nser_ of the Port-Royal, was originally projected to teach a young
nobleman all that was practically useful in the art of logic in a few
days, and was intended to have been written in one morning by the great
ARNAULD; but to that profound thinker so many new ideas crowded in that
slight task, that he was compelled to call in his friend NICOLLE; and thus
a few projected pages closed in a volume so excellent, that our elegant
metaphysician has recently declared, that "it is hardly possible to
estimate the merits too highly." Pemberton, who knew NEWTON intimately,
informs us that his Treatise on Natural Philosophy, full of a variety of
profound inventions, was composed by him from scarcely any other materials
than the _few propositions he had set down several years before_, and
which having resumed, occupied him in writing one year and a half. A
curious circumstance has been preserved in the life of the other immortal
man in philosophy, Lord BACON. When young, he wrote a letter to Father
Fulgentio concerning an Essay of his, to which he gave the title of "The
Greatest Birth of Time," a title which he censures as too pompous. The
Essay itself is lost, but it was the first outline of that great design
which he afterwards pursued and finished in his "Instauration of the
Sciences." LOCKE himself has informed us, that his great work on "The
Human Understanding," when he first put pen to paper, he thought "would
have been contained in one sheet, but that the farther he went on, the
larger prospect he had." In this manner it would be beautiful to trace the
history of the human mind, and observe how a NEWTON and a BACON and a
LOCKE were proceeding for thirty years together, in accumulating truth
upon truth, and finally building up these fabrics of their invention.

Were it possible to collect some thoughts of great thinkers, which were
never written, we should discover vivid conceptions, and an originality
they never dared to pursue in their works! Artists have this advantage
over authors, that their virgin fancies, their chance felicities, which
labour cannot afterwards produce, are constantly perpetuated; and those
"studies," as they are called, are as precious to posterity as their more
complete designs. In literature we possess one remarkable evidence of
these fortuitous thoughts of genius. POPE and SWIFT, being in the country
together, observed, that if contemplative men were to notice "the thoughts
which suddenly present thems