branches,....and models the stalk his own fancy. upon I was born at Parium,.....a Roman colony in the district of Mysia, and bordering on the coast of the Hellespont......The industry of its inhabitants, together with its peculiarly advantageous situation on a bay of the Propontis, which afforded a safe riding to their shipping, rendered it at once an enviable and flourishing city. My father traded as a merchant, and his necessary pursuits calling him perpetually to different countries, he had neither leisure or inclination to superintend my education; he therefore.....on my quitting the gynæceum, .....sent me to the care of my maternal grandfather, who resided at a short distance from the city, on an estate to which he had retired. My mother dying, when I was scarcely fourteen years of age, my grandfather......with the consent of my father....adopted me; from which circumstance I assumed the sirname of Proteus. Nature, very liberally, gave me an engaging exterior, with a heart full of susceptibility, and an imágination warm....romantic....and lively. Thus endowed..........you will not wonder at the operation of Homer's works on my visionary mind. His rhapsodies were the first studies.....as was usual in those days....which my ideas encountered..... How inexpres sibly delighted every faculty of my astonished soul became with his marvellous tales! I wandered through Olympus with increasing avidity..... devouring his scenic representations of the Gods on that vast theatre, amid all the enchanting coloring with which he decorates description. My master was a pedagogue..... Wrapt in his own pedantic ideas..... he saw phrases and dialects,.....figures and tropes,.....allusions, rhetorical and grammatical.....but he saw nothing of their dangerous tendency on my unformed mind, while I was imbibing a destructive venom, which marked my character in future life, and poisoned all my growing prospects. Instead of strengthening,.....or correcting,.....the impressions I received, according to their tendency on my youthful fancy, he only admired the powers of my memory, and the docility with which I profited by his lectures.....I was all he wished me..... he became my panegyrist on every occasion.....was proud of his scholar .....and vaunted my abilities at declamation to the very skies.....I could repeat the longest passages from the divine bard,.....relate the exact list of shipping.....name every Trojan who fell by the sword of Diomed or Achilles,.....and describe the wounds of each with as much accuracy and facility, as if I had been surgeongeneral to the Grecian army. My grandfather was one of those dull, insipid mortals, who seem formed for no end, but to supply a blank in the creation, and crawl about the surface of the globe without pursuit or motive..... Inoffensive, yet useless.... he cared little about the world, and having nothing to ask, contented himself by supinely sitting down, without an exertion to benefit mankind. His patrimony was not large,......but it exceeded his expences,.....and in the course of eighty years which he vegetated on earth, he never made one effort to improve it.....Satisfied with his own, he never envied his neighbour's possessions,.......or by compa rison suffered himself to suppose another happier than he was....If he had a passion.....it was for pleasure.....but then his pleasures were not of a nature to disturb his habitual indolence..... Yet, as we must pursue some object beyond the mere indulgences of appetite and sloth,.....and, as we cannot for ever slumber on a couch,.....recline on the banks of a purling stream,..... admire the beauty of the passing clouds,....or contemplate the majestic grandeur of a setting sun.. .my grandfather most ingeniously contrived a pastime exactly suited to his love of ease, and which was to him, what mental recreation is to the rest of mankind. Accident,........which often determines our fate,....had introduced him, when very young, to the famous Appollonius of Tyana,....and the impressions made on his mind by this most |