themselves after Antoninus and Cæsar, the latter after Christus and Petrus, and among whom there are men whose thrones shall be Lüneburg torture chairs for the human race, if not the converse of a Place de Grève, where the masses shall be put to death, and the single individual feted and amused.[31] And I shall be taken to task on account of Borgia, Pizarro, St. Dominic, and Potemkin. Even supposing I should manage to evade being blamed for black exceptions such as these, I should be obliged to admit that my descendants really cannot get through the space of half-an-hour without either thinking or doing something foolish, that the war of giants, waged in them by their passions, is never broken by a peace, seldom even by a truce; that the greatest of all man's faults is that he has such a number of little ones; that his conscience serves for scarcely anything but _hating his neighbours and being morbidly sensitive to their transgressions_; that he never leaves off evil ways till he is on his deathbed; that, he learns and loves the language of virtue, but is at enmity with the virtuous--just as the English employ French language teachers, though they detest the French themselves. Eve, Eve, we shall have little to congratulate ourselves upon if we marry; Adam means in the original "red earth," and truly my cheeks will consist entirely thereof, and will blush scarlet at the mere thought of the indescribable and unparalleled conceit and vanity of our great-grandchildren, increasing as the centuries go on. Nobody will tweak _himself_ by the nose--unless perhaps when he is shaving. Critics will set themselves up above authors, authors above critics--Heimlicher von Blaise will give his hand to be kissed by orphans; ladies theirs to be kissed by all and sundry; mighty ones the embroidered hems of their garments. Eve, I had only got as far on with my prophetic extracts from the world's history as the sixth century, when you bit the apple under the tree, and I, like a fool, did as you did, and everything slipped out of my head: God only knows what sort of a set the fools and foolesses of the subsequent centuries may turn out to be. Virgin, wilt thou now put into action thy _Sternocleidomastoideum_, as Sömmering styles the muscle which nods the head, and so express your "yes" when I put to you the question, "Wilt thou have the marriage-preacher to thy wedded husband?" "'You will no doubt reply, let us first hear the second head of the discourse, in which the subject is considered from another point of view. And indeed, dearly beloved, we had almost forgotten that we must proceed to the SECOND PLACE,