[775] This curious exhibition may perhaps remind some of my readers of the ludicrous lines, made, during Sir Robert Walpole's administration, on Mr. George (afterwards Lord) Lyttelton, though the figures of the two personages must be allowed to be very different:—

'But who is this astride the pony;
So long, so lean, so lank, so bony?
Dat be de great orator, Littletony.'
BOSWELL.

These lines were beneath a caricature called The Motion, described by Horace Walpole in his letter of March 25, 1741, and said by Mr. Cunningham to be 'the earliest good political caricature that we possess.' Walpole's Letters, i. 66. Mr. Croker says that 'the exact words are:— bony? O he be de great orator Little-Tony.'

[776] See ante, ii. 213.

[777] In 1673 Burnet, who was then Professor of Theology in Glasgow, dedicated to Lauderdale A Vindication of the Authority, &c., of the Church and State of Scotland. In it he writes of the Duke's 'noble character, and more lasting and inward characters of his princely mind.'

[778] See ante, i. 450.

[779] See ante, p. 250.

[780] 'Others have considered infinite space as the receptacle, or rather the habitation of the Almighty; but the noblest and most exalted way of considering this infinite space, is that of Sir Isaac Newton, who calls it the sensorium of the Godhead. Brutes and men have their sensoriola, or little sensoriums, by which they apprehend the presence, and perceive the actions, of a few objects that lie contiguous to them. Their knowledge and observation turn within a very narrow circle. But as God Almighty cannot but perceive and know everything in which he resides, infinite space gives room to infinite knowledge, and is, as it were, an organ to Omniscience.' Addison, The Spectator, No. 565.

[781] 'Le célèbre philosophe Leibnitz ... attaqua ces expressions du philosophe anglais, dans une lettre qu'il écrivit en 1715 à la feue reine d'Angleterre, épouse de George II. Cette princesse, digne d'être en commerce avec Leibnitz et Newton, engagea une dispute reglée par lettres entre les deux parties. Mais Newton, ennemi de toute dispute et avare de son temps, laissa le docteur Clarke, son disciple en physique, et pour le moins son égal en métaphysique, entrer pour lui dans la lice. La dispute roula sur presque toutes les idées métaphysiques de Newton, et c'est peut-être le plus beau monument que nous ayons des combats littéraires.' Voltaire's Works, ed. 1819, xxviii. 44.

[782] See ante, iii. 248.