uried
alive with his deceased wife, the king's daughter, was no invention
beyond the probability of custom. The Scythians, as Herodotus tells us,
thought it an honourable act and no _murders_ committed, when they
slaughtered the king's councillors and officers of state, and guards and
their horses, on which they stuck them upright by skewers, to be in
death the king's attendants. The suttee is still thought no wrong. There
is habit of thought that justifies habit of deed. Southey, in his
_History of the Brazils_, tells a sad tale of a dying _converted_
Indian. In her dying moments, cannibalism prevailed over Christian
conscience; and was the Pagan conscience silent? She was asked by those
standing about her, if they could do any thing for her. She replied,
that she thought she _could_ pick the bones of a little child's hand,
but that she had no one now who would go and kill her one. I dare to
say, Eusebius, she died in peace. The greater part of the world die in
peace. Their conscience may be the first part of then that departs--it
is dead before the man--most say, I have done no harm. I have known a
man die in the very effort of triumphant chuckling over his unfortunate
neighbours, by his successful fraud and over-reaching; yet, perhaps,
this man's conscience was only dead as to any sense of right and wrong
in this particular line; very possibly he had "compunctious visitings"
about "mint and cumine"--and oh! human inconsistency, some such have
been known to found hospitals--some spark of conscience working its way
into the very rottenness of their hearts, that, like tinder, have let
out all their kindred and latent fire, till that moment invisible, all
but _in posse_ non-existent. But for any thing like a public conscience
so kindling since the repentance of the Ninevites, it is not to be
thought of. The pretence of such a thing is a sign of the last state of
national hypocrisy. It was not that sense which emancipated the Negroes
and forbade the slave trade. Take, for example, the Portuguese, and
their "board of conscience" at Lisbon, which they set up to quiet the
remorse, if any should exist, of those who had bought the miserable
natives of Reoxcave, when they sold themselves and their children for
food. This very convenient scruple was started in "the court, to
sanction the purchase, that if these so purchased slaves were set free,
they might _apostatize_!" Now, who were the judges in such a court? Oh!
the villany o