servants were burnt with him in order that he might not go unattended to the other world; and that, for the same reason, his dearest friends would rush voluntarily into the fire in order to accompany him.

On the death of a king in the South Sea Islands, his principal friends and favourites were put to death; and to this 'honour' it is said they readily and cheerfully submitted. This custom only ceased with the introduction of Christianity there.

At and about the region of Sierra Leone, too, the wives and favourite women of a king were always put to death and buried with him. Indeed, among the African tribes the funerals of chiefs and great men are accompanied by human sacrifices to a horrible amount. Their wives, slaves, captives, and horses are slain; their arms, clothing, and treasures are buried with them.

Human sacrifices in honour of the dead prevailed in Egypt, Assyria, Etruria, &c. In Greece and Rome gladiatorial combats were supposed to add dignity to the ceremony.

Those customs which in older time originated in the mistaken idea of the necessities of the traveller bound to the other world,1 gradually became merely

1 In the neighbourhood of Arica, on the west coast of South America, there are graves, which appear not to have been touched

a vehicle for show and ostentation; and at length a man's rank and wealth were estimated by the number and value of the sacrificial offerings at his tomb.

Of the funeral of Patroclus, Homer writes :

High on the top the manly corse they lay,
And well-fed sheep and sable oxen slay:
Achilles covered with their fat the dead,
And the piled victims round the body spread;
Then jars of honey and of fragrant oil
Suspends around, low-bending o'er the pile.
Four sprightly coursers with a deadly groan
Pour forth their lives, and on the pyre are thrown.
Of nine large dogs, domestic at his board,
Fall two, selected to attend their lord.
Then last of all, and horrible to tell,

Sad sacrifice! twelve Trojan captives fell.
On these the rage of fire victorious preys,

Involves and joins them in one common blaze.

But even this wholesale slaughter was nothing to what we are told of in ancient writers, as part of the ceremonial of a Scythian king's funeral.

The mourners disfigured themselves, cut off a piece of their ears, shaved their heads, gashed their arms and faces, &c. It was some such type of

since the Conquest of Peru, lying along the coast on the site of an ancient fishing village. In each grave was found invariably a fishing-hook, and underneath, a quantity of shell-fish, probably as bait for the hook.-PETTIGREW.

mourning I suppose, borrowed probably from heathen nations, which Moses condemns in the children of Israel,1

The remains of the royal Scythian were graced at the moment of interment by the sacrifice of one of his wives, his cupbearer, his cook, his groom, his valet, and his messenger, who were all strangled and interred with him; and a few months afterwards fifty native Scythian slaves and fifty fine horses were strangled, and placed as trophies, or ornaments, round the barrow.

Yet is even this merciful as compared with what we are told of a custom of Guiana, that when a Carib chief dies, his wives are expected, for thirty days, in that climate, to watch the body so closely that not even a fly may alight on it. At the end of this probation one would think that death would be a boon to all. One only is sacrificed at the funeral. The immolation of a Hindoo widow is merciful as compared with this.

But the pyramidal catacombs of Egypt, the elaborated Etruscan chambers, the chiselled wonders of Petra, and other Eastern excavated sepulchres, and

1 See infra, chap. xii. Also, we may remark, that Mohammed was very peremptory and earnest in his decrees against such customs.

the newly-explored marvels of Nineveh, are all results of intelligence, progress, and refinement; it is to the rude cairn, the sepulchral heap, that we must refer as the usual mode of interment in uncultivated times.

Barrows, or immense mounds of earth, are supposed to be the most ancient and the most general sepulchral monuments in the world. They are found in almost every part of the habitable globe, having been preserved, doubtless, in many instances, by the custom, almost universal, of each passer-by throwing a stone on the mass. There are a great many barrows in England in which were bones of animals mingled with those of human kind; but, indeed, the contents of these tumuli are as varied as are the habits of the different people who occupy the world.

Dr. Clarke, speaking of the barrows in Russia, says:-Throughout the whole of this country are seen, dispersed over immense plains, mounds of earth covered with a fine turf, the sepulchres of the ancient world, common to almost every habitable country. If there exist anything of former times which may afford monuments of antediluvian manners, it is this mode of burial.'

In the New World barrows are the inseparable appendages to great settlements. They are of various forms, proportions, and sizes. They are called Indian

graves; and one in Virginia was opened which contained the bones of nearly one hundred persons.

This mode of burial was gradually discontinued in every country as civilization increased and refinement advanced. The barrows raised over the remains of Patroclus, Hector, Achilles, and other Homeric heroes of wide-world renown, have been described and quoted by writers innumerable. But in later days, while the tomb of the accomplished Greek was adorned with all the pride of exquisite sculpture, and celebrated with all the pathos of elegiac strain, and whilst the magnificent Roman was raising cenotaphs over the remains of friends inurned with all the pomp and circumstance of woe, the Briton continued the rude usages of the Celts and the Belge. Many of the large isolated barrows in waste lands, opened in our own country, contain urns and burnt bones; others, bones in their natural state, the body having been buried without burning. The former are guessed to be Belgic Gauls; the latter the Celtic Britons, a more primitive people, who adopted the most early rites of burial.

Not wanting in solemn pomp, in gorgeous ceremonial, in mystic and awful incantation, but yet reeking with human sacrifice and unhallowed rite, was the religion of our ancestors in Britain, before