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Rh inexplicable why men assigned him these additions as circumstances of terror and deformity. The Sylvans and Fauns, with their leader the great Pan, were most poetical personages, and were connected in the imagination of the Pagans with all that could enliven and delight. They were supposed to be innocent beings in habits, and not greatly different from the shepherds and herdsmen of whom they were the patron saints. But the Christians contrived to turn the wrecks of the Greek mythology, as well as the little they understood of their philosophy, to purposes of deformity and falsehood. I suppose the sting with which he was armed gave him a dragon-like and viperous appearance, very formidable.

I can sufficiently understand why the author of evil should have been typified under the image of a serpent; that animal producing merely by its sight so strong an associated recollection of the malignity of many of its species. But this was eminently a practice confined to the Jews, whose earliest mythology suggested this animal as the cause of all evil. Among the Greeks the Serpent was considered as an auspicious and favourable being. He attended on Æsculapius and Apollo. In Egypt the Serpent was an hieroglyphic of eternity. The Jewish account is, that the Serpent, that is the animal, persuaded the original pair of human beings to eat of a fruit, from which God had commanded them to abstain, and then in consequence God expelled them from the pleasant garden, where he had before permitted them to reside, God on this occasion, it is said, assigned a punishment to the Serpent, that its motion should be as it now is along the ground upon its belly. We are given to suppose, that before this misconduct it hopped along