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ROSSEAU'S ELOISA. A PROPHECY.

GENEVA, 1761.

In those days there shall appear in France a very extraordinary person, come from the banks of the lake of Geneva. He shall say unto the people, I am possessed of the demon of enthusiasm: I have received from heaven the gift of inconsistency. And the multitude shall run after him, and many shall believe in him, and he shall say unto them, Ye are all villains and rascals, your women are all abandoned, and I am come to live among you. And he shall take advantage of the natural levity of this country, to abuse the people; and he shall add, that all the men are virtuous in the country where he was born; and he shall maintain that the sciences and the arts must necessarily corrupt our morals, and he shall treat of all sorts of sciences and arts; and he shall maintain that the theatre is a source of corruption, and he shall compose operas and write plays. He shall publish, that there is no virtue but among savages, though he never was among them; he shall advise mankind to go naked, and he shall wear laced clothes, when given to him. He shall employ his time in writing French music, and he shall tell you there is no French music. He shall tell you, that it is impossible to preserve your morals if you read romances, and he shall compose a romance; and in this romance shall be seen vice in deeds and virtue in words, and the actors in it shall be mad with love and with philosophy; and in this romance we shall learn how to seduce philosophically, and the disciple shall lose all shame and all modesty, and she shall practise folly and raise maxims with her masters. And bis love-letters shall be philosophical homilies; and he shall get drunk with an English nobleman, who shall insult him, and he shall challenge him to fight, and his mistress, who has lost the honour of her own sex, shall decide with regard to that of men, and she shall teach her master, who taught her every thing, that he ought not to fight. And he shall go to Paris, where he shall be introduced to wantons of the town, and he shall get drunk like a fool; and he shall write an account of this adventure to his mistress, and she shall thank him for it. The man who shall marry his mistress shall know that

she is loved to distraction by another, and this good man notwithstanding shall be an Atheist; and she shall write to her lover, that if she were again at liberty she would wed her husband rather than him: and the philosopher shall have a mind to kill himself, and shall compose a long dissertation to prove that a lover ought always to kill himself when he has lost his mistress; and her husband shall prove to him that it is not worth while, and he shall not kill himself. Then he shall set out to make the tour of the world, in order to allow time for the children of his mistress to grow up, and that he may get to Switzerland time enough to be their preceptor, and to teach them virtue as he has done their mother. And he shall see nothing in the tour of the world; and he shall return to Europe, and when he shall have arrived there, they shall still love each other with transport, and they shall squeeze each other's hands and weep. And this fine lover being in a boat alone with his mistress, shall have a mind to throw her into the water, and himself along with her. And all this they shall call philosophy and virtue; and they shall talk so much of philosophy and virtue, that nobody shall know what philosophy or virtue is. And the mistress of the philosopher shall have a few trees and a rivulet in her garden, and she shall call that her Elysium, and nobody shall be able to comprehend what that Elysium is; and every day she shall feed sparrows in her garden; and she shall sup in the midst of her harvest people; and she shall cut hemp with them, having her lover at her side, and the philosopher shall be desirous of cutting hemp the day after, and the day after that, and all the days of his life. And she shall be a pedant in every word she says, and all the rest of her sex shall be contemptible in her eyes. And she shall die; and before she dies, she shall preach, according to custom; and she shall talk incessantly, till her strength fails her; and she shall dress herself out like a coquette, and die like

a saint.

The author of this book, like those empirics who make wounds in order to show the virtue of their balsams, shall poison our souls for the glory of curing them, and this poison shall act violently on the understanding and on the heart,

and the antidote shall operate only on the understanding; and the poison shall triumph, and he shall boast of having opened a gulf, and he shall think he saves himself from all blame, by crying, Wo be to the young girls who shall fall into it, I have warned them against it in my Preface'-and young girls never read a preface; and he shall say, by way of excuse for his having written a book which inspires vice, that he lives in an age wherein it is impossible to be good; and to justify himself, he shall slander the whole world, and threaten with his contempt all those who do not like his book; and every body shall wonder how, with a soul so pure, he could compose a book which is so much the reverse; and many who believed in him shall believe in him no

more.

Remarkable Tenuity of the Spider's Thread.-In the introduction to a modern system of entomology, there is a description of the process by which the spider weaves its web. After describing the four spinners, as they are termed, from which the visible threads proceed, the writer makes the following curious observations:

These are machinery, through which, by a process more singular than that of rope-spinning, the thread is drawn. Each spinner is pierced like the plate of a wire-drawer, with a multitude of holes, so numerous and exquisitely fine, that a space often not bigger than a pin's point includes a thousand. Through each of these holes proceeds a thread of an inconceivable tenuity, which, immediately after issuing from the orifice, unites with all the other threads from the same spinner into one. Hence, from each spinner proceeds a compound thread; and these four threads at the distance of about one-tenth of an inch from the apex of the spinner, again unite, and form the thread we are accustomed to see, which the spider uses in forming its web. Thus, a spider's web, even spun by the smallest species, and when so fine that it is almost imperceptible to our senses, is not, as we suppose, a single line, but a rope, composed of at least 4,000 strands. But, to feel all the wonders of this fact, we must follow Leuwenhoeck in one of his calculations on the subject. This renowned microscopic observer found, by an accurate

estimation, that the threads of the spiders, some of which are not larger than a grain of sand, are so fine, that 400,000 of them would not exceed in thickness one of the hairs of his beard. Now we know that each of these threads is composed of 4,000 still finer. It follows, therefore, that above 16,000,000 of the finest threads which issue from such ɛpiders, are not altogether thicker than a human hair.'

Literary Intelligence.

In a few weeks will be published 'Vindicia Hibernicæ or a Vindication of Ireland from some of the errors contained in the Histories of Temple, Borlase, Rapin, Carte, Leland, Macauley and Hume on the subject of the affairs of that Kingdom' in one large octavo volume. By Matthew Carey, Esq.

Henry Wheaton, Esq. Reporter to the Supreme Court of the United States is preparing for the press a Digest of the Decisions of that Court from its establishment in 1789 until the present time; and also including the decisions of the Continental Court of appeals in prize causes during the Revolutionary war.

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Messrs Mitchell and Ames are publishing a History of the United States before the Revolution, with some account of the Aborigines' by E. Sanford, Esq. in one vol, octavo.

Mr. Moses Thomas has in press a new satirical work entitled the Hermit in America on a visit in Philadelphia, containing some account of the Beaux and Belles, Dandies and Coquettes, Cotillion Parties, Supper parties, Tea parties, &c. &c. &c. of that famous city. By a young gentleman of this city.

Our countryman Mr. D. B. Warden is about to publish in London 'a statistical, political and historical account of the United States, &c. on a new plan' 3 vols. octavo.

Tales of my Landlord.-There is said to be a third series of these charming novels preparing for publication, of which the copy-right has sold for five thousand guineas.

Fine Arts. Mr. Sully is engaged to paint a large picture for the legislature of North Carolina; the subject is the crossing of the Delaware before the battle of Trenton. It will contain a full size equestrian figure of general Washington.

THENEWTON
PUBLICLIR.

ASTON, LENOX AND TILDEN FOUNDATIONS.

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THE

ANALECTIC MAGAZINE.

MARCH, 1819.

ART. I.-A Treatise on Political Economy: to which is prefixed, a Supplement to a Preceding Work on the Understanding, or Elements of Ideology; with an Analytical Table, and an Introduction on the Faculty of the Will. By the Count Destutt Tracy, member of the Senate and Institute of France, and of the American Philosophical Society. Translated from the unpublished French Original. Georgetown, published by Joseph Milligan, 1817.

THIS

HIS treatise is ushered into the presence of the public, by the following letter from Mr. Jefferson to the publisher. Monticello, October 25, 1818. SIR-I now return you, according to promise, the translation of M. Destutt Tracy's Treatise on Political Economy, which I have carefully revised and corrected. The numerous corrections of sense in the translation, have necessarily destroyed uniformity of style, so that all I may say on that subject is, that the sense of the author is every where now faithfully expressed. It would be difficult to do justice, in any translation, to the style of the original, in which no word is unnecessary, no word can be changed for the better, and severity of logic results in that brevity, to which we wish all science reduced. The merit of this work will, I hope, place it in the hands of every reader in our country. By diffusing sound principles of Political Economy, it will protect the public industry from the parasite institutions now consuming it, and lead us to that just and regular distribution of the public burthens from which we have sometimes strayed. It goes forth, therefore, with my hearty prayers, that while the Review of Montesquieu, by the same author, is made with us the elementary book of instruction in the principles of civil government, so the present work may be in the particular branch of Political Economy.

MR. MILLIGAN.

THOMAS JEFFERSON.

A recommendation so strong, from a person of such eminence in literary as well as political station, gives no common interest to the book that has called forth this voluntary eulogium; and the public will of course feel much curiosity to know something of the author, and of the contents and character of the book, thus highly recommended to their notice.

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