There is probably some exaggeration in this statement; and if the biographer was conversant with the history of his own country, he must have known that there was a time when his own countrymen made it a point of duty to eat pork on Saturdays, for the sake of despiting the Jews. But the practice cannot have been so common as he represents it, for if it had, Friday would not have retained its inauspicious character to the present time. Yet even this which is in common opinion the most unlucky of all the days, may, from particular circumstances, deserve it appears to be marked with a white stone. Upon a trial brought at the Chelmsford Assizes, by a disconsolate widow against a faithless suitor, for breach of promise, a letter of the defendant's was produced, containing this passage: “Mrs. Martha Harris, you say I have used you ill; but I do not think I have at all; for I told you not to count too much, lest something should happen to disappoint. You say the day was mine; but respecting that, I said, ‘if before harvest it must be very soon, or it would be in harvest;’ and you said ‘fix any time soon.’ But you said you should like to marry on a Friday, for you thought that a good day; for on a Friday your husband died, and on a Friday I first came to see you, and Friday was market day.” Old opinions, however groundless, are not often so easily overcome. The farmer has let precious days pass by without profiting by favourable weather, because he was warned against them by his almanack, or by tradition; and for the same reason, measures which might have relieved and saved a patient, have been fatally procrastinated. There were about thirty days in the christian year to which such malignant influences were imputed, that the recovery of any person who fell ill upon them was thought to be almost impossible: in any serious disease how greatly must this persuasion have increased the danger! More than half the days in the year are unlucky in Madagascar: and the Ombiasses, as the sort of bastard Mahomedan jugglers in that great island are called, have made the deluded people believe that any child born on one of those days, will, if it be allowed to grow up, prove a parricide, be addicted to every kind of wickedness, and moreover be miserable throughout the whole course of its life. The infant is always exposed in consequence; and unless some humaner parents employ a slave or relation to preserve it, and remove it for ever from their knowledge, it is left for beasts, birds, or reptiles to devour!