conceal
her beauty, had locked her up in this chest.

The whole creation in these rabbinical fancies is strangely gigantic and
vast. The works of eastern nations are full of these descriptions; and
Hesiod's Theogony, and Milton's battles of angels, are puny in
comparison with these rabbinical heroes, or rabbinical things. Mountains
are hurled, with all their woods, with great ease, and creatures start
into existence too terrible for our conceptions. The winged monster in
the "Arabian Nights," called the Roc, is evidently one of the creatures
of rabbinical fancy; it would sometimes, when very hungry, seize and fly
away with an elephant. Captain Cook found a bird's nest in an island
near New Holland, built with sticks on the ground, six-and-twenty feet
in circumference, and near three feet in height. But of the rabbinical
birds, fish, and animals, it is not probable any circumnavigator will
ever trace even the slightest vestige or resemblance.

One of their birds, when it spreads its wings, blots out the sun. An egg
from another fell out of its nest, and the white thereof broke and glued
about three hundred cedar-trees, and overflowed a village. One of them
stands up to the lower joint of the leg in a river, and some mariners,
imagining the water was not deep, were hastening to bathe, when a voice
from heaven said--"Step not in there, for seven years ago there a
carpenter dropped his axe, and it hath not yet reached the bottom."

The following passage, concerning fat geese, is perfectly in the style
of these rabbins:--"A rabbin once saw in a desert a flock of geese so
fat that their feathers fell off, and the rivers flowed in fat. Then
said I to them, shall we have part of you in the other world when the
Messiah shall come? And one of them lifted up a wing, and another a leg,
to signify these parts we should have. We should otherwise have had all
parts of these geese; but we Israelites shall be called to an account
touching these fat geese, because their sufferings are owing to us. It
is our iniquities that have delayed the coming of the Messiah; and these
geese suffer greatly by reason of their excessive fat, which daily and
daily increases, and will increase till the Messiah comes!"

What the manna was which fell in the wilderness, has often been
disputed, and still is disputable; it was sufficient for the rabbins to
have found in the Bible that the taste of it was "as a wafer made with
honey," to have raised their