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vent her birth in a certain place, that she could not help being affected by a certain malady, at a certain time; that the physician could be in no other place than where he was, that your aunt could not but apply to him, that he could not but prescribe medicines which cured her, or were thought to cure her, while nature was the sole physician.

A peasant thinks that it hailed upon his field by chance; but the philosopher knows that there was no chance, and that it was absolutely impossible, according to the constitution of the world, for it not to have hailed at that very time and place.

Ther are some who, being shocked by this truth, concede only half of it, like debtors who offer one moiety of their property to their creditors, and ask remission for the other. There are, they say, some events which are necessary, and others which are not so. It would be curious for one part of the world to be changed and the other not; that one part of what happens should happen inevitably, and another fortuitously. When we examine the question closely, we see that the doctrine opposed to that of destiny is absurd; but many men are des- { tined to be bad reasoners, others not to reason at all, and others to persecute those who reason well or ill.

a beautiful hand; we shall be convin that we ought to be vain of nothing, yet vain we shall always be.

I have necessarily the passion writing as I now do; and, as for y you have the passion for censuring we are both equally fools, both equa the sport of destiny. Your nature is do ill, mine is to love truth, and pub it in spite of you.

The owl, while supping upon mớ his ruined tower, said to the nighting "Stop your singing there in your be tiful arbour, and come to my hole t may eat you." The nightingale rep "I am born to sing where I am, an laugh at you."

You ask me what is to become of berty: I do not understand you; 1 not know what the liberty you spea really is. You have been so long puting about the nature of it that you not understand it. If you are wi or rather, if you are able to ex with me coolly what it is, turn to letter L.

DEVOTEE.

B

THE word devout (devot) signifies voted (devoué), and, in the strict s of the term, can only be applicat monks, and to females belonging to religious order and under vows. Some caution us by saying, "Do not the gospel makes no mention of vos believe in fatalism, for, if you do, every-devotees, the title ought not, in fa thing appearing to you unavoidable, you be given to any person: the whole will exert yourself for nothing; you will ought to be equally just. A man sink down in indifference; you will re- calls himself devout, is like a plebeia: gard neither wealth, nor honours, nor calls himself a marquis; he arrogs praise; you will be careless about ac- quality which does not belong to quiring anything whatever; you will he thinks himself a better man th consider yourself meritless and power-neighbour. We pardon this fo less; no talent will be cultivated, and { all will be overwhelmed in apathy."

Do not be afraid, gentlemen; we shall always have passions and prejudices, since it is our destiny to be subjected to prejudices and passions. We shall very well know that it no more depends upon us to have great merit or superior talents than to have a fine head of hair, or

women; their weakness and frivolity der them excusable; they pass, things, from a lover to a spiritual di : with perfect sincerity, but we canno: don the knaves who direct them abuse their ignorance, and establis throne of their pride on the credul the sex. They form a snug mystic rem, composed of seven or eight el

beauties subjugated by the weight of in-ward ten degrees." And Isaiah the prooccupation, and almost all these subjects phet cried unto the Lord, and he brought pay tribute to their new master. No the shadow ten degrees backwards from young women without lovers; no elderly the point to which it had gone down on devotee without a director.-Oh, how the dial of Ahaz. much more shrewd are the orientals than we! A pacha never says,-We supped last night with the aga of the janissaries, who is my sister's lover; and with the vicar of the mosque, who is my wife's director!

DIAL.
Dial of Ahaz.

We should like to know what this dial of Ahaz was; whether it was the work of a dial-maker named Ahaz, or whether it was a present made to a king of that name, it is an object of curiosity. There have been many disputes on this dial; the learned have proved that the Jews never knew either clocks or dials before their captivity in Babylon; the only time, say they, in which they learned anything of the Chaldeans, or the greater part of the nation began to read or write. It is even known that in their language they had no words to express clock, dial, geometry, or astronomy; and, in the book of Kings, the dial of Ahaz is called the hour of the stone.

Ir is well known that everything is miraculous in the history of the Jews; the miracle performed in favour of King Hezekiah on the dial of Ahaz is one of the greatest that ever took place it is evident that the whole earth must have been deranged, the course of the stars changed for ever, and the periods of the eclipses of the sun and moon so altered But the grand question is, to know as to confuse all the ephemerides. This how King Hezekiah, the possessor of this was the second time the prodigy hap-clock, or dial of the sun--this hour of pened. Joshua had stopped the sun at stone,-could tell that it was easy to adnoon on Gibeon, and the moon on Aska-vance the sun ten degrees. It is cerlon, in order to get time to kill a troop of tainly as difficult to make it advance Amorites already crushed by a shower of against its ordinary motion as to make it stones from heaven. go backward.

The sun, instead of stopping for King Hezekiah, went back, which is nearly the same thing, only differently described.

In the first place, Isaiah said to Hezekiah, who was sick, "Thus saith the Lord, set thine house in order; for thou shalt die and not live."

The proposition of the prophet appears as astonishing as the discourse of the king: Shall the shadow go forward ten degrees, or go back ten degrees? That would have been well said in some town of Lapland, where the longest day of the year is twenty hours; but at JerusaHezekiah wept, and God was softened, lem, where the longest day of the year is he signified to him, through Isaiah, that about fourteen hours and a half, it was he should still live fifteen years, and that absurd. The king and the prophet dein three days he should go to the temple;ceived one another grossly. We do not then Isaiah brought a plaister of figs and deny the miracle, we firmly believe it; put it on the king's ulcers, and he was we only remark that Hezekiah and Isaiah Cured-"et curatus est." knew not what they said. Whatever the Hezekiah demanded a sign to convince hour, it was a thing equally impossible him that he should be cured. Isaiah to make the shadow of the dial advance said to him, "Shall the shadow go for- or recede ten hours. If it were two hours ward ten degrees, or go back ten de-after noon, the prophet could, no doubt, grees?" And Hezekiah answered, "It have very well made the shadow of the is a light thing for the shadow to go down dial go back to four o'clock in the mornten degrees; let the shadow return back-'ing; but in this case he could not have

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advanced it ten hours, since then it Gazette," a formidable writer," they add, would have been midnight, and at that" whose arrow," which had already bee time it is not usual to have a shadow of compared to that of Jonathan, “never the sun in perfection. returned back, and was always steeped in the blood of the slain, in the carnage of the valiant."-A sanguine interfectorum ab adipe fortium sagitta Jonathæ nunquàm abiit retrorsùm.

It is difficult to discover when this strange history was written, but perhaps it was towards the time in which the Jews only confusedly knew that there were clocks and sun-dials. In that case it is true that they only got a very imperfect knowledge of these sciences until they went to Babylon. There is a still greater difficulty which the commentators have not thought of; which is, that the Jews did not count by hours as we do.

It will, no doubt, be easily admitted that the connection between Jonathan, the son of Saul, who was killed at the battle of Gilboa, and a Parisian convulsionary, who scribbles ecclesiastical notices in his garret, in 1758, is wonderfully striking.

The same miracle happened in Greece, The author of this preface speaks in the day that Atreus served up the chil-it of the great Colbert. We should condren of Thyestes for their father's supper.ceive, at first, that the great statesman The same miracle was still more sensi- who conferred such vast benefits on bly performed at the time of Jupiter's France is alluded to; no such thing, it intrigue with Alcmena. It required a is a bishop of Montpellier. Ile comnight double the natural length to form plains that no other dictionary has beHercules. These adventures are com- stowed sufficient praise on the celebrated mon in antiquity, but very rare in our Abbé d'Asfeld, the illustrious Boursier, days, in which all things have degene- the famous Gennes, the immortal La rated. Borde, and that the lash of invective on the other hand has not been sufficiently applied to Lanquet, Archbishop of Sens, and a person of the name of Fillot, all, as he pretends, men well known from the Pillars of Hercules to the frozen ocean. He engages to be "animated, energetic, and sarcastic, on a principle of religion; that he will make his countenance sterner } than that of his enemies, and his front harder than their front, according to the words of Ezekiel," &c.

DICTIONARY.

THE invention of dictionaries, which was unknown to antiquity, is of the most unquestionable utility; and the Encyclopædia, which was suggested by Messrs. Alembertand Diderot, and so successfully completed by them and their associates, notwithstanding all its defects, is a decisive evidence of it. What we find there under the article DICTIONARY Would be a sufficient instance; it is done by the hand of a master.

He declares that he has put in contri-; bution all the journals and all the anas; and he concludes with hoping that heaven will bestow a blessing on his labours.

I mean to speak here only of a new species of historical dictionaries, which contain a series of lies and satires in al- In dictionaries of this description, phabetical order; such is the Historical which are merely party works, we rarely Literary and Critical Dictionary, contain-find what we are in quest of, and often a summary of the lives of celebrated men of every description, and printed in 1758, in six volumes, 8vo. without the name of the author.

The compilers of that work begin with declaring that it was undertaken by the advice of the author of the Ecclesiastical

{what we are not. Under the word Adonis, for example, we learn that Venus fell in love with him; but not a word about the worship of Adonis, or Adonai among the Phenicians-nothing about those very ancient and celebrated festivals, those lamentations succeeded by re

joicings, which were manifest allegories, like the feasts of Ceres, of Isis, and all the mysteries of antiquity. But, in compensation, we find Adkichomia a devotee, who translated David's psalms in the sixteenth century; and Adkichomus, apparently her relation, who wrote the life of Jesus Christ in Low-German.

magistrate, but also learned and estima-
ble; but the calumniator concealed him-
self, like most libellers, under a fictitious
name.

Immediately after having applied such shameful language to a man respectable compared with himself, he considers him as an irrefragable witness, because BoinWe may well suppose that all the in-din-whose unhappy temper was well dividuals of the faction which employed known-left an ill-written and exceedthis person are loaded with praise, and ingly ill-advised memorial; in which he their enemies with abuse. The author, accuses La Motte-one of the worthiest or the crew of authors, who have put to- men in the world, a geometrician, and an gether this vocabulary of trash, say of ironmonger with having written the inNicholas Boindin, attorney-general of the famous verses for which Jean Baptiste treasurers of France, and a member of the Rousseau was convicted. Finally, in Academy of Belles-lettres, that he was a the list of Boindin's works, he altogether poet and an atheist. omits his excellent dissertations printed in the collection of the Academy of Belleslettres, of which he was a highly distinguished member.

That magistrate, however, never printed any verses, and never wrote anything on metaphysics or religion.

He adds, that Boindin will be ranked by posterity among the Vaninis, the Spinozas, and the Hobbeses. He is ignorant that Hobbes never professed atheism -that he merely subjected religion to the sovereign power, which he denominates the Leviathan. He is ignorant that Vanini was not an atheist; that the term atheist is not to be found even in the decree which condemned him; and that he was accused of impiety for having strenuously opposed the philosophy of Åristotle, and for having disputed with indiscretion and acrimony against a counsellor of the parliament of Toulouse, called Francon, or Franconi, who had the credit of getting him burnt to death; for the latter burn whom they please; witness the Maid of Orleans, Michael Servetus, the Counsellor Dubourg, the wife of Marshal d'Ancre, Urbain Grandier, Morin, and the books of the Jansenists. See, moreover, the apology for Vanini by the learned Lament has done more; it has punished Crosse, and the article ATHEISM.

The article FONTENELLE is nothing but a satire upon that ingenious and learned academician, whose science and talents are esteemed by the whole of literary Europe. The author has the effrontery to say, that "his History of Oracles does no honour to his religion." If Vandale, the author of "the History of Oracles," and his abridger Fontenelle, had lived in the time of the Greeks and of the Roman republic, it might have been said, with reason, that they were rather good philosophers than good Pagans; but, to speak sincerely, what injury do they do to Christianity, by showing that the Pagan priests were a set of knaves. Is it not evident, that the authors of the libel, miscalled a Dictionary, are pleading their own cause? "Jam proximus ardet Ucalegon." But would it be offering an insult to the Christian religion to prove the knavery of the Convulsionaries. Govern

The vocabulary treats Boindin as a miscreant; his relations were desirous of proceeding at law, and punishing an author who himself so well deserved the appellation which he so infamously applied to a man who was not merely

a

them without being accused of irreligion.

The libeller adds, that he suspects Fontenelle never performed the duties of a Christian but out of contempt for Christianity itself. It is a strange species of madness on the part of these fanatics, to be always proclaiming that a philosopher

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cannot be a Christian. They ought to be excommunicated and punished for this alone; for assuredly it implies a wish to destroy Christianity to assert, that it is impossible for a man to be a good reasoner, and at the same time believe a religion so reasonable and holy.

years her countenance bore the most hideous marks of old age-that her per son was afflicted with all the infirmities belonging to that stage of life, and that her mind was under the influence of the maxims of an austere philosophy.

Under the article DESHOULIERES, the Des Iveteaux, preceptor of Louis XIV., compiler pretends that that lady was the is accused of having lived and died with- same who was designated under the term out religion. It seems as if these com- prude (precieuse) in Boileau's satire upon pilers had none; or, at least, as if, while women, Never was any woman more free violating all the precepts of the true one, from such weakness than Madame Desthey were searching about everywhere for › houliéres: she always passed for a woaccomplices. man of the best society, possessed great simplicity, and was highly agreeable in conversation.

The very gentlemanly writer of these articles, is wonderfully pleased with exhibiting all the bad verses that have been written on the French Academy, and various anecdotes as ridiculous as they are false. This also is apparently out of zeal for religion.

I ought not to lose an opportunity of refuting an absurd story which has been much circulated, and which is repeated exceedingly mal-á-propos under the article of the ABBE GEDOUIN, upon whom the writer falls foul with great satisfaction, because in his youth he had been a Jesuit; a transient weakness, of which I know he repented all his life.

The article LA MOTTE abounds with atrocious abuse of that academician, who was a man of very amiable manners, and a philosophic poet, who produced excellent works of every description. Finally, the author, in order to secure the sale of his book of six volumes, has made of it a slanderous libel.

His hero is Carré de Montgeron, who presented to the king a collection of the miracles performed by the Convulsionaries in the cemetery of St. Medard; who became mad and died insane.

The interest of the republic of literature The devout and scandalous compiler of and reason, demands that those libellers the Dictionary asserts, that the Abbé Gé- should be delivered up to public indigdouin slept with the celebrated Ninon nation, lest their example operating upon l'Enclos on the very night of her com- the sordid love of gain, should stimulate pleting her eightieth year. It certainly others to imitation; and the more so, as was not exactly befitting in a priest to re-nothing is so easy as to copy books in late this anecdote in a pretended Diction-alphabetical order, and add to them inary of illustrious men. Such a foolery, sipidities, calumnies, and abuse. however, is in fact highly improbable; and I can take upon me to assert that nothing can be more false. The same anecdote was formerly put down to the credit of the Abbé Chateauneuf, who was not very difficult in his amours, and who, it was said, had received Ninon's favours when she was of the age of sixty, or rather, had conferred upon her his own. In early life, I saw a great deal of the Abbé Gédouin, the Abbé Chateauneuf, and Mademoiselle l'Enclos; and I can truly declare, that at the age of eighty

Extract from the Reflections of an Academician on the Dictionary of the French Academy.

It would be desirable to state the natural and incontestable etymology of every word, to compare the application, the various significations, the extent of the word, with the use of it; the different acceptations, the strength or weakness of correspondent terms in foreign languages; and finally, to quote the best authors who have used the word, to show the greater

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