was driven through the nastiest city in the world, though at the same time one of the most populous, to a kind of coffee-house, which is very pleasantly situated on the brow of a hill, about a mile from the city, and hath a very fine prospect of the river Tajo from Lisbon to the sea.

Here we regaled ourselves with a good supper, for which we were as well charged, as if the bill had been made on the Bath road, between Newbury and London.

And now we could joyfully say,

Egressi optata Troes potiuntur arena.

Therefore, in the words of Horace, -hic Finis chartaque viæque,

A FRAGMENT

ΟΡ

A COMMENT

ON

LORD BOLINGBROKE'S ESSAYS.

A FRAGMENT, &c.

I MUST confess myself to be one of those who brought with me to the perusal of the late published volumes of lord Bolingbroke a very high prejudice to the doctrines said to have been established in them; but, at the same time, can as truly assert, that I had the highest and strongest prepossession in favour of the abilities of the author. Such, indeed, was this prepossession, that it might, I think, be a sufficient warrant of a man's candour against any prejudice whatever; and it is in the true spirit of this candour that I declare, upon the perusal, I have found my prepossessions greatly abated, and my prejudices not in the least removed.

Could it therefore be supposed, that all mankind were alike able to try the cause of truth, and to form their judgment on the weight of argument and evidence only, I think there could be no danger in leaving the decision of this matter upon his lordship's own reasoning, without any attempt to answer him. But when we consider how very weak the abilities of mankind in general are in disquisitions of this nature; how much weaker they are rendered for this purpose by want of due attention; and, lastly, how apt they are to carry any little partiality which they have preconceived before the examination of a cause up to the final decision

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