e constitution, and
rest content that Adam had fallen lower, whereby, by knowing no other
original, and deeper ignorance of themselves, they might have enjoyed
the happiness of inferiour creatures, who in tranquillity possess
their constitutions, as having not the apprehension to deplore their
own natures; and being framed below the circumference of these hopes
of cognition of better things, the wisdom of God hath necessitated
their contentment. But the superiour ingredient and obscured part of
ourselves, whereto all present felicities afford no resting
contentment, will be able, at last, to tell us we are more than our
present selves; and evacuate such hopes in the fruition of their own
accomplishments."

To his treatise on urn-burial, was added the Garden of Cyrus, or the
quincunxial Lozenge, or network Plantation of the Ancients,
artificially, naturally, mystically, considered. This discourse he
begins with the Sacred Garden, in which the first man was placed; and
deduces the practice of horticulture, from the earliest accounts of
antiquity to the time of the Persian Cyrus, the first man whom we
actually know to have planted a quincunx; which, however, our author
is inclined to believe of longer date, and not only discovers it in
the description of the hanging gardens of Babylon, but seems willing
to believe, and to persuade his reader, that it was practised by the
feeders on vegetables before the flood.

Some of the most pleasing performances have been produced by learning
and genius, exercised upon subjects of little importance. It seems to
have been, in all ages, the pride of wit, to show how it could exalt
the low, and amplify the little. To speak not inadequately of things
really and naturally great, is a task not only diflicult but
disagreeable; because the writer is degraded in his own eyes, by
standing in comparison with his subject, to which he can hope to add
nothing from his imagination: but it is a perpetual triumph of fancy
to expand a scanty theme, to raise glittering ideas from obscure
properties, and to produce to the world an object of wonder, to which
nature had contributed little. To this ambition, perhaps, we owe the
frogs of Homer, the gnat and the bees of Virgil, the butterfly of
Spenser, the shadow of Wowerus, and the quincunx of Browne.

In the prosecution of this sport of fancy, he considers every
production of art and nature, in which he could find any decussation
or approaches to the fo