ould have been wanting, in order to have taken a man's character, but
to have taken a chair and gone softly, as you would to a dioptrical
bee-hive, and look'd in,--view'd the soul stark naked;--observed all
her motions,--her machinations;--traced all her maggots from their first
engendering to their crawling forth;--watched her loose in her frisks,
her gambols, her capricios; and after some notice of her more solemn
deportment, consequent upon such frisks, &c.--then taken your pen and
ink and set down nothing but what you had seen, and could have sworn
to:--But this is an advantage not to be had by the biographer in this
planet;--in the planet Mercury (belike) it may be so, if not better
still for him;--for there the intense heat of the country, which is
proved by computators, from its vicinity to the sun, to be more than
equal to that of red-hot iron,--must, I think, long ago have vitrified
the bodies of the inhabitants, (as the efficient cause) to suit them for
the climate (which is the final cause;) so that betwixt them both, all
the tenements of their souls, from top to bottom, may be nothing else,
for aught the soundest philosophy can shew to the contrary, but one fine
transparent body of clear glass (bating the umbilical knot)--so that,
till the inhabitants grow old and tolerably wrinkled, whereby the rays
of light, in passing through them, become so monstrously refracted,--or
return reflected from their surfaces in such transverse lines to the
eye, that a man cannot be seen through;--his soul might as well, unless
for mere ceremony, or the trifling advantage which the umbilical point
gave her,--might, upon all other accounts, I say, as well play the fool
out o'doors as in her own house.

But this, as I said above, is not the case of the inhabitants of this
earth;--our minds shine not through the body, but are wrapt up here in
a dark covering of uncrystalized flesh and blood; so that, if we would
come to the specific characters of them, we must go some other way to
work.

Many, in good truth, are the ways, which human wit has been forced to
take, to do this thing with exactness.

Some, for instance, draw all their characters with
wind-instruments.--Virgil takes notice of that way in the affair of
Dido and Aeneas;--but it is as fallacious as the breath of fame;--and,
moreover, bespeaks a narrow genius. I am not ignorant that the Italians
pretend to a mathematical exactness in their designations of one
particular