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La femme à Loth, quoique sel devenue,
Est femme cncor; car elle a sa menstrue.

The land of aromatics was also the and of fables. Intc the desarts of Arabia Petræa the ancient mythologists pretend that Myrrha, the grand-daughter of a statue, fled after committing incest with her father, as Lot's daughters did with theirs, and that she was metamorphosed into the tree which bears myrrh. Other profound mythologists assure us, that she fled into Arabia Felix; and this opinion is as well supported as the other.

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Virgil speaks of the transformation of Moris into a wolf, as a thing of very ordinary occurrence—

Saepe lupum fieri Moerim, et se condere silvis.
Oft changed to wolf, he seeks the forest shade.

Was this doctrine of metamorphoses derived from the old fables of Egypt, which gave out that the gods had changed themselves into animals, in the war against the giants?

The Greeks, great imitators and improvers of the Oriental fables, metamorphosed almost all the gods into men or into beasts, to make them succeed the better in their amorous designs.

If the gods changed themselves into bulls, horses, swans, doves, &c.; why should not men have undergone the same operation?

Be this as it may, not one of our travellers has yet thought fit to examine the soil of Sodom, with its asphaltus, its salt, its trees and their fruits, to weigh the water of the lake, to analyse it, to ascertain whether bodies of greater specific gravity than common water float upon its surface, and to give us a faithful account of the natural history of the country. Our pilgrims to Jerusalem do not care to go and make these researches: this Several commentators, forgetting the desart has become infested by wandering respect due to the Holy Scriptures, have Arabs, who range as far as Damascus, cited the example of Nebuchadnezzar and retire into the caverns of the moun- changed into an ox; but this was a mitains the authority of the pacha of Da-racle—a divine vengeance-a thing quite nascus having hitherto been inadequate to repress them. Thus the curious have very little information about anything concerning the Asphaltic Lake.

As to Sodom, it is a melancholy reflection for the learned that, among so many who may be deemed natives, not one has furnished us with any notion whatever of this capital city.

ASS.

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out of the course of nature, which ought not to be examined with profane eyes, and cannot become an object of our re

searches.

Others of the learned, perhaps with equal indiscretion, avail themselves of what is related in the Gospel of the Infancy. An Egyptian maiden having entered the chamber of some women, saw there a mule with a silken cloth over his back, and an ebony pendant at his neck.

These women were in tears, kissing him and giving him to eat. The mule was their own brother. Some sorceresses had deprived him of the human figure: but the Master of Nature soon restored it.

WE will add a little to the article Ass in the Encyclopedia, concerning Lucian's Ass, which became golden in the hands of Apuleius. The pleasantest part of the adventure, however, is in Lucian ;—that a lady fell in love with this gentleman Although this gospel is apocryphal, while he was an ass, but would have no- the very name which it bears prevents us thing more to say to him when he was from examining this adventure in detail; but a man. These metamorphoses was only it may serve to show how much very common throughout antiquity. Si-metamorphoses were in vogue almost lenus' Ass had spoken; and the learned throughout the earth. The Christians, have thought that he explained himself in who composed this gospel, were

un

doubtedly honest men. They did not seek to fabricate a romance, they related with simplicity what they had heard. The church, which afterwards rejected this gospel, together with forty-nine others, did not accuse its authors of impiety and prevarication: those obscure individuals addressed the populace in language conformable with the prejudices of the age in which they lived. China was perhaps the only country exempt from these superstitions.

The adventure of the companions of Ulysses, changed into beasts by Circe, was much more ancient than the dogma of the metempsychosis, broached in Greece and Italy by Pythagoras.

On what can the assertion be founded, that there is no universal error which is not the abuse of some truth; that there have been quacks only because there have been true physicians; and that false prodigies have been believed, only because there have been true ones?

Were there any certain testimonies that men had become wolves, oxen, horses, or asses? This universal error had for its principle only the love of the marvellous and the natural inclination to superstition. One erroneous opinion is enough to fill the whole world with fables. An Indian doctor sees that animals have feeling and memory. He concludes that they have a soul. Men have one likewise. What becomes of the soul of man after death? What becomes of that of the beast? They must go somewhere. They go into the nearest body that is beginning to be formed. The soul of a Brahmin takes up its abode in the body of an elephant, the soul of an ass in that of a little Brahmin. Such is the dogma of the metempsychosis, which was built upon simple deduction. But it is a wide step from this dogma to that of metamorphosis. We have no longer a soul without a tenement, seeking a lodging; but one body changed into another, the soul remaining as before. Now, we certainly have not in nature any example of such legerdemain.

Let us then enquire into the origin of

so extravagant yet so general an opinion. If some father said to his son, sunk in ignorance and filthy debauchery, you are a hog, a horse, or an ass, and afterwards made him do peuance with an ass's cap on his head, and some servant-girl of the neighbourhood gave it out that this young man had been turned into an ass as a punishment for his faults, her neighbours would repeat it to other neighbours, and from mouth to mouth this story, with a thousand embellishments, would make the tour of the world. An ambiguous expression would suffice to deceive the whole earth.

Here then let us confess, with Boileau, that ambiguity has been the parent of most of our ridiculous follies.

Add to this the power of magic, which has been acknowledged as indisputable in all nations, and you will no longer be astonished at anything.

One word more on asses. It is said, that in Mesopotamia they are warlike, and that Mervan, the twenty-first caliph, was surnamed the Ass, for his valour.

The patriarch Photius relates, in the extract from the Life of Isidorus, that Ammonius had an ass which had a great taste for poetry, and would leave his manger to go and hear verses.

The fable of Midas is better than the tale of Photius.

Machiavel's Golden Ass.

Machiavel's Ass is but little known. The dictionaries which speak of it say, that it was a production of his youth: it would seem, however, that he was of mature age; for he speaks in it of the misfortunes which he had formerly and for a long time experienced. The work is a satire on his contemporaries. The author sees a number of Florentines, of whom one is changed into a cat, another into a dragon, a third into a dog that bays the moon, a fourth into a fox who does not suffer himself to be caught: each character is drawn under the name of an animal. The factions of the house of Medicis and their enemies, are doubt

less figured therein; and the key to this
comic apocalypse would admit us to the
secrets of Pope Leo and the troubles of
Florence. This poem is full of morality
and philosophy. It ends with the very
rational reflections of a large hog, which
addresses man in nearly the following
terms:

Ye naked bipeds, without beaks or caws,
Hairless, and featherless, and tender-hided,
Weeping ye come into the world-because
Ye feel your evil destiny decided:
Nature has given you industrious paws;

You, like the parrots, are with speech provided:
But have ye honest hearts?-Alas! alas!
In this we swine your bipedships surpass!

Man is far worse than we-more fierce, more wild-
Coward or madman, sinning every minute;

By frenzy and by fear in turn beguiled,

He dreads the grave, yet plunges headlong in it: If pigs fall out, they soon are reconciled;

Their quarrel's ended ere they well begin it. If crime with manhood always must combine, Good Lord! let me for ever be a swine.

bly might be an old ass in the neighbourhood of Verona, on whose back the populace remarked a finer cross than his brethren could boast of: some good old woman would be at hand to say, that this was the ass on which Christ rode into Jerusalem: and the ass would be honoured with a magnificent funeral. The feast established at Verona passed into other countries, and was especially celebrated in France. In the mass was sung

Orientis partibus
Adventabit asinus,

Pulcher et fortissimus

There was a long procession, headed by a young woman with a child in her arms mounted on an ass, representing the Virgin Mary going into Egypt. At the end of the mass the priest, instead of saying Ite missa est, brayed three times with all his might, and the people an

This is the original of Boileau's Satire on Man, and La Fontaine's fable of the Companions of Ulysses; but it is very likely that neither La Fontaine nor Boi-swered in chorus. leau had ever heard of Machiavel's Ass.

The Ass of Verona.

We have books on the feast of the Ass, and the feast of Fools: they furnish materials towards a universal history of the human mind,

ASSASSIN-ASSASSINATION.

SECTION I.

A NAME Corrupted from the word Ehissessin. Nothing is more common to those who go into a distant country than

I must speak the truth, and not deceive my readers. I do not very clearly know whether the Ass of Verona still exists in all his splendour; but the travellers who saw him forty or fifty years ago agree in saying, that the relics were inclosed in the body of an artificial ass made on purpose, which was in the keep-to write, repeat, and understand incoring of forty monks of Our Lady of the Organ, at Verona, and was carried in procession twice a year. This was one of the most ancient relics of the town. According to the tradition, this ass, having carried our Lord in his entry into Jerusalem, did not choose to abide any longer in that city, but trotted over the seawhich for that purpose became as hard as his hoof-by way of Cyprus, Rhodes, Candia, Malta, and Sicily. There he went to sojourn at Aquilea; and at last he settled at Verona, where he lived a long while.

rectly in their own language what they have misunderstood in a language entirely foreign to them, and afterwards to deceive their countrymen as well as themselves. Error flies from mouth to mouth, from pen to pen, and to destroy it requires ages.

In the time of the crusades, there was a wretched little people of mountaineers inhabiting the caverns near the road to Damascus. These brigands elected a chief, whom they named Cheik Elchassissin. It is said that this honorific title of cheik originally signified old, as with This fable originated in the circum- us the title of seigneur comes from senior, stance, that most asses have a sort of elder, and the word graf, a count, signiblack cross on their backs. There possi-fies old among the Germans; for, in

ders' vessel ready to convey them in an amicable manner, and the two last must have found another.

ancient times, almost every people conferred the civil command upon the old men. Afterwards, the command having become hereditary, the title of cheik, graf, seigneur, or count, has been given to children; and the Germans call a little master of four years old, the Count-was on the spot, says nothing about it.— that is, the old gentleman.

However, a hundred authors, one after another, have related this adventure, though Joinville, a contemporary, who

Et voila justement comme on écrit l'histoire. The crusaders named the old man of The Jesuit Maimbourg, the Jesuit the Arabian mountains, the Old Man of Daniel, twenty other Jesuits, and Mézethe Hill, and imagined him to be a great rai-though he was not a Jesuit-have prince, because he had caused a Count repeated this absurdity. The Abbé Véli, of Montserrat and some other crusading in his History of France, tells it over again nobles to be robbed and murdered on the with perfect complaisance, without any highway. These people were called the discussion, without any examination, and assassins, and their cheik the king of the on the word of one William of Nangis, vast country of the assassins. This vast who wrote about sixty years after this territory is five or six leagues long by two fine affair is said to have happened, at a or three broad, being part of Anti-Liba-time when history was composed from nus, a horrible country, full of rocks, like nothing but town talk. almost all Palestine, but intersected by pleasant meadow-lands, which feed nuinerous flocks, as it is attested by all who have made the journey from Aleppo to Damascus.

If none but true and useful things were recorded, our immense historical libraries would be reduced to a very narrow compass; but we should know more, and know it better.

For six hundred years the story has been told over and over again, of the Old Man of the Hill (le vieux de la montagne)

The cheik or senior of these assassins could be nothing more than a chief of banditti; for there was at that time a soldan of Damascus who was very pow-who, in his delightful gardens, intoxicated

erful.

Our romance-writers of that day, as fond of chimeras as the crusaders, thought proper to relate that, in 1236, this great prince of the assassins, fearing that Louis IX. of whom he had never heard, would put himself at the head of a crusade, and come and take from him his territory, sent two great men of his court from the caverns of Anti-Libanus to Paris, to assassinate that king; but that having the next day heard how generous and amiable a prince Louis was, he immediately sent out to sea two more great men to countermand the assassination:-I say, out to sea for neither the two emissaries sent to kill Louis, nor the two others sent to save him, could make the voyage without embarking at Joppa, which was then in the power of the crusaders, which renders the enterprise doubly marvellous. The two first must have found a crusa

his young elect with voluptuous plea-
sures, made them believe that they were
in paradise, and sent them to the ends of
the earth to assassinate kings in order to
merit an eternal paradise.

Near the Levantine slores there dwelt of old
An aged ruler, feared in every land;
Not that he owned enormous heaps of gold,
Not that vast armies marched at his command,-
But on his people's minds he things impressed,
Which filled with desperate courage every breast.
The boldest of his subjects first he took,
Of paradise to give them a foretaste-
The paradise his lawgiver had painted:
With every joy the lying prophet's book
Within his falsely-pictured heaven had placed,
They thought their senses had become acquainted.
And how was this effected? 'Twas by wine-
Of this they drank till every sense gave way,
And, while in drunken lethargy they lay,
Were borne, according to their chief s design,
To sports of pleasantness-to sunshine glades,
Delightful gardens and inviting shades.
Young tender beauties were abundant there,
In earliest bloom, and exquisitely fair:
These gaily thronged around the sleeping men,
Who, when at length they were awake again.
Wondering to see the beauteous objects round,
Beli ved that some way they'd already found
Those fields of bliss, in every beauty decked,
The false Mahomet promised his elect.

Acquaintance quickly made, the Turks advance;
The ma dens join them in a sprightly dance;
Sweet music charms them as they trip along;
And every feathered warbler adds his song.
The joys that could for every sense suffice.
Were found within this earthly paradise.
Wine, too, was there-and its effects the same:
These people drank, till they could drink no more,
But sinking down as senseless as before,
Were carried to the p ace from whence they came.
And what resulted from this trickery?
These men believed that they should surely be
Again transported to that place of pleasure,
If, without fear of suffering or of death,
They showed devotion to Mahomet's faith,
And to their prince obedience without measure.
Thus might their sovereign with reason say,
His subjects were determined to obey,
And that, now his device had made them so,
His was the mightiest empire here below, &c.

prostitution, makes him decide that this disciple should be an assassin. So that the education which Jean Jacques would give to a young man, consists in teaching him how to handle the plane, and in fitting him for salivation and the rope.

We doubt whether fathers of families will be eager to give such preceptors to their children. It seems to us, that the romance of Emilius departs rather too much from the maxims of Mentor in Telemachus; but it also must be acknowledged that our age has in all things very much varied from the great age of Louis XIV.

All this might be very well in one of La Fontaine's tales-setting apart the weakness of the verse; and there are a Happily, none of these horrible infatuhundred historical anecdotes which couldations are to be found in the Encyclopedia. be tolerated only there.

SECTION II.

Assassination being, next to poisoning. the crime most cowardly and most deserving of punishment, it is not astonishing that it has found an apologist in a man whose singular reasoning is, in some things, at variance with the reason of the rest of mankind.

In a romance entitled Emilius, he imagines that he is the guardian of a young man, to whom he is very careful to give an education such as is received in the military school--teaching him languages, geometry, tactics, fortification, and the history of his country. He does not seek to inspire him with love for his king and his country, but contents himself with making him a joiner. He would have this gentleman-joiner, when he has received a blow or a challenge, instead of returning it and fighting, "prudently assassinate the man.'" Moliére does, it is true, say jestingly, in L'Amour Peintre, "assassination is the safest;" but the author of this romance asserts that it is the most just and reasonable. He says this very seriously; and, in the immensity of his paradoxes, this is one of the three or four things which he says the first. The same spirit of wisdom and decency which makes him declare that a preceptor should often accompany his pupil to a place of

It often displays a philosophy seemingly bold, but never that atrocious and extravagant babbling, which two or three fools have called philosophy, and two or three ladies, eloquence.

ASTROLOGY.

ASTROLOGY might rest on a better foundation than magic. For if no one has seen farfadets, or lemures, or dives, or peris, or demons, or cacodemons, the predictions of astrologers have often been found true. Let two astrologers be consulted on the life of an infant, and on the weather; if one of them say that the child shall live to the age of man, the other that he shall not; if one foretel rain, and the other fair weather, it is quite clear that there will be a prophet.

The great misfortune of astrologers is, that the heavens have changed since the rules of the art were laid down. The sun, which at the equinox was in the Ram in the time of the Argonauts, is now in the Bull; and astrologers, most unfortunately for their art, now attribute to one house of the sun that which visibly belongs to another. Still, this is not a demonstrative argument against astrology. The masters of the art are mistaken; but it is not proved that the art cannot exist.

There would be no absurdity in saying, "Such a child was born during the moon's increase, in a stormy season, at the rising

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