 been wanting, in order to have taken a man's character, but to have taken a
chair and gone softly, as you would to a dioptrical bee-hive, and look'd in, -
view'd the soul stark naked; - observ'd all her motions, -her machinations; -
traced all her maggots from their first engendering to their crawling forth; -
watched her loose in her frisks, her gambols, her capricios; and after some
notice of her more solemn deportment, consequent upon such frisks, etc. -- then
taken your pen and ink and set down nothing but what you had seen, and could
have sworn to: - But this is an advantage not to be had by the biographer in
this planet, - in the planet Mercury (belike) it may be so, if not better still
for him; -- for there the intense heat of the country, which is proved by
computators, from its vicinity to the sun, to be more than equal to that of red
hot iron, - must, I think, long ago have vitrified the bodies of the
inhabitants, (as the efficient cause) to suit them for the climate (which is the
final cause); so that, betwixt them both, all the tenements of their souls, from
top to bottom, may be nothing else, for aught the soundest philosophy can shew
to the contrary, but one fine transparent body of clear glass (bating the
umbilical knot); - so, that till the inhabitants grow old and tolerably
wrinkled, whereby the rays of light, in passing through them, become so
monstrously refracted, -- or return reflected from their surfaces in such
transverse lines to the eye, that a man cannot be seen thro'; - his soul might
as well, unless, for more ceremony, - or the trifling advantage which the
umbilical point gave her, - might, upon all other accounts, I say, as well play
the fool out o'doors as in her own house.
    But this, as I said above, is not the case of the inhabitants of this earth;
-our minds shine not through the body, but are wrapt up here in a dark covering
of uncrystalized flesh and blood; so that if we would come to the specifick
characters of them, we must go some other way to work.
    Many, in good truth, are the ways which human wit has been forced to take to
do this thing with exactness.
    Some, for instance, draw all their characters with wind instruments. -
Virgil takes notice
