Imatges de pàgina
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extraordinary a length that it reached down to his feet, and then turned up quite to his girdle; it was yet longer, for besides this, he wound it about his staff. He gloried so much in it, that he very seldom went to court either in a coach or on horseback, but almost always on foot, that his long beard might be seen, which he carried like a streamer waving in the wind. When he died, it was cut into two tufts.

Rauber died in the sixty-eighth year of his age, at his castle of Petronel, in the year 1575, and there he lies interred between his two wives.-Art. RAUBER.

SUBLIME CONJUGALITY.

BENJAMIN D'ARODON, a German Jew, was author of a book full of precepts for the ladies. It was translated from the German into Italian, by rabbi Jacob Alpron. This book is filled with observances, not only in regard to cleanliness of body, but likewise with respect to the practice of prayer and good works. The observances of the first kind contain several niceties and superstitious regularities; and there is sometimes a great deal of rigour in those of the second; for example; "the husband and wife must not speak a word in the act of conjugal duty, and entertain only pious thoughts, without any consideration of the pleasure, and in pursuance only of the divine will;" and they are assured that, "if they act otherwise, their children will be born deformed, lame, dumb, or squint eyed." This precept is both very refined and very rigid. See what is said in the "News from the Republic of Letters," concerning a book of Mr Yvon, a minister of the Labadists. Such great purity in this kind of pleasure is rather to be wished than hoped for; nevertheless the Casuists are to be commended for insisting upon it, and endeavouring to introduce purity where the passion of brutal lust has too much sway. Had our rabbi believed, as the church of Rome does,

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that marriage is a sacrament, he could not have required more holy dispositions from the married than those he demands. He imposes upon them at once the law of" favete linguis--keep silence," the observation whereof the Pagans recommended in their greatest mysteries, and that of " sursum corda,-lift up your hearts," which the ancient church never forgot to prescribe in the celebration of its most solemn ceremonies in a word, it is certain that had he received the doctrine of Jesus Christ with a true faith, and been animated with the spirit of grace, he could not have given advice more worthy of evangelical purity. This ought to shame the looser Casuists, who are so common among Christians.

Observe, that the prccepts of this rabbi do not at all agree with the advice of physicians, who pretend that a child, conceived under distraction of mind, I mean under serious, grave, and spiritual thoughts, will be simple, foolish, and weak. They give very different advice to those who desire children; but any man of tolerable sense must grant, that they lead mankind into a very bad school of chastity; their precepts are calculated only for those who would confine every thing to animal, earthly, sensual, and Epicurean life. We must go to our rabbi's school, if we would learn to demean ourselves in this part of our duty like creatures endowed with a spiritual soul, and not deserve the censure;

O curvæ in terras animæ, et cœlestium inanes.

PERSIUS, Sat. ii, ver. 16.

O sordid minds, of heavenly thoughts devoid! We shall the better comprehend how excellent and sublime the morality of this Jew is, if we remember that it is directly opposite to the maxims of those doctors of impurity, who have filled their poems with so much wantonness. These dangerous poisoners are far from advising silence; and it is this which fur

nished a modern with a confirmation of the interpretation he has given of the words of a Greek poet, which contain a description of the grotto of the nymph. "As for the agreeable murmurings," says he, "mentioned by Homer, they are without doubt the obliging words of lovers, the 'ohi me cor mio,--oh! my heart!' of the Italians; the ‘Swŋ kai 4vxn,—my life and soul!' of the Greeks; and the 'alma de mi alma,—soul of my soul,' of the Spaniards."

The famous Epithalamium of the emperor Gallienus, which Trebellius Pollio prefers to those of a hundred other poets, who all exercised their pens on the same subject, wonderfully expresses these soft and obliging murmurs, and the caresses which are inseparable from them. It is said that, holding the hands of two of his brother's children, when he married them, he pronounced these verses of his own composition :

Ite, ite, o pueri, pariter sudate medullis

Omnibus inter vos, non murmura vestra columbæ,
Brachia non hederæ, non vincant oscula concha.

It is difficult to conceive any thing more pathetic or passionate on this head. To be diametrically opposite to these false doctors, the bane of youth, is no small praise it is a just presumption, that the morality which one advances is of admirable purity; add to this the judicious answer of the famous M. Drelincourt to a bishop, who had made an observation altogether unbecoming, I will not say of a person of his character, but even of a layman who is not over fond of a wanton style. These are M. Drelincourt's words :* "Instead of washing out with his tears those ways of speaking, that the Virgin Mary is the spirit and life of Christians, he defends them with a raillery which would better become those who tread the stage. You gentlemen,' says he,' pastors of the protestant * Drelincourt's Avant-coureur de la République à M. le Camus, Evêque de Belly.

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church, who have your dear counterparts, not so much inseparable accidents of your substance, as bone of your bone, and flesh of your flesh, nay, who are but one flesh in two persons, use indeed much more endearing terms to those souls of your souls, those lives of your lives, those lives of your hearts and souls, those souls of your lives and hearts, than the world knows of; for you are those spiritual persons, who judge the whole world, nay the very angels, and with much more reason the Romanists, without being subject to be judged by any.'-I know not whence he had his information, and shall not answer for the expressions of those who have wives by stealth: but a grave person, who lives in a chaste marriage, does not study such extravagant rhetoric." The prelate replied in a manner so burlesque, that nothing could exceed it.*-Art. ARODON.

SUBTILTIES OF LOGIC.

EUCLID, a native of Megara, and disciple of Socrates, did not follow the taste of his master; for instead of addicting himself chiefly to the doctrine of morality, he set himself to refine the subtilties of logic. He founded a sect which passes for a branch, or rather a continuation of the school of Xenophanes, Parmenides, and Zeno Eleates. Those who followed his method of philosophizing were named Megarians, Megarici, and afterwards Disputers, and at last Dialecticians. His opinions are little known, and it is pretty difficult to comprehend any thing in his doctrine of the nature of good. He made use of nothing but conclusions in his disputes, by which we may judge of the ardour and impetuosity he mixed them with. We may also judge of it by the character of the temper he inspired his disciples with; which was

* See his Answer to the Avant-coureur of M. Drelincourt, pag. 156.

a rage or fury of disputing. Eubulides, who succeeded him, was the inventor of divers sophisms exceedingly captious and perplexing; these are the names of them: the liar, the deceiver, the electra, the veiled, the sorites, the horned, the bald. You will find in Gassendus a good explanation of all these sophisms, supported by instances. You will find the same in M. Menage. I shall content myself with showing what the liar was. He supposed a man who said I lie, and then he argued in such a manner that from what he said true he concluded that he lied, and from what he lied in, he concluded he spoke truth. 'Si dicis te mentiri, verumque dicis, mentiris: dicis autem te mentiri, verumque dicis, mentiris igitur." To puzzle the more, they made one consider that, in such reasonings as this, as to the form, the conclusion was true; "how then dare you reject the conclusion of this," said they," while you admit that of others?" Cicero observes that Chrysippus, who formed himself these difficulties, could not resolve them. "Qui potes hanc non probare, quum probaveris ejusdem generis superiorem? Hæc Chrysippea sunt ne ab ipso quidem dissoluta." They build the same sophism upon that which Epimenides, who was of the isle of Crete, had said, "that all the Cretans were liars." "He lied then in saying so," concluded they; therefore the Cretans are not liars, then they deserve to be believed; then the affirmation of Epimenides is to be believed; and then the Cretans are liars. Aristotle has acknowledged that these sophistries are almost inexplicable. Africanus, the civilian, having put a case in which the knot was indissoluble, compares it to the sophism here in question. "I said this argument was one of the insoluble, called by logicians the liar; for whatever is laid down for true, will be found to be false." It is good to see how Seneca laughs at those who lost *Cicero, Acad. Quæst. lib. iv. cap. 28 et 29. Africanus, lib. xxxviii.

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