Selections from the Spectator, Tatler, Guardian, and Freeholder

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: quaintance of their rudeness, illbehaviour, and Impertinence. My patient smiled, and promised to observ my preseriptions, not forgetting to give me an account of their operation. This distemper being pretty epidemical, I shall, for the benefit of mankind, give the public an account of the progress I make in the cure of it.' ADDISON. TABLES OF FAME. No. 8t. There are two kinds of immortality; that which the soul really enjoys after this life, and that imaginary existence by which men live in theirfame and reputation. The best and greatest actions have proceeded from the prospect of the one or the other of these; but my design is to treat only of those who have chiefly proposed to themselves the latter, as the principal reward for their labours. It was for this reason that I excluded from my tables of fame all the great founders and votaries of religion; and it is for this reason also, that I am more than ordinary anxious to do justice to the persons of ' whom I am now going to speak; for, since fame was the only end of all their enterprizes and studies, a man. cannot be too serupulous in allotting them their due proportion of it. It was this consideration which made me call the whole body of the learned to my assistance; to many of whom I must own my obligations for the catalogues of illustrious persons which they have sent me in upon this occasion. I yesterday employed thu vhole afternoon in comparing them with each other; which made so strong an impression upon my imagina- ' tion, that they broke my sleep for the first part of the following night, and at length threw me into a very agreeableAgreeable vision, which I shall beg leave to describe ia til its particulars. I dreamed that I was conveyed into a wide and toundless plain, that was covered with p...