How hosts distrest, her smock for banner wore, how fish in conventicles met, And mackerel were with bait of doctrine caught: How fly-flap, of church-censure houses rid All these are allusions to the extravagant fictions in "the Golden Legend." Among other gross impositions to deceive the mob, Oldham likewise attacks them for certain publications on topics not less singular. The tales he has recounted, Oldham says, are only baits for children, like toys at a fair; but they have their profounder and higher matters for the learned and the inquisitive. He goes on: One undertakes by scales of miles to tell Another frights the rout with useful stories Satyr IV. The readers of Oldham, for Oldham must ever have readers among the curious in our poetry, have been greatly disappointed in the pompous edition of a Captain Thompson, which illustrates none of his allusions. In the above lines Oldham alludes to some singular works. Treatises and topographical descriptions of HELL, PURGATORY, and even HEAVEN, were once the favourite researches among certain zealous defenders of the Romish church, who exhausted their ink-horns in building up a Hell to their own taste, or for their particular purpose. We have a treatise of Cardinal Bellarmin, a jesuit, on Purgatory; he seems to have the science of a surveyor, among all the secret tracks and the formidable divisions of "the bottomless pit." Bellarmin informs us that there are beneath the earth four different places, or a profound place divided into four parts. The deepest of these places is Hell; it contains all the souls of the damned, where will be also their bodies after the resurrection, and likewise all the demons. The place nearest Hell is Purgatory, where souls are purged, or rather where they appease the anger of God by their sufferings. He says that the same fires and the same torments are alike in both these places, the only difference. between Hell and Purgatory consisting in their duration. Next to Purgatory is the limbo of those infants who die without having received the sacrament; and the fourth place is the limbo of the Fathers; that is to say, of those just men who died before the death of Christ. But since the days of the Redeemer, this last division is empty, like an apartment to be let. A later catholic theologist, the famous Tillemont, condemns all the illustrious pagans to the eternal torments of Hell! because they lived before the time of Jesus, and therefore could not be benefited by the redemption! Speaking of young Tiberius, who was compelled to fall on his own sword, Tillemont adds, "Thus by his own hand he ended his miserable life, to begin another, the misery of which will never end " Yet history records nothing bad of this prince. Jortin observes that he added this reflection in his later edition, so that the good man as he grew older grew more uncharitable in his religious notions. It is in this manner too that the Benedictine editor of Justin Martyr speaks of the illustrious pagans. This Father, after highly applauding Socrates, and a few more who resembled him, inclines to think that they are not fixed in Hell. But the Benedictine editor takes great pains to clear the good father from the shameful imputa tion of supposing that a virtuous pagan might be saved as well as a Benedictine monk! For a curious specimen of this odium theologicum, see the Censure" of the Sorbonne on Marmontel's Belisarius. The adverse party, who were either philosophers or reformers, received all such information with great suspicion. Anthony Cornellius, a lawyer in the 16th century, wrote a small tract, which was so effectually suppressed, as a monster of atheism, that a copy is now only to be found in the hands of the curious. This author ridiculed the absurd and horrid doctrine of infant damnation, and was instantly decried as an atheist, and the printer prosecuted to his ruin! Cælius Secundus Curio, a noble Italian, published a treatise De Amplitudine beati regni Dei, to prove that Heaven has more inhabitants than Hell, or in his own phrase that the elect are more numerous than the reprobate. However we may incline to smile at these works, their design was benevolent. They were the first streaks of the morning light of the Reformation. Even such works assisted mankind to examine more closely, and hold in greater contempt, the extravagant and pernicious doctrines of the domineering papistical church. THE ABSENT MAN. WITH the character of Bruyere's Absent Man the reader is well acquainted. It is translated in the Spectator, and it has been exhibited on the theatre. The general opinion runs that it is a fictitious character, or at least one the author has too highly coloured. It was well known, however, to his contemporaries to be the Count De Brancas. The present anecdotes concerning the same person have been unknown to, or forgotten by, Bruyere; and are to the full as extraordinary as those which characterize Menalcas, or the Absent Man. The count was reading by the fireside, (but Heaven knows with what degree of attention,) when the nurse brought him his infant child. He throws down the book; he takes the child in his arms. He was playing with her, when an important visitor was announced. Having forgot he had quitted his book, and that it was his child he held in his hands, he hastily flung the squalling innocent on the table. The count was walking in the street, and the Duke de la Rochefoucault crossed the way to speak to him." God bless thee, poor man!" exclaimed the count. Rochefoucault smiled, and was beginning to address him :-" Is it not |