BRAHMIN CHARITY. 205 



their own circulating fluid ! The directors of this hospital are 

 said to contract with beggars to supply the objects of their 

 bounty ; and herein is the something wanting, whether the 

 establishment be founded on an extreme of humanity or an 

 extreme of justice. Rich votaries of Brarnah ! to make your 

 charity complete, you should assuage the cravings of your pen- 

 sioners from the current of your own overflowing veins, and 

 not from the poor exhausted reservoirs of the meagre starve- 

 ling. Alas ! for human nature ! So in thy every virtue, 

 carried to a height extreme, may we detect a flaw, even as in 

 the over-stretched mantle of Brahmin charity ! 



According to the above tradition, human flesh alone would 

 have been heir to the debt for which, in his dire extremity, the 

 venerable Noah was induced to give a bond ; but as all beasts, 

 birds, and creeping things, were sharers in the preservation 

 wrought by the cunning stopper of their leaky vessel, it is but 

 fair that they also should pay a part of the tribute prospec- 

 tively exacted. At all events, we find that throughout each 

 order of animated being, from man down to the meanest 

 insect, there is scarcely one exempt from some tormenting 

 infestor which lives upon its vital juices. Scarce anybody who 

 has ever noticed at all either a common black beetle or a 

 humble-bee, can have failed to observe the shining mail of the 

 one and the downy doublet of the other covered with a living- 

 load of small white or brownish insects, from whose attacks 

 they are sometimes brought to a deplorable condition. These 



