Yet all the allegories which adorn our legends are not so remote from truth or nature. The vampires are said to have gloated over the sacrifices of human life, while the gouls and afrits, the hyenas in human shape, not only fed on dead carcases, but, by a special transmigration, took possession of a corpse. On this fable is founded the monstrous legend of “Assuet and Ajut.” I confess it monstrous; but indeed there is little exaggeration even in these tales of horror, if we may believe, for once, Master Edmund Spenser, in that part of his record of the rebellion of Desmond, in Ireland, which treats of the Munster massacre:—“Out of every corner of the woodes and glennes, they came creeping forth upon their handes, for their legges could not bear them; they looked like anatomies of death; they spake like ghostes, crying out of their graves: they eat the dead carrions—happy were they could they find them—yea, and one another soon after, insomuch as the very carcases they spared not to scrape out of their graves.” That episode also, in the “Inferno” of Dante, in which Count Ugolino wears out days and nights in gnawing the skull of an enemy, may well seem a fiction; but even this hellish repast is but a prototype of the savage rage for scalping and cannibalism among the Indian hordes of America. DEMONOLOGY. “Be thy intents wicked or charitable, Thou com’st in such a questionable shape—” HAMLET. ASTR. Now from the holy records, from the creed of the Magus Zoroaster, from the Greek, and Roman, and other legends, how clear is the influence of ethereal beings, of angels and demons, on man’s life; and of the imparted power of _exorcism_! In allusion to this divine gift to Solomon, Josephus has the following story:—“God also enabled him to learn that skill which expels demons, which is a science useful and sanative to men. And this method is of great force unto this day, for I have seen a certain man of my own country, whose name was Eleazer, releasing people that were demoniacal in the presence of Vespasian, and his sons, and his captains, and the whole multitude of his soldiers. The manner of the cure was this. He put a ring, that had a root of one of those sorts mentioned by Solomon, to the nostrils of the demoniac, after which he drew out the demon through his nostrils; and when the man fell down immediately, he adjured him to return into him no more, making still mention of Solomon, and reciting the incantations which he composed. And when Eleazer would persuade and demonstrate to the spectators that he had such a power, he set a little way off a cup or bason full of water, and commanded the demon, as he went out of the man, to overturn it, and thereby to let the spectators know that he had left the man.”