powered to take such steps as were preferable in his opinion: the subsequent proceedings being left unreservedly to his discretion.
we may observe that his Lordship while engrossed by such demonstrations seems to have been lucky in escaping the ken of the English Aristophanes, as Foote was often called, who was always on the look out for some farcical display, whereby to edify the galleries and replenish his purse, which was often below par. It would have been a good thing to have got hold of a philosopher employing workmen (conformably to his counsel) at an expense of forty or fifty pounds a week, but without any funds to pay them; these he was to borrow of Lady Pantweasel, Dr. Last, or Major Sturgeon, if he could; if he could not, he must go to a spunging-house perdue (maugre his privilege of peerage) from whence he is redeemed by some good-natured Nabob; to whom he gives, as security, a secret which all the mechanics in London would not be able to find out.—With something illustrating these cross-purposes, this dramatic humourist would have extracted some mirth at the expense of the Royal Society (as he had before done from the College, in Warwick-lane) by eulogizing their choice of a President, whom he would perhaps have equalled to James 1st for experimental philosophy: and, for every thing else, to the oracular head which Friar Bacon was so long in fabricating. But some one interposes here, to observe, that as clever men, like his Lordship, are constitutionally accessible to flattery, a few words from the Inventor of the Timekeeper, complimentary to the President's skill in these matters, his consummate knowledge and inventive powers, which the Royal Society[subnote 1] knew how to estimate, would soon have exemplified the utility of the
- ↑ The Fellows of the Royal Society, by their successive choice of Sir John Pringle, Sir Joseph Banks, Sir Humphry Davy, and His Royal Highness, the Duke of Sussex, have amply redeemed the unaccountable blunder they must have fallen into, when they fixed on the discreditable pretender brought forward in these pages.
