, being present,
bravely and frankly interposed, saying, that 'whatever I was,
I was a Roman; that Englishmen were not so precipitously to be
condemned to so exemplary a punishment; that representing that
book to be a libel against the king was too remote a
consequence to be admitted of in a nation free-born, and
governed by laws, and tender of ill precedents.'" It was a
noble speech, in the relaxed politics of the court of Charles
II. He who made it deserved to have had his name more
explicitly told: he is designated as "that excellent
Englishman, the great ornament of this age, nation, and House
of Commons; he whose single worth balanceth much of the
debaucheries, follies, and impertinences of the kingdom."--_A
Reply unto the Letter written to Mr. Henry Stubbe, Oxford,
1671_, p. 20.

[274] Stubbe gives some curious information on this subject. Harvey
published his Treatise at Frankfort, 1628, but Caesalpinus's
work had appeared in 1593. Harvey adopted the notion, and more
fully and perspicuously proved it. I shall give what Stubbe
says. "Harvey, in his two Answers to Riolan, nowhere asserts
the invention so to himself, as to deny that he had the
intimation or notion from Caesalpinus; and his silence I take
for a tacit confession. His _ambition of glory_ made him
_willing to be thought the author of a paradox_ he had so
illustrated, and brought upon the stage, where _it lay
unregarded_, and in all probability buried in oblivion; yet
such was his modesty, as not to vindicate it to himself by
telling a lie."--STUBBE'S _Censure_, &c., p. 112.

I give this literary anecdote, as it enters into the history
of most discoveries, of which the _improvers_, rather than the
_inventors_, are usually the most known to the world. Bayle,
who wrote much later than Stubbe, asserts the same, and has
preserved the entire passage, art. _Caesalpinus_. It is said
Harvey is more expressly indebted to a passage in Servetus,
which Wotton has given in the preface to his "Reflections on
Ancient and Modern Learning," edition 1725. The notion was
probably then afloat, and each alike contributed to its
development. Thus it was disputed with Copernicus, whether hi