[4] However little connexion there seems between our indifference as to what becomes of the body and our belief in the immortality of the soul, it is, nevertheless, certain that believers and unbelievers do not view the subject in the same light. The ancients, in spite of Aristotle, (as we find him construed by Pomponatius,) were greater _natural_ believers in the doctrine of the soul's immortality, than the moderns, in spite of Des Cartes. And see how they venerated the dead! The Athenians put to death six generals who had achieved for them the greatest of their victories, because they had omitted to bury those who had been killed. When Alcyoneus took the head of Pyrrhus to his father Antigonus, that king struck the bearer with a staff, covered his eyes, and wept, and ordered that the dead body and the head should be honourably put on the pyre. The rabbinical fable of the _Luz_, or little bone of the size of a grain, which could not be destroyed even by fire, and from which _nostrum corpus animate repullulascet_, seems to have spread beyond Judea. We need not speak of Egypt and its sacred mummies. [5] If, in these narratives, it may be found that I depart in some details from the discrepant confessions of Burke, I have to plead such authority as I possess, in a collection of notes taken at the time by one who intended to use them in a fuller account than that comprised in the two pamphlets published by Buchanan. [6] She had been once a lodger in Log's house. [7] On examining the animal, the knackers found that many old sores become hollows had been filled up with tow, and then plastered over with a thin skin. [8] They are fully described, for the first time we believe, in "Curiosities of Crime in Edinburgh." [9] We adopt this version in preference to another, which substitutes Burke. [10] It was never believed that the cases confessed to by Burke exhausted the real list. One in particular, that of a little Italian boy, Ludovico, who went about with white mice, was a favourite story which could not be doubted, when it was known that the people of Tanner's Close saw, for years afterwards, the two little animals haunting the dark recesses, where their young master had been sacrificed. And many other visions were seen there besides those of the white mice. But, apart from these superstitions, it is certain that there was found in Hare's house a cage with the mice's turning-wheel in it, which clearly had belonged to one of these Italian wanderers. The silence of Burke on the subject is of no importance, for his confessions did not agree, and, besides, it was properly asked, might not poor Ludovico have been the subject which Hare managed "on his own hook" unknown to Burke? Like the others, he would be mourned, but it would be far away in some little hamlet among the Apennines.