way of consecration. This bishop officiated pontifically, and gave his blessing to the people, before whom he appeared bearing the mitre, the crosier, and even the archiepiscopal cross. In those churches which held immediately from the Holy See, a pope of the Fools was elected, who officiated in all the decorations of papacy. All the clergy assisted at the mass, some dressed in women's apparel, others as buffoons, or masked in a grotesque and ridiculous manner.

Not

content with singing licentious songs in the choir, they sat and played at dice on the altar, at the side of the officiator. When mass was over, they ran, leaped and danced about the church, uttering obscene words, singing immodest songs, and putting themselves in a thousand indecent postures, sometimes exposing themselves almost naked. They then had themselves drawn about the streets, in tumbrels full of filth, that they might throw it at the mob which gathered round them. The looser part of the seculars would mix among the clergy, that they might play some fool's part in an ecclesiastical habit.

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This feast was held in the same manner in the convents of monks and nuns, as Naudé testifies in his complaint to Gassendi, in 1645, in which he relates that, at Antibes, in the Franciscan monastery, neither the officiating monks nor the guardian went to the choir on the day of the Innocents. The lay-brethren occupied their places on that day, and, clothed in sa. cerdotal decorations, torn and turned inside out, made a sort of office. They held books turned upside down, which they seemed to be reading through spectacles, the glasses of which were made of orange-peel; and muttered confused words, or uttered strange cries, accompanied by extravagant contortions.*

The second register of the church of Autun, by the secretary Rotarii, which ends with 1416, says, without specifying the day, that at the feast of Fools, an ass was led along with a clergyman's cape on his back, the attendants singing-He haw! Mr. Ass, He haw!

The readers of the Scottish Novels will find some use made of this mummery in "The Abbot."-T.

Ducange relates a sentence of the officialty of Viviers, upon one William, who, having been elected fool-bishop in 1406, had refused to perform the solemnities, and to defray the expenses customary on such occasions.

And, to conclude, the registers of St. Stephen, at Dijon, in 1521, declare, without mentioning the day, that the vicars ran about the streets with drums, fifes, and other instruments, and carried lamps before the préchantre of the Fools, to whom the honour of the feast principally belonged. But the parliament of that city, by a decree of the 19th January, 1552, forbade the celebration of this feast, which had already been condemned by several councils, and especially by a circular of the 11th March, 1444, sent to all the clergy in the kingdom by the Paris university. This letter, which we find at the end of the works of Peter of Blois, says, that this feast was, in the eyes of the clergy, so well-imagined and so christian, that those who sought to suppress it were looked on as excommunicated; and the Sorbonne doctor, John Des Lyons, in his discourse against the paganism of the Roi-boit, informs us, that a doctor of divinity publicly maintained at Auxerre, about the close of the fifteenth century, "that the feast of Fools was no less pleasing to God than the feast of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin; besides, that it was of much higher antiquity in the church."

E

CANNIBALS.

SECTION I.

We have spoken of love.* It is hard to pass from people kissing to people eating one another. It is, however, but too true, that there have been cannibals. We have found them in America; they are, perhaps, still to be found; and the Cyclops were not the only individuals in antiquity who sometimes fed on human flesh. Juvenal relates, that among the Egyptians

*The article Amour precedes this article in the original.See the article Love.

that wise people, so renowned for their laws-those pious worshippers of crocodiles and onions-the Tentyrites ate one of their enemies, who had fallen into their hands. He does not tell this tale on hearsay; the crime was committed almost before his eyes; he was then in Egypt, and not far from Tentyra. On this occasion he quotes the Gascons and the Saguntines, who formerly fed on the flesh of their countrymen.

In 1725, four savages were brought from the Mississippi to Fontainebleau, with whom I had the honour of conversing. There was among them a lady of the country, whom I asked if she had eaten men; she answered, with great simplicity, that she had. I appeared somewhat scandalized; on which she excused herself by saying, that it was better to eat one's dead enemy than to leave him to be devoured by wild beasts, and that the conquerors deserved to have the preference. We kill our neighbours in battles, or skirmishes; and, for the meanest consideration, provide meals for the crows and the worms. There is the horror; there is the crime. What matters it, when a man is eaten by a soldier, or by a dog

dead, whether he is and a crow?

We have more respect for the dead than for the living. It would be better to respect both the one and the other. The nations called polished have done right in not putting their vanquished enemies on the spit; for if we were allowed to eat our neighbours, we should soon eat our countrymen, which would be rather unfortunate for the social virtues. But polished nations have not always been so: they were all for a long time savage; and, in the infinite number of revolutions which this globe has undergone, mankind have been sometimes numerous, and sometimes very scarce. It has been with human beings as it now is with elephants, lions, or tigers, the race of which has very much decreased. In times, when a country was but thinly inhabited by men, they had few arts; they were hunters. The custom of eating what they had killed, easily led them to treat their enemies like their stags and their boars. It was superstition that caused

human victims to be immolated; it was necessity that caused them to be eaten..

Which is the greater crime?-to assemble piously together to plunge a knife into the heart of a girl adorned with fillets, or to eat a worthless man who has been killed in our own defence.

Yet we have many more instances of girls and boys sacrificed, than of girls and boys eaten. Almost every nation of which we know anything has sacrificed boys and girls. The Jews immolated them. This was called the Anathema: it was a real sacrifice; and in Leviticus, it is ordained that the living souls which shall be devoted shall not be spared: but it is not in any manner prescribed that they shall be eaten; this is only threatened. Moses tells the Jews, that unless they observe his ceremonies, they shall not only have the itch, but the mothers shall eat their children. It is true, that in the time of Ezekiel, the Jews must have been accustomed to eat human flesh; for, in his thirty-ninth chapter, he foretels to them that God will cause them to eat, not only the horses of their enemies, but moreover the horsemen and the rest of the warriors. And, indeed, why should not the Jews have been cannibals? It was the only thing wanting to make the people of God the most abominable people upon earth.

SECTION II.

In the Essay on the Manners and Spirit of Nations, we read the following singular passage

"Herrera assures us that the Mexicans ate the human victims which they immolated. Most of the first travellers and missionaries say that the Brazilians, the Caribbees, the Iroquois, the Hurons, and some other tribes, ate their captives taken in war; and they do not consider this as the practice of some individuals only, but as a national usage. So many writers, ancient and modern, have spoken of cannibals, that it is difficult to deny their existence. A hunting people,

See Note, in Sec. ii. p. 84.

like the Brazilians or the Canadians, not always having a certain subsistence, may sometimes become cannibals. Famine and revenge accustomed them to this kind of food; and while, in the most civilized ages, we see the people of Paris devouring the bleeding remains of marshal d'Ancre, and the people of the Hague eating the heart of the grand pensionary De Witt, we ought not to be surprised that a momentary outrage amongst us has been continual among savages.

"The most ancient books we have leave no room to doubt that hunger has driven men to this excess. The prophet Ezekiel, according to some commentators, promises to the Hebrews, from God,† that if they de

*

* Ezekiel, chap. xxxix.

+ The following are the reasons of those who have maintained that, in this passage, Ezekiel addresses the Jews of his own time as well as the other carnivorous animals;-for assuredly, the Jews of the present day are not so; the Inquisition, rather, has been carnivorous towards them. They say that one part of this apostrophe regards the wild beasts, and the other is for the Jews. The first part is couched in these

terms

"Speak unto every feathered fowl, and to every beast of the field, assemble yourselves and come: gather yourselves on every side to my sacrifice that I do sacrifice for you, even a great sacrifice upon the mountains of Israel, that ye may eat flesh and drink blood.

"Ye shall eat the flesh of the mighty, and drink the blood of the princes of the earth, of rams, and lambs, and of goats, of bullocks, all of them fatlings of Bashan."

This cannot concern any but the birds of prey and the wild beasts. But the second part appears to have been addressed to the Hebrews themselves-" Thus ye shall be filled at my table with horses and chariots, with mighty men, and with all men of war, saith the Lord. And I will set my glory among the heathen," &c.

It is quite certain that the kings of Babylon had Scythians in their armies. These Scythians drank blood out of the skulls of their enemies, and ate their horses, and sometimes human flesh. It is not improbable that the prophet alluded to this barbarous custom, and threatened the Scythians with being treated as they treated their enemies.

This conjecture is rendered still more likely by the use of the word table; "You shall be filled at my table with horses and chariots." It cannot be supposed that the speaker was ad