Pelloutier, who sought for everything that might do honor to the Celts, took the pains to contradict Jerome, and to maintain that his credulity had been imposed on. But Jerome speaks very gravely, and of what he _saw_. We may, with deference, dispute with a father of the church about what he has heard; but to doubt of what he has _seen_ is going very far. After all, the safest way is to doubt of everything, even of what we have seen ourselves. One word more on cannibalism. In a book which has had considerable success among the well-disposed we find the following, or words to the same effect: "In Cromwell's time a woman who kept a tallow chandler's shop in Dublin sold excellent candles, made of the fat of Englishmen. After some time one of her customers complained that the candles were not so good. 'Sir,' said the woman, 'it is because we are short of Englishmen.'" I ask which were the most guilty--those who assassinated the English, or the poor woman who made candles of their fat? And further, I ask which was the greatest crime--to have Englishmen cooked for dinner, or to use their tallow to give light at supper? It appears to me that the great evil is the being killed; it matters little to us whether, after death, we are roasted on the spit or are made into candles. Indeed, no well-disposed man can be unwilling to be useful when he is dead. CASTING (IN METAL). There is not an ancient fable, not an old absurdity which some simpleton will not revive, and that in a magisterial tone, if it be but authorized by some classical or theological writer. Lycophron (if I remember rightly) relates that a horde of robbers who had been justly condemned in Ethiopia by King Actisanes to lose their ears and noses, fled to the cataracts of the Nile and from thence penetrated into the Sandy Desert, where they at length built the temple of Jupiter Ammon. Lycophron, and after him Theopompus, tells us that these banditti, reduced to extreme want, having neither shoes, nor clothes, nor utensils, nor bread, bethought themselves of raising a statue of gold to an Egyptian god. This statue was ordered one evening and made in the course of the night. A member of the university much attached to Lycophron and the Ethiopian robbers asserts that nothing was more common in the venerable ages of antiquity than to cast a statue of gold in one night, and afterwards throw it into a fire to reduce it to an impalpable powder, in order to be swallowed by a whole people. But where did these poor devils, without breeches, find so much gold? "What, sir!" says the man of learning, "do you forget that they had stolen enough to buy all Africa and that their daughters' earrings alone were worth nine millions five hundred thousand livres of our currency?"