Page:A budget of paradoxes (IA cu31924103990507).pdf/505

 publishing a separate work, an old copy will be fished up from a stall two hundred years hence by the coming man, and will be described in an article which will end by his comparing our century with his own, and sighing out in the best New Zealand pronunciation—

And pray, Sir! I have been asked by more than one—do your orthodox never fall into mistake, nor rise into absurdity? They not only do both, but they admit it of each other very freely individually, they are convinced of sin, but not of any particular sin. There is not a syndoxer among them all but draws his line in such a way as to include among paradoxers a great many whom I should exclude altogether from this work. My worst specimens are but exaggerations of what may be found, occasionally, in the thoughts of sagacious investigators. At the end of the glorious dream, we learn that there is a way to Hell from the gates of Heaven, as well as from the City of Destruction and that this is true of other things besides Christian pilgrimage is affirmed at the end of the Budget of Paradoxes. If D'Alembert had produced enough of a quality to match his celebrated mistake on the chance of throwing head in two throws, he would have been in my list. If Newton had produced enough to match his reception of the story that Nausicaa, Homer's Phæacian princess, invented the celestial sphere, followed by his serious surmise tliat then Newton himself would have she got it from the Argonauts, had an appearance entered for him, in spite of the Principia. In illustration, I may cite a few words from 'Tristram Shandy'—

I now proceed to die out. Some prefatory remarks will follow in time. I shall have occasion to insist that all is not barren: I think I shall find, on casting up, that two out of five of my paradoxers are not to be utterly contemned. Among the better lot will be found all gradations of merit; at the same time, as was remarked on quite a different subject, there may be little to choose between the last of the saved and the first of the lost.