sant contempt and good-humored superiority, and thanking heaven
for his increased lights, he will shut the book, and be a fool as his
fathers were before him.

It runs in the blood. Well hast thou said, O ragged Macaire,--"Le jour
va passer, MAIS LES BADAUDS NE PASSERONT PAS."

LITTLE POINSINET.

About the year 1760, there lived, at Paris, a little fellow, who was
the darling of all the wags of his acquaintance. Nature seemed, in the
formation of this little man, to have amused herself, by giving loose
to half a hundred of her most comical caprices. He had some wit and
drollery of his own, which sometimes rendered his sallies very amusing;
but, where his friends laughed with him once, they laughed at him a
thousand times, for he had a fund of absurdity in himself that was more
pleasant than all the wit in the world. He was as proud as a peacock, as
wicked as an ape, and as silly as a goose. He did not possess one single
grain of common sense; but, in revenge, his pretensions were enormous,
his ignorance vast, and his credulity more extensive still. From his
youth upwards, he had read nothing but the new novels, and the verses in
the almanacs, which helped him not a little in making, what he called,
poetry of his own; for, of course, our little hero was a poet. All the
common usages of life, all the ways of the world, and all the customs of
society, seemed to be quite unknown to him; add to these good qualities,
a magnificent conceit, a cowardice inconceivable, and a face so
irresistibly comic, that every one who first beheld it was compelled
to burst out a-laughing, and you will have some notion of this strange
little gentleman. He was very proud of his voice, and uttered all his
sentences in the richest tragic tone. He was little better than a dwarf;
but he elevated his eyebrows, held up his neck, walked on the tips of
his toes, and gave himself the airs of a giant. He had a little pair of
bandy legs, which seemed much too short to support anything like a human
body; but, by the help of these crooked supporters, he thought he could
dance like a Grace; and, indeed, fancied all the graces possible were
to be found in his person. His goggle eyes were always rolling about
wildly, as if in correspondence with the disorder of his little brain
and his countenance thus wore an expression of perpetual wonder. With
such happy natural gifts, he not only fell into all traps that were laid
for him, but seemed almost to go