We have to notice the state of the dead as happy or miserable. On this point, the ideas of men have been vague, especially in the infancy of their intellectual cultivation. Their state was represented in early times as not wholly miserable, and still as not altogether desirable. "Curse the shades," Achilles tartly replies, when congratulated by Ulysses upon his singular good fortune in that he was adored by the Greeks while alive, and reigned over the shades after death; "talk not to me of reigning over them, for I had rather be the veriest day-labourer that walks the earth." No rewards and punishments were supposed to be allotted to them, at least in places specially designed for each. Tartarus was the place of punishment of the giants alone, and Elysium was the abode only of heroes or demi-gods. But the conceptions of the Greeks gradually advanced in distinctness and correctness, until at length they came to suppose that men were admitted to Elysium and sent down to Tartarus. They even then, however, seem to have supposed only the grossest crimes were there punished. In Homer only one is mentioned, that of perjury. As they advanced in intellectual cultivation, and their moral ideas came to higher perfection, they supposed other crimes were punished, and finally that every virtue met its due reward, and every vice its due punishment; such, in imitation of Plato and other philosophers, is the representation of Virgil. The ideas of the ancient Israelites seem to have been in like manner indistinct and defective, so much so, that some have contended that there is no allusion at all to the future existence of the soul in the Old Testament.

It may be proper here briefly to notice, in what future rewards and punishments were supposed to consist. We have already spoken of Virgil's description of Elysium: it was the counterpart of Italy, a sensual paradise, where heroes reposed from their toils after they had shuffled off their mortal coil, and amused themselves as they saw fit, in sports and conversation. Of the nature of the punishments the soul is to endure, the Platonists had a very beautiful theory. "They suppose every passion which has been contracted by it during

its residence in the body, remains with it in a separate state, and that the soul, in the body or out of the body, differs no more than the man does from himself when he is in his house or in open air. When, therefore, the obscene passions in particular have once taken root and spread themselves in the soul, they cleave to her inseparably, and remain in her for ever after the body is cast off and thrown aside. Thus the punishment of a voluptuous man after death consists in this: he is tormented with desires which it is impossible for him to gratify, solicited by a passion that has no objects adapted to it. He lives in a state of invincible desire and impotence, and always burns in the pursuit of what he always desires to possess." Virgil has given this idea a beautiful poetic dress:

"They lie below on golden beds displayed,

And genial feasts with regal pomp are made.
The queen of furies by their side is set,

And snatches from their mouths the untasted meat,
Which if they touch, her hissing snakes she rears,
Tossing her torch, and thundering in their ears."

Such a punishment, too, seems to have been drawn in the description of Tantalus, who was punished with the rage of an eternal thirst, set up to the chin in water, which fled from his lips whenever he attempted to drink it. The sensible images by which the happiness or misery of the soul in the future world is represented, are in all cases those things which are looked upon with the greatest desire or dread by those that make use of them. The Jews' figure for the consummation of future bliss, is the garden of Eden; that for the intensity of future misery, the being consigned to a fire, of which that kindled in the valley of Hinnom, continually burning and smouldering, is a faint emblem. The Indian imagined his heaven an immense hunting-ground, abounding in every kind of most precious game, where "the deer doth bound in her gladness free," and the buffalo roams over the vast prairie. He is said to have had a singular idea of future punishment as respects the Spaniards, drawn from their greediness for gold: he

supposed them placed either in a molten sea of this metal, or else the same, red-hot, continually poured down their throats.

Another point which deserves notice, is the forms of the dead. They are supposed to bear an exact resemblance to their forms when alive, so that they are at once easily recognized. They are enlarged, however, in size, to giant proportions, and are shadowy; they are seen, but cannot be felt. Of this many illustrations might be given. Eneas attempts to embrace his father, but to his surprise, finds nothing but air, thin air. A spirit is indeed before him, and he discerns the form thereof, but it is something which cannot be felt, an "imago par levibus ventis volercrigue simillimee somno.' Achilles attempts to embrace the shade of his friend Patrolus, but it eludes his embrace, and in astonishment he exclaims, "Heavens! every thing in Hades is spirit and shadow; of substance there is none." So Ulysses, when he attempts to

embrace his mother,

"I ardent wished to clasp the shade

Of my departed mother; thrice I sprang
Toward her, by desire impetuous urged,
And thrice she flitted from between my arms,
Light as a passing shadow or a dream."

We have to notice one other idea, that of transmigration. A belief in this, under different forms, is found to have prevailed among many nations. Some have supposed the soul to pass from one human body into another, some into the bodies of beasts, or even into plants and stones. "The belief in this doctrine," says Knapp, "seems to have rested at first upon a certain supposed analogy in nature, where one body is always observed to pass into another, and even when it seems to perish, only alters its form and returns in different shapes. Or it may have sprung in part from the almost universal idea that every thing in the whole creation is animated by a soul, especially every thing possessing internal life and power of motion." This doctrine was a prominent article in the religious creed of India, of some of the nations of our own continent

and of Egypt, and from this latter country it is supposed to have been introduced by Pythagoras into Greece, and thence into Rome. The doctrine as held by the philosophers of these last countries was, that "the souls of men exist in a separate state long before their union with their bodies, and that upon their immersion into flesh, they forget every thing which passed in the state of pre-existence, so that what we call knowledge is nothing else but memory or the recovery of those things which we knew before." The poetical version of the same as given by Virgil is, that the souls, to prepare themselves for living upon the earth, come to the river Lethe, and quaff the waters of oblivion. Other nations, particularly in India and other parts of the East, have supposed that the soul passes into the vilest animals. A singular story, arising from this belief, is given in the Asiatic Researches, from the literary annals of the Burmese. "A priest died, and, according to custom, his fellow-priests proceeded to divide among themselves his effects. When they came to the robe and were about to cut it a louse was discovered, and showed, by his frequent going and coming, and by his extraordinary gestures, that the division of the robe would be nowise agreeable to his feelings. The priests, all astonishment, consulted God upon the occasion, from whom they received information of the character of this louse; that the soul of the priest had passed into it, and were commanded to delay for seven days their intended division, that being the length of time allowed for the life of a louse among the Burmese."

From the doctrine of transmigration, as thus held, may have arisen the idea that it is unlawful to kill animals, and that whoever does so is to suffer death, and also to be punished hereafter, according to the nature of the animal killed, the manner of killing it, and the use made of it. Those who kill oxen, swine, goats, and other such animals, are to suffer between two burning mountains two thousand years; those who kill animals by immersing in boiling oil or water, are to have their bowels consumed by fire entering their mouths, and this is to last four thousand years; and all who, besides

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killing, skin, roast, or eat these animals, are to be transfixed on an iron spit, while they are cut and torn by the demons, and this is to last sixteen thousand years. This prohibition and punishment would seem very natural, upon the supposition that the soul passes into these animals, for in killing or eating them, one might kill and eat his neighbour, or even his own father. This idea is beautifully expressed by Ovid, as translated by Dryden.

"Thus all things are but altered, nothing dies,
And here and there the embodied spirit flies;
By time or force or sickness dispossessed,
And lodges where it lights in bird or beast;
Or hunts without till ready limbs it find,
And actuates those according to their kind;
From tenement to tenement is toss'd,
The soul is still the same, the figure only lost.
Then let not piety be put to flight,
To please the taste of glutton appetite,
But suffer inmate souls secure to dwell,
Lest from their seats your parents you expel;
With rapid hunger feed upon your kind,

Or from a beast dislodge a brother's mind."

Hence too, perhaps, the care taken in some parts of the East of old worn-out or useless animals, such as old horses, oxen, cows, dogs, cats, monkeys, and reptiles. Of an establishment for this purpose among the Mahrattas, we find an account in the Missionary Herald for 1841-2. In this establishment, the writer says, were about 100 old horses, 175 oxen and cows, about 200 dogs and cats, monkeys and reptiles, whose numbers he does not give. These are furnished with whatever they may need as long as they live.

The kind of animal into which the soul of a person enters, has been sometimes supposed to be that which he most resembles in his manners. For example, the soul of Orpheus, who was musical, melancholy, and a woman-hater, enters into a swan; the soul of Ajax, which was all wrath and fierceness, into a lion; the soul of Agamemnon, that was rapacious and imperial, into an eagle; and the soul of Thersites, who was a mimic and buffoon, into a monkey.