men our country ever gave
birth to, and who was beginning to run the noble career which his father
had set him, would have been reduced to the extremes of misery had he not
been patronised by Monsieur Fagon.

But the circumstance which mostly encourages the arts in England is the
great veneration which is paid them. The picture of the Prime Minister
hangs over the chimney of his own closet, but I have seen that of Mr.
Pope in twenty noblemen's houses. Sir Isaac Newton was revered in his
lifetime, and had a due respect paid to him after his death; the greatest
men in the nation disputing who should have the honour of holding up his
pall. Go into Westminster Abbey, and you will find that what raises the
admiration of the spectator is not the mausoleums of the English kings,
but the monuments which the gratitude of the nation has erected to
perpetuate the memory of those illustrious men who contributed to its
glory. We view their statues in that abbey in the same manner as those
of Sophocles, Plato, and other immortal personages were viewed in Athens;
and I am persuaded that the bare sight of those glorious monuments has
fired more than one breast, and been the occasion of their becoming great
men.

The English have even been reproached with paying too extravagant honours
to mere merit, and censured for interring the celebrated actress Mrs.
Oldfield in Westminster Abbey, with almost the same pomp as Sir Isaac
Newton. Some pretend that the English had paid her these great funeral
honours, purposely to make us more strongly sensible of the barbarity and
injustice which they object to us, for having buried Mademoiselle Le
Couvreur ignominiously in the fields.

But be assured from me, that the English were prompted by no other
principle in burying Mrs. Oldfield in Westminster Abbey than their good
sense. They are far from being so ridiculous as to brand with infamy an
art which has immortalised a Euripides and a Sophocles; or to exclude
from the body of their citizens a set of people whose business is to set
off with the utmost grace of speech and action those pieces which the
nation is proud of.

Under the reign of Charles I. and in the beginning of the civil wars
raised by a number of rigid fanatics, who at last were the victims to it;
a great many pieces were published against theatrical and other shows,
which were attacked with the greater virulence because that monarch and
his queen, daughter to Henry I. of Fra