With equal triumph too did he read a passage in one of the numbers of the Connoisseur, which made him wonder that the writer from whom it proceeded in levity should not have been led on by it to the clear perception of a great truth. “The affinity,” says that writer, who is now known to have been no less a person than the author of the Task, “the affinity between chatterers and monkeys, and praters and parrots, is too obvious not to occur at once. Grunters and growlers may be justly compared to hogs. Snarlers are curs that continually shew their teeth, but never bite; and the spitfire passionate are a sort of wild cats, that will not bear stroking, but will purr when they are pleased. Complainers are screech-owls; and story-tellers always repeating the same dull note are cuckoos. Poets that prick up their ears at their own hideous braying are no better than asses; critics in general are venomous serpents that delight in hissing; and some of them, who have got by heart a few technical terms without knowing their meaning, are no better than magpies.” So too the polyonomous Arabian philosopher Zechariah Ben Mohammed Ben Mahmud Al Camuni Al Cazvini. “Man,” he says, “partakes of the nature of vegetables, because like them he grows and is nourished; he stands in this farther relation to the irrational animals, that he feels and moves; by his intellectual faculties he resembles the higher orders of intelligences, and he partakes more or less of these various classes, as his inclination leads him. If his sole wish be to satisfy the wants of existence, then he is content to vegetate. If he partakes more of the animal than the vegetable nature, we find him fierce as the lion, greedy as the bull, impure as the hog, cruel as the leopard, or cunning as the fox; and if as is sometimes the case, he possesses all these bad qualities, he is then a demon in human shape.” Gratifying as these passages were to him, some of them being mere sports of wit, and others only the produce of fancy, he would have been indeed delighted if he had known what was in his days known by no European scholar, that in the Institutes of Menu, his notion is distinctly declared as a revealed truth; there it is said, “In whatever occupation the Supreme Lord first employed any vital soul, that occupation the same soul attaches itself spontaneously, when it receives a new body again and again. Whatever quality, noxious or innocent, harsh or mild, unjust or just, false or true, he conferred on any being at its creation, the same quality enters it of course on its future births.”[2] [Footnote 2: SIR W. JONES.]