XXVI PREFACE. 



&quot; music, to avoid or slide from the close or cadence, 

 &quot; common with the trope of rhetoric of deceiving 

 &quot; expectation ? Is not the delight of the quavering 

 &quot; upon a stop in music the same with the playing of 

 &quot; light upon the water.&quot; 



If in a work written when the author was 

 more than sixty years of age, and if, after 

 the vexations and labours of a professional and 

 political life, the varieties and sprightliness of youth 

 ful imagination, are not to be found, yet the pecu 

 liar properties of his mind may easily be traced, and 

 the stateliness of the edifice be discovered from the 

 magnificence of the ruins. His vigilance in record 

 ing every fact tending to alleviate misery, or to 

 promote happiness, is noticed by Bishop Sprat in his 

 history of the Royal Society, where he says &quot; I shall 

 &quot; instance in the sweating-sickness. The medicine 

 &quot; for it was almost infallible : but, before that could 

 &quot; be generally published, it had almost dispeopled 

 f&amp;lt; whole towns. If the same disease should have re- 

 &quot; turned, it might have been again as destructive, 

 &quot; had not the Lord Bacon taken care, to set down 

 &quot; the particular course of physic for it, in his history 

 &quot; of Henry the Seventh, and so put it beyond the 

 &quot; possibility of any private man s invading it.&quot; 



And his account of the same calamity * contains an 

 allusion to his favourite doctrine of vital spirit, of 

 which the philosophy is explained in his history of 

 Life and Death, and illustrated in his fable of Pro- 



* Page 114 of this volume. 



