BOOK III.



CHAPTER I.

WHEREIN THE HISTORY MAKES GREAT PROGRESS AND IS MARKED BY ONE IMPORTANT
EVENT IN HUMAN LIFE.

SPINOZA is said to have loved, above all other amusements, to put flies
into a spider's web; and the struggles of the imprisoned insects were
wont to bear, in the eyes of this grave philosopher, so facetious and
hilarious an appearance, that he would stand and laugh thereat until the
tears "coursed one another down his innocent nose." Now it so happened
that Spinoza, despite the general (and, in my most meek opinion, the
just) condemnation of his theoretical tenets,* was, in character and in
nature, according to the voices of all who knew him, an exceedingly
kind, humane, and benevolent biped; and it doth, therefore, seem a
little strange unto us grave, sober members of the unphilosophical Many,
that the struggles and terrors of these little winged creatures should
strike the good subtleist in a point of view so irresistibly ludicrous
and delightful. But, for my part, I believe that that most imaginative
and wild speculator beheld in the entangled flies nothing more than a
living simile--an animated illustration--of his own beloved vision of
Necessity; and that he is no more to be considered cruel for the
complacency with which he gazed upon those agonized types of his system
than is Lucan for dwelling with a poet's pleasure upon the many
ingenious ways with which that Grand Inquisitor of Verse has contrived
to vary the simple operation of dying. To the bard, the butchered
soldier was only an epic ornament; to the philosopher, the murdered fly