on of the titles they had. We all approved the cure's wisdom,
and Grimm insisted on having his portrait taken."[214]

_Chinese Superiority_.---"Apropos of the Chinese, do you know that with
them nobility ascends, and descends never? It is the children who
ennoble their ancestors, and not the ancestors the children. And upon my
word that is most sensible. We are greater poets, greater philosophers,
greater orators, greater architects, greater astronomers, greater
geometers, than these good people; but they understand better than we
the science of good sense and virtue; and if peradventure that science
should happen to be the first of all sciences, they would be right in
saying that they have two eyes and we have only one, and all the rest of
the world is blind."[215]

_Why Women write good Letters_.--"She writes admirably, really
admirably. That is because good style is in the heart; and that is why
so many women talk and write like angels without ever having learnt
either to talk or to write, and why so many pedants will both talk and
write ill all the days of their life, though they were never weary of
studying,--only without learning."[216]

"A little adventure has just happened here that proves that all our fine
sermons on intolerance have as yet produced but poor fruit. A young man
of respectable birth, some say apprentice to an apothecary, others to a
grocer, took it into his head to go through a course of chemistry; his
master consented, on condition that he should pay for board; the lad
agreed. At the end of the quarter the master demanded the money, and it
was paid. Soon after, another demand from the master; the apprentice
replied that he barely owed a single quarter. The master denied that the
first quarter had been paid. The affair was taken into court. The master
is put on his oath, and swears. He had no sooner perjured himself than
the apprentice produced his receipt, and the master was straightway
fined and disgraced. He was a scoundrel who deserved it, but the
apprentice was a rash fellow, whose victory was bought at a price dearer
than life. He had received, in payment or otherwise, from some
colporteur, two copies of _Christianity Unveiled_, and one of them he
had sold to his master. The master informs against him. The colporteur,
his wife, and his apprentice, are all three arrested, and they have just
been pilloried, whipped, and branded, and the apprentice condemned to
nine years of the galleys, the