portal of the tomb the relics of funeral feasts, and within it indications of viands destined for the use of the departed on their way to a land of spirits; while among the funeral gifts are weapons wherewith in other fields to chase the gigantic deer, the cave-lion, the cave-bear, and woolly rhinoceros,—we have at last succeeded in tracing back the sacred rites of burial, and, more interesting still, a belief in a future state, to times long anterior to those of history and tradition. Rude and superstitious as may have been the savage of that remote era, he still deserved, by cherishing hopes of a here after, the epithet of 'noble,' which Dryden gave to what he seems to have pictured to himself as the primitive condition of our race:
'as Nature first made man
When wild in woods the noble savage ran.'[1]
- ↑ Siege of Granada, Part I., act i. scene 1.
