'To-morrow, when the eastern sun
With his first beams adorns the front
Of yonder hill, if you're content
To wander with me in the woods you see,
We will pursue those loves of ours,
By favour of the sylvan nymphs:
and invoking, first, the genius of the place, we'll try to obtain at least some faint and distant view of the sovereign genius and first beauty.' Charact. vol. ii. p. 245.—P. W.]
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[ 'Society adores:' see the Pantheisticon, with its liturgy and rubrics, composed by Toland.—W.]
436 ([return])
[ 'Silenus:' Silenus was an Epicurean philosopher, as appears from Virgil, Eclog. vi., where he sings the principles of that philosophy in his drink. He is meant for one Thomas Gordon.—P. W.]
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[ 'First, slave to words:' a recapitulation of the whole course of modern education described in this book, which confines youth to the study of words only in schools, subjects them to the authority of systems in the universities, and deludes them with the names of party distinctions in the world,—all equally concurring to narrow the understanding, and establish slavery and error in literature, philosophy, and politics. The whole finished in modern free-thinking; the completion of whatever is vain, wrong, and destructive to the happiness of mankind, as it establishes self-love for the sole principle of action.—P. W.]
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[ 'Smiled on by a queen:' i.e. this queen or goddess of Dulness.—P.]