f the
mention of current reviews, not one in a thousand names the editor.
In the summer of 1865 I made my first acquaintance with the tales of
Nathaniel Hawthorne, and the first I read was about the siege of Boston in
the War of Independence. I could not make it out: everybody seemed to have
got into somebody else's place. I was beginning the second tale, when a
parcel arrived: it was a lot of old pamphlets and other rubbish, as he
called it, sent by a friend who had lately sold his books, had not thought
it worth while to send these things for sale, but thought I might like to
look at them and possibly keep some. The first thing I looked at was a
sheet which, being opened, displayed "A plan of Boston and its environs,
shewing the true situation of his Majesty's army and also that of the
rebels, drawn by an engineer, at Boston Oct. 1775." Such detailed plans of
current sieges being then uncommon, it is explained that "The principal
part of this plan was surveyed by Richard Williams, Lieutenant at Boston;
and sent over by the son of a nobleman to his father in town, by whose
permission it was published." I immediately saw that my confusion arose
from my supposing that the king's troops were besieging the rebels, when it
was just the other way.
April 1, 1853, while engaged in making some notes on a logical point, an
idea occurred which was perfectly new to me, on the mode of conciliating
the notions _omnipresence_ and _indivisibility into parts_. What it was is
no matter here: suffice it that, since it was published elsewhere (in a
paper on _Infinity_, _Camb. Phil. Trans._ vol. xi. p. 1) I have not had it
produced to me. I had just finished a paragraph on the subject, when a
parcel came in from a bookseller containing Heywood's[96] _Analysis of
Kant's Critick_, 1844.
{50} On turning over the leaves I found (p. 109) the identical thought
which up to this day, I only know as in my own paper, or in Kant. I feel
sure I had not seen it before, for it is in Kant's first edition, which was
never translated to my knowledge; and it does not appear in the later
editions. Mr. Heywood gives some account of the first edition.
In the broadsheet which gave account of the dying scene of Charles II, it
is said that the Roman Catholic priest was introduced by P. M. A. C. F. The
chain was this: the Duchess of Portsmouth[97] applied to the Duke of York,
who may have consulted his Cordelier confessor, Mansuete, about procuring a
priest
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