birds of passage, which cross the Sea in Spring, to load their table in Autumn. The Northern Pole, where they have no cruiser, pours on their shores every Summer legions of mackerel, of fresh cod, and of turbots, fattened in the long nights of Winter.

Not only the fowls and the fishes change for them their climate, but the very trees themselves. Their orchards formerly were transplanted from Asia, and now their parks from America. Instead of the chestnut and walnut, which surrounded the farms of their vassals in the rustic domains of their ancestors, the ebony, the sorb-apple of Canada, the great chestnut of India, the magnolium, the tulip-bearing laurel, encircle their country palaces with the umbrage of the New World, and ere long of it's solitudes. They have summoned the jasmin ftom Arabia, the orange from China, the pine-apple from Brasil, and a multitude of sweet-scented plants from every region of the torrid Zone. They have no longer occasion for suns: they can dispose of latitudes. They can convey in their hot-houses the heats of Syria to exotic plants, at the very season when their hinds are perishing with the cold of the Alps in their hovels.

No one of the productions of Nature can escape their avidity. What they cannot have while living, they contrive to have when dead. The insects, birds, shell-fish, minerals, nay the very soil of the most distant lands enrich their cabinets. Painting and engraving present them with the prospect, and procure them the enjoyment of the Glaciers of Switzerland, during the burning heat of the Dog-days;

and

and of the Spring of the Canaries, in the midst of Winter. The intrepid Navigator brings them from regions into which the Arts dare not to penetrate, journals of voyages still more interesting than the productions of the pencil; and redouble the silence, the tranquillity, the security of their nights, sometimes by a recital of the horrible tempests of CapeHorn, sometimes by that of the dances of the happy Islanders of the South Seas.

Not only every thing that actually exists, but Ages past, all contribute to their felicity. Not for the Temple of Venus only did Corinth invent those beautiful columns rising like palm-trees; no, but tʊ support the alcoves of their beds. Their voluptuous Art veils the light of the day through taffetas of every colour and imitating by softened reflexes, either of moon-light or of sun-rising, represents the objects of their loves like so many Dianas or Auroras. The art of Phidias has for them produced a contrast to female beauty, in the venerable busts of a Socrates and a Plato.

Obscure scholars, by efforts of labour which nothing can remunerate, have for them procured the knowledge of the sublime geniuses who were ornaments of the World in times nearer to the Creation; Orpheus, Zoroaster, Esop, Lokman, David, Solomon, Confucius, and a multitude of others, unknown even to Antiquity. It was not for the Greeks, it is for them, that Homer still sings of Heroes and of Gods, and that Virgil warbles the notes of the Latin flute, which ravished the ears of the Court of Augustus, and there rekindled the love of Country

and

and of Nature. For them it is that Horace, Pope, Addison, La Fontaine, Gesner, have smoothed the rough paths of Wisdom, and have rendered them more accessible, and more lovely, than the treacherous steeps of Folly.

A multitude of Poets and Historians of all Nations a Sophocles, an Euripides, a Corneille, a Racine, aƒ Shakespear, a Tasso, a Xenophon, a Tacitus, a Plutarch, a Suetonius, introduce them into the very closets of those terrible Potentates, who bruised with a rod of iron the head of the Nations whose happiness was intrusted to their care, and call them to rejoice in their happy destiny, and to hope for a better still, under the reign of another Antoninus. Those vast geniuses, of all Ages and of all Countries, celebrating without concert the undecaying lustre of Virtue and the Providence of Heaven in the punishment of Vice, add the authority of their sublime reason to the universal instinct of Mankind, and multiply a thousand and a thousand times in their favour the hopes of another life, of much longer duration, and of more exalted felicity.

Does it not seem reasonable that a chorus of praise should ascend day and night from the dome of every hotel to the AUTHOR of Nature? Never did ancient King of Asia accumulate so many means of enjoyment in Susa or in Ecbatana, as our common tradesmen do in Paris. These Monarchs, nevertheless, every day paid adoration to the Gods; they would engage in no enterprize till the Gods were consulted; they would not so much as sit down to table until the libation of religious acknowledgement

was

was poured out. Would to GOD that our Epicureans were chargeable with indifference only to the hand which is continually loading them with benefits! But it is from the very lap of plenteousness and pleasure that the voice of murmuring against Providence now arises. From their Libraries stored with so many sources of knowledge, issue forth the black clouds which have obscured the hopes and the virtues of Europe.

STUDY

STUDY THIRD.

OBJECTIONS AGAINST PROVIDENCE.

HERE is no God," say these self-constituted "From the work form your judg

"THE

sages. "ment of the workman.* Observe first of all this "Globe of ours, so destitute of proportion and sym

metry. Here it is deluged by vast seas; there it "is parched with thirst, and presents only wilder "nesses of barren sand. A centrifrugal force, occa "sioned by it's diurnal rotation, has heaved out it's Equator into enormous mountains, while it flat"tened the Poles: for the Globe was originally in a

state of softness; whether it was a mud recovered "from the empire of the Waters, or what is more probable, a scum detached from the Sun. The "volcanos which are scattered over the whole Earth

demonstrate, that the fire which formed it is still "under our feet. Over this scoria, so wretchedly "levelled, the rivers run as chance directs. Some of "them inundate the plains; others are swallowed up, or precipitate themselves in cataracts, and no

one of them presents any thing like a regular curThe Islands are merely fragments of the "Continent, violently separated from it by the

"rent.

VOL. I.

* See replies to this objection in Study IV.
I

"Ocean;