sophical habit of mind, you may be surprised to hear me say it
would be certain passages in 'Rasselas.' They are the ones where the
astronomer gives an account to Imlac of his management of the elements,
the control of which, as he had persuaded himself, had been committed to
him. Let me read you a few sentences from this story, which is commonly
bound up with the 'Vicar of Wakefield,' like a woollen lining to a silken
mantle, but is full of stately wisdom in processions of paragraphs which
sound as if they ought to have a grammatical drum-major to march before
their tramping platoons.

"The astronomer has taken Imlac into his confidence, and reveals to him
the secret of his wonderful powers:--

"'Hear, Imlac, what thou wilt not without difficulty credit. I have
possessed for five years the regulation of the weather and the
distribution of the seasons the sun has listened to my dictates, and
passed from tropic to tropic by my direction; the clouds, at my call,
have poured their waters, and the Nile has overflowed at my command; I
have restrained the rage of the dog-star, and mitigated the fervors of
the crab. The winds alone, of all the elemental powers, have hitherto
eluded my authority, and multitudes have perished by equinoctial
tempests, which I found myself unable to prohibit or restrain.'

"The reader naturally wishes to know how the astronomer, a sincere,
devoted, and most benevolent man, for forty years a student of the
heavens, came to the strange belief that he possessed these miraculous
powers. This is his account:

"'One day, as I was looking on the fields withering with heat, I felt in
my mind a sudden wish that I could send rain on the southern mountains,
and raise the Nile to an inundation. In the hurry of my imagination I
commanded rain to fall, and by comparing the time of my command with that
of the inundation I found that the clouds had listened to my lips.'

"'Might not some other cause,' said I, 'produce this concurrence? The
Nile does not always rise on the same day.'

"'Do not believe,' said he, with impatience, I that such objections could
escape me: I reasoned long against my own conviction, and labored against
truth with the utmost obstinacy. I sometimes suspected myself of
madness, and should not have dared to impart this secret but to a man
like you, capable of distinguishing the wonderful from the impossible and
the incredible from the false.'

"The good old astronomer gives his parti