"Let us now suppose this venerable insect, this Nestor of Hypanis, should, a little before his death, and about sun-set, send for all his descendants, his friends, and his acquaintance; out of the desire he may have to impart his last thoughts to them, and admonish them with his departing breath. They meet, perhaps, under the spacious shelter of a mushroom; and the dying sage addresses himself to them after the following

manner :

• Friends and fellow-citizens, I perceive the longest life must have an end: the period of mine is now at hand: neither do I repine at my fate, since my great age is become a burden; and there is nothing new to me under the sun. The calamities and revolutions I have seen in my country; the manifold private misfortunes to which we are all liable; and the fatal diseases incident to our race; have abundantly taught me this lesson-that no happiness can be secure nor lasting, which is placed in things that are out of our power. Great is the uncertainty of life! a whole brood of infants has perished in a moment by a keen blast: shoals of our straggling youth have been swept into the waves by an unexpected breeze: what wasteful deluges have we suffered from a sudden shower! our strongest holds are not proof against a storm of

hail; and even a dark cloud makes the stoutest hearts to quail.

'I have lived in the first ages, and conversed with insects of a larger size and stronger make, and (I must add) of greater virtue, than any can boast of in the present generation. I must conjure you to give yet farther credit to my latest words, when I assure you, that yonder sun, which now appears westward beyond the water, and seems not to be far distant from the earth, in my remembrance stood in the middle of the sky, and shot his beams directly down upon us. The world was much more enlightened in those ages, and the air much warmer. Think it not dotage in me if I affirm, that glorious being moves: I saw his first setting-out in the east ; and I began my race of life near the time when he began his immense career. He has for several ages advanced along the sky with vast heat, and unparalleled brightness; but now, by his declension, and a sensible decay (more especially of late) in his vigour, I foresee that all nature must fail in a little time, and that the creation will lie buried in darkness in less than a century of minutes.

"Alas! my friends, how did I once flatter myself with the hopes of abiding here for ever! How magnificent are the cells which I hollowed

out for myself! What confidence did I repose in the firmness and spring of my joints, and in the strength of my pinions! But I have lived enough to nature, and even to glory; neither will any of you whom I leave behind have equal satisfaction in life, in the dark, declining age, which I see is already begun."

Thus far my unknown correspondent pursues his fiction upon the thought of Cicero; neither will it seem extravagant to those who are acquainted with the manner of instruction prac-, tised by the early teachers of mankind. Solomon sends the sluggard to the ant; and, after his example, we may send the ambitious or the covetous man, who seems to overlook the shortness and uncertainty of life, to the little animals. upon, the banks of the Hypanis; let him consider their transitory state, and be wise. We, like the ephemeri, have but a day to live: the morning, and noon, and the evening of life, is. the whole portion of our time: many perish in the very dawn; and the man (out of a million) who, lingers on to the evening twilight, is not accounted happy.

1

The right use of this reflection is, not to make, men regardless of posterity; nor to slacken their diligence in the pursuit of any kind of knowledge that becomes a reasonable mind; nor yet

ness.

to abate their industry, in endeavouring by honest means to acquire a comfortable subsistence for themselves and their children: on the contrary, our very nature prompts us to action and contemplation; and the indolent, listless person, who delivers himself up to idleness, and whose whole time is a blank, grows tired of himself, and is every hour oppressed with his own laziWhat then are we to learn from our precarious, transitory condition? The most important precept of wisdom; the great document of human prudence, which we should perpetually inculcate to ourselves, from youth to age, and imprint it on our hearts as the peculiar and lasting signature of sound sense: namely, that there is no consideration in life sufficient to tempt a wise man to sacrifice one truth, or one virtue, to the folly of avarice, or the madness of ambition.

This has been the settled judgment of the men most renowned for their understanding, in all ages; and, as it is finely expressed in the Wisdom of Solomon; I cannot recommend it with greater energy and authority, than by giving it to the reader in his own words: "What hath pride profited us? or what good have riches with our vaunting brought us? All

those things are passed away like a shadow; and as a post that hasted by; and as a ship that passeth over the waves of the water, which, when it is gone by, the trace thereof cannot be found, neither the path-way of the keel in the waves: or as when a bird hath flown through the air, there is no token of her way to be found; but the light air being beaten with the stroke of her wings, and parted with the violent noise and motion of them, is passed through, and therein afterwards no sign where she went is to be found: or, like as when an arrow is shot at a mark, it parteth the air, which immediately cometh together again; so that a man cannot know where it went through:-even so we, in like manner, as soon as we were born, began to draw to our end, and had no sign of virtue to shew; but were consumed in our own wickedness."

FREE-THINKER, No. 114, Apr. 24, 1719.

Of this admirable paper, the production of Dr. Pearce, what a poetical and impressive epitome do we possess in a few lines of Gray; who, in his Ode to Spring, contrasting the human species with the insect world, emphatically remarks:

To Contemplation's sober eye,

Such is the race of man :

And they that creep, and they that fly,

Shall end where they began.