Mr. Craggs, secretary of state in England, would never permit any person in his office to open private letters; he said that to do so was a breach of public faith, and that no man ought to possess himself of a secret that was not voluntarily confided to him; that it is often a greater crime to steal a man's thoughts than his gold; and that such treachery is proportionally more disgraceful, as it may be committed without danger, and without even the possibility of conviction. To bewilder the eagerness of curiosity and defeat the vigilance of malice, a method was at first invented of writing a part of the contents of letters in ciphers; but the part written in the ordinary hand in this case sometimes served as a key to the rest. This inconvenience led to perfecting the art of ciphers, which is called "stenography." Against these enigmatical productions was brought the art of deciphering; but this art was exceedingly defective and inefficient. The only advantage derived from it was exciting the belief in weak and ill-formed minds, that their letters had been deciphered, and all the pleasure it afforded consisted in giving such persons pain. According to the law of probabilities, in a well-constructed cipher there would be two, three, or even four hundred chances against one, that in each mark the decipherer would not discover the syllable of which it was the representative. The number of chances increases in proportion to the complication of the ciphers; and deciphering is utterly impossible when the system is arranged with any ingenuity. Those who boast that they can decipher a letter, without being at all acquainted with the subject of which it treats, and without any preliminary assistance, are greater charlatans than those who boast, if any such are to be found, of understanding a language which they never learned. With respect to those who in a free and easy way send you by post a tragedy, in good round hand, with blank leaves, on which you are requested kindly to make your observations, or who in the same way regale you with a first volume of metaphysical researches, to be speedily followed by a second, we may just whisper in their ear that a little more discretion would do no harm, and even that there are some countries where they would run some risk by thus informing the administration of the day that there are such things in the world as bad poets and bad metaphysicians. POWER--OMNIPOTENCE. I presume every reader of this article to be convinced that the world is formed with intelligence, and that a slight knowledge of astronomy and anatomy is sufficient to produce admiration of that universal and supreme intelligence. Once more I repeat "_mens agitat molem._" Can the reader of himself ascertain that this intelligence is omnipotent, that is to say, infinitely powerful? Has he the slightest notion of infinity, to enable him to comprehend the meaning and extent of almighty power?