among others of Jesus Christ having driven a legion of Devils into a herd of pigs, who were so discomfited with these new invaders that they all threw themselves over a precipice into the lake, and were drowned. These were a set of hypochondriacal and high-minded swine, very unlike any others of which we have authentic record; they disdained to live, if they must live in so intimate a society with Devils, as that which was imposed on them, and the pig-drivers were no doubt confounded by so heroical a resolution. What became of the Devils after the death of the pigs, whether they passed into the fish, and thence by digestion, through the stomach, into the brain of the Gadarene Icthyophagists; whether they returned to Hell, or remained on the Earth, the historian has left as subject for everlasting conjecture. I should be curious to know whether any half starved Jew picked up these pigs, and sold them at the market of Gadara, and what effect the bacon of a demoniac pig, who had killed himself, produced upon the consumers. The Devils requested Jesus Christ to send them into the pigs, and the Son of God shewed himself more inclined to do what was agreeable to the Devils than what was profitable to the owners of the pigs. He had, no doubt, say the Christians, some good reasons. Poor fellows! They were probably ruined by this operation. The Gadarenes evidently disapproved of this method of casting out Devils-they thought probably that Jesus shewed an unjust preference to these disagreeable beings; and they sent a deputation to request him to depart out of their country. I doubt whether the yeomen of the present day would have treated him with so much lenity.

Among the numerous theories concerning the condition

of Devils, some have resorted to the Pythagorean hypothesis, but in such a manner as to pervert that hypothesis, from motives of humanity, into an example for cruel tyranny. They suppose that the bodies of animals, and especially domestic animals, are animated by Devils, and that the tyranny exercised over these unfortunate beings by man is an unconscious piece of retaliation over the beings who betrayed them into a state of reprobation. On this theory Lord Erskine's Act' might have been entitled "An Act for the better protection of Devils." How devils inhabit the bodies of men is not explained. It cannot be that they animate them like what is called the soul or vital principle because that is supposed to be already preoccupied. Some have supposed that they exist in the human body in the shape of teniæ and hydatids, but I know not whether those persons subject to vermicular and animalcular diseases, are the most likely to be subject to the incursions of Devils from any reason a priori, although they may safely be said to be tormented of Devils. The pedicular diseases on this view of the subject may be the result of diabolical influence, the sensorium of every separate louse being the habitation of a distinct imp. Some have supposed that the Devils live in the Sun, and that that glorious

1 More strictly speaking Lord Erskine's Bill; for Shelley did not live to see an Act passed on this subject. Lord Campbell tells us in his Lives of the Lord Chancellors that Erskine "almost entirely confined himself for some years to a subject which he made peculiarly his own, and with which his name will ever continue to be associated." On the 15th of May 1809, he made a memorable speech, in moving the second reading of his Bill the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals," which, however, was

For

thrown out by the Commons after passing the Lords. Erskine reintroduced it with amendments in 1810, but withdrew it after it had passed the Committee of the Commons. It was not until the 22nd of July 1822, a fortnight after Shelley's death, but while Erskine was still alive, that the measure, having been brought forward by Mr. Martin, M.P. for Galway, became law, and set the example which has since been so largely followed by legislators throughout the civilized world.

luminary is the actual Hell; perhaps that every fixed star is a distinct Hell appropriated to the use of its several systems of planets, so great a proportion of the inhabitants of which are probably devoted to everlasting damnation, if the belief of one particular creed is essential to their escape, and the testimony of its truth so very far remote and obscure as in the planet which we inhabit. I do not envy the theologians, who first invented this theory. The Magian worship of the Sun as the creator and Preserver of the world, is considerably more to the credit of the inventors. It is in fact a poetical exposition of the matter of fact, before modern science had so greatly enlarged the boundaries of the sensible world, and was, next to pure deism or a personification of all the powers whose agency we know or can conjecture, the religion attended by the fewest evil consequences.

If the sun is Hell, the Devil has a magnificent abode, being elevated as it were on the imperial throne of the visible world. If we assign to the Devil the greatest and most glorious habitation within the scope of our senses, where shall we conceive his mightier adversary to reside? Shall we suppose that the Devil occupies the centre and God the circumference of existence, and that one urges inwards with the centripetal, whilst the other is perpetually struggling outwards from the narrow focus with the centrifugal force, and that from their perpetual conflict results the mixture of good and evil, harmony and discord, beauty and deformity, production and decay, which are the general laws of the moral and material world? Alas! the poor theologian never troubled his fancy with nonsense of so philosophical a form. He

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contented himself with supposing that God was somewhere or other; that the Devil and all his angels together with the perpetually increasing multitude of the damned were burning above to all eternity in that prodigious orb of elemental light, which sustains and animates that multitude of inhabited globes, in whose company this earth revolves. Others have supposed Hell to be distributed among the comets, which constitute, according to this scheme, a number of floating prisons of intense and inextinguishable fire; a great modern poet has adopted this idea when he calls a comet

"A wandering hell in the eternal space."

It

Misery and injustice contrive to produce very poetical effects, because the excellence of poetry consists in its awakening the sympathy of men, which, among persons influenced by an abject and gloomy superstition, is much more easily done by images of horror than of beauty. often requires a higher degree of skill in a poet to make beauty, virtue, and harmony poetical, that is, to give them an idealized and rhythmical analogy with the predominating emotions of his readers,-than to make injustice, deformity and discord poetical. There are fewer Raphaels than Michael Angelos; better verses have been written on Hell than Paradise. How few read the Purgatorio or the Paradiso of Dante, in the comparison of those who know the Inferno well. And yet the Purgatorio, with the exception of two famous passages, is a finer poem than the Inferno. No poet can develope the same power in that part of his composition where he feels himself insecure of the emotions of his readers, as in those where he knows that he can command their sympathy.

As to the Devil, and the imps, and the damned living in the Sun, why there is no great probability of it. The Comets are better fitted for this; except that some astronomer has suggested the possibility of their orbits gradually becoming ecliptical, until at last they might arrange themselves in orbits concentric with the planets, lose their heat and their substance, become subject to the same laws of animal and vegetable life as those according to which the substance of the surface of the others is arranged. The Devils and the damned, without some miraculous interposition would then be the inhabitants of a very agreeable world; and as they probably would have become very good friends from a community of misfortune and the experience which time gives those who live long enough of the folly of quarrelling—would probably administer the affairs of their Colony with great harmony and success. But there is an objection to this whole theory of solar and planetary Hells; which is, that there is no proof that the Sun and the Comets are themselves burning. It is the same with fire as with wit. A man may not be witty himself as Falstaff was, though like him he may be the cause of wit in others. So the Sun, though the cause of fire, may only develope a limited proportion of that principle on its own surface. Herschel's discoveries incline to a presumption that this is actually the case. He has discovered that the cause of light and heat is not the burning body of the Sun itself; but a shell as it were of phosphoric vapours, suspended many thousand miles in the atmosphere of that body. These vapours surround the sphere of the Sun at a distance, which has not been accurately computed, but which is assuredly very great, encircling and canopying it with a vault of ætherial