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

let us speak of the times when most bar- ferring a great deal. The thing, however, barous nations quitted their own countries is not mathematically impossible; and if to seek others which were not much better.it be demonstrated, I assent: it would be It is true, if there be anything true in very uncivil to refuse to the Welches what ancient history, that there were Gaulish is granted to the Tartars. 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 Ro-most troubled with mice. In what nation mans 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. The Gauls, who were dying of hunger, finding nothing to eat at home, went to try their fortune further off; as the Romans afterwards did, when they ravaged so many countries; and as the people of the North did at a later period, when they destroyed the Roman empire.

:

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.

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?

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 son, or to mourn, or seem to mourn, at the death of a father. Every one is very glad to see the moon again, after having lost her for several nights. There are a hundred usages so natural to all men, that it cannot be said the Biscayans taught them to the Phrygians, or the Phrygians to the Biscayans.

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, to infer from these that the Gauls But the mysterious ceremonies which or Celts, afterwards conquered by a few it is so difficult to understand, the usages of Cæsar's legions, then by a horde of which nature does not teach-in what Goths, then by a horde of Burgundians, place, when, where, how, why, were they and lastly by a horde of Sicambri, under invented? Who communicated them to one Clodovic, had before subjugated the other nations? It is not likely that it whole earth, and given their names and should, at the same time, have entered the their laws to Asia, seems to me to be in-head of an Arab and of an Egyptian, to

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 preserved, which were made the day after the assassination of Coligni: there was

But what, then, will become of that learned antiquity which preceded the 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 maum. 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

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 feast-the very day that they are apprised of the day was sacred to diversion: so true is loss of a battle and the death of a hunthis, that the Egyptian priests fasted on dred brave officers? They run to the the eve, in order to eat the more on the play and the opera. morrow-a custom which our monks have preserved. There were, no doubt, mourn-shal ful 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 MarD'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, conOn the Antiquity of Feasts, which, it has demned by the cries of his infuriated enebeen asserted, were always mournful. mies, was led to the scaffold in a dungMen of ingenuity, profound searchers cart, with a gag in his mouth ?-When a into antiquity, who would know how the young man of nineteen, full of candour, earth was made a hundred thousand yearsdent, was carried to the most dreadful of courage, and modesty, but very impruago, if genius could discover it, have asserted, 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 comn.e

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.

of the Seine. Such has he been at all Such is man, at least man on the banks have always had hair, and larks feathers. times, for the same reason that rabbits

an oak for the purpose of crossing a river, did not build galleys; nor did they who piled up unhewn stones, and laid pieces of wood across them, dream of the pyramids. Every thing is done by degrees, and the glory belongs to no one.

All was done in the dark, until philosophers, aided by geometry, taught men to proceed with accuracy and safety.

It was left for Pythagoras, on his return from his travels, to show workmen the way to make an exact square. He took three rules, one two, one three, one four, and one five feet long, and with these he made a rightangled triangle. Moreover, it was found that the side 5 furnished a square just equal to the two squares produced by the sides 4 and 3; a method of importance in all regular works.

This is the famous theorem which he had brought from India, and which, we have elsewhere said, was known in China long before, according to the relation of the Emperor Cam-hi. Long before Plato, the Greeks made use of a single geometrical figure to double the square.

Archytas and Erastothenes invented a method of doubling the cube, which was impracticable by ordinary geometry, and which would have done honour to Archimedes.

This Archimedes found the method of calculating exactly the quantity of alloy mixed with gold; for gold had been worked for ages before the fraud of the workers could be discovered. Knavery existed long before mathematics. The pyramids, built with the square, and corresponding exactly with the four cardinal points, sufficiently show that geometry was known in Egypt from time immemorial; and yet it is proved that Egypt is quite a new country.

Without philosophy, we should be little above the animals, that dig or erect their habitations, prepare their food in them, take care of their little ones in their dwellings, and have besides the good fortune, which we have not, of being born ready clothed.

Vitruvius, who nad travelled in Gaul

and Spain, tells us, that in his time the houses were built of a sort of mortar, covered with thatch or oak shingles, and that the people did not make use of tiles. What was the time of Vitruvius? It was that of Augustus. The arts had scarcely yet reached the Spaniards, who had mines of gold and silver, or the Gauls, who had fought for ten years against Cæsar.

The same Vitruvius informs us, that in the opulent and ingenious town of Marseilles, which traded with so many na{tions, the roofs were only of a kind of clay mixed with straw.

He says, that the Phrygians dug themselves habitations in the ground: they stuck poles round the hollow, brought them together at top, and laid earth over them. The Hurons and the Algonquins are better lodged. This gives us no very lofty idea of Troy, built by the gods, and the palace of Priam :

Apparet domus intus, et atria longa patescunt;
Apparent Priami et veterum penetralia regum.

A mighty breach is made; the rooms concealed
Appear, and all the palace is revealed-

The halls of audience, and of public state.-Dryden.

To be sure, the people are not lodged like kings; huts are to be seen near the Vatican and near Versailles.

Besides, industry rises and falls among nations by a thousand revolutions :

Et campos ubi Troja fuit.

Now waves the sheaf where Troy once stood. We have our arts; the ancients had theirs. We could not make a galley with three benches of oars; but we can build ships with a hundred pieces of cannon.

We cannot raise obelisks a hundred feet high, in a single piece; but our meridians are more exact.

The byssus is unknown to us; but the stuffs of Lyons are more valuable.

The Capitol was worthy of admiration; the church of St. Peter is larger and more beautiful.

The Louvre is a master-piece when compared with the palace of Persepolis, the situation and ruins of which do but tell of a vast monument of barbaric wealth.

Rameau's music is probably better than

that of Timotheus; and there is not a looked forward to this resurrection of the picture presented at Paris in the Hall of body, why did they take out the brains Apollo (salon d'Apollon), which does not before embalming them? Were the excel the paintings dug out of Hercula-Egyptians to be resuscitated without brains?

neum.

APIS.

Was the ox Apis worshipped at Memphis as a God? as a symbol? or as an ox? It is likely that the fanatics regarded him as a god, the wise as merely a symbol, and that the more stupid part of the people worshipped the ox. Did Cambyses do right in killing this ox with his own hand? Why not? He showed to the imbecile that their God might be put on the spit without Nature's arming herself to revenge the sacrilege. The Egyptians have been much extolled. I have not

heard of a more miserable people. There must always have been in their character, and in their government, some radical vice which has constantly made vile slaves of them. Let it be granted, that in times almost unknown they conquered the earth; but in historical times they have been subjugated by all who have chosen to take the trouble,-by the Assyrians, by the Greeks, by the Romans, by the Arabs, by the Mamelukes, by the Turks, by all, in short, but our crusaders, who were even more ill-advised than the Egyptians were cowardly. It was the Mameluke militia that beat the French under St. Louis. There are, perhaps, but two things tolerable in this nation; the first is, that those who worshipped an ox, never sought to compel those who adored an ape to change their religion; the second, that they have always hatched

chickens in ovens.

We are told of their pyramids; but they are monuments of an enslaved people. The whole nation must have been set to work on them, or those unsightly masses could never have been raised. And for what use were they? To preserve in a small chamber the mummy of some prince, or governor, or intendant, which his soul was to re-animate at the end of a thousand years. But if they

APOCALYPSE.

SECTION I.

JUSTIN the Martyr, who wrote about the year 270 of the Christian era, was the first who spoke of the Apocalypse; he attributes it to the apostle John the Evangelist. In his dialogue with Tryphon,

that Jew asks him if he does not believe that Jerusalem is one day to be re-established? Justin answers, that he believes it, as all Christians do who think aright. "There was among us," says he, "a certain person named John, one of the twelve apostles of Jesus; he foretold that the faithful shall pass a thousand years in Jerusalem.”

The belief in this reign of a thousand years was long prevalent among the Christians. This period was also in great credit among the Gentiles. The souls of the Egyptians returned to their bodies at the end of a thousand years; and, according to Virgil, the souls in purgatory were exercised for the same space of time;et mille per annos. The New Jerusalem of a thousand years was to have twelve gates, in memory of the twelve aposties; its form was to be square; its length, breadth, and height, were each to be a thousand stadii, i.e. five hundred leagues; so that the houses were to be five hundred

leagues high. It would be rather disagreeable to live in the upper story; but we find all this in the 21st chapter of the Apocalypse.

If Justin was the first who attributed the Apocalypse to St. John, some persons have rejected his testimony; because in this same dialogue with the Jew Tryphon, he says that, according to the relahe went into the Jordan, made the water tion of the Apostles, Jesus Christ, when boil,-which, however, is not to be found in any writing of the Apostles.

The same St. Justin confidently cites