even Izaak Walton of blessed memory could not have shown cause for mitigation of the sentence, if Rhadamanthus and his colleagues in the Court below, had condemned him to be spitted upon the hook of some dear lover and ornament of the art, in the shape of “a black snail with his belly slit to shew the white;” or of a perch which of fish, he tells us, is the longest lived on a hook; or sewed him metempsycho-sized into a frog, to the arming iron, with a fine needle and silk, with only one stitch, using him in so doing, according to his own minute directions, as if he loved him, that is, harming him as little as he possibly might, that he might live the longer. This would be fitting he thought, and there would have been enough of purgatory in it to satisfy the sense of vindictive justice, if any scheme of purgatory had been reconcilable with his scriptural belief. Bishop Hall has a passage in his Choice Helps for a Pious spirit, which might be taken in the sense of this opinion, though certainly no such meaning was intended by the writer. “Man,” he says, “as he consists of a double nature, flesh and spirit, so is he placed in a middle rank, betwixt an angel, which is a spirit, and a beast, which is flesh: partaking of the qualities and performing the acts of both. He is angelical in his understanding, in his sensual affections bestial; and to whether of these he most incline and comforteth himself, that part wins more of the other, and gives a denomination to him; so as he that was before half angel, half beast, if he be drowned in sensuality, hath lost the angel and is become a beast; if he be wholly taken up with heavenly meditations, he hath quit the beast, and is improved angelical. It is hard to hold an equal temper, either he must degenerate into a beast, or be advanced to an angel.” Had the Doctor held this opinion according to the letter, and believed that those who brutalized their nature in the stage of humanity, were degraded to the condition of brutes after death, he could even have persuaded himself that intelligible indications of such a transmigration might be discovered in the eyes of a dog when he looks to some hard master for mercy, or to some kind one for notice, and as it were for a recognition of the feelings and thoughts which had no other means of expression. But he could not have endured to think it possible that the spaniel who stood beside him in mute supplication, with half-erected ears, looking for a morsel of food, might be a friend or relation; and that in making a troublesome or a thievish cur slink away with his tail between his legs, he might be hurting the feelings of an old acquaintance.