M6 tfOTKS AND 



and permitted to look for a mine in America, where, having given offence to tiie 

 king of Spain, he Avas sacrificed to the resentment of that government, and exe- 

 cuted on his old sentence, in 1618. Just before his decapitation, he took the 

 ax from the executioner, and, smiling, thus addressed the sheriff: " this is a 

 sharp medicine, mr. Sheriff, but it is a physician that will cure all diseases." 

 State Trials, vol. 1. 



The following supplementary note relates to the 2lstpage. 



Butler's satire against the Royal Society commences in the following strain .- 

 " A learn'd society of late, 

 The glory of a foreign state, 

 Agreed, upon a summer's night, 

 To, search the moon by 'her own light. 

 To take an inventory of all 

 Her real estate and personal j 

 And make an actual survey 

 Of all her lands and how they lay." 



The poem then proceeds to state that they pointed a telescope at the moou, 

 and saw two armies engaged in desperate battle ; and finally a huge elephant, 

 which was supposed to have taken fright, and broken loose from one of the hos- 

 tile armies j after several strange speculations upon these phenomena, and their 

 preparing a memoir on the spot for insertion in the transactions of the society, 

 a person present, who was not so deeply infected with this philosophical mania, 

 discovered that the elephant was a mouse which had insinuated itself into the in- 

 strument. This threw the assembly into confusion, and finally they agreed to 

 " unmount the tube and open it," when lo ! the hostile armies appeared in the 

 shape of 



prodigious swarms 



Of flies and gnats, like men in arms." 



And the poem then concludes, 



" But when they had uoscrew'd the glass, 

 To find out where th' impostor was, 

 And saw the mouse that by mishap 

 Had made the telescope a trap, 

 Amaz'd, confounded, and afflicted.. 

 To be so openly convicted. 



