Copernicans of all sorts convicted ... to which is added a Treatise of the Magnet. By the Hon. Edw. Howard, of Berks. London, 1705, 8vo.
Not all the blood of all the Howards will gain respect for a writer who maintains that eclipses admit no possible explanation under the Copernican hypothesis, and who asks how a man can "go 200 yards to any place if the moving superficies of the earth does carry it from him?" Horace Walpole, at the beginning of his _Royal and Noble Authors_, has mottoed his book with the Cardinal's address to Ariosto, "Dove diavolo, Messer Ludovico, avete pigliato tante coglionerie?"[271] Walter Scott says you could hardly pick out, on any principle of selection--except badness itself, he means of course--the same number of plebeian authors whose works are so bad. But his implied satire on aristocratic writing forgets two points. First, during a large period of our history, when persons of rank condescended to write, they veiled themselves under "a person of honor," "a person of quality," and the like, when not wholly undescribed. Not one of these has Walpole got; he omits, {132} for instance, Lord Brounker's[272] translation of Descartes on Music. Secondly, Walpole only takes the heads of houses: this cuts both ways; he equally eliminates the Hon. Robert Boyle and the precious Edward Howard. The last writer is hardly out of the time in which aristocracy suppressed its names; the avowal was then usually meant to make the author's greatness useful to the book. In our day, literary peers and honorables are very favorably known, and contain an eminent class.[273] They rough it like others, and if such a specimen as Edw. Howard were now to appear, he would be greeted with
"Hereditary noodle! knowest thou not Who would be wise, himself must make him so?"
