Chinese Superiority.—–­“Apropos of the Chinese, do you know that with them nobility ascends, and descends never?  It is the children who ennoble their ancestors, and not the ancestors the children.  And upon my word that is most sensible.  We are greater poets, greater philosophers, greater orators, greater architects, greater astronomers, greater geometers, than these good people; but they understand better than we the science of good sense and virtue; and if peradventure that science should happen to be the first of all sciences, they would be right in saying that they have two eyes and we have only one, and all the rest of the world is blind."[215]

Why Women write good Letters.—­“She writes admirably, really admirably.  That is because good style is in the heart; and that is why so many women talk and write like angels without ever having learnt either to talk or to write, and why so many pedants will both talk and write ill all the days of their life, though they were never weary of studying,—­only without learning."[216]

“A little adventure has just happened here that proves that all our fine sermons on intolerance have as yet produced but poor fruit.  A young man of respectable birth, some say apprentice to an apothecary, others to a grocer, took it into his head to go through a course of chemistry; his master consented, on condition that he should pay for board; the lad agreed.  At the end of the quarter the master demanded the money, and it was paid.  Soon after, another demand from the master; the apprentice replied that he barely owed a single quarter.  The master denied that the first quarter had been paid.  The affair was taken into court.  The master is put on his oath, and swears.  He had no sooner perjured himself than the apprentice produced his receipt, and the master was straightway fined and disgraced.  He was a scoundrel who deserved it, but the apprentice was a rash fellow, whose victory was bought at a price dearer than life.  He had received, in payment or otherwise, from some colporteur, two copies of Christianity Unveiled, and one of them he had sold to his master.  The master informs against him.  The colporteur, his wife, and his apprentice, are all three arrested, and they have just been pilloried, whipped, and branded, and the apprentice condemned to nine years of the galleys, the colporteur to five years, and the woman to the hospital for life....  Do you see the meaning of this judgment?  A colporteur brings me a prohibited book.  If I buy more than one copy, I am declared to be encouraging unlawful trading, and exposed to a frightful prosecution.  You have read the Man with Forty Crowns,[217] and will hardly be able to guess why it is placed under the ban in the judgment I am telling you of.  It is in consequence of the profound resentment that our lords and masters feel about a certain article, Tyrant, in the Philosophical Dictionary.  They will never forgive Voltaire for saying that it