I PROPOSE setting out soon from this place, so that you are to expect no more letters from this side of the water; besides, I am hurried to death, and my head swims with that vast variety of objects which I am obliged to view with such rapidity, the shortness of my time not allowing me to examine them at my leisure.  There is here an excessive prodigality of ornaments and decorations, that is just the opposite extreme to what appears in our royal gardens; this prodigality is owing to the levity and inconstancy of the French taste, which always pants after something new, and thus heaps ornament upon ornament, without end or measure.  It is time, however, that I should put an end to my letter; so I wish you good night,
          
                                                And am, &c.

LET.  LVIII.

TO THE COUNT ——.

Translated from the French.

I AM charmed, Sir, with your obliging letter; and you may perceive, by the largeness of my paper, that I intend to give punctual answers to all your questions, at least if my French will permit me; for, as it is a language I do not understand to perfection, so I much fear, that, for want of expressions, I shall be quickly obliged to finish.  Keep in mind, therefore, that I am writing in a foreign language, and be sure to attribute all the impertinencies and triflings (sic) dropping from my pen, to the want of proper words for declaring my thoughts, but by no means to dulness, or natural levity.

THESE conditions being thus agreed and settled, I begin with telling you, that you have a true notion of the alcoran, concerning which the Greek priests (who are the greatest scoundrels in the universe) have invented, out of their own heads, a thousand ridiculous stories, in order to decry the law of Mahomet; to run it down, I say, without any examination, or so much as letting the people read it; being afraid, that if once they began to sift the defects of the alcoran, they might not stop there, but proceed to make use of their judgment about their own legends and fictions.  In effect, there is nothing so like as the fables of the Greeks and of the Mahometans; and the last have multitudes of saints, at whose tombs miracles are by them said to be daily performed; nor are the accounts of the lives of those blessed musselmans much less stuffed with extravagancies, than the spiritual romances of the Greek papas.

AS to your next inquiry, I assure you, ’tis certainly false, though commonly believed in our parts of the world, that Mahomet excludes women from any share in a future happy state.  He was too much a gentleman, and loved the fair sex too well, to use them so barbarously.  On the contrary, he promises a very fine paradise to the Turkish women.  He says, indeed, that this paradise will be a separate place from that of their husbands; but I fancy the most part of them won’t like it the worse for that; and that the regret of this separation will