phers, Epictetus, and Pythagoras, who was himself the scholar of Zoroafter,* fought wisdom in the folitary cell. Even the venerable prophets of the true religion took up their abode in the folitudes of the desert ; and the herald of the MESSIAH, whofe meat was the locufts and the wild honey which thofe folitudes produced, declares himself to be" the voice of one crying in the wilderness." In later ages, the crafty impostor Mohammed, in order more effectually to establish the pretended fanctity of his character, thought it necessary to shun the society of men, and retired to fabricate his daring impofitions in "a lonely cave, amidst the receffes of Mount Hara."

GROVES, facred to religion and science, were famous over all the Eaft. Abraham is faid to have " planted a grove in Beershebah, and to have called there upon the name of the Lord." But his degenerate posterity afterwards prostituted the hallowed grove to purposes of the baseft devotion. They were up

braided,

that the word Zend-avefta fignifies Fire-kindler. See Prideaux's Connections, vol. i. p. 317, o&t. edit. 1724. See also Dr. Hyde, Hift. Vet. Relig. Perf. cap. xxvi. p. 330. Edit. Oxon. 1760.

• Prideaux's Connections, vol. i. p. 224.

+ Gen. xxi. verse 23.

braided, by the prophets, with burning incenfe and offering oblations, under every oak and green tree, to the gods of the Phoenicians and the neighbouring nations. It was against the groves, polluted by fuch idolatrous facrifices, that the most awful anathemas of offended heaven were, in holy writ, perpetually denounced. Amidst the ardours of a torrid clime, those sylvan folitudes could not fail to afford the most grateful retreat; but, according to the united atteftations of the ancients, their inmost recefles were often polluted by the most dreadful rites. The SCYTHIANS, alfo, who never erected temples to the Deity, in their colder regions, celebrated the mysteries of their fanguinary fuperftition under groves of oak of astonishing extent and of the profoundest gloom. Some of thofe oaks, according to Keyfler,* who has diligently investigated the antiquities of that northern race, and traced them among their descendants in Europe, were of a prodigious magnitude, and were always plentifully sprinkled with the blood of the expiring victims. However vaft the dimensions of thofe oaks might have been, it is hardly poffible they could have exceeded in fize that wonderful

* See Keysler's Antiquitates Septentrionales, Differt. 3. [

wonderful Indian tree under which we are told, by the ancients,* that four hundred horsemen might take shelter at once. This was doubtless the facred BATTA, or baniantree of the moderns, under the ample shade of whose radicating branches, Tavernier informs us, that the Hindoos of modern times delight to refide, to drefs their victuals and erect their pagods. Of one of this fpecies, growing near Surat, he has given an engraving, with a number of FAKEERS, the gymnofophifts of the ancients, in every dreadful pofture of penance and distortion. The Druids of Gaul and of Mona, the immediate descendants of the ancient CEltoSCYTHIANS, retained the fame veneration for groves of oak; and, according to the Roman historians, in the early periods of that empire, practised the same tremendous fpecies of fuperstition, devoting to the gods, with many horrid ceremonies, the unhappy captives,‡

taken

* Confult Strabo, lib. xv. p. 659, & Plin. Nat. Hift. lib. xii. c. iv. in regard to the immense bulk of the Indian trees, especially of the FICUS INDICA.

See the engraving, Voyage de Tavernier, tom. iv. p. 118, edit. à Rouen, 1713, and p. 166 of the London folio edit.

‡ Victima feems to be derived a vide, the perfon conquered in battle, and therefore doomed to facrifice.

taken in war. Lucan,* defcribing the Maffilian grove of the former, enumerates circumftances which make us fhudder as we read the gloomy, damp, impenetrable, grove, where no fylvan deity ever refided, no bird ever fang, no beast ever flumbered, no gentle zephyr ever played, nor even the lightning could rend a paffage. It was a place of blood and horror, abounding with altars reeking with the gore of human victims, by which all the trunks of the lofty and eternal oaks, which composed it, were dyed of a crimson colour: a black and turbid water rolled through it in many a winding stream: no foul ever entered the forlorn abode, except the priest, who, at noon and at midnight, with paleness on his brow and tremor in his step, went thither to celebrate the horrible mysteries in honour of that terrific deity, whofe afpect he dreaded more than death to behold.

*

That a country, like India, whose JUNGLES, at this period of general cultivation, form in fome places an impervious barrier, and whose fages have ever affected both the austerity and feclufion of anchorites, fhould once have abounded with the nobleft groves, calculated for every purpose of fuperftition as well as instruction, is a fuppofition neither irrational nor incredible. Indeed many very extensive and beautiful groves yet remain in Hindoftan, though now applied to other purpofes. Whatever may have been urged in favour of the high antiquity of BENARES, as the original feat of Hindoo literature and the most favoured refidence of the Brahmins, it seems to be a fact, authenticated by the evidence of the Ayeen Akbery, and corroborated in fome degree by the Afiatic Refearches, that TIRHOOт, a city fituated in the north of Bahar, poffeffes a prior claim to that honour; for, it is faid, "from old time, to have been the refidence of Hindoo learning;" and those delighful groves of orangetrees mentioned before, which extended no

हैं

lefs

In the SACONTALA, an ancient Indian drama, the Brahmins are represented as refiding in the bofom of a deep foreft.

+ Ayeen Akbery, vol. ii. p. 32.

Afiatic Researches, vol. i. p. 163.