, temperate, chaste, indulgent to others'
faults, pious and no shaft of ridicule be aimed at you to destroy your
wisdom, as yet only in its bud. Heaven has given you liberty, health, a
good conscience, and friends; kings themselves, whose favour you desire,
are not so happy.

_Paul._--Ah! I only want to have Virginia with me: without her I have
nothing,--with her, I should possess all my desire. She alone is to me
birth, glory, and fortune. But, since her relations will only give her
to some one with a great name, I will study. By the aid of study and of
books, learning and celebrity are to be attained. I will become a man of
science: I will render my knowledge useful to the service of my country,
without injuring any one, or owning dependence on any one. I will become
celebrated, and my glory shall be achieved only by myself.

_The Old Man._--My son, talents are a gift yet more rare than either
birth or riches, and undoubtedly they are a greater good than either,
since they can never be taken away from us, and that they obtain for
us every where public esteem. But they may be said to be worth all
that they cost us. They are seldom acquired but by every species of
privation, by the possession of exquisite sensibility, which often
produces inward unhappiness, and which exposes us without to the malice
and persecutions of our contemporaries. The lawyer envies not, in
France, the glory of the soldier, nor does the soldier envy that of the
naval officer; but they will all oppose you, and bar your progress to
distinction, because your assumption of superior ability will wound
the self-love of them all. You say that you will do good to men; but
recollect, that he who makes the earth produce a single ear of corn
more, renders them a greater service than he who writes a book.

_Paul._--Oh! she, then, who planted this papaw tree, has made a more
useful and more grateful present to the inhabitants of these forests
than if she had given them a whole library.

So saying, he threw his arms around the tree, and kissed it with
transport.

_The Old Man._--The best of books,--that which preaches nothing but
equality, brotherly love, charity, and peace,--the Gospel, has served as
a pretext, during many centuries, for Europeans to let loose all their
fury. How many tyrannies, both public and private, are still practised
in its name on the face of the earth! After this, who will dare to
flatter himself that any thing he can write will