Which from the exhaustless lore of human weal
Draws on the virtuous mind, the thoughts that rise

bility is perfectible, and that the number of ideas which his mind is capable of receiving is indefinite. One man is stretched on the rack during twelve hours; another sleeps soundly in his bed: the difference of time perceived by these two persons is immense; one hardly will believe that half an hour has elapsed, the other could credit that centuries had flown during his agony. Thus, the life of a man of talent, who should die in is thirtieth year, is, with regard to his own feelings, longer than that of a miserable priest-ridden slave, who dreams out a century of dulness. The one has perpetually cultivated his mental faculties, has rendered himself master of his thoughts, can abstract and generalize amid the lethargy of every-day business; the other can slumber over the brightest moments of his being, and is unable to remember the happiest hour of his life. Perhaps the perishing ephemeron enjoys a longer life than the tortoise.

Dark flood of time!
Roll as it listeth thee-I measure not

By months or moments thy ambiguous course.
Another may stand by me on the brink

And watch the bubble whirled beyond his ken
That pauses at my feet. The sense of love,
The thirst for action, and the impassioned thought
Prolong my being. If I wake no more,

My life more actual living will contain

Than some grey veterans of the world's cold school,
Whose listless hours unprofitably roll,

By one enthusiast feeling unredeemed.

See Goodwin's Pol. Jus. vol. i. page 411;and Condorcet, Esquisse d'un Tableau Historique des Progrés de l'Esprit Humain, Epoque ix.

In time destroying infiniteness, gifts
With self-enshrined eternity, that mocks
The unprevailing hoariness of age,

And man, once fleeting o'er the transient scene
Swift as an unremembered vision, stands
Immortal upon earth: no longer now*

* I hold that the depravity of the physical and moral nature of man originated in his unnatural habits of life. The origin of man, like that of the universe of which he is a part, is enveloped in impenetrable mystery. His generations either had a beginning, or they had not. The weight of evidence in favour of each of these suppositions seems tolerably equal; and it is perfectly unimportant to the present argument which is assumed. The language spoken however by the mythology of nearly all religions seems to prove, that at some distant period man forsook the path of nature, and sacrificed the purity and happiness of his being to unnatural appetites. The date of this event seems to have also been that of some great change in the climates of the earth, with which it has an obvious correspondence. The allegory of Adam and Eve eating of the tree of evil, and entailing upon their posterity the wrath of God, and the loss of everlasting life, admits of no other explanation than the disease and crime that have flowed from unnatural diet. Milton was so well aware of this, that he makes Raphael thus exhibit to Adam the consequence of his disobedience.

-Immediately a place
Before his eyes appeared: sad, noisome, dark:
A lazar-house it seem'd; wherein were laid
Numbers of all diseased: all maladies

Of ghastly spasm, or racking torture, qualms
Of heart-sick agony, all feverous kinds,
Convulsions, epilepsies, fierce catarrhs,

He slays the lamb that looks him in the face,
And horribly devours his mangled flesh,

Intestine stone and ulcer, cholic pangs,
Dæmoniac frenzy, moping melancholy,
And moon-struck madness, pining atrophy,
Marasmus, and wide-wasting pestilence,
Dropsies, and asthmas, and joint-racking rheums.

And how many thousands more might not be added to this frightful catalogue!

The Story of Prometheus is one likewise which although universally admitted to be allegorical, has never been satisfactorily explained. Prometheus stole fire from heaven, and was chained for this crime to mount Caucasus, where a vulture continually devoured his liver, that grew to meet its hunger. Hesiod says, that, before the time of Prometheus, mankind were exempt from suffering; that they enjoyed a vigorous youth, and that death, when at length it came, approached like sleep, and gently closed their eyes. Again, so general was this opinion, that Horace, a poet of the Augustan age, writes

Thus the sun's ethereal beam

When bold Prometheus stole th' enlivening flame,
Of fevers dire a ghastly brood,

Till then unknown, th' unhappy fraud pursu'd;
On earth their horrors baleful spread,
And the pale monarch of the dead,
Till then slow-moving to his prey,
Precipitately rapid swept his way.

Francis's Horace, Book i. Ode 3.

How plain a language is spoken by all this. Prometheus (who represents the human race) effected some great change in the condition of his nature, and applied

N

Which still avenging nature's broken law,
Kindled all putrid humours in his frame,

ex

fire to culinary purposes; thus inventing an pedient for screening from his disgust the horrors of the shambles, From this moment his vitals were devoured by the vulture of disease. It consumed his being in every shape of its loathsome and infinite variety, inducing the soul-quelling sinkings of premature and violent death. All vice arose from the ruin of healthful innocence. Tyranny, superstition, commerce, and inequality, were then first known, when reason vainly attempted to guide the wanderings of exacerbated passion. I conclude this part of the subject with an extract from Mr. Newton's Defence of Vegetable Regimen, from whom I have borrowed this interpretation of the fable of Prometheus.

Making allowance for such transposition of the events of the allegory as time might produce after the important truths were forgotten, which this portion of the ancient mythology was intended to transmit, the drift of the fable seems to be this:-Man at his creation was endowed with the gift of perpetual youth: that is, he was not formed to be a sickly suffering creature as we now see him, but to enjoy health, and to sink by slow degrees into the bosom of his parent earth without disease or pain. Prometheus first taught the use of animal food (primus bovem occidit Prometheus) * and of fire, with which to render it more digestible and pleasing to the taste. Jupiter, and the rest of the gods, foreseeing the consequences of these inventions, were amused or irritated at the short-sighted devices of the newly-informed creature, and left him to experience the sad effects of them Thirst, the necessary

Prometheus first killed an ox. Plin. Nat. Hist. lib. vii, sect. 57

All evil passions, and all vain belief,
Hatred, despair, and loathing in his mind,

concomitant of a flesh diet, (perhaps of all diet vitiated by culinary preparation), ensued; water was resorted to, and man forfeited the inestimable gift of health which he had received from heaven: he became diseased, the partaker of a precarious existence and no longer descended slowly to his grave."*

But just disease to luxury suceeeds,
And every death its own avenger breeds;
The fury passion from that blood began,
And turned on man a fiercer savage-man.

The

Man and the animals whom he has infected with his society, or depraved by his dominion, are alone, disceased. The wild hog, the mouflon, the bison, and the wolf, are perfectly exempt from malady, and invariably die either from external violence, or natural old age. But the domestic hog, the sheep, the cow, and the dog, are subject to an incredible variety of distempers: and, like the corrupters of their nature, have physicians who thrive upon miseries. supereminence of man is like Satan's, a supereminence of pain; and the majority of his species, doomed to penury, disease and crime, have reason to curse the untoward event, that by enabling him to communicate bis sensations, raised him above the level of his fellow animals. But the steps that have been taken are irrevocable. The whole of human science is comprised in one question:-How can the advantages of intellect and civilization be reconciled with the liberty and pure pleasures of natural life? How can we take the benefits,

* Return to Nature. Cadell 1811.