Gilles.

Our historians chiefly write concerning _Godfrey de Bouillon_; only the
learned know that the Count _de St. Gilles_ acted there so important a
character. The stories of the _Saracens_ are just the reverse; they
speak little concerning Godfrey, and eminently distinguish Saint Gilles.

Tasso has given in to the more vulgar accounts, by making the former so
eminent, at the cost of the other heroes, in his Jerusalem Delivered.
Thus Virgil transformed by his magical power the chaste Dido into a
distracted lover; and Homer the meretricious Penelope into a moaning
matron. It is not requisite for poets to be historians, but historians
should not be so frequently poets. The same charge, I have been told,
must be made against the Grecian historians. The Persians are viewed to
great disadvantage in Grecian history. It would form a curious inquiry,
and the result might be unexpected to some, were the Oriental student to
comment on the Grecian historians. The Grecians were not the demi-gods
they paint themselves to have been, nor those they attacked the
contemptible multitudes they describe. These boasted victories might be
diminished. The same observation attaches to Caesar's account of his
British expedition. He never records the defeats he frequently
experienced. The national prejudices of the Roman historians have
undoubtedly occasioned us to have a very erroneous conception of the
Carthaginians, whose discoveries in navigation and commercial
enterprises were the most considerable among the ancients. We must
indeed think highly of that people, whose works on agriculture, which
they had raised into a science, the senate of Rome ordered to be
translated into Latin. They must indeed have been a wise and grave
people.--Yet they are stigmatised by the Romans for faction, cruelty,
and cowardice; and the "Punic" faith has come down to us in a proverb:
but Livy was a Roman! and there is such a thing as a patriotic
malignity!

METEMPSYCHOSIS.

If we except the belief of a future remuneration beyond this life for
suffering virtue, and retribution for successful crimes, there is no
system so simple, and so little repugnant to our understanding, as that
of the metempsychosis. The pains and the pleasures of this life are by
this system considered as the recompense or the punishment of our
actions in an anterior state: so that, says St. Foix, we cease to wonder
that, among men and animals, some enjoy an easy and agreeabl