PREYEES UPON MAN. 359 



Ascending to quadrupeds, it is needless to whisper in ears 

 polite the name of that exciting cause, or causes, under which 

 our " Marlboroughs " are apt to forget their high breeding, 

 and our " King Charles's " to encroach on their parlour pre- 

 rogatives. 



Grimalkin, with her own nine lives, has been said by Lin- 

 naeus to possess a happy immunity from the burthen of 

 carrying other lives about her; but we are more inclined to 

 believe, with less distinguished naturalists, that while Puss is 

 imbibing the yet warm juices of a mouse, a hungry flea may be 

 similarly employed in sucking up her own. 



We come now to the insect preyers on lordly man, of whom 

 the lordliest, the kings and potentates of earth, have furnished 

 some striking and most horrible examples of how the meanest 

 and most despicable of earth's denizens have been employed by 

 the Almighty Hand to lower the pride and reprove the cruelty 

 of tyrants and oppressors. 



Antiochus Epiphanes, Sylla, the two Herods, and the second 

 Philip of Spain, the great persecutor of the Protestants, are 

 all recorded to have been frightfully distinguished in their 

 deaths as in their lives, by falling victims to the pedicular 

 disease. 



Various instances are related of another disease, somewhat 

 resembling, though not similar, in which mites or Acari, lodge 

 beneath the skin. One of these we shall briefly repeat, though 

 often quoted, from Mouffet's " Theatre of Insects," because a 

 natural cause is assigned for the infestation there described, 

 such as would seem wanting in the cases of those tormentors 

 tormented, on whom the finger of God was supposed to have 

 been supernaturally laid. 



Of " the Lady Penruddocke " our narrator tells us, that 

 Acari, or mites, swarmed in every part of her body, head, eyes, 

 nose, lips, gums, and soles of her feet, tormenting her day and 

 night, till, in spite of every remedy, all the flesh of her body 

 was consumed, and death relieved her. 



