Man seems to contain, according as he is contemplated in different lights, inexplicable contradictions of character; and to be at one time all tenderness of heart; and at another an odious compound of insensibility and cruelty; according to the circumstances with which he is surrounded, and the positions in which he is placed. Who could believe, that it was the same being, that now dissolves into tears at the rehearsal of a tragedy, on reading a romance or witnessing a spectacle of misery, and now hurries from these emotions to see a bull-fight; and in passing to the show, encourages two bullies in the street to form a ring, to bruise each other! Who would believe, that it has always been considered an attribute in the more susceptible sex, to regard duellists with a partial eye; to give a secret place in their kind feelings to those who are reckless of their own and another’s blood; and more than all to look propitiously on soldiers encrimsoned with the fresh stains of the battle field? Nay, more, who reads without astonishment, and almost without unbelief, that a whole people, in the days of the pagan Roman emperors, days of the utmost luxury of taste and refinement, days, in which, in all probability, traits of kindness, generosity and magnanimity were no more uncommon than now, the ladies of the greatest and most splendid city in the world thronged with an irrepressible curiosity, and an intense desire, to see naked gladiators lacerate, and stab each other, and old and feeble men torn in pieces by lions and wild beasts, when merely a movement of a finger would save them! The ministers of the gospel, who attribute the abhorrence, which the same spectacles would excite in the population of a Christian city, to the humanizing influences of our faith, forget that such a city has seen, times without number, its inhabitants pouring forth from its gates, to witness miserable victims burnt to death at an _auto da fé_, and shouting with joy at the spectacle. Protestant ministers exult, in contrasting the influences of the reformed faith with results like these; and yet witness their congregations thronging in crowds to see a wretched criminal swinging in the agonies of strangulation. The same people thrill with horror, as they hear, around their evening fire, how those whom they call savages, dance, and yell round the stake, at which a captive enemy is burning. To the red man it seems the extreme of cold-blooded ferocity, to execute a criminal with a halter, by the hands of a person who bears no ill will to the victim.