"In consecrated earth, And on the holy hearth, The Lars and Lemures moan with midnight plaint; In urns and altars round, A drear and dying sound Affrights the Flamens at their service quaint; And the chill marble seems to sweat, While each peculiar Power foregoes his wonted seat. "Peor and Baalim Forsake their temples dim, With that twice-battered god of Palestine; And mooned Ashtaroth, Heaven's queen and mother both, Now sits not girt with tapers' holy shine; The Lybic Hammon shrinks his horn; In vain the Tyrian maids their wounded Thammuz mourn. "And sullen Moloch, fled, Hath left in shadows dread His burning idol all of darkest hue; In vain with cymbals ring, They call the grisly king, In dismal dance about the furnace blue; The brutish gods of Nile as fast, Isis and Orus, and the Dog Anubis, haste." The quotation is a long one, but it is scarcely possible to shorten what is so beautiful and interesting a description of the heathen deities, whether in the classic personifications of Greece, the horrible shapes worshipped by mere barbarians, or the hieroglyphical enormities of the Egyptian Mythology. The idea of identifying the pagan deities, especially the most distinguished of them, with the manifestation of demoniac power, and concluding that the descent of our Saviour struck them with silence, so nobly expressed in the poetry of Milton, is not certainly to be lightly rejected. It has been asserted, in simple prose, by authorities of no mean weight; nor does there appear anything inconsistent in the faith of those who, believing that, in the elder time, fiends and demons were permitted an enlarged degree of power in uttering predictions, may also give credit to the proposition, that at the Divine Advent that power was restrained, the oracles silenced, and those demons who had aped the Divinity of the place were driven from their abode on earth, honoured as it was by a guest so awful.