twenty-three toises too short, it was not at all unlikely that the degrees towards the south had in like manner been found too long. Thus the first error of Picard, having furnished the foundations for the measurements of the meridian, also furnished an excuse for the almost inevitable errors, which very good astronomers might have committed in the course of these operations. ative style. We do not admit it into history, for too many metaphors are hurtful, not only to perspicuity, but also to truth, by saying more or less than the thing itself. In didactic works, this style should be rejected. It is much more out of place in a sermon than in a funeral oration, because the sermon is a piece of instruction in which the truth is to be announced; while the funeral oration is a declamation in which it is to be exaggerated. Unfortunately, other men of science found that, at the Cape of Good Hope, the degrees of the meridian did not agree The poetry of enthusiasm as the epopee with ours. Other measurements, taken and the ode, is that to which this style is in Italy, likewise contradicted those of best adapted. It is less admissible in France, and all were falsified by those of tragedy, where the dialogue should be China. People again began to doubt, natural as well as elevated; and still less and to suspect, in my opinion very rea-in comedy, where the style must be more sonably, that the earth had protuberances. simple. As for the English, though they are fond of travelling, they spared themselves the fatigue, and held fast their theory. The limits to be set to the figurative style, in each kind, are determined by taste. Balthazar Gracian says, that "our thoughts depart from the vast shores of memory, embark on the sea of imagin and are entered at the custom-house of the understanding." The difference between one diameter and the other is not more than five or six of our leagues-a difference immense ination, arrive in the harbour of intelligence, the eyes of a disputant, but almost imperceptible to those who consider the measurement of the globe only in reference to the purposes of utility which it may serve. A geographer could scarcely make this difference perceptible on a map; nor would a pilot be able to discover whether he was steering on a spheroid or on a sphere. Yet there have been men bold enough to assert, that the lives of navigators depended on this question. Oh quackery! wilt thou spare no degrees-not even those of the meridian? FIGURED-FIGURATIVE. We say, a truth 'figured' by a fable, by a parable; the church figured' by the young spouse in Solomon's Song; ancient Rome 'figured' by Babylon. A figurative style is constituted by metaphorical expressions, figuring the things spoken of and disfiguring them when the metaphors are not correct. This is precisely the style of Harlequin. He says to his master, “The ball of your commands has rebounded from the racket of my obedience." Must it not be owned that such is frequently that oriental style which people strive to ad mire. Another fault of the figurative style is the accumulating of incoherent figures. A poet, speaking of some philosophers, has called them : D'ambitieux pygmées Qui sur leurs pieds vainement iedresses Vont redoublant leurs fol es escalades. When philosophers are to be written against, it should be done better. How do ambitious pigmies, reared on their hind legs on mountains of arguments, continue escalades? What a false and ridiculous image! What elaborate dul Ardent imagination, passion, desire-ness! frequently deceived-produce the figur In an allegory by the same author, en titled the Liturgy of Cytherea, we find piece of red cloth, placed by the courtethese lines : De toutes parts, autour de l'inconnue, zan Rahab at her window, for a signal to Joshua's spies, as a figure of the blood of Jesus Christ. This is an error of an order of mind, which would find mystery in everything. Nor can it be denied that St. Ambrose made a very bad use of his taste for allegory, when he says, in his book of Noah and the Ark, that the back-door of the ark was a figure of our hinder parts. Here we have harvests of hearts thrown on the ground like small hail; and among these hearts palpitating on the ground, are gods bound to the car of the unknown; All men of sense have asked how it while Love, sent by Venus, ruminates in can be proved that these Hebrew words, his seraglio in heaven, what he shall do{"maher, salas-has-bas," (take quick the to bring back to the fold this lost mutton spoils) are a figure of Jesus Christ? surrounded by scattered hearts. All this How Judah, tying his ass to a vine, and forms a figure at once so false, so puerile, washing his cloak in the wine, is also a and so incoherent-so disgusting, so ex-figure of him? How Ruth, slipping into travagant, so stupidly expressed, we are astonished that a man, who made good verses of another kind, and was not devoid of taste, could write anything so miserably bad. Figures, metaphors, are not necessary in an allegory: what has been invented with imagination, may be told with simplicity. Plato has more allegories than figures; he often expresses them elegantly and without ostentation. Nearly all the maxims of the ancient orientals and of the Greeks were in the figurative style. All those sentences are metaphors, or short allegories; and in them the figurative style has great effect in rousing the imagination and impressing the memory. We know that Pythagoras said, "In the tempest adore the echo," that is, during civil broils retire to the country; and, "Stir not the fire with the sword," meaning, do not irritate minds already inflamed. In every language, there are many common proverbs, which are in the figurative style. FIGURE IN THEOLOGY. Ir is quite certain, and is agreed by the most pious men, that figures and allegories have been carried too far. Some of the fathers of the church regard the bed to Boaz, can figure the church? How Sarah and Rachel are the church, and Hagar and Leah the synagogue? How the kisses of the Shunamite typify the marriage of the church? A volume might be made of these enigmas, which, to the best theologians of later times, have appeared to be rather far-fetched than edifying. The danger of this abuse is fully admitted by the abbé Fleury, the author of the "Ecclesiastical History." It is a vestige of rabbinism; a fault into which the learned St. Jerome never fell. It is like oniromancy, or the explanation of dreams. If a girl sees muddy water, when dreaming, she will be ill married; if she sees clear water, she will have a good husband; a spider denotes money, &c. In short, will enlightened posterity believe it? the understanding of dreams has, for more than four thousand years, been made a serious study. Symbolical Figures. All nations have made use of them, as we have said in the article EMBLEM. But who began? Was it the Egyptians? It is not very likely. We think we have already more than once proved that Egypt is a country quite new, and that many ages were requisite to save the The Iroquois have more sense. They do not take the trouble to enquire what passed on the shores of lake Ontario some thousand years ago: instead of country from inundations, and render it, habitable. It is impossible that the Egyptians should have invented the signs of the zodiac, since the figures denoting our seed-time and harvest cannot coin-making systems, they go hunting. cide with theirs. When we cut our corn, their land is covered with water; and when we sow, their reaping time is ap-signified superabundance, because some proaching. Thus the bull of our zodiac, and the girl bearing ears of corn, cannot have come from Egypt. Here is also an evident proof of the falsity of the new paradox, that the Chinese are an Egyptian colony. The characters are not the same. The Chinese mark the course of the sun by twenty-eight constellations; and the Egyptians, after the Chaldeans, reckoned only twelve, like ourselves. The figures that denote the planets are in China and in India all different from those of Egypt and of Europe; so are the signs of the metals; so is the method of guiding the hand in writing. Nothing could have been more chimerical than to send the Egyptians to people China. All these fabulous foundations, laid in fabulous times, have caused an irreparable loss of time to a prodigious multitude of the learned, who have all been bewildered in their laborious researches, which might have been serviceable to mankind if directed to arts of real utility. Pluche, in his History, or rather his fable, of the Heavens, assures us that Ham, son of Noah, went and reigned in Egypt, where there was nobody to reign over; that his son Menes was the greatest of legislators, and that Thoth was his prime minister. { The same authors affirm that the sphynxes, with which Egypt was adorned, interpreters have asserted that the Hebrew word spang meant an excess; as if the Egyptians had taken lessons from the Hebrew tongue, which is, in great part, derived from the Phenician: besides, what relation has a sphynx to an abundance of water? Future schoolmen will maintain, with greater appearance of reason, that the masks which decorate the key-stones of our windows are emblems of our masquerades; and that these fantastic ornaments announced that balls were given in every house to which they were affixed. Figure, Figurative, Allegorical, Mysti cal, Tropological, Typical, &c. This is often the art of finding in books everything but what they really contain. For instance, Romulus killing his brother Remus shall signify the death of the Duke of Berry, brother to Louis XI.; Regulus, imprisoned at Carthage, shall typify St. Louis captive at Massoura. It is very justly remarked in the Encyclopedia, that many fathers of the church have, perhaps, carried this taste for allegorical figures a little too far; but they are to be reverenced, even in their wanderings. If the holy fathers used and then abused this method, their little excesses of imagination may be pardoned, in consideration of their holy zeal. According to him and his authorities, this Thoth, or somebody else, instituted feasts in honour of the deluge; and the joyful cry of "Io Bacche," so famous The antiquity of the usage may also among the Greeks, was, among the Egyp-be pleaded in justification, since it was tians, a lamentation. Bacche came from practised by the earliest philosophers. the Hebrew beke, signifying sobs, and But it is true that the symbolical figures that at a time when the Hebrew people employed by the fathers are in a different did not exist. According to this expla- taste. nation, joy means sorrow, and to sing signifies to weep. For example: When St. Augustin wishes to make it appear that the forty two generations of the genealogy of Jesus forms good works; length is perseveare announced by St. Matthew, who rance; depth is the hope of reward. He gives only forty-one, he says that Jecho- carries the allegory very far, applying it nias must be counted twice, because Je-to the cross, and drawing great consechonias is a corner-stone belonging to two quences therefrom. walls; that these two walls figure the old and the new law; and that Jechonias, being thus the corner-stone, figures Jesus Christ, who is the real corner-stone. The use of these figures had passed from the Jews to the Christians long before St. Augustin's time. It is not for us to know within what bounds it was right to stop. The same saint, in the same sermon, says that the number forty must prevail; The examples of this fault are innumerand at once abandons Jechonias and his able. No one who has studied to adcorner-stone, counted as two. The num-vantage will hazard the introduction of ber forty, he says, signifies life; ten, such figures, either in the pulpit or in the which is perfect beatitude, being mul-school. We find no such instances among tiplied by four, which, being the number the Romans or the Greeks, not even in of the seasons, figures time. their poets. Again, in the same sermon, he explains why St. Luke gives Jesus Christ seventyseven ancestors: fifty-six up to the patriarch Abraham, and twenty-one from Abraham up to God himself. It is true that, according to the Hebrew text, there would be but seventy-six; for the Hebrew does not reckon a Cainan, who is interpolated in the Greek translation called the Septuagint. In Ovid's Metamorphoses themselves, we find only ingenious deductions drawn from fables which are given as fables. Deucalion and Pyrrha threw stones behind them between their legs, and men were produced therefrom. Ovid says:— Inde genus durum sumus, experiensque laborum, Apollo loves Daphne, but Daphne does not love Apollo. This is because love has two kinds of arrows; the one golden and piercing, the other leaden and blunt. Apollo has received in his heart a golden arrow, Daphne a leaden one. Ecce sagittifera prompsit duo tela pharetra Quod facit auratum est, et cuspide fulget acnta: Thus saith Augustin :-"The number seventy-seven figures the abolition of all sins by baptism.... the number ten signifies justice and beatitude, resulting from the creature, which makes seven with the Trinity, which is three: therefore it is that God's commandments are ten in number. The number eleven denotes sin, because it transgresses ten....This number seventy-seven is the product of eleven, figuring sin, multiplied by seven, and not by ten, for seven is the symbol of the creature. Three represents the soul, which is in some sort an image of the Divinity; and four represents the body, on account of its four qualities,"ceive no one. &c. In these explanations, we find some trace of the cabalistic mysteries and the quaternary of Pythagoras. This taste was very long in vogue. St. Augustin goes much farther, concerning the dimensions of matter. Breadth is the dilatation of the heart, which per burn, &c. Two different shafts be from his quiver draws; One shaft is pointed with refulgent gold, These figures are all ingenious, and de That Venus, the goddess of beauty, should not go unattended by the Graces, is a charming truth. These fables, which were in the mouth of every one-these allegories, so natural and attractive-had so much sway over the minds of men, that perhaps the first Christians imitated while they opposed them. They took up the weapons of mythology to destroy it, but they could not wield them with the same address. They did not reflect that the sacred austerity of our holy religion placed these resources out of their power, and that a Christian hand would have dealt but awkwardly with the lyre of Apollo. However, the taste for these typical and prophetic figures was so firmly rooted, { that every prince, every statesman, every pope, every founder of an order, had allegories or allusions taken from the holy scriptures, applied to him. Satire and flattery rivalled each other in drawing from this source. When Pope Innocent III. made a bloody crusade against the court of Toulouse, he was told, "Innocens eris a maledictione." Assisi with Jesus Christ." We find in it sixty-four predictions of the coming of St. Francis, some in the Old Testament, others in the New; and each prediction contains three figures, which signify the founding of the Cordeliers. So that these fathers find themselves foretold in the Bible a hundred and ninety-two times. From Adam down to St. Paul, everything prefigured the blessed Francis of Assisi. The scriptures were given to announce to the universe the sermons of Francis to the quadrupeds, the fishes, and the birds, the sport he had with a woman of snow, his frolics with the devil, his adventures with brother Elias and brother Pacificus. These pious reveries, which amounted even to blasphemy, have been condemned. But the Order of St. Francis has not suffered by them, having renounced these extravagancies so common to the barbar When the order of the Minimes was established, it appeared that their founder had been foretold in Genesis :-" Mini-ous ages. mus cum patre nostro." The preacher who preached before John of Austria after the celebrated battle of Lepanto, took for his text, "Fuit homo missus à Deo, cui nomen erat Johannes;" A man sent from God, whose name was John and this allusion was very fine, if all the rest were ridiculous. It is said to have been repeated for John Sobeiski, after the deliverance of Vienna; but this latter preacher was nothing more than a plagiarist. : In short, so constant has been this custom, that no preacher of the present day has ever failed to take an allegory for his text. One of the most happy instances, is the text of the funeral oration over the Duke of Candale, delivered before his sister, who was considered a pattern of virtue:-" Dic, quia soror mea es, ut mihi bene eveniat propter te."-" Say, I pray thee, that thou art my sister, that it may be well with me for thy sake." It is not to be wondered at, that the Cordeliers carried these figures rather too far in favour of St. Francis of Assisi, in the famous, but little known book, entitled, "Conformities of St. Francis of FINAL CAUSES. SECTION I. VIRGIL says, (Æneid, book vi. 727): Mens agitat molem et magno se corpore miscet. Virgil said well: and Benedict Spinoza, who has not the brilliancy of Virgil, nor his merit, is compelled to acknowledge an intelligence presiding over all. Had he denied this, I should have said to him-Benedict, you are a fool; you possess intelligence and you deny it, and to whom do you deny it? In the year 1770, there appeared a man, in some respects far superior to Spinoza, as eloquent as the Jewish Hollander is dry, less methodical, but infinitely more perspicuous; perhaps equal to him in mathematical science, but without the ridiculous affectation of applying mathematical reasonings to metaphysical and moral subjects. The man I mean is the author of the "System of Nature." He assumed the name of Mirabaud, the secretary of the French Academy. Alas! the worthy secretary was incapable of |