Paradise Lost Author:William Watts 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: 'wilderness forty days without food; and afterwards, in expostulating with him while he is strongly intrenched in a poor man's guts, from whence he will not budg... more »e but by capitulating for permission to take refuge among some pigs, who are so scared at his ugly appearance that they all scuttle orT in a great hurry into the sea, where they all perish. There's a Deity for you ! and a precious pure religion for enlightened and rational Christians!! Old Burton certainly did not place you out of your proper class when he dubbed you Asini Bi- Pedes. Now, " Are not these choice commodities To be imported from the skies, And vended here among the rabble, For staple goods, and marketable ? " But to resume our prefatory discussion on this most interesting and wonderful history of the snake, the crab, and our ninCompoopish progenitors, which, if we except Swift's " wonderful wonder of wonders," f exceeds all wonderful histories whatever. " In the beginning," says the blessed book, which excelleth all the riches of the earth,J " God made the heaven and the earth." § But what precedeth this beginning ? what is meant Clarke's Review, 110 and 11. t Swift's Works, iv. 92. Bathurst's edit. J See the blarneying dedication of the Translators of the Bible to James I. § Were heaven and earth created by a Spirit out of nothing? Ex nihilo nihil fit. This is, however, contradicted by Cowper, whose head was, to be sure, un pen derangee, since he tells us, in his poem called "Expostulation," that " This delightful earth and that fair sky Leaped out of nothing." Uno absurdo dato mille sequentur. ? C'est ne que le premier pas qui coflte. When the incomprehensibility of creating Matter by Spirit chapter{Section 4by beginning ? In the vulgar opinion, the creation took place about...« less