On the late Hot Weather. amply endowed. The internal fermentations
of his mind revealed every
thing to him, and he was almost never mistaken, except in deducing practical consequences. He was called a sophist, because the purity of the sentiments which he uttered was unadapted to the grovelling passions of society ; but no person ever had a more disinterest- ed love of truth. Voltaire, in his youth, had been well drilled amidst the cabals of
Paris, and therefore understood
better how to gain credit among his contemporaries.
THE LATE HOT WEATHER. MR EDITOR, BEING very desirous of becoming
acquainted with you, for reasons which
lie fear of being suspected of flattery, reluctance to offend your modesty, &c. &c. prevent me from offering, I shall take the opportunity of a sober overcast day to make my overtures. Allow me to begin after the orthodox manner of my countrymen, this is fine cool weather, Mr Editor; this is pleasanter than the great heat of List summer. You will cease to smile at the salutation, when you learn in what hazard the interests of this Magazine
have been put by the state of
the late season. Know then, it is wholly owing to this cause that I have lot hitherto attempted to approach that coifed wizard with the thistle wreath encircled, whose effigy oft hath fixed and low abashed mine eye, and to tender him the produce of my pen, though I have felt a wondrous longing to do any time these three months, deaden languor sat upon the wings of my imagination. It was with me, during the whole summer, an every- day history of suction and evaporation nothing else. The heat of the weather, in fact, I felt, I thought of, ind, when I could slumber, dreamt of. It entered into all my perceptions,
and regulated, in a great measure, all my functions, corporal and
mental; disposing me to light diet, light reading, light clothing, light sleep, and, I had almost said, light thoughts. No sublime flights no profound reflections the deuce a bit. A fortunate succession of showers has gradually restored me so far, as to en- able me to set about a whole book ! (whereof more anon) and likewise to indite this epistle, both of which are of course to be devoted to the interesting subject which has so long occupied my mind. In short, the theory of the union of light and heat became perfectly familiar to me. I have taken it for granted, that you in the north are well aware that his Majesty's liege subjects, in this part of the empire, did, for a long space of time now past, grievously complain that the atmosphere was warm, sultry, hot, close, oppressive, intolerable, and killing ; and that although the same could not but be well known to certain persons holding certain high situations, yet that no remedy whatever was in this case provided. Carrying the charge no farther, we may at least aver, that most culpable negligence is chargeable somewhere. How far, in- deed, those whom we are entitled, or, which is the same thing, accustomed, to charge with all the evils which befal the nation, may have even contributed, (as some, who shall be nameless, have ventured to surmise,) to our sufferings, is a matter of much graver and weightier import. For the present, I will only hint, that the confidence with which the temperature of the late season was predicted by one gentleman in office ; the visit of the Esquimaux to this island, where he met with the greatest attention from individuals of distinction ; the appearance in London of an American chief and suite, in the suspicious character of players ; the fitting out, at an immense expense, of ships of war, destined to the north for the ostensible purpose of discovery; and the parti- cular communications which appeal* to have been kept up between the Ad- miralty and the Greenland whalers, (not to mention the unusual number of ice-poles which those vessels have been known to carry of late) are facts which cannot have escaped the saga- city of your readers. The politicians, to whom I allude, scruple not to as- sert, mistakenly I hope, that his Ma- jesty's government has formed an al- liance with the Esquimaux and Cop- per Indians on the one side, and with the Samoieds and Tchukotskoi on the Asiatic margin of the polar basin ; that these nations, in furtherance of the objects of the treaty, have, by a powerful contemporaneous direction of their ' physical force/ (as a great
