[810] About 1650 he and his cousin John Reeve (1608-1658) began to have visions. As part of their creed they taught that astronomy was opposed by the Bible. They asserted that the sun moves about the earth, and Reeve figured out that heaven was exactly six miles away. Both Muggleton and Reeve were imprisoned for their unitarian views. Muggleton wrote a Transcendant Spirituall Treatise (1652). I have before me A true Interpretation of All the Chief Texts ... of the whole Book of the Revelation of St. John.... By Lodowick Muggleton, one of the two last Commissioned Witnesses & Prophets of the onely high, immortal, glorious God, Christ Jesus (1665), in which the interpretation of the "number of the beast" occupies four pages without arriving anywhere.
[811] In 1652 he was, in a vision, named as the Lord's "last messenger," with Muggleton as his "mouth," and died six years later, probably of nervous tension resulting from his divine "illumination." He was the more spiritual of the two.
[812] William Guthrie (1708-1770) was a historian and political writer. His History of England (1744-1751) was the first attempt to base history on parliamentary records. He also wrote a General History of Scotland in 10 volumes (1767). The work to which Frost refers is the Geographical, Historical, and Commercial Grammar (1770) which contained an astronomical part by J. Ferguson. By 1827 it had passed through 24 editions.
[813] George Fox (1624-1691), founder of the Society of Friends; a mystic and a disciple of Boehme. He was eight times imprisoned for heresy.
[814] If they were friends they were literary antagonists, for Muggleton wrote against Fox The Neck of the Quakers Broken (1663), and Fox replied in 1667. Muggleton also wrote A Looking Glass for George Fox.
[815] John Conduitt (1688-1737), who married (1717) Newton's half niece, Mrs. Katherine Barton. See note [284], page [136].
[816] Probably Peter Mark Roget's (1779-1869) Thesaurus of English Words (1852) is not much used at present, but it went through 28 editions in his lifetime. Few who use the valuable work are aware that Roget was a professor of physiology at the Royal Institution (London), that he achieved his title of F. R. S. because of his work in perfecting the slide rule, and that he followed Sir John Herschel as secretary of the Royal Society.
[817] See note [703], page [327]. This work went into a second edition in the year of its first publication.