Chapter C: H a P. XCVII

——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, 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 tabid decline, in the 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 _Priapus_ 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, and taste no more of ’em than what I borrow from my imagination——peace to thee, generous fool! and let me go on.

C H A P. XCVIII

——“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-horse 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, 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.