ertain data,
or concessions of truth that were self-evident; and therefore he must
have his assent to a few axioms, which he was sure Mr. Pickle would see
no reason to dispute. "In the first place, then," said he, "you will
grant, I hope, that youth and discretion are with respect to each other
as two parallel lines, which, though infinitely produced, remain still
equidistant, and will never coincide: then you must allow that passion
acts upon the human mind in a ratio compounded of the acuteness of
sense, and constitutional heat; and, thirdly, you will not deny that
the angle of remorse is equal to that of precipitation. These postulata
being admitted," added he, taking pen, ink, and paper, and drawing a
parallelogram, "let youth be represented by the right line, a b, and
discretion by another right line, c d, parallel to the former. Complete
the parallelogram, a b c d, and let the point of intersection, b,
represent perdition. Let passion, represented under the letter c, have
a motion in the direction c a. At the same time, let another motion
be communicated to it, in the direction c d, it will proceed in the
diagonal c b, and describe it in the same time that it would have
described the side c a, by the first motion, or the side, c d, by the
second. To understand the demonstration of this corollary, we must
premise this obvious principle, that when a body is acted upon by a
motion of power parallel to a right line given in position, this power,
or motion, has no effect to cause the body to approach towards that
line, or recede from it, but to move in a line parallel to a right line
only; as appears from the second law of motion: therefore c a being
parallel to d b--"

His pupil having listened to him thus far, could contain himself no
longer, but interrupted the investigation with a loud laugh, and
told him that his postulata put him in mind of a certain learned and
ingenious gentleman, who undertook to disprove the existence of natural
evil, and asked no other datum on which to found his demonstration,
but an acknowledgment that "everything that is, is right." "You may
therefore," said he, in a peremptory tone, "spare yourself the trouble
of torturing your invention; for, after all, I am pretty certain that
I shall want capacity to comprehend the discussion of your lemma, and
consequently be obliged to all the pangs of an ingenuous mind that I
refuse my assent to your deduction."

Mr. Jolter was disconcerted at th