same

The basilisk, as our readers are aware, is the the fabulous cockatrice, and was supposed to be endowed with the most deadly poison. Its congener in the human race is to be found amongst your backbiters-your whisperers, who separate chief friends, and who contemplate the prosperity of others with a jaundiced, green-eyed, jealousy. The female basilisk is the most dangerous of the two, and there are great varieties of them. There is the one, who fascinates the heart of some unwary youth by the glittering of her eye, and just when he has so far fallen a victim to the lure as to make an unconditional surrender, she jilts him for another. But the one of whom our readers should beware, is she who has herself been wounded in her affections by the inconstancy of a lover or the faithlessness of a husband let a man meet 66 a bear robbed of her whelps" rather than such a one.

We might have swollen our catalogue by

many more of the animals enumerated by Dr. Bräuner-by the fretful porcupine, as well as by the insidious crocodile-by the half-humanized Hottentot, and the savage walrus, but we forbear. Enough has been written in this and the XXII. chapter to establish the position that Le Brun was not so far wrong after all when he published his celebrated engravings of the human face divine transformed by unbridled passions or debasing lusts into every bestial countenance under heaven; and if we wish to avoid our lineaments assuming those of the brutes that perish, let us guard against any approach to the indulgence of those passions which slowly, but surely and irrevocably, tend to produce this result.

We had originally intended to omit this chapter altogether, but as Christopher is a saint

exalted in the Romish calendar nearly to an equality with the Virgin Mary, and, as the laying open of the abominations arising from the demonolatry paid to him, will be of service in showing the depth of superstition into which that church has fallen, we have taken it in hand in seriousness and sadness; and those to whom such a subject is uncongenial, can skip the chapter.

It is no easy task that we have undertaken; but the profanity of what is attributed to this so-called saint, we entreat our readers to bear in mind, is that of the Papacy, not our own.

Images have been erected and chapels dedicated to this saint, widely over the darkened continent. At Mayence, on the Rhine, there is, or was, a chapel bearing his name, before which no Roman Catholic dared to pass without doffing his hat and making a lowly reverence: at Berne, in Switzerland, under an arch of the hospital door, was an

enormous wooden image of him, and there was hardly a city or town of note, at one time, in Germany but what was desecrated in a similar

manner.

According to the Golden Legend, printed A.D. 1810, Christopher flourished in the third century of the Christian era, and Molanus, in his XXVII. chapter on Sacred Pictures, gives us the following hymn of praise as offered up to him :

Christophore Sancte, virtutes sunt tibi tanto,
Qui te mané vident, nocturno tempore rident.
Christophori Sancti speciem quicunque tuetur,
Ista nempe die non morte mala morietur."

which we translate for the benefit of the ladies.

"Oh! Holy Christopher, thy power is so great that whosoever shall see thee in the morning shall have cause for laughter by night. Whosoever shall behold the image of Holy Christopher shall not die that day by any evil death.”