_Albert._ There are few good translators; and _me judice_, the latest are the best. Wolfius is a miracle. Our Frenchmen have shown their sense by giving the ancient poets in prose; for it is death to classic metres and classic thought to entangle them in Alexandrines, with male and female rhymes. Taylor’s Plato is close enough and bald enough, but it is harder than the Greek. It is easy to turn _simplex munditiis_ into “simple in mundicity,” but it becomes neither sense nor English. Cervantes knew what he was about, when he compared a version to the wrong side of a piece of tapestry; you make out the figures, but where are the tone, the beauty, the expression? _Pedant._ Then you must learn Hebrew to read the Bible. _Albert._ O, that I could! As it is—one chapter of St. John’s Greek is glorious, beyond all the scores of version from St. Jerome to Campbell. I never could endure the barbarisms of the Vulgate, even from the lips of my honored abbé. I think even he blushed when he recited—_Amen, amen_ _dico vobis: quia plorabitis et flebitis vos_, etc., S. Joann. cap. xvi, 20. Yet it is better in its senility than the French-polish of Castalio. And your English Bible has a venerableness from the lordly old English of its day. Our French Bibles smack of the _salon_; the _tournure_ of phrase is colloquial and courtly. _Pedant._ My friend Pfeffers protests that the gospels are fabricated. _Albert._ Pfeffers is a fool—pardon me—your friend Pfeffers is duped by the cold, bloodless philosophers of the High Dutch universities. So Hardouin undertook to prove that Homer, and Virgil, and all, were vamped up by monks in the Middle Age. _Papae!_ When that is done, I will demonstrate that the Temple of Neptune at Paestum was built by the crusaders, and that the Antinous was chipped out of marble by a couple of Savoyard image-boys in the year 1789. The microscopic objections of Bahrdi and Paulus are just such infinitesimal lichens and abrasions and scratchings as a strong lens will detect on the cheek of the Discobolos, or the Venus of Florence. Is there sweetness in that breath of wild roses which comes over us from the west? Was it made to be enjoyed? Is it correlate with this olfactory sense? Then is the seventeenth chapter of St. John a heavenly aroma, formed for this inward craving of a departing soul. Take me back to my wild Indians, and their medicine-men with gourds and wampum, rather than to the drivel of a learning once Christian, but now materialistic or godless! That manna was good, but it has bred worms. _Corruptio optimi pessima est._ _Pedant._ Dearest De Mornay, you flush and injure yourself. _Albert._ Thanks to thee, Paul Guerin, that thou leftest me lessons which live in the soil of this heart and germinate after thy departure! God grant that grief and the suns of Martinique may not despoil the earth of the purest of the emigrant clergy. * * * * *