than to fighten and to fie men, and to drynken gladlyest
mannes blood, which they clepen Dieu."--P. 235. Yet, whatever absurdity
may appear on the face of these tales; and what can be more absurd than
to suppose that a few wild Scots or Irish (for the name was then proper
to Ireland), should so lord it in Gaul, as to eat the breasts of the
women and the hips of the shepherds? Yet, whatever absurdities our
Mandevylles may have obtruded on the public, the evidence of the fact is
not thereby wholly destroyed. Though Dampier and other visitors of
barbarous nations have assured us that they never met with any
man-eaters, and though Voltaire has ridiculed the opinion, yet one may
venture the assertion of their existence, without partaking of a
credulity similar to that of those foreigners, who believed that the men
of Kent were born with tails like sheep (see Lambert's Peramb.), the
punishment inflicted upon them for the murder of Thomas a Becket. Many
are the credible accounts, that different barbarous nations used to eat
their prisoners of war. According to the authentic testimony of the best
Portuguese writers, the natives of Brazil, on their high festivals,
brought forth their captives, and after many barbarous ceremonies, at
last roasted and greedily devoured their mangled limbs. During his
torture the unhappy victim prided himself in his manly courage,
upbraiding their want of skill in the art of tormenting, and telling his
murderers that his belly had been the grave of many of their relations.
Thus the fact was certain long before a late voyage discovered the
horrid practice in New Zealand. To drink human blood has been more
common. The Gauls and other ancient nations practised it. When
Magalhaens proposed Christianity to the King of Subo, a north-eastern
Asiatic island, and when Francis de Castro discovered Santigana and
other islands, a hundred leagues north of the Moluccas, the conversion
of their kings was confirmed by each party drinking of the blood of the
other. Our poet Spenser tells us, in his View of the State of Ireland,
that he has seen the Irish drink human blood, particularly, he adds, "at
the execution of a notable traitor at Limerick, called Murrogh O'Brien,
I saw an old woman, who was his foster-mother, take up his head whilst
he was quartering and suck up all the blood that run thereout, saying,
that the earth was not worthy to drink it, and therewith also steeped
her face and breast and tore her hair,