_Snoring_.--The following story of a death caused by it is entirely authentic. Erythræus relates that when Cardinal Bentivoglio--a scholar equally elegant and laborious--was called to sit in the Conclave, for the election of a successor to Urban VIII, the summons found him much exhausted by the literary vigils to which he was addicted. Immured in the sacred palace, (such is the custom while the Pope is not yet chosen,) his lodging was assigned him along side of a Cardinal, whose snoring was so incessant and so terrible, that poor Bentivoglio ceased to be able to obtain even the {356} little sleep which his studies and his cares usually permitted him. After eleven nights of insomnolence thus produced, he was thrown into a violent fever. They removed him, and he slept--but waked no more. _Human Usefulness_.--Wilkes has said, that of all the uses to which a man can be put, there is none so poor as hanging him. I hope that I may, without offence to any body's taste, add, that of all the purposes to which a _soul_ can be put, I know of none less useful than _damning it_. _Sneezing_.--It is the Catholics (see father Feyjoo for the fact) who trace the practice of bidding God bless a man when he sneezes, to a plague in the time of St. Gregory. He, they say, instituted the observance, in order to ward off the death of which this spasm had, till then, been the regular precursor, in the disease. If the story be true, such a plague had already happened, long before the day of St. Gregory. In the _Odyssey_, Penelope takes the sneezing of Telemachus for a good omen; and the army of Xenophon drew a favorable presage, as to one of his propositions, from a like accident: Aristotle speaks of the salutation of one sneezing as the common usage of his time. In Catullus's _Acme and Sempronius_, Cupid ratifies, by an approving sneeze, the mutual vows of the lovers. Pliny alludes to the practice, and Petronius in his _Gyton_. In Apuleius's _Golden Ass_, a husband hears the concealed gallant of his wife sneeze, and blesses her, taking the sternutation to be her own. If there be a marvel or an absurdity, the Rabbins rarely fail to adorn the fiction or the folly with some trait of their own. Their account of the matter is, that in patriarchal days, men never died except by sneezing, which was then the only disease, and always mortal. Apparently then, the antiquity of the Scotch nation and of rappee cannot be carried back to the time of Jacob. Be this point of chronology as it may, however, it is certain that the same sort of observance, as to sneezing, was found in America at the first discovery.