against the month of June: "Festum Vestæ-Asinus coronatur." As we know that many of our customs are derived from Pagan institutions, is it not probable that the crowning of our Laureates originated in this superstition? The Gnostics worshipped this long-eared deity. In the precincts of the Holy Land, though not invested with idolatrous honour, the Ass was held in high respect and reverence; and I know not any contrast of fate more affecting, and reverse of grandeur, even including that of the Jewish nation itself, more absolute and wretched, than the present doom of this outcast quadruped with its former lot in Palestine, where, as the use of horses was prohibited, the Ass was the royal beast, whose covering was cloth of gold, whose housings were studded with the carbuncle and the pearl, and whose provender was showered down into royal mangers. Deborah, addressing her song to the rulers of Israel, exclaims-" Speak, ye that ride on white Asses, ye that sit in judgment." Jair of Gilead, we are told, had thirty sons, who rode upon as many Asses, and commanded in thirty cities; and the holy writer, wishing to exalt the grandeur of Abdon, one of the judges of Israel, proclaims that he had forty sons and thirty grandsons, who rode upon seventy Asses. According to a tradition of the Jewish Rabbins, one of the ten privileged creatures formed by God at the end of the sixth day, was the identical beast bestrode by Balaam, the same that Abraham loaded with wood for the sacrifice of Isaac, which Moses long after employed to transport his wife and son across the desert, and which, still existing in the

depths of some unknown and impenetrable wilderness, will continue to be miraculously fed and guarded until the advent of their pretended Messiah, when he will mount upon its back and ride forth to conquer all the nations of the earth.

But, leaving these reveries, must we not admit, unless we join Maimonides and Gregory of Nyssa in considering the whole story a vision or allegory, that the animal whereof we write is the same that, on the flowery banks of Euphrates, saw the Angel of the Lord standing before it with a drawn sword, turned aside thrice into the path of the vineyard, and, when smitten for crushing its master's foot against a wall, was miraculously endued with speech that it might rebuke its infatuated rider? When the priests and elders looked forth from the towers and temples and walls of Hierosolyma towards the valley beneath, where the multitude were filling the air with Hosannas, and spreading palm-branches before the Saviour of the world, who was destined to overthrow the Sophists of Athens and the Pagan Pontiffs of allconquering Rome, they beheld him riding upon-an Ass. Reader! if thou hast been more fortunate than he who now addresses thee, and hast been enabled to pick up a little book of Heinsius entitled, "Laus Asini," I counsel thee to lay it next thy heart, for it disserts of most long-eared matter, and is rich in asinine reminiscences. Doubtless thou hast passed the Pons Asinorum of the mathematicians-thou hast laughed at the punishment inflicted by Apollo upon the Phrygian king-thou hast feasted on the third Dialogue of

Lucian, wherein he relates his adventures after being converted into an Ass by a sorceress-and hast been enraptured with Apuleius's most exquisite and imaginative expansion of this fiction; and if thou canst still deny that the Ass who is now passing thy door, instead of being loaded with sand and cabbages, bears a rich freightage of sacred, classical, and scientific associations and conceits, I tell thee thou art duller "than the fat weed that rots itself at ease on Lethe's wharf,” and meritest thyself that appellation which limits all thy ideas of the passing quadruped.

Poor, shaggy, half-starved, mauled and maltreated beast! when I behold thee—

"Fallen, fallen, fallen, fallen,

Fallen from thy high estate"

and, alas, too often "weltering in thy blood!" and yet bearing thine insults and torments with a resignation, a fortitude, a heroism, that would do honour to a Stoic philosopher, I am not content with the poet's exclamation—“ I love the patient meekness of thy face," but feel tempted to transform the common whereon I encounter thee into the greensward of the fairies, that I may say with Titania—

"Come, lie thee down upon this flowery bed,
While I thy amiable cheeks do coy,

And stick musk-roses in thy sleek smooth head,
And kiss thy fair large ears, my gentle joy."

The reader will say that I am full of my subject; and, pleading guilty to the charge, I confess that I know no sound more affecting, more pathetic, than

the braying of an Ass, "startling the night's dull
ear." It seems a 66
sense of intolerable wrong," an out-
pouring of long accumulated griefs, the delivery of
an agonized soul, the hysteric of exhausted patience;
and, while the sides distend as if the heart were burst-
ing, and the deep-closing sigh sends its appealing
breath up to Heaven, I have sometimes followed it,
and found delight in imagining that there might not
only be reason for the poor Indian's hope—

"Who thinks, admitted to yon equal sky,
His faithful dog shall bear him company”-

but that these long-eared innocents may be rewarded for their endurance in some garden of paradisaical thistles--some Eden of perpetual pasture-some Elysium of clover.

What a poor compound is humanity, and how ridiculous, as well as ungrateful, is its pride, when we see beauty and nobility converting this despised beast into a species of parent, and receiving its milk into their veins as the sole means of health or existence! I have never beheld this unconscious wet-nurse of the wealthy standing at the doors of our proud mansions, without sending my imagination not only up-stairs, where the pale sons and daughters of sickness were reclining upon their luxurious sofas, but into the sheds and penthouses of Knightsbridge or Petty France, where their four-footed foster-brothers and sisters, compelled, like the hairy Esau, to exchange their birthright for a mess of pottage, were porrecting their long ears at every sound, and en

deavouring to snuff the return of their teeming mothers, in the mingled impatience of defrauded appetite and disappointed affection. No substance is so poor in stimulants for present thought, but that it may be rendered pregnant in its past concoction and future decomposition; and as I have sometimes gazed upon this foal-purloined milk, frothing into a tumbler, I have traced it backwards to the earth when it was grass, and to the skies when it was rain; and following its forward destiny, I have fancied it converted into the bloom of beauty's cheek, or the sparkle of its eye, or by a still more subtle sublimation refecting and inspiring the brain until it finally evaporate in dazzling coruscations of wit. We are all compounds of the same matter, and should therefore learn to sympathise with all its organizations.

Although my subject, that I might be strictly asinary, has led me to a grave and serious treatment, it is not unfertile in more trivial suggestions. In England, where cruelty to animals of all kinds has attained its maximum, this Paria of the quadrupeds endures so large a share of outrage that I have sometimes imagined there must be a special Tophet reserved for its drivers; and as I once fell into conversation with an individual of that class, I endeavoured to explain to him the doctrine of the metempsychosis, insisting on the probability that he would one day be an Ass himself, and receive exactly such usage as he bestowed. Being assured, in answer to his inquiry whether there was any thing "about that there" in the Bible, that there was grave warranty for the