near the road to Damascus. These brigands elected a chief, whom they named Cheik Elchassissin. It is said that this honorific title of cheik originally signified old, as with us the title of seigneur comes from senior, elder, and the word graf, a count, signifies old. among the Germans; for, in ancient times, almost every people conferred the civil command upon the old men. Afterwards, the command having become hereditary, the title of cheik, graf, seigneur, or count, has been given to children; and the Germans call a little master of four years old, the Count—that is, the old gentleman.

The crusaders named the old man of the Arabian mountains, the Old Man of the Hill, and imagined him to be a great prince, because he had caused a Count of Montserrat and some other crusading nobles to be robbed and murdered on the highway. These people were called the assassins, and their cheik the king of the vast country of the assassins. This vast territory is five or six leagues long by two or three broad, being part of Anti-Libanus, a horrible country, full of rocks, like almost all Palestine, but intersected by pleasant meadow-lands, which feed numerous flocks, as is attested by all who have made the journey from Aleppo to Damascus.

The cheik or senior of these assassins could be nothing more than a chief of banditti; for there was at that time a soldan of Damascus, who was very powerful.

Our romance-writers of that day, as fond of chimeras as the crusaders, thought proper to relate that, in 1236, this great prince of the assassins, fearing that Louis IX. of whom he had never heard, would put himself at the head of a crusade, and come and take from him his territory, sent two great men of his court from the caverns of Anti-Libanus to Paris, to assassinate that king; but that having the next day heard how generous and amiable a prince Louis was, he immediately sent out to sea two more great men to countermand the assassination:—I say, out to sea; for neither the two emissaries sent to kill Louis, nor the two others sent to save him, could make the voyage without

embarking at Joppa, which was then in the power of the crusaders, which renders the enterprise doubly marvellous. The two first must have found a crusaders' vessel ready to convey them in an amicable manner, and the two last must have found another.

However, a hundred authors, one after another, have related this adventure, though Joinville, a contemporary, who was on the spot, says nothing about it.

Et voila justement comme on écrit l'histoire.

The Jesuit Maimbourg, the Jesuit Daniel, twenty other Jesuits, and Mézerai-though he was not a Jesuit-have repeated this absurdity. The Abbé Véli, in his History of France, tells it over again with perfect complaisance, without any discussion, without any examination, and on the word of one William of Nangis, who wrote about sixty years after this fine affair is said to have happened, at a time when history was composed from nothing but town-talk.

If none but true and useful things were recorded, our immense historical libraries would be reduced to a very narrow compass; but we should know more, and know it better.

For six hundred years, the story has been told over and over again, of the Old Man of the Hill (le vieux de la montagne) who, in his delightful gardens, intoxicated his young elect with voluptuous pleasures, made them believe that they were in paradise, and sent them to the ends of the earth to assassinate kings in order to merit an eternal paradise.

Near the Levantine shores there dwelt of old
An aged ruler, feared in every land;

Not that he owned enormous heaps of gold,
Not that vast armies marched at his command,
But on his people's minds be things impressed,
Which filled with desperate courage every breast.
The boldest of his subjects first he took,
Of paradise to give them a foretaste-
The paradise his lawgiver bad painted:
With every joy the lying prophet's book
Within his falsely-pictured heaven had placed,
They thought their senses had become acquainted.
And how was this effected? "Twas by wine :—
Of this they drank till every sense gave way,

And, while in drunken lethargy they lay,
Were borne, according to their chief's design,
To spots of pleasantness-to sunshine glades,
Delightful gardens and inviting shades.
Young tender beauties were abundant there,
In earliest bloom, and exquisitely fair:
These gaily thronged around the sleeping men,
Who, when at length they were awake again,
Wondering to see the beauteous objects round,
Believed that some way they'd already found
Those fields of bliss, in every beauty decked,
The false Mahomet promised his elect.
Acquaintance quickly made, the Turks advance;
The maidens join them in a sprightly dance;
Sweet music charms them as they trip along;
And every feathered warbler adds his song.
The joys that could for every sense suffice,
Were found within this earthly paradise.-
Wine, too, was there-and its effects the same:
These people drank, till they could drink no more,
But sinking down as senseless as before,
Were carried to the place from whence they came.
And what resulted from this trickery?-
These men believed that they should surely be
Again transported to that place of pleasure,
If, without fear of suffering or of death,
They showed devotion to Mahomet's faith,
And to their prince obedience without measure.
Thus might their sovereign with reason say,
His subjects were determined to obey,

And that, now his device had made them so,
His was the mightiest empire here below, &c.

All this might be very well in one of La Fontaine's tales-setting apart the weakness of the verse; and there are a hundred historical anecdotes which could be tolerated only there.

SECTION II.

Assassination being, next to poisoning, the crime most cowardly and most deserving of punishment, it is not astonishing that it has found an apologist in a man whose singular reasoning is, in some things, at variance with the reason of the rest of mankind.

In a romance entitled Emilius, he imagines that he is the guardian of a young man, to whom he is very careful to give an education such as is received in the military school teaching him languages, geometry,

VOL. I,

2 A

tactics, fortification, and the history of his country. He does not seek to inspire him with love for his king and his country, but contents himself with making him a joiner. He would have this gentleman-joiner, when he has received a blow or a challenge, instead of returning it and fighting, "prudently assassinate the man." Molière does, it is true, say jestingly, in L'Amour Peintre, "assassination is the safest;" but the author of this romance asserts that it is the most just and reasonable. He says this very seriously; and, in the immensity of his paradoxes, this is one of the three or four things which he says the first. The same spirit of wisdom and decency which makes him declare that a preceptor should often accompany his pupil to a place of prostitution,* makes him decide that this disciple should be an assassin. So that the education which Jean Jacques would give to a young man, consists in teaching him how to handle the plane, and in fitting him for salivation and the rope.

We doubt whether fathers of families will be eager to give such preceptors to their children. It seems to us, that the romance of Emilius departs rather too much from the maxims of Mentor in Telemachus; but it must also be acknowledged that our age has in all things very much varied from the great age of Louis XIV.

Happily, none of these horrible infatuations are to be found in the Encyclopedia. It often displays a philosophy seemingly bold, but never that atrocious and extravagant babbling, which two or three fools have called philosophy, and two or three ladies, eloquence.

ASTROLOGY.

ASTROLOGY might rest on a better foundation than magic. For if no one has seen farfadets, or lemures, or dives, or peris, or demons, or cacodemons, the predictions of astrologers have often been found true. Let two astrologers be consulted on the life of an in

* Emile, tomę iii. p. 261.

fant, and on the weather; if one of them say that the child shall live to the age of man, the other that he shall not; if one foretel rain and the other fair weather, it is quite clear that there will be a prophet.

The great misfortune of astrologers is, that the heavens have changed since the rules of the art were laid down. The sun, which at the equinox was in the Ram in the time of the Argonauts, is now in the Bull; and astrologers, most unfortunately for their art, now attribute to one house of the sun that which visibly belongs to another. Still, this is not a demonstrative argument against astrology. The masters of the art are mistaken; but it is not proved that the art cannot exist.

There would be no absurdity in saying-" Such a child was born during the moon's increase, in a stormy season, at the rising of a certain star: its constitution was bad, and its life short and miserable, which is the ordinary lot of weak temperaments; another, on the contrary, was born when the moon was at the full, and the sun in all his power, in calm weather, at the rising of another particular star; his constitution was good, and his life long and happy." If such observations had been frequently repeated and found just, experience might, at the end of a few thousand centuries, have formed an art which it would have been difficult to call in question: it would have been thought, not without some appearance of truth, that men are like trees and vegetables, which must be planted only in certain seasons. It would have been of no service against the astrologers, to say, "My son was born in fine weather; yet he died in his cradle." The astrologer would have answered-" It often happens that trees planted in the proper season perish prematurely ; I will answer for the stars, but not for the particular conformation which you communicated to your child : astrology operates only when there is no cause opposed to the good which they have power to work."

Nor would astrology have suffered any more discre dit from its being said" Of two children who were