prey; no creature shews any fondness for its short-lived prisoner, except a man and a cat. Man was born to live with innocence and simplicity, but he has deviated from nature; he was born to share the bounties of heaven, but he has monopolized them; he was born to govern the brute creation, but he is become their tyrant. If an epicure now shall happen to surfeit on his last night's feast, twenty animals the next day are to undergo the most exquisite tortures, in order to provoke his appetite to another guilty meal. Hail, O ye simple, honest Bramins of the east; ye inoffensive friends of all that were born to happiness as well as you; you never sought a short-lived pleasure from the miseries of other creatures! You never studied the tormenting arts of ingenious refinement; you never surfeited upon a guilty meal! How much more purified and refined are all your sensations than ours! you distinguish every element with the utmost precision; a stream untasted before is a new luxury, a change of air is a new banquet, too refined for western imaginations to conceive. Though the Europeans do not hold the transmigration of souls, yet one of their doctors has, with great force of argument, and great plausibility of reasoning, endeavoured to prove, that the bodies of animals are the habitations of demons and wicked spirits, which are obliged to reside in these prisons till the resurrection pronounces their everlasting punishment; but are previously condemned to suffer all the pains and hardships inflicted upon them by man, or by each other, here. If this be the case, it may frequently happen, that while we whip pigs to death, or boil live lobsters, we are putting some old acquaintance, some near relation, to excruciating tortures, and are serving him up to the very same table where he was once the most welcome companion. "Kabul, says the Zendavesta,(1) was born on the rushy banks of the river Mawra: his possessions were great, and his luxuries kept pace with the affluence of his fortune; he hated the harmless Bramins, and despised their holy religion; every day his table was decked out with the flesh of a hundred different animals, and his cooks had a hundred different ways of dressing it, to solicit even satiety. "Notwithstanding all his eating, he did not arrive at old age; he died of a surfeit, caused by intemperance: upon this, his soul was carried off, in order to take its trial before a select assembly of the souls of those animals which his gluttony had caused to be slain, and who were now appointed his judges. "He trembled before a tribunal, to every member of which he had formerly acted as an unmerciful tyrant: he sought for pity, but found none disposed to grant it. Does he not remember, cries the angry boar, to what agonies I was put, not to satisfy his hunger, but his vanity? I was first hunted to death, and my flesh scarce thought worthy of coming once to his table. Were my advice followed, he should do penance in the shape of a hog, which in life he most resembled. "I am rather, cries a sheep upon the bench, for having him suffer under the appearance of a lamb; we may then send him through four or five transmigrations in the space of a month. Were my voice of any weight in the assembly, cries a calf, he should rather assume such a form as mine; I was bled every day, in order to make my flesh white, and at last killed without mercy. Would it not be wiser, cries a hen, to cram him in the shape of a fowl, and then smother him in his own blood, as I was served? The majority of the (1) [The name of the sacred books which the descendants of the ancient Persians assert that they received, more than four thousand years ago, from Zoroaster, or Zerdusht.] assembly were pleased with this punishment, and were going to condemn him without farther delay, when the ox rose up to give his opinion: I am informed, says this counsellor, that the prisoner at the bar has left a wife with child behind him. By my knowledge in divination, I foresee that this child will be a son, decrepid, feeble, sickly, a plague to himself and all about him. What say you, then, my companions, if we condemn the father to animate the body of his own son; and by this means make him feel in himself those miseries his intemperance must otherwise have entailed upon his posterity? The whole court applauded the ingenuity of his torture; they thanked him for his advice. Kabul was driven once more to revisit the earth; and his soul, in the body of his own son, passed a period of thirty years, loaded with misery, anxiety, and disease." LETTER XVI. OF FALSEHOOD PROPAGATED BY BOOKS SEEMINGLY SINCERE. From the Same. I know not whether I am more obliged to the Chinese missionaries for the instruction I have received from them, or prejudiced by the falsehoods they have made me believe. By them I was told that the Pope was universally allowed to be a man, and placed at the head of the Church; in England, however, they plainly prove him to be a whore in man's clothes, and often burn him in effigy as an impostor. A thousand books have been written on either side of the question: priests are eternally disputing against each other; and those mouths that want argument are filled with abuse. Which party must I believe, or shall I give credit to neither? When I survey the absurdities and falsehoods with which the books of the Europeans are filled, I thank Heaven for having been born in China, and that I have sagacity enough to detect imposture. The Europeans reproach us with false history and fabulous chronology: how should they blush to see their own books, many of which are written by the doctors of their religion, filled with the most monstrous fables, and attested with the utmost solemnity. The bounds of a letter do not permit me to mention all the absurdities of this kind, which in my reading I have met with. I shall confine myself to the accounts which some of their lettered men give of the persons of some of the inhabitants on our globe; and not satisfied with the most solemn asseverations, they sometimes pretend to have been eye-witnesses of what they describe. A Christian doctor, in one of his principal performances, (1) says, that it was not impossible for a whole nation to have but one eye in the middle of the forehead. He is not satisfied with leaving it in doubt; but in another work (2) assures us, that the fact was certain, and that he himself was an eye-witness of it. "When," says he, "I took a journey into Ethiopia, in company with several other servants of Christ, in order to preach the gospel, there I beheld, in the Southern provinces of that country, a nation which had only one eye in the midst of their foreheads." You will no doubt be surprised, reverend Fum, with this author's effrontery; but, alas! he is not alone in this story; he has only borrowed it from several others who wrote before him. Solinus creates another nation of Cyclops, the Arimaspians, who inhabit those countries that border on the Caspian Sea. This author goes on to tell us of a people of India, who have but one leg and one eye, and yet are extremely active, run with great swiftness, and live by (1) Augustin. de Civit. Dei, lib. xvi. p. 422. hunting. These people we scarcely know how to pity or admire; but the men whom Pliny calls Cynamolci, who have got the heads of dogs, really deserve our compassion: instead of language, they express their sentiments by barking. Solinus confirms what Pliny mentions; and Simon Mayole, a French bishop,(1) talks of them as of particular and familiar acquaintances. "After passing the deserts of Egypt," says he, "we meet with the Kunokephaloi, who inhabit those regions that border on Ethiopia; they live by hunting; they cannot speak, but whistle; their chins resemble a serpent's head; their hands are armed with long sharp claws; their breast resembles that of a greyhound; and they excel in swiftness and agility." Would you think it, my friend, that these odd kind of people are, notwithstanding their figure, excessively delicate; not even an alderman's wife, or Chinese mandarine, can excel them in this particular. "These people," continues our faithful bishop, "never refuse wine; love roast and boiled meat: they are particularly curious in having their meat well-dressed, and spurn at it if in the least tainted. When the Ptolemies reigned in Egypt," says he a little farther on, "those men with dog's heads taught grammar and music." For men who had no voices to teach music, and who could not speak, to teach grammar, is, I confess, a little extraordinary. Did ever the disciples of Fohi broach any thing more ridiculous? Hitherto we have seen men with heads strangely deformed, and with dog's heads; but what would you say if you heard of men without any heads at all? Pomponius Mela, Solinus, and Aulus Gellius describe them to our hand : "The Blemiæ have a nose, eyes, and mouth on their breasts; or, as others will have it, placed on their shoulders." One would think that these authors had an antipathy to (1) [Simon Maiolo was an Italian, and bishop of Volturara. He was born at Asti in 1520, and died in 1597.] |