O harmless Death! whom still the valiant brave,
The wise expect, the sorrowful invite ;
And all the good embrace, who know the Grave
A short dark passage to eternal light.

SIR WILLIAM DAVENANT,

SIR KENELM DIGBY went to Holland for the purpose of conversing with Descartes, who was then living in retirement at Egmont. Speculative knowledge, Digby said to him, was no

doubt a refined and agreeable pursuit, but it was too uncertain and too useless to be made a man's occupation, life being so short that one has scarcely time to acquire well the knowledge of necessary things. It would be far more worthy of a person like Descartes, he observed, who so well understood the construction of the human frame, if he would apply himself to discover means of prolonging its duration, rather than attach himself to the mere speculation of philosophy. Descartes made answer that this was a subject on which he had already meditated; that as for rendering man immortal, it was what he would not venture to promise, but that he was very sure he could prolong his life to the standard of the Patriarchs.

Saint-Evremond to whom Digby repeated this, says that this opinion of Descartes was well known both to his friends in Holland and in France. The Abbé Picot, his disciple and his martyr, was so fully persuaded of it that it was long before he would believe his master was dead, and when at length unwillingly convinced of what it was no longer possible to deny or

doubt, he exclaimed, que c'en étoit fait et que la fin du Genre humain alloit venir !

A certain Sicilian physician who commented upon Galen was more cautious if not more modest than Descartes. He affirmed that it was certainly possible to render men immortal, but then they must be bred up from the earliest infancy with that view; and he undertook so to train and render them,-if they were fit subjects. Poor children! if it had indeed been

possible thus to divest them of their reversionary interest in Heaven.

A much better way of abolishing death was that which Asgill imagined, when he persuaded himself from Scripture that it is in our power to go to Heaven without any such unpleasant middle passage. Asgill's is the worst case of intolerance that has occurred in this country since persecution has ceased to affect life or member.

This remarkable man was born about the middle of the seventeenth century and bred to the Law in Lincoln's Inn under Mr. Eyre a very eminent lawyer of those days. In 1698, he

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published a treatise with this title-" Several assertions proved, in order to create another species of money than Gold and Silver," and also an "Essay on a Registry for Titles of Lands." Both subjects seem to denote that on these points he was considerably advanced beyond his age. But the whole strength of his mind was devoted to his profession, in which he had so completely trammelled and drilled his intellectual powers that he at length acquired a habit of looking at all subjects in a legal point of view. He could find flaws in an hereditary title to the crown. But it was not to seek flaws that he studied the Bible; he studied it to see whether he could not claim under the Old and New Testament something more than was considered to be his share. The result of this examination was that in the year 1700 he published " An Argument proving that according to the Covenant of Eternal Life revealed in the Scriptures Man may be translated from hence into that Eternal Life without passing through death, although the Human Nature of Christ himself could not

be thus translated till he had passed through death."

That, the old motto, (says he) worn upon tomb-stones, "Death is the Gate of Life," is a lie, by which men decoy one another into death, taking it to be a thorough-fare into Eternal Life, whereas it is just so far out of the way. For die when we will, and be buried where we will, and lie in the grave as long as we will, we must all return from thence and stand again upon the Earth before we can ascend into the Heavens. "Hinc itur ad astra." He admitted that "this custom of the world to die hath gained such a prevalency over our minds by prepossessing us of the necessity of death, that it stands ready to swallow his argument whole without digesting it." But the dominion of death, he said, is supported by our fear of it, by which it hath bullied the world to this day. Yet "the custom of the World to die is no argument one way or other;" however, because he knew that custom itself is admitted as an evidence of title, upon presumption that such custom had once a reasonable commencement