their children, by continually cautioning them against vices they might otherwise, perhaps, have never thought of. This method is like burning of books by the common hangman, and prohibiting of certain goods, which only makes them more courted and esteemed. But I shall conclude with a story out of Montaigne's Essays.

"My daughter (says the author), the only child I have, is now of an age that forward young women are allowed to be married at. She is of a soft, tender complexion, and has accordingly been brought up by her mother after a private and particular manner, so that she but now begins to be weaned from her childish simplicity. She was one day reading before me in a French book, where she happened to meet with a word of a very harmless and indifferent meaning, but that bore some small resemblance to another word not altogether so innocent. The woman to whose conduct she is committed stop her short a little rudely, and ordered her to skip over that ugly word. I let her alone, not to trouble their rules, for I never concern myself in that sort of government. The feminine policy has a sort of mysterious proceeding in it, and we ought to leave entirely to themselves; though, if I am not mistaken, the conversation of twenty lacquies, could not, in six months' time, have so firmly imprinted in her fancy the full meaning of these smutty syllables, as this old woman did by her reprimand and interdiction."

HILLARIO.

For the Literary Magazine.

MEMOIRS OF THE CELEBRATED

BOERHAAVE.

HERMAN BOERHAAVE was born at Woerhout, near Leyden, in the year 1668. This great physician has given us the Institutes of Medicine, which he wrote for the

instruction of his pupils; Aphorisms upon the Knowledge and Cure of Disorders: he may be stiled the Euclid of physicians, and these the elements of chemistry. This last work is considered as the masterpiece of this illustrious man, who has published several other useful treatises.

From the time of the learned Hippocrates, no physician has more justly merited the esteem of his contemporaries, and the thanks of posterity, than Boerhaave. He united to an uncommon genius, &c. extraordinary talents, the qualities of the heart, which give them so great a value to society. He is painted to us above the middle size, and well proportioned, of a strong, robust constitution. He made a decent, simple, and venerable appearance, particularly when age had changed the colour of his hair; in a word, he greatly resembled the picture that is given us of Socrates; he had the same features, but they were softened, and more engaging. He was an eloquent orator, and declaimed with dignity and grace. He taught very methodically, and with great precision; he never tired his auditors, but they always regretted that his discourses were finished. He would sometimes give them a lively turn with raillery; but his raillery was refined and ingenious, and it enliv ened the subject he treated of, without carrying with it any thing severe or satirical. A declared foe to all excess, he considered decent mirth as the salt of life. Morning and evening he consecrated to study: he gave the public part of the time which intervened; the rest was for his friends and his amusement. When health would permit, he regularly rode on horseback; when his strength began to fail him, he walked on foot; and, upon his return home, music, of which he was passionately fond, made the hours of relaxation glide agreeably away, and enabled him to return to his labours with redoubled alacrity.

Boerhaave, at the age of fifteen, found himself without parents, pro

tection, advice, or fortune. He had already studied theology, and the other ecclesiastical sciences, with the design of devoting himself to a clerical life; but the science of nature, which equally engaged his attention, soon engrossed his whole time. He practised physic, after being received doctor in that science, in 1693. This illustrious physician, whose name afterwards spread throughout the world, and who left at his death above 200,0001. sterling, could, at that time, barely live by his labours, and was compelled to teach the mathematics to obtain necessaries. His merits being at length discovered, many powerful friends patronized him, and procured him three valuable employments; the first was that of professor of medicine in the university of Leyden; the second that of professor of chemistry; and, thirdly, that of professor of botany. The academy of sciences at Paris, and the royal society at London, invited him to become one of their members. He communicated to each his discoveries in chemistry. The city of Leyden became, in his time, the school of Europe for this science, as well as medicine and botany. All the princes of Europe sent him disciples, who found in this skilful professor, not only an indefatigable teacher, but even a tender father, who encouraged them to pursue their labours, consoled them in their afflictions, and solaced them in their wants.

When Peter the great went to Holland in 1715, to instruct himself in maritime affairs, he also attended Boerhaave to receive his lessons.

His reputation was spread as far as China: a mandarine wrote to him with this inscription, To the illustrious Boerhaave, physician in Europe; and the letter came regularly to him.

The city of Leyden have raised a monument in the church of St. Peter to the salutary genius of Boerhaave, Salutifero Boerhaavii genio застит. It consists of an urn upon a pedestal of black marble; six heads, four of which represent the

VOL. VIII NO. XLVII.

four ages of life, and two the sciences in which Boerhaave excelled, form a group issuing between the urn and its supporters. The capital of this basis is decorated with a drapery of white marble, in which the artist has shewn the different emblems of disorders and their remedies. Above, upon the surface of the pedestal, is the medallion of Boerhaave; at the extremity of the frame, a ribbon displays the favourite motto of this learned man: Simplex sigillum veri, Truth unarrayed.

Boerhaave, after passing a useful and agreeable life, departed this world in the year 1738, aged sixtynine, sincerely lamented by his friends, regretted by the worthy and the good, and revered by the great and the learned.

For the Literary Magazine.

EVENING MEDITATIONS.

"And oft I think, fair planet of the night, That in thy orb the wretched may have rest!"

CRIED MITIO, as he was walking one evening, and gazing on the placid countenance of the moon, in her utmost splendour. Thus he continued: "Retired from company, wearied with the insipid trifling, the noisy jars, and the confused bustle of the inhabitants of this terraqueous and wretched settlement, I address myself to thee, and would fain hold converse with some modest intelligent being of thine unknown regions. I would ask him, if he be aflicted with the cries of age in penury, and of childhood in distress, soliciting the morsel from the hand of insatiate avarice? If, in any corner of his abode, the sons of anguish in tenements of wretchedness let fall the tear, unnoticed and unknown? If he were ever an unhappy witness to a parent's tears over an abandoned child; to a wretched profligate's cursing the grey hairs of his vene

rable sire; to a dissipated husband's raising a hideous storm amidst his peaceful family, and driving them, by extravagance, to despair, wretchedness, and death? If he knew aught of traffic; its cares, its frauds, its disappointments, and its dangers? If he ever saw a being formed for immortality toiling from morn till eve, from year to year, from youth to age, to call a little clay and a thousand cares his own? I would ask him, if, in his orb, thousands of beings are formed in fierce battalions, each one armed with an instrument of death; disciplined in savage manners; nursed in all the brutal vices; led to the field of slaughter; aiming the deadly weapon at the vitals of an unknown company of his fellow-creatures; expiring amidst the rage of murderous anger? If he has ever seen the worshippers of the Deity, in his world, pursue each other with infernal rancour, lighting up fires round the bodies of the conscientious, and pursuing them with anathemas and the terrors of civil justice, for a difference of sentiment on the mode of exercising their religious services? If he hath ever seen the felons' den the gloomy gibbet, and the wretched exit of ignorance and vice? If he ever saw the savage murderer leap from the thicket, and embrue his hands in the blood of the lonely, unsuspecting, unoffending traveller? The child taking away the life of the father; the mother butchering her child? If he ever visited a slave ship, or the regions of an inquisition? If he hath ever seen the sons of riot in their midnight revels, disease and death their companions? If he hath ever felt jealousy, ambition, envy, anger, distrust, or terror, disturbing his bosom?

If he be haunted with the fear of death? Or, if his orb be free from all these evils? If peace and plenty, the calm of innocence, the joys of health, the social ties of friendship, the sacred bliss of fond affection, prevail in all the circuit of his tranquil world?

Happy happy inhabitants! when

shall I feel your pleasures, and be released from all the ills and all the crimes which stain our mother earth ?"

W.

For the Literary Magazine.

ON COMETS.

Written in 1756.

THE Newtonian philosophy and the observations of modern astronomers have given sufficient reason to conclude that comets are not only solid and durable bodies, but also revolve round the sun in very eccentric ellipses, and, consequently, return within our system, and become visible to us at stated and regular periods. Yet what those precise periods are, has been determined only as to three of them, with any great degree of probability, viz., the comet which appeared last in the year 1680, and is expected again about the year 2255; that which appeared in 1661, and is expected in 1789; and that which appeared in 1682, and is expected in 1758.

The first of these, that in 1680, was the comet which, more than any other, both acquired the most astonishing degree of heat by its amazing approximation to the sun, and threatened the earth with the nearest appulse. This was so near the sun at its perihelion, that its distance from his surface was but a sixth part of the diameter of the sun's body, and therefore the heat it then received was twenty-eight thousand times greater than that of summer, or two thousand times hotter than red-hot iron. Its least distance from the annual orbit of the earth was, according to Dr. Halley's computation, no more than one semi-diameter of the sun, or about the radius of the lunar orbit; and, consequently, if our globe had been in one particular part of its path, the comet might have been as near us as the moon. Upon examination