.THE MISAHTHEOPICAL DICTIONAET. 185 



Bound, in not being the cause of a great crime or a great 

 folly, may not have been used in promulgating some absur- 

 dity or other; savants and grammarians are at hand to fill 

 up the voids. 



By searching thoroughly, we shall find that every letter 

 even, has isolately served as a subject of some impertinences 

 at least ; every one knows the history of the two school- 

 masters, whose ears a, king caused to be cut off, because they 

 refused to adopt two letters added to the alphabet by this 

 prince, who was as cruel as they were silly. We know that 

 there have been two hundred volumes written,, several coun- 

 cils held, long persecutions made and undergone, with deaths 

 and tortures, for a diphthong added to or cut off from the 

 Credo. We likewise know the disputes and hatreds raised 

 regarding the real pronunciation of the letter K. 



The letter A, which commences all dictionaries, is it not, in 

 French, the third person of the verb avoir, to have ; is not 

 avoir the root of avarice? How many volumes would it 

 require to describe the baseness and crimes committed for 

 avoir, to have 1 



By following up the words, one by one, you wiU not be 

 long before you arrive at the word aheille (bee). A large 

 volume might be made of nothing but the silly things men 

 have said on the subject of bees. It was thinking of bees 

 that brought to my mind the idea of this dictionary, which 

 may be entitled. The Misanthropical Dictionary, or the 

 History, in an alphabetical order, of the follies and wicked- 

 nesses of Man. 



There is however one thing to be observed ; many of the 

 silly things said about bees have not been said by the 

 moderns, because the ancients abused their position to say 

 them first. The moderns have only been able to repeat them 

 and teach them in their colleges, as they do to the present 

 day. You have, my fi'iend, passed ten years,^ — as I did, as 

 everybody has, — in learning Latin. During five or six, Virgil 

 was your principal subject of thought and study; and you 

 always esteemed him with an admiration without bounds and 

 without restriction during six years, that is to say, according 

 to the usages of colleges, during six professors. Never did 

 one professor think it worth his while to remark, that the 



