e life,
while others seem born only to suffer all kinds of miseries.
Preposterous as this system may appear, it has not wanted for advocates
in the present age, which indeed has revived every kind of fanciful
theory. Mercier, in _L'an deux mille quatre cents quarante_, seriously
maintains the present one.

If we seek for the origin of the opinion of the metempsychosis, or the
transmigration of souls into other bodies, we must plunge into the
remotest antiquity; and even then we shall find it impossible to fix the
epoch of its first author. The notion was long extant in Greece before
the time of Pythagoras. Herodotus assures us that the Egyptian priests
taught it; but he does not inform us of the time it began to spread. It
probably followed the opinion of the immortality of the soul. As soon as
the first philosophers had established this dogma, they thought they
could not maintain this immortality without a transmigration of souls.
The opinion of the metempsychosis spread in almost every region of the
earth; and it continues, even to the present time, in all its force
amongst those nations who have not yet embraced Christianity. The people
of Arracan, Peru, Siam, Camboya, Tonquin, Cochin-China, Japan, Java, and
Ceylon still entertain that fancy, which also forms the chief article of
the Chinese religion. The Druids believed in transmigration. The bardic
triads of the Welsh are full of this belief; and a Welsh antiquary
insists, that by an emigration which formerly took place, it was
conveyed to the Bramins of India from Wales! The Welsh bards tell us
that the souls of men transmigrate into the bodies of those animals
whose habits and characters they most resemble, till after a circuit of
such penitential miseries, they are purified for the celestial presence;
for man may be converted into a pig or a wolf, till at length he assumes
the inoffensiveness of the dove.

My learned friend Sharon Turner has explained, in his "Vindication of
the ancient British Poems," p. 231, the Welsh system of the
metempsychosis. Their bards mention three circles of existence. The
circle of the all-enclosing circle holds nothing alive or dead, but God.
The second circle, that of felicity, is that which men are to pervade
after they have passed through their terrestrial changes. The circle of
evil is that in which human nature passes through those varying stages
of existence which it must undergo before it is qualified to inhabit the
circle