ESSAY V. ON THE STATE OF THE POOR, AND THE MEANS PURSUED BY THE SOCIETY FOR BETTERING THEIR CONDITION. 1816. ESSAY V. ON THE STATE OF THE POOR, &c. &c. DURING many ages it was an undisputed opinion that the state of the world was continually growing worse, according to the complaint of Horace : Damnosa quid non imminuit dies? It was even believed that the earth itself decayed as it grew old, and that nature in all her operations was debilitated with age. "There have been many great inquests,' says Joshua Sylvester, To find the cause why bodies still grow less, And daily nearer to the pigmies' size.' To confute this opinion, Hakewill wrote his Apology, or Declaration of the Power and 'Providence of God in the Government of the 'World.' Some of the good old archdeacon's topics may excite a smile in these times: he clears away doubts touching the strong physic which 'the ancients used,' and' touching the length of 'the duodenum, or first gut,' which in the Greeks 6 was said to be twelve inches long, and in these degenerate days hardly four, an objection which, ' of any he had met with, was most fully opened and seriously urged by Archangelus Piccolomini ' in his Anatomical Lectures,'.. and which would evince that the happiness of an Athenian archon exceeded that of a London alderman in the proportion of three to one. And he proves that the human race was not less prolific in his age than in elder times, by the epitaph of Dame Honeywood, of Charing, in Kent, who had, at her decease, 367 children lawfully descended from her; and by that of a woman in Dunstable Church 'who bore at three several times three children at 'a birth, and five at a birth two other times.' But his moral philosophy is of a higher strain, and may command our respect both for its truth, and for the feeling with which he has expressed it. 6 'How other men,' says he, may stand affected in reading I know not; sure I am that in writing it often lifted up my soul in admiring ' and praising the infinite wisdom and bounty of the Creator in maintaining and managing his own work, in the government and preservation of the universe, which in truth is nothing else 'but (as the schools speak) continuata productio, a continuated production: and often did it call 6 to my mind those holy raptures of the Psalmist, "" O Lord, how glorious are thy works, and thy thoughts are very deep: an unwise man doth "not well consider this, and a fool doth not un""derstand it." I must confess that, sometimes looking stedfastly upon the present face of 'things both at home and abroad, I have often 6.66 |