whom they celebrate; and their poems, their mercuries, and orations, nay their very gazettes, are filled with the praises of the learned.

I am fatisfied, had they a Philips among them, and known how to value him; had they had one of his learning, his temper, but above all of that particular turn of humour, that altogether 'new genius, he had been an example to their poets, and a fubject of their panegyricks, and perhaps fet in competition with the ancients, to whom only he ought to fubmit.

I fhall therefore endeavour to do juftice to his memory, fince nobody elfe undertakes it. And indeed I can affign no caufe why fo many of his acquain

tance

tance (that are as willing and more able than myself to give an account of him), fhould forbear to celebrate the memory of one fo dear to them, but only that they look upon it as a work entirely belonging to me.

I fhall content myself with giving only a character of the perfon and his writings, without meddling with the tranfactions of his life, which was altogether private: I thall only make this known obfervation of his family, that there was scarce fo many extraordinary men in any one. I have been acquainted with five of his brothers (of which three are ftill living), all men of fine parts, yet all of a very unlike temper and genius. So that their fruitful mother, like

the mother of the gods, feems to have produced a numerous offspring, all of different though uncommon faculties. Of the living, neither their modefty nor the humour of the prefent age permits me to fpeak of the dead, I may fay fomething.

One of them had made the greatest progrefs in the ftudy of the law of nature and nations of any one I know. He had perfectly mastered, and even improved, the notions of Grotius, and the more refined ones of Puffendorf.

He

could refute Hobbes with as much folidity as fome of greater name, and expose him with as much wit as Echard. That noble study, which requires the greatest reach of reafon and nicety of diftinction,

was

was not at all difficult to him. "Twas a national lofs to be deprived of one who understood a fcience fo neceffary, and yet fo unknown in England. Ifhall add only, he had the fame honefty and fincerity as the perfon I write of, but more heat the former was more inclined to argue, the latter to divert: one employed his reafon more; the other his imagination: the former had been well qualified for thofe pofts, which the modefty of the latter made him refuse.. His other dead brother would have been. an ornament to the college of which he was a member. He had a genius either for poetry or oratory; and, though very young, compofed feveral very agreeablepieces. In all probability he would have

wrote:

wrote as finely, as his brother did nobly. He might have been the Waller, as the other was the Milton of his time. The one might celebrate Marlborough, the other his beautiful offspring. This had not been fo fit to deferibe the actions of heroes as the virtues of private men. In a word, he had been fitter for my place and while his brother was writing upon the greatest men that any age ever produced, in a ftile equal to them, he might have ferved as a panegyrift on him.

This is all I think neceffary to fay of his family. I fhall proceed to himself and his writings; which I fhall first treat of, because I know they are cenfured

2.

by