iod of the seventeenth century, that really _does_
surprise me; I mean the assassination of philosophers. For, gentlemen, it
is a fact, that every philosopher of eminence for the two last centuries
has either been murdered, or, at the least, been very near it; insomuch,
that if a man calls himself a philosopher, and never had his life
attempted, rest assured there is nothing in him; and against Locke's
philosophy in particular, I think it an unanswerable objection (if we
needed any), that, although he carried his throat about with him in this
world for seventy-two years, no man ever condescended to cut it. As these
cases of philosophers are not much known, and are generally good and well
composed in their circumstances, I shall here read an excursus on that
subject, chiefly by way of showing my own learning.

The first great philosopher of the seventeenth century (if we except
Galileo) was Des Cartes; and if ever one could say of a man that he was all
_but_ murdered--murdered within an inch--one must say it of him. The case
was this, as reported by Baillet in his _Vie De M. Des Cartes_, tom. I. p.
102-3. In the year 1621, when Des Cartes might be about twenty-six years
old, he was touring about as usual, (for he was as restless as a hyaena,)
and, coming to the Elbe, either at Gluckstadt or at Hamburgh, he took
shipping for East Friezland: what he could want in East Friezland no man
has ever discovered; and perhaps he took this into consideration himself;
for, on reaching Embden, he resolved to sail instantly for _West_
Friezland; and being very impatient of delay, he hired a bark, with a few
mariners to navigate it. No sooner had he got out to sea than he made a
pleasing discovery, viz. that he had shut himself up in a den of murderers.
His crew, says M. Baillet, he soon found out to be "des scelerats,"--not
_amateurs_, gentlemen, as we are, but professional men--the height of
whose ambition at that moment was to cut his throat. But the story is too
pleasing to be abridged; I shall give it, therefore, accurately, from the
French of his biographer: "M. Des Cartes had no company but that of his
servant, with whom he was conversing in French. The sailors, who took him
for a foreign merchant, rather than a cavalier, concluded that he must
have money about him. Accordingly they came to a resolution by no means
advantageous to his purse. There is this difference, however, between
sea-robbers and the robbers in forests, that the