doubt but what Robert Taylor
left some valuable writings which cannot be recovered. Such is the
feeble chance of great men's writings being published when they are no
longer alive.

With regard to the literary claims of Collins. His works are logically
composed and explicitly worded. He invariably commences by stating the
groundwork of his opponent's theories, and from them deduces a great
number of facts and axioms of a contrary character, and upon those
builds his whole chain of argument. He is seldom witty--never uses the
flowers of rhetoric, combining a most rigid analysis with a synthetic
scheme, admitting but of one unswerving end. He was characteristically
great in purpose. He avoided carrying forward his arguments beyond
the basis of his facts. Whether in treating the tangled intricacies
of necessity, or the theological quagmires of prophecy, he invariably
explained without confusing, and refuted without involving other
subjects than those legitimately belonging to the controversy. His style
of writing was serious, plain, and without an undue levity, yet withal
perfectly readable. Men studied Collins who shrunk from contact with
the lion-hearted Woolston, whose brusque pen too often shocked those
it failed to convince. There was a timidity in many of the letters of
Blount, and a craving wish to rely more on the witticisms of Brown, than
was to be found in the free and manly spirit of our hero. To the general
public, the abstruse speculations of the persecuted Toland were a
barrier which his many classical allusions only heightened; and the
musical syllables of Shaftesbury, with his style, at once so elevated,
so pompous, and so quaint; or the political economic doctrines of
Mandeville, all tended to exalt the name of Collins above those of his
contemporaries and immediate successors; and posterity cannot fail to
place his bust in that historic niche betwixt Hobbes--his master on one
hand--and Bolingbroke, his successor on the other. From the great
St. John has descended in the true apostolical descent the mantle of
Free-thought upon Hume, Gibbon, Paine, Godwin, Carlile, Taylor, and
Owen. And amongst this brilliant galaxy of genius, no name is more
deserving of respect than that of Anthony Collins.

A. C.

DES CARTES.

Rene des Cartes Duperron, better known as Des Cartes, the father of
modern philosophy, was born at La Haye, in Touraine, of Breton parents,
near the close of the sixteenth century, at a