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256 unrestrainedly than do we. Very fair, very impartial, truly, when the question is not which is the more advanced man, but which is the happier man. We have much the same sort of thing in the case of comparisons made by Christian divines and historians as between paganism and Christianity—their relative degree of truth, merit, influence in a right direction, etc.; judgment, of course, being always given in favour—generally immensely in favour—of the latter. Seeing that the pagans are all dead and cannot answer any point made against them, I wonder these complacent bestowers of unqualified approval on themselves are not ashamed to bluster so, where they have it all their own way. When I read one of these prejudiced panegyrics, affecting the form and manner of impartiality, I always seem to see a picture of some reverend old learned priest of Jupiter or Apollo, who, in similar pompous periods, and with the very same tones and gestures which one can imagine in the Christian author, goes over the same ground, and, with the same show of absolute fairness, settles everything precisely the opposite way.

As I have slidden out of a consideration of the relative happiness enjoyed by man and the lower animals into a similar appraisement as between the civilised man and the savage, I will just express my opinion (at this moment) that wherever the latter has the advantage over the former, the animal a fortiori has it still more. Amongst animals, moreover, there is not the same inequality of pleasure, as between the