} tiquity, are the Indian, the Chinese, and the Hebrew. half of our globe, excepting those of Mexico and Peru, which are not very ancient. Besides, knotted cords are a sort We cannot give the name of annals to of books which cannot enter into very vague and rude fragments of history minute details. Three-fourths of Africa without date, order, or connection. They never had annals; and, at the presentare riddles proposed by antiquity to posday, in the most learned nations,-interity, who understand nothing at all of those which have even used and abused them. the art of writing the most, ninety-nine We venture to affirm that Sanchoniaout of a hundred individuals may be re-thon, who is said to have lived before the garded as not knowing anything that hap- time of Moses, composed annals. He pened there farther back than four gene-probably limited his researches to cosmorations, and as almost ignorant of the gony, as Hesiod afterwards did in Greece. names of their great-grandfathers. Such We advance this latter opinion only as a is the case with nearly all the inhabitants doubt; for we write only to be informed, of towns and villages, very few families and not to teach. holding titles of their possessions. When a litigation arises respecting the limits of a field or a meadow, the judges decide according to the testimony of the old men ; and possession constitutes the title. Some great events are transmitted from father to son, and are entirely altered in passing from mouth to mouth. They have no other annals. But what deserves the greatest attention is, that Sanchoniathon quotes the books of the Egyptian Thoth, who, he tells us, lived eight hundred years before him. Now Sanchoniathan probably wrote in the age in which we place Joseph's adventure in Egypt. We commonly place the epoch of the promotion of the Jew Joseph to the prime-ministry of Egypt at the year of {the creation 2,300. If, then, the books of Thoth were {written eight hundred years before, they were written in the year 1500 of the creation. Therefore, their date was a hun{dred and fifty-six years before the Deluge. They must, then, have been engraven on stone, and preserved in the universal inundation. Look at all the villages of our Europe, so polished, so enlightened, so full of immense libraries, and which now seems to groan under the enormous mass of books. In each village, two men at most, on an average, can read and write. Society loses nothing in consequence. All works are performed-building, planting, sowing, reaping, as they were in the remotest times. The labourer has not even leisure to regret that he has not been taught to Another difficulty is, that Sanchoniaconsume some hours of the day in read-thon does not speak of the Deluge, and ing. This proves that mankind had no that no Egyptian writer has ever been need of historical monuments, to cultivate quoted who does speak of it. But these the arts really necessary to life. difficulties vanishes before the Book of Genesis, inspired by the Holy Ghost. It is astonishing, not that so many tribes of people are without annals, but that three or four nations have preserved them for five thousand years or thereabouts, through so many violent revolutions which the earth has undergone. Not a line remains of the ancient Egyptian, Chaldean, or Persian annals, nor of those of the Latins and Etruscans. The nly annals than can boast of a little an 11 We have no intention here to plunge into the chaos which eighty writers have sought to clear up, by inventing different chronologies: we always keep to the Old Testament. We only ask, whether in the time of Thoth, they wrote in hieroglyphics, or in alphabetical characters ? Whether stone and brick had vet been M laid aside for vellum, or any other mate-matic Sanction abolished them again. rial? Whether Thoth wrote annals, or only a cosmogony? Whether there were some pyramids already built in the time of Thoth ? Whether Lower Egypt was already inhabited ? Whether canals had been constructed to receive the waters of the Nile ? Whether the Chaldeans had already taught the arts of the Egyptians, and whether the Chaldeans had received them from the Brahmins?— There are persons who have resolved all these questions; which once occasioned a man of sense and wit to say of a grave doctor, "That man must be very ignorant, for he answers every question that is asked him." ANNATS. THE epoch of the establishment of annats is uncertain; which is a proof that the exaction of them is a usurpation-an { extortionary custom. Whatever is not founded on an authentic law, is an abuse. Every abuse ought to be reformed, unless the reform is more dangerous than the abuse itself. Usurpation begins by small { and successive encroachments; equity and the public interest at length exclaim and protest: then comes policy, which does its best to reconcile usurpation with equity, and the abuse remains. Francis I. by a private treaty which he made with Leo X. and which was not inserted in the concordat, allowed the pope to raise this tribute, which produced him annually, during that prince's reign, a hundred thousand crowns of that day, according to the calculation then made by Jacques Capelle, advocate-general to the parliament of Paris. The parliament, the universities, the clergy, the whole nation, protested against this exaction; and Henry II. yielding at length to the cries of his people, renewed the law of Charles VII. by an edict of the 3d of September, 1551. The paying of annats was again forbidden by Charles IX. at the States of Orleans, in 1560:-" By the advice of our council, and in pursuance of the decrees of the Holy Councils, the ancient ordinances of the kings our predecessors, and the decisions of our courts of parliament, we order that all conveying of gold and silver out of our kingdom, and paying of money under the name of annats, vacant or otherwise, shall cease, on pain of a four-fold penalty on the offenders." This law, promulgated in the general assembly of the nation, must have seemed irrevocable; but, two years afterwards, the same prince, subdued by the court of Rome, at that time powerful, re-estab{lished what the whole nation and himself had abrogated. edict of the 22d of January, 1596. In several dioceses, the bishops, chap- Henry, IV. who feared no danger, but ters, and arch-deacons, after the exam-feared Rome, confirmed the annats by an ple of the popes, imposed annats upon the cures. In Normandy, this exaction is called droit de déport. Policy having no interest in maintaining this pillage, it was abolished in several places; it still exists in others; so true is it that money is the first object of worship! In 1409, at the council of Pisa, Pope Alexander V.expressly renounced annats; Charles VII. condemned them by an ict of April, 1418; the council of sle declared that they came under the mination of simony; and the Prag Three celebrated jurisconsults, Dumoulin, Lannoy, and Duaren, have written strongly against annats, which they call a real simony, If, in default of their payment, the pope refuses his bulls. ? Duaren advises the Gallican church to imitate that of Spain, which, in the twelfth council of Toledo, charged the archbishop of that city, on the pope's refusal, to provide for the prelates appointed {by the king. It is one of the most certain maxims of ANTHROPOMORPHITES. ANTI-LUCRETIUS. 83 French law, consecrated by article four-painters and sculptors. As soon as they teen of our liberties, that the bishop of could draw a little or shape a figure, they Rome has no power over the temporali-made an image of the Divinity. ties of benefices, but enjoys the revenues If the Egyptians consecrated cats and of annats only by the king's permission. gnats, they also sculptured Isis and But ought there not to be a term to this { Osiris. Bel was carved at Babylon, Herpermission? What avails our enlighten-cules at Tyre, Brahma at India. ment, if we are always to retain our abuses? The Mussulmans did not paint God as a man. The Guebres had no image of The amount of the sums which have the Great Being. The Sabean Arabs did been and still are paid to the pope, is not give the human figure to the stars. truly frightful. The attorney-general, The Jews did not give it to God in their Jean de St. Romain, has remarked that, temple. None of these nations cultivated in the time of Pius II. twenty-two bish- the art of design; and if Solomon placed opricks having become vacant in France figures of animals in his temple, it s in the space of three years, it was neces-likely that he had them carved at Tyre; sary to carry to Rome a hundred and but all the Jews have spoken of God as twenty thousand crowns; that sixty-one of a man. abbeys having also become vacant, the Although they had no images, they like sum had been paid to the court of seem to have made God a man on all ocRome; that, about the same time, there casions. He comes down into the garhad been paid to this court for provisions den; he walks there every day at noon; for the priorships, deaneries, and other { he talks to his creatures; he talks to the inferior dignities, a thousand crowns; serpent; he makes himself heard by Mothat for each curate there was at least a ses, in the bush; he shows him only his gráce expectative, which was sold for back parts on the mountain; he nevertwenty-five crowns; besides an infinite theless talks to him, face to face, like one number of dispensations, amounting to friend to another. two millions of crowns. St. Romain lived in the time of Louis XI. Judge, then, what these sums would now amount to. Judge how much other states have given. Judge whether the Roman commonwealth, in the time of Lucullus, drew more gold and silver from the nations conquered by its sword, than the popes, the fathers of those same nations, have drawn from them by their pens. Supposing that St. Romain's calculation is too high by half, which is very unlikely, does there not still remain a sum sufficiently considerable to entitle us to call the apostolical chamber to an account, and demand restitution,-seeing that there is nothing at all apostolical in such an amount of money? ANTHROPOMORPHITES. THEY are said to have been a small sect of the fourth century; but they were rather the sect of every people that had In the Koran, too, God is always looked up to as a king. In the twelfth chapter, a throne is given him above the waters. He had this Koran written by a secretary, as kings have their orders. He sent this same Koran to Mahomet, by the angel Gabriel, as kings communicate their orders through the great officers of the crown. In short, although God is declared in the Koran to be neither be{getting nor begotten, there is, nevertheless a morsel of anthropomorphism. In the Greek and Latin churches, God has always been painted with a great beard. ANTI-LUCRETIUS. THE reading of the whole poem of the late Cardinal Polignac has confirmed me in the idea which I formed of it when he read to me the first book. I am moreover astonished that, amidst the dissipations of the world and the troubles in public life, he should have been able to write a long work in verse, in a foreign language;-he, who could hardly have made four good lines in his own tongue. It seems to me that he often united the strength of Lucretius and the elegance of Virgil. I admire him, above all, for that facility with which he expresses such difficult things. sold for money the remission of the most horrible enormities. I beheld, on one hand, infatuated men, stained with vices, and seeking to purify themselves before impure gods; and on the other, knaves who boasted that they could justify the most perverse by initiating them in mysteries, by dropping bullock's blood on their heads, or by dipping them in the waters of the Ganges. I beheld the most unjust wars undertaken with perfect sanc Perhaps, indeed, his Anti-Lucretius is too diffuse, and too little diversified; but he is here to be examined as a philose-tity, so soon as a ram's liver was found pher, not as a poet. It appears to me that so fine a mind as his should have done more justice to the morals of Epicurus, who, though he was a very bad natural philosopher, was, nevertheless, a very worthy man, and always taught mildness, temperance, moderation, and justice, virtues which his example inculcated still more forcibly. In the Anti-Lucretius, this great man is thus apostrophised— Si virtutis eras avidus, rectique bonique If virtue, justice, goodness, were thy care, But Epicurus might reply to the cardinal: "If I had had the happiness of knowing, like you, the true God,—of be- { ing born, like you, in a pure and holy religion, I should certainly not have rejected that revealed God, whose tenets were necessarily unknown to my mind, but whose morality was in my heart. 1 could not admit the existence of such gods as were announced to me by Paganism. I was too rational to adore divinities made to spring from a father and a mother, like mortals, and like them, to make war upon one another. I was too great a friend to virtue, not to hate a religion which now invited to crime by the example of those gods themselves, and now unspotted, or a woman, with hair dishevelled and rolling eyes, uttered words of which neither she nor any one else knew the meaning. In short, I beheld all the countries of the earth stained with the blood of human victims, sacrificed by barbarous pontiffs to barbarous gods. I consider that I did well to detest such religions. Mine is virtue. I exhorted my disciples not to meddle with the affairs of this world, because they were horribly governed. A true Epicurean was mild, moderate, just, amiable-a man of whom no society had to complain-one who did not pay executioners to assassinate in public those who thought differently from himself. From hence to the holy religion in which you have been bred, there is but one step. I destroyed the false gods; and, had I lived in your day, I would have recognised the true ones.' Thus might Epicurus justify himself concerning his error. He might even entitle himself to pardon respecting the dogma of the immortality of the soul, by saying :-"Pity me for having combated a truth which God revealed five hundred years after my birth. I thought like all the first Pagan legislators of the world; and they were all ignorant of this truth." I wish, then, that Cardinal Polignac had pitied while he condemned Epicurus: it would have been no detriment to fine poetry. With regard to physics, it appears to me that the author has lost much time and many verses in refuting the declination of atoms and the other absurdities which swarm in the poem of Lucretius. This is employing artillery to destroy a cottage. Besides, why remove Lucretius' reveries to substitute those of Descartes ? the same thing, at the sources of the Guadalquivir, the Guadiana, the Douro, and the Ebro. For of Pison we easily make Pharis, and of Pharis we easily vir. The Gihon, it is plain, is the Guadiana, for they both begin with a G. And the Ebro, which is in Catalonia, is unquestionably the Euphrates, both begin Cardinal Polignac has inserted in his poem some very fine lines on the disco-make the Bætis, which is the Guadalquiveries of Newton; but in these, unfortunately for himself, he combats demonstrated truths. The philosophy of Newton is not to be discussed in verse; it is scarcely to be approached in prose.ning with an E. Founded altogether on geometry, the genius of poetry is not fit to assail it. The surface of these truths may be decorated with fine verses; but to fathom them, calculation is requisite, and not verse. ANTIQUITY. SECTION I. But a Scotchman comes, and in his turn demonstrates that the garden of Eden was at Edinburgh, which has retained its name; and it is not unlikely that, in a few centuries, this opinion will prevail. The whole globe was once burned, says a man conversant with ancient and modern history; for I have read in a journal, that charcoal quite black has been found a HAVE you not sometimes seen, in a village, Pierre Aoudri and his wife Pero-hundred feet deep, among mountains nelle striving to go before their neighbours in a procession? "Our grandfathers," say they, "rung the bells, before those who elbow us now had so much as a stable of their own." The vanity of Pierre Aoudri, his wife, and his neighbours, knows no better. They grow warm. The quarrel is an important one, for honour is in question. Proofs must now be found. Some learned church-singer discovers an old rusty iron pot, marked with an A, the initial of the brazier's name who made the pot. Pierre Aoudri persuades himself that it was the helmet of one of his ancestors. So Cæsar descended from a hero and from the goddess Venus. Such is the history of nations; such is, very nearly, the knowledge of early antiquity. covered with wood. And it is also suspected that there were charcoal-burners in this place. Phaeton's adventure sufficiently shows that everything has been boiled, even to the bottom of the sea. The sulphur of Mount Vesuvius incontrovertibly proves that the banks of the Rhine, the Danube, {the Ganges, the Nile, and the Great Yellow River, are nothing but sulphur, nitre, and oil of guiacum, which only wait for the moment of explosion to reduce the earth to ashes, as it has already once been. The sand on which we walk is an evident proof that the universe has vitrified, and that our globe is nothing but a ball of glass-like our ideas. { But if fire has changed our globe, water has produced still more wonderful revoThe learned of Armenia demonstrate {lutions. For it is plain that the sea, the that the terrestrial paradise was in their tides of which, in our latitudes, rise eight country. Some profound Swedes demon- feet, has produced the mountains, which strate that it was somewhere about Lake are sixteen to seventeen thousand feet high. Wenner, which exhibits visible remains This is so true, that some learned men, of it. Some Spaniards, too, demonstrate who never were in Switzerland, found a that it was in Castile. While the Japa-large vessel there, with all its rigging, penese, the Chinese, the Tartars, the In- trified, either on Mount St. Gothard or at dians, the Africans, and the Americans, the bottom of a precipice-it is not posiare so unfortunate as not even to know tively known which; but it is quite certhat a terrestrial paradise once existed attain that it was there. Therefore, men the sources of the Pison, the Gihon, the were originally fishes-Q. E. D Tigris and the Euphrates, or, which is Coming down to antiquity less ancient, |