le John Evelyn was in the Netherlands, a woman was
pointed out to him who had had twenty-five husbands, and was then a
widow; 'yet it could not be proved,' he says, that 'she had made any
of her husbands away, though the suspicion had brought her several
times to trouble.' However, the Dutch logicians made no difficulty of
the matter; and arguing, from the number of the woman's husbands, that
she could not be wholly innocent of their death, prohibited her from
marrying again--which, her addiction to matrimony being considered,
was perhaps, of all the 'troubles' she had undergone, by no means the
least.

The logical faculty, which not only consists with the poetical, but is
invariably and necessarily associated with it, whenever the latter
exists in an advanced stage of development, is in no writer more
conspicuous as an intellectual characteristic than in Schiller. In
this respect he is not excelled even by Wordsworth himself; but Homer
sometimes snoozes, and Schiller's reasoning is not always
consequential: as, for instance, when he denies two compositions of
Ovid--the _Tristia_ and _Ex Ponto_--to be genuine poetry, on the
ground that they were the results not of inspiration, but of
necessity; just as if poetry were not a thing to be judged of by
itself; and as if one could not determine whether it were present or
absent in a composition, without knowing to what influences the author
was subjected at the time the composition was produced!

Rousseau, in one of his moods of bilious cynicism, falls foul of human
reason altogether. No man despised it more in action; no one could
more consistently decry it in speculation. In his opinion, the
exercise of the reasoning powers is absolutely sinful--_l'homme qui
raisonne est l'homme qui peche_. Franklin, on the other hand, in a
familiar tone of playful banter, vindicates its utility, alleging that
it is mightily 'convenient to be a rational animal, who knows how to
find or invent a plausible pretext for whatever it has an inclination
to do.' Examples of this convenience abound. The Barbary Jews were
rich and industrious, and, accordingly, their wealth provoke the
cupidity of the indolent and avaricious Mussulmans. These latter,
whenever a long drought had destroyed vegetation, and the strenuous
prayers offered up in the mosques had proved unavailing for its
removal, were accustomed to argue--and a mighty convenient argument it
was--that it was the foul breath of the Jews that