“Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these;” and Solomon in all his wisdom never taught more wholesome lessons than these silent monitors convey to a thoughtful mind and an “understanding heart.” “There are two books,” says Sir Thomas Browne, “from whence I collect my divinity; besides that written one of God, another of his servant Nature, that universal and public manuscript that lies expansed unto the eyes of all. Those that never saw him in the one, have discovered him in the other. This was the scripture and theology of the heathens: the natural motion of the sun made them more admire him than its supernatural station did the children of Israel; the ordinary effects of nature wrought more admiration in them, than in the other all his miracles. Surely the heathens knew better how to join and read these mystical letters, than we Christians who cast a more careless eye on these common hieroglyphics, and disdain to suck divinity from the flowers of nature.”
INTERCHAPTER XIV.
CONCERNING INTERCHAPTERS.
If we present a mingle-mangle, our fault is to be excused, because the whole world is become a hodge-podge.
LYLY.
It occurs to me that some of my readers may perhaps desire to be informed in what consists the difference between a Chapter and an Inter Chapter; for that there is a difference no considerate person would be disposed to deny, though he may not be able to discover it. Gentle readers,—readers after my own heart, you for whom this opus was designed long before it was an opus, when as Dryden has said concerning one of his own plays, “it was only a confused mass of thoughts, tumbling over one another in the dark; when the fancy was yet in its first work, moving the sleeping images of things towards the light, there to be distinguished, and then either chosen or rejected by the judgement,”—good-natured readers, you who are willing to be pleased, and whom therefore it is worth pleasing,—for your sakes,
And for because you shall not think that I
Do use the same without a reason why,1