as music, dancing and drawing, but they carry their researches into the higher branches of litterature and science and acquire with great facility foreign languages.  It is true that you now and then meet with a little pedantry on the part of the young men and some of the young women are tant soit feu precieuses; and you may guess from their conversation, which is sometimes forced, that the person who speaks has been learning his discourse by heart from some book in the morning, with the intention of sporting it as a natural conversation in the evening.  In short, one does not meet with that abandon in society that is to be met with in Paris; you must measure your words well to shine in a Genevese society.  This, however, is a very pardonable sort of coxcombry; and tho’ it appear sometimes pedantic, and occasionally laughable, yet it tends to encourage learning and science, and compels the young men to read in order to shine and captivate the fair.

The Genevese women make excellent wives and mothers; and many strangers, struck with their beauty and talent, as well as with the agremens of the country in general, marry at Geneva and settle themselves there for life.  It is observed that the Genevoises are so attached to their country that on forming a matrimonial connection with foreigners, they always stipulate that they shall not be removed from it.  On the dismemberment of the Empire of Napoleon, Geneva was agrege to the Helvetic Confederation, as an independent Canton of which there are now twenty-two.  Three, viz.  Geneva, Vaud, and Neufchatel, are French in language and manners.  One, the Tessino, is Italian, and the remaining eighteen are all German.  It is a great advantage to Geneva to belong to the Helvetic Confederacy, as formerly, when she was an isolated independent state, she was in continual dread of being swallowed up by one or other of her two powerful neighbours, France and the King of Sardinia, and only existed by their forbearance and mutual jealousy.

I walked out one morning to Ferney in order to visit the chateau of Voltaire and to do hommage to the memory of that great man, the benefactor of the human race.  It was he who gave the mortal blow to superstition and to the power of the clergy.  It is the fashion for priests, Ultras and Tories to rail against him, but I judge him by his works and the effect of his works.  His memory is held in reverence by the inhabitants of Ferney as their father and benefactor.  He spent his whole fortune in acts of the most disinterested charity; he saved entire families from ruin and portioned off many a young woman who was deprived of the gifts of fortune and enabled them to form happy matrimonial connections; in short, doing good seems to have been one of the most ardent passions of his soul.  In three memorable instances he shewed his hatred of cruelty and injustice, and unmasked triumphantly ecclesiastical imposture and fanaticism.  He has been reproached with vanity, but surely that may be pardoned in a man who received the hommage of the whole literary world, who was considered as an oracle, and whose every sentence was recorded; whose talent was so universal, that he excelled in every branch of litterature that he undertook.