_Pour finir tous ces débats-là,_ _Tu n'avais qu'à les laisser faire._ To end debates in such a tone 'Twas but to leave the men alone. It is observable under all the articles of morality and history, by what an invisible chain, by what unknown springs, all the ideas that disturb our minds and all the events that poison our days are bound together and brought to co-operate in the formation of our destinies. Fénelon dies in exile in consequence of holding two or three mystical conversations with a pious but fanciful woman. Cardinal Bouillon, nephew of the great Turenne, is persecuted in consequence of not himself persecuting at Rome the archbishop of Cambray, his friend: he is compelled to quit France, and he also loses his whole fortune. By a like chain of causes and effects, the son of a solicitor at Vire detects, in a dozen of obscure phrases of a book printed at Amsterdam, what is sufficient to fill all the dungeons of France with victims; and at length, from the depth of those dungeons arises a cry for redress and vengeance, the echo of which lays prostrate on the earth an able and tyrannical society which had been established by an ignorant madman. LOVE (SOCRATIC LOVE). If the love called Socratic and Platonic is only a becoming sentiment, it is to be applauded; if an unnatural license, we must blush for Greece. It is as certain as the knowledge of antiquity can well be, that Socratic love was not an infamous passion. It is the word "love" which has deceived the world. Those called the lovers of a young man were precisely such as among us are called the minions of our princes--honorable youths attached to the education of a child of distinction, partaking of the same studies and the same military exercises--a warlike and correct custom, which has been perverted into nocturnal feasts and midnight orgies. The company of lovers instituted by Laius was an invincible troop of young warriors, bound by oath each to preserve the life of any other at the expense of his own. Ancient discipline never exhibited anything more fine.