rtained to be predictions,
and among others that of the inflammability of the diamond; and many
have been eagerly seized upon as indisputable axioms. A hint at the
close of his Optics, that "If natural philosophy should be continued to
be improved in its various branches, the bounds of moral philosophy
would be enlarged also," is perhaps among the most important of human
discoveries--it gave rise to Hartley's _Physiological Theory of the
Mind_. The queries, the hints, the conjectures of Newton, display the
most creative sagacity; and demonstrate in what manner the discoveries
of retired men, while they bequeath their legacies to the world, afford
to themselves a frequent source of secret and silent triumphs.

FOOTNOTES:

[263] The remarkable clue to the reading of the hieroglyphic language
of ancient Egypt perfected in our own times is a striking instance
of this; as well as the investigations now proceeding in Babylonian
inscriptions, which promise to enable us to comprehend a language
that was once considered as hopelessly lost.

[264] The curious reader may view the marks, and the manner in which
the Greek characters were made out, in the preface to Hearne's
"Curious Discourses." The amethyst proved more difficult than the
frieze, from the circumstance, that in engraving on the stone the
letters must be reversed.

SENTIMENTAL BIOGRAPHY.

A periodical critic, probably one of the juniors, has thrown out a
startling observation. "There is," says this literary senator,
"something melancholy in the study of biography, because it is--a
history of the dead!" A truism and a falsity mixed up together is the
temptation with some modern critics to commit that darling sin of
theirs--novelty and originality! But we really cannot condole with the
readers of Plutarch for their deep melancholy; we who feel our spirits
refreshed, amidst the mediocrity of society, when we are recalled back
to the men and the women who WERE! illustrious in every glory! Biography
with us is a re-union with human existence in its most excellent state!
and we find nothing dead in the past, while we retain the sympathies
which only require to be awakened.

It would have been more reasonable had the critic discovered that our
country has not yet had her Plutarch, and that our biography remains
still little more than a mass of compilation.

In this study of biography there is a species which has not yet b