sold for money the remission of the most horrible enormities. I beheld, on one hand, infatuated men, stained with vices, and seeking to purify themselves before impure gods; and on the other, knaves who boasted that they could justify the most perverse by initiating them in my public life, he should have been able to write a long work in verse, in a foreign language;-he, who could hardly have made four good lines in his own tongue. It seems to me that he often united the strength of Lucretius and the elegance of Virgil. I admire him, above all, for that facility with which he expresses such dif-steries, by dropping bullock's blood on ficult things. their heads, or by dipping them in the waters of the Ganges. I beheld the most unjust wars undertaken with perfect sanctity, so soon as a ram's liver was found unspotted, or a woman, with hair dishevelled and rolling eyes, uttered words of which neither she nor any one else knew the meaning. In short, I beheld all the countries of the earth stained with the blood of human victims, sacrificed by barbarous pontiffs to barbarous gods. I con Perhaps, indeed, his Anti-Lucretius is too diffuse, and too little diversified; but he is here to be examined as a philosopher, not as a poet. It appears to me that so fine a mind as his should have done more justice to the morals of Epicurus, who, though he was a very bad natural philosopher, was, nevertheless, a very worthy man, and always taught mildness, temperance, moderation, and justice, virtues which his example incul-sider that I did well to detest_such relicated still more forcibly. In the Anti-Lucretius, this great man is thus apostrophised Si virtutis eras avidus, rectique bonique If virtue, justice, goodness, were thy care, No, no-the worst of men, the worst of crimes But Epicurus might reply to the cardinal "If I had had the happiness of knowing, like you, the true God,-of being born, like you, in a pure and holy religion, I should certainly not have rejected that revealed God, whose tenets were necessarily unknown to my mind, but whose morality was in my heart. 1 could not admit the existence of such gods as were announced to me by Paganism. I was too rational to adore divinties made to spring from a father and a mother, like mortals, and like them, to make war upon one another. I was too great a friend to virtue, not to hate a religion which now invited to crime by the example of those gods themselves, and now gions. Mine is virtue. I exhorted my disciples not to meddle with the affairs of this world, because they were horribly governed. A true Epicurean was mild, moderate, just, amiable-a man of whom no society had to complain-one who did not pay executioners to assassinate in public those who thought differently from himself. From hence to the holy religion in which you have been bred, there is but one step. I destroyed the false gods; and, had I lived in your day, I would have recognised the true ones.' Thus might Epicurus justify himself concerning his error. He might even entitle himself to pardon respecting the dogma of the immortality of the soul, by saying :-"Pity me for having combated a truth which God revealed five hundred years after my birth. I thought like all the first Pagan legislators of the world; and they were all ignorant of this truth." I wish, then, that Cardinal Polignac had pitied while he condemned Epicurus: it would have been no detriment to fine poetry. With regard to physics, it appears to me that the author has lost much time and many verses in refuting the declination of atoms and the other absurdities which swarm in the poem of Lucretius. This is employing artillery to destroy a cottage. Besides, why remove Lucretius' reveries to substitute those of Descartes ? the same thing, at the sources of the Guadalquivir, the Guadiana, the Douro, and the Ebro. For of Pison we easily Cardinal Polignac has inserted in his make Phæris, and of Pharis we easily poem some very fine lines on the disco-make the Bætis, which is the Guadalquiveries of Newton; but in these, unfortu- vir. The Gihon, it is plain, is the Guanately for himself, he combats demon- {diana, for they both begin with a G. And strated truths. The philosophy of New- the Ebro, which is in Catalonia, is unton is not to be discussed in verse; it is questionably the Euphrates, both beginscarcely to be approached in prose.ning with an E. Founded altogether on geometry, the genius of poetry is not fit to assail it. The surface of these truths may be decorated with fine verses; but to fathom them, culation is requisite, and not verse. ANTIQUITY. SECTION I. But a Scotchman comes, and in his turn demonstrates that the garden of Eden was at Edinburgh, which has retained its cal-name; and it is not unlikely that, in a few centuries, this opinion will prevail. The whole globe was once burned, says a man conversant with ancient and modern history; for I have read in a journal, that charcoal quite black has been found a HAVE you not sometimes seen, in a village, Pierre Aoudri and his wife Pero-hundred feet deep, among mountains nelle striving to go before their neighbours m a procession? "Our grandfathers," say they, "rung the bells, before those who elbow us now had so much as a stable of their own." covered with wood. And it is also suspected that there were charcoal-burners in this place. Phaeton's adventure sufficiently shows that everything has been boiled, even to The vanity of Pierre Aoudri, his wife, the bottom of the sea. The sulphur of and his neighbours, knows no better.-Mount Vesuvius incontrovertibly proves They grow warm. The quarrel is an im- that the banks of the Rhine, the Danube, portant one, for honour is in question. the Ganges, the Nile, and the Great YelProofs must now be found. Some learned low River, are nothing but sulphur, nitre, church-singer discovers an old rusty iron and oil of guiacum, which only wait for pot, marked with an A, the initial of the the moment of explosion to reduce the brazier's name who made the pot. Pierre earth to ashes, as it has already once been. Aoudri persuades himself that it was the The sand on which we walk is an evident helmet of one of his ancestors. So Cæsar proof that the universe has vitrified, and descended from a hero and from the god-that our globe is nothing but a ball of dess Venus. Such is the history of na-glass-like our ideas. nons; such is, very nearly, the knowledge of early antiquity. But if fire has changed our globe, water has produced still more wonderful revoThe learned of Armenia demonstrate lutions. For it is plain that the sea, the that the terrestrial paradise was in their tides of which, in our latitudes, rise eight country. Some profound Swedes demon- feet, has produced the mountains, which strate that it was somewhere about Lake are sixteen to seventeen thousand feet high. Wenner, which exhibits visible remains This is so true, that some learned men, of it. Some Spaniards, too, demonstrate who never were in Switzerland, found a that it was in Castile. While the Japa- large vessel there, with all its rigging, penese, the Chinese, the Tartars, the In-trified, either on Mount St. Gothard or at dans, the Africans, and the Americans, the bottom of a precipice-it is not posiare so unfortunate as not even to know tively known which; but it is quite certhat a terrestrial paradise once existed attain that it was there. Therefore, men the sources of the Pison, the Gihon, the were originally fishes-Q. E. D. Tigris, and the Euphrates, or, which is Coming down to antiquity less ancient, let us speak of the times when most bar-ferring a great deal. The thing, however, is not mathematically impossible; and if it be demonstrated, I assent: it would be very uncivil to refuse to the Welches what is granted to the Tartars. SECTION II. On the Antiquity of Usages. Who have been the greatest fools, and who the most ancient fools? Ourselves? or the Egyptians? or the Syrians? or some other people? What was signified by our misletoe? Who first consecrated a cat?-It must have been he who was the most troubled with mice. In what nation did they first dance under the boughs of trees in honour of the gods? Who first made processions, and placed fools, with caps and bells, at the head of them? Who first carried a Priapus through the streets, and fixed one like a knocker at the door? What Arab first took it into his head to hang his wife's drawers out at the window, the day after his marriage? barous nations quitted their own countries to seek others which were not much better. It is true, if there be anything true in ancient history, that there were Gaulish robbers, who went to plunder Rome in the time of Camillus. Other robbers from Gaul had, it is said, passed through Illyria to sell their services as murderers to other murderers in the neighbourhood of Thrace: they bartered their blood for bread, and at length settled in Galatia. But who were these Gauls? Were they natives of Berry and Anjou? They were, doubtless, some of those Gauls whom the Romans called Cisalpine, and whom we call Transalpine-famishing mountaineers, inhabiting the Alps and the Appennines. The Gauls of the Seine and the Marne did not then know that Rome existed; and could not resolve to cross Mount Cenis, as was afterwards done by Hannibal, to steal the wardrobes of the Roman senators, whose only moveables were-a gown of bad grey cloth, decorated with a band, the colour of bull's blood; two small knobs of ivory, or rather dog's bone, fixed to the arms of a wooden chair; and a piece of rancid bacon in their kitchens.son, or to mourn, or seem to mourn, at The Gauls, who were dying of hunger, the death of a father. Every one is very finding nothing to eat at home, went to glad to see the moon again, after having try their fortune further off; as the Ro- lost her for several nights. There are a mans afterwards did, when they ravaged hundred usages so natural to all men, that so many countries; and as the people of it cannot be said the Biscayans taught the North did at a later period, when they them to the Phrygians, or the Phrygians destroyed the Roman empire. to the Biscayans. And whence have we received our vague information respecting these emigrations? From some lines written at a venture by the Romans for, as for the Celts, Welches, or Gauls, whom some would have us believe to have been eloquent, neither they nor their bards could at that time read or write. But, to infer from these that the Gauls or Celts, afterwards conquered by a few of Cæsar's legions, then by a horde of Goths, then by a horde of Burgundians, and lastly by a horde of Sicambri, under one Clodovic, had before subjugated the whole earth, and given their names and their laws to Asia, seems to me to be in { All nations have formerly danced at the time of the new moon. Did they then give one another the word? No: no more than they did to rejoice at the birth of a Fire and water have been used in temples. This custom needed no introduction. A priest did not choose always to have his hands dirty. Fire was necessary to cook the immolated carcases, and to burn slips of resinous wood and spices, in order to combat the odour of the sacerdotal shambles. But the mysterious ceremonies which it is so difficult to understand, the usages which nature does not teach-in what place, when, where, how, why, were they invented? Who communicated them to other nations? It is not likely that it should, at the same time, have entered the head of an Arab and of an Egyptian, to cut off one end of his son's prepuce; nor that a Chinese and a Persian should, both at once, have resolved to castrate little boys. {voured his father, and that he devoured his children. No allegory is more reasonable: Time devours the past and the present, and will devour the future. Why seek for vain and gloomy explanations of a feast so universal, so gay, and so well known? When I look well into It can never have been that two fathers, in different countries, have, at the same moment, formed the idea of cutting their sons' throats to please God. Some na-antiquity, I do not find a single annual tions must have communicated to others their follies, serious, ridiculous, or bartarous. In this antiquity men love to search, to discover, if possible, the first madman and the first scoundrel who perverted human nature. But, how are we to know whether Jehu, in Phoenicia, by immolating his son, was the inventor of sacrifices of human blood? How can we be assured that Lycaon was the first who ate human flesh, when we do not know who first began to eat fowls? We seek to know the origin of ancient feasts. The most ancient and the finest is that of the Emperors of China tilling and sowing the ground, together with their first mandarins. The second is, that of the Thesmophoria at Athens. To celebrate at once agriculture and justice, to show men how necessary they both are, to unite the curb of law with the art which is the source of all wealth-nothing is more wise, more pious, or more useful. festival of a melancholy character; or, at least, if they begin with lamentations, they end in dancing and revelry. If tears are shed for Adoni or Adonai, whom we call Adonis, he is soon resuscitated, and re(joicing takes place. It is the same with the feasts of Isis, Osiris, and Horus. The Greeks, too, did as much for Ceres as for Proserpine. The death of the serpent Python was celebrated with gaiety. A feast day and a day of joy were one and the same thing. At the feasts of Bacchus this joy was only carried too far. I do not find one general commemoration of an unfortunate event. The institutors of the feasts would have shown themselves to be devoid of common sense, if they had established at Athens a celebration of the battle lost at Cheronea, and at Rome another of the battle of Cannæ. They perpetuated the remembrance of what might encourage men, and not of that which might fill them with cowardice or despair. This is so true, that fables were invented for the purpose of instituting There are old allegorical feasts to be feasts. Castor and Pollux did not fight found everywhere, as those of the return for the Romans near Lake Regillus; but, of the seasons. It was not necessary that at the end of three or four hundred years, one nation should come from afar off, to some priests said so, and all the people teach another that marks of joy and friend-danced. Hercules did not deliver Greece ship for one's neighbours may be given on the first day of the year. This custom has been that of every people. The Saturnalia of the Romans are better known than those of the Allobroges and the Picts; because there are many Roman writings and monuments remaining, but there are none of the other nations of western Europe. The feast of Saturn was the feast of Time. He had four wings; Time flies quackly. His two faces evidently signified the concluded and the commencing year. The Greeks said that he had de from a hydra with seven heads; but Hercules and his hydra were sung. SECTION III. Festivals founded on Chimeras. I do not know that there was, in all antiquity, a single festival founded on an established fact. It has been elsewhere remarked, how extremely ridiculous those schoolmen appear, who say to you, with a magisterial air :-Here is an ancient hymn in honour of Apollo, who visited Claros; therefore, Apollo went to Claros: a chapel was erected to Perseus; there-burning of the whole city, in the reign of fore, he delivered Andromeda. Poor men! you should rather say, therefore, there was no Andromeda. Charles II. We made songs while the massacres of Bartholomew were still going on. Some pasquinades have been But what, then, will become of that preserved, which were made the day after learned antiquity which preceded the the assassination of Coligni: there was olympiads? It will become what it is printed in Paris, Passio Domini nostri an unknown time, a time lost, a time of Gaspardi Colignii secundum Bartholoallegories and lies, a time regarded with { mæum. contempt by the wise, and profoundly discussed by blockheads, who like to float in a void, like Epicurus' atoms. What do the people of Paris do, on the very day that they are apprised of the loss of a battle and the death of a hundred brave officers? They run to the play and the opera. It has a thousand times happened that the Sultan, who reigns in Constantinople, has made his eunuchs and odalisks dance There were everywhere days of pen-in apartments stained with the blood of ance, days of expiation in the temples; his brothers and his viziers. but these days were never called by a name answering to that of feasts. Every feastday was sacred to diversion: so true is this, that the Egyptian priests fasted on the eve, in order to eat the more on the morrow-a custom which our monks have preserved. There were, no doubt, mournful ceremonies. It was not customary to dance the Greek brawl while interring or carrying to the funeral pile a son or a daughter; this was a public ceremony, but certainly not a feast. SECTION IV. What did they when the wife of Marshal D'Ancre was given up in the Grève to the barbarity of her persecutors ?— When Marshal De Marillac was dragged to execution in a waggon, by virtue of a paper signed by robed lackies in Cardinal De Richelieu's anti-chamber?-When a lieutenant-general of the army, a foreigner, who had shed his blood for the state, condemned by the cries of his infuriated enemies, was led to the scaffold in a dungcart, with a gag in his mouth ?--When a young man of nineteen, full of candour, courage, and modesty, but very impru On the Antiquity of Feasts, which, it has been asserted, were always mournful. Men of ingenuity, profound searchers into antiquity, who would know how the earth was made a hundred thousand years ago, if genius could discover it, have as-dent, was carried to the most dreadful of serted, that mankind, reduced to a very small number in both continents, and still terrified at the innumerable revolutions which this sad globe had undergone, perpetuated the remembrance of their calamities by dismal and mournful comme morations. "Every feast," say they, "was a day of horror, instituted to remind men that their fathers had been destroyed by the fires of the volcanoes, by rocks falling from the mountains, by eruptions of the sea, by the teeth and claws of wild beasts, by war, pestilence and famine." Then we are not made as men were then. There was never so much rejoicing in London, as after the plague and the punishments? They sang vaudevilles. Such is man, at least man on the banks of the Seine. Such has he been at all times, for the same reason that rabbits have always had hair, and larks feathers." SECTION V. On the Origin of the Arts. What! we would know the precise theology of Thoth, Zerdusht, or Sanchoniathon, although we know not who invented the shuttle. The first weaver, the first mason, the first smith, were undoubtedly great geniuses; yet no account has been made of them. And why? Because not one of them invented a perfect art. He who first hollowed the trunk of |