on me, in vain the iron hoof of the wrathful steed!  The mine, big with destructive power, burst upon me, and hurled me high in the air—­I fell on heaps of smoking limbs, but was only singed.  The giant’s steel club rebounded from my body; the executioner’s hand could not strangle me, the tiger’s tooth could not pierce me, nor would the hungry lion in the circus devour me.  I cohabited with poisonous snakes, and pinched the red crest of the dragon.—­The serpent stung, but could not destroy me.  The dragon tormented, but dared not to devour me.—­I now provoked the fury of tyrants:  I said to Nero, ‘Thou art a bloodhound!’ I said to Christiern, ’Thou art a bloodhound!, I said to Muley Ismail, ’Thou art a bloodhound!’—­The tyrants invented cruel torments, but did not kill me.  Ha! not to be able to die—­not to be able to die—­not to be permitted to rest after the toils of life—­to be doomed to be imprisoned for ever in the clay-formed dungeon—­to be for ever clogged with this worthless body, its lead of diseases and infirmities—­to be condemned to [be]hold for millenniums that yawning monster Sameness, and Time, that hungry hyaena, ever bearing children, and ever devouring again her offspring!—­Ha! not to be permitted to die!  Awful Avenger in Heaven, hast Thou in Thine armoury of wrath a punishment more dreadful? then let it thunder upon me, command a hurricane to sweep me down to the foot of Carmel, that I there may lie extended; may pant, and writhe, and die.!"’

This fragment is the translation of part of some German work, whose title I have vainly endeavoured to discover.  I picked it up, dirty and torn, some years ago, in Lincoln’s-Inn Fields.

7. 135, 136:—­

I will beget a Son, and He shall bear
The sins of all the world.

A book is put into our hands when children, called the Bible, the purport of whose history is briefly this:  That God made the earth in six days, and there planted a delightful garden, in which He placed the first pair of human beings.  In the midst of the garden He planted a tree, whose fruit, although within their reach, they were forbidden to touch.  That the Devil, in the shape of a snake, persuaded them to eat of this fruit; in consequence of which God condemned both them and their posterity yet unborn to satisfy His justice by their eternal misery.  That, four thousand years after these events (the human race in the meanwhile having gone unredeemed to perdition), God engendered with the betrothed wife of a carpenter in Judea (whose virginity was nevertheless uninjured), and begat a son, whose name was Jesus Christ; and who was crucified and died, in order that no more men might be devoted to hell-fire, He bearing the burthen of His Father’s displeasure by proxy.  The book states, in addition, that the soul of whoever disbelieves this sacrifice will be burned with everlasting fire.