blossoms from trees;” “that the lightning and thunder are, as it were, the deciduous fruits of the ethereal stars;” “that the stars eat and are nourished,” etc. etc. All this, and a good deal more to the like purpose. Since the beginning of the world, men have asked of themselves and others strange questions, like those Southey discovered in Luys de Escobar: “When God made dresses for Adam and Eve, how did He get the skins of which those dresses were made, seeing that beasts were not yet killed?” “Perhaps,” says the respondent, “He made skins on purpose.” “Why are there three persons in the Trinity rather than four or five?” “St. Cosmas and St. Damian cut off a black man’s leg and fastened it on a white man; which will have the leg at the resurrection?” “How did Adam learn Hebrew?” Queer curiosities these, all of which will remind the reader of the madness of Elinora Melorina, a lady of Mantua, who, being fully persuaded she was married to a king, would kneel down and talk with him, as if he had then been present with his retinue. Nay, if she by any chance found a piece of glass upon a dunghill, or if she came upon a piece of oyster-shell or tin, or any such thing that would glisten in the sunshine, she would say it was a jewel sent from her lord and husband, and upon this account she would fill her cabinet full of this kind of rubbish. The cabinets of the mystics, amidst some worthier matter, are full of the kind of rubbish we have quoted above, which, when instanced as solutions of things psychical or physical, seem to be as satisfactory as the old story of the foolish person who, riding an ass to the pond to drink by the light of the moon, and some clouds intervening, and hiding the moon while the ass was drinking, arrived at the grave conclusion that the ass had swallowed up the moon, and took it clean out of being. When such grave problems and questions are the result of so much of fasting and devotion, they only remind us of the question preferred by a monk on one occasion to a higher Church dignitary: “How many keys did Christ give to Peter?” which brought the satisfactory reply, that “he ought to prepare himself by a course of physic for such grave, sweet, and savoury questions!” Illustrative as they are of the literary vanities and follies of the time, follies to which even scholarly clergymen and eminent writers lent themselves, and as illustrating also not only the freedom of Watts from such epidemical foolishness, but the work he did in calling the mind to healthful methods of thought, the writer trusts their quotation here may be forgiven.