named Cato, no augur could ever look another in the face without laughing; and finally, that Cicero, the greatest orator and best philosopher of Rome, wrote a little work against the augurs, entitled "Of Divination," in which he delivers up to eternal ridicule all the predictions and sorceries of soothsayers with which the earth is infatuated. The emperor of China has the curiosity to read this book of Cicero; the interpreters translate it; and in consequence he admires at once the book and the Roman Republic. VAMPIRES. What! is it in our eighteenth century that vampires exist? Is it after the reigns of Locke, Shaftesbury, Trenchard, and Collins? Is it under those of d'Alembert, Diderot, St. Lambert, and Duclos that we believe in vampires, and that the reverend father Dom Calmet, Benedictine priest of the congregation of St. Vannes, and St. Hidulphe, abbé of Senon--an abbey of a hundred thousand livres a year, in the neighborhood of two other abbeys of the same revenue--has printed and reprinted the history of vampires, with the approbation of the Sorbonne, signed Marcilli? These vampires were corpses, who went out of their graves at night to suck the blood of the living, either at their throats or stomachs, after which they returned to their cemeteries. The persons so sucked waned, grew pale, and fell into consumption; while the sucking corpses grew fat, got rosy, and enjoyed an excellent appetite. It was in Poland, Hungary, Silesia, Moravia, Austria, and Lorraine, that the dead made this good cheer. We never heard a word of vampires in London, nor even at Paris. I confess that in both these cities there were stock-jobbers, brokers, and men of business, who sucked the blood of the people in broad daylight; but they were not dead, though corrupted. These true suckers lived not in cemeteries, but in very agreeable palaces. Who would believe that we derive the idea of vampires from Greece? Not from the Greece of Alexander, Aristotle, Plato, Epicurus, and Demosthenes; but from Christian Greece, unfortunately schismatic. For a long time Christians of the Greek rite have imagined that the bodies of Christians of the Latin church, buried in Greece, do not decay, because they are excommunicated. This is precisely the contrary to that of us Christians of the Latin church, who believe that corpses which do not corrupt are marked with the seal of eternal beatitude. So much so, indeed, that when we have paid a hundred thousand crowns to Rome, to give them a saint's brevet, we adore them with the worship of "_dulia_."