In well regulated families, women are taught by heart some prayers in Arabic, which at certain hours they assemble in a hall to repeat; never being allowed the liberty of going to the public mosque. They are enjoined always to wash themselves before praying; and, indeed, the virtues of cleanliness, of chastity, and obedience, are so strongly and constantly inculcated on their minds, that in spite of their general debauchery of manners, there are not a few among them, who, in their common deportment, do credit to the instructions bestowed upon them; nor is this much to be wondered at, when we consider the tempting recompense that is held out to them; they are, in paradise, to flourish forever, in the vigor of youth and beauty; and however old, or ugly, when they depart this life, are there to be immediately transformed into all that is fair, and all that is graceful. RELIGIOUS FESTIVALS OF THE GREEKS. A cause, which contributed to make the religious festivals of the Greeks appear as amusements and diversions, was that ridiculous buffoonery that constituted so great a part of them: it would be tedious to enumerate one half of these buffooneries; but let a few serve as a specimen. At a festival held in honor of Bacchus, the women ran about for a long time seeking the god, who, they pretended, had run away from them: this done, they passed their time in proposing riddles and questions to each other, and laughing at such as could not answer them; and at last often closed the scene with such enormous excesses, that at one of these festivals, the daughters of Minya, having, in their madness, killed Hippasus, had him dressed and served up to table as a rarity. At another, kept in honor of Venus and Adonis, they beat their breasts, tore their hair, and mimicked all the signs of the most extravagant grief, with which they supposed the goddess to have been affected on the death of her favorite paramour. At another, in honor of the nymph Cotys, they addressed her as the goddess of wantonness with many mysterious rites and ceremonies. At Corinth, these rites and ceremonies, being perhaps thought inconsistent with the character of modest women, this festival was only celebrated by harlots. Athenaeus mentions a festival, at which the women laid hold on all the old bachelors they could find, and dragged them round an altar; beating them all the time with their fists, as punishment for their neglect of the sex. We shall only mention two more; at one of which, after the assembly had met in the temple of Ceres, the women shut out all the men and dogs, themselves and the bitches remaining in the temple all night; in the morning, the men were let in, and the time was spent in laughing together at the frolic. At the other, in honor of Bacchus, they counterfeited phrenzy and madness; and to make this madness appear the more real, they used to eat the raw and bloody entrails of goats newly slaughtered. And, indeed, the whole of the festivals of Bacchus, a