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CHAP. XIV

——But she did not know I was under a vow not to shave my beard till I got to Paris;——yet I hate to make mysteries of nothing;——’tis the cold cautiousness of one of those little souls from which Lessius (lib. 13. de moribus divinis, cap. 24.) hath made his estimate, wherein he setteth forth, That one Dutch mile, cubically multiplied, will allow room enough, and to spare, for eight hundred thousand millions,1 which he supposes to be as great a number of souls (counting from the fall of Adam) as can possibly be damn’d to the end of the world.

From what he has made this second estimate——unless from the parental goodness of God—I don’t know——I am much more at a loss what could be in Franciscus Ribbera’s head, who pretends that no less a space than one of two hundred Italian miles multiplied into itself, will be sufficient to hold the like number——he certainly must have gone upon some of the old Roman souls, of which he had read, without reflecting how much, by a gradual and most tabid2 decline, in a course of eighteen hundred years, they must unavoidably have shrunk, so as to have come, when he wrote, almost to nothing.

In Lessius’s time, who seems the cooler man, they were as little as can be imagined——

——We find them less now——

And next winter we shall find them less again; so that if we go on from little to less, and from less to nothing, I hesitate not one moment to affirm, that in half a century, at this rate, we shall have no souls at all; which being the period beyond which I doubt likewise of the existence of the Christian faith, ’twill be one advantage that both of ’em will be exactly worn out together——

Blessed Jupiter! and blessed every other heathen god and goddess! for now ye will all come into play again, and with Priapus3 at your tails——what jovial times!——but where am I? and into what a delicious riot of things am I rushing? I——I who must be cut short in the midst of my days,4 and taste no more of ’em than what I borrow from my imagination——peace to thee, generous fool! and let me go on.

CHAP. XV

——“So hating, I say, to make mysteries of nothing”——I intrusted it with the post-boy, as soon as ever I got off the stones; he gave a crack with his whip to balance the compliment; and with the thill-horse1 trotting, and a sort of an up and a down of the other, we danced it along to Ailly au clochers, famed in days of yore for the finest chimes in the world; but we danced through it without music——the chimes being greatly out of order—(as in truth they were through all France).

And so making all possible speed, from

Ailly au clochers, I got to Hixcourt,

from Hixcourt, I got to Pequignay, and

from Pequignay, I got to AMIENS,2

concerning which town I have nothing to inform you, but what I have informed you once before——and that was——that Janatone went there to school.

CHAP. XVI

In the whole catalogue of those whiffling vexations which come puffing across a man’s canvass, there is not one of a more teasing and tormenting nature, than this particular one which I am going to describe——and for which, (unless you travel with an avance-courier,1 which numbers do in order to prevent it)——there is no help: and it is this.

That be you in never so kindly a propensity to sleep——tho’ you are passing perhaps through the finest country—upon the best roads,—and in the easiest carriage for doing it in the world——nay was you sure you could sleep fifty miles straight forwards, without once opening your eyes——nay what is more, was you as demonstratively satisfied as you can be of any truth in Euclid, that you should upon all accounts be full as well asleep as awake——nay perhaps better——Yet the incessant returns of paying for the horses at every stage,——with the necessity thereupon of putting your hand into your pocket, and counting out from thence, three livres fifteen sous (sous by sous) puts an end to so much of the project, that you cannot execute above six miles of it (or supposing it is a post and a half, that is but nine)——were it to save your soul from destruction.