phers and the most rigid disciplinarians. He is no more to be soothed by the suggestions of adulation in its most pleasing form, than he is to be terrified by the loudest clamours of reproach. Ambition and power can have no influence over the man who looks down upon thrones with scorn, who considers the scanty and tattered fragment of yellow linen that girds his loins as of value far more transcendant than the embroidered robe of majesty; and who looks upon himself to be a portion of that Deity, into whose infinite essence he is soon to be wholly and eternally absorbed. Avarice cannot influence the mind that is rich in the countless treasures of immortality; a mind that esteems gold as dross and to whom rubies have lost their lustre and value. In fine, the highest distinction, to which the Saniassi aspires, is a state of invincible apathy. By long habits of indifference, he becomes inanimate as a piece of wood or stone; and, though he mechanically respires the vital air, he is to all the purposes of active life defunct. In consequence of these unexampled severities, and this invincible abstraction from every thing finite, the veneration which the whole Indian nation entertain for the Saniassis is beyond all conception. Veeshnu himself re veres them to whatsoever object they touch they impart sanctity, and the very dust of their feet is consecrated, from the steeps of Caucasus to the point of Comorin!!! CHAPTER +7 CHAPTER IV. The Soul, passing through its several Stages of Probation in the Veil of Mortality, not inelegantly compared by the Antients to the AuRELIA, and the various Vicissitudes which that beautiful Insect undergoes in its Progress to Maturity. The natural History of the CHRYSALIS, or AURELIA, considered, which necessarily and immediately introduces the noble Greek Allegory of CUPID and PSYCHE, of an Origin undoubtedly ASIATIC.-The sublime Moral, evidently intended to be inculcated through the Whole of that Allegory, explained by Reference to numerous Gems and Sculptures of Antiquity, of beautiful Design and elaborate Execution. THIS HIS anxious impatience, this ardent fever, of the soul panting after its immortal rest, and ascending progressively through the stages of purity to that final abode, THE DEITY; these incessant efforts of the devout Brahmins to stifle every ebullition of human passion, and live upon earth as if they they were already, and in reality, disembodied, cannot fail to remind the classical reader of the noble and beautiful allegory, recorded in Apuleius and other antient writers, relative to the sufferings of the charming Yox, or Psyche. This celestial progeny, Psyche, or, in other words, the human soul personified, was generally represented by the antients under the form of a beautiful young virgin with the wings of a butterfly; and, sometimes, on antique gems and marbles, she is portrayed under the form of the aurelia itself, in the natural history of which insect we may discover the reason as well as the force of the comparison. The general outline of that history is, in brief, as follows: The aurelia is, in the first stage of its existence, a common grub, or worm, and lies, during the winter, in a state of torpor, apparently dead. When the genial spring renovates nature, it bursts its prison, and issues forth, as it were, to new life, arrayed in beautiful attire. The Egyptians thought this a just and striking emblem of the human soul, which, after a long imprisonment in a human form, at length, bursts its terrestrial bonds and immerges into immortality. Such, I say, is the general outline of that history; but, having considered the sub ject |