induce a number of noblemen, statesmen and officers of the first rank and most unblemished charac-
reverend Gentleman, at the head of the Chapter in Westminster, so immersed in metaphysics that he cannot rise to the surface and breathe a freer element? Though not possessing a thousandth part of Dr. Ireland's erudite acquisitions, the Author is well disposed to buckle on the armour of a cockney, and to break a figurative lance with him on the position,—that no superior poet, moralist, or musician, like Dryden, Addison, and Handel, for instance, ever did, or ever could, confer an obligation on the whole civilized world like the discovery of the Longitude. How comes the order of affairs to be reversed then, in the case of the distinguished Genius who reached the goal in a race of so much competition?[subnote 1] Is the tympanum of
- ↑ Several men of genius from time to time attempted the solution of this memorable problem of the Longitude, by horological mechanics; among whom we find Monsr. Hygens; Hutchinson, the theologian (known otherwise by the extravagance of his opinions;) Thevenot the traveller and librarian to the Ring of France; whose machine was further intended to show the declination of the needle. In 1728, Henry Sully, an ingenious young watchmaker in London, bid fair to succeed, but fell a martyr
unnoticed for several years. After the death of his sister, William Harrison erected a tomb from a regular design, in the prevailing style, with an inscription indicative of his respect for his Father's genius, but the taste of which cannot be commended, as it may be said to smell of the oil in a sense different from that applied to the compositions of Demosthenes. The celebrity of the first man that found the Longitude might have been estimated here, for, although it was many years after he had departed this sublunary scene, the news of the monument and of the epitaph soon travelled repeatedly through an alphabetical nomenclature, and parties were formed in great Augusta (as the poets called London) for a walk to Hampstead, to view this sepulchre and the record of its occupant—not indeed so numerous as the pilgrims of Thomas a'Becket, but yet sufficiently so to show the contrast between the ignorant, or the learned inattention (which must we call it?) and this plain manifestation of the public sentiment; for the Sexton told a stranger who was making enquiries, "he was sure not fewer than ten thousand people had visited the place within two or three months after the masons had left it."
