compasses Paris, enjoying at once the city and the country, as soon as the walls are levelled which intercept the view of it. There results from this choice of situation some other very considerable advantages: such as our being able to employ the superb buildings of the barriers, constructed in form of rotundos, of colossal columns, of pantheons, of Egyptian temples, formerly appropriated as lodging houses for the Clerk of the Exchequer, to serve in future as monuments of the great men who have deserved well of their Country. Their statues might be placed between the columns or upon the entablature of those edifices at the same barriers where the roads terminate which lead to the provinces from which such great men originally came. Their august images might be made to face toward those same provinces, as if they were inviting the People of the country to the capital to take an interest in the inhabitants of the provinces. Each of these monuments might be devoted as a place of transient hospitality to poor travellers.

There we should read, on large tablets of stone, inscriptions relative to the great men who attained the rank, of tutelary deities from the services. which they rendered to the unfortunate. On patriotic feast days, they might be decorated with garlands of foliage and flowers; there it would be proper to make distributions of provision among the people, and at night they might be illuminated with rows of lamps. Those temples of hospitality, of an antique architecture, linked together by a triple avenue of trees in verdure, filled with a peopeople free and happy, would form around Paris a

crown

crown of felicity and glory which would render her the capital of the Nations.

4

The Constituent Assembly decreed that the new -church of Sainte-Genevieve should serve as a re- ceptacle for the remains of the great men who shall have merited well of the Nation. As these. Illustrious Citizens are frequently of different communions which excommunicate each other, it has been deemed proper, that there may be no discord among them at least after death, to admit no kind of religious worship in the temple where their ashes repose. An interesting memoir has appeared on this subject, in which it is proposed to dedicate the Altar of that church to the COUNTRY, and there to administer the oaths of office to Magistrates. But where are the virtues which can rest on any other foundation than the Supreme Being who bestows them, and who alone can suitably reward them?

I could wish then that this monument might be consecrated to DEITY by these words: To GOD, THE FATHER OF ALL MEN. The memoir to which I have referred, observes that sculpture ought to be employed in figurative representations, at the extremities of the nave, of four religions, the Jewish, the Greek, the Roman and the Gallician. I know not what train of reflection could have suggested the symbols of four religions geperated the one from the other, which hate and persecute each other. It seems to me much more conformable to the design, to introduce the primi tive or patriarchial religion, from which all the rest have emanated, and to constitute the first

Magistrates

Magistrates the pontiffs of it. It's ancient worship, simple and diffused over the whole earth, would adapt itself to the great men of every communion, as they must derive their greatness entirely from the services they have rendered to mankind. It is the only one which unites men of all religions, for there is no one but what admits DEITY as it's principle and as it's end. The dead would thus convey lessons of toleration to the living.

I cannot terminate this article better, than by subjoining an oriental anecdote, much calculated to inspire all men with mutual religious toleration.

THE