Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: the girl, very English and very innocent, scribbling her satire in the protection of the great Sir Isaac’s observatory. Perhaps we cover up her defects by remembering that Newton himself, despite his mightiness in science, was but a child when he came to reflect on human life; and certainly there are few more entertaining books and few names fairer and dearer to us than hers. NOTE ON DADDY CRISP If any evidence, further than Fanny Burney’s Diary, is necessary to show the entire distortion of Macaulay’s picture of Samuel Crisp as a wild beast in his lair, it is abundantly forthcoming in a collection of letters written by Crisp from Chessington to his sister, Mrs. Sophia Crisp Cast, at Burford, and now edited by Mr. W. H. Hutton. Crisp was a disappointed man, no doubt, and weariness of the world, as much as the need of economising money and health, led him to make his home at Chesington (as it was then spelled), where there was only one safe route across the wild common, to which he gave the clew to his friends as a secret. But there was nothing morose in his character, nothing peevish in his retirement. There is a greater measure of truth in the epitaph which Dr. Burney wrote for his friend, and which may still be read in the village church:
Reader, this cold and humble spot contains The much lamented, much revered remains Of one whose wisdom, learning, taste and sense Good humour’d art and wide benevolence Cheer’d and enlighten’d all this hamlet round Wherever genius, worth, or want was found. To few it is that bounteous Heav'n imparts Such depth of knowledge, and such taste in arts, Such penetration and enchanting powers Of brightening social and convivial hours. Had he through life been blest by Nature kind With health robust of body as of mind, With skill to…
