Not one of these has Walpole
got; he omits, {132} for instance, Lord Brounker's[272] translation of
Descartes on Music. Secondly, Walpole only takes the heads of houses: this
cuts both ways; he equally eliminates the Hon. Robert Boyle and the
precious Edward Howard. The last writer is hardly out of the time in which
aristocracy suppressed its names; the avowal was then usually meant to make
the author's greatness useful to the book. In our day, literary peers and
honorables are very favorably known, and contain an eminent class.[273]
They rough it like others, and if such a specimen as Edw. Howard were now
to appear, he would be greeted with

"Hereditary noodle! knowest thou not
Who would be wise, himself must make him so?"

THE LONGITUDE PROBLEM.

A new and easy method to find the longitude at land or sea. London,
1710, 4to.

This tract is a little earlier than the great epoch of such publications
(1714), and professes to find the longitude by the observed altitudes of
the moon and two stars.[274] {133}

A new method for discovering the longitude both at sea and land, humbly
proposed to the consideration of the public.[275] By Wm. Whiston[276]
and Humphry Ditton.[277] London, 1714, 8vo.

This is the celebrated tract, written by the two Arian heretics. Swift,
whose orthodoxy was as undoubted as his meekness, wrote upon it the
epigram--if, indeed, that be epigram of which the point is pious
wish--which has been so often recited for the purity of its style, a purity
which transcends modern printing. Perhaps some readers may think that Swift
cared little for Whiston and Ditton, except as a chance hearing of their
plan pointed them out as good marks. But it was not so: the clique had
their eye on the guilty pair before the publication of the tract. The
preface is dated July 7; and ten days afterwards Arbuthnot[278] writes as
follows to Swift:

"Whiston has at last published his project of the longitude; the most
ridiculous thing that ever was thought on. But a pox on him! he has spoiled
one of my papers of Scriblerus, which was a proposition for the longitude
not very unlike his, to this purpose; that since there was no pole for east
and west, that all the princes of Europe should join and build two
prodigious poles, upon high mountains, {134} with a vast lighthouse to
serve for a polestar. I was thinking of a calculation of the time, charges,
and dimensions. Now you must understand hi