Happy people! that once a week at least are fure to lay down all your cares together, and dance and fing and sport away the weights of grievance, which bow down the fpirit of other nations to the earth.

THE FRAGMENT.

PARIS.

A Fleur had left me fomething to

LA

to amuse myself with for the day more than I had bargained for, or could have enter'd either into his head or mine.

He had brought the little print of butter upon a currant leaf; and as the morning was warm, and he had begg'd a sheet of wafte paper to put betwixt the currant leaf and his hand -As that was plate fufficient, I bad him lay it upon the table as it was,

and as I refolved to stay within all day, I ordered him to call upon the traiteur to bespeak my dinner, and leave me to breakfast by myself.

When I had finished the butter, I threw the currant-leaf out of the window, and was going to do the fame by the waste paper-but stopping to read a line first, and that drawing me on to a fecond and third-I thought it better worth; fo I fhut the window, and drawing a chair up to it, I fat down to read it.

It was in the old French of Rabelais's time, and for ought I know might have been wrote by him-it was moreover in a Gothic letter, and that

VOL. II.

K

fo

fo faded and gone off by damps and length of time, it coft me infinite trouble to make any thing of itI threw it down; and then wrote a letter to Eugenius-then I took it up again, and embroiled my patience with it afresh-and then to cure that, I wrote a letter to Eliza.-Still it kept hold of me; and the difficulty of understanding it increafed but the defire.

I got my dinner; and after I had enlightened my mind with a bottle of Burgundy, I at it again-and after two or three hours poring upon it, with almoft as deep attention as ever Gruter or Jacob Spon did upon a nonfenfical infcription, I thought I made

made fenfe of it; but to make fure of it, the best way, I imagined, was to turn it into English, and fee how it would look then-fo I went on leifurely as a trifling man does, fometimes writing a fentence-then taking a turn or two-and then looking how the world went, out of the window; fo that it was nine o'clock at night before I had done it-I then begun and read it as follows.