retains at the age of more than forty a colour the very reverse of bloodless and pale, inducing almost every one to consider me as ten years younger than I really am: neither is my skin shrivelled,' nor my body in any way contracted. If in any of these circumstances I speak not the truth, I should justly incur the ridicule of thousands of my own countrymen, as well as a number of foreigners, who are acquainted with my person. It may fairly then be concluded, what little credit in other respects is due to one, who has thus unnecessarily in this particular been guilty of a gross and wanton falsehood. So much have I been compelled to state about my own person of yours, though I have been informed that it is the most contemptible, and the most strongly expressive of the dishonesty and malevolence by which it is actuated, I am as little disposed to speak as others would be to hear.

Would it were in my power with the same facility to refute the charge, which my unfeeling adversary brings against me, of blindness! Alas! it is not, and I must therefore submit to it. It is not, however, miserable to be blind. He only is miserable, who cannot bear his blindness with fortitude: and why should I not bear a calamity, which every man's mind should be disciplined, on the contingency of it's happening, to bear with patience; a calamity, to the contingency of which every man, by the

condition of his nature, is exposed; and which I know to have been the lot of some of the greatest and the best of my species? Among those I might reckon many of the wisest of the bards of remote antiquity, whose loss of sight the Gods are said to have compensated with far more valuable endowments; and whose virtues mankind held in such veneration, as rather to choose to arraign heaven itself of injustice, than to deem their blindness as proof of their having deserved it. What is handed down to us respecting the augur Tiresias, is generally known. Of Phineus, Apollonius in his Argonautics thus sung:

εδ' όσσον οπίζετο και Διος αυτό

Χρειων ατρεκεως ἱερον νέον ανθρωποισι
Tw xai άι γηρας μεν επι δηναιον ιαλλεν,
Ex do intropane can yaoxepoy paos. *

Careless of Jove, in conscious virtue bold,
His daring lips heaven's sacred mind unfold.
The God hence gave him years without decay,
But robb'd his eye-balls of the pleasing day.

C..

Now God himself is truth: the more conscientiously, then, any one "unfolds the sacred mind of heaven," the liker and the more acceptable must he be to God. To suppose the Deity averse from the communication of truth to his creatures, or to suppose him unwilling that it should be communicated in the most extensive

* II. 181.

degree, is perfectly impious. It implied therefore no guilt in this excellent character, who anxiously sought like many other philosophers to impart instruction to mankind, to have lost his sight. I might farther mention other names,*

* Of this illustrious list, Timoleon (says Plutarch, in his Life) ηδη πρεσβυτερος ων απημβλυνθη την οψιν, ειτα τελεως επηρώθη με ολίγον. ετε αυτος ἑαυτῷ προφασιν παρασχων, ὅτε παροινήθεις ύπο της τύχης, αλλά συγγενικής τινος (ως εοικεν) αιτίας και καταβολής άμα Ty porn videos. Appius Claudius, qui propter invalitudinem oculorum jamdiu consiliis publicis se abstinuerat, venit in curiam, et sententiâ suâ tenuit, ut id Pyrrho negaretur-sc. in urbem recipi (Liv. Suppl. Epit. xiii.) Metellus is, also, mentioned ib. xix.

To these ancient instances might have been added from Cicero, Tusc. Disp. v. 38., where the privations of blindness are discussed, the names of Antipater of Cyrene, and C. Drusus.

Of the modern part of the catalogue, Zisca (so called from the loss of an eye) was chosen leader to the Hussites, and in the prosecution of their quarrel with the emperor Sigismund lost the other at Rabi. He died A. D. 1404; and his skin, such was the terror of his name, was converted into a drum. Zanchius, or Zanchy, a voluminous writer of great piety and learning among the Reformers, died at Heidelberg (where he had been appointed Professor of Divinity) A. D. 1590. But I may be told, by some modern Johnson, that "I am chasing a schoolboy to his common-places."

I will add however to the number, upon their own respective authorities, Ossian and Dr. Lucas, author of the excellent Essay on Happiness.' The former, in the midst of his sublime apostrophe to the Sun (at the end of his Carthon') says; "But to Ossian thou lookest in vain, for he beholds thy beams no more; whether thy yellow hair flows on the eastern clouds, or thou tremblest at the gates of the west." See P. L. iii. 41. "But not to me returns" &c. quoted in a following note. And the latter: "Should I struggle to rescue myself from that

illustrious for their civil wisdom and heroic exploits; Timoleon of Corinth, the rescuer of his own state and of all Sicily from oppression, one of the best, and-in every thing relative to the republic-the purest of men: Appius Claudius, whose patriotic speech in the senate, though it could not restore his own sight, relieved Italy from her great enemy, Pyrrhus: Cæcilius Metellus the High Priest, who lost his eyes in preserving not only Rome, but the Palladium also to which her fate was attached

contempt, to which this condition (wherein I may seem lost. to the world, and myself) exposes me; should I ambitiously affect to have my name march in the train of those all (though not all equally) great ones-Homer, Appius, Cn. Aufidius, Didymus, Walkup, P. Jean l'Aveugle, &c. all of them eminent for their service and usefulness, as for their affliction of the same kind as mine; even this might seem almost a commendable infirmity," &c. (Pref.) He afterward, in the very spirit of Milton, affirms; "The soul can gaze on those charms and glories, which are not subject to the bodily eye, the vultus nimiùm lubricos aspici; "" pronounces her "happy in her own strength and wealth, ipsa suis pollens opibus ;" and represents her as 66 going out, like Dinah, to see the daughters of the land." (Gen. xxxiv. 1.)

To the above list may, also, be subjoined the celebrated Irish bard Carolan, whose elegant little Composition on the influence of beauty is preserved in Miss Brookes' Reliques of

English Poetry.' It concludes thus:

E'en he, whose hapless eyes no ray
Admit from Beauty's cheering day,
Yet though he cannot see the light,
He feels it warm and knows it bright."

and her most sacred vessels from the flames; since the Deity has upon so many occasions evinced his regard for bright examples even of heathen piety, that what happened to such a man so employed can hardly be accounted an evil. Why need I adduce the modern instances of Dandolo, the celebrated Doge of Venice or the brave Bohemian General Zisca, the great defender of Christianity, of Jerome Zanchius, and other eminent divines; when it appears that even the patriarch Isaac,* than whom no one was ever more beloved by his Maker, lived for some years blind, as did also his son Jacob,t an equal favourite with heaven; and when our Saviour himself explicitly affirmed, with regard to the man whom he healed,‡ that neither on account of his own sin, nor that of his parents, had he been "blind from his birth?”

In respect to myself-I call thee, O God, to witness, who "triest the very heart and the reins," that after a frequent and most serious examination and scrutiny of every corner of my life, I am not conscious of any recent or remote crime, which by it's atrocity can have drawn down this calamity exclusively upon my head. As to what I have at any time written (for, in reference to this, the royalists triumphantly deem my blindness a sort of judgement) I declare, with the same solemn appeal to the Almighty,

* Gen. xxvii. 1.

+ Gen. xlviii. 10.

‡ John ix. 3.