I am aware that virility, whether circumcised or uncircumcised, has caused very fatal quarrels. I know what it cost Priam's son Paris, and Agamemnon's brother Menelaus. I have read enough of your books to know that Hamor's son Sichem ravished Leah's daughter Dinah, who at most was not more than five years old, but was very forward for her age. He wanted to make her his wife; and Jacob's sons, brothers of the violated damsel, gave her to him in marriage on condition that he and all his people should be circumcised. When the operation was performed, and all the Sichemites, or Sechemites, were lying-in of the pains consequent thereupon, the holy patriarchs Simeon and Levi cut all their throats one after another. But, after all, I do not believe that uncircumcision ought now to produce such abominable horrors; and especially I do not think that men should hate, detest, anathematize, and damn one another every Saturday and Sunday, on account of a morsel more or less of flesh. If I have said that some of the circumcised have clipped money at Metz, at Frankfort on the Oder, and at Warsaw (which I do not remember) I ask their pardon; for, being almost at the end of my pilgrimage, I have no wish to embroil myself with Israel. I have the honor to be (as they say), Yours, etc. SECOND LETTER. _Antiquity of the Jews._ Gentlemen: I have ever agreed, having read a few historical books for amusement, that you are a very ancient people, and your origin may be dated much farther back than that of the Teutones, the Celts, the Slavonians, the Angles, and Hurons. I see you assembling as a people in a capital called, sometimes Hershalaïm, sometimes Shaheb, on the hill Moriah, and on the hill Sion, near a desert, on a stony soil, by a small torrent which is dry six months of the year. When you began to-establish yourselves in your corner, I will not say of land, but of pebbles, Troy had been destroyed by the Greeks about two centuries. Medon was archon of Athens. Echestratus was reigning in Lacedæmon. Latinus Sylvius was reigning in Latium; and Osochor in Egypt. The Indies had been flourishing for a long succession of ages. This was the most illustrious period of Chinese history. The emperor Tchin-wang was reigning with glory over that vast empire; all the sciences were there cultivated; and the public annals inform us that the king of Cochin China, being come to pay his respects to this emperor, Tchin-wang, received from him a present of a mariner's compass. This compass might have been of great service to your Solomon, for his fleets that went to the fine country of Ophir, which no one has ever known anything about. Thus, after the Chaldæans, the Syrians, the Persians, the Phoenicians, the Egyptians, the Greeks, the Indians, the Chinese, the Latins, and the Etruscans, you are the first people upon earth who had any known form of government.