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taken. Mr. Freeze, who designed it, calls it one, and nobody disputes his pretensions to taste. I now found it vain to contradict the lady in any thing she thought fit to advance; so was resolved rather to act the disciple than the instructor. She took me through several rooms all furnished, as she told me, in the Chinese manner; sprawling dragons, squatting pagods, and clumsy mandarines, were stuck upon every shelf: in turning round, one must have used caution not to demolish a part of the precarious furniture.

In a house like this, thought I, one must live continually upon the watch; the inhabitant must resemble a knight in an enchanted castle, who expects to meet an adventure at every turning. But, madam, said I, do not accidents ever happen to all this finery ? Man, Sir, replied the lady, is born to misfortunes, and it is but fit I should have a share. Three weeks ago, a careless servant snapped off the head of a favourite mandarine: I had scarce done grieving for that, when a monkey broke a beautiful jar; this I took the more to heart, as the injury was done me by a friend: however, I survived the calamity; when yesterday crash went half a dozen dragons upon the marble hearth stone; and yet I live; I survive it all: you can't conceive what comfort I find under afflictions from philosophy. There is Seneca, and Bolingbroke, and some others, who guide me through life, and teach me to support its calamities. I could not but smile at a woman who makes her own misfortunes, and then deplores the miseries of her situation. Wherefore, tired of acting with dissimulation, and willing to indulge my meditations in solitude, I took leave just as the servant was bringing in a plate of beef, pursuant to the directions of his mistress.

Adieu.

LETTER

LETTER XV.

FROM THE SAME.

THE better sort here pretend to the utmost compassion for animals of every kind; to hear them speak, a stranger would be apt to imagine they could hardly hurt the gnat that stung them; they seem so tender, and so full of pity, that one would take them for the harmless friends of the whole creation; the protectors of the meanest insect or reptile that was privileged with existence. And yet (would you believe it?) I have seen the very men who have thus boasted of their tenderness, at the same time devouring the flesh of six different animals tossed up in a fricassee. Strange contrariety of conduct! they pity, and they eat the objects of their compassion! The lion roars with terror over its captive; the tiger sends forth its hideous shriek to intimidate its 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

refined are all your sensations than ours: you
distin-
guish every element with the utmost precision; a
stream untasted before is new luxury, a change of
air is a new banquet, too refined for Western ima-
ginations to conceive.

Though the Europeans do not hold the transmi-
gration 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 dæmons 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 com-
panion.

"Kabul, says the Zendavesta, 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 an hundred different animals, and his cooks had an 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 unmerci

[graphic]

ལ་

ful 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 an 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 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."

VOL. III.

E

LETTER

LETTER XVI.

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 cloaths, 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 chris

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