Page:The Works of the Rev. Jonathan Swift, Volume 2.djvu/134

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82
INTRODUCTION.

of the Metempsychosis, deducing the progress of the soul through all her stages.

The next is Dr. Faustus, penned by Artephius, an author bonæ notæ, and an adeptus; he published it in the nine-hundred-eighty-fourth year of his age[1]; this writer proceeds wholly by reincrudation, or in the via humida: and the marriage between Faustus and Helen, does most conspicuously dilucidate the fermenting of the male and female dragon.

Whittington and his Cat is the work of that mysterious rabbi, Jehuda Hannasi, containing a defence of the gemara of the Jerusalem misna[2], and its just preference to that of Babylon, contrary to the vulgar opinion.

The Hind and Panther. This is the master-piece of a famous writer now living[3], intended for a complete abstract of sixteen thousand school-men, from Scotus to Bellarmin.

Tommy Pots. Another piece supposed by the same hand, by way of supplement to the former.

The Wise Men of Gotham, cum appendice. This is a treatise of immense erudition, being the great original and fountain of those arguments, bandied about both in France and England, for a just defence of the moderns learning and wit, against the presumption, the pride, and ignorance of the ancients. This unknown author has so exhausted the subject, that a penetrating reader will easily discover

  1. The chemists say of him in their books, that he prolonged his life to a thousand years, and then died voluntarily.
  2. The gemara is the decision, explanation, or interpretation of the Jewish rabbis: and the misna is properly the code or body of the Jewish civil or common law.
  3. Viz. In the year 1697.
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