Stanza the second, verse the second. The fatal stroke.] Scioppius, Salmasius, and many others, for the read a; but I have stuck to the usual reading.

Verse the third. Till by her wit.] Some manuscripts have it his wit, others your, others their wit. But as I find Corinna to be the name of a woman in other authors, I cannot doubt but it should be her.

other notable discovery of the like im- | Vatican manuscript for I reads it; but this portance. Indeed, when a different reading must have been the hallucination of the gives us a different sense or a new elegance transcriber, who probably mistook the dash in an author, the editor does very well in of the I for a T. taking notice of it; but when he only entertains us with the several ways of spelling the same word, and gathers together the various blunders and mistakes of twenty or thirty different transcribers, they only take up the time of the learned readers, and puzzle the minds of the ignorant. I have often fancied with myself how enraged an old Latin author would be, should he see the several absurdities, in sense and grammar, which are imputed to him by some or other of these various readings. In one he speaks nonsense; in another makes use of a word that was never heard of; and indeed there is scarce a solecism in writing which the best author is not guilty of, if we may be at liberty to read him in the words of some manuscript which the laborious editor has thought fit to examine in the prosecution of his work. |

I question not but the ladies and pretty fellows will be very curious to understand what it is that I have been hitherto talking of. I shall therefore give them a notion of this practice, by endeavouring to write after the manner of several persons who make an eminent figure in the republic of letters. To this end we will suppose that the following song is an old ode, which I present to the public in a new edition, with the several various readings which I find of it in former editions, and in ancient manuscripts. Those who cannot relish the various readings, will perhaps find their account in the song, which never before appeared in print.

My love was fickle once and changing,
Nor e'er would settle in my heart;
From beauty still to beauty ranging,
In every face I found a dart.

"Twas first a charming shape enslav'd me;
An eye then gave the fatal stroke:
Till by her wit Corinna sav'd me,
And all my former fetters broke.

But now a long and lasting anguish
For Belvidera I endure;

Hourly I sigh, and hourly languish,

Nor hope to find the wonted cure.
For here the false unconstant lover,
After a thousand beauties shown,
Does new surprising charms discover,
And finds variety in one.'

Various Readings.
Stanza the first, verse the first. And
changing.] The and in some manuscripts
is written thus, &; but that in the Cotton
library writes it in three distinct letters.

Stanza the third, verse the first. A long and lasting anguish.] The German manuscript reads a lasting passion, but the rhyme will not admit it.

Verse the second. For Belvidera I endure.] Did not all the manuscripts reclaim, I should change Belvidera into Pelvidera; Pelvis being used by several of the ancient comic writers for a looking-glass, by which means the etymology of the word is very visible, and Pelvidera will signify a lady who often looks in her glass; as indeed she had very good reason, if she had all those beauties which our poet here ascribes to her.

Verse the third. Hourly I sigh and hourly languish.] Some for the word hourly read daily, and others nightly; the last has great authorities of its side.

Verse the fourth. The wonted cure.] The elder Stevens reads wanted cure.

Stanza the fourth, verse the second. After a thousand beauties.] In several copies we meet with a hundred beauties, by the usual error of the transcribers, who probably omitted a cypher, and had not taste enough to know that the word thousand was ten times a greater compliment to the poet's mistress than a hundred.

one.

Verse the fourth. And finds variety in e.] Most of the ancient manuscripts have it in two. Indeed so many of them concur in this last reading, that I am very much in doubt whether it ought not to take place. There are but two reasons which incline me to the reading as I have published it: first, because the rhyme; and, secondly, because the sense is preserved by it. It might likewise proceed from the oscitancy of transcribers, who, to despatch their work the sooner, used to write all numbers in cypher, and seeing the figure 1 followed by a little dash of the pen, as is customary in old manuscripts, they perhaps mistook the dash for a second figure, and, by casting up both together, composed out of them the figure 2. But this I shall leave to the learned, without determining any thing in

Verse the second. Nor e'er would.]a matter of so great uncertainty. Aldus reads it ever would; but as this would

hurt the metre, we have restored it to the

genuine reading, by observing that synære- No. 471.] Saturday, August 30, 1712. sis which had been neglected by ignorant transcribers.

Ibid. In my heart.] Scaliger and others, on my heart.

Verse the fourth. I found a dart.] The

C.

Εν ελπίσιν χρή τους σοφες εχειν βίου. Euripid. The wise with hope support the pains of life. THE time present seldom affords sufficient employment in the mind of man.

Objects of pain or pleasure, love or admi- | but every reader will draw a moral from ration, do not lie thick enough together in this story, and apply it to himself without life to keep the soul in constant action, and my direction. supply an immediate exercise to its faculties. In order, therefore, to remedy this defect, that the mind may not want business, but always have materials for thinking, she is endowed with certain powers, that can recall what is passed, and anticipate what is to come.

Religious hope has likewise this advanBesides these several advantages which tage above any other kind of hope, that it rise from hope, there is another which is is able to revive the dying man, and to fill none of the least, and that is, its great his mind not only with secret comfort and efficacy in preserving us from setting too refreshment, but sometimes with rapture high a value on present enjoyments. The and transport. He triumphs in his agonies, saying of Cæsar is very well known. When whilst the soul springs forward with delight he had given away all his estate in gratuities to the great object which she has always among his friends, one of them asked what had in view, and leaves the body with an he had left for himself; to which that great expectation of being reunited to her in a man replied, Hope.' His natural mag-glorious and joyful resurrection. nanimity hindered him from prizing what he was certainly possessed of, and turned all his thoughts upon something more valuable that he had in view. I question not

rounded him; for the following passage had
its present and personal, as well as its fu-
ture and prophetic sense. 'I have set the
Lord always before me. Because he is at
my right hand I shall not be moved. There-
fore my heart is glad, and my glory re-
joiceth. My flesh also shall rest in hope.
For thou wilt not leave my soul in hell,
neither wilt thou suffer thine holy one to
see corruption. Thou wilt show me the
path of life. i. thy presence is fulness of
joy, at thy right hand there are pleasures
for evermore.'
C.

No. 472.] Mon, September 1, 1712.

-Voluptas

were not petrified with the love of this world, against all sense of the commerce which ought to be among them, it would not be an unreasonable bill for a poor man in the agony of pain, aggravated by want and poverty, to draw upon a sick aiderman after this form:

'MR. BASIL PLENTY,-Sir, you have the gout and stone, with sixty thousand pounds sterling; I have the gout and stone, not worth one farthing; I shall pray for you, and desire you would pay the bearer twenty shillings, for value received from, sir, your humble servant,

LAZARUS HOPEFUL. 'Cripplegate, August 29, 1712.'

The reader's own imagination will suggest to him the reasonableness of such correspondences, and diversify them into a thousand forms; but I shall close this as I began upon the subject of blindness. The following letter seems to be written by a man of learning, who is returned to his study, after a suspense of ability to do so. The benefit he reports himself to have received, may well claim the handsomest encomium he can give the operator.

Solamenque malio- Virg. Æn. iii. 660. This only solace his hard fortune sends.-Dryden. I RECEIVED Some time ago a proposal, which had a preface to it, wherein the author discoursed at large of the innumerable objects of charity in a nation, and admonished the rich, who were afflicted with any distemper of body, particularly to regard the poor in the same species of affliction, and confine their tenderness to them, since it is impossible to assist all who are presented to them. The proposer had been 'MR. SPECTATOR,-Ruminating lately relieved from a malady in his eyes by an on your admirable discourses on the Pleaoperation performed by Sir William Read, sures of the Imagination, I began to consiand, being a man of condition, had taken a der to which of our senses we are obliged resolution to maintain three poor blind men for the greatest and most important share during their lives, in gratitude for that great of those pleasures; and I soon concluded blessing. This misfortune is so very great that it was to the sight. That is the soveand unfrequent, that one would think an reign of the senses, and mother of all the establishment for all the poor under it, arts and sciences, that have refined the might be easily accomplished, with the ad- rudeness of the uncultivated mind to a podition of a very few others to those wealthy liteness that distinguishes the fine spirits who are in the same calamity. However, from the barbarous gout of the great vulthe thought of the proposer arose from a gar and the small. The sight is the obligvery good motive; and the parcelling of ing benefactress that bestows on us the ourselves out, as called to particular acts most transporting sensations that we have of beneficence, would be a pretty cement from the various and wonderful products of society and virtue. It is the ordinary of nature. To the sight we owe the amazfoundation for men's holding a commerce ing discoveries of the height, magnitude, with each other, and becoming familiar, and motion of the planets, their several rethat they agree in the same sort of plea-volutions about their common centre of sure; and sure it may also be some reason light, heat and motion, the sun. The sight for amity, that they are under one com- travels yet farther to the fixed stars, and mon distress. If all the rich who are lame furnishes the understanding with solid reawith the gout, from a life of ease, pleasure, sons to prove, that each of them is a sun, and luxury, would help those few who moving on its own axis, in the centre of its have it without a previous life of pleasure, own vortex, or turbillion, and performing and add a few of such laborious men, who the same offices to its dependant planets are become lame from unhappy blows, that our glorious sun does to this. But the falls, or other accidents of age or sickness; I inquiries of the sight will not be stopped say, would such gouty persons administer here, but make their progress through the to the necessities of men disabled like them- immense expanse to the Milky Way, and selves, the consciousness of such a behaviour there divide the blended fires of the galaxy would be the best julep, cordial, and ano-into infinite and different worlds, made up dyne, in the feverish, faint, and tormenting of distinct suns, and their peculiar equipage vicissitudes of that miserable distemper. of planets, till, unable to pursue this track The same may be said of all other, both any farther, it deputes the imagination to bodily and intellectual evils. These classes go on to new discoveries, till it fill the unof charity would certainly bring down bless- boundless space with endless worlds. ings upon an age and people; and if men "The sight informs the statuary's chisel

with power to gi breath to lifeless brass and marble, and the painter's pencil to swell the flat canvass with moving figures actuated by imaginary souls. Music indeed may plead another original, since Jubal, by the different falls of his hammer on the anvil, discovered by the ear the first rude music that pleased the antediluvian fathers; but then the sight has not only reduced those wilder sounds into artful order and harmony, but conveys that harmony to the most distant parts of the world without the help of sound. To the sight we owe not only all the discoveries of philosophy, but all the divine imagery of poetry that transports the intelligent reader of Homer, Milton, and Virgil.

'As the sight has polished the world, so does it supply us with the most grateful and lasting pleasure. Let love, let friendship, paternal affection, filial piety, and conjugal duty, declare the joys the sight bestows on a meeting after absence. But it would be endless to enumerate all the pleasures and advantages of sight; every one that has it, every hour he makes use of it, finds them, feels them, enjoys them.

Thus, as our greatest pleasures and knowledge are derived from the sight, so has Providence been more curious in the formation of its seat, the eye, than of the organs of the other senses. That stupendous machine is composed, in a wonderful manner, of muscles, membranes, and humours. Its motions are admirably directed by the muscles; the perspicuity of the humours transmits the rays of light; the rays are regularly refracted by their figure; the black lining of the sclerotes effectually prevents their being confounded by reflection. It is wonderful indeed to consider how many objects the eye is fitted to take in at once, and successively in an instant, and at the same time to make a judgment of their position, figure, or colour. It watches against our dangers, guides our steps, and lets in all the visible objects, whose beauty and variety instruct and delight.

The pleasures and advantages of sight being so great, the loss must be very grievous; of which Milton, from experience, gives the most sensible idea, both in the third book of his Paradise Lost, and in his Samson Agonistes.

To light, in the former:

-Thee I revisit safe,

And feel thy sov'reign vital lamp; but thou
Revisit'st not these eyes, that roll in vain
To find thy piercing ray, but find no dawn."

And a little after:

Seasons return, but not to me returns
Day, or the sweet approach of ev'n or morn,
Or sight of vernal bloom, or summer's rose,

Or flocks of herds, or human face divine;
But cloud instead, and ever-during dark
Surround me from the cheerful ways of men
Cut off, and for the book of knowledge fair,
Presented with an universal blank

Of nature's works, to me expung'd and raz'd,
And wisdom at one entrance quite shut out."

"The enjoyment of sight then being so great a blessing, and the loss of it so terrible an evil, how excellent and valuable is the skill of that artist which can restore the former, and redress the latter! My frequent perusal of the advertisements in the public newspapers (generally the most agreeable entertainment they afford,) has presented me with many and various benefits of this kind done to my countrymen by that skilful artist, Dr. Grant, her majesty's has brought and restored to sight several oculist extraordinary, whose happy hard hundreds in less than four years. Many have received sight by his means who came blind from their mother's womb, as in the famous instance or Jones of Newington. I myself have been cured by him of a weakness in my eyes next to blindness, and am ready to believe any thing that is reported of his ability this way; and know that many who could not purchase his assistance with money, have enjoyed it from his charity. letter beyond its bounds: what I have said But a list of particulars would swell my being sufficient to comfort those who are in the like distress, since they may conceive hopes of being no longer miserable in this kind, while there is yet alive so able an oculist as Dr. Grant. I am the Spectator's humble servant, 'PHILANTHROPUS.'

T.

'SIR,-I am now in the country, and employ most of my time in reading, or thinking upon what I have read. Your paper comes constantly down to me, and it affects me so much, that I find my thoughts run into your way: and I recommend to you a subject upon which you have not yet touched, and that is, the satisfaction some men seem to take in their imperfections: I think one may call it glorying in their insufficiency. A certain great author is of

knowledge of them was rather a diminution
than an advancement of a man's character;
though, at the same time, I know he lan-
guishes and repines he is not master of
them himself. Whenever I take any of
these fine persons thus detracting from what
they do not understand, I tell them I will
complain to you; and say I am sure you will
not allow it an exception against a thing,
that he who contemns it is an ignorant in
it. I am, sir, your most humble servant,
'S. T.'

'MR. SPECTATOR,-I am a man of a very good estate, and am honourably in love. I hope you will allow, when the ultimate purpose is honest, there may be, without. trespass against innocence, some toying by the way. People of condition are perhaps too distant and formal on those occasions; but however that is, I am to confess to you that I have writ some verses to atone for my offence. You professed authors are a little severe upon us, who write like gentlemen: but if you are a friend to love, you how much service it would do me with my will insert my poem. You cannot imagine fair one, as well as reputation with all my friends, to have something of mine in the Spectator. My crime was, that I snatched a kiss, and my poetical excuse as follows:

opinion it is the contrary to envy, though perhaps it may proceed from it. Nothing is so common as to hear men of this sort, speaking of themselves, add to their own merit (as they think,) by impairing it, in praising themselves for their defects, freely allowing they commit some few frivolous errors, in order to be esteemed persons of uncommon talents and great qualifications. They are generally professing an injudicious neglect of dancing, fencing, and riding, as also an unjust contempt for travelling, and the modern languages; as for their part, they say, they never valued or troubled their heads about them. This panegyrical satire on themselves certainly is worthy of your animadversion. I have known one of these gentlemen think himself obliged to forget the day of an appointment, and sometimes even that you spoke to him; and when you see 'em, they hope you'll pardon 'em, for they have the worst memory in the world. One of 'em started up t'other day in some confusion, and said, "Now I think on 't, I am to meet Mr. Mortmain, the attorney, about some business, but whether it is today or to-morrow, faith I can't tell." Now, to my certain knowledge, he knew his time to a moment, and was there accordingly. These forgetful persons have, to heighten their crime, generally the best memories of any people, as I have found out by their remembering sometimes through inadvertency. Two or three of 'em that I know, can say most of our modern tragedies by heart. I asked a gentleman the other day, that is famous for a good carver, (at which acquisition he is out of countenance, imagining it may detract from some of his more essential qualifications,) to help me to something that was near him; but he excused himself, and blushing told me, "Of all things he could never carve in his life;" though it can be proved upon him that he cuts up, disjoints, and uncases with incomparable dexterity. I would not be understood as if I thought it laudable for a man of quality and fortune to rival the acquisiAug. 23, 1712. tions of artificers, and endeavour to excel 'SIR,-Having a little time upon my in little handy qualities; no, I argue only hands, I could not think of bestowing it against being ashamed of what is really better, than in writing an epistle to the praise-worthy. As these pretences to in-Spectator, which I now do, and am, sir, genuity show themselves several ways, you humble servant, your BOB SHORT. will often see a man of this temper ashamed 'P. S. If you approve of my style, I am to be clean, and setting up for wit, only from likely enough to become your correspondnegligence in his habit. Now I am upon ent. I desire your opinion of it. I design it this head, I cannot help observing also upon for that way of writing called by the judia very different folly proceeding from the cious "the familiar."" same cause. As these above-mentioned arise from affecting an equality with men

I.

"Belinda, see from yonder flowers
The bee flies loaded to its cell:
Can you perceive what it devours?

Are they impaired in show or smell?

II.

"So, though I robb'd you of a kiss,
Sweeter than their ambrosial dew;
Why are you angry at my bliss?
Has it at all impoverish'd you?

III.

""Tis by this cunning I contrive, In spite of your unkind reserve, To keep my famish'd love alive, Which you inhumanly would starve." 'I am, sir, your humble servant, TIMOTHY STANZA.'

T.

of greater talents, from having the same No. 474.] Wednesday, September 3, 1712.

Asperitas agrestis et inconcinna

Hor. Ep. 18. Lib. 1. 6. Rude, rustic, and inelegant.

faults, there are others that would come at a parallel with those above them, by possessing little advantages which they want. I heard a young man not long ago, who has sense, comfort himself in his ignorance of 'MR. SPECTATOR,-Being of the number Greek, Hebrew, and the Orientals: at the of those that have lately retired from the same time that he published his aver- centre of business and pleasure, my uneasision to those languages, he said that theness in the country, where I am, arises