open war, lest, instead of speaking or writing against your opinions, they overturn your temples and endanger your own persons. What have you gained in France and Holland by advising persecution? Trust not to your great numbers. Your sovereigns have neighbours, and consequently your sectaries will not want protectors and assistants, though they were Turks. Lastly, let those turbulent divines, who take so much pleasure in innovations, continually have in view the religious wars of the sixteenth century. The reformers were the innocent cause of them, for, according to their principles, there was no medium: they must either suffer the Papists to be damned eternally, or convert them to Protestantism. But that people, who are persuaded that an error does not damn at all, should have no regard to possession, and rather disturb the public peace than suppress their own private opinions, is a thing that cannot be too much detested.

There is no probability that any party should arise among the Protestants to reform their religion after the same manner as they reformed the Romish church, that is, as a religion we must necessarily forsake except we will be damned. Thus the disorders that might be feared from any innovating party, would be less terrible than those of the last century; the animosities would be less violent than at that time, especially since none of the parties could destroy any sensible object of superstition in the other; there would be no topical deities or tutelar saints to be broken, or coined into money; no reliques to be thrown away, no pixes or altars to be overturned. There might, therefore, be some differences between Protestant and Protestant, without fearing all the outrages that appeared in the quarrels between Protestant and Catholic; but still the mischief would be fatal enough to deserve our endeavours to prevent it. To conclude, the leaps of Mâcon have been more

immortalized than those of the isle of Caprea. And yet a famous historian has inserted them in his work, and the place was shown as one of the curiosities of the isle. "Carnificinæ ejus (Tiberii) ostenditur locus Capreis, unde damnatos post longa et exquisita tormenta præcipitari coram se in mare jubebat, excipiente classiariorum manu et contis atque remis elidente cadavera, ne cui residui spiritus quidquam in esset.--In Caprea they shew the place where Tiberius exercised his cruelties; when after long and exquisite tortures, he ordered the condemned to be thrown headlong into the sea, a body of mariners receiving them in their falls, and dashing to pieces their bodies with poles and oars, to prevent their escaping alive." But in short, I do not believe that the ancients are to be compared with the moderns, in transferring the same things from one book to another, and so the leaps of Mâcon are to be read in more places, and have more monuments for pledges of their immortality than those of the emperor Tiberius. It was not for the credit of those who made use of such a punishment in the sixteenth century that they followed the steps of such a tyrant. Art. MACON.

RETIREMENT OF AUTHORS.

FEW persons know how to retreat in time, or can say with Horace :

Est mihi purgatam crebro qui personet aurem :
Solve senescentem maturè sanus equum, ne

Peccet ad extremus ridendus et ilia ducat.

HOR. Epist. 1, lib. i.

The voice of reason cries with piercing force,
Loose from the rapid car yon aged horse,
Lest in the race divided, left behind,
Jaded he drag his limbs, and burst his wind.

FRANCIS.

Poets and orators ought to be most careful of withdrawing from their business at a proper time, because they stand most in need of the warmth of imagination; yet it too frequently happens that they persist in their career till the lowest decline of age. They think the public is obliged to drink the very dregs of their pretended nectar. But if formerly the legislators limited the time wherein people might marry, (for they prohibited it to women of fifty and men of sixty years of age) and if they supposed that, after a certain age, it was time to leave off thinking of procreation, either because of the extinction, or the weakness of the faculties, every author ought, for the same reason, to set bounds to himself in the production of books, which is a kind of generation, for which every age is by no means proper. Poets should leave Apollo's service betimes. I add, that if they feel the return of any poetical fit, they should take it for a temptation of an evil genius, and put up the same prayer to the goddesses of Parnassus that one of their brethren addressed to the Goddess of Love:

parce, precor, precor,

Mon sum qualis eram bonæ

Sub regno Cynaræ. Desine, dulcium

Mater sæva Cupidinum,

Circa lustra decem flectere mollibus

Jam durum imperiis: abi

Quò blandæ juvenum te revocant preces.

HOR. Od. 1, lib. 4, ver. 2.

O spare for pity, Venus, spare!

I am not what I was

In lovely Cynara's easy reign,

When heat warm'd every vein,
And manly beauty fill'd my face.
Cease, queen of soft desires,

To bend my mind grown stiff with age,

Nor fifty years engage

To crackle in thy wanton fires;
But youth and beauty hear.

CREECH.

re

The service of the Muses is in many things like the service of the ladies; it is better to leave it too soon than too late. It is said that certain kings ordered some of their domestics to tell them every day, member such a business." If it be allowable to compare little things with great ones, old poets should have somebody to tell them every morning, "Remember your age." Horace boasts of having had such advice given him.---Arts. AFER and D'AURAT.

RHYNSAULT.

THIS story is related in an ample manner, not without some flourishes of rhetoric, by Pontus Heuterus; the substance of it is thus:-Rhynsault, a very brave captain of duke Philip the good, had obtained for a recompense of his services the government of a place. There he fell in love with his landlady, a woman of singular beauty and modesty. He talked to her of love, and swore to be secret and constant to her. She answered that her conscience would not suffer her to violate her conjugal faith, and that he ought to remember the sacred laws of hospitality, and place is inclinations on some other where he might do it lawfully. There were a great many rich maids to be found much preferable to herself for beauty; he might choose one suitable to his temper, and marry her and get children in a legitimate way. This answer serving only to augment his passion, he attacked her on another side; he offers her a large sum of money, and promises to make her go finer than any of her neighbours and relations, and to procure her husband a beneficial and honourable post. His promises making no impression, he raises another battery; he imprisons the husband on pretence of rebellion, and when the wife applied to him as the only means of saving the prisoner's life, he answered that the crime was manifest,

and that he could not avoid putting him to death, unless the mercy of the sovereign interposed. "I promise to obtain it," continues he, "provided you will immediately grant me the favour I have asked of you so often." This proposal made her blush, weep, sigh, raised a combat between conjugal love and virtue, and struck her dumb. He takes advantage of her irresolution, and satisfies his lust. She from time to time presses him to perform his promise; he puts her off with a thousand lies, and at last causes the prisoner's head to be cut off privately, and made the wife believe she would have him delivered out of prison, on presenting the gaoler a paper which he gave her. She runs to the prison, and there found her husband had lost his life by the hands of the executioner. The sight of such an object struck her speechless, but soon after she returned to the governor and loaded him with all the reproaches that a just indignation could suggest. He makes a hundred excuses and offers to marry her, and promises her a magnificent fortune. She rejected these offers, and related the whole adventure to some relations, who advise her to wait the arrival of duke Charles, and to demand justice of him. That prince having had proof of the governor's crimes ordered him to marry the widow; she had an aversion to it which could not be surmounted without a great deal of solicitation. The marriage contract was drawn, and the wife was to inherit all the estate of her husband, if he died before her without children. The ceremony of the marriage was performed in due form, and then the duke asked the woman if she was content?" "Yes," said she. "But," replied he, "I am not so." He then sent the governor to prison, and two hours after he caused him to be beheaded in the same room where the first husband had lost his head. A copy of the sentence of death was delivered to the woman, and she was sent to see that the double crime of a