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 66 as a wafer made with honey," to have raised their fancy to its pitch. They declare it was "like oil to children, honey to old men, and cakes to middle age." It had every kind of taste except that of cucumbers, melons, garlick, and onions, and leeks, for these were those Egyptian roots which the Israelites so much regretted to have lost. This manna had, however, the quality to accommodate itself to the palate of those who did not murmur in the wilderness; and to these it became fish, flesh, or fowl.

66

The rabbins never advance an absurdity without quoting a text in scripture; and to substantiate this fact they quote Deut. ii. 7. where it is said, through this great wilderness, these forty years the Lord thy God hath been with thee, and thou hast lacked nothing!" St. Austin repeats this explanation of the rabbins, that the faithful found in this manna the taste of their favourite food! However, the Israelites could not have found all these benefits as the rabbins tell us, for in Numbers xi. 6. they exclaim, "There is nothing at all besides this manna before our eyes!" They had just said that they remembered the melons, cucumbers, &c. which they had eaten of so freely in Egypt. One of the hyperboles of the rabbins is, that the manna fell in such mountains that the kings of the east

and the west beheld them; which they found in a passage in the 23d Psalm: "Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies!" These may serve as specimens of the forced interpretations on which their grotesque fables are founded.

Their detestation of Titus, their great conqueror, appears by the following wild invention.After having narrated certain things too shameful to read, of a prince whom Josephus describes in far different colours, they tell us that on sea Titus tauntingly observed in a great storm that the God of the Jews was only powerful on the water, and that therefore he had succeeded in drowning Pharaoh and Sisra. "Had he been strong he would have waged war with me in Jerusalem." On uttering this blasphemy, a voice from heaven said, "Wicked man! I have a little creature in the world which shall wage war with thee!" When Titus landed, a gnat entered his nostrils, and for seven years together made holes in his brains. When his skull was opened the gnat was found as large as a pigeon; the mouth of the gnat was of copper, and the claws of iron.

That however there are some beautiful inventions in the Talmud I refer to the story of "Solomon and Sheba," in the present collections.

ON THE CUSTOM OF SALUTING AFTER SNEEZING.

Ir is probable that this custom, so universaly prevalent, originated in some ancient superstition: it seems to have excited inquiry among all nations.

Some Catholics, says Father Feyjoo, have attri buted the origin of this custom to the ordinance of a pope, Saint Gregory-who is said to have instituted a short benediction to be used on such occasions, at a time when, during a pestilence, the crisis was attended by meezing, and in most cases followed by death.

But the rabbins, who have a story for every thing, say, that before Jacob, men never sneezed but once, and then immediately died: they assure us that that patriarch was the first who died by natural disease, before him all men died by sneezing; the memory of which was ordered to be preserved in all nations by a command of every prince to his subjects to employ some salutary exclamation after the act of sneezing. But these are Talmudical dreams, and only serve to prove that so familiar a custom has always created inquiry.

Even Aristotle has delivered some considerable nonsense on this custom; he says it is an honourable acknowledgment of the seat of good sense and

genius-the head—to distinguish it from two other offensive eruptions of air, which are never accompanied by any benediction from the by-standers, The custom at all events existed long prior to Pope Gregory. The lover in Apuleius, Gyton in Petronius, and allusions to it in Pliny, prove its antiquity; and a memoir of the French academy notices the practice in the New World on the first discovery of America. Every where man is saluted for sneezing.

An amusing account of the ceremonies which attend the sneezing of a king of Monomotapa, shows what a national concern may be the sneeze of despotism.-Those who are near his person, when this happens, salute him in so loud a tone that persons in the antichamber hear it, and join in the acclamation; in the adjoining apartments they do the same, till the noise reaches the street, and becomes propagated throughout the city; so that at each sneeze of his majesty, results a most horrid cry from the salutations of many thousands of his vassals.

When the king of Sennaar sneezes, his courtiers immediately turn their backs on him, and give a loud slap on their right thigh.

With the ancients sneezing was ominous; from the right it was considered auspicious; and Plutarch, in his life of Themistocles, says, that before a naval