XXIV INTRODUCTION. 



this cause. Nothing could appear to them more con- 

 firmatory of the doctrine, than that an inert aurelia 

 should be again transformed into a living body. The 

 only method they had for accounting for this, was, 

 that it had been tenanted by the soul of some 

 wretch whose misdeeds on earth had merited such a 

 pilgrimage. 



In the institutes of Menge, we are told that a priest 

 who has drunk wine, shall migrate into a moth or fly, 

 and be doomed to feed on ordure ; and that the man 

 who steals gold from a priest, shall inhabit a thousand 

 times the bodies of spiders. If any one steal honey, 

 he shall be re-born a great stinging gnat. Shake- 

 speare puts the same idea into the words of old 

 Christopher Sly, the drunken tinker, in the Induc- 

 tion to the Taming of the Shrew. " Am I not old 

 Sly's son, by birth a pedlar, by education a card- 

 maker, by transmutation a bear-herd, and by 

 profession a tinker." 



The story of the phrenix arising from its own 

 ashes, is no doubt of similar origin. The tradition 

 is, that it lives five or six hundred years in the 

 wilderness, and when thus advanced in age, builds 

 itself a pile of sweet wood and aromatic gums, and 

 firing it with the wafting of its wings, thus destroys 

 itself; while from its ashes arises a worm, which in 

 time grows up to be again a phoenix. 



