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Barnard keenly retorts on Vernon for his surreptitious use of whole pages from Heylin's works, which he has appropriated to himself without any marks of quotation. I am no such excerptor (as he calls me); he is of the humour of the man who took all the ships in the Attic haven for his own, and yet was himself not master of any one vessel."

Again:

"But all this while I misunderstand him, for possibly he meaneth his own dear words I have excerpted. Why doth he not speak in plain downright English, that the world may see my faults? For every one does not know what is excerpting. If I have been so bold to pick or snap a word from him, I hope I may have the benefit of the clergy. What words have I robbed him of? and how have I become the richer for them? I was never so taken with him as to be once tempted to break the commandments, because I love plain speaking, plain writing, and plain dealing, which he does not: I hate the word excerpted, and the action imported in it. However, he is a fanciful man, and thinks there is no elegancy nor wit but in his own way of talking.

I must say as Tully did, Malim equidem indisertam prudentiam quam stultam loquacitatem."

In his turn he accuses Vernon of being a perpetual transcriber, and for the Malone minuteness of his history.

"But how have I excerpted his matter? Then I am sure to rob the spittle-house; for he is so poor and put to hard shifts, that he has much ado to compose a tolerable story, which he hath been hammering and conceiving in his mind for four years together, before he could bring forth his fœtus of intolerable transcriptions to molest the reader's patience and memory. How doth he run himself out of breath, sometimes for twenty pages and more, at other times fifteen, ordinarily nine and ten, collected out of Dr. Heylin's old books, before he can take his wind again to return to his story. I never met with such a transcriber in all my days; for want of matter to fill up a vacuum, of which his book was in much danger, he hath set down the story of Westminster, as long as the ploughman's tale in Chaucer, which to the reader would have been more pertinent and pleasant. I wonder he did not transcribe bills of chancery, especially about a tedious suit

my father had for several years about a lease at Norton."

In his raillery of Vernon's affected metaphors and comparisons, "his similitudes and dissimilitudes strangely hooked in, and fetched as far as the Antipodes," Barnard observes, "The man hath also a strange opinion of himself that he is Doctor Heylin; and because he writes his life, that he hath his natural parts, if not acquired. The soul of St. Augustine (say the schools) was Pythagorically transfused into the corpse of Aquinas; so the soul of Dr. Heylin into a narrow soul. I know there is a question in philosophy, an anima sint æquales? Whether souls be alike? But there's a difference between the spirits of Elijah and Elisha: so small a prophet with so great an

one!"

Dr. Barnard concludes by regretting that good counsel came now unseasonable, else he would have advised the writer to have transmitted his task to one who had been an ancient friend of Dr. Heylin, rather than ambitiously have assumed it, who was a professed stranger to him, by reason of which no better account could be expected from him than what he has given. He hits off

the character of this piece of biography—“ A life to the half; an imperfect creature, that is not only lame (as the honest bookseller said), but wanteth legs, and all other integral parts of a man; nay the very soul that should animate a body like Dr. Heylin. So that I must say of him as Plutarch doth of Tib. Gracchus, that he is a bold undertaker and rash talker of those matters he does not understand.' And so I have done with him, unless he creates to himself and me a future trouble."

Vernon appears to have slunk away from the duel. The son of Heylin stood corrected by the superior life produced by their relative; the learned and vivacious Barnard probably never again ventured to alter and improve the works of an author kneeling and praying for corrections. These bleating lambs, it seems, often turn out roaring lions!

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OF LENGLET DU FRESNOY.

THE "Methode pour etudier l'Histoire," by the Abbé LENGLET DU FRESNOY, is a master-key to all the locked-up treasures of ancient and modern history, and to the more secret stores of the obscurer memorialists of every nation. The history of this work and its author are equally remarkable. The man was a sort of curiosity in human nature, as his works are in literature. Lenglet du Fresnoy is not a writer merely laborious; without genius, he still has a hardy originality in his manner of writing and of thinking; and his vast and restless curiosity fermenting his immense book-knowledge, with a freedom verging on cynical causticity, led to the pursuit of uncommon topics. Even the prefaces to the works which he edited are singularly curious, and he has usually added bibliotheques, or critical catalogues of authors, which we may still consult for notices on the writers of romances-of those on literary subjects-on alchymy, or the hermetic philosophy; of those who have written on