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Updated: July 10, 2025
I, who am one of the humblest of the seers, a universal admirer of all things beautiful and great, from the commonwealths of Plato and Solon, severally, expulsed, as poet without music or politic, and a follower of the great, I, from my dormitory, or nest, of twelve feet square, can, at an hour's notice, or less, enter palaces, and bear away, unchecked and unquestioned, those imagines of Des Cartes which emanate or are thrown off from all forms, and this, not in imagination, but in the flesh.
So home, and to dinner alone with my wife, who, poor wretch! sat undressed all day, till ten at night, altering and lacing of a noble petticoat: while I by her, making the boy read to me the Life of Julius Caesar, and Des Cartes' book of Musick By Rene Des Cartes, Amsterdam, 1617; rendered into English, London, 1653, 4to.
And all this solemn farce of Secretariats and cartes d'entree to obtain admission! It is curious how the bureaucratic instinct is ingrained in the French character. It was a large, ill-ventilated room, blue with cigarette and cigar smoke. Some thirty men were sitting or standing around a baccarat table in the centre, and two or three groups hung around ecarte tables in the corners.
In a hall of the simpler sort the only requirements are a high-backed chair or settee, a table for cartes de visite, an umbrella receptacle, and a mirror wall hanger with hooks for the use of guests. The time-honored halltree is no more, and long may it rest in peace. If there had been no other reasons for its passing, its abuse in the average household made it an eyesore.
It would be absurd to conclude that the Welch or Highlanders are a gigantic people, because those mountains may have produced a few individuals near seven feet high. It would be equally absurd to suppose the French are a nation of philosophers, because France has given birth to a Des Cartes, a Maupertuis, a Reaumur, and a Buffon.
I remember a score of genuine offers from French demoiselles, who enclosed their cartes in billets more surprising and enterprising than any other "proposals" it was my office to translate.
It was the nightfall when we were turned into the presence of Sir Alasdair, who was sitting under a few ells of canvas playing cartes with some chieftains by the light of a fir-root fire. "Whom have we here?" said he, never stopping for more than a glimpse of us. "Two Campbells and a man who says he's bard of Keppoch," he was told.
The 4th oval, serving only for impossible reflexions, there is no need to set it forth. As for the manner in which Mr. Des Cartes discovered these lines, since he has given no explanation of it, nor any one else since that I know of, I will say here, in passing, what it seems to me it must have been.
Demonstrations of this kind were the characteristics of the period. Des Cartes had set the example of constructing them, and was followed by Cudworth, Clarke, Berkeley, and many others besides Spinoza.
The French fondness for epigram for terse, paradoxical statement is exemplified even in the best writers, as, for example, Blaise Pascal. A disciple of Des Cartes, he did not strictly follow his master. Of all his writings, his Telemachus, composed for the young Duke of Burgundy, his pupil, has been the most read.
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