of felicity.

The progression of man through the circle of evil is marked by three
infelicities: Necessity, oblivion, and deaths. The deaths which follow
our changes are so many escapes from their power. Man is a free agent,
and has the liberty of choosing; his sufferings and changes cannot be
foreseen. By his misconduct he may happen to fall retrograde into the
lowest state from which he had emerged. If his conduct in any one state,
instead of improving his being, had made it worse, he fell back into a
worse condition, to commence again his purifying revolutions. Humanity
was the limit of the degraded transmigrations. All the changes above
humanity produced felicity. Humanity is the scene of the contest; and
after man has traversed every state of animated existence, and can
remember all that he has passed through, that consummation follows which
he attains in the circle of felicity. It is on this system of
transmigration that Taliessin, the Welsh bard, who wrote in the sixth
century, gives a recital of his pretended transmigrations. He tells how
he had been a serpent, a wild ass, a buck, or a crane, &c.; and this
kind of reminiscence of his former state, this recovery of memory, was a
proof of the mortal's advances to the happier circle. For to forget what
we have been was one of the curses of the circle of evil. Taliessin,
therefore, adds Mr. Turner, as profusely boasts of his recovered
reminiscence as any modern sectary can do of his state of grace and
election.

In all these wild reveries there seems to be a moral fable in the
notion, that the clearer a man recollects what a _brute_ he has been, it
is a certain proof that he is in an improved state!

According to the authentic Clavigero, in his history of Mexico, we find
the Pythagorean transmigration carried on in the West, and not less
fancifully than in the countries of the East. The people of Tlascala
believe that the souls of persons of rank went after their death to
inhabit the bodies of _beautiful and sweet singing birds_, and those of
the _nobler quadrupeds_; while the souls of inferior persons were
supposed to pass into _weasels_, _beetles_, and such other _meaner
animals_.

There is something not a little ludicrous in the description Plutarch
gives at the close of his treatise on "the delay of heavenly justice."
Thespesius saw at length the souls of those who were condemned to return
to life, and whom they violently forced to take the forms of all kind