London, on the same day; that while he was called God's vicegerent in Italy, he should be represented in the streets of Moscow as a hog, for the amusement of Peter the Great. Mahomet, stationed at the right hand of God over half the globe, and damned over the other half, is the greatest of contrasts. Travel far from your own country, and everything will be contrast for you. The white man who first saw a negro was much astonished; but the first who said that the negro was the offspring of a white pair astonishes me much more; I do not agree with him. A painter who represents white men, negroes, and olive-coloured people, may display fine contrasts. CONVULSIONARIES. ABOUT the year 1724, the cemetery of St. Medard abounded in amusement, and many miracles were performed there. The following epigram by the Duchess of Maine gives a tolerable account of the character of most of them : JJne decroteur à la Royale, A Port-Royal shoe-black, who had one lame leg, To make both alike the Lord's favour did beg; Heav'n listen'd, and straightway a miracle came, For quickly he rose up, with both his legs lame. The miracles continued, as is well known, until a guard was stationed at the cemetery. De par le roi, défense à Dieu Louis to God:-To keep the peace, Here miracles must henceforth cease. It is also well known that the jesuits being no longer able to perform similar miracles, in consequence of Xavier having exhausted their stock of grace and miraculous power, by resuscitating nine dead persons at one time, resolved, in order to counteract the credit of the Jansenists, to engrave a print of Jesus Christ dressed as a Jesuit. The Jansenists, on the other hand, in order to give a satisfactory proof that Jesus Christ had not assumed the habit of a Jesuit, filled Paris with convulsions, and attracted great crowds of people to witness them. The counsellor of parliament, Carré de Montgeron, went to present to the king a quarto collection of all these miracles, attested by a thousand witnesses. He was very properly shut up in a chateau, where attempts were made to restore his senses by regimen; but truth always prevails over persecution, and the miracles lasted for thirty years together, without interruption. Sister Rose, sister Illuminée, and the sisters Promise and Comfitte, were scourged with great energy, without, however, exhibiting any appearance of the whipping next day. They were bastinadoed on their stomachs without injury, and placed before a large fire, but being defended by certain pomades and preparations, were not burnt. At length, as every art is constantly advancing towards perfection, their persecutors concluded with actually thrusting swords through their chairs, and with crucifying them. A famous schoolmaster had also the benefit of crucifixion; all which was done to convince the world that a certain bull was ridiculous, a fact that might have been easily proved without so much trouble. However, Jesuits and Jansenists, all united against the "Spirit of Laws," and against... and against... and against . . . and . . . And after all this, we dare to ridicule Laplanders, Samoiedes, and Negroes! CORN.* THEY must be sceptics indeed who doubt that pain comes from panis. But to make bread we must have corn. The Gauls had corn in the time of. Cæsar: The new light thrown upon the subject of corn by the political economists, and the progress of general information, in a great degree supersede the information and remarks of Voltaire; so that little more is retained of this article, than a few faets and pleasantries, conveyed in his own very peculiar vein.-T. but whence did they take the word blé ? It is pretended that it is from bladum, a word employed in the barbarous Latin of the middle age by the chancellor Desvignes, or de Erneis, whose eyes, it is said, were torn out by order of the emperor Frederick II. But the Latin words of these barbarous ages were only ancient Celtic or Teutonic words Latinized. Bladum then comes from our blead, and not our blead from bladum. The Italians call it bioda, and the countries in which the ancient Roman language is preserved still say blia. This knowledge is not infinitely useful; but we are curious to know where the Gauls and Teutones found corn to sow? We are told that the Tyrians brought it into Spain, the Spaniards into Gaul, and the Gauls into Germany. And where did the Tyrians get this corn? Probably from the Greeks, in exchange for their alphabet. Who made this present to the Greeks? It was the goddess Ceres, without doubt; and having ascended to Ceres, we can scarcely go any higher. Ceres must have descended from heaven expressly to give us wheat, rye, and barley. However, as the credit of Ceres, who gave corn to the Greeks, and that of Ishet or Isis, who gratified the Egyptians with it, are at present very much decayed, we may still be said to remain in uncertainty as to the origin of corn. Sanchoniathon tells us that Dagon or Dagan, one of the grandsons of Thaut, had the superintendence of the corn in Phoenicia. Now his Thaut was near the time of our Jared; from which it appears that corn is very ancient, and that it is of the same antiquity as grass. Perhaps this Dagon was the first who made bread; but that is not demonstrated. What a strange thing that we should know positively that we are obliged to Noah for wine, and that we do not know to whom we owe the invention of bread. And what is still more strange, we are still so ungrateful to Noah, that while we have more than two thousand songs in honour of Bacchus, we scarcely sing one in honour of our benefactor Noah. A Jew assured me that corn came without cultiva tion in Mesopotamia,, as apples, wild pears, chesnuts; and medlars, in the west. It is as well to believe him, until we are sure of the contrary; for it is necessary that corn should grow spontaneously somewhere. It has become the ordinary and indispensable nourish ment in the finest climates, and in all the north. ̈· The great philosophers whose talents we estimate so highly, and whose systems we do not follow, have pre tended, in the natural history of the dog (page 195) that men created corn; and that our ancestors, by means of sowing tares and cow-grass together, changed them into wheat. As these philosophers are not of our opinion on shells, they will permit us to differ from them on corn. We do not think that tulips could ever have been produced from jasmine. We find that, the germ of corn is quite different from that of tares, and we do not believe in any transmutation. When it shall be proved to us, we will retract. We have seen, in the article BREAD-TREE, that in three quarters of the earth bread is not eaten. It is pretended that the Ethiopians laughed at the Egyptians, who lived on bread. But since corn is our chief nourishment, it has become one of the greatest objects of commerce and politics. So much has been written on this subject, that if a labourer sowed as many pounds of wheat as we have volumes on this commodity, he might expect a more ample harvest, and become richer than those who, in their painted and gilded saloons, are ignorant of the excess of his oppression and misery. Egypt became the best country in the world for wheat, when, after several ages, which it is difficult to reckon exactly, the inhabitants found the secret of rene déring a destructive river, which had always inundated the country, and was only useful to the rats, insects, reptiles, and crocodiles of Egypt, serviceable to the fecundity of the soil. Its waters, mixed with a black mud, were neither useful to quench the thirst of the inhabitants, nor for ablution. It must have taken immense time and a prodigious labour to subdue the river, to divide it into canals, to found towns on lands formerly moveable, and to change the caverns of the rocks into vast buildings.. All this is more astonishing than the pyramids; for being accomplished, behold a people sure of the best corn in the world, without the necessity of labour! It is the inhabitant of this country who raises and fattens poultry superior to that of Caux, who is habited in the finest linen in the most temperate climate, and who has none of the real wants of other people. Towards the year 1750, the French nation, surfeited with tragedies, comedies, operas, romances, and romantic histories with moral reflections still more romantic, and with theological disputes on grace and on convulsionaries, began to reason upon corn. They even forgot the vine, in treating of wheat and rye. Useful things were written on agriculture, and every body read them except the labourers. The good people imagined, as they walked out of the comic opera, that France had a prodigious quantity of corn to sell, and the cry of the nation at last obtained of the government, in 1764, the liberty of exportation." * Accordingly they exported. The result was exactly what it had been in the time of Henry IV. they sold a little too much, and a barren year succeeding, Mademoiselle Bernard was obliged, for the second time, to sell her necklace to get linen and chemises. Now the complainants passed from one extreme to the other and exclaimed against the exportation that they had so recently demanded, which shows how difficult it is to please all the world and his wife. -Able and well-meaning people, without interest, have written with as much sagacity as courage, in favour of the unlimited liberty of the commerce in grain. Others of as much mind, and with equally pure views, have written in the idea of limiting this liberty; and the Neapolitan abbé Gagliani amused the French nation on the expor * A celebrated milliner. |