Religion and morality lay a check on the force of the natural temper, but cannot extirpate it. A sot, when in a convent, reduced to half a pint of cyder at each meal, will no longer be seen drunk, but his love of wine will ever be the same.

Age weakens the natural character; it is a tree which produces only some degenerate fruits, still are they of one and the same nature. It grows knotty, and over-run with moss, and worm-eaten but amidst all this, it continues what it was, whether oak or pear-tree. Could a man change his character, he would give himself one; he would be superior to nature. Can we give ourselves any thing? What have we that we have not received? Endeavour to rouze the indolent to a conftant activity, to freeze the impe tuous into an apathy, to give a taste for poetry and music to one who has neither taste or ears, you may as well go about washing the Blackmoor white, or giving sight to one born blind. We only improve, polish, and conceal, what nature has put into us; we have nothing of our own putting.

A country gentleman is told, there are too many fish in that pond, they will never thrive; your meadows are crowded with sheep, they have not grass sufficient, they fall away to nothing. Sometime after this advice, it so falls out, that the pikes devour half the carps, and the wolves thin his meadows, so that what sheep are left, fatten apace. Shall he pique himself on his management? Well, this country gentleman is no other than thyself: one of thy passions has swallowed up the rest, and thou boastest of self-conquest, How very few among us, who may not be compared to that decrepid general, ninety years old,

who

who meeting some young officers making a little free with girls, said to them, quite in a passion, Fy, gentlemen, what do you mean! do I set you any such example?

CHINA.

WE go to fetch earth from China, as if we

had none; stuffs, as if we were without stuffs; a small herb to infuse into water, as if our cli mates did not afford any simples. In return, which is a very commendable zeal, we are for converting the Chinese; but we should not offer to dispute their antiquity, and tell them that they are idolaters: for, indeed, what would be thought of a capuchin who, after being kindly entertained at a seat of the Montmorenci's, should go about to persuade them that they were but new made nobles, like secretaries of state, and accuse them of being idolators, having observed in this seat two or three of the constable's statues, which they highly value.

The celebrated Wolff, mathematical professor in the university of Halle, once made a judicious oration on the Chinese philosophers: he praised this ancient race of men, though different from us in the beard, eyes, nose, ears, and reasoning; he commended the Chinese as adoring one Supreme God, and cherishing virtue, thus doing justice to the emperors of China, to the Kolaos, to the tribunals, to the literati : the justice, which the bonzes deserve, is of a different kind.

This Wolff, you must know, drew to Halle a great resort of scholars from all nations: there was in the same university a professor of divinity named Engel, who had scarce a single scholar; G 2

this

this man, exasperated at starving with cold in his empty auditory, conceived a design, and, to be sure very justly, to ruin the professor of mathematics, and, as usual with such men, he charged him with not believing in God.

Some European writers, utter strangers to China, had affirmed, that all the men of any note or consideration at Pekin were atheists; now Wolff had commended the Pekin philosophers; Wolff therefore was an atheist; envy and hatred never formed better syllogisms. Yet this argument, with the help of a cabal and a protector, appeared so conclusive to the king of the country, that he sent the mathematician a dilemma in form, the import of which was, either to leave Halle in twenty-four hours, or to be hanged. As Wolff always reasoned very justly, he immediately left the city; but by his departure the king lost two or three hundred thousand crowns a year, which the great number of that philosopher's scholars brought into the kingdom.

May this be a document to sovereigns, not always to lend an ear to calumny, and sacrifice great man to the rancour of a blockhead.

Let us return to China.

What do we mean here, at the farthest part of the west, thus virulently to dispute whether Fohi, Emperor of China, was the fourteenth Emperor or not, and whether Fohi lived three thousand, or two thousand nine hundred years before our common æra? I should laugh at two Irishmen wrangling at Dublin about who, in the twelfth century, was the owner of the estate which I now hold; is it not clear that they should be determined by me, as having the writings in my hands? The case, I think, is similar, with regard to the first emperors of

China;

China; the tribunals of the country are the best judges.

After all your important altercations about the fourteen princes who reigned before Fohi, the result will be, that China was then very well peopled, and had laws and a political constitution. Now, let me ask you, whether a nation living in towns, and having laws and sovereigns, does not imply a prodigious antiquity? Consi der the time that must have passed, and the concurrence of circumstances, before iron could be found out in the mines, and then fitted for agriculture; and likewise before the invention of the shuttle and all other trades.

Some who play the fool with their pens have contrived a whimsical sort of calculation; the Jesuit Petau, in his sagacious computation, at the epocha of only two hundred and eighty-five years after the deluge, gives the earth an hundred times more inhabitants than can be supposed in it at present. Cumberland and Whiston are no less ridiculous in their calculations. Good men ! Had they only consulted the registers of our American colonies, they would have been astonished. They would have seen how very slowly the human species multiplies, and very often, so far from increasing, diminishes.

Let us, therefore, who are but of yesterday, descendants from the Celts, who have but just cleared our wild countries from the forests with which they were over-run; let us, I say, leave the Chinese and the Indians in the quiet enjoyment of their fine climate and their antiquity; especially let us forbear calling the Emperor of China and the Soubah of Decan idolators: neither are we to be infatuated with Chinese merit.

The constitution of their empire is, indeed, the best in the whole world, the only one which is entirely modelled from paternal power (the mandarins, however, chastise their children very severely) the only one where the governor of a province is punished, if, at the expiration of his office, the people do not shew their approbation of his conduct by loud acclamations; the only one which has instituted prizes for virtue, whilst every where else the laws only punish vice; the only one whose laws have recommended themselves to its conquerors, whilst we are still swayed by the cuftoms of our conquerors, the Burgundians, the Franks, and the Goths. But it must be owned, that the commonalty who are bonzeridden, are no less knavish than ours; that foreigners are extremely imposed on, as amongst us; that in sciences the Chinese are two hundred years behind us; that, like us, they have a thousand ridiculous notions, that they give credit to talismans and judicial astrology, which was also our case for a long time.

It must farther be owned, that they were amazed at our thermometer, at our way of freezing liquors by salt-petre, and with Torricelli's and Ohto Gueric's experiments, just as we ourselves were at our first seeing those physical exhibitions farther, their physicians do not cure mortal distempers any more than ours; and the slighter illnesses nature alone cures them, as here: notwithstanding all this, the Chinese, four thousand years ago, when we did not know our letters, were masters of all that is essentially useful in that knowledge which we so much value ourselves on at present.

CHRIS