[1] In Bath, he was surnamed 'the Child of Nature;'--which arose from his
contrasting on every occasion the existing man of our present experience
with the ideal or Stewartian man that might be expected to emerge in some
myriads of ages; to which latter man he gave the name of the Child of
Nature.
[2] I was not aware until the moment of writing this passage that Walking
Stewart had publicly made this request three years after making it to
myself: opening the 'Harp of Apollo,' I have just now accidentally
stumbled on the following passage, 'This Stupendous work is destined, I
fear, to meet a worse fate than the Aloe, which as soon as it blossoms
loses its stalk. This first blossom of reason is threatened with the loss
of both its stalk and its soil: for, if the revolutionary tyrant should
triumph, he would destroy all the English books and energies of thought. I
conjure my readers to translate this work into Latin, and to bury it in
the ground, communicating on their death-beds only its place of
concealment to men of nature.'
From the title page of this work, by the way, I learn that 'the 7000th
year of Astronomical History' is taken from the Chinese tables, and
coincides (as I had supposed) with the year 1812 of our computation.