There is an exhibition of phenomena equally curious when the religious sentiment, instead of thus swallowing up all the others, is deprived of even its own proper object. I once saw a solitary hen bullfinch, that retired one spring into a dark corner of her cage and laid an egg, over which she sat until it was addled. It is always thus when the devotional sentiment is left to form a religion for itself. Encaged like the poor bullfinch, it proves fruitful in just a similar way, and moping in its dark recesses, brings forth its pitiful abortions unassisted and alone. I have ever thought of the pantheons and mythological dictionaries of our libraries as a kind of museums, stored, like those of the anatomist, with embryos and abortions. It must be remarked further, that the devotional sentiment operates in this way not only when its proper object is wanting, but even, should the mind be dark and uninformed, when that is present. Every false religion may be regarded as a wild irregular production, springing out of that basis of sentiment (one of the very foundations of our nature) which, when rendered the subject of a right course of culture, and sown with the good seed, proves the proper field of the true. But on this field, even when occupied the better way, there may be the weeds of a rank indigenous mythology shooting up below--a kind of subordinate superstition, which, in other circumstances, would have been not the underwood, but the forest. Hence our difficulty in fixing the genealogy of the Pagan-like usages to which I allude; there are two opposite sources, from either of which they may have sprung:--they may form a kind of undergrowth, thrown up at no very early period by a soil occupied by beliefs the most serious and rational, or they may constitute the ancient and broken vestiges of an obsolete and exploded mythology. I shall briefly describe a few of the more curious. [Sidenote: INTERESTING USAGES.]