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Tacitus or Quintilian, assures us it was the ridiculous boast of certain orators in the time of the declension of genuine eloquence, that their harangues were capable of being set to mufic, and sung upon the stage. But it must be remembred, that the true end of this art I am recommending, is to aid, not to supersede reason; that it is so far from being necessarily effeminate, that it not only adds grace but strength to the powers of perfuafion. For this purpose Tully and Quintilian, those great masters of numerous composition, have laid it down as a fixed and invariable rule, that it must never appear the effect of labor in the orator; that the tuneful flow of his periods must always seem the cafual result of their disposition; and that it is the highest offence against the art, to weaken the expreffion in order to give a more musical tone to the cadence. In short, that no unmeaning words are to be thrown in merely to fill up the requifite measure, but that they must still rise in sense as they improve in sound. I am, &c.

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XV

LETTER

TO CLEORA.

August 11, 1738.

HO' it is but a few hours fince I parted from my Cleoa; yet I have already, you fee, taken up my pen to write to her. You must not expect, however, in this, or in any of my future letters, that I say fine things to you; fince I only intend to tell you true ones. My heart is too full to be regular, and too fincere to be ceremonious. I have changed the manner, not the style of my former conversations: and I write to you, as I used to talk to you, without form or art. Tell me then, with the fame undissembled fincerity, what effect this abfence has upon your usual chearfulness ? as I will honestly confess on my own part, that I am too interested to wish a circumstance so little consistent with my own repose, should be altogether reconcileable to yours. I have attempted, however, to pursue your advice, and divert myself by the subject you recommended to my thoughts: but it is impoffible, I perceive, to turn off the

the mind at once from an object, which it has long dwelt upon with pleasure. My heart, like a poor bird which is hunted from her nest, is still returning to the place of its affections, and after some vain efforts to fly off, settles again where all its cares and all its tenderness are centered. Adieu.

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LETTER

FEAR

To PHILOTES.

XVI.

August, 20, 1739.

I shall lose all my credit with you as a gardener, by this specimen which I venture to send you of the produce of my walls. The snails, indeed, have had more than their share of my peaches and nectarines this season : but will you not smile when I tell you, that I deem it a fort of cruelty to fuffer them to be destroyed? I should scarce dare to acknowledge this weakness (as the generality of the world, no doubt, would call it) had I not experienced, by many agreeable instances, that I may safely lay open to you every sentiment of my heart. To confess the truth then, have

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I have some scruples with respect to the liberty we assume in the unlimited deftruction of these lower orders of existence. I know not upon what principle of reason and justice it is, that mankind have founded the right over the lives of every creature that is placed in a fubordinate rank of being to themselves. Whatever claim they may have in right of food and felf-defence, did they extend their privilege no farther than those articles would reasonably carry them, numberless beings might enjoy their lives in peace, who are now deprived of them by the most wanton and unnecessary cruelties. I cannot, indeed, discover why it should be thought less inhuman to crush to death a harmless infect, whose single offence is that he eats the fruit which nature has prepared for his sustenance, than it would be, were I to kill any more bulky creature for the fame reafon. There are few tempers so hardened to the impreffions of humanity, as not to shudder at the thought of the latter; and yet the former is universally practifed without the least check of compaffion. This seems to arise from the gross error of fuppofing, that every creature is really in itself contemptible, which happens to be cloathed with a body infinitely difproportionate to our own; not confidering that great and little are merely relative terms. But the inimitable Shakespeare would teach us, that

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the poor beetle, that we tread upon, In corp'ral fuffrance feels a pang as great As when a giant dies.

And this is not thrown out in the latitude of poetical imagination, but fupported by the discoveries of the most improved philosophy: for there is every reason to believe that the sensations of many infects are as exquifite as those of creatures of far more enlarged dimenfions; perhaps even more so. The Millepedes, for instance, rolls itself round, upon the flightest touch; and the snail gathers in her horns upon the least approach of your hand. Are not these the strongest indications of their sensibility? and is it any evidence of ours, that we are not therefore induced to treat them with a more sympathizing tenderness ?

I was extremely pleased with a sentiment I met with the other day in honest Montaigne. That good-natured author remarks, that there is a certain general claim of kindness

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