orations and disputations;—he was born an orator;— Θεοδίδακτος .—Persuasion hung upon his lips, and the elements of Logick and Rhetorick were so blended up in him,—and, withal, he had so shrewd a guess at the weaknesses and passions of his respondent,⸺that Nature might have stood up and said,—“This man is eloquent.”—In short, whether he was on the weak or the strong side of the question, ’twas hazardous in either case to attack him.—And yet, ’tis strange, he had never read Cicero , nor Quintilian de Oratore , nor Isocrates , nor Aristotle , nor Longinus amongst the ancients;—nor Vossius , nor Skioppius , nor Ramus , nor Farnaby amongst the moderns;—and what is more astonishing, he had never in his whole life the least light or spark of subtlety struck into his mind, by one single lecture upon Crackenthorp or Burgersdicius , or any Dutch logician or commentator;—he knew not so much as in what the difference of an argument ad ignorantiam , and an argument ad hominem consisted; so that I well remember, when he went up along with me to enter my name at Jesus College in ****,—it was a matter of just wonder with my worthy tutor, and two or three fellows of that learned society,—that a man who knew not so much as the names of his tools, should be able to work after that fashion with them.
To work with them in the best manner he could, was what my father was, however, perpetually forced upon;⸺for he had a thousand little sceptical notions of the comick kind to defend⸺most of which notions, I verily believe, at first entered upon the footing of mere whims, and of a vive la Bagatelle ; and as such he would make merry with them for half an hour or so, and having sharpened his wit upon them, dismiss them till another day.
I mention this, not only as matter of hypothesis or conjecture upon the progress and establishment of my father’s many odd opinions,—but as a warning to the learned reader against the indiscreet reception of such guests, who, after a free and undisturbed entrance, for some years, into