I RECEIVED Some time ago a proposal, which had a preface to it, wherein the author discoursed at large of the innumerable objects of charity in a nation, and admonished the rich, who were afflicted with any distemper of body, particularly to regard the poor in the same species of affliction, and confine their tenderness to them, since it is impossible to assist all who are presented to them. The proposer had been relieved from a malady in his eyes by an operation, performed by Sir William Read, and, being a man of condition, had taken a resolution to maintain three poor blind men during their lives, in gratitude for that great blessing. This misfortune is so very great and unfrequent, that one would think an establishment for all the poor under it might be easily accomplished, with the addition of a very few others to those wealthy, who are in the same calamity. However, the thought of the proposer arose from a very good motive; and the parcelling of ourselves out, as called to particular acts of beneficence, would be a pretty cement of society and virtue. It is the ordinary foundation for men's holding a commerce with each other, and becoming familiar, that they agree in the same sort of pleasure; and sure it may also be some reaon for amity, that they are under one common distress. If all the rich who are lame in the gout, from a life of ease, pleasure, and luxury, would help those few, who have it without a previous life of pleasure, and add a few of such laborious men, who are become lame from unhappy blows, falls or other accidents of age or sickness; I say, would such gouty persons administer to the necessities of men disabled like themselves, the consciousness of such a behaviour would be the best julep, cordial, and anodyne, in the feverish, faint, and tormenting vicissitudes of that miserable distemper. The same may be said of all other, both bodily and intellectual, evils. These classes of charity, would certainly bring down blessings upon an age and people; and if men were not petrified with the love of this world, against all sense of the commerce, which ought to be among them, it would not be an unreasonable bill for a poor man in the agony of pain, aggravated by want and poverty, to draw upon a sick alderman after this form: "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, The reader's own imagination will suggest to him the reasonableness of such corrrespondences, and diversify them into a thousand forms; but I shall ness. close this, as I began, upon the subject of blindThe following letter seems to be written by a man of learning, who is returned to his study after a suspense of an ability to do so. The benefit he reports himself to have received, may well claim the handsomest encomium he can give the operator. 66 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 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 further 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, * 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. 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 enless 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 canvas 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 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 absense. 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 stupen * Mr. Weaver ascribes the discovery to Pythagoras. dous machine is composed, in a wonderful manner, of muscles, membranes, and humours. Its motions are admirably directed by the muscles; the perspicuity of the humour transmits the rays of light; the rays are regularly refracted by their figure; the black lining of the sclerotes effectually prevents their being confounded by reflection. 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 judgement of their position, figure, and 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 sovereign vital lamp; but thou "And a little after. Seasons return, but not to me returns Of nature's works, to me expunged and razed, iii. 21. ib. 41. |