So gradual have often been the great inventions of genius. What others conjectured, and some discovered, Harvey demonstrated. The fate of Harvey’s discovery is a curious instance of that patience and fortitude which genius must too often exert in respect to itself. Though Harvey lived to his eightieth year, he hardly witnessed his great discovery established before he died; and it has been said, that he was the only one of his contemporaries who lived to see it in some repute. No physician adopted it; and when it got into vogue, they then disputed whether he was the inventor! Sir William Temple denied not only the discovery, but the doctrine of the Circulation of the Blood. “Sense can hardly allow it; which,” says he, “in this dispute must be satisfied as well as reason, before mankind will concur.”
Stubbe has an eloquent passage, which describes the philosophy of science. The new Experimental School had perhaps too wholly rejected some virtues of the old one; the cultivation of the human understanding, as well as the mere observation on the facts that they collected; an error which has not been entirely removed.
“That art of reasoning by which the prudent are discriminated from fools, which methodiseth and facilitates our discourses, which informs us of the validity of consequences and the probability of arguments, and manifests the fallacies of impostors; that art which gives life to solid eloquence, and which renders Statesmen, Divines, Physicians, and Lawyers accomplished; how is this cried down and vilified by the ignoramuses of these days! What contempt is there raised upon the disputative Ethics of Aristotle and the Stoics; and those moral instructions, which have produced the Alexanders and the Ptolemies, the Pompeys and the Ciceroes, are now slighted in comparison of day-labouring! Did we live at Sparta, where the daily employments were the exercises of substantial virtue and gallantry, and men, like setting dogs, were rather bred up unto, than taught reason and worth, it were a more tolerable proposal (though the different policy of these times would not admit of it); but this working, so recommended, is but the feeding of carp in the air, &c. As for the study of Politics, and all critical learning, these are either pedantical, or tedious, to those who have a shorter way of studying men.”—Preface to “Legends no Histories.”
“Legends no Histories,” p. 5.
Dr. King was allied to the families of Clarendon and Rochester; he took a degree as Doctor of Civil Law, and soon got into great practice. “He afterwards went with the Earl of Pembroke, Lord-Lieutenant, to Ireland, where he became Judge Advocate, Sole Commissioner of the Prizes, Keeper of the Records, Vicar-General to the Lord Primate of Ireland; was countenanced by persons of the highest rank, and might have made a fortune. But so far was he from heaping up riches, that he returned to England with no other treasure than a few merry poems and humorous essays, and returned to his student’s place in Christ Church.”—Enc. Brit. He was assisted by Bolingbroke; but when his patronage failed, Swift procured him the situation of editor to “Barber’s Gazette.” He ultimately took to drinking; Lintot the bookseller, told Pope, “I remember Dr. King could write verses in a tavern three hours after he could not speak.” His last patron was Lord Clarendon, and he died in apartments he had provided for him in London, Dec. 25, 1712, and was buried in the cloisters of Westminster Abbey at the expense of his lordship.—Ed.
Sloane describes Clark, the famous posture-master, “Phil. Trans.” No. 242, certainly with the wildest grammar, but with many curious particulars; the gentleman in one of Dr. King’s Dialogues inquires the secretary’s opinion of the causes of this man’s wonderful pliability of limbs; a question which Sloane had thus solved, with colloquial ease: it depended upon “bringing the body to it, by using himself to it.”