Rica to Usbek, at A * * *.
THE other day I was in a house where there was a circle of all sorts of people; I found the conversation engrossed by two old ladies, who had laboured in vain all the morning to make themselves young again. “It must be allowed said one of them, that the men of these times are very different from those whom we saw in our youth; they were polite, well bred, complaisant, but now they are intolerably brutish.” “Every thing is changed, said a man, who appeared crippled with the gout; times are not as they were: forty years ago all the world behaved well, they walked, were gay, they desired nothing but to dance and sing, but now all the world is insupportably dull.” Soon after the conversation turned to politics.—Said an old lord, “The state is no longer governed; point me out now, such a minister as monsieur Colbert; he was one of my friends, he always ordered the pay of my pension before it was due: in what good order did he keep the finances! every body was at ease, but now I am ruined.” Sir, said an ecclesiastic, you are speaking of the most wonderful times of our invincible monarch; was there any thing so great as what he then did to extirpate heresy?” “And do you reckon for nothing his putting an end to duels?” said another with an air of satisfaction, who had not spoke a word before. “That remark is very judicious, said another in a whisper to me. This man is charmed with the edict, and he observes it so strictly, that six months ago he suffered himself to be heartily caned, rather than violate it.” It appears to me, Usbek, that we never judge of things but with a private view to ourselves. I do not wonder that the negroes paint the devil in the most glaring whiteness, and their gods as black as a coal; that the Venus of some nations should be represented with breasts pendant to her thighs; nor indeed that all idolators have made their gods of human figures, and have ascribed to them all their own passions. My dear Usbek, when I see men who creep upon an atom, the earth, which is but as a point to the universe, propose themselves as the immediate models of Providence, I know not how to reconcile so much presumption with so much insufficiency.