ur so voluminous might grow tedious; but King, often
with a LUCIANIC spirit, with flashes of RABELAIS, and not seldom with
the causticity of his friend Swift, dissipated life in literary
idleness, with parodies and travesties on most of his contemporaries;
and he made these little things often more exquisite at the cost of
consuming on them a genius capable of better. A parodist or a
burlesquer is a wit who is perpetually on the watch to catch up or to
disguise an author's words, to swell out his defects, and pick up his
blunders--to amuse the public! King was a wit, who lived on the
highway of literature, appropriating, for his own purpose, the
property of the most eminent passengers, by a dextrous mode no other
had hit on. What an important lesson the labours of King offer to real
genius! Their temporary humour lost with their prototypes becomes like
a paralytic limb, which, refusing to do its office, impedes the action
of the vital members.

WOTTON, in summing up his "Reflections upon Ancient and Modern
Learning," was doubtful whether knowledge would improve in the next
age proportionably as it had done in his own. "The humour of the age
is visibly altered," he says, "from what it had been thirty years ago.
Though the Royal Society has weathered the rude attacks of Stubbe,"
yet "the sly insinuations of the _Men of Wit_," with "the _public
ridiculing_ of all who spend their time and fortunes in scientific or
curious researches, have so taken off the edge of those who have
opulent fortunes and a love to learning, that these studies begin to
be contracted amongst physicians and mechanics."--He treats King with
good-humour. "A man is got but a very little way (in philosophy) that
is concerned as often as such a merry gentleman as Dr. King shall
think fit to make himself sport."[280]

FOOTNOTES:

[253] Some may be curious to have these monkish terms defined.
_Causes_ are distinguished by Aristotle into four kinds:--The
material cause, _ex qua_, out of which things are made;
the formal cause, _per quam_, by which a thing is that
which it is, and nothing else; the efficient cause, _a qua_,
by the agency of which anything is produced; and the final
cause, _propter quam_, the end for which it is produced. Such
are his notions in his Phys. 1. ii. c. iii., referred to by
Brucker and Formey in their Histories of Philosophy. Of the
Scholastic Metaphys