sis, is the true
modern and fashionable; and that buckles are not to be worn, by this
system, till the 10th of March, in the year 1714, which, according to
the computation of some of our greatest divines, is to be the first year
of the Millennium[421]; in which blessed age, all habits will be reduced
to a primitive simplicity; and whoever shall be found to have persevered
in a constancy of dress, in spite of all the allurements of profane and
heathen habits, shall be rewarded with a never-fading doublet of a
thousand years. All points in the system which are doubted, shall be
attested by the knight's extemporary oath, for the satisfaction of his
readers.

Will's Coffee-house, July 18.

We were upon the heroic strain this evening, and the question was, What
is the True Sublime? Many very good discourses happened thereupon; after
which a gentleman at the table, who is, it seems, writing on that
subject, assumed the argument; and though he ran through many instances
of sublimity from the ancient writers, said, he had hardly known an
occasion wherein the true greatness of soul, which animates a general in
action, is so well represented, with regard to the person of whom it was
spoken, and the time in which it was writ, as in a few lines in a modern
poem: "there is," continued he, "nothing so forced and constrained, as
what we frequently meet with in tragedies; to make a man under the
weight of a great sorrow, or full of meditation upon what he is soon to
execute, cast about for a simile to what he himself is, or the thing
which he is going to act: but there is nothing more proper and natural
than for a poet, whose business is to describe, and who is spectator of
one in that circumstance when his mind is working upon a great image,
and that the ideas hurry upon his imagination--I say, there is nothing
so natural, as for a poet to relieve and clear himself from the burthen
of thought at that time, by uttering his conception in simile and
metaphor. The highest act of the mind of man, is to possess itself with
tranquillity in imminent danger, and to have its thoughts so free, as to
act at that time without perplexity. The ancient poets have compared
this sedate courage to a rock that remains immovable amidst the rage of
winds and waves; but that is too stupid and inanimate a similitude, and
could do no credit to the hero. At other times they are all of them
wonderfully obliged to a Lybian lion, which may give indeed very
ag