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Tristram's fertile Brain soon hit on a new method of making his Ser-
mon to be read, which succeeded beyond his most sanguine hopes. He
immediately sat down to write the Life and Opinions of himself.
The whole Town were taken in by this Bit of History which hung
delicious on their palates as it was highly Season'd, Pepper'd, and
Salted with the most poignant wit, and decorated with the most lively
Imagination. They read on with the utmost rapidity. But, as they
were in the midst of their career, they ran full butt against the poor
Sermon, which had been so long despised by the world, and were as
much frighted as a poor Pilot is, who strikes upon a hidden Rock
while his Vessel is under full sail. What should they do? They
tried to pass it by on every side; but pious Tristram had laid it across
their way with so much art, and tacked both Ends of it so fast to the
precedent and subsequent parts of the history, that a man might as
easily get from one side of Bristol Quay to the other without passing
the Drawbridge, as to get through the whole Art and Mystery of Dr.
Slop without reading the Sermon, which they all did, no
question to the great refreshment of their Consciences. O Tristram,
how great is thy Ingenuity! It can surely be equalled by nothing
but thy burning zeal for the Propagation of Religion. How many
poor souls would have gone into another world without ever having
read a Sermon in this, had it not been for this thy pious Fraud!
Reverends and right Reverends shall give their Testimonials of their
approbation of thy Contrivance! And, lo! they have already done
it. Alas! poor Yorick, thou art dropt, and the unstern Face of the
real Author, prefixt to his Volume of Sermons, vindicates his Works,
and the Universal applause they have acquired him. Two Volumes
of Sermons are now published by the Revd. Mr. Sterne, Prebendary
of York, Biographer of Tristram Shandy, and Successor to the revd.
Mr. Yorick and his Horse. They are very pretty little quaint moral
Essays, wrote with a great Spirit of Philanthropy; ushered into the
world by Dukes and Duchesses, Bishops, Priests and Deacons, grave
Matrons, pretty Masters, and innocent Misses, who will no doubt all
read them, and recommend them to their Friends. Is not this a
noble Conquest over the vicious Novellists? But perhaps you have
neither seen Mr. Shandy, or Mr. Yorrick, and then all the Stuff I have
been prating is meer unintelligible Jargon.'

The collection of letters, from which we have hitherto been making extracts, has led us far away from the quiet Cornish rectory, and what was passing there; and has left us little space to speak but in the most cursory manner of those pursuits which formed the life-work of William Borlase. His biography has indeed been so frequently sketched and his published works so often criticised, that it only remains for us to gather up from his MSS. such stray fragments as have never yet seen the light. The promise made in early life to amend those days of carelessness' was indeed amply fulfilled. His life as a literary man may be divided into three periods. The earlier portion was occupied 2 D 2

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by the study of Archæology; the time of middle age and the vigour of his mind was engrossed by that of Natural History; while his later years were devoted to making collections for a parochial account of Cornwall, containing the Heraldry and Genealogy of the district, and which he never lived to publish.

The study of Antiquities, although rapidly reviving, had, at the commencement of the eighteenth century, fallen into very indifferent hands.

'I remember,' says Borlase, writing to Huddesford, 'when the name of an antiquary was, through some particulars in the professors, at a very low ebb. The eldest, in my recollection, was Tom Hearne, at Oxford, well skilled, indeed, in History, and a laborious and exact editor, but perhaps the oddest figure of a man, and one least cut out for society, or to make any study amiable that was ever met with. He was remarkable among us boys (such fools have disgraced Oxford) for his lank hair and uncouth address. My friend, Mr. Wise, had his share of learning, but he was the joke of the wits. Dr. Brown Willis had doubtless his merit, and as a compiler has much benefited English Ecclesiastical History; but you will allow he was not cut out to cast much lustre upon science. In his beloved forte, Antiquity, he was indefatigable, and intent upon and charmed with everything that was old. I remember he told me at Oxford how old his chariot was; I have really forgot the date, but it was an age before any post-chaise had being his horses were a little more modern, and so was his garb, but not much. Dr. Rawlinson equalled all that went before him in oddity, as much as he fell short of them in learning. These were the antiquaries of my younger daies, all industrious, but unhappily inimical to elegance, not to say decency, and wanting that liberal turn and general knowledge of arts and mankind which this study has since experienced the benefit of."

Neither were the ideas of these old antiquaries at all in advance of their manners. Dr. Stukeley, for instance, writes to Borlase: 'I am persuaded our Druids were of the patriarchal religion, and came from Abraham. I believe Abraham's grandson, Asser, helped to plant our island, and gave name to it.' Such being the condition of the science, it must have required a bold man to venture on the track. In 1754 appeared the first edition of the 'Antiquities of Cornwall,' a work universally approved and applauded both at home and abroad. The Druids have, indeed, of late years been somewhat rudely dismissed from the shade of their accustomed oaks, and the rock basins have been proved to be simply the result of the weathering of the granite; but, these things excepted, the work is one which still holds its own as an authority among students of Archæology at the present day. The study of Natural History at Ludgvan soon followed that of Antiquities, almost as a natural consequence. To a mind like

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that of Borlase, the inquiry into the origin of the works of man soon passed, as from child's play to earnest, to the attentive consideration of those of man's Creator. Archæology to him had been but the first attempt to find a footing in the past, and, apart from the value of its own results, it gave birth to that spirit of curiosity which is the handmaid and forerunner of a more profound science. And this craving after science soon became science itself.

At the time of which we speak, the end of the first chapter in the modern history of inductive science was being worked out. But still the age was simply one of collecting, without a sufficient rudimentary knowledge in the collectors themselves to make any adequate generalisation possible. It would take far more space than is at present at our disposal to give any idea of the gropings in the dark, sometimes on the right track, generally on the wrong, which this collection of letters reveals. Progress, however, was undoubtedly being made. Let one of the correspondents, Emanuel Mendez Da Costa, speak for himself: 'Learning,' he says (writing in 1761), 'is greatly pursued at present, and we may hope that rewards will attend the meritorious. The discoveries daily made are of the utmost importance to human kind; the variations of the magnetic needle, and the deductions which will result from the observations on the late transit of Venus will be invaluable benefits to posterity; and who knows,' he adds almost prophetically, 'what may hereafter be discovered from Electricity? for I am convinced that extraordinary effect in nature, one time or other, will be found to be of the greatest benefit to mankind.' As to Geology, that science, in the form in which we learn it now, was not in existence. Even Werner's theory of the position of mineral groups had not yet appeared; but still signs of a coming change in the modes of thought on that subject, too, were to be found in papers read at the Royal Society on the causes of earthquakes, tidal waves, &c. Several phenomena of this nature, noticed in Mount's Bay, and one in especial which occurred simultaneously with the earthquake at Lisbon, set Borlase thinking; and accordingly, in due time, a MS. volume was circulated amongst his friends, entitled 'Private Thoughts on the Creation and the Deluge.' His view on submarine upheaval is curiously allied to that which has been so generally accepted of late years on that subject, and his theory on the causes of earthquakes might sometimes be almost placed in parallel columns with that found in Sir Charles Lyell's Principles,' so strikingly similar are the two. In spite of the fact that some of his friends detected in it passages at variance with the Mosaic account, this treatise was not only prepared for the

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press,

press, but two specimen pages were printed in octavo by Nichols, when the work was finally arrested by the last illness of its author. In this state it has come down to us, a volume full of interest, if not to the student, at all events to the historian of Inductive Science; since, while on the one hand it loyally adheres to the historic truth of the Mosaic account, it denies in toto its scientific pretensions. It enters at the same time a curious but forcible protest (giving a résumé of their theories) against the vagaries of Woodward and Burnet, Whiston and Hutchinson. Altogether it is the product of a bold and thoughtful as well as of a religious mind, and, had it been published, would have marked, if we mistake not, one not unimportant step in the progress of induction as it strove to free itself from the physico-theological mizmaze which reined the intellect and clouded the perception of those who were following immediately in the wake of Newton.

The Cornish minerals, which had before been the medium of Borlase's correspondence with Pope, formed also his introduction to the world of science. The Germans were at this time the sole masters of the metallic art. They derived a much-boasted knowledge more the result of imagination and of a survival from the alchemists, than of real induction-from the effects of fire upon the different mineral bodies. The origin of crystals was one of their chief objects of research. But Romé de Lisle had not yet written his treatise, and the Leyden professors, Boerhaave, Gronovius, and even Linnæus himself, were still but gropers in the dark. The latter (Linnæus) was, as is well known, by no means happy in the mineralogical portion of his great work, as we could abundantly prove from original extracts now before us. Indeed, he owns himself elsewhere, that lithology is not what he plumes himself upon.' These were the men with whom Borlase corresponded. Each of them enriched his collection from the mines of Cornwall, and all communicated in return the results of their experiments, to be inserted in the year 1758 into the Natural History' of that county. On the subject of tin Linnæus remarks that it is nullibi præstantius quam in Cornwallia." Amongst the numerous visitors who at different times paid a visit to Ludgvan, we may mention Thomas Pennant, whose love for natural history, according to his own account, commenced in the study there among the strings of birds' eggs and endless curiosities which adorned the walls and shelves. Ellis, too, the author of the 'Corallines,' and the elaborator in England of the French theory of their animal origin, picked up some of his best specimens on the Geer rock south of Penzance in the company of his Cornish friend. The letters of these two eminent naturalists form

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form no small portion of the later correspondence. In order to show how a love of science for its own sake was gaining ground in the middle of the last century, we may insert one extract from the pen of James Theobald, of Waltham Place, Berks: 'I had the honour,' he says, 'of being a member of the Royal Society during the time when Sir Isaac Newton filled the President's chair; and then, if the meeting consisted of ten or a dozen, it was thought a handsome appearance, but at present it is reckoned a very thin one if there are not upwards of fifty.'

Of the Heraldic and Parochial collections of Dr. Borlase this is not the place to speak. The third volume, in which they were to have appeared, he never lived to complete. Suffice it to say that they are teeming with matters of interest, many still unpublished, relating to all parts of the county. We hear, for example, of the ghost of Boconnock; of the oak-tree whose leaves turned white on the day when King Charles I. was murdered; of the great and noble family of Carminow, who could trace their descent direct from King Arthur himself; of one of this family in later times who, being forced by circumstances to leave his house, wrote up over the door, 'Sin and iniquity have rooted out antiquity; and of the last of the line, who was dragged over the cliff by greyhounds and dashed to pieces below. We hear, too, told in quaint language, the story of St. Agnes and the Giant Bolster; of a certain Sir Richard Vyvyan, who being master of the Mint, under Charles I., carried the Royal stamp to his seat at Trelowarren, and there coined money for the Western cavaliers; and (which is perhaps more interesting than all) we hear in this collection of a Cornish Bible, translated (as it seems from the context) into that language by John de Trevisa, Fellow of Queen's College, Oxford, at the close of the 14th and commencement of the 15th century. Here is a subject for inquiry indeed; apart from its bibliological value, this volume, if it exists, would restore to the philologist the entire Cornish tongue.

In 1769 Borlase lost his wife, 'one,' he says, 'who took more than her part of domestic cares on purpose to indulge his tendency to his favourite pursuits.' From this date the care of his parish occupied most of his time. He had, indeed, never permitted his literary pursuits to render him callous to the duties of his profession. In 1732 he had, in addition to Ludgvan, been presented to the living of St. Just, a bleak mining country on the moors of the Land's End district. Comparing these two places (both of which he knew well), Oliver had written to him Ludgvan is like a buxom girl of eighteen, always laughing and playing, and affording plentifully all the superficial pleasures of

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