abourer, was no longer imagined to lie
concealed at the bottom of the waters.

Thunderstruck at this dreadful reverse to all his hopes, and
witnessing the unrequited labour of more than thirty years withered
in an hour, the unhappy Carte drew up a faint appeal, rendered still
more weak by a long and improbable tale, that the objectionable
illustration had been merely a private note which by mistake had
been printed, and only designed to show that the person who had been
healed improperly attributed his cure to the sanative virtue of the
regal unction; since the prince in question had never been anointed.
But this was plunging from Scylla into Charybdis, for it inferred
that the Stuarts inherited the heavenly-gifted touch by descent. This
could not avail; yet heavy was the calamity! for now an historian of
the utmost probity and exactness, and whose labours were never
equalled for their scope and extent, was ruined for an absurd but
not peculiar opinion, and an indiscretion which was more ludicrous
than dishonest.

This shock of public opinion was met with a fortitude which only
strong minds experience; Carte was the true votary of study,--by
habit, by devotion, and by pleasure, he persevered in producing an
invaluable folio every two years; but from three thousand copies he
was reduced to seven hundred and fifty, and the obscure patronage of
the few who knew how to appreciate them. Death only arrested the
historian's pen--in the fourth volume. We have lost the important
period of the reign of the second Charles, of which Carte declared
that he had read "a series of memoirs from the beginning to the end of
that reign which would have laid open all those secret intrigues which
Burnet with all his genius for conjecture does not pretend to account
for."

So precious were the MS. collections Carte left behind him, that the
proprietor valued them at 1500_l._; Philip Earl of Hardwicke paid
200_l._ only for the perusal, and Macpherson a larger sum for their
use; and Hume, without Carte, would scarcely have any authorities.
Such was the calamitous result of Carte's historical labours, who has
left others of a more philosophical cast, and of a finer taste in
composition, to reap the harvest whose soil had been broken by his
hand.

FOOTNOTES:

[78] It is much to the honour of Carte, that the French acknowledge
that his publication of the "Rolles Gascognes" gave to them
the first idea of their learned w