d, will allow room
enough, and to spare, for eight hundred thousand millions, which he
supposes to be as great a number of souls (counting from the fall of
Adam) as can possibly be damn'd to the end of the world.

From what he has made this second estimate--unless from the parental
goodness of God--I don't know--I am much more at a loss what could be in
Franciscus Ribbera's head, who pretends that no less a space than one of
two hundred Italian miles multiplied into itself, will be sufficient to
hold the like number--he certainly must have gone upon some of the old
Roman souls, of which he had read, without reflecting how much, by a
gradual and most tabid decline, in the course of eighteen hundred years,
they must unavoidably have shrunk so as to have come, when he wrote,
almost to nothing.

In Lessius's time, who seems the cooler man, they were as little as can
be imagined--

--We find them less now--

And next winter we shall find them less again; so that if we go on from
little to less, and from less to nothing, I hesitate not one moment to
affirm, that in half a century at this rate, we shall have no souls
at all; which being the period beyond which I doubt likewise of the
existence of the Christian faith, 'twill be one advantage that both of
'em will be exactly worn out together.

Blessed Jupiter! and blessed every other heathen god and goddess!
for now ye will all come into play again, and with Priapus at your
tails--what jovial times!--but where am I? and into what a delicious
riot of things am I rushing? I--I who must be cut short in the midst
of my days, and taste no more of 'em than what I borrow from my
imagination--peace to thee, generous fool! and let me go on.

Chapter 3.XCVIII.

--'So hating, I say, to make mysteries of nothing'--I intrusted it with
the post-boy, as soon as ever I got off the stones; he gave a crack with
his whip to balance the compliment; and with the thill-horse trotting,
and a sort of an up and a down of the other, we danced it along to Ailly
au clochers, famed in days of yore for the finest chimes in the world;
but we danced through it without music--the chimes being greatly out of
order--(as in truth they were through all France).

And so making all possible speed, from

Ailly au clochers, I got to Hixcourt, from Hixcourt I got to Pequignay,
and from Pequignay, I got to Amiens, concerning which town I have
nothing to inform you, but what I have informed you once before