"She taught the weak to bend, the proud to pray To powers unseen, and mightier far than they: She, from the rending earth and bursting skies, Saw gods descend, and fiends infernal rise; Here fixed the dreadful, there the blessed abodes: Fear made her devils, and weak hope her gods: Gods partial, changeful, passionate, unjust, Whose attributes were rage, revenge, or lust; Such as the souls of cowards might conceive, And, formed like tyrants, tyrants would believe. Zeal, then, not charity, became the guide; And hell was built on spite, and heaven on pride. Then sacred seemed the ethereal vault no more; Altars grew marble then, and reeked with gore; Then first the flamen tasted living food; Next his grim idol smeared with human blood; With heaven's own thunders shook the world below, And played the god an engine on his foe." The savage has only rudimentary notions of the justice, the respect, and the good-will which man owes to his fellows. Nevertheless, if in some parts of the world he appears an intractable, cruel, and perfidious being, in others his manners are gentle, inoffensive, and hospitable. And nearly everywhere he seems capable of gratitude, devotion, and even of veritable heroism. But, in general, the law of the strongest is the only law which he recognizes; the fear of an immediate and corporeal chastisement is the sole restraint upon his passions; and the material instincts are the most powerful impulses of his actions. The want or narrowness of the moral sense induces as its natural consequences among the unfortunate savages every form of debauchery--the absolute and brutal tyranny of the chief over his tribe, of man over woman, of the father over his children, of the conqueror over the conquered; murder on the slightest occasion, and with incredible refinements of cruelty; and, finally, anthropophagy--that hideous custom which lowers man below the most ferocious beasts, and which, nevertheless is not always, as might be supposed, the sign of the lowest abasement. Anthropophagy springs from different causes, and clothes itself in various forms. Sometimes it is but the expression of a sanguinary instinct, of an atrocious sentiment of vengeance; sometimes it is the consequence of a state of misery and of famine almost permanent; often, also, it is closely connected with the usage of human sacrifices, and those who practise it consider it as a sacred duty, as an act of piety, agreeable to their divinities or to the _manes_ of the victims whose very flesh they devour.