Indeed, one would think that mankind do all in their power to remain in a much lower rank than nature designs them! and they seldom fail to turn to their hurt the best dispositions she gives them for their Good. On the Babylonians, for instance, nature has bestowed an inexhaustible fund of agreeableness. Her aim was manifestly to form a people the most aimable. They were made to enliven reason, to root out the thorns that spring from the approaches of the sciences, to soften the austerity of wisdom, and, if possible, to adorn virtue. Thou knowest it: her favours which should have been diffused on these objects have been diverted from their destination; and frivolousness and debauchery have been cloathed with them. In the hands of the Babylonians, vice loses all her deformity. Behold in their manners, their discourses, their writings, with what discretion vice unveils herself, with what art she ingages, with what address she insinuates: you have not yet thought of her, and she is seated in your heart. Even he who, by his function, lifts up his voice against her, dares not paint her in her true colours. In a word, no where does vice appear less vice than at Babylon. Even to the very names, all things are changed, all things are softened. The sincere and honest are now-a-days your modish men who are outwardly all complaisance but inwardly full of corruption: Good company are not the Virtuous but those who excel in palliating vice. The man of fortitude is not he that bears the shocks of fortune unmoved, but he that braves Providence. Bare-faced Irreligion is now styled free-thinking, blasphemy is called boldness of speech, and the most shameful excesses, Gallantry. Thus it is that with what they might become a pattern to all nations, the Babylonians (to say no worse) are grown libertines of the most seducing and most dangerous kind. [Illustration] CHAP. V. THE APPARITIONS. I return (continues the Prefect of Giphantia) to the elementary spirits. Their constant abode in the air, always full of vapours and exhalations; in the sea, ever mixed with salts and earths; in the fire, perpetually used about a thousand heterogeneous bodies; in the earth, where all the other elements are blended together: this abode, I say, by degrees spoils the pure essence of the spirits, whose original nature is to be (as to their material substance) all fire, all air, or other unmixt element. This degradation has sometimes gone so far, as that by the mixture of the different elements, the spirits have acquired a sufficient consistence to render them visible. People have seen them in the fire and called them Salamanders, and Cyclops: they have seen them in the air and called them Sylphs, Zephyrs, Aquilons: they have seen them in the water and called them Sea-nymphs, Naiads, Nereids, Tritons: they have seen them in caverns, desarts, woods, and have called them Gnomes, Sylvans, Fauns, Satyrs, _&c._