ht tear away one of the covers of the
one that best matched my Cicero, and give it to the binder to cobble my
crippled volume with.

The Master took the three books from a cupboard and continued.

No. I. An odd volume of The Adventurer. It has many interesting things
enough, but is made precious by containing Simon Browne's famous
Dedication to the Queen of his Answer to Tindal's "Christianity as old as
the Creation." Simon Browne was the Man without a Soul. An excellent
person, a most worthy dissenting minister, but lying under a strange
delusion.

Here is a paragraph from his Dedication:

"He was once a man; and of some little name; but of no worth, as his
present unparalleled case makes but too manifest; for by the immediate
hand of an avenging GOD, his very thinking substance has, for more than
seven years, been continually wasting away, till it is wholly perished
out of him, if it be not utterly come to nothing. None, no, not the least
remembrance of its very ruins, remains, not the shadow of an idea is
left, nor any sense that so much as one single one, perfect or imperfect,
whole or diminished, ever did appear to a mind within him, or was
perceived by it."

Think of this as the Dedication of a book "universally allowed to be the
best which that controversy produced," and what a flood of light it pours
on the insanities of those self-analyzing diarists whose morbid reveries
have been so often mistaken for piety! No. I. had something for me,
then, besides the cover, which was all it claimed to have worth offering.

No. II. was "A View of Society and Manners in Italy." Vol. III. By John
Moore, M. D. (Zeluco Moore.) You know his pleasant book. In this
particular volume what interested me most, perhaps, was the very spirited
and intelligent account of the miracle of the liquefaction of the blood
of Saint Januarius, but it gave me an hour's mighty agreeable reading.
So much for Number Two.

No. III. was "An ESSAY On the Great EFFECTS of Even Languid and Unheeded
LOCAL MOTION." By the Hon. Robert Boyle. Published in 1685, and, as
appears from other sources, "received with great and general applause."
I confess I was a little startled to find how near this earlier
philosopher had come to the modern doctrines, such as are illustrated in
Tyndall's "Heat considered as a Mode of Motion." He speaks of "Us, who
endeavor to resolve the Phenomena of Nature into Matter and Local
motion." That sounds like the n