ray for you,
and desire you would pay the Bearer Twenty Shillings for Value
received from_,

SIR,
Your humble Servant,
_Lazarus Hopeful_.

Cripple-Gate,
Aug. 29, 1712.

The Reader's own Imagination will suggest to him the Reasonableness of
such Correspondence; 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 Suspence of an Ability to do so. The Benefit he reports
himself to have received, may well claim the handsomest Encomium he can
give the Operator.

_Mr_. SPECTATOR,

'Ruminating lately on your admirable Discourses on the _Pleasures of
the Imagination_, I began to consider to which of our Senses we are
obliged for the greatest and most important Share of those Pleasures;
and I soon concluded that it was to the _Sight:_ That is the Sovereign
of the Senses, and Mother of all the Arts and Sciences, that have
refined the Rudeness of the uncultivated Mind to a Politeness that
distinguishes the fine Spirits from the barbarous _Gout_ of the
_great_ Vulgar and the _small_. The Sight is the obliging
Benefactress, that bestows on us the most transporting Sensations that
we have from the various and wonderful Products of Nature. To the
Sight we owe the amazing Discoveries of the Height, Magnitude, and
Motion of the Planets; their several Revolutions about their common
Centre of Light, Heat, and Motion, the _Sun_. The _Sight_ travels yet
farther to the fixed Stars, and furnishes the Understanding with solid
Reasons to prove, that each of them is a _Sun_ moving on its own Axis
in the Centre of its own Vortex or Turbillion, and performing the same
Offices to its dependant Planets, that our glorious Sun does to this.
But the Enquiries of the _Sight_ will not be stopped here, but make
their Progress through the immense Expanse to the _Milky Way_, and
there divide the blended Fires of the _Galaxy_ into infinite and
different Worlds, made up of distinct Suns, and their peculiar
Equipages of Planets, till unable to pursue this Track any farther, it
deputes the Imagination to go on to new Discoveries, till it fill the
unbounded Space with endless Worlds.

The _Sight_ informs the Statuary's Chizel with Power to give Breath to
lifeless Brass and Marble, and the Painter's Pencil to swell the flat
Canv