ys of his work, that some will cry out, "This is a
thinge of meere industrie; a _collection_ without wit or invention; a
very toy! So men are valued; their labours vilified by fellowes of no
worth themselves, as things of nought: Who could not have done as much?
Some understande too little, and some too much."

Should we proceed with this list to our own country, and to our own
times, it might be curiously augmented, and show the world what men the
Critics are! but, perhaps, enough has been said to soothe irritated
genius, and to shame fastidious criticism. "I would beg the critics to
remember," the Earl of Roscommon writes, in his preface to Horace's Art
of Poetry, "that Horace owed his favour and his fortune to the character
given of him by Virgil and Varus; that Fundanius and Pollio are still
valued by what Horace says of them; and that, in their golden age, there
was a good understanding among the ingenious; and those who were the
most esteemed, were the best natured."

THE PERSECUTED LEARNED.

Those who have laboured most zealously to instruct mankind have been
those who have suffered most from ignorance; and the discoverers of new
arts and sciences have hardly ever lived to see them accepted by the
world. With a noble perception of his own genius, Lord Bacon, in his
prophetic Will, thus expresses himself: "For my name and memory, I leave
it to men's charitable speeches, and to foreign nations, and the next
ages." Before the times of Galileo and Harvey the world believed in the
stagnation of the blood, and the diurnal immovability of the earth; and
for denying these the one was persecuted and the other ridiculed.

The intelligence and the virtue of Socrates were punished with death.
Anaxagoras, when he attempted to propagate a just notion of the Supreme
Being, was dragged to prison. Aristotle, after a long series of
persecution, swallowed poison. Heraclitus, tormented by his countrymen,
broke off all intercourse with men. The great geometricians and
chemists, as Gerbert, Roger Bacon, and Cornelius Agrippa, were abhorred
as magicians. Pope Gerbert, as Bishop Otho gravely relates, obtained the
pontificate by having given himself up entirely to the devil: others
suspected him, too, of holding an intercourse with demons; but this was
indeed a devilish age!

Virgilius, Bishop of Saltzburg, having asserted that there existed
antipodes, the Archbishop of Mentz declared him a heretic; and the Abbot
Trithemius,