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Rh joy at the prospect of so hopeful a successor; and, as he was putting the pen into his hand, said, “I give it to you, as the dying shepherd Damœtas bequeathed his pipe to the little Corydon.”

The name of Pascal (that prodigy of parts, as Locke calls him) is more familiar to modern ears, than that of any of the other learned and polished anchorites, who have rendered the sanctuary of Port-Royal so illustrious; but his writings furnish few materials for philosophical history. Abstracting from his great merits in mathematics and in physics, his reputation rests chiefly on the Provincial Letters; a work from which Voltaire, notwithstanding his strong prejudices against the author, dates the fixation of the French language; and of which the same excellent judge has said, that “Molière’s best comedies do not excel them in wit, nor the compositions of Bossuet in sublimity.” The enthusiastic admiration of Gibbon for this book, which he was accustomed from his youth to read once a year, is well known; and is sufficient to account for the rapture with which it never fails to be spoken of by the erudite vulgar in this country. I cannot help, however, suspecting, that it is now more praised than read in Great Britain; so completely have those disputes, to which it owed its first celebrity, lost their interest. Many passages in it, indeed, will always be perused with delight; but it may be questioned, if Gibbon himself would have read it so often from beginning to end, had it not been for the strong hold which ecclesiastical controversies, and the Roman Catholic faith, had early taken of his mind.

In one respect, the Provincial Letters are well entitled to the attention of philosophers; inasmuch as they present so faithful and lively a picture of the influence of false religious views in perverting the moral sentiments of mankind. The overwhelming ridicule lavished by Pascal on the whole system of jesuitical casuistry, and the happy effects of his pleasantry in preparing, from a distance, the fall of that formidable order, might be quoted as proofs, that there are at least some truths, in whose defence this weapon may be safely employed;—perhaps with more advantage than the commanding voice of Reason herself. The mischievous absurdities which it was his aim to correct, scarcely admitted of the gravity of logical discussion; requiring only the extirpation or the prevention of those early prejudices which choke the growth of common sense and of conscience: And for this purpose, what so likely to succeed with the open and generous minds of youth, as Ridicule, managed with decency and taste; more especially when seconded, as in the