The British Essayists; With Prefaces by L.T. Berguer (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: pause at the end of every word or sentence, to avoid confusion. The friend in the meanwhile saw his own sympathetic needle moving of itself to every letter which that of his correspondent pointed at. By this means they talked together across a whole continent, and conveyed their thoughts to one another in an instant over cities or mountains, seas or deserts. If Monsieur Scudery, or any other writer of romance, had introduced a necromancer, who is gene, rally in the train of a knight,errant, making a present to two lovefs of a couple of these above-mentioned needles, the reader would not have been a little pleased to have seen them corresponding with one another when they were guarded by spies and watches, or separated by castles and adventures. In the meanwhile, if. ever this invention should be revived or put in practice, I would propose that upon the lover's dial-plate there should be written not only the four-and-twenty letters, but several entire words which have always a place in passionate epistles; as flames, darts, die, language, absence, Cupid, heart, eyes, hang, drown, and the like. This would very much abridge the lover's pains in this way of writing a letter, as it would enable him to express the most useful and significant words with a single touch of the needle.?C. N242. FRIDAY, DECEMBER 7, 1711. Creditnr, ex medio quia res aroessit, habere Sudoris minimum Hon. 2 Ep. i. 168. To write on vulgar themes, is thought an easy task. MR. SPECTATOR, ' Your speculations do not so generally prevail over men's manners as I could wish. A former paper of your's concerning the misbehaviour of people who are necessarily in each other's company in travelling, ought to have been a lasting admonition against transgressions of that kind. But I had the fate of yo...