Newton this island may boast of having produced the greatest and
rarest genius that ever arose for the ornament and instruction of the
species. Cautious in admitting no principles but such as were founded on
experiment, but resolute to adopt every such principle, however new or
unusual; from modesty, ignorant of his superiority above the rest of
mankind, and thence less careful to accommodate his reasonings to common
apprehension; more anxious to merit than acquire fame; he was from these
causes long unknown to the world; but his reputation at last broke out
with a lustre which scarcely any writer, during his own lifetime, had
ever before attained. While Newton seemed to draw off the veil from some
of the mysteries of nature, he showed at the same time the imperfections
of the mechanical philosophy; and thereby restored her ultimate secrets
to that obscurity, in which they ever did and ever will remain. He died
in 1727, aged eighty-five.

This age was far from being so favorable to polite literature as to the
sciences. Charles, though fond of wit, though possessed himself of a
considerable share of it, though his taste in conversation seems to have
been sound and just, served rather to corrupt than improve the poetry
and eloquence of his time. When the theatres were opened at the
restoration, and freedom was again given to pleasantry and ingenuity,
men, after so long an abstinence, fed on these delicacies with less
taste than avidity, and the coarsest and most irregular species of wit
was received by the court as well as by the people. The productions
represented at that time on the stage were such monsters of extravagance
and folly, so utterly destitute of all reason or even common sense, that
they would be the disgrace of English literature, had not the nation
made atonement for its former admiration of them by the total oblivion
to which they are now condemned. The duke of Buckingham's Rehearsal,
which exposed these wild productions, seems to be a piece of ridicule
carried to excess; yet in reality, the copy scarcely equals some of the
absurdities which we meet with in the originals.[*]

* The duke of Buckingham died on the 16th of April 1688.

This severe satire, together with the good sense of the nation,
corrected, after some time, the extravagancies of the fashionable wit;
but the productions of literature still wanted much of that correctness
and delicacy which we so much admire in the ancients, and in the