n
abstinence, as the prescription requires.

CHAPTER VI.

A further account of the academy. The author proposes some improvements,
which are honourably received.

In the school of political projectors, I was but ill entertained; the
professors appearing, in my judgment, wholly out of their senses, which
is a scene that never fails to make me melancholy. These unhappy people
were proposing schemes for persuading monarchs to choose favourites upon
the score of their wisdom, capacity, and virtue; of teaching ministers to
consult the public good; of rewarding merit, great abilities, eminent
services; of instructing princes to know their true interest, by placing
it on the same foundation with that of their people; of choosing for
employments persons qualified to exercise them, with many other wild,
impossible chimeras, that never entered before into the heart of man to
conceive; and confirmed in me the old observation, "that there is nothing
so extravagant and irrational, which some philosophers have not
maintained for truth."

But, however, I shall so far do justice to this part of the Academy, as
to acknowledge that all of them were not so visionary. There was a most
ingenious doctor, who seemed to be perfectly versed in the whole nature
and system of government. This illustrious person had very usefully
employed his studies, in finding out effectual remedies for all diseases
and corruptions to which the several kinds of public administration are
subject, by the vices or infirmities of those who govern, as well as by
the licentiousness of those who are to obey. For instance: whereas all
writers and reasoners have agreed, that there is a strict universal
resemblance between the natural and the political body; can there be any
thing more evident, than that the health of both must be preserved, and
the diseases cured, by the same prescriptions? It is allowed, that
senates and great councils are often troubled with redundant, ebullient,
and other peccant humours; with many diseases of the head, and more of
the heart; with strong convulsions, with grievous contractions of the
nerves and sinews in both hands, but especially the right; with spleen,
flatus, vertigos, and deliriums; with scrofulous tumours, full of fetid
purulent matter; with sour frothy ructations: with canine appetites, and
crudeness of digestion, besides many others, needless to mention. This
doctor therefore proposed, "that upon the meeting of