256 THE BIRD WATCHER 
unrestrainedly than @g@ we. Very fair, very impartial, 
truly, when the question is not which is the more 
advanced man, but which is the happier man. We 
have much the same sort of thing in the case of com- 
parisons made by Christian divines and historians as 
between paganism and Christianity—their relative 
degree of truth, merit, influence in a right direction, 
etc.; judgment, of course, being always given in 
favour—generally immensely in favour—of the latter. 
Seeing that the pagans are all dead and cannot answer 
any point made against them, 1 wonder these com- 
placent bestowers of unqualified approval on them- 
selves are not ashamed to bluster so, where they have 
it all their own way. When I read one of these 
prejudiced panegyrics, affecting the form and manner 
of impartiality, I always seem to see a picture of some 
reverend old learned priest of Jupiter or Apollo, 
who, in similar pompous periods, and with the very 
same tones and gestures which one can imagine in the 
Christian author, goes over the same ground, and, 
with the same show of absolute fairness, settles every- 
thing precisely the opposite way. 
As I have slidden out of a consideration of the 
relative happiness enjoyed by man and the lower 
animals into a similar appraisement as between the 
civilised man and the savage, I will just express my 
opinion (at this moment) that wherever the latter has 
the advantage over the former, the animal a /ortiori 
has it still more. Amongst animals, moreover, there 
is not the same inequality of pleasure, as between the 
