MISCELLANEOUS THOUGHTS. 393 forbid your assent. Farewel, dear man, and let your next letter proceed on the phisosophical themes that are before us, in which you may expect a bolder freedom of thought, a more agreeable reply and correspondence from Yours, 1Cc. Southampton, 1696. L. Of Labour and Patience in Instructing Mankind. To Pocyon, complaining of bis just Anger and Melancholy Resentment, that be met with so many Persons of narrow and uncharitable Souls, obstinate Opi- nions, and violent against all other Notions and Practices but what them- selves had embraced. YESTERDAY, my friend, I received your long complaint, and I have already five hundred things to say to you ; for there is not a person I converse with that can stir up the thoughts which lie at the bottom of my soul like you. All my notions are afloat when I read your letters, but at present it is in a troubled sea ; for you express your own melancholy with so lively an air, that it raises a gust of the same passion in me ; though nature has not mingled much of that dark humour in my constitution. If I cannot present you my sympathy in such vivid and tender ex- pressions as I would, yet I can read over your lines again and again, and say I feel them. I could help you, methinks, to spurn this globe away, And join with you in renouncing commerce with men, while we arise to some higher worlds, furnished with inhabitants of a better composition. Or, if this be too bold a thought, and we cannot ascend above the common rank of human nature, let us retire from them into some solitary shade, that we may be free from their impertinences ; for we cannot live happily among the race which this earth breeds, they are of so perverse a mold. How have I fretted sometimes to stand by and hear the nonsense of a brutal world that pretends to reason ! It is education, it is passion, it is prejudice, it is stubbornness, it is what you will but good sense, that commands the judgments, and stamps the opi- nions of men. How often have I laboured by reasons of the brightest evidence to rectify a gross and vulgar mistake ? But words have been lost in 'the wind : Prejudice and education had eleven points of the law, and it was impossible for argument to dispossess them. Those arguments that I have sought out from afar, and digged deep for them with the sweat of my soul, and have felt and yielded to their resistless power, those very argu- ments, I say, have been answered with a jest or a loud laugh, and been scorned by unlettered animals, as the Leviathan derides and mocks at a spear of straw. Then, my friend, I have almost regretted the labours of my brain, and wondered to what pur- pose I had devoted myself to studies that improved my reason. It is true, our design is to tame and polish VOL. Ix. o e
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