t if you please; but if not, when you get
to England, desire the bettermost sort of people that you are acquainted
with to read to you an act of parliament, which of course is written in the
clearest and plainest style in which anything can be written, and you will
find that not one in ten will be able to make tolerable sense of it. The
language would have been an excellent language, if it had not been for the
council of Nice, and the words had been well boiled.

"Here the company burst out into a fit of laughter. The Englishman got up
and shook hands with the Swede: _si non e vero_, said he, _e ben
trovato_.[476] But, however I may laugh at it here, I would not advise you
to tell this story on the other side of the water. So here's a bumper to
Old England for ever, and God save the king."

ON YOUTHFUL PRODIGIES.

The accounts given of extraordinary children and adolescents frequently
defy credence.[477] I will give two well-attested instances.

The celebrated mathematician Alexis Claude Clairault (now Clairaut)[478]
was certainly born in May, 1713. His treatise on curves of double curvature
(printed in 1731)[479] received {220} the approbation of the Academy of
Sciences, August 23, 1729. Fontenelle, in his certificate of this, calls
the author sixteen years of age, and does not strive to exaggerate the
wonder, as he might have done, by reminding his readers that this work, of
original and sustained mathematical investigation, must have been coming
from the pen at the ages of fourteen and fifteen. The truth was, as
attested by De Molieres,[480] Clairaut had given public proofs of his power
at twelve years old. His age being thus publicly certified, all doubt is
removed: say he had been--though great wonder would still have been
left--twenty-one instead of sixteen, his appearance, and the remembrances
of his friends, schoolfellows, etc., would have made it utterly hopeless to
knock off five years of that age while he was on view in Paris as a young
lion. De Molieres, who examined the work officially for the _Garde des
Sceaux_, is transported beyond the bounds of official gravity, and says
that it "ne merite pas seulement d'etre imprime, mais d'etre admire comme
un prodige d'imagination, de conception, et de capacite."[481]

That Blaise Pascal was born in June, 1623, is perfectly well established
and uncontested.[482] That he wrote his conic sections at the age of
sixteen might be difficult to establish, though tol