MR. BASIL PLENTY, 'SIR, "You have the gout and stone, with sixty thousand pounds sterling; I have the gout and stone, not worth one farthing; I shall pray for you, and desire you would pay the bearer twenty shillings for value received from, Cripplegate, Aug. 29, 1712. Sir, Your humble servant, LAZARUS HOPEFUL.' The reader's own imagination will suggest to him the reasonableness of such correspondences, and diversify them into a thousand forms: but I shall close this, as I began, upon the subject of blindness.* The following letter seems to be written by a man of learning, who is returned to his study after a suspense of ability to do so. The benefit he reports himself to have received, may well claim the handsomest encomium he can give the operator. MR. SPECTATOR, 'RUMINATING lately on your admirable discourses on the Pleasures of the Imagination, I began to consider to which of our senses we are obliged for the greatest and most important share of those pleasures; and I soon concluded that it was to the sight. That is the sovereign of the senses, and mother of all the arts and sciences, that have refined the rudeness of the uncultivated mind to * A benevolent institution in favour of blind people, and Swift's hospital, seem to have originated from this paper, certainly from the principles of humanity stated in it. a politeness that distinguishes the fine spirits from the barbarous goût of the great vulgar and the small. The sight is the obliging benefactress that bestows on us the most transporting sensations that we have from the various and wonderful products of nature. To the sight we owe the amazing discoveries of the height, magnitude, and motion of the planets; their several revolutions about their common centre of light, heat and motion, the sun. The sight travels yet farther to the fixed stars, and furnishes the understanding with solid reasons to prove, that each of them is a sun, moving on its own axis, in the centre of its own vortex or turbillion, and performing the same offices to its dependent planets that our glorious sun does to this. But the inquiries of the sight will not be stopped here, but make their progress through the immense expanse to the Milky Way, and there divide the blended fires of the galaxy into infinite and different worlds, made up of distinct suns, and their peculiar equipages of planets, till, unable to pursue this track any further, it deputes the imagination to go on to new discoveries, till it fill the unbounded space with endless worlds. 'The sight informs the statuary's chisel with power to give breath to lifeless brass and marble, and the painter's pencil to swell the flat canvass with moving figures actuated by imaginary souls. Music indeed may plead another original, since Jubal, by the different falls of his hammer on the anvil, discovered by the ear the first rude music that pleased the antediluvian fathers; but then the sight has not only reduced those wilder sounds into artful order and harmony, but conveys that * Mr. Weaver ascribes the discovery to Pythagoras. harmony to the most distant parts of the world without the help of sound. To the sight we owe not only all the discoveries of philosophy, but all the divine imagery of poetry that transports the intelligent reader of Homer, Milton, and Virgil. 'As the sight has polished the world, so does it supply us with the most grateful and lasting pleasure. Let love, let friendship, paternal affection, filial piety, and conjugal duty, declare the joys the sight bestows on a meeting after absence. But it would be endless to enumerate all the pleasures and advantages of sight; every one that has it, every hour he makes use of it, finds them, feels them, enjoys them. 'Thus, as our greatest pleasures and knowledge are derived from the sight, so has Providence been more curious in the formation of its seat, the eye, than of the organs of the other senses. That stupendous machine is composed, in a wonderful manner, of muscles, membranes, and humours Its motions are admirably directed by the mus cles the perspicuity of the humours transmits the rays of light; the rays are regularly refracted by their figure; the black lining of the scler otes effectually prevents their being confounded by reflexion. It is wonderful indeed to consider how many objects the eye is fitted to take in at once, and successively in an instant, and at the same time, to make a judgment of their position, figure, or colour. It watches against our dangers, guides our steps, and lets in all the visible objects, whose beauty and variety instruct and delight. 'The pleasures and advantages of sight being so great, the loss must be very grievous; of which Milton, from experience, gives the most sensible idea, both in the third book of his Paradise Lost, and in his Samson Agonistes. 'To light, in the former. -Thee I revisit safe, And feel thy sov'reign vital lamp; but thou 'And a little after. "Seasons return, but not to me returns Of nature's works, to me expung'd and raz'd, 'Again in Samson Agonistes. -But chief of all, O loss of sight! of thee I most complain: Light, the prime work of God, to me's extinct, -Still as a fool, In pow'r of others, never in my own, Scarce half I seem to live, dead more than half : The enjoyment of sight then being so great a blessing, and the loss of it so terrible an evil, how excellent and valuable is the skill of that artist which can restore the former, and redress the latter! My frequent perusal of the advertise ments in the public newspapers (generally the most agreeable entertainment they afford) has presented me with many and various benefits of this kind done to my countrymen by that skilful artist Dr. Grant, her majesty's oculist extraordinary, whose happy hand has brought and restored to sight several hundreds in less than four years. Many have received sight by his means who came blind from their mother's womb, as in the famous instance of Jones of Newington.* I myself have been cured by him of a weakness in my eyes next to blindness, and am ready to believe any thing that is reported of his ability this way; and know that many, who could not purchase his assistance with money, have enjoyed it from his charity. But a list of particulars would swell my letter beyond its bounds: what I have said being sufficient to comfort those who are in the like distress, since they may conceive hopes of being no longer miserable in this kind, while. there is yet alive so able an oculist as Dr. Grant. I am the Spectator's T. humble servant, PHILANTHROPUS.' * This ostentatious oculist was, it seems, originally a cobler or tinker, afterwards a preacher in a congregation of Baptists. William Jones was not born blind, and was but very little, if at all, benefited by Grant's operation, who appears to have been guilty of great fraud and downright forgery in his account and advertisements of this pretended cure. |