he would have assented to that system no farther than such preceding conformity extended. Holding it only as the result of his own speculations,—as hypothesis,—a mere fancy,—a toy of the mind,—a plaything for the intellect in its lighter moments, and sometimes in its graver ones the subject of a dream,—he valued it accordingly. And yet the more he sported with it, and the farther he pursued it in his reveries, the more plausible it appeared, and the better did it seem to explain some of the physical phenomena, and some of the else seemingly inexplicable varieties of human nature. It was Henry More's opinion that the Pre-existence of the Soul, which is so explicit and frequent a doctrine of the Platonists, “was a tenet for which there are many plausible reasons, and against which there is nothing considerable to be alleged; being a key, he said, for some main mysteries of Providence which no other can so handsomely unlock.” More however, the Doctor thought might be advanced against that tenet, than against his own scheme, for to that no valid objection could be opposed. But the metempsychosis in a descending scale as a scheme of punishment would have been regarded by him as one of those corruptions which the Bards derived from the vain philosophy or false religions of the Levant. Not that this part of their scheme was without a certain plausibility on the surface which might recommend it to inconsiderate minds. He himself would have thought that no Judge ever pronounced a more just decision than the three Infernal Lord Chancellors of the dead would do, if they condemned his townsman the pettyfogger to skulk upon earth again as a pole-cat, creep into holes as an earwig, and be flattened again between the thumbnails of a London chambermaid, or exposed to the fatal lotion of Mr. Tiffin, bug-destroyer to his Majesty. It was fitting he thought that every keen sportsman, for once at least should take the part of the inferior creature in those amusements of the field which he had followed so joyously, and that he should be winged in the shape of a partridge, run down in the form of a hare by the hounds, and Actæonized in a stag: that the winner of a Welsh main should be the cock of one, and die of the wounds received in the last fight; that the merciless postmaster should become a posthorse at his own inn; and that they who have devised, or practised, or knowingly permitted any wanton cruelty for the sake of pampering their appetites, should in the next stage of their existence, feel in their own person the effect of those devices, which in their human state they had only tasted. And not being addicted himself to “the most honest, ingenuous, quiet, and harmless art of angling,” (forgive him Sir Humphrey Davy! forgive him Chantrey! forgive him, thou best of all publishers, John Major, who mightest write _Ne plus ultra_ upon thy edition of any book which thou delightest to honour) he allowed that