It is unquestionably a very noble art to ravage countries, destroy dwellings, and communibus annis, out of a hundred thousand men to cut off forty thousand. This invention was originally cultivated by nations, assembled for their common good; for instance, the diet of the Greeks sent word to the diet of Phrygia and its neighbours, that they were putting to sea in a thousand fishing-boats, in order to do their best to cut them off root and branch.

The Roman people, in a general assembly, resolved that it was their interest to go and fight the Vejentes or the Volscians before harvest; and some years after, all the Romans being angry with all the Carthaginians, fought a long time both by sea and land. It is otherwise in our tine.

A genealogist sets forth to a prince that he is descended in a direct line from a count, whose kindred, three or four hundred years ago, had made a family compact with a house, the very memory of which is extinguished. That house had some distant claim to a province, the last proprietor of which died of an apoplexy. The prince and his council instantly resolve, that this. province belongs to him by divine right. The province, which is some hundred leagues from him, protests that it does not so much as know him; that it is not disposed to be governed by him; that before prescribing laws to them, their consent, at least, was necessary: these allegations do not so much as reach the prince's ears; it is insisted on that his right is incontestable. He instantly picks up a multitude of men, who have nothing to do, nor nothing to lose; cloaths them with coarse blue cloth, one sou to the ell;

puts

puts them on hats bound with coarse white worsted; makes them turn to the right and left; and thus marches away with them to glory.

Other princes, on this armament, take part in it to the best of their ability, and soon cover a small extent of country, with more hireling murderers than Gengis. Kan, Tamerlane and Bajazet had at their heels.

People, at no small distance, on hearing that fighting is going forward, and that if they would make one, there are five or six sous a day for them, immediately divide into two bands, like reapers, and go and sell their services to the first bidder.

These multitudes furiously butcher one an other, not only without having any concern in the quarrel, but without so much as knowing what it is about.

Sometimes five or six powers are engaged, three against three, two against four, sometimes even one against five, all equally detesting one another; and friends and foes, by turns, agreeing only in one thing, to do all the mischief possible.

An odd circumstance in this infernal enterprize is, that every chief of these ruffians has his colours consecrated; and solemnly prays to God before he goes to destroy his neighbour. If the slain in a battle do not exceed two or three thousand, the fortunate commander does not think it worth thanking God for; but if, besides killing ten or twelve thousand men, he has been so far favoured by heaven, as totally to destroy some remarkable place, then a verbose hymn is sung in four parts, composed in a language unknown to all the combatants, and besides stuffed with barbarisms.

barbarisms. The same song does for marriages and births, as for massacres; which is scarce pardonable, especially in a nation of all others the most noted for new songs.

All countries pay a certain number of orators to celebrate these sanguinary actions; some in a long black coat, and over it a short docked cloak; others in a gown, with a kind of shirt over it; some again over their shirts have two pieces of a motley-coloured stuff hanging down. They are all very long-winded in their harangues, and to illustrate a battle fought in Weteravia, bring up what passed thousands of years ago in Palestine.

At other times these gentry declaim against vice; they prove by syllogisms and antitheses, that ladies, for slightly heightening the hue of their cheeks with a little carmine, will assuredly be the eternal objects of eternal vengeance; that Polyeucte and Athalia (1) are the devil's works; that he, whose table on a day of abstinence, is loaded with fish to the amount of two hundred crowns, is infallibly saved; and that a poor man, for eating two penny-worth of mutton, goes to the devil for ever and ever.

Among five or six thousand such declamations, there may be, and that is the most, three or four, written by a Gaul named Massillon, which a gentleman may bear to read; but in not one of all those discourses has the orator the spirit to animadvert on war, that scourge and crime which includes all others. These groveling speakers are continually prating against

love,

(1) Two French Tragedies.

love, mankind's only solace, and the only way of repairing it: not a word do they say of the detestable endeavours of the mighty for its destruction.

Bourdaloue, a very bad sermon have you made against impurity, but not one either bad or good on those various kinds of murders, on those robberies, on those violences, that universal rage, by which the world is laid waste! Put together all the vices of all ages and places, and never will they come up to the mischiefs and enormities of only one campaign.

Ye bungling soul-physicians, to bellow for an hour and more against a few flea-bites, and not say a word about that horrid distemper, which tears us to pieces. Burn your books, ye moralizing philosophers! Whilst the humour of a few shall make it an act of loyalty to butcher thousands of our fellow-creatures, the part of mankind dedicated to heroism will be the most execrable and destructive monsters in all nature. Of what avail is humanity, benevolence, modesty, temperance, mildness, discretion, and piety; when half a pound of lead discharged at the distance of six hundred paces shatters my body; when I expire at the age of twenty under pains unspeakable, and amidst thousands in the same miserable condition; when my eyes at their last opening see my native town all in a blaze; and the last sounds I hear are the shrieks and groans of women and children expiring among the ruins, and all for the pretended interest of a man who is a stranger to us!

The worst is, that war appears to be an unavoidable scourge; for if we observe it, the god Mars was worshipped in all nations; and among

the

the Jews, Sabaoth signifies the god of armies: but in Homer, Minerva calls Mars a furious hare-brained infernal deity.

WHATEVER IS IS RIGHT.

WHAT a clamour was raised in the schools, and even among sober thinkers, when Leibnitz, paraphrasing on Plato, built his structure of the best of possible worlds, affirming that all things went in the best manner, and that God could make but one world. Now, Plato had allowed that God could make five, there being five regular solid bodies; the tetraedron or three-faced pyramid, with the base equal, the cube, the exaedron, the dodecaedron, and licoaedron. But our world is not of the form of any of Plato's bodies, so that he should have allowed God a sixth manner.

So much for the divine Plato. Leibnitz, who certainly was his superior both in metaphysics and geometry, in the tenderness of philanthropy shewed mankind, that we ought to be very well satisfied, and that God had done all he could for us; that he had necessarily, among all possibilities, made choice of what was indisputably the best.

What becomes of original sin? was the cry of many. Let what will come of it, said Leibnitz and his friends; but in his public writings he makes original sin necessarily a part of the best world.

How! our first parents to be driven out of a delightful abode, where they were to have lived for ever, had they not eaten an apple! How! in wretchedness to beget children loaded with a

variety