Sir William
Temple, are models of the genteel style in writing. We should prefer
saying--of the lordly, and the gentlemanly. Nothing can be more unlike
than the inflated finical rhapsodies of Shaftesbury, and the plain
natural chit-chat of Temple. The man of rank is discernible in both
writers; but in the one it is only insinuated gracefully, in the other
it stands out offensively. The peer seems to have written with his
coronet on, and his Earl's mantle before him; the commoner in his
elbow chair and undress.--What can be more pleasant than the way in
which the retired statesman peeps out in the essays, penned by the
latter in his delightful retreat at Shene? They scent of Nimeguen,
and the Hague. Scarce an authority is quoted under an ambassador.
Don Francisco de Melo, a "Portugal Envoy in England," tells him it
was frequent in his country for men, spent with age or other decays,
so as they could not hope for above a year or two of life, to ship
themselves away in a Brazil fleet, and after their arrival there to
go on a great length, sometimes of twenty or thirty years, or more,
by the force of that vigour they recovered with that remove. "Whether
such an effect (Temple beautifully adds) might grow from the air, or
the fruits of that climate, or by approaching nearer the sun, which
is the fountain of light and heat, when their natural heat was so
far decayed: or whether the piecing out of an old man's life were
worth the pains; I cannot tell: perhaps the play is not worth the
candle."--Monsieur Pompone, "French Ambassador in his (Sir William's)
time at the Hague," certifies him, that in his life he had never
heard of any man in France that arrived at a hundred years of age; a
limitation of life which the old gentleman imputes to the excellence
of their climate, giving them such a liveliness of temper and humour,
as disposes them to more pleasures of all kinds than in other
countries; and moralises upon the matter very sensibly. The "late
Robert Earl of Leicester" furnishes him with a story of a Countess of
Desmond, married out of England in Edward the Fourth's time, and who
lived far in King James's reign. The "same noble person" gives him
an account, how such a year, in the same reign, there went about the
country a set of morrice-dancers, composed of ten men who danced, a
Maid Marian, and a tabor and pipe; and how these twelve, one with
another, made up twelve hundred years. "It was not so much (says
Temple) that so