ntold and unutterable horrors, or crimes, as
they were deemed, which to us seem bewildering nonsense? What of
were-wolf manias, of districts made horrible by nightmare and
vampyreism, urged to literal and incredible reality; of abominations
which no modern wickedness dare hint at, but which raged like epidemics?
Or what of the Sieur de Gilles, with his thousand or two of girl
children elaborately tortured to death--and he a type and not a sporad?

'But,' we are told, 'men would do all this over again, if they dared.
The vice is all here, safely housed away snug as ever, only waiting its
time.' I grant it--just as I grant that the same atoms and elements
which once formed mastodons and trilobites are here--and with about as
much chance of reappearing as mastodons as humanity has of reproducing
those antique horrors. The fragments of witch-madness and star-faith may
be still raked in tolerably perfect lumps out of the mire or chaff of
mankind; but I do not think, young lady, that you will ever be accused
of riding on a broom, though you unquestionably had an ancestress,
somewhere before or after Hengist, who enjoyed the reputation of
understanding that unpopular mode of volatility. _Pommade Dupuytren_ and
_Eau de toilette_ have taken the place of the witch-ointments; and if
the spice-powder of the old alchemist Mutio di Frangipani has risen from
the recipes of the Middle Ages into modern fashion, rest assured that it
will never work wonder more, save in connection with bright eyes,
rustling fans, and Valenciennes-edged pocket-handkerchiefs.

To the student to whom all battles of the past are not like the dishes
of certain Southern hotels,--all served in the same gravy, possessing
the same agrarian, muttony flavor,--and to whom Zoroaster and Spurgeon
are not merely clergymen, differing only in dress and language, it must
appear plain enough that as there are now on earth races physically
differing from one another almost as much as from other mammalia, just
so in the course of ages have been developed in the same single descent
even greater mental and moral differences. In fact, when we remember
that the same lust, avarice, ambition and warfare have mingled with our
blood at all times, it becomes wonderful when we reflect how marvelously
the mind has been molded to such myriad varieties. It has in full
consciousness of its power sacrificed all earthly happiness, toiled and
died for rulers, for ideas of which it had no idea