I have, however, either friends who wish to amuse and solace my old age, or enemies who mean to heap coals of fire on my head, and kill me with kindness; for they overwhelm me with books from all quarters, enough to obfuscate all eyes, and smother and stifle all human understanding. Chateaubriand, Grimm, Tucker, Dupuis, La Harpe, Sismondi, Eustace, a new translation of Herodotus, by Bedloe, with more notes than text. What should I do with all this lumber? I make my "woman-kind," as the antiquary expresses it, read to me all the English, but as they will not read the French, I am obliged to excruciate my eyes to read it myself; and all to what purpose? I verily believe I was as wise and good, seventy years ago, as I am now. At that period Lemuel Bryant was my parish priest, and Joseph Cleverly my Latin schoolmaster. Lemuel was a jolly, jocular, and liberal scholar and divine. Joseph a scholar and a gentleman; but a bigoted Episcopalian, of the school of Bishop Saunders, and Dr. Hicks,--a downright conscientious, passive obedience man, in Church and State. The parson and the pedagogue lived much together, but were eternally disputing about government and religion. One day, when the schoolmaster had been more than commonly fanatical, and declared "if he were a monarch, _he would have but one religion in his dominions_;" the parson coolly replied, "Cleverly! you would be the best man in the world if you had no religion." Twenty times in the course of my late reading have I been on the point of breaking out, "This would be the best of all possible worlds, if there were no religion in it!!!" But in this exclamation I should have been as fanatical as Bryant or Cleverly. Without religion this world would be something not fit to be mentioned in polite society, I mean hell. So far from believing in the total and universal depravity of human nature, I believe there is no individual totally depraved. The most abandoned scoundrel that ever existed, never yet wholly extinguished his conscience, and while conscience remains there is some religion. Popes, Jesuits, and Sorbonists, and Inquisitors, have some conscience and some religion. So had Marius and Sylla, Cæsar, Catiline and Antony; and Augustus had not much more, let Virgil and Horace say what they will. What shall we think of Virgil and Horace, Sallust, Quintilian, Pliny, and even Tacitus? and even Cicero, Brutus and Seneca? Pompey I leave out of the question, as a mere politician and soldier. Every one of the great creatures has left indelible marks of conscience, and consequently of religion, though every one of them has left abundant proofs of profligate violations of their consciences by their little and great passions and paltry interests.