The doctor, &c., vol. 6 (of 7)

By Author	[ A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z \| Other Symbols ]
By Title	[ A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z \| Other Symbols ]
By Language

Download this book: [ ASCII ]

Look for this book on Amazon

We have new books nearly every day.
If you would like a news letter once a week or once a month fill out this form and we will give you a summary of the books for that week or month by email.

Title: The doctor, &c., vol. 6 (of 7)
Author: Southey, Robert
Language: English
As this book started as an ASCII text book there are no pictures available.

*** Start of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "The doctor, &c., vol. 6 (of 7)" ***

THE DOCTOR, &c.

There is a kind of physiognomy in the titles of books no less than in
the faces of men, by which a skilful observer will as well know what
to expect from the one as the other.

BUTLER'S REMAINS.

THE DOCTOR, &c.

[Illustration: a tetrahedron]

VOL. VI.

LONDON:

LONGMAN, BROWN, GREEN, AND LONGMANS.

1847.

LONDON:

PRINTED BY W. NICOL, PALL-MALL.

PREFACE.

INVENIAS ETIAM DISJECTI MEMBRA POETÆ.

In the distribution of the lamented Southey's literary property, the
History of the Brazils, his much treasured MS. History of Portugal,
the Doctor, &c. and the MS. materials for its completion, fell to the
share of Edith May Warter, his eldest child, and, as he used to call
her, his right hand,—to whom he addressed the Dedication of the Tale
of Paraguay, and to whom he commenced a little Poem of which the lines
following are almost the last, if not the very last, he ever wrote in
verse.

O daughter dear, who bear'st no longer now
Thy Father's name, and for the chalky flats
Of Sussex hast exchanged thy native land
Of lakes and mountains,—neither change of place
Condition, and all circumstantial things,
Nor new relations, and access of cares
Unfelt before, have alienated thee
Nor wean'd thy heart from this beloved spot,
Thy birth place, and so long thy happy home!

The present Volume is drawn up from the MS. materials alluded to, as
nearly as possible in the order the Author had intended, and the
seventh and concluding volume is in the press and will shortly be
published.

The whole of the MS. sheets, previous to being sent to the press, were
cautiously examined by his no less amiable and excellent, than highly
gifted Widow, who, at the time, was staying with us on a visit at
West-Tarring. Had the lamented Southey continued the work, it was his
intention, in this volume, to have advanced a step in the story,—and
the Interchapters, no doubt, would have been enlarged, according to
custom. His habit was, as he said, “to lay the timbers of them, and to
jot down, from time to time, remarks serious or jocose, as they
occurred to him.” Full readily would this holy and humble man of heart
have acceded to the truth conveyed in these lines from Martin Tupper's
Proverbial philosophy,—and none the less for their dactylic cadence.

There is a grave-faced folly, and verily a laughter loving wisdom;
And what, if surface judges, account it vain frivolity?
There is indeed an evil in excess, and a field may lie fallow too
long;
Yet merriment is often as a froth, that mantleth on the strong mind:
And note thou this for a verity,—the subtlest thinker when alone,
From ease of thoughts unbent, will laugh the loudest with his
fellows:
And well is the loveliness of wisdom mirrored in a cheerful
countenance,
Justly the deepest pools are proved by dimpling eddies;
For that, a true philosophy commandeth an innocent life,
And the unguilty spirit is lighter than a linnet's heart;
Yea, there is no cosmetic like a holy conscience;
The eye is bright with trust, the cheek bloomed over with affection,
The brow unwrinkled with a care, and the lip triumphant in its
gladness.[1]

[Footnote 1: Of Ridicule, 1st Series. On my acquainting Mrs. Southey
with my intention of quoting these lines, she wrote me word back:
“That very passage I had noted, as singularly applicable to him _we_
knew so well,—whom the world, the children of this generation,—knew so
little!”]

The only liberty taken with the original MS. is the omission of, now
and then a name, or even a paragraph, which might have given pain to
the living. Such passages were thrown off playfully, and were, as Mrs.
Southey can testify, erased by the author continually. It was no
custom of Southey to cast “fire-brands, arrows, and death,” and to
say, “Am I not in sport?” _(Proverbs, xxvi. 18, 19.)_

It only remains to add that the Editor has carefully verified all
references,—that he is responsible for the headings of the chapters
(some few excepted,)—for the Mottoes to cc. clxxx. and clxxxi.,—and
for the casual foot notes.

JOHN WOOD WARTER.

_Vicarage House,_
_West-Tarring, Nov. 25th._

PRELUDE OF MOTTOES.

Two thyngys owyth every clerk
To advertysyn, begynnyng a werk,
If he procedyn wyl ordeneely,
The fyrste is _what_, the secunde is _why_.
In wych two wurdys, as it semyth me
The Foure causys comprehendyd be
Wych as our philosofyrs us do teche,
In the begynnyng men owe to seche
Of every book; and aftyr there entent,
The fyrst is clepyd cause efficyent:
The secunde they clepe cause materyal,
Formal the thrydde; the fourte fynal.
The efficyent cause is the auctour,
Wych aftyr hys cunnyng doth hys labour
To a complyse the begunne matere,
Wych cause is secunde; and the more clere
That it may be, the formal cause
Settyth in dew ordre clause be clause.
And these thre thyngys, longyn to what,
Auctour, matere and forme ordinat,
The fynal cause declaryth pleynly
Of the werk begunne the cause why;
That is to seyne what was the entent
Of the auctour fynally, and what he ment.

OSBERN BOKENAM.

Look for no splendid painted outside here,
But for a work devotedly sincere;
A thing low prized in these too high-flown days:
Such solid sober works get little praise.
Yet some there be
Love true solidity.

And unto such brave noble souls I write,
In hopes to do them and the subject right.
I write it not to please the itching vein
Of idle-headed fashionists, or gain
Their fond applause;
I care for no such noise.

I write it only for the sober sort,
Who love right learning, and will labour for't;
And who will value worth in art, though old,
And not be weary of the good, though told
Tis out of fashion
By nine-tenths of the nation.

I writ it also out of great good will
Unto my countrymen; and leave my skill
Behind me for the sakes of those that may
Not yet be born; but in some after day
May make good use
Of it, without abuse.

But chiefly I do write it, for to show
A duty to the Doctor which I owe.

THOMAS MACE.

Physicians are many times forced to leave such methods of curing as
themselves know to be the fittest, and being overruled by their
patient's impatiency are fain to try the best they can in taking that
way of cure, which the cured will yield unto: in like sort,
considering how the case doth stand with this present age, full of
tongue and weak of brain, behold we yield to the stream thereof: into
the causes of goodness we will not make any curious or deep inquiry;
to touch them now and then it shall be sufficient, when they are so
near at hand that easily they may be conceived without any far removed
discourse. That way we are contented to prove, which being the worse
in itself, is notwithstanding now, by reason of common imbecility, the
fitter and likelier to be brooked.

HOOKER.

_Qui lit beaucoup et jamais ne medite,
Semble à celuy qui mange avidement,
Et de tous mets surcharge tellement
Son estomach que rien ne luy profit._

QUATRAINE DE PIBRAC.

thus englished by Sylvester,

Who readeth much and never meditates,
Is like a greedy eater of much food,
Who so surcloys his stomach with his cates
That commonly they do him little good.

_Je sçay qu'en ce discours l'on me pourra reprendre, que j'ay mis
beaucoup de particularitez qui sont fort superfluës. Je le crois:
mais, je sçay, que si elles desplaisent à aucuns, elles plairont aux
autres: me semblant, que ce n'est pas assez, quand on louë des
personnes, dire qu'elles sont belles, sages, vertueuses, valeureuses,
vaillantes, magnanimes, libérales, splendides et très-parfaites. Ce
sont loüanges et descriptions genérales, et lieux-communs empruntez de
tout le monde. Il en faut specifier bien le tout, et descrire
particuliérement les perfections, afin que mieux on les touche au
doigt: et telle est mon opinion._

BRANTOME.

_Non sai se l'arte, o il caso abbia fornita
Cosi bell' opra, o siano entrambi a parte;
Perocchè l'arte è tal che il caso imita,
E'l caso è tal che rassomiglia all' arte:
E questo a quella, e quella a questo unita,
Quanto può, quanto sa, mesce e comparte.
Un la materia al bel lavor dispose,
L'altra meglio adornolla, e poi s'ascose._

METASTASIO.

_Tous ceux qui ont quelquesfois pesé le grand travail et le labeur de
l'imagination, l'ont jugé pour le plus grand qui se puisse trouver, et
ont eu raison; d'autant que celuy lequel veut et desire en contenter
plusieurs, doit aussi chercher des moyens differens, afin que ce qui
est ennuyeux à l'un, l'autre le trouve doux et agreable; car de le
donner à tous, il est impossible; veu, qu' entre trois personnes
seulement que l'on aura conviées, il se trouvera une grande diference
de gouts, ainsi que l'a dit Horace, luy, dis-je qui l'avoit si bien
experimenté: par ainsi il n'est pas possible qu'en une si longue
histoire que celle dont je vay traictant, que je ne donne de la peine
par la diversité des chapitres. Toutetfois si le jugement s'en faict
par des personnes privees et libres de toute passion, ils diront que
c'est le vray moyen d'entretenir les esprits curieux._

L'HISTOIRE DU CHEVALIER DU SOLEIL.

Be rather wise than witty, for much wit hath commonly much froth; and
'tis hard to jest and not sometimes jeer too; which many times sinks
deeper than was intended or expected; and what was designed for mirth,
ends in sadness.

CALEB TRENCHFIELD.
(probably a fictitious name.) RESTITUTA.

In some passages you will observe me very satirical. Writing on such
subjects I could not be otherwise. I can write nothing without aiming,
at least, at usefulness. It were beneath my years to do it, and still
more dishonourable to my religion. I know that a reformation of such
abuses as I have censured is not to be expected from the efforts of an
author; but to contemplate the world, its follies, its vices, its
indifferences to duty, and its strenuous attachment to what is evil,
and not to reprehend, were to approve it. From this charge, at least,
I shall be clear; for I have neither tacitly, nor expressly flattered
either its characters or its customs.

COWPER.

_Nemo eo sapientius desipuisse, nemo stultius sapuisse videtur._

Said of Cardan by I know not who.

_Il y en a qui pensent que les lecteurs reçoivent peu d'instruction,
quand on leur représente des choses qui n'ont pas esté achevées,
qu'eux appellent œuvres imparfaites; mais je ne suis pas de leur
advis; car quand quelque fait est descrit à la verité, et avec ses
circonstances, encor qu'il ne soit parvenu qu' à mychemin, si peut-on
tousjours en tirer du fruict._

LA NOUE.

Authors, you know of greatest fame,
Thro' modesty suppress their name;
And would you wish me to reveal
What these superior wits conceal?
Forego the search, my curious friend,
And husband time to better end.
All my ambition is, I own,
To profit and to please unknown,
Like streams supplied from springs below
Which scatter blessings as they flow.

DR. COTTON.

Thus have I, as well as I could, gathered a posey of observations as
they grew,—and if some rue and wormwood be found amongst the sweeter
herbs, their wholesomeness will make amends for their bitterness.

ADAM LITTLETON.

This worthy work in which of good examples are so many,
This orchard of Alcinous, in which there wants not any
Herb, tree, or fruit that may mans use for health or pleasure serve;
This plenteous horn of Acheloy, which justly doth deserve
To bear the name of Treasury of Knowledge, I present
To your good worships once again,—desiring you therefore
To let your noble courtesy and favour countervail
My faults, where art or eloquence on my behalf doth fail,
For sure the mark whereat I shoot is neither wreaths of bay,
Nor name of author, no, nor meed; but chiefly that it may
Be liked well of you and all the wise and learned sort;
And next, that every wight that shall have pleasure for to sport
Him in this garden, may as well bear wholesome fruit away
As only on the pleasant flowers his retchless senses stay.

GOLDING.

Doubtless many thoughts have presented, and are still presenting
themselves to my mind, which once I had no idea of. But these, in I
believe every instance, are as much the growth of former rooted
principles, as multiplied branches grow from one and the same main
stem. Of such an inward vegetation I am always conscious; and I
equally seem to myself to perceive the novelty of the fresh shoot, and
its connexion with what had been produced before.

ALEXANDER KNOX.

The extensive argument and miscellaneous nature of the work led him to
declare his sentiments on a multitude of questions, on which he
thought differently from other writers, and of course, to censure or
confute their opinions. Whole bodies of men, as well as individuals of
the highest reputation, were attacked by him, and his manner was to
speak his sense of all with freedom and force. So that most writers,
and even readers, had some ground of complaint against him. Not only
the free-thinkers and unbelievers, against whom the tenour of his book
was directed, but the heterodox of every denomination were treated
without much ceremony, and of the orthodox themselves, some tenet or
other, which till then they had held sacred, was discussed and
reprobated by him. Straggling heresies, or embodied systems, made no
difference with him; as they came in his way, no quarter was given to
either, “his end and manner of writing,” as Dr. Middleton truly
observed, “being to pursue truth wherever he found it.”

HURD'S LIFE OF WARBURTON.

Thou art like my rappee, here, a most ridiculous superfluity; but a
pinch of thee now and then is a more delicious treat.

CLANDESTINE MARRIAGE.

Yea—but what am I?
A scholar, or a schoolmaster, or else some youth?
A lawyer, a student, or else a country clown?
A brumman, a basket-maker, or a baker of pies?
A flesh, or a fishmonger, or a sower of lies?
A louse, or a louser, a leek or a lark,
A dreamer, a drommell, a fire or a spark?
A caitiff, a cut-throat, a creeper in corners,
A hairbrain, a hangman, or a grafter of horners?
A merchant, a maypole, a man or a mackarel,
A crab or a crevise, a crane or a cockerell?

APIUS AND VIRGINIA.

It may appear to some ridiculous
Thus to talk knave and madman, and sometimes
Come in with a dried sentence, stuft with sage.

WEBSTER.

_Etsi verò, quæ in isto opere desiderentur, rectiùs forsan quàm quivis
alius, perspiciam; et si meo planè voto standum fuisset, id, in tantâ,
quæ hodie est librorum copiâ, vel planè suppressissem, vel in multos
annos adhuc pressissem; tamen aliquid amicis, aliquid tempori dandum;
et cum iis qui aliquid fructus ex eo sperant, illud communicandum
putavi. Hunc itaque meum qualemcunque laborem, Lector candide, boni
consule; quod te facilè facturum confido, si eum animum ad legendum
attuleris, quem ego ad scribendum, veritatis nimirum aliisque
inserviendi cupidum._

SENNERTUS.

CONTENTS.

CHAPTER CLXXII.—p. 1.

DESCARTES' NOTION CONCERNING THE PROLONGATION OF LIFE. A SICILIAN
PROPOSAL FOR BREEDING UP CHILDREN TO BE IMMORTAL. ASGILL'S ARGUMENT
AGAINST THE NECESSITY OF DYING.

O harmless Death! whom still the valiant brave,
The wise expect, the sorrowful invite;
And all the good embrace, who know the Grave
A short dark passage to eternal light.

SIR WILLIAM DAVENANT.

CHAPTER CLXXIII.—p. 30.

MORE CONCERNING ASGILL. HIS DEFENCE IN THE HOUSE OF COMMONS, HIS
EXPULSION, FARTHER SPECULATIONS AND DEATH.

Let not that ugly Skeleton appear!
Sure Destiny mistakes; this Death's not mine!

DRYDEN.

CHAPTER CLXXIV.—p. 48.

THE DOCTOR INDULGES IN THE WAY OF FANTASTIC AND TYPICAL SPECULATION ON
HIS OWN NAME, AND ON THE POWERS OF THE LETTER D., WHETHER AS REGARDS
DEGREES AND DISTINCTIONS, GODS AND DEMIGODS, PRINCES AND KINGS,
PHILOSOPHERS, GENERALS OR TRAVELLERS.

My mouth's no dictionary; it only serves as the needful interpreter of
my heart.

QUARLES.

CHAPTER CLXXV.—p. 56.

THE DOCTOR FOLLOWS UP HIS MEDITATIONS ON THE LETTER D. AND EXPECTS
THAT THE READER WILL BE CONVINCED THAT IT IS A DYNAMIC LETTER, AND
THAT THE HEBREWS DID NOT WITHOUT REASON CALL IT DALETH—THE DOOR—AS
THOUGH IT WERE THE DOOR OF SPEECH.—THE MYSTIC TRIANGLE.

More authority dear boy, name more; and sweet my child let them be men
of good repute and carriage.—

LOVE'S LABOUR LOST.

CHAPTER CLXXVI.—p. 66.

THE DOCTOR DISCOVERS THE ANTIQUITY OF THE NAME OF DOVE FROM PERUSING
JACOB BRYANT'S ANALYSIS OF ANCIENT MYTHOLOGY.—CHRISTOPHER AND
FERDINAND COLUMBUS.—SOMETHING ABOUT PIGEON-PIE, AND THE REASON WHY THE
DOCTOR WAS INCLINED TO THINK FAVOURABLY OF THE SAMARITANS.

An I take the humour of a thing once, I am like your tailor's needle;
I go through.

BEN JONSON.

CHAPTER CLXXVII.—p. 73.

SOMETHING ON THE SCIENCE AND MYSTERY OF NUMBERS WHICH IS NOT ACCORDING
TO COCKER.—REVERIES OF JEAN D'ESPAGNE, MINISTER OF THE FRENCH-REFORMED
CHURCH IN WESTMINSTER, AND OF MR. JOHN BELLAMY.—A PITHY REMARK OF
FULLER'S AND AN EXTRACT FROM HIS PISGAH SIGHT OF PALESTINE, TO
RECREATE THE READER.

None are so surely caught, when they are catch'd
As wit turn'd fool: folly, in wisdom hatch'd
Hath wisdom's warrant, and the help of school,
And wit's own grace to grace a learned fool.

LOVE'S LABOUR LOST.

CHAPTER CLXXVIII.—p. 85.

THE MYSTERY OF NUMBERS PURSUED, AND CERTAIN CALCULATIONS GIVEN WHICH
MAY REMIND THE READER OF OTHER CALCULATIONS EQUALLY
CORRECT—ANAGRAMMATIZING OF NAMES, AND THE DOCTOR'S SUCCESS THEREIN.

“There is no efficacy in numbers, said the wiser Philosophers; and
very truly,”—saith Bishop Hacket in repeating this sentence; but he
continues,—“some numbers are apt to enforce a reverent esteem towards
them, by considering miraculous occurrences which fell out in _holy
Scripture_ on such and such a number.—_Non potest fortuitò fieri, quod
tam sæpe fit_, says Maldonatus whom I never find superstitious in this
matter. It falls out too often to be called contingent; and the
oftener it falls out, the more to be attended.”

CHAPTER CLXXIX.—p. 93.

THE SUBJECT OF ANAGRAMS CONTINUED; A TRUE OBSERVATION WHICH MANY FOR
WANT OF OBSERVATION WILL NOT DISCOVER TO BE SUCH, VIZ., THAT THERE IS
A LATENT SUPERSTITION IN THE MOST RATIONAL OF MEN.—LUCKY AND
UNLUCKY—FITTING AND UNFITTING—ANAGRAMS, AND HOW THE DOCTOR'S TASTE IN
THIS LINE WAS DERIVED FROM OUR OLD ACQUAINTANCE JOSHUA SYLVESTER.

_Ha gran forza una vecchia opinione;
E bisogna grand' arte, e gran fatica,
A cavarla del capo alle persone._

BRONZINO PITTORE.

CHAPTER CLXXX.—p. 101.

THE DOCTOR'S IDEAS OF LUCK, CHANCE, ACCIDENT, FORTUNE AND
MISFORTUNE.—THE DUCHESS OF NEWCASTLE'S DISTINCTION BETWEEN CHANCE AND
FORTUNE WHEREIN NO-MEANING IS MISTAKEN FOR MEANING.—AGREEMENT IN
OPINION BETWEEN THE PHILOSOPHER OF DONCASTER AND THE PHILOSOPHER OF
NORWICH.—DISTINCTION BETWEEN UNFORTUNATELY UGLY, AND WICKEDLY
UGLY.—DANGER OF PERSONAL CHARMS.

_Ἔστι γὰρ ὡς ἀληθῶς ἐπίφθεγμα τὸ αὐτόματον, ἀνθρώπων ὡς ἔτυχε καὶ
ἀλογίστως φρονούντων, καὶ τὸν μὲν λόγον αὐτῶν μὴ καταλαμβανόντων, διὰ
δὲ τὴν ἀσθένειαν τῆς καταλήψεως, αλόγως οἰομένων διατετάχθαι ταῦτα, ὧν
τὸν λόγον ἐιπεῖν ὀυκ ἔχουσιν._

CONSTANT. ORAT. AD SANCT. CÆT. C. VII.

“Deformity is either natural, voluntary, or adventitious, being either
caused by _God's unseen Providence_, (_by men nick-named, chance_,) or
by men's cruelty.”

FULLER'S HOLY STATE, B. iii. C. 15.

CHAPTER CLXXXI.—p. 108.

NO DEGREE OF UGLINESS REALLY UNFORTUNATE.—FIDUS CORNELIUS COMPARED TO
A PLUCKED OSTRICH.—WILKES' CLAIM TO UGLINESS CONSIDERED AND NEGATIVED
BY DR. JOHNSON, NOTWITHSTANDING HOGARTH'S PORTRAIT.—CAST OF THE EYE À
LA MONTMORENCY.—ST. EVREMOND AND TURENNE.—WILLIAM BLAKE THE PAINTER,
AND THE WELSH TRIADS.—CURIOUS EXTRACT FROM THAT VERY CURIOUS AND RARE
BOOK, THE DESCRIPTIVE CATALOGUE OF HIS OWN PICTURES,—AND A PAINFUL ONE
FROM HIS POETICAL SKETCHES.

“_If thou beest not so handsome as thou wouldest have been thank God
thou art not more unhandsome than thou art._ 'Tis His mercy thou art
not the mark for passenger's fingers to point at, an Heteroclite in
nature, with some member defective or redundant. Be glad that thy clay
cottage hath all the necessary forms thereto belonging, though the
outside be not so fairly plaistered as some others.”

FULLER'S HOLY STATE, B. iii. C. 15.

CHAPTER CLXXXII.—p. 128.

AN IMPROVEMENT IN THE FORM OF THE HUMAN LEG SUGGESTED BY A PHYSICIAN.
THE DOCTOR'S CURE OF A BROKEN SHIN AND INVENTION OF A SHIN-SHIELD.

_Res fisci est, ubicunque natat._ Whatsoever swims upon any water,
belongs to this exchequer.

JEREMY TAYLOR. _Preface to the Duct. Dub._

CHAPTER CLXXXIII.—p. 133.

VIEWS OF OLD AGE. MONTAGNE, DANIEL CORNEILLE, LANGUET, PASQUIER, DR.
JOHNSON, LORD CHESTERFIELD, ST. EVREMOND.

What is age
But the holy place of life, the chapel of ease
For all men's wearied miseries?

MASSINGER.

CHAPTER CLXXXIV.—p. 148.

FURTHER OBSERVATIONS CONCERNING OLD AGE. BISHOP REYNOLDS. OPINION OF
THE DOCTOR CONCERNING BEASTS AND MEN. M. DE CUSTINE. THE WORLD IS TOO
MUCH WITH US. WORDSWORTH. SIR WALTER RALEIGH.

In these reflections, which are of a serious, and somewhat of a
melancholy cast, it is best to indulge; because it is always of use to
be serious, and not unprofitable sometimes to be melancholy.

FREEMAN'S SERMONS.

CHAPTER CLXXXV.—p. 157.

EVOLVEMENTS. ANALOGIES. ANTICIPATIONS.

I have heard, how true
I know not, most physicians as they grow
Greater in skill, grow less in their religion;
Attributing so much to natural causes,
That they have little faith in that they cannot
Deliver reason for: this Doctor steers
Another course.

MASSINGER.

CHAPTER CLXXXVI.—p. 163.

LEONE HEBREO'S DIALOGI DE AMORE.—THE ELIXIR OF LIFE NO OBSTACLE TO
DEATH.—PARACELSUS.—VAN HELMONT AND JAN MASS.—DR. DOVE'S OPINION OF A
BIOGRAPHER'S DUTIES.

There's a lean fellow beats all conquerors!

OLD FORTUNATUS.

CHAPTER CLXXXVII.—p. 174.

VAN HELMONT'S WORKS, AND CERTAIN SPECIALITIES IN HIS LIFE.

_Voilà mon conte.—Je ne sçay s'il est vray; mais, je l'ay ainsi ouy
conter.—Possible que cela est faux, possible que non.—Je m'en rapporte
à ce qui en est. Il ne sera pas damné qui le croira, ou décroira._

BRANTÔME.

INTERCHAPTER XX.—p. 181.

ST. PANTALEON OF NICOMEDIA IN BITHYNIA—HIS HISTORY, AND SOME FURTHER
PARTICULARS NOT TO BE FOUND ELSEWHERE.

_Non dicea le cose senza il quia;
Che il dritto distingueva dal mancino,
E dicea pane al pane, e vino al vino._

BERTOLDO.

ARCH-CHAPTER.—p. 198.

CHAPTER CLXXXVIII.—p. 207.

FOLLY IN PRINT, REFERRED TO, BUT (N.B.) NOT EXEMPLIFIED. THE FAIR MAID
OF DONCASTER. DOUBTS CONCERNING THE AUTHENTICITY OF HER STORY.
THEVENARD, AND LOVE ON A NEW FOOTING. STARS AND GARTERS, A MONITORY
ANECDOTE FOR OUR SEX, AND A WHOLESOME NOVELTY IN DRESS RECOMMENDED TO
BOTH.

They be at hand, Sir, with stick and fiddle,
They can play a new dance, Sir, called hey, diddle, diddle.

KING CAMBYSES.

CHAPTER CLXXXIX.—p. 217.

THE DOCTOR'S OPINION OF LATE HOURS. DANCING. FANATICAL OBJECTION OF
THE ALBIGENSES; INJURIOUS EFFECT OF THAT OPINION WHEN TRANSMITTED TO
THE FRENCH PROTESTANTS. SIR JOHN DAVIES AND BURTON QUOTED TO SHOW THAT
IT CAN BE NO DISPARAGEMENT TO SAY THAT ALL THE WORLD'S A STAGE, WHEN
ALL THE SKY'S A BALL-ROOM.

I could be pleased with any one
Who entertained my sight with such gay shows,
As men and women moving here and there,
That coursing one another in their steps
Have made their feet a tune.

DRYDEN.

CHAPTER CXC.—p. 229.

DANCING PROSCRIBED BY THE METHODISTS. ADAM CLARKE. BURCHELL'S REMARKS
ON THE UNIVERSALITY OF THIS PRACTICE. HOW IT IS REGARDED IN THE
COLUMBIAN PHILOSOPHY.

_Non vi par adunque che habbiamo ragionato a bastanza di questo? A
bastanza parmi, rispose il Signor Gasparo; pur desidero io d'intendere
qualche particolarità anchor._

IL CORTEGIANO.

CHAPTER CXCI.—p. 242.

A SERIOUS WORD IN SAD APOLOGY FOR ONE OF THE MANY FOOLISH WAYS IN
WHICH TIME IS MIS-SPENT.

Time as he passes us, has a dove's wing,
Unsoil'd, and swift, and of a silken sound;
But the World's Time, is Time in masquerade!
Their's, should I paint him, has his pinions fledged,
With motley plumes; and where the peacock shews
His azure eyes, is tinctured black and red
With spots quadrangular of diamond form,
Ensanguined hearts, clubs typical of strife,
And spades, the emblem of untimely graves.

COWPER.

CHAPTER CXCII.—p. 249.

MORE OF THE DOCTOR'S PHILOSOPHY, WHICH WILL AND WILL NOT BE LIKED BY
THE LADIES, AND SOME OF THE AUTHOR'S WHICH WILL AND WILL NOT BY THE
GENTLEMEN. THE READER IS INTRODUCED TO COUNT CASTIGLIONE, AND TO SIR
JOHN CHEKE.

_Ou tend l'auteur à cette heure?
Que fait'il? Revient-il? Va-t-il? Ou s'il demeure?_

L'AUTEUR.

_Non, je ne reviens pas, car je n'ai pas été;
Je ne vais pas aussi, car je suis arrété;
Et ne demeure point, car, tout de ce pas même
Je pretens m'en aller._

MOLIERE.

CHAPTER CXCIII.—p. 265.

MASTER THOMAS MACE, AND THE TWO HISTORIANS OF HIS SCIENCE, SIR JOHN
HAWKINS AND DR. BURNEY. SOME ACCOUNT OF THE OLD LUTANIST AND OF HIS
“MUSIC'S MONUMENT.”

This Man of Music hath more in his head
Than mere crotchets.

SIR W. DAVENANT.

CHAPTER CXCIV.—p. 289.

A MUSIC LESSON FROM MASTER THOMAS MACE TO BE PLAYED BY LADY FAIR:—A
STORY, THAN WHICH THERE IS NONE PRETTIER IN THE HISTORY OF MUSIC.

What shall I say? Or shall I say no more?
I must go on! I'm brim-full, running o'er.
But yet I'll hold, because I judge ye wise;
And few words unto such may well suffice.
But much—much more than this I could declare;
Yet for some certain reasons I'll forbear.
But less than this I could not say; because,
If saying less, I should neglect my cause,
For 'tis the Doctor's cause I plead so strong for,
And 'tis his cause compleated that I long for,
And 'tis true doctrine certainly I preach,
And 'tis that doctrine every priest should teach.

THOMAS MACE, TO ALL DIVINE READERS.

CHAPTER CXCV.—p. 300.

ANOTHER LESSON WITH THE STORY AND MANNER OF ITS PRODUCTION.

_Οὐδεὶς ἐρεῖ ποθ᾽, ὡς ὑπόβλητον λόγον,
———ἔλεξας, ἀλλὰ τῆς σαυτῦ φρενός._

SOPHOCLES.

CHAPTER CXCVI.—p. 305.

FURTHER ACCOUNT OF MASTER THOMAS MACE,—HIS LIGHT HEART, HIS SORROWS,
AND HIS POVERTY,—POORLY, POOR MAN, HE LIVED, POORLY, POOR MAN, HE
DIED—PHINEAS FLETCHER.

The sweet and the sour,
The nettle and the flower,
The thorn and the rose,
This garland compose.

SMALL GARLAND OF PIOUS AND GODLY SONGS.

CHAPTER CXCVII.—p. 322.

QUESTION PROPOSED, WHETHER A MAN BE MAGNIFIED OR MINIFIED BY
CONSIDERING HIMSELF UNDER THE INFLUENCE OF THE HEAVENLY BODIES, AND
ANSWERED WITH LEARNING AND DISCRETION.

I find by experience that Writing is like Building, wherein the
undertaker, to supply some defect, or serve some convenience which at
first he foresaw not, is usually forced to exceed his first model and
proposal, and many times to double the charge and expence of it.

DR. JOHN SCOTT.

CHAPTER CXCVIII.—p. 335.

PETER HOPKINS' VIEWS OF ASTROLOGY. HIS SKILL IN CHIROMANCY, PALMISTRY,
OR MANUAL DIVINATION WISELY TEMPERED.—SPANISH PROVERB AND SONNET BY
BARTOLOME LEONARDO DE ARGENSOLA.—TIPPOO SULTAN.—MAHOMETAN
SUPERSTITION.—W. Y. PLAYTES' PROSPECTUS FOR THE HORN BOOK FOR THE
REMEMBRANCE OF THE SIGNS OF SALVATION.

_Seguite dunque con la mente lieta,
Seguite, Monsignor, che com' io dico,
Presto presto sarete in su la meta._

LUDOVICO DOLCE.

CHAPTER CXCIX.—p. 347.

CONCERNING THE GREAT HONOURS TO WHICH CERTAIN HORSES HAVE ATTAINED,
AND THE ROYAL MERITS OF NOBS.

_Siento para contarlas que me llama
El á mi, yo á mi pluma, ella á la fama._

BALBUENA.

CHAPTER CC.—p. 355.

A CHAPTER OF KINGS.

FIMBUL-FAMBI _heitr
Sá er fatt kann segia,
That er ósnotvrs athal._

_Fimbul-fambi (fatuus) vocatur
Qui pauca novit narrare:
Ea est hominis insciti proprietas._

EDDA, _Háva Mál._

INTERCHAPTER XXI.—p. 372.

MEASURE FOR MEASURE.

_Le Plebe è bestia
Di cento teste, e non rinchiude in loro
Pur oncia di saper._

CHIABRERA.

INTERCHAPTER XXII.—p. 378.

VARIETY OF STILES.

_Qualis vir, talis oratio._

ERASMI ADAGIA.

INTERCHAPTER XXIII.—p. 383.

A LITTLE ADVICE BESTOWED UPON THE SCORNFUL READER IN A SHORT
INTERCHAPTER.

No man is so foolish, but may give another good counsel sometimes; and
no man is so wise, but may easily err, if he will take no other
counsel but his own.

BEN JONSON.

THE DOCTOR, &c.

CHAPTER CLXXII.

DESCARTES' NOTION CONCERNING THE PROLONGATION OF LIFE. A SICILIAN
PROPOSAL FOR BREEDING UP CHILDREN TO BE IMMORTAL. ASGILL'S ARGUMENT
AGAINST THE NECESSITY OF DYING.

O harmless Death! whom still the valiant brave,
The wise expect, the sorrowful invite;
And all the good embrace, who know the Grave
A short dark passage to eternal light.

SIR WILLIAM DAVENANT.

Sir Kenelm Digby went to Holland for the purpose of conversing with
Descartes, who was then living in retirement at Egmont. Speculative
knowledge, Digby said to him, was no doubt a refined and agreeable
pursuit, but it was too uncertain and too useless to be made a man's
occupation, life being so short that one has scarcely time to acquire
well the knowledge of necessary things. It would be far more worthy of
a person like Descartes, he observed, who so well understood the
construction of the human frame, if he would apply himself to discover
means of prolonging its duration, rather than attach himself to the
mere speculation of philosophy. Descartes made answer that this was a
subject on which he had already meditated; that as for rendering man
immortal, it was what he would not venture to promise, but that he was
very sure he could prolong his life to the standard of the Patriarchs.

Saint-Evremond to whom Digby repeated this, says that this opinion of
Descartes was well known both to his friends in Holland and in France.
The Abbé Picot, his disciple and his martyr, was so fully persuaded of
it that it was long before he would believe his master was dead, and
when at length unwillingly convinced of what it was no longer possible
to deny or doubt, he exclaimed, _que c'en étoit fait et que la fin du
Genre humain alloit venir!_

A certain Sicilian physician who commented upon Galen was more
cautious if not more modest than Descartes. He affirmed that it was
certainly possible to render men immortal, but then they must be bred
up from the earliest infancy with that view; and he undertook so to
train and render them,—if they were fit subjects.—Poor children! if it
had indeed been possible thus to divest them of their reversionary
interest in Heaven.

A much better way of abolishing death was that which Asgill imagined,
when he persuaded himself from Scripture that it is in our power to go
to Heaven without any such unpleasant middle passage. Asgill's is the
worst case of intolerance that has occurred in this country since
persecution has ceased to affect life or member.

This remarkable man was born about the middle of the seventeenth
century and bred to the Law in Lincoln's Inn under Mr. Eyre a very
eminent lawyer of those days. In 1698 he published a treatise with
this title—“Several assertions proved, in order to create another
species of money than Gold and Silver,” and also an “Essay on a
Registry for Titles of Lands.” Both subjects seem to denote that on
these points he was considerably advanced beyond his age. But the
whole strength of his mind was devoted to his profession, in which he
had so completely trammelled and drilled his intellectual powers that
he at length acquired a habit of looking at all subjects in a legal
point of view. He could find flaws in an hereditary title to the
crown. But it was not to seek flaws that he studied the Bible; he
studied it to see whether he could not claim under the Old and New
Testament something more than was considered to be his share. The
result of this examination was that in the year 1700 he published “An
Argument proving that according to the Covenant of Eternal Life
revealed in the Scriptures Man may be translated from hence into that
Eternal Life without passing through death, although the Human Nature
of Christ himself could not be thus translated till he had passed
through death.”

That, the old motto, (says he) worn upon tomb-stones, “Death is the
Gate of Life,” is a lie, by which men decoy one another into death,
taking it to be a thorough-fare into Eternal Life, whereas it is just
so far out of the way. For die when we will, and be buried where we
will, and lie in the grave as long as we will, we must all return from
thence and stand again upon the Earth before we can ascend into the
Heavens. “_Hinc itur ad astra._” He admitted that “this custom of the
world to die hath gained such a prevalency over our minds by
prepossessing us of the necessity of death, that it stands ready to
swallow his argument whole without digesting it.” But the dominion of
death, he said, is supported by our fear of it, by which it hath
bullied the world to this day. Yet “the custom of the World to die is
no argument one way or other;” however, because he knew that custom
itself is admitted as an evidence of title, upon presumption that such
custom had once a reasonable commencement and that this reason doth
continue, it was incumbent upon him to answer this Custom by shewing
the time and reason of its commencement and that the reason was
determined.

“First then,” says he, “I do admit the custom or possession of Death
over the world to be as followeth: that Death did reign from Adam to
Moses by an uninterrupted possession over all men women and children,
created or born, except one breach made upon it in that time by Enoch;
and hath reigned from Moses unto this day by the like uninterrupted
possession, except one other breach made upon it in this time by
Elijah. And this is as strong a possession as can be alledged against
me.

“The religion of the World now is that Man is born to die. But from
the beginning it was not so, for Man was made to live. God made not
Death till Man brought it upon himself by his delinquency. Adam stood
as fair for Life as Death, and fairer too, because he was in the
actual possession of Life,—as Tenant thereof at the Will of God, and
had an opportunity to have made that title perpetual by the Tree of
Life, which stood before him with the Tree of Knowledge of Good and
Evil. And here 'tis observable how the same act of man is made the
condition both of his life and death: ‘put forth thy hand and pull and
eat and die,’ or ‘put forth thy hand and pull and eat and live for
ever.’ 'Tis not to be conceived that there was any physical virtues in
either of these Trees whereby to cause life or death; but God having
sanctified them by those two different names, he was obliged to make
good his own characters of them, by commanding the whole Creation to
act in such a manner as that Man should feel the effects of this word,
according to which of the Trees he first put forth his hand. And it is
yet more strange, that man having life and death set before him at the
same time and place, and both to be had upon the same condition, that
he should single out his own death and leave the Tree of Life
untouched. And what is further strange, even after his election of
death he had an interval of time before his expulsion out of Paradise,
to have retrieved his fate by putting forth his hand to the Tree of
Life; and yet he omitted this too!

“But by all this it is manifest that as the form or person of man in
his first creation was capable of eternal life without dying, so the
fall of man which happened to him after his creation hath not disabled
his person from that capacity of eternal life. And therefore durst Man
even then have broken through the Cherubim and flaming sword, or could
he now any way come at the Tree of Life, he must yet live for ever,
notwithstanding his sin committed in Paradise and his expulsion out of
it. But this Tree of Life now seems lost to Man; and so he remains
under the curse of that other Tree, ‘in the day that thou eatest
thereof thou shalt die.’ Which sentence of the Law is the cause of the
death of Man, and was the commencement of the Custom of Death in the
World, and by the force of this Law Death has kept the possession
(before admitted) to this day.

“By his act of delinquency and the sentence upon it, Adam stood
attainted and became a dead man in law, though he was not executed
till about nine hundred years afterwards.” Lawyer as Asgill was, and
legally as he conducts his whole extraordinary argument, he yet offers
a moral extenuation of Adam's offence. Eve after her eating and Adam
before his eating, were, he says, in two different states, she in the
state of Death, and he in the State of Life; and thereby his was much
the harder case. For she by her very creation was so much a part of
himself that he could not be happy while she was miserable. The loss
of her happiness so much affected him by sympathy that all his other
enjoyments could do him no good; and therefore since he thought it
impossible for her to return into the same state with him, he chose,
rather than be parted from her, to hazard himself in the same state
with her. Asgill then resumes his legal view of the case: the offence
he says was at last joint and several; the sentence fell upon Mankind
as descendants from these our common ancestors, and so upon Christ
himself. And this is the reason why in the genealogy of our Saviour as
set down by two Evangelists his legal descent by Joseph is only
counted upon, “because all legal descents are accounted from the
father.” As he was born of a Virgin to preserve his nature from the
defilement of humanity, so was he of a Virgin espoused to derive upon
himself the curse of the Law by a legal father: for which purpose it
was necessary that the birth of Christ should, in the terms of the
Evangelist, be on this wise and no otherwise. And hence the Genealogy
of Christ is a fundamental part of Eternal Life.

The reader will soon perceive that technically as Asgill treated his
strange argument, he was sincerely and even religiously convinced of
its importance and its truth. “Having shewn,” he proceeds, “how this
Law fell upon Christ, it is next incumbent on me to shew that it is
taken away by his death, and consequently that the long possession of
Death over the World can be no longer a title against Life. But when I
say this Law is taken away, I don't mean that the words of it are
taken away; for they remain with us to this day and being matter of
Record must remain for ever; but that it is satisfied by other matter
of Record, by which the force of it is gone. Law satisfied is no Law,
as a debt satisfied is no debt. Now the specific demand of the Law was
Death; and of a man; and a man made under the Law. Christ qualified
himself to be so: and as such suffered under it, thus undergoing the
literal sentence. This he might have done and not have given the Law
satisfaction, for millions of men before him had undergone it and yet
the Law was nevertheless dissatisfied with them and others, but He
declared _It is finished_ before he gave up the ghost. By the dignity
of his person he gave that satisfaction which it was impossible for
mankind to give.”

For the Law, he argues, was not such a civil contract that the breach
of it could be satisfied; it was a Law of Honour, the breach whereof
required personal satisfaction for the greatest affront and the
highest act of ingratitude to God, inasmuch as the slighter the thing
demanded is, the greater is the affront in refusing it. “Man by his
very creation entered into the labours of the Creator and became Lord
of the Universe which was adapted to his enjoyments. God left him in
possession of it upon his parole of honour, only that he would
acknowledge it to be held of Him, and as the token of this tenure that
he would only forbear from eating of one tree, withal telling him that
if he did eat of it, his life should go for it. If man had had more
than his life to give, God would have had it of him. This was rather a
resentment of the affront, than any satisfaction for it; and therefore
to signify the height of this resentment God raises man from the dead
to demand further satisfaction from him. Death is a commitment to the
prison of the Grave till the Judgement of the Great Day; and then the
grand Habeas Corpus will issue to the Earth and to the Sea, to give up
their dead: to remove the Bodies, with the cause of their commitment.

“Yet was this a resentment without malice; for as God maintained his
resentment under all his love, so He maintained his love under all his
resentment. For his love being a love of kindness flowing from his own
nature, could not be diminished by any act of man; and yet his honour
being concerned to maintain the truth of his word, he could not
falsify that to gratify his own affection. And thus he bore the
passion of his own love, till he had found out a salvo for his honour
by that Son of Man who gave him satisfaction at once by the dignity of
his person. Personal satisfactions by the Laws of Honour are esteemed
sufficient or not, according to the equality or inequality between the
persons who give or take the affront. Therefore God to vindicate his
honour was obliged to find out a person for this purpose equal to
Himself: the invention of which is called the manifold wisdom of God,
the invention itself being the highest expression of the deepest love,
and the execution of it, in the death of Christ, the deepest
resentment of the highest affront.

“Now inasmuch as the person of our Saviour was superior to the human
nature, so much the satisfaction by his death surmounted the offence.
He died under the Law but he did not arise under it, having taken it
away by his death. The life regained by him in his resurrection was by
Conquest, by which, according to all the Laws of Conquest, the Law of
Death is taken away. For by the Laws of Conquest the Laws of the
conquered are _ipso facto_ taken away, and all records and writings
that remain of them are of no more force than waste paper. Hence the
title of Christ to Eternal Life is become absolute,—by absolute”—says
this theologo-jurist,—“I mean discharged from all tenure or condition,
and consequently from all forfeiture. And as his title to life is thus
become absolute by Conquest, so the direction of it is become eternal
by being annexed to the Person of the Godhead: thus Christ ever since
his resurrection did, and doth, stand seized of an absolute and
indefeazable Estate of Eternal Life, without any tenure or condition
or other matter or thing to change or determine it for ever.” “I had
reason” says Asgill “thus to assert the title of Christ at large;
because this is the title by and under which I am going to affirm my
argument and to claim Eternal Life for myself and all the world.”

“And first I put it upon the Profession of Divinity to deny one word
of the fact as I have repeated it. Next I challenge the Science of the
Law to shew such another Title as this is. And then I defy the
Logicians to deny my Argument: of which this is the abstract: That the
Law delivered to Adam before the Fall is the original cause of Death
in the World: That this Law is taken away by the Death of Christ: That
therefore the legal power of death is gone. And I am so far from
thinking this Covenant of Eternal Life to be an allusion to the forms
of Title amongst men, that I rather adore it as the precedent for them
all; believing with that great Apostle that the things on Earth are
but the patterns of things in the Heavens where the Originals are
kept.” This he says because he has before made it appear that in the
Covenant of Eternal Life all things requisite to constitute a legal
instrument are found, to wit, the date, the parties, the contents, and
consideration, the sealing, and execution, the witnesses, and the
Ceremony required of Man, whereby to execute it on his part and take
the advantage of it.

By the sacrifice which our Lord offered of himself, this technical but
sincere and serious enthusiast argues, more than an atonement was
made. “And that this superabundancy might not run to waste, God
declared that Man should have Eternal Life absolute as Christ himself
had it; and hence Eternal Life is called the Gift of God through our
Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, over and above our redemption. Why
then,” he asks, “doth Death remain in the World? Why because Man knows
not the Way of Life—‘the way of Life they have not known.’ Because our
faith is not yet come to us—‘when the Son of Man comes shall he find
faith upon the earth?’ Because Man is a beast of burden that knows not
his own strength in the virtue of the Death and the power of the
Resurrection of Christ. Unbelief goes not by reason or dint of
argument, but is a sort of melancholy madness, by which if we once
fancy ourselves bound, it hath the same effect upon us as if we really
were so. Death is like Satan, who appears to none but those who are
afraid of him: Resist the Devil and he will flee from you. Because
Death had once dominion over us, we think it hath and must have it
still. And this I find within myself, that though I can't deny one
word I have said in fact or argument, yet I can't maintain my belief
of it without making it more familiar to my understanding, by turning
it up and down in my thoughts and ruminating upon some proceedings
already made upon it in the World.

“The Motto of the Religion of the World is _Mors Janua Vitæ_; if we
mean by this the Death of Christ, we are in the right; but if we mean
our own Death then we are in the wrong. Far be it from me to say that
Man may not attain to Eternal Life, though he should die; for the Text
runs double. ‘_I am the Resurrection and the Life; he that liveth and
believeth on me, shall never die; and though he were dead he shall
live._’ This very Text shows that there is a nearer way of entering
into Eternal Life than by the way of Death and Resurrection. Whatever
circumstances a man is under at the time of his death, God is bound to
make good this Text to him, according to which part of it he builds
his faith upon; if he be dead there's a necessity for a resurrection;
but if he be alive there's no occasion for Death or Resurrection
either. This text doth not maintain two religions, but two articles of
faith in the same religion, and the article of faith for a present
life without dying is the higher of the two.

“No man can comprehend the heights and depths of the Gospel at his
first entrance into it; and in point of order, ‘the last enemy to be
destroyed is Death.’ The first essay of Faith is against Hell, that
though we die we may not be damned; and the full assurance of this is
more than most men attain to before Death overtakes them, which makes
Death a terror to men. But they who attain it can sing a requiem ‘Lord
now lettest thou thy Servant depart in peace!’ and if God takes them
at their word, they lie down in the faith of the Resurrection of the
Just. But whenever he pleases to continue them, after that attainment,
much longer above ground, that time seems to them an interval of
perfect leisure, till at last espying Death itself, they fall upon it
as an enemy that must be conquered, one time or other, through faith
in Christ. This is the reason why it seems intended that a respite of
time should be allotted to believers after the first Resurrection and
before the dissolution of the World, for perfecting that faith which
they began before their death but could not attain to in the first
reach of life: for Death being but a discontinuance of Life, wherever
men leave off at their death, they must begin at their resurrection.
Nor shall they ascend after their resurrection, till they have
attained to this faith of translation, and by that very faith they
shall be then convinced that they need not have died.

“When Elijah courted death under the juniper tree in the wilderness,
and ‘said—now Lord, take away my life, for I am not better than my
fathers,’ that request shews that he was not educated in this faith of
translation, but attained it afterwards by study. Paul tells ‘we shall
not all die but we shall all be changed;’ yet though he delivered this
to be his faith in general, he did not attain to such a particular
knowledge of the way and manner of it as to prevent his own death: he
tells us he had not yet attained the Resurrection of the dead, but was
pressing after it. He had but a late conversion, and was detained in
the study of another part of divinity, the confirming the New
Testament by the Old and making them answer one another,—a point
previous to the faith of translation, and which must be learned before
it—in order to it. But this his pressing (though he did not attain,)
hath much encouraged me,” says Asgill, “to make this enquiry, being
well assured that he would not have thus pursued it, had he not
apprehended more in it than the vulgar opinion.

“We don't think ourselves fit to deal with one another in human
affairs till our age of one and twenty. But to deal with our offended
Maker, to counterplot the malice of fallen Angels, and to rescue
ourselves from eternal ruin, we are generally as well qualified before
we can speak plain, as all our life-time after. Children can say over
their religion at four or five years old, and their parents that
taught them can do no more at four or five and fifty. The common Creed
of the Christian religion may be learned in an hour: and one days
philosophy will teach a man to die. But to know the virtue of the
Death and Power of the Resurrection of Christ, is a science calculated
for the study of Men and Angels for ever.

“But if man may be thus changed without death, and that it is of no
use to him in order to Eternal Life; what then is Death? Or, whereunto
serveth it? What is it? Why 'tis a misfortune fallen upon man from the
beginning, and from which he has not yet dared to attempt his
recovery: and it serves as a Spectre to fright us into a little better
life (perhaps) than we should lead without it. Though God hath formed
this Covenant of Eternal Life, Men have made an agreement with Death
and Hell, by way of composition to submit to Death, in hope of
escaping Hell by that obedience; and under this allegiance we think
ourselves bound never to rebel against it! The study of Philosophy is
to teach men to die, from the observations of Nature; the profession
of Divinity is to enforce the doctrine from Revelation: and the
science of the Law is to settle our civil affairs pursuant to these
resolutions. The old men are making their last Wills and Testaments;
and the young are expecting the execution of them by the death of the
testators; and thus

_Mortis ad exemplum totus componitur orbis._

I was under this Law of Death once; and while I lay under it, I felt
the terror of it, till I had delivered myself from it by those
thoughts which must convince them that have them. And in this thing
only, I wish, for their sakes, that all men were as I am. The reason
why I believe that this doctrine is true, is, because God hath said
it: yet I could not thus assert it by argument, if I did not conceive
it with more self-conviction than I have from any maxims or positions
in human science. The Covenant of Eternal Life is a Law of itself and
a science of itself, which can never be known by the study of any
other science. It is a science out of Man's way, being a pure
invention of God. Man knows no more how to save himself than he did to
create himself; but to raise his ambition for learning this, God
graduates him upon his degree of knowledge in it, and gives him badges
of honour as belonging to that degree, upon the attainment whereof a
man gains the title of a Child of the Resurrection: to which title
belongs this badge of honour, to die no more but make our exit by
translation, as Christ, who was the first of this Order, did before
us. And this world being the academy to educate Man for Heaven, none
shall ever enter there till they have taken this degree here.

“Let the Dead bury the Dead! and the Dead lie with the Dead! And the
rest of the Living go lie with them! I'll follow him that was dead,
and is alive, and living for ever. And though I am now single, yet I
believe that this belief will be general before the general change, of
which Paul speaks, shall come; and that then, and not before, shall be
the Resurrection of the Just, which is called the first Resurrection;
and after that the Dead so arisen, with the Living, then alive, shall
have learned this faith, which shall qualify them to be caught up
together in the air, then shall be the General Resurrection, after
which Time shall be no more.

“The beginning of this faith, like all other parts of the Kingdom of
Heaven will be like a grain of mustard seed, spreading itself by
degrees till it overshadow the whole earth. And since ‘the things
concerning Him must have an end,’ in order to this they must have a
beginning. But whoever leads the van will make the world start, and
must expect for himself to walk up and down, like Cain, with a mark on
his forehead, and run the gauntlet for an Ishmaelite, having every
man's hand against him because his hand is against every man; than
which nothing is more averse to my temper. This makes me think of
publishing with as much regret as he that ran way from his errand when
sent to Niniveh: but being just going to cross the water—(he was going
to Ireland,—) I dared not leave this behind me undone, lest a Tempest
send me back again to do it. And to shelter myself a little, (though I
knew my speech would betray me) I left the Title page anonymous. Nor
do I think that any thing would now extort my name from me but the
dread of the sentence, ‘he that is ashamed of me and of my words, of
him will I be ashamed before my Father and his Angels:’ for fear of
which I dare not but subscribe my argument, though with a trembling
hand; having felt two powers within me all the while I have been about
it, one bids me write, and the other bobs my elbow. But since I have
wrote this, as Pilate did his inscription, without consulting any one,
I'll be absolute as he was; ‘what I have written, I have written.’

“Having pursued that command, ‘Seek first the Kingdom of God,’ I yet
expect the performance of that promise, ‘to receive in this life an
hundred fold, and in the world to come life everlasting.’ I have a
great deal of business yet in this world, without doing of which
Heaven itself would be uneasy to me: but when that is done I know no
business I have with the dead, and therefore do depend that I shall
not go hence by ‘returning to the dust,’ which is the sentence of that
law from which I claim a discharge: but that I shall make my exit by
way of translation, which I claim as a dignity belonging to that
Degree in the Science of Eternal Life of which I profess myself a
graduate. And if after this I die like other men, I declare myself to
die of no religion. Let no one be concerned for me as a desperade: I
am not going to renounce the other part of our religion, but to add
another article of faith to it, without which I cannot understand the
rest. And if it be possible to believe too much in God, I desire to be
guilty of that sin.

“Behold ye despisers and wonder! Wonder to see Paradise lost, with the
Tree of Life in the midst of it! Wonder and curse at Adam for an
original fool, who in the length of one day never so much as thought
to put forth his hand, for him and us, and pull and eat and live for
ever! Wonder at and damn ourselves for fools of the last impression,
that in the space of seventeen hundred years never so much as thought
to put forth our hands, every one for himself, and seal and execute
the Covenant of Eternal Life.

“To be even with the World at once, he that wonders at my faith, I
wonder at his unbelief. The Blood of Christ hath an incident quality
which cleaneth from sin; and he that understands this never makes any
use of his own personal virtues as an argument for his own salvation,
lest God should overbalance against him with his sins; nor doth God
ever object a man's sins to him in the day of his faith; therefore
till I am more sinful than He was holy, my sins are no objection
against my faith. And because in Him is all my hope, I care not
(almost) what I am myself.

“It is observed in the mathematics that the practice doth not always
answer the theory; and that therefore there is no dependence upon the
mere notions of it as they lie in the brain, without putting them
together in the form of a tool or instrument, to see how all things
fit. This made me distrust my own thoughts till I had put them
together, to see how they would look in the form of an argument. But
in doing this, I thank God I have found every joint and article to
come into its own place and fall in with and suit one another to a
hair's breadth, beyond my expectation: or else I could not have had
the confidence to produce this as an engine in Divinity to convey man
from Earth to Heaven. I am not making myself wings to fly to Heaven
with, but only making myself ready for that conveyance which shall be
sent me. And if I should lose myself in this untrodden path of Life, I
can still find out the beaten Road of Death blindfold. If therefore,
after this, ‘I go the way of my fathers’ I freely waive that haughty
epitaph, _magnis tamen excidit ausis_, and instead knock under table
that Satan hath beguiled me to play the fool with myself, in which
however he hath shewed his masterpiece; for I defy the whole clan of
Hell to produce another lye so like to truth as this is. But if I act
my motto, and go the way of an Eagle in the air, then have I played a
trump upon Death and shewn myself a match for the Devil.

“And while I am thus fighting with Death and Hell, it looks a little
like foul play for Flesh and Blood to interpose themselves against me.
But if any one hath spite enough to give me a polt, thinking to
falsify my faith by taking away my life, I only desire them first to
qualify themselves for my executioners, by taking this short test in
their own consciences: whoever thinks that any thing herein contained
is not fair dealing with God and Man, let him—or her—burn this book,
and cast a stone at him that wrote it.”

CHAPTER CLXXIII.

MORE CONCERNING ASGILL. HIS DEFENCE IN THE HOUSE OF COMMONS, HIS
EXPULSION, FARTHER SPECULATIONS AND DEATH.

Let not that ugly Skeleton appear!
Sure Destiny mistakes; this Death's not mine!

DRYDEN.

The substance of Asgill's argument has been given in his own words,
but by thus abstracting and condensing it his peculiar manner is lost.
This though it consisted more perhaps in appearance than in reality,
is characteristic of the author, and may be well exemplified in the
concluding passage of one of his political pamphlets:

“But I shall raise more choler by this way of writing,
For writing and reading are in themselves commendable things,
But 'tis the way of writing at which offence is taken,
And this is the misfortune of an Author,
That unless some are angry with him, none are pleased.
Which puts him under this dilemma,
That he must either ruin himself or his Printer.

“But to prevent either, as far as I can, I would rather turn Trimmer
and compound too. And to end all quarrels with my readers (if they
please to accept the proposal,

And to shew withal that I am no dogmatical Author,)

I now say to them all, in print, what I once did to one of them, by
word of mouth. Whoever meets with any thing in what I publish, which
they don't like,

_Let 'em strike it out._
But to take off part of the Odium from me,
They say others write like me,
In short paragraphs:
(An easy part of a mimick,)
But with all my heart!
I don't care who writes like me,
So I do'nt write like them.”

Many a book has originated in the misfortunes of its Author. Want,
imprisonment, and disablement by bodily infirmity from active
occupation, have produced almost as many works in prose or rhyme, as
leisure, voluntary exertion, and strong desire. Asgill's harmless
heresy began in an involuntary confinement to which he was reduced in
consequence of an unsuccessful speculation; he had engaged in this
adventure (by which better word our forefathers designated what the
Americans call a _spec_,) with the hope of increasing his fortune,
instead of which he incurred so great a loss that he found it
necessary to keep his chamber in the Temple for some years. There he
fell to examining that “Book of Law and Gospel,” both which we call
the Bible; and examining it as he would have perused an old deed with
the hope of discovering in it some clause upon which to ground a claim
at law, this thought, he says, first came into his head; but it was a
great while coming out. He was afraid of his own thoughts, lest they
were his own only, and as such a delusion. And when he had tried them
with pen, ink and paper, and they seemed to him plainer and plainer
every time he went over them, and he had formed them into an Argument,
“to see how they would bear upon the proof,” even then he had no
intention of making them public.

“But writing an ill hand,” says he, “I resolved to see how it would
look in print. On this I gave the Printer my Copy, with money for his
own labour, to print off some few for myself, and keep the press
secret. But I remember before he got half way through, he told me his
men fancied I was a little crazed, in which I also fancied he spoke
one word for them and two for himself. However I bid him go on; and at
last it had so raised his fancy that he desired my leave to print off
one edition at the risque of his own charge, saying he thought some of
the Anabaptists would believe it first. I being just then going for
Ireland, admitted him, with this injunction, he should not publish
them 'till I was got clear out of Middlesex; which I believe he might
observe; though by what I heard afterwards, they were all about town
by that time I got to St. Albans: and the book was in Ireland almost
as soon as I was, (for a man's works will follow him,) with a noise
after me that I was gone away mad.”

Asgill was told in Ireland that the cry which followed him would
prevent his practice; it had a contrary effect, for “people went into
Court to see him as a Monster and heard him talk like a man.” In the
course of two years he gained enough by his profession to purchase
Lord Kenmure's forfeited estate, and to procure a seat in the Irish
House of Commons. The purchase made him enemies; as he was on the way
to Dublin he met the news that his book had been burnt by Order of the
House. He proceeded however, took the oaths and his seat, and the Book
having been condemned and executed without hearing the author in its
defence, nothing more was necessary than to prove him the Author and
expel him forthwith, and this was done in the course of four days.
After this he returned to England and obtained a seat for Bramber,
apparently for the mere sake of securing himself against his
creditors. This borough he represented for two years; but in the first
Parliament after the Union some of the Scotch Members are said to have
looked upon it as a disgrace to the House of Commons that a man who
enjoyed his liberty only under privilege should sit there, and instead
of attempting to remedy a scandal by straight forward means, they took
the easier course of moving for a Committee to examine his book. Their
report was that it was profane and blasphemous, highly reflecting upon
the Christian Religion. He was allowed however to make his defence,
which he thus began.

“Mr. Speaker, this day calls me to something I am both unapt and
averse to—Preaching. For though, as you see, I have vented some of my
thoughts in religion, yet I appeal to my conversation, whether I use
to make that the subject of my discourse. However that I may not let
this accusation go against me by a _Nihil dicit_, I stand up to make
my defence. I have heard it from without doors that I intended to
withdraw myself from this day's test and be gone; which would have
given them that said it an opportunity to boast that they had once
spoken truth. But _quo me fata trahunt_, I'll give no man occasion to
write _fugam fecit_ upon my grave-stone.”

He then gave the history of his book and of his expulsion in Ireland,
and thanked the House for admitting him to a defence before they
proceeded to judgement. “I find,” said he, “the Report of the
Committee is not levelled at the argument itself which I have
advanced, nor yet against the treatise I have published to prove it,
but against some expressions in that proof, and which I intend to give
particular answers to. But there is something else laid to my charge
as my design in publishing that argument, of higher concern to me than
any expressions in the treatise, or any censure that can fall on me
for it; as if I had wrote it with a malicious intention to expose the
scriptures as false, because they seemed to contain what I asserted;
and that therefore if that assertion did not hold true, the Scripture
must be false. Now whether this was my intention or no, there is but
one Witness in Heaven or Earth can prove, and that is He that made me,
and in whose presence I now stand, and Who is able to strike me dead
in my place; and to Him I now appeal for the truth of what I protest
against: that I never did write or publish that argument with any
intention to expose the Scriptures; but on the contrary, (though I was
aware that I might be liable to that censure, which I knew not how to
avoid) I did both write and publish it, under a firm belief of the
truth of the Scriptures: and with a belief, (under that) that what I
have asserted in that argument is within that truth. And if it be not,
then I am mistaken in my argument and the Scripture remains true. Let
God be true and every man a lyar. And having made this protestation, I
am not much concerned whether I am believed in it or not; I had rather
tell a truth than be believed in a lie at any time.”

He then justified the particular passage which had been selected for
condemnation, resting his defence upon this ground, that he had used
familiar expressions with the intent of being sooner read and more
readily understood. There was indeed but a single word which savoured
of irreverence, and certainly no irreverence was intended in its use:
no one who fairly perused his argument but must have perceived that
the levity of his manner in no degree detracted from the seriousness
of his belief. “Yet,” said he, “if by any of those expressions I have
really given offence to any well-meaning Christian, I am sorry for it,
though I had no ill intention in it: but if any man be captious to
take exceptions for exception sake, I am not concerned. I esteem my
own case plain and short. I was expelled one House for having too much
land; and I am going to be expelled another for having too little
money. But if I may yet ask one question more; pray what is this
blasphemous crime I here stand charged with? A belief of what we all
profess, or at least what no one can deny. If the death of the body be
included in the Fall, why is not the life of the body included in the
Resurrection? And what if I have a firmer belief of this than some
others have? Am I therefore a blasphemer? Or would they that believe
less take it well of me to call them so. Our Saviour in his day took
notice of some of little faith and some of great faith, without
stigmatizing either of them with blasphemy for it. But I do not know
how 'tis, we are fallen into such a sort of uniformity that we would
fain have Religion into a Tyrant's bed, torturing one another into our
own size of it only. But it grows late, and I ask but one saying more
to take leave of my friends with. I do believe that had I turned this
Defence into a Recantation, I had prevented my Expulsion: but I have
reserved my last words as my ultimate reason against that Recantation.
He that durst write that book, dares not deny it!”

“And what then?” said this eccentric writer, when five years
afterwards he published his Defence. “Why then they called for
candles; and I went away by the light of 'em: and after the previous
question and other usual ceremonies, (as I suppose) I was expelled the
House. And from thence I retired to a Chamber I once had in the
Temple; and from thence I afterwards surrendered myself in discharge
of my bail, and have since continued under confinement. And under that
confinement God hath been pleased to take away, ‘the Desire of mine
Eyes with a stroke,’ which hath however drowned all my other troubles
at once; for the less are merged in the greater;

_Qui venit hic fluctus, fluctus supereminet omnes._

And since I have mentioned her, I'll relate this of her. She having
been educated a Protestant of the Church of England, by a Lady her
Grandmother, her immediate parents and other relations being Roman
Catholics, an honest Gentleman of the Romish persuasion, who knew her
family, presented her, while she was my fellow-prisoner, with a large
folio volume, being the history of the Saints canonized in that
Church, for her reading; with intention, as I found, to incline her
that way. With which, delighting in reading, she entertained herself
'till she shad gone through it; and some time after that she told me
that she had before some thoughts towards that religion, but that the
reading that history had confirmed her against it.

“And yet she would never read the book I was expelled for 'till after
my last expulsion; but then reading it through, told me she was
reconciled to the reasons of it, though she could not say she believed
it. However she said something of her own thoughts with it, that hath
given me the satisfaction that she is ‘dead in Christ,’ and thereby
sure of her part in the first Resurrection: the Dead in Christ shall
arise first. And this _pars decessa mei_ leaving me half dead while
she remains in the grave, hath since drawn me, in diving after her,
into a nearer view and more familiar though more unusual thoughts of
that first Resurrection than ever I had before. From whence I now find
that nothing less than this _fluctus decumanus_ would have cast me
upon, or qualified me for, this theme, if yet I am so qualified. And
from hence I am advancing that common Article in our Creed, the
Resurrection of the Dead, into a professed study; from the result of
which study I have already advanced an assertion, which (should I vent
alone) perhaps would find no better quarter in the world than what I
have advanced already. And yet, though I say it that perhaps should
not, it hath one quality we are all fond of,—it is News; and another
we all should be fond of, it is good News: or at least, good to them
that are so, ‘for to the froward all things are froward.’

“Having made this Discovery, or rather collected it from the Word of
Life; I am advancing it into a Treatise whereby to prove it in special
form, not by arguments of wit or sophistry, but from the evidence and
demonstration of the truth as it is in Jesus: which should I
accomplish I would not be prevented from publishing that edition to
gain more than I lost by my former; nor for more than Balak ever
intended to give, or than Balaam could expect to receive, for cursing
the people of Israel, if God had not spoilt that bargain. I find it as
old as the New Testament, ‘if by any means I may attain the
Resurrection of the Dead.’ And though Paul did not then so attain,
(not as if I had already attained,) yet he died in his calling, and
will stand so much nearer that mark at his Resurrection. But if Paul,
with that effusion of the Spirit upon him in common with the other
Apostles, and that superabundant revelation given him above them all,
by that rapture unto things unutterable, did not so attain in that his
day; whence should I a mere Lay, (and that none of the best neither)
without any function upon me, expect to perfect what he left so
undone?—In pursuit of this study I have found, (what I had not before
observed) that there are some means since left us towards this
attainment, which Paul had not in his day; for there now remain extant
unto the world, bound up with that now one entire record of the Bible,
two famous Records of the Resurrection that never came to Paul's
hands; and for want whereof, perhaps, he might not then so attain. But
having now this intelligence of them, and fearing that in the day of
Account I may have a special surcharge made upon me for these
additional Talents and further Revelations; and bearing in mind the
dreadful fate of that cautious insuring servant who took so much care
to redeliver what he had received _in statu quo_ as he had it that it
might not be said to be the worse for his keeping, I have rather
adventured to defile those Sacred Records with my own study and
thoughts upon them, than to think of returning them wrapt up in a
napkin clean and untouched.

“Whether ever I shall accomplish to my own satisfaction what I am now
so engaged in, I do not yet know; but 'till I do, I'll please myself
to be laughed at by this cautious insuring world, as tainted with a
frenzy of dealing in Reversions of Contingencies. However in the mean
time I would not be thought to be spending this interval of my days by
myself in beating the air, under a dry expectancy only of a thing so
seemingly remote as the Resurrection of the Dead: like
Courtiers-Extraordinary fretting out their soles with attendances in
ante-rooms for things or places no more intended to be given them than
perhaps they are fit to have them. For though I should fall short of
the attainment I am attempting, the attempt itself hath translated my
Prison into a Paradise; treating me with food and enamouring me with
pleasures that man knows not of: from whence, I hope, I may without
vanity say,

_Deus nobis hæc otia fecit._”

What the farther reversion might be to which Asgill fancied he had
discovered a title in the Gospels, is not known. Perhaps he failed in
satisfying himself when he attempted to arrange his notions in logical
and legal form, and possibly that failure may have weakened his
persuasion of the former heresy: for though he lived twenty years
after the publication of his Defence and the announcement of this
second discovery in the Scriptures, the promised argument never
appeared. His subsequent writings consist of a few pamphlets in favour
of the Hanoverian succession. They were too inconsiderable to
contribute much towards eking out his means of support, for which he
was probably chiefly indebted to his professional knowledge. The
remainder of his life was past within the Rules of the King's Bench
Prison, where he died in 1738 at a very advanced age, retaining his
vivacity and his remarkable powers of conversation to the last. If it
be true that he nearly attained the age of an hundred (as one
statement represents) and with these happy faculties unimpaired, he
may have been tempted to imagine that he was giving the best and only
convincing proof of his own argument. Death undeceived him, and Time
has done him justice at last. For though it stands recorded that he
was expelled the House of Commons as being the Author of a Book in
which are contained many profane and blasphemous expressions, highly
reflecting upon the Christian Religion! nothing can be more certain
than that this censure was undeserved, and that his expulsion upon
that ground was as indefensible as it would have been becoming, if, in
pursuance of the real motives by which the House was actuated, an Act
had been past disqualifying from that time forward any person in a
state of insolvency from taking or retaining a seat there.

In the year 1760 I find him mentioned as “the celebrated gentleman
commonly called ‘translated Asgill.’” His name is now seen only in
catalogues, and his history known only to the curious:—“_Mais, c'est
assez parlé de luy, et encore trop, ce diront aucuns, qui pourront
m'en blasmer, et dire que j'estois bien de loisir quand j'escrivis
cecy; mais ils seront bien plus de loisir de la lire, pour me
reprendre._”[1]

[Footnote 1: BRANTOME.]

CHAPTER CLXXIV.

My mouth's no dictionary; it only serves as the needful interpreter of
my heart.

QUARLES.

There were few things in the way of fantastic and typical speculation
which delighted the Doctor so much as the contemplation of his own
name:

DANIEL DOVE.

D. D. it was upon his linen and his seal. D. D. he used to say,
designated the highest degree in the highest of the sciences, and he
was D. D. not by the forms of a University, but by Nature or Destiny.

Besides, he maintained, that the letter D was the richest, the most
powerful, the most fortunate letter in the alphabet, and contained in
its form and origin more mysteries than any other.

It was a potential letter under which all powerful things were
arranged; Dictators, Despots, Dynasties, Diplomas, Doctors,
Dominations; Deeds and Donations and Decrees; Dioptrics and Dynamics;
Dialectics and Demonstrations.

Diaphragm, Diathesis, Diet, Digestion, Disorder, Disease, Diagnosis;
Diabrosis, Diaphragmatis, Diaphthora, Desudation, Defluxions,
Dejection, Delirium, Delivery, Dyspepsy, Dysmenorrhœa, Dysorœxia,
Dyspnœa, Dysuria, Dentition, Dropsy, Diabetes, Diarrhœa, Dysentery;
then passing almost in unconscious but beautiful order from diseases
to remedies and their consequences, he proceeded with Dispensation,
Diluents, Discutients, Deobstruents, Demulcents, Detergents,
Desiccatives, Depurantia, Diaphoretics, Dietetics, Diachylon,
Diacodium, Diagrydium, Deligations, Decoctions, Doses, Draughts,
Drops, Dressings, Drastics, Dissolution, Dissection. What indeed he
would say, should we do in our profession without the Ds?

Or what would the Divines do without it—Danger, Despair, Death, Devil,
Doomsday, Damnation; look to the brighter side, there is the Doxology,
and you ascend to _Διὸς_, and Deus and Deity.

What would become of the farmer without Dung, or of the Musician
without the Diapason? Think also of Duets in music and Doublets at
Backgammon. And the soldier's toast in the old Play, “the two Ds Drink
and your Duty.”[1]

[Footnote 1: Shirley, Honoria and Mammon.]

Look at the moral evils which are ranged under its banners,
Dissentions, Discord, Duels, Dissimulation, Deceit, Dissipation,
Demands, Debts, Damages, Divorce, Distress, Drunkenness,
Dram-drinking, Distraction, Destruction.

When the Poet would describe things mournful and calamitous, whither
doth he go for epithets of alliterative significance? where but to the
letter D? there he hath Dim, Dusky, Drear, Dark, Damp, Dank, Dismal,
Doleful, Dolorous, Disastrous, Dreadful, Desperate, Deplorable.

Would we sum up the virtues and praise of a perfect Woman, how should
we do it but by saying that she was devout in religion, decorous in
conduct, domestic in habits, dextrous in business, dutiful as a wife,
diligent as a mother, discreet as a mistress, in manner debonnaire, in
mind delicate, in person delicious, in disposition docile, in all
things delightful. Then he would smile at Mrs. Dove and say, I love my
love with a D. and her name is Deborah.

For degrees and distinctions, omitting those which have before been
incidentally enumerated, are there not Dauphin and Dey, Dux, Duke,
Doge. Dominus, with its derivatives Don, the Dom of the French and
Portugueze, and the Dan of our own early language; Dame, Damsel, and
Damoisel in the untranslated masculine. Deacons and Deans, those of
the Christian Church, and of Madagascar whose title the French write
Dian, and we should write Deen not to confound them with the
dignitaries of our Establishment. Druids and Dervises, Dryads,
Demigods and Divinities.

Regard the Mappa Mundi. You have Denmark and Dalecarlia, Dalmatia and
the fertile Delta, Damascus, Delos, Delphi and Dodona, the Isles of
Domingo and Dominica, Dublin and Durham and Dorchester and Dumfries,
the shires of Devon, Dorset and Derby and the adjoining Bishoprick.
Dantzic and Drontheim, the Dutchy of Deux Ponts; Delhi the seat of the
Great Mogul, and that great city yet unspoiled, which

Geryon's sons
Call El Dorado,—

the Lakes Dembea and Derwentwater, the rivers Dwina, Danube and
Delawar, Duero or Douro call it which you will, the Doubs and all the
Dons, and our own wizard Dee,—which may be said to belong wholly to
this letter, the vowels being rather for appearance than use.

Think also, he would say of the worthies, heroes and sages in D.
David, and his namesake of Wales. Diogenes, Dædalus, Diomede, and
Queen Dido, Decebalus the Dacian King, Deucalion, Datames the Carian
whom Nepos hath immortalized, and Marshal Daun who so often kept the
King of Prussia in check, and sometimes defeated him. Nay if I speak
of men eminent for the rank which they held, or for their exploits in
war, might I not name the Kings of Persia who bore the name of Darius,
Demaratus of Sparta, whom the author of Leonidas hath well pourtrayed
as retaining in exile a reverential feeling toward the country which
had wronged him: and Deodatus, a name assumed by, or given to Lewis
the 14th, the greatest actor of greatness that ever existed. Dion who
lives for ever in the page of Plutarch; the Demetrii, the Roman Decii,
Diocletian, and Devereux Earl of Essex, he by whom Cadiz was taken,
and whose execution occasioned the death of the repentant Elizabeth by
whom it was decreed. If of those who have triumphed upon the ocean
shall we not find Dragat the far-famed corsair, and our own more
famous and more dreadful Drake. Dandolo the Doge who at the age of
[2] triumphed over the perfidious Greeks, and was first chosen by the
victorious Latins to be the Emperor of Constantinople: Doria of whom
the Genoese still boast. Davis who has left his name so near the
Arctic Pole. Dampier of all travellers the most observant and most
faithful.[3] Diaz who first attained that Stormy Cape, to which from
his time the happier name of Good Hope hath been given; and Van Diemen
the Dutchman. If we look to the learned, are there not Duns Scotus and
Descartes. Madame Dacier and her husband. Damo the not-degenerate
daughter of Pythagoras, and though a woman renowned for secrecy and
silence; Dante and Davila, Dugdale and Dupin; Demosthenes, Doctor Dee,
(he also like the wizard stream all our own) and Bishop Duppa to whom
the _Εικὼν Βασιλικὴ_ whether truly or not, hath been ascribed: Sir
Kenelm Digby by whom it hath been proved that Dogs make syllogisms;
and Daniel Defoe. Here the Doctor always pronounced the christian name
with peculiar emphasis, and here I think it necessary to stop, that
the Reader may take breath.

[Footnote 2: The blank is in the original MS. Quære, _ninety-five_?]

[Footnote 3: “One of the most faithful, as well as exact and excellent
of all voyage writers.” _Vindiciæ Eccl. Angl._ p. 115. Unhappily
Southey's wish to continue this work was not responded to. The
continuation would have proved invaluable now; for who, so well as he,
knew the wiles of the Romish Church, and the subtilties of the
Jesuit?]

CHAPTER CLXXV.

More authority dear boy, name more; and sweet my child let them be men
of good repute and carriage.—

LOVE'S LABOUR LOST.

The Doctor as I have said in the last Chapter pronounced with peculiar
emphasis the christian name of Daniel Defoe. Then taking up the
auspicious word.—Is there not Daniel the prophet, in honour of whom my
baptismal name was given, Daniel if not the greatest of the prophets,
yet for the matter of his prophecies the most important. Daniel the
French historian, and Daniel the English poet; who reminds me of other
poets in D not less eminent. Donne, Dodsley, Drayton, Drummond,
Douglas the Bishop of Dunkeld, Dunbar, Denham, Davenant, Dyer, Durfey,
Dryden, and Stephen Duck; Democritus the wise Abderite, whom I
especially honour for finding matter of jest even in the profoundest
thought, extracting mirth from philosophy, and joining in delightful
matrimony wit with wisdom. Is there not Dollond the Optician.
Dalembert and Diderot among those Encyclopedists with whose renown

all Europe rings from side to side,

Derham the Astro-Physico—and Christo—Theologian, Dillenius the
botanist, Dion who for his eloquence was called the golden-mouthed;
Diagoras who boldly despising the false Gods of Greece, blindly and
audaciously denied the God of Nature. Diocles who invented the
cissoid, Deodati, Diodorus, and Dion Cassius. Thus rich was the letter
D even before the birth of Sir Humphrey Davy, and the catastrophe of
Doctor Dodd: before Daniel Mendoza triumphed over Humphreys in the
ring, and before Dionysius Lardner, Professor at the St —— 'niversity
of London, projected the Cabinet Cyclopædia, Daniel O'Connell fought
Mr. Peel, triumphed over the Duke of Wellington, bullied the British
Government, and changed the British Constitution.

If we look to the fine arts, he pursued, the names of Douw, and Durer,
Dolce and Dominichino instantly occur. In my own profession, among the
ancients, Dioscorides; among the moderns Dippel, whose marvellous oil
is not more exquisitely curious in preparation than powerful in its
use; Dover of the powder; Dalby of the Carminative; Daffy of the
Elixir; Deventer by whom the important art of bringing men into the
world has been so greatly improved; Douglas who has rendered lithotomy
so beautiful an operation, that he asserteth in his motto it may be
done speedily, safely, and pleasantly; Dessault now rising into fame
among the Continental surgeons, and Dimsdale who is extending the
blessings of inoculation. Of persons eminent for virtue or sanctity,
who ever in friendship exceeded Damon the friend of Pythias? Is there
not St. John Damascenus, Dr. Doddridge, Deborah the Nurse of Rebekah,
who was buried beneath Beth-el under an Oak, which was called
Allon-bachuth, the Oak of Weeping, and Deborah the wife of Lapidoth,
who dwelt under her palm-trees between Ramah and Beth-el in Mount
Ephraim, where the children of Israel came up to her for judgment, for
she was a mother in Israel; Demas for whom St. Paul greets the
Colossians, and whom he calleth his fellow labourer; and Dorcas which
being interpreted is in Hebrew Tabitha and in English Doe, who was
full of good works and alms-deeds, whom therefore Peter raised from
the dead, and whom the Greeks might indeed truly have placed among the
_Δευτερόποτμοι_; Daniel already named, but never to be remembered too
often, and Dan the father of his tribe. Grave writers there are, the
Doctor would say, who hesitate not to affirm that Dan was the first
King of Denmark more properly called Danmark from his name, and that
he instituted there the military order of Dannebrog. With the
pretensions of these Danish Antiquaries he pursued, I meddle not.
There is surer authority for the merits of this my first namesake.
“Dan shall judge his people, as one of the tribes of Israel. Dan shall
be a serpent by the way, an adder in the path, that biteth the horse's
heels, so that his rider shall fall backward.” Daniel quoth the
Doctor, is commonly abbreviated into Dan, from whence doubtless it
taketh its root; and the Daniel therefore who is not wise as a
serpent, falsifieth the promise of the patriarch Jacob.

That this should have been the Dan who founded the kingdom of Denmark
he deemed an idle fancy. King Dans in that country however there have
been, and among them was King Dan called Mykelati or the Magnificent,
with whom the Bruna Olld, or age of Combustion, ended in the North,
and the Hougs Olld or age of barrows began, for he it was who
introduced the custom of interment. But he considered it as indeed an
honour to the name, that Death should have been called _Δάνος_ by the
Macedonians, not as a dialectic or provincial form of _Θάνατος_ but
from the Hebrew Dan, which signifies, says Jeremy Taylor, a Judge, as
intimating that Judges are appointed to give sentence upon criminals
in life and death.

Even if we look at the black side of the shield we still find that the
D preserves its power: there is Dathan, who with Korah and Abiram went
down alive into the pit, and the earth closed upon them; Dalila by
whom Sampson was betrayed; Dionysius the acoustical tyrant; Domitian
who like a true vice-gerent of Beelzebub tormented flies as well as
men; Decius the fiercest of the persecutors; the inhuman Dunstan, and
the devilish Dominic, after whom it seems all but an anticlimax to
name the _ipsissimus_ Diabolus, the Devil himself. And here let us
remark through how many languages the name of the author of evil
retains its characteristic initial, _Διάβολος_, Diabolus, Diavolo,
Diablo, Diabo, Diable, in Dutch Duival, in Welsh Diawl, and though the
Germans write him Teufel, it is because in their coarser articulation
the D passes into the cognate sound of T, without offending their
obtuser organs of hearing. Even in the appellations given him by
familiar or vulgar irreverence, the same pregnant initial prevails, he
is the Deuce, and Old Davy and Davy Jones. And it may be noted that in
the various systems of false religion to which he hath given birth,
the Delta is still a dominant inchoative. Witness Dagon of the
Philistines, witness the Daggial of the Mahommedans, and the forgotten
root from whence the _Διὸς_ of the Greeks is derived. Why should I
mention the Roman Diespiter, the Syrian Dirceto, Delius with his
sister Delia, known also as Dictynna and the great Diana of the
Ephesians. The Sicyonian Dia, Dione of whom Venus was born, Deiphobe
the Cumæan Sybil who conducted Æneas in his descent to the infernal
regions. Doris the mother of the Nereids, and Dorus father of the race
of Pygmies. Why should I name the Dioscuri, Dice and Dionysus, the
Earth, Mother Demeter, the Demiourgos, gloomy Dis, Demogorgon dread
and Daphne whom the Gods converted into a Laurel to decorate the brows
of Heroes and Poets.

Truly he would say it may be called a dynamic letter; and not without
mystery did the Hebrews call it Daleth, the door, as though it were
the door of speech. Then its form! how full of mysteries! The wise
Egyptians represented it by three stars disposed in a triangle: it was
their hieroglyphic of the Deity. In Greek it is the Delta.

In this form were the stupendous Pyramids built, when the sage
Egyptians are thought to have emblematised the soul of man, which the
divine Plato supposed to be of this shape. This is the mysterious
triangle, which the Pythagoreans called Pallas, because they said it
sprang from the brain of Jupiter, and Tritogeneia, because if three
right lines were drawn from its angles to meet in the centre, a triple
birth of triangles was produced, each equal to the other.

[Figure: a tetrahedron]

I pass reverently the diviner mysteries which have been illustrated
from hence, and may perhaps be typified herein. Nor will I do more
than touch upon the mechanical powers which we derive from a knowledge
of the properties of the figures, and upon the science of
Trigonometry. In its Roman and more familiar form, the Letter hath
also sublime resemblances or prototypes. The Rainbow resting upon the
earth describes its form. Yea, the Sky and the Earth represent a grand
and immeasurable D; for when you stand upon a boundless plain, the
space behind you and before in infinite longitude is the straight
line, and the circle of the firmament which bends from infinite
altitude to meet it, forms the bow.

For himself, he said, it was a never failing source of satisfaction
when he reflected how richly his own destiny was endowed with Ds. The
D was the star of his ascendant. There was in the accident of his
life,—and he desired it to be understood as using the word accident in
its scholastic acceptations,—a concatenation, a concentration. Yea he
might venture to call it a constellation of Ds. Dove he was born;
Daniel he was baptized; Daniel was the name of his father; Dinah of
his mother, Deborah of his wife; Doctor was his title, Doncaster his
dwelling place; in the year of his marriage, which next to that of his
birth was the most important of his life, D was the Dominical letter;
and in the amorous and pastoral strains wherein he had made his
passion known in the magazines, he had called himself Damon and his
mistress Delia.

CHAPTER CLXXVI.

An I take the humour of a thing once, I am like your tailor's needle;
I go through.

BEN JONSON.

Dove also was a name which abounded with mystical significations, and
which derived peculiar significance from its mysterious conjunction
with Daniel. Had it not been said “Be ye wise as serpents and harmless
as Doves?” To him the text was personally applicable in both parts.
Dove he was by birth. Daniel by baptism or the second birth, and
Daniel was Dan, and Dan shall be a serpent by the way.

But who can express his delight when in perusing Jacob Bryant's
Analysis of ancient Mythology, he found that so many of the most
illustrious personages of antiquity proved to be Doves, when their
names were truly interpreted or properly understood! That erudite
interpreter of hidden things taught him that the name of the Dove was
Iön and Iönah, whence in immediate descent the Oän and Oannes of
Berosus and Abydenus, and in longer but lineal deduction Æneas,
Hannes, Hanno, Ionah, _Ιοάννης_, Johannes, Janus, Eanus among the
elder Romans, Giovanni among the later Italians, Juan, Joam, Jean,
John, Jan, Iwain, Ivan, Ewan, Owen, Evan, Hans, Ann, Hannah, Nannette,
Jane, Jeannette, Jeanne, Joanna and Joan; all who had ever borne these
names, or any name derived from the same radical, as doubtless many
there were in those languages of which he had no knowledge, nor any
means of acquiring it, being virtually Doves. Did not Bryant expressly
say that the prophet Jonah was probably so named as a messenger of the
Deity, the mystic Dove having been from the days of Jonah regarded as
a sacred symbol among all nations where any remembrance of the
destruction and renovation of mankind was preserved! It followed
therefore that the prophet Jonah, Hannibal, St. John, Owen Glendower,
Joan of Arc, Queen Anne, Miss Hannah More, and Sir Watkin Williams
Wynn, were all of them his namesakes, to pretermit or pass over Pope
Joan, Little John, and Jack the Giantkiller. And this followed, not
like the derivation of King Pepin from _Ὅσπερ_, by a jump in the
process, such as that from _διάπερ_ to napkin; nor like the equally
well known identification of a Pigeon with an Eel Pye, in the logic of
which the Doctor would have detected a fallacy, but in lawful
etymology, and according to the strict interpretation of words. If he
looked for the names through the thinner disguise of language there
was Semiramis who having been fed by Doves, was named after them. What
was Zurita the greatest historian of Arragon, but a young stock Dove?
What were the three Palominos so properly enumerated in the
Bibliotheca of Nicolas Antonio. Pedro the Benedictine in whose sermons
a more than ordinary breathing of the spirit might not unreasonably be
expected from his name; Francisco who translated into Castillian the
Psychomachia of the Christian poet Aurelius Prudentius, and Diego the
Prior of Xodar, whose _Liber de mutatione aeris, in quo assidua, et
mirabilis mutationis temporum historia, cum suis causis, enarratur_,
he so greatly regretted that he had never been able to procure: what
were these Palominos? what but Doves?—Father Colombiere who framed the
service for the Heart of Jesus which was now so fashionable in
Catholic countries, was clearly of the Dove genus. St. Columba was a
decided Dove; three there were certainly, the Senonian, the Cordovan
and the Cornish: and there is reason to believe that there was a
fourth also, a female Dove, who held a high rank in St. Ursula's great
army of virgins. Columbo the Anatomist, deservedly eminent as one of
those who by their researches led the way for Harvey, he also was a
Dove. Lastly,—and the Doctor in fine taste always reserved the
greatest glory of the Dove name, for the conclusion of his
discourse—lastly, there was Christopher Columbus, whom he used to call
his famous namesake. And he never failed to commend Ferdinand Columbus
for the wisdom and piety with which he had commented upon the mystery
of the name, to remark that his father had conveyed the grace of the
Holy Ghost to the New World, shewing to the people who knew him not
who was God's beloved son, as the Holy Ghost had done in the figure of
a Dove at the baptism of St. John, and bearing like Noah's Dove the
Olive Branch, and the Oil of Baptism over the waters of the ocean.

And what would our onomatologist have said if he had learned to read
these words in that curious book of the &c. family, the Oriental
fragments of Major Edward Moor: “In respect to St. Columba, or Colomb,
and other superstitious names and things in close relationship, I
shall have in another place something to say. I shall try to connect
_Col-omb_, with Kal-O'm,—those infinitely mysterious words of Hindu
mythology: and with these, divers _Mythé_, converging into or
diverging from O'M—A U M,—the Irish _Ogham_,—I A M,—_Amen,
ΙΛω_,—Il-Kolmkill, &c. &c. &c.” Surely had the onomatologist lived to
read this passage, he would forthwith have opened and corresponded
with the benevolent and erudite etcæterarist of Bealings.

These things were said in his deeper moods. In the days of courtship
he had said in song that Venus's car was drawn by Doves, regretting at
the time that an allusion which came with such peculiar felicity from
him, should appear to common readers to mean nothing more than what
rhymers from time immemorial had said before him. After marriage he
often called Mrs. Dove his Turtle, and in his playful humours when the
gracefulness of youth had gradually been superseded by a certain
rotundity of form, he sometimes named her _φάττα_ his ring-dove. Then
he would regret that she had not proved a stock-dove,—and if she
frowned at him, or looked grave, she was his pouting pigeon.

One inconvenience however Mrs. Dove felt from his reverence for the
name. He never suffered a pigeon-pie at his table. And when he read
that the Samaritans were reproached with retaining a trace of Assyrian
superstition because they held it unlawful to eat this bird, he was
from that time inclined to think favourably of the schismatics of
Mount Gerizim.

CHAPTER CLXXVII.

None are so surely caught, when they are catch'd
As wit turn'd fool: folly, in wisdom hatch'd
Hath wisdom's warrant, and the help of school,
And wit's own grace to grace a learned fool.

LOVE'S LABOUR LOST.

It may easily be supposed that the Doctor was versed in the science of
numbers; not merely that common science which is taught at schools and
may be learnt from Cocker's Arithmetic, but the more recondite
mysteries which have in all ages delighted minds like his; and of
which the richest specimens may be seen in the writings of the Hugonot
Minister Jean de l'Espagne, and in those of our contemporary Mr. John
Bellamy, author of the Ophion, of various papers in the Classical
Journal, and defender of the Old and New Testament.

_Cet auteur est assez digne d'etre lu_, says Bayle of Jean de
l'Espagne, and he says it in some unaccountable humour, too gravely
for a jest. The writer who is thus recommended was Minister of the
Reformed French Church in Westminster, which met at that time in
Somerset Chapel, and his friend Dr. De Garencieres, who wrote
commendatory verses upon him in French, Latin and Greek, calls him

_Belle lumiere des Pasteurs,
Ornement du Siecle ou nous sommes,
Qui trouve des admirateurs
Par tout ou il y a des hommes._

He was one of those men to whom the Bible comes as a book of problems
and riddles, a mine in which they are always at work, thinking that
whatever they can throw up must needs be gold. Among the various
observations which he gave the world without any other order, as he
says, than that in which they presented themselves to his memory,
there may be found good, bad and indifferent. He thought the English
Church had improperly appointed a Clerk to say Amen for the people.
Amen being intended, among other reasons, as a mark whereby to
distinguish those who believed with the officiating Priest from
Idolaters and Heretics. He thought it was not expedient that Jews
should be allowed to reside in England, for a Jew would perceive in
the number of our tolerated sects, a confusion worse than that of
Babel; and as the multitude here are always susceptible of every folly
which is offered, and the more monstrous the faith, to them the better
mystery, it was to be feared, he said, that for the sake of converting
two or three Jews we were exposing a million Christians to the danger
of Judaizing; or at least that we should see new religions start up,
compounded of Judaism with Christianity. He was of opinion, in
opposition to what was then generally thought in England that one
might innocently say God bless you, to a person who sneezed, though he
candidly admitted that there was no example either in the Old or New
Testament, and that in all the Scriptures only one person is mentioned
as having sneezed, to wit the Shunamite's son. He thought it more
probable from certain texts that the Soul at death departs by way of
the nostrils, than by way of the mouth according to the vulgar
notion:—had he previously ascertained which way it came in, he would
have had no difficulty in deciding which way it went out. And he
propounded and resolved a question concerning Jephtha which no person
but himself ever thought of asking: _Pourquoy Dieu voulant delivrer
les Israelites, leur donna pour liberateur, voire pour Chef et
Gouverneur perpetuel, un fils d'une paillarde?_ “O Jephtha, Judge of
Israel,” that a Frenchman should call thee in filthy French _fils
d'une putain!_

But the peculiar talent of the _Belle Lumiere des Pasteurs_ was for
cabalistic researches concerning numbers, or what he calls _L'Harmonie
du Temps_. Numbers, he held, (and every generation, every family,
every individual was marked with one,) were not the causes of what
came to pass, but they were marks or impresses which God set upon his
works, distinguishing them by the difference of these their cyphers.
And he laid it down as a rule that in doubtful points of computation,
the one wherein some mystery could be discovered was always to be
preferred. QUOY?—(think how triumphantly his mouth opened and his nose
was erected and his nostrils were dilated, when he pronounced that
interrogation)—QUOY? _la varieté de nos opinions qui provient
d'imperfection, aneantira-t-elle les merveilles de Dieu?_ In the
course of his Scriptural computations he discovered that when the Sun
stood still at the command of Joshua, it was precisely 2555 years
after the Creation, that is seven years of years, a solar week, after
which it had been preordained that the Sun should thus have its
sabbath of rest: _Ceci n'est il pas admirable?_ It was on the tenth
year of the tenth year of the years that the Sun went back ten
degrees, which was done to show the chronology: _ou est le stupide qui
ne soit ravi en admiration d'une si celeste harmonie?_ With equal
sagacity and equal triumph he discovered how the generations from Adam
to Christ went by twenty-twos; and the generations of Christ by
sevens, being 77 in all, and that from the time the promise of the
Seed was given till its fulfilment there elapsed a week of years,
seven times seventy years, seventy weeks of years, and seven times
seventy weeks of years by which beautiful geometry, if he might be
permitted to use so inadequate a term, the fullness of time was made
up.

What wonderful significations also hath Mr. Bellamy in his kindred
pursuits discovered and darkly pointed out! Doth he not tell us of
seven steps, seven days, seven priests, seven rams, seven bullocks,
seven trumpets, seven shepherds, seven stars, seven spirits, seven
eyes, seven lamps, seven pipes, seven heads, four wings, four beasts,
four kings, four kingdoms, four carpenters; the number three he has
left unimproved,—but for two,—

which number Nature framed
In the most useful faculties of man,
To strengthen mutually and relieve each other,
Two eyes, two ears, two arms, two legs and feet,
That where one failed the other might supply,

for this number Mr. Bellamy has two cherubims, two calves, two
turtles, two birds alive, two [1], two baskets of figs, two
olive trees, two women grinding, two men in the fields, two woes, two
witnesses, two candlesticks; and when he descends to the unit, he
tells us of one tree, one heart, one stick, one fold, one pearl,—to
which we must add one Mr. John Bellamy the Pearl of Commentators.

[Footnote 1: The blank is in the MS.]

But what is this to the exquisite manner in which he elucidates the
polytheism of the Greeks and Romans, showing us that the inferior Gods
of their mythology were in their origin only men who had exercised
certain departments in the state, a discovery which he illustrates in
a manner the most familiar, and at the same time the most striking for
its originality. Thus, he says, if the Greeks and Romans had been
Englishmen, or if we Englishmen of the present day were Greeks and
Romans, we should call our Secretary at War, Lord Bathurst for
instance, Mars; the Lord Chancellor (Lord Eldon to wit) Mercury,—as
being at the head of the department for eloquence.—(But as Mercury is
also the God of thieves may not Mr. Bellamy, grave as he is, be
suspected of insinuating here that the Gentlemen of the Long Robe are
the most dextrous of pickpockets?)—The first Lord of the Admiralty,
Neptune. The President of the College of Physicians, Apollo. The
President of the Board of Agriculture, Janus. Because with one face he
looked forward to the new year, while at the same time he looked back
with the other on the good or bad management of the agriculture of the
last, wherefore he was symbolically represented with a second face at
the back of his head. Again Mr. Bellamy seems to be malicious, in thus
typifying or seeming to typify Sir John Sinclair between two
administrations with a face for both. The ranger of the forests he
proceeds, would be denominated Diana. The Archbishop of Canterbury,
Minerva;—Minerva in a Bishop's wig! The first Lord of the Treasury,
Juno; and the Society of Suppression of Vice,—Reader, lay thy watch
upon the table, and guess for three whole minutes what the Society for
the Suppression of Vice would be called upon this ingenious scheme, if
the Greeks and Romans were Englishmen of the present generation, or if
we of the present generation were heathen Greeks and Romans. I leave a
_carte blanche_ before this, lest thine eye outrunning thy judgement,
should deprive thee of that proper satisfaction which thou wilt feel
if thou shouldst guess aright. But exceed not the time which I have
affixed for thee, for if thou dost not guess aright in three minutes,
thou wouldest not in as many years.

* * * * *

VENUS. Yes Reader. By Cyprus and Paphos and the Groves of Idalia. By
the little God Cupid,—by all the Loves and Doves,—and by the lobbies
of the London theatres—he calls the Society for the Suppression of
Vice, VENUS!

Fancy, says Fuller, runs riot when spurred with superstition. This is
his marginal remark upon a characteristic paragraph concerning the
Chambers about Solomon's Temple, with which I will here recreate the
reader. “As for the mystical meaning of these chambers, Bede no doubt,
thought he hit the very mark—when finding therein the three conditions
of life, all belonging to God's Church: in the ground chamber, such as
live in marriage; in the middle chamber such as contract; but in the
_excelsis_ or third story, such as have attained to the sublimity of
perpetual virginity. Rupertus in the lowest chamber lodgeth those of
practical lives with Noah; in the middle—those of mixed lives with
Job; and in the highest—such as spend their days with Daniel in holy
speculations. But is not this rather _lusus_, than _allusio_, sporting
with, than expounding of scriptures? Thus when the gates of the Oracle
are made _five square_, Ribera therein reads our conquest over the
five senses, and when those of the door of the Temple are said to be
_four square_, therein saith he is denoted the _quaternion_ of
Evangelists. After this rate, Hiram (though no doubt dexterous in his
art) could not so soon fit a pillar with a fashion as a Friar can fit
that fashion with a mystery. If made three square, then the Trinity of
Persons: four square, the cardinal virtues: five square, the
_Pentateuch of Moses_: six square, the _Petitions_ or the _Lord's
Prayer_: seven square, their _Sacraments_: eight square, the
_Beatitudes_: nine square, the Orders of Angels: ten square, the
Commandments: eleven square, the moral virtues: twelve square, the
articles of the creed are therein contained. In a word—for matter of
numbers—fancy is never at a loss—like a beggar, never out of her way,
but hath some haunts where to repose itself. But such as in expounding
scriptures reap more than God did sow there, never eat what they reap
themselves, because such grainless husks, when seriously thrashed out,
vanish all into chaff.”[2]

[Footnote 2: Pisgah Sight of Palestine, Book iii. c. vii.]

CLXXVIII.

THE MYSTERY OF NUMBERS PURSUED, AND CERTAIN CALCULATIONS GIVEN WHICH
MAY REMIND THE READER OF OTHER CALCULATIONS EQUALLY
CORRECT—ANAGRAMMATIZING OF NAMES, AND THE DOCTOR'S SUCCESS THEREIN.

[Footnote 1: On referring to Bishop Hacket's Sermons I find this Motto
it not copied out _Verbatim_. See p. 245.]

This choice morsel hath led us from the science of numbers. Great
account hath been made of that science in old times. There was an
epigrammatist who discovering that the name of his enemy Damagoras
amounted in numerical letters to the same sum as _Λοιμὸς_ the plague,
inferred from thence that Damagorus and the Plague were one and the
same thing; a stingless jest serving like many satires of the present
age to show the malice and not the wit of the satirist. But there were
those among the ancients who believed that stronger influences existed
in the number of a name, and that because of their arithmetical
inferiority in this point, Patroclus was slain by Hector, and Hector
by Achilles. Diviners grounded upon this a science which they called
Onomantia or Arithmomantia. When Maurice of Saxony to the great fear
of those who were most attached to him, engaged in war against Charles
V, some one encouraged his desponding friends by this augury, and said
that if the initials of the two names were considered, it would be
seen that the fortunes of Maurice preponderated over those of Charles
in the proportion of a thousand to a hundred.

A science like this could not be without attractions for the Doctor;
and it was with no little satisfaction that he discovered in the three
Ds with which his spoons and his house linen were marked, by
considering them as so many capital Deltas, the figures 444, combining
the complex virtues of the four thrice told. But he discovered greater
secrets in the names of himself and his wife when taken at full
length. He tried them in Latin and could obtain no satisfactory
result, nor had he any better success in Greek when he observed the
proper orthography of _Δανιὴλ_ and _Δεββῶρα_.[2] But anagrammatists
are above the rules of orthography, just as Kings, Divines and Lawyers
are privileged, if it pleases them, to dispense with the rules of
grammar. Taking these words therefore letter by letter according to
the common pronunciation (for who said he pronounces them Danieel and
Deboarah?) and writing the surname in Greek letters instead of
translating it, the sum which it thus produced was equal to his most
sanguine wishes, for thus it proved

Daniel and Deborah Dove.
_Δανιὲλ_ _Δεβόῥα_ _Δοὺε_.

_Δανιὲλ_
_Δ_ 4
_α_ 1
_ν_ 50
_ι_ 10
_ε_ 5
_λ_ 30
-—-
Daniel 100

_Δεβόῥα_
_Δ_ 4
_ε_ 5
_β_ 2
_ο_ 70
_ρ_ 100
_α_ 1
-—-
Deborah 182

_Δοὺε_
_Δ_ 4
_ο_ 70
_υ_ 400
_ε_ 5
-—-
Dove 479

The whole being added together gave the following product

Daniel 100
Deborah 182
Dove 479
—--
761

[Footnote 2: _Δεβόῥῥα_ Gen. xxxv. 8., _Δεββῶρα_ Judges iv. 4. The
double _ῥ_ will not affect the mystery!]

Here was the number 761 found in fair addition, without any arbitrary
change of letters, or licentious innovation in orthography. And herein
was mystery. The number 761 is a prime number; from hence the Doctor
inferred that as the number was indivisible, there could be no
division between himself and Mrs. Dove; an inference which the harmony
of their lives fully warranted. And this alone would have amply
rewarded his researches. But a richer discovery flashed upon him. The
year 1761 was the year of his marriage, and to make up the deficient
thousand there was M for marriage and matrimony. These things he would
say must never be too explicit; their mysterious character would be
lost if they lay upon the surface; like precious metals and precious
stones you must dig to find them.

He had bestowed equal attention and even more diligence in
anagrammatizing the names. His own indeed furnished him at first with
a startling and by no means agreeable result; for upon transposing the
component letters of Daniel Dove, there appeared the words _Leaden
void!_ Nor was he more fortunate in a Latin attempt, which gave him
_Dan vile Deo_. _Vel dona Dei_ as far as it bore a semblance of
meaning was better; but when after repeated dislocations and juxta
positions there came forth the words _Dead in love_, Joshua Sylvester
was not more delighted at finding that Jacobus Stuart made _justa
scrutabo_, and James Stuart _A just Master_, than the Doctor,—for it
was in the May days of his courtship. In the course of these
anagrammatical experiments he had a glimpse of success which made him
feel for a moment like a man whose lottery ticket is next in number to
the £20,000 prize. Dove failed only in one letter of being Ovid. In
old times they did not stand upon trifles in these things, and John
Bunyan was perfectly satisfied with extracting from his name the words
_Nu hony in a B_,—a sentence of which the orthography and the import
are worthy of each other. But although the Doctor was contented with a
very small sufficit of meaning, he could not depart so violently from
the letters here. The disappointment was severe though momentary: it
was, as we before observed, in the days of his courtship; and could he
thus have made out his claim to be called Ovid, he had as clear a
right to add Naso as the Poet of Sulmo himself, or any of the Nasonic
race, for he had been at the promontory, “and why indeed Naso,” as
Holofernes has said?—Why not merely for that reason ‘looking toward
Damascus’ which may be found in the second volume of this work in the
sixty-third chapter and at the two hundred and thirtieth page, but
also “for smelling out the odoriferous flowers of fancy, the jerks of
invention?”[3]

[Footnote 3: Love's Labour Lost, Act iv. Sc. ii.]

Thus much for his own name. After marriage he added his wife's with
the conjunction copulative, and then came out _Dear Delia had bound
one_: nothing could be more felicitous, Delia as has already been
noticed, having been the poetical name by which he addressed the
object of his affections. Another result was _I hadden a dear
bond-love_, but having some doubts as to the syntax of the verb, and
some secret dislike to its obsolete appearance, he altered it into
_Ned, I had a dear bond-love_, as though he was addressing his friend
Dr. Miller the organist, whose name was Edward.

CLXXIX.

THE SUBJECT OF ANAGRAMS CONTINUED; A TRUE OBSERVATION WHICH MANY FOR
WANT OF OBSERVATION WILL NOT DISCOVER TO BE SUCH, VIZ., THAT THERE IS
A LATENT SUPERSTITION IN THE MOST RATIONAL OF MEN. LUCKY AND
UNLUCKY—FITTING AND UNFITTING—ANAGRAMS, AND HOW THE DOCTOR'S TASTE IN
THIS LINE WAS DERIVED FROM OUR OLD ACQUAINTANCE JOSHUA SYLVESTER.

Ha gran forza una vecchia opinione;
E bisogna grand' arte, e gran fatica,
A cavarla del capo alle persone.

BRONZINO PITTORE.

Anagrams are not likely ever again to hold so high a place among the
prevalent pursuits of literature as they did in the seventeenth
century, when Louis XIII. appointed the Provençal Thomas Billen to be
his Royal Anagrammatist, and granted him a salary of 1200 _livres_.
But no person will ever hit upon an apt one without feeling that
degree of pleasure and surprize with which any odd coincidence is
remarked. Has any one who knows Johnny the Bear heard his name thus
anagrammatized without a smile? we may be sure he smiled and growled
at the same time when he first heard it himself.

Might not Father Salvator Mile, and Father Louis Almerat, who were
both musicians, have supposed themselves as clearly predestined to be
musical, as ever seventh son of a Septimus thought himself born for
the medical professions, if they had remarked what Penrose discovered
for them, that their respective names, with the F. for Friar prefixed,
each contained the letters of the six musical notes _ut_, _re_, _mi_,
_fa_, _sol_, _la_, and not a letter more or less?

There is, and always hath been, and ever will be, a latent
superstition in the most rational of men. It belongs to the weakness
and dependence of human nature. Believing as the scriptures teach us
to believe, that signs and tokens have been vouchsafed in many cases,
is it to be wondered at that we seek for them sometimes in our moods
of fancy, or that they suggest themselves to us in our fears and our
distress? Men may cast off religion and extinguish their conscience
without ridding themselves of this innate and inherent tendency.

Proper names have all in their origin been significant in all
languages. It was easy for men who brooded over their own
imaginations, to conceive that they might contain in their elements a
more recondite, and perhaps, fatidical signification; and the same
turn or twist of mind which led the Cabbalists to their extravagant
speculations have taken this direction, when confined within the
limits of languages which have no supernatural pretensions. But no
serious importance was attached to such things, except by persons
whose intellects were in some degree deranged. They were sought for
chiefly as an acceptable form of compliment, sometimes in
self-complacency of the most offensive kind, and sometimes for the
sting which they might carry with them. Lycophron is said to have been
the inventor of this trifling.

The Rules for the true discovery of perfect anagrams, as laid down by
Mrs. Mary Fage,[1] allowed as convenient a license in orthography as
the Doctor availed himself of in Greek.

E may most—what conclude an English word,
And so a letter at a need afford.
H is an aspiration and no letter;
It may be had or left which we think better.
I may be I or Y as need require;
Q ever after doth a U desire;
Two Vs may be a double U; and then
A double U may be two Vs again.
X may divided be, and S and C
May by that letter comprehended be.
Z a double S may comprehend:
And lastly an apostrophe may ease
Sometimes a letter when it doth not please.

[Footnote 1: In her Fames Roule, or the names of King Charles, his
Queen and his most hopeful posterity; together with the names of the
Dukes, Marquisses, &c., anagrammatized, and expressed by acrostick
lines on their lives. London, 1637, R. S.]

Two of the luckiest hits which anagrammatists have made were on the
Attorney General William Noy, _I moyl in law_; and Sir Edmundbury
Godfrey _I find murdered by rogues_. Before Felton's execution it was
observed that his anagram was _No, flie not_.

A less fortunate one made the Lady Davies mad, or rather fixed the
character of her madness. She was the widow of Sir John Davies, the
statesman and poet, and having anagrammatized Eleanor Davies into
Reveal O Daniel, she was crazy enough to fancy that the spirit of the
Prophet Daniel was incorporated in her. The Doctor mentioned the case
with tenderness and a kind of sympathy. “Though the anagram says Dr.
Heylyn, had too much by an L and too little by an S, yet she found
Daniel and Reveal in it, and that served her turn.” Setting up for a
Prophetess upon this conceit, and venturing upon political predictions
in sore times, she was brought before the Court of High Commission,
where serious pains were preposterously bestowed in endeavouring to
reason her out of an opinion founded on insanity. All, as might have
been expected, and ought to have been foreseen, would not do, “till
Lamb, then Dean of the Arches, shot her through and through with an
arrow borrowed from her own quiver.” For while the Divines were
reasoning the point with her out of scripture, he took a pen into his
hand, and presently finding that the letters of her name might be
assorted to her purpose, said to her, Madam, I see that you build much
on anagrams, and I have found out one which I hope will fit you: Dame
Eleanor Davies,—_Never so mad a Ladie!_ He then put it into her hands
in writing, “which happy fancy brought that grave Court into such a
laughter, and the poor woman thereupon into such a confusion, that
afterwards she either grew wiser, or was less regarded.”—This is a
case in which it may be admitted that ridicule was a fair test of
truth.

When Henri IV. sent for Marshal Biron to court, with an assurance of
full pardon if he would reveal without reserve the whole of his
negociations and practices, that rash and guilty man resolved to go
and brave all dangers, because certain Astrologers had assured him
that his ascendant commanded that of the King, and in confirmation of
this some flattering friend discovered in his name _Henri de Bourbon_
this anagram _De Biron Bonheur_. _Comme ainsi fust_, says one of his
contemporaries, _qu'il en fist gloire, quelque Gentilhomme bien advisé
là present—dit tout bas à l'oreille d'un sien amy, s'il le pense ainsi
il n'est pas sage, et trouvera qu'il y a du_ Robin _dedans_ Biron.
_Robin_ was a name used at that time by the French as synonymous with
simpleton. But of unfitting anagrams none were ever more curiously
unfit than those which were discovered in Marguerite de Valois, the
profligate Queen of Navarre; _Salve, Virgo Mater Dei; ou, de vertu
royal image!_ The Doctor derived his taste for anagrams from the poet
with whose rhymes and fancies he had been so well embued in his
boyhood, old Joshua Sylvester, who as the translator of Du Bartas,
signed himself to the King in anagrammatical French _Voy Sire
Saluste_, and was himself addressed in anagrammatical Latin as _Vere
Os Salustii_.

“Except Eteostiques,” say Drummond of Hawthornden, “I think the
Anagram the most idle study in the world of learning. Their maker must
be _homo miserrimæ patientiæ_, and when he is done, what is it but
_magno conatu nugas magnas agere!_ you may of one and the same name
make both good and evil. So did my Uncle find in Anna Regina,
_Ingannare_, as well as of Anna Britannorum Regina, _Anna Regnantium
Arbor_: as he who in Charles de Valois, found _Chassè la dure loy_,
and after the massacre found _Chasseur desloyal_. Often they are most
false, as Henri de Bourbon, _Bonheur de Biron_. Of all the
anagrammatists and with least pain, he was the best who, out of his
own name, being Jacques de la Chamber, found _La Chamber de Jacques_,
and rested there: and next to him, here at home, a Gentleman whose
mistress's name being Anna Grame, he found it an _Anagrame_ already.”

CHAPTER CLXXX.

CONSTANT. ORAT. AD SANCT. CÆT. C. VII.

“Deformity is either natural, voluntary, or adventitious, being either
caused by _God's unseen Providence_, (_by men nick-named, chance_,) or
by men's cruelty.”

FULLER'S HOLY STATE, B. iii. c. 15.

It may readily be inferred from what has already been said of our
Philosopher's way of thinking, that he was not likely to use the words
luck, chance, accident, fortune or misfortune, with as little
reflection as is ordinarily shown in applying them. The distinction
which that fantastic—and yet most likeable person—Margaret Duchess of
Newcastle, makes between Chance and Fortune was far from satisfying
him. “Fortune,” says her Grace, (she might have been called her Beauty
too) “is only various corporeal motions of several creatures—designed
to one creature, or more creatures; either to _that_ creature, or
_those_ creatures advantage, or disadvantage; if advantage, man names
it Good Fortune; if disadvantage, man names it Ill Fortune. As for
Chance, it is the visible effects of some hidden cause; and Fortune, a
sufficient cause to produce such effects; for the conjunction of
sufficient causes, doth produce such or such effects, which effects
could not be produced—if any of those causes were wanting: so that
Chances are but the effects of Fortune.”

The Duchess had just thought enough about this to fancy that she had a
meaning, and if she had thought a little more she might have
discovered that she had none.

The Doctor looked more accurately both to his meaning and his words;
but keeping as he did, in my poor judgement, the golden mean between
superstition and impiety, there was nothing in this that savoured of
preciseness or weakness, nor of that scrupulosity which is a compound
of both. He did not suppose that trifles and floccinaucities of which
neither the causes nor consequences are of the slightest import, were
predestined; as for example—whether he had beef or mutton for dinner,
wore a blue coat or a brown—or took off his wig with his right hand or
with his left. He knew that all things are under the direction of
almighty and omniscient Goodness; but as he never was unmindful of
that Providence in its dispensations of mercy and of justice, so he
never disparaged it.

Herein the Philosopher of Doncaster agreed with the Philosopher of
Norwich who saith, “let not fortune—which hath no name in Scripture,
have any in thy divinity. Let providence, not chance, have the honour
of thy acknowledgements, and be thy Œdipus on contingences. Mark well
the paths and winding ways thereof; but be not too wise in the
construction, or sudden in the application. The hand of Providence
writes often by abbreviatures, hieroglyphics or short characters,
which like the laconism on the wall, are not to be made out but by a
hint or key from that spirit which indicted them.”[1]

[Footnote 1: The Readers of Jeremy Taylor will not fail to remember
the passage following from his Great Exemplar.

“God's Judgments are like _the writing upon the wall_, which was a
missive of anger from God upon Belshazzar. It came upon an errand of
revenge, and yet was writ in so dark characters that none could read
it but a prophet.”—DISC. xviii. _Of the Causes and Manner of the
Divine Judgments_.]

Some ill, he thought, was produced in human affairs by applying the
term unfortunate to circumstances which were brought about by
imprudence. A man was unfortunate, if being thrown from his horse on a
journey, he broke arm or leg, but not if he broke his neck in
steeple-hunting, or when in full cry after a fox; if he were
impoverished by the misconduct of others, not if he were ruined by his
own folly and extravagance; if he suffered in any way by the villainy
of another, not if he were transported, or hanged for his own.

Neither would he allow that either man or woman could with propriety
be called, as we not unfrequently hear in common speech,
_unfortunately_ ugly. _Wickedly_ ugly, he said, they might be, and too
often were; and in such cases the greater their pretensions to beauty,
the uglier they were. But goodness has a beauty of its own, which is
not dependent upon form and features, and which makes itself felt and
acknowledged however otherwise ill-favoured the face may be in which
it is set. He might have said with Seneca, _errare mihi visus est qui
dixit_

_Gratior est pulchro veniens e corpore virtus;_

_nullo enim honestamento eget; ipsa et magnum sui decus est, et corpus
suum consecret._ None, he would say with great earnestness, appeared
so ugly to his instinctive perception as some of those persons whom
the world accounted handsome, but upon whom pride, or haughtiness or
conceit had set its stamp, or who bore in their countenances what no
countenance can conceal, the habitual expression of any reigning vice,
whether it were sensuality and selfishness, or envy, hatred, malice
and uncharitableness. Nor could he regard with any satisfaction a fine
face which had no ill expression, if it wanted a good one: he had no
pleasure in beholding mere formal and superficial beauty, that which
lies no deeper than the skin, and depends wholly upon “a set of
features and complexion.” He had more delight, he said in looking at
one of the statues in Mr. Weddel's collection, than at a beautiful
woman if he read in her face that she was as little susceptible of any
virtuous emotion as the marble. While therefore he would not allow
that any person could be unfortunately ugly, he thought that many were
unfortunately handsome, and that no wise parent would wish his
daughter to be eminently beautiful, lest what in her childhood was
naturally and allowably the pride of his eye—should when she grew up
become the grief of his heart. It requires no wide range of
observation to discover that the woman who is married for her beauty
has little better chance of happiness than she who is married for her
fortune. “I have known very few women in my life,” said Mrs. Montagu,
“whom extraordinary charms and accomplishments did not make unhappy.”

CHAPTER CLXXXI.

FULLER'S HOLY STATE, B. iii. c. 15.

I asked him once if there was not a degree of ugliness which might be
deemed unfortunate, because a consciousness of it affected the
ill-favoured individual so as to excite in him discontent and envy,
and other evil feelings. He admitted that in an evil disposition it
might have this tendency; but he said a disposition which was
injuriously affected by such a cause, would have had other
propensities quite as injurious in themselves and in their direction,
evolved and brought into full action by an opposite cause. To
exemplify this he instanced the two brothers Edward IV. and Richard
III.

Fidus Cornelius burst into tears in the Roman Senate, because Corbulo
called him a plucked ostrich: _adversus alia maledicta mores et vitam
convulnerantia, frontis illi firmitas constitit; adversus hoc tam
absurdum lacrimæ prociderunt; tanta animorum imbecillitas est ubi
ratio discessit._ But instances of such weakness, the Doctor said, are
as rare as they are ridiculous. Most people see themselves in the most
favourable light. “Ugly!” a very ugly, but a very conceited fellow
exclaimed one day when he contemplated himself in a looking-glass;
“ugly! and yet there's something genteel in the face!” There are more
coxcombs in the world than there are vain women; in the one sex there
is a weakness for which time soon brings a certain cure, in the other
it deserves a harsher appellation.

As to ugliness, not only in this respect do we make large allowances
for ourselves, but our friends make large allowances for us also. Some
one praised Palisson to Madame de Sevigné for the elegance of his
manners, the magnanimity, the rectitude and other virtues which he
ought to have possessed; _hé bien_ she replied, _pour moi je ne
connois que sa laideur; qu'on me le dedouble donc._ Wilkes, who
pretended as little to beauty, as he did to public virtue, when he was
off the stage used to say, that in winning the good graces of a lady
there was not more than three days difference between himself and the
handsomest man in England. One of his female partizans praised him for
his agreeable person, and being reminded of his squinting, she replied
indignantly, that it was not more than a gentleman ought to squint. So
rightly has Madame de Villedieu observed that

_En mille occasions l'amour a sçeu prouver
Que tout devient pour luy, matiere à sympathie,
Quand il fait tant que d'en vouloir trouver._

She no doubt spoke sincerely, according to the light wherein, in the
obliquity of her intellectual eyesight she beheld him. Just as that
prince of republican and unbelieving bigots, Thomas Holles said of the
same person, “I am sorry for the irregularities of Wilkes; they are
however only as spots in the sun!” “It is the weakness of the many,”
says a once noted Journalist “that when they have taken a fancy to a
man, or to the name of a man they take a fancy even to his failings.”
But there must have been no ordinary charm in the manners of John
Wilkes, who in one interview overcame Johnson's well-founded and
vehement dislike. The good nature of his countenance, and its vivacity
and cleverness made its physical ugliness be overlooked; and probably
his cast of the eye, which was a squint of the first water, seemed
only a peculiarity which gave effect to the sallies of his wit.

Hogarth's portrait of him he treated with characteristic good humour,
and allowed it “to be an excellent compound caricature, or a
caricature of what Nature had already caricatured. I know but one
short apology said he, to be made for this gentleman, or to speak more
properly, for the _person_ of Mr. Wilkes; it is, that he did not make
himself; and that he never was solicitous about the _case_ (as
Shakespeare calls it) only so far as to keep it clean and in health. I
never heard that he ever hung over the glassy stream, like another
Narcissus admiring the image in it; nor that he ever stole an amorous
look at his counterfeit in a side mirror. His form, such as it is,
ought to give him no pain, while it is capable of giving so much
pleasure to others. I believe he finds himself tolerably happy in the
clay cottage to which he is tenant for life, because he has learned to
keep it in pretty good order. While the share of health and animal
spirits which heaven has given out, should hold out, I can scarcely
imagine he will be one moment peevish about the outside of so
precarious, so temporary a habitation; or will ever be brought to our
_Ingenium Galbæ malè habitat:—Monsieur est mal logé._” This was part
of a note for his intended edition of Churchill.

Squinting, according to a French writer, is not unpleasing, when it is
not in excess. He is probably right in this observation. A slight
obliquity of vision sometimes gives an archness of expression, and
always adds to the countenance a peculiarity, which when the
countenance has once become agreeable to the beholder, renders it more
so. But when the eye-balls recede from each other to the outer verge
of their orbits, or approach so closely that nothing but the
intervention of the nose seems to prevent their meeting, a sense of
distortion is produced, and consequently of pain. _Il y a des gens_,
says Vigneul Marville, _qui ne sauroient regarder des louches sans en
sentir quelque douleur aux yeux. Je suis des ceux-la._ This is because
the deformity is catching, which it is well known to be in children;
the tendency to imitation is easily excited in a highly sensitive
frame—as in them; and the pain felt in the eyes gives warning that
this action which is safe only while it is unconscious and unobserved,
is in danger of being deranged.

A cast of the eye _à la Montmorency_ was much admired at the Court of
Louis XIII. where the representative of that illustrious family had
rendered it fashionable by his example. Descartes is said to have
liked all persons who squinted for his nurse's sake, and the anecdote
tells equally in favour of her and of him.

St. Evremond says in writing the Eulogy of Turenne. _Je ne m'amuserai
point à depeindre tous les traits de son visage. Les caractéres des
Grands Hommes n'ont rien de commun avec les portraits des belles
femmes. Mais je puis dire en gros qu'il avoit quelque chose d'auguste
et d'agréable; quelque chose en sa physionomie qui faisoit concevoir
je ne sai quoi de grand en son ame, et en son esprit. On pouvoit juger
à le voir, que par un disposition particuliere la Nature l'avoit
préparé à faire tout ce qu'il a fait._ If Turenne had not been an
ill-looking man, the skilful eulogist would not thus have excused
himself from giving any description of his countenance; a countenance
from which indeed, if portraits belie it not, it might be inferred
that nature had prepared him to change his party during the civil
wars, as lightly as he would have changed his seat at a card-table,—to
renounce the Protestant faith, and to ravage the Palatinate. _Ne
souvenez-vous pas de la physionomie funeste de ce grand homme,_ says
Bussy Rabutin to Madame de Sevigné. An Italian bravo said _che non
teneva specchio in camera, perche quando si crucciava diveniva tanto
terribile nell' aspetto, che veggendosi haria fatto troppo gran paura
a se stesso._[1]

[Footnote 1: IL CORTEGIANO, 27.]

Queen Elizabeth could not endure the sight of deformity; when she went
into public her guards it is said removed all misshapen and hideous
persons out of her way.

Extreme ugliness has once proved as advantageous to its possessor as
extreme beauty, if there be truth in those Triads wherein the Three
Men are recorded who escaped from the battle of Camlan. They were
Morvran ab Teged, in consequence of being so ugly, that every body
thinking him to be a Demon out of Hell fled from him; Sandde
Bryd-Angel, or Angel-aspect, in consequence of being so fine of form,
so beautiful and fair, that no one raised a hand against him—for he
was thought to be an Angel from Heaven: and Glewlwyd Gavaelvawr, or
Great-grasp (King Arthur's porter) from his size and strength, so that
none stood in his way, and every body ran before him; excepting these
three, none escaped, from Camlan,—that fatal field where King Arthur
fell with all his chivalry.

That painter of great but insane genius, William Blake, of whom Allan
Cunningham has written so interesting a memoir, took this Triad for
the subject of a picture, which he called the Ancient Britons. It was
one of his worst pictures,—which is saying much; and he has
illustrated it with one of the most curious commentaries in his very
curious and very rare descriptive Catalogue of his own Pictures.

It begins with a translation from the Welsh, supplied to him no doubt
by that good simple-hearted, Welsh-headed man, William Owen, whose
memory is the great store-house of all Cymric tradition and lore of
every kind.

“In the last battle of King Arthur only Three Britons escaped; these
were the Strongest Man, the Beautifullest Man, and the Ugliest Man.
These Three marched through the field unsubdued as Gods; and the Sun
of Britain set, but shall arise again with tenfold splendour, when
Arthur shall awake from sleep, and resume his dominion over earth and
ocean.

“The three general classes of men,” says the painter, “who are
represented by the most Beautiful, the most Strong, and the most Ugly,
could not be represented by any historical facts but those of our own
countrymen, the Ancient Britons, without violating costumes. The
Britons (say historians) were naked civilised men, learned, studious,
abstruse in thought and contemplation; naked, simple, plain in their
acts and manners; wiser than after ages. They were overwhelmed by
brutal arms, all but a small remnant. Strength, Beauty and Ugliness
escaped the wreck, and remain for ever unsubdued, age after age.

“The British Antiquities are now in the Artist's hands; all his
visionary contemplations relating to his own country and its ancient
glory, when it was, as it again shall be, the source of learning and
inspiration. He has in his hands poems of the highest antiquity. Adam
was a Druid, and Noah. Also Abraham was called to succeed the
Druidical age, which began to turn allegoric and mental signification
into corporeal command; whereby human sacrifice would have depopulated
the earth. All these things are written in Eden. The artist is an
inhabitant of that happy country; and if every thing goes on as it has
begun, the work of vegetation and generation may expect to be opened
again to Heaven, through Eden, as it was in the beginning.

“The Strong Man represents the human sublime. The Beautiful Man
represents the human pathetic, which was in the ban of Eden divided
into male and female. The Ugly Man represents the human reason. They
were originally one man, who was fourfold: he was self divided and his
real humanity drawn on the stems of generation; and the form of the
fourth was like the Son of God. How he became divided is a subject of
great sublimity and pathos. The Artist has written it, under
inspiration, and will if God please, publish it. It is voluminous, and
contains the ancient history of Britain, and the world of Satan and of
Adam.

“In the mean time he has painted this picture, which supposes that in
the reign of that British Prince, who lived in the fifth century,
there were remains of those naked heroes in the Welsh mountains. They
are now. Gray saw them in the person of his Bard on Snowdon; there
they dwell in naked simplicity; happy is he who can see and converse
with them, above the shadows of generation and death. In this picture,
believing with Milton the ancient British history, Mr. Blake has done
as all the ancients did, and as all the moderns who are worthy of
fame, given the historical fact in its poetical vigour; so as it
always happens; and not in that dull way that some historians pretend,
who being weakly organised themselves, cannot see either miracle or
prodigy. All is to them a dull round of probabilities and
possibilities; but the history of all times and places is nothing else
but improbabilities and impossibilities,—what we should say was
impossible, if we did not see it always before our eyes.

“The antiquities of every nation under Heaven are no less sacred than
those of the Jews, they are the same thing, as Jacob Bryant and all
antiquaries have proved. How other antiquities came to be neglected
and disbelieved, while those of the Jews are collected and arranged is
an enquiry, worthy of both the Antiquarian and the Divine. All had
originally one language, and one religion, this was the religion of
Jesus, the everlasting Gospel. Antiquity preached the Gospel of Jesus,
the reasoning historian, turner and twister of courses and
consequences, such as Hume, Gibbon, and Voltaire, cannot with all
their artifice, turn or twist one fact, or disarrange self evident
action and reality. Reasons and opinions concerning acts are not
history. Acts themselves alone are history, and they are neither the
exclusive property of Hume, Gibbon, and Voltaire, Echard, Rapin,
Plutarch, nor Herodotus. Tell me the acts O historian, and leave me to
reason upon them as I please; away with your reasoning and your
rubbish. All that is not action is not worth reading. Tell me the
What; I do not want you to tell me the Why, and the How; I can find
that out myself, as well as you can, and I will not be fooled by you
into opinions, that you please to impose, to disbelieve what you think
improbable, or impossible. His opinion, who does not see spiritual
agency, is not worth any man's reading; he who rejects a fact because
it is improbable, must reject all History, and retain doubts only.

“It has been said to the Artist, take the Apollo for the model of your
beautiful man, and the Hercules for your strong man, and the Dancing
Fawn for your ugly man. Now he comes to his trial. He knows that what
he does is not inferior to the grandest antiques. Superior they cannot
be, for human power cannot go beyond either what he does, or what they
have done, it is the gift of God, it is inspiration and vision. He had
resolved to emulate those precious remains of antiquity. He has done
so, and the result you behold. His ideas of strength and beauty have
not been greatly different. Poetry as it exists now on earth, in the
various remains of ancient authors, Music as it exists in old tunes or
melodies, Painting and Sculpture as it exists in the remains of
antiquity and in the works of more modern genius, is Inspiration, and
cannot be surpassed; it is perfect and eternal: Milton, Shakspeare,
Michael Angelo, Rafael, the finest specimens of ancient Sculpture and
Painting, and Architecture, Gothic, Grecian, Hindoo and Egyptian are
the extent of the human mind. The human mind cannot go beyond the gift
of God, the Holy Ghost. To suppose that Art can go beyond the finest
specimens of Art that are now in the world, is not knowing what Art
is; it is being blind to the gifts of the Spirit.

“It will be necessary for the Painter to say something concerning his
ideas of Beauty, Strength and Ugliness.

“The beauty that is annexed and appended to folly, is a lamentable
accident and error of the mortal and perishing life; it does but
seldom happen; but with this unnatural mixture the sublime Artist can
have nothing to do; it is fit for the burlesque. The beauty proper for
sublime Art, is lineaments, or forms and features that are capable of
being the receptacle of intellect; accordingly the Painter has given
in his beautiful man, his own idea of intellectual Beauty. The face
and limbs (?) that deviates or alters least, from infancy to old age,
is the face and limbs (?) of greatest Beauty and Perfection.

“The Ugly likewise, when accompanied and annexed to imbecillity and
disease, is a subject for burlesque and not for historical grandeur;
the artist has imagined the Ugly man; one approaching to the beast in
features and form, his forehead small, without frontals; his nose high
on the ridge, and narrow; his chest and the stamina of his make,
comparatively little, and his joints and his extremities large; his
eyes with scarce any whites, narrow and cunning, and everything
tending toward what is truly ugly; the incapability of intellect.

“The Artist has considered his strong man as a receptacle of Wisdom, a
sublime energizer; his features and limbs do not spindle out into
length, without strength, nor are they too large and unwieldy for his
brain and bosom. Strength consists in accumulation of power to the
principal seat, and from thence a regular gradation and subordination;
strength in compactness, not extent nor bulk.

“The strong man acts from conscious superiority, and marches on in
fearless dependence on the divine decrees, raging with the
inspirations of a prophetic mind. The Beautiful man acts from duty,
and anxious solicitude for the fates of those for whom he combats. The
Ugly man acts from love of carnage, and delight in the savage
barbarities of war, rushing with sportive precipitation into the very
teeth of the affrighted enemy.

“The Roman Soldiers rolled together in a heap before them: ‘like the
rolling thing before the whirlwind:’ each shew a different character,
and a different expression of fear, or revenge, or envy, or blank
horror, or amazement, or devout wonder and unresisting awe.

“The dead and the dying, Britons naked, mingled with armed Romans,
strew the field beneath. Amongst these, the last of the Bards who were
capable of attending warlike deeds, is seen falling, outstretched
among the dead and the dying; singing to his harp in the pains of
death.

“Distant among the mountains are Druid Temples, similar to Stone
Henge. The sun sets behind the mountains, bloody with the day of
battle.

“The flush of health in flesh, exposed to the open air, nourished by
the spirits of forests and floods, in that ancient happy period, which
history has recorded, cannot be like the sickly daubs of Titian or
Rubens. Where will the copier of nature, as it now is, find a
civilized man, who has been accustomed to go naked. Imagination only
can furnish us with colouring appropriate, such as is found in the
frescoes of Rafael, and Michael Angelo: the disposition of forms
always directs colouring in works of true art. As to a modern man,
stripped from his load of clothing, he is like a dead corpse. Hence
Rubens, Titian, Correggio, and all of that class, are like leather and
chalk; their men are like leather, and their women like chalk, for the
disposition of their forms will not admit of grand colouring; in Mr.
B's Britons, the blood is seen to circulate in their limbs; he defies
competition in colouring.”

My regard for thee, dear Reader, would not permit me to leave
untranscribed this very curious and original piece of composition.
Probably thou hast never seen, and art never likely to see either the
“Descriptive Catalogue” or the “Poetical Sketches” of this insane and
erratic genius, I will therefore end the chapter with the _Mad Song_
from the latter,—premising only _Dificultosa provincia es la que
emprendo, y à muchos parecerà escusada; mas para la entereza desta
historia, ha parecido no omitir aguesta parte._[2]

The wild winds weep,
And the night is a-cold;
Come hither, Sleep,
And my griefs unfold:
But lo! the morning peeps
Over the eastern steep;
And the rustling birds of dawn
The earth do scorn.

Lo! to the vault
Of paved heaven,
With sorrow fraught
My notes are driven:
They strike the ear of night
Make weep the eyes of day;
They make mad the roaring winds
And with tempests play.

Like a fiend in a cloud
With howling woe,
After night I do croud
And with night will go;
I turn my back to the east,
From whence comforts have increas'd;
For light doth seize my brain
With frantic pain.

[Footnote 2: LUIS MUÑOZ. VIDA DEL P. L. DE GRANADA.]

CHAPTER CLXXXII.

AN IMPROVEMENT IN THE FORM OF THE HUMAN LEG SUGGESTED BY A PHYSICIAN.
THE DOCTOR'S CURE OF A BROKEN SHIN AND INVENTION OF A SHIN-SHIELD.

_Res fisci est, ubicunque natat._ Whatsoever swims upon any water,
belongs to this exchequer.

JEREMY TAYLOR. _Preface to the Duct. Dub._

Some Dr. Moreton is said to have advanced this extraordinary opinion
in a treatise upon the beauty of the human structure, that had the
calf of the leg been providentially set before, instead of being
preposterously placed behind, it would have been evidently better, for
as much as the shin-bone could not then have been so easily broken.

I have no better authority for this than a magazine extract. But there
have been men of science silly enough to entertain opinions quite as
absurd, and presumptuous enough to think themselves wiser than their
Maker.

Supposing the said Dr. Moreton has not been unfairly dealt with in
this statement, it would have been a most appropriate reward for his
sagacity if some one of the thousand and one wonder-working Saints of
the Pope's Calendar had reversed his own calves for him, placed them
in front, conformably to his own notion of the fitness of things, and
then left him to regulate their motions as well as he could. The
_Gastrocnemius_ and the _Solæus_ would have found themselves in a new
and curious relation to the _Rectus femoris_ and the two _Vasti_, and
the anatomical reformer would have learnt feelingly to understand the
term of antagonizing muscles in a manner peculiar to himself.

The use to which this notable philosopher would have made the calf of
the leg serve, reminds me of a circumstance that occurred in our
friend's practice. An old man hard upon threescore and ten, broke his
shin one day by stumbling over a chair; and although a hale person who
seemed likely to attain a great age by virtue of a vigorous
constitution, which had never been impaired through ill habits or
excesses of any kind, the hurt that had been thought little of at
first became so serious in its consequences, that a mortification was
feared. Daniel Dove was not one of those practitioners who would let a
patient die under their superintendence _secundum artem_, rather than
incur the risque of being censured for trying in desperate cases any
method not in the regular course of practise: and recollecting what
he had heard when a boy, that a man whose leg and life were in danger
from just such an accident, had been saved by applying yeast to the
wound, he tried the application. The dangerous symptoms were presently
removed by it; a kindly process was induced, the wound healed, and the
man became whole again.

Dove was then a young man; and so many years have elapsed since old
Joseph Todhunter was gathered to his fathers, that it would now
require an antiquarian's patience to make out the letters of his name
upon his mouldering headstone. All remembrance of him (except among
his descendants, if any there now be) will doubtless have past away,
unless he should be recollected in Doncaster by the means which Dr.
Dove devised for securing him against another such accident.

The Doctor knew that the same remedy was not to be relied on a second
time, when there would be less ability left in the system to second
its effect. He knew that in old age the tendency of Nature is to
dissolution, and that accidents which are trifling in youth, or middle
age, become fatal at a time when Death is ready to enter at any breach
and Life to steal out through the first flaw in its poor crazy
tenement. So, having warned Todhunter of this, and told him that he
was likely to enjoy many years of life, if he kept a whole skin on his
shins, he persuaded him to wear spatterdashes, quilted in front and
protected there with whalebone, charging him to look upon them as the
most necessary part of his clothing, and to let them be the last
things which he doffed at night, and the first which he donn'd in the
morning.

The old man followed this advice; lived to the great age of
eighty-five, enjoyed his faculties to the last; and then died so
easily, that it might truly be said he fell asleep.

My friend loved to talk of this case; for Joseph Todhunter had borne
so excellent a character through life, and was so cheerful and so
happy, as well as so venerable an old man, that it was a satisfaction
for the Doctor to think he had been the means of prolonging his days.

CHAPTER CLXXXIII.

VIEWS OF OLD AGE, MONTAGNE, DANIEL CORNEILLE, LANGUET, PASQUIER, DR.
JOHNSON, LORD CHESTERFIELD, ST. EVREMOND.

What is age
But the holy place of life, the chapel of ease
For all men's wearied miseries?

MASSINGER.

Montagne takes an uncomfortable view of old age. _Il me semble_, he
says, _qu'en la vieillesse, nos ames sont subjectes à des maladies et
imperfections plus importunes qu'en la jeunesse. Je le disois estant
jeune, lors on me donnoit de mon menton par le nez; je le dis encore à
cette heure, que mon poil gris me donne le credit. Nous appellons
sagesse la difficulté de nos humeurs, le desgoust des choses
presentes: mais à la verité, nous ne quittons pas tant les vices,
comme nous les changeons; et, à mon opinion, en pis. Outre une sotte
et caduque fierté, un babil ennuyeux, ces humeures espineuses et
inassociables, et la superstition, et un soin ridicule des richesses,
lors que l'usage en est perdu, j'y trouve plus d'envie, d'injustice,
et de malignité. Elle nous attache plus de rides en l'esprit qu'au
visage: et ne se void point d'ames ou fort rares, qui en vieillissant
ne sentent l'aigre, et le moisi._

Take this extract, my worthy friends who are not skilled in French, or
know no more of it than a Governess may have taught you,—in the
English of John Florio, Reader of the Italian tongue unto the
Sovereign Majesty of Anna, Queen of England, Scotland, &c. and one of
the gentlemen of her Royal privy chamber, the same Florio whom some
commentators upon very insufficient grounds, have supposed to have
been designed by Shakespere in the Holofernes of Love's Labour's Lost.

“Methinks our souls in age are subject unto more importunate diseases
and imperfections than they are in youth. I said so being young, when
my beardless chin was upbraided me, and I say it again, now that my
gray beard gives me authority. We entitle wisdom, the frowardness of
our humours, and the distaste of present things; but in truth we
abandon not vices so much as we change them; and in mine opinion for
the worse. Besides a silly and ruinous pride, cumbersome tattle,
wayward and unsociable humours, superstition, and a ridiculous carking
for wealth, when the use of it is well nigh lost. I find the more
envy, injustice and malignity in it. It sets more wrinkles in our
minds than in our foreheads, nor are there any spirits, or very rare
ones, which in growing old taste not sourly and mustily.”

In the same spirit, recollecting perhaps this very passage of the
delightful old Gascon, one of our own poets says,

Old age doth give by too long space,
Our souls as many wrinkles as our face;

and the same thing, no doubt in imitation of Montagne has been said by
Corneille in a poem of thanks addressed to Louis XIV., when that King
had ordered some of his plays to be represented during the winter of
1685, though he had ceased to be a popular writer,

_Je vieillis, ou du moins, ils se le persuadent;
Pour bien écrire encor j'ai trop long tems écrit,
Et les rides du front passent jusqu' à l'esprit._

The opinion proceeded not in the poet Daniel from perverted
philosophy, or sourness of natural disposition, for all his affections
were kindly, and he was a tender-hearted, wise, good man. But he wrote
this in the evening of his days, when he had

out lived the date
Of former grace, acceptance and delight,

when,

those bright stars from whence
He had his light, were set for evermore;

and when he complained that years had done to him

this wrong,
To make him write too much, and live too long;

so that this comfortless opinion may be ascribed in him rather to a
dejected state of mind, than to a clear untroubled judgement. But
Hubert Languet must have written more from observation and reflection
than from feeling, when he said in one of his letters to Sir Philip
Sidney, “you are mistaken if you believe that men are made better by
age; for it is very rarely so. They become indeed more cautious, and
learn to conceal their faults and their evil inclinations; so that if
you have known any old man in whom you think some probity were still
remaining, be assured that he must have been excellently virtuous in
his youth.” _Erras si credis homines fieri ætate meliores; id nam est
rarissimum. Fiunt quidem cautiores, et vitia animi, ac pravos suos
affectus occultare discunt: quod si quem senem novisti in quo aliquid
probitatis superesse judices, crede eum in adolescentiâ fuisse
optimum._

Languet spoke of its effects upon others. Old Estienne Pasquier in
that uncomfortable portion of his _Jeux Poëtiques_ which he entitles
_Vieillesse Rechignée_ writes as a self-observer, and his picture is
not more favourable.

_Je ne nourry dans moy qu'une humeur noire,
Chagrin, fascheux, melancholic, hagard,
Grongneux, despit, presomptueux, langard,
Je fay l'amour au bon vin et au boire._

But the bottle seems not to have put him in good humour either with
others or himself.

_Tout la monde me put; je vy de telle sort,
Que je ne fay meshuy que tousser et cracher,
Que de fascher autruy, et d'autruy me fascher;
Je ne supporte nul, et nul ne me supporte.
Un mal de corps je sens, un mal d'esprit je porte;
Foible de corps je veux, mais je ne puis marcher;
Foible de esprit je n'oze à mon argent toucher,
Voilà les beaux effects que la vieillesse apporte!
O combien est heureux celuy qui, de ses ans
Jeune, ne passe point la fleur de son printans,
Ou celuy qui venu s'en retourne aussi vite!
Non: je m'abuze; ainçois ces maux ce sont appas
Qui me feront un jour trouver doux mon trespas,
Quand il plaira a Dieu que ce monde je quitte._

The miserable life I lead is such,
That now the world loathes me and I loathe it;
What do I do all day but cough and spit,
Annoying others, and annoyed as much!
My limbs no longer serve me, and the wealth
Which I have heap'd, I want the will to spend.
So mind and body both are out of health,
Behold the blessings that on age attend!
Happy whose fate is not to overlive
The joys which youth, and only youth can give,
But in his prime is taken, happy he!
Alas, that thought is of an erring heart,
These evils make me willing to depart
When it shall please the Lord to summon me.

The Rustic, in Hammerlein's curious dialogues _de Nobilitate et
Rusticitate_, describes his old age in colours as dark as Pasquier's;
_plenus dierum_, he says, _ymmo senex valde, id est, octogenarius, et
senio confractus, et heri et nudiustercius, ymmo plerisque
revolutionibus annorum temporibus, corporis statera recurvatus,
singulto, tussito, sterto, ossito, sternuto, balbutio, catharizo,
mussico, paraleso, gargariso, cretico, tremo, sudo, titillo, digitis
sæpe geliso, et insuper (quod deterius est) cor meum affligitur, et
caput excutitur, languet spiritus, fetet anhelitus, caligant oculi et
facillant_[1] _articuli, nares confluunt, crines defluunt, tremunt
tactus et deperit actus, dentes putrescunt et aures surdescunt; de
facili ad iram provocor, difficili revocor, cito credo, tarde
discedo._

[Footnote 1: _Facillant_ is here evidently the same as _vacillant_.
For the real meaning of _facillo_ the reader is referred to Du Cange
in v. or to Martinii Lexicon.]

The effects of age are described in language not less characteristic
by the Conte Baldessar Castiglione in his Cortegiano. He is explaining
wherefore the old man is always “_laudator temporis acti_;” and thus
he accounts for the universal propensity;—_gli anni fuggendo se ne
portan seco molte commodità, e tra l' altre levano dal sangue gran
parte de gli spiriti vitali; onde la complession si muta, e divengon
debili gli organi, per i quali l' anima opera le sue virtù. Però de i
cori nostri in quel tempo, come allo autunno le fogli de gli arbori,
caggiono i soavi fiori di contento; e nel loco de i sereni et chiari
pensieri, entra la nubilosa e turbida tristitia di mille calamità
compagnata, di modo che non solamente il corpo, ma l' animo anchora è
infermo; ne de i passati piaceri reserva altro che una tenace memoria,
e la imagine di quel caro tempo della tenera eta, nella quale quando
ci troviamo, ci pare che sempre il cielo, e la terra, e ogni cosa
faccia festa, e rida intorno à gli occhi nostri e nel pensiero, come
in un delitioso et vago giardino, fiorisca la dolce primavera d'
allegrezza: onde forse saria utile, quando gia nella fredda stagione
comincia il sole della nostra vita, spogliandoci de quei piaceri,
andarsene verso l' occaso, perdere insieme con essi anchor la lor
memoria, e trovar_ (_come disse Temistocle_) _un' arte, che a scordar
insegnasse; perche tanto sono fallaci i sensi del corpo nostro, che
spesso ingannano anchora il giudicio della mente. Però parmi che i
vecchi siano alla condition di quelli, che partendosi dal porto,
tengon gli occhi in terra, e par loro che la nave stia ferma, e la
riva si parta; e pur è il contrario; che il porto, e medesimamente il
tempo, e i piaceri restano nel suo stato, e noi con la nave della
mortalità fuggendo n' andiamo, l' un dopo l' altro, per quel
procelloso mare che ogni cosa assorbe et devora; ne mai piu pigliar
terra ci è concesso; anzi sempre da contrarii venti combattuti, al
fine in qualche scoglio la nave rompemo._

Take this passage, gentle reader, as Master Thomas Hoby has translated
it to my hand.

“Years wearing away carry also with them many commodities, and among
others take away from the blood a great part of the lively spirits;
that altereth the complection, and the instruments wax feeble whereby
the soul worketh his effects. Therefore the sweet flowers of delight
vade[2] away in that season out of our hearts, as the leaves fall from
the trees after harvest; and instead of open and clear thoughts, there
entereth cloudy and troublous heaviness, accompanied with a thousand
heart griefs: so that not only the blood, but the mind is also feeble,
neither of the former pleasures retaineth it any thing else but a fast
memory, and the print of the beloved time of tender age, which when we
have upon us, the heaven, the earth and each thing to our seeming
rejoiceth and laugheth always about our eyes, and in thought (as in a
savoury and pleasant garden) flourisheth the sweet spring time of
mirth: So that peradventure, it were not unprofitable when now, in the
cold season, the sun of our life, taking away from us our delights
beginneth to draw toward the West, to lose therewithall the
mindfulness of them, and to find out as Themistocles saith, an art to
teach us to forget; for the senses of our body are so deceivable, that
they beguile many times also the judgement of the mind. Therefore,
methinks, old men be like unto them that sailing in a vessel out of an
haven, behold the ground with their eyes, and the vessel to their
seeming standeth still, and the shore goeth; and yet is it clean
contrary, for the haven, and likewise the time and pleasures, continue
still in their estate, and we with the vessel of mortality flying
away, go one after another through the tempestuous sea that swalloweth
up and devoureth all things, neither is it granted us at any time to
come on shore again; but, always beaten with contrary winds, at the
end we break our vessel at some rock.”

[Footnote 2: ‘Vade’ is no doubt the true word here. The double sense
of it,—that is, to _fade_, or to _go away_,—may be seen in Todd's
Johnson and in Nares' Glossary. Neither of them quote the following
lines from the Earl of Surrey's Poems. They occur in his Ecclesiastes.

We, that live on the earth, draw toward our decay,
Our children fill our place awhile, and then they vade away.

And again,

New fancies daily spring, which vade, returning mo.]

“Why Sir,” said Dr. Johnson, “a man grows better humoured as he grows
older. He improves by experience. When young he thinks himself of
great consequence, and every thing of importance. As he advances in
life, he learns to think himself of no consequence, and little things
of little importance, and so he becomes more patient and better
pleased.” This was the observation of a wise and good man, who felt in
himself as he grew old, the effect of Christian principles upon a kind
heart and a vigorous understanding. One of a very different stamp came
to the same conclusion before him; _Crescit ætate pulchritudo
animorum_, says, Antonio Perez, _quantum minuitur eorundem corporum
venustas._

One more of these dark pictures. “The heart” says Lord Chesterfield,
“never grows better by age; I fear rather worse; always harder. A
young liar will be an old one; and a young knave will only be a
greater knave as he grows older. But should a bad young heart,
accompanied with a good head, (which by the way, very seldom is the
case) really reform, in a more advanced age, from a consciousness of
its folly, as well as of its guilt; such a conversion would only be
thought prudential and political, but never sincere.”

It is remarkable that Johnson, though, as has just been seen, he felt
in himself and saw in other good men, that the natural effect of time
was to sear away asperities of character

Till the smooth temper of their age should be
Like the high leaves upon the Holly Tree,

yet he expressed an opinion closely agreeing with this of Lord
Chesterfield. “A man, he said, commonly grew wicked as he grew older,
at least he but changed the vices of youth, head-strong passion and
wild temerity, for treacherous caution and desire to circumvent.”
These he can only have meant of wicked men. But what follows seems to
imply a mournful conviction that the tendency of society is to foster
our evil propensities and counteract our better ones: “I am always, he
said, on the young people's side when there is a dispute between them
and the old ones; for you have at least a charm for virtue, till age
has withered its very root.” Alas, this is true of the irreligious and
worldly-minded, and it is generally true because they composed the
majority of our corrupt contemporaries.

But Johnson knew that good men became better as they grew older,
because his philosophy was that of the Gospel. Something of a
philosopher Lord Chesterfield was, and had he lived in the days of
Trajan or Hadrian, might have done honour to the school of Epicurus.
But if he had not in the pride of his poor philosophy shut both his
understanding and his heart against the truths of revealed religion,
in how different a light would the evening of his life have closed.

_Une raison essentielle_, says the Epicurean Saint Evremond, _qui nous
oblige à nous retirer quand nous sommes vieux, c'est qu'il faut
prevenir le ridicule où l'age nous fait tomber presque toujours._ And
in another place he says, _certes le plus honnéte-homme dont personne
n'a besoin, a de la peine a s'exempter du ridicule en vieillissant._
This was the opinion of a courtier, a sensualist, and a Frenchman.

I cannot more appositely conclude this chapter than by a quotation
ascribed, whether truly or not, to St. Bernard. _Maledictum caput
canum et cor vanum, caput tremulum et cor emulum, canities in vertice
et pernicies in mente: facies rugosa et lingua nugosa, cutis sicca et
fides ficta; visus caligans et caritas claudicans; labium pendens et
dens detrahens; virtus debilis et vita flebilis; dies uberes et
fructus steriles, amici multi, et actus stulti._

CHAPTER CLXXXIV.

FURTHER OBSERVATIONS CONCERNING OLD AGE. BISHOP REYNOLDS. OPINION OF
THE DOCTOR CONCERNING BEASTS AND MEN. M. DE CUSTINE. THE WORLD IS TOO
MUCH WITH US. WORDSWORTH. SIR WALTER RALEIGH.

In these reflections, which are of a serious, and somewhat of a
melancholy cast, it is best to indulge; because it is always of use to
be serious, and not unprofitable sometimes to be melancholy.

FREEMAN'S SERMONS.

“As usurers,” says Bishop Reynolds, “before the whole debt is paid, do
fetch away some good parts of it for the loan, so before the debt of
death be paid by the whole body, old age doth by little and little,
take away sometimes one sense sometimes another, this year one limb,
the next another; and causeth a man as it were to die daily. No one
can dispel the clouds and sorrows of old age, but Christ who is the
sun of righteousness and the bright morning star.”

Yet our Lord and Saviour hath not left those who are in darkness and
the shadow of death, without the light of a heavenly hope at their
departure, if their ways have not wilfully been evil,—if they have
done their duty according to that law of nature which is written in
the heart of man. It is the pride of presumptuous wisdom (itself the
worst of follies) that has robbed the natural man of his consolation
in old age, and of his hope in death, and exacts the forfeit of that
hope from the infidel as the consequence and punishment of his sin.
Thus it was in heathen times, as it now is in countries that are
called christian. When Cicero speaks of those things which depend upon
opinion, he says, _hujusmodi sunt probabilia; impiis apud inferos
pœnas esse præparatas; eos, qui philosophiæ dent operam, non arbitrari
Deos esse._ Hence it appears he regarded it as equally probable that
there was an account to be rendered after death; and that those who
professed philosophy would disbelieve this as a vulgar delusion, live
therefore without religion, and die without hope, like the beasts that
perish!

“_If_ they perish,” the Doctor, used always reverently to say when he
talked upon this subject. Oh Reader, it would have done you good as it
has done me, if you had heard him speak upon it, in his own beautiful
old age! “_If_ they perish,” he would say. “That the beasts die
without hope we may conclude; death being to them like falling asleep,
an act of which the mind is not cognizant! But that they live without
religion, he would not say,—that they might not have some sense of it
according to their kind; nor that all things animate, and seemingly
inanimate did not actually praise the Lord, as they are called upon to
do by the Psalmist, and in the _Benedicite_!”

It is a pious fancy of the good old lexicographist Adam Littleton that
our Lord took up his first lodging in a stable amongst the cattle, as
if he had come to be the Saviour of them as well as of men; being by
one perfect oblation of himself, to put an end to all other
sacrifices, as well as to take away sins. This, he adds the Psalmist
fears not to affirm speaking of God's mercy. “Thou savest,” says he,
“both man and beast.”

The text may lead us further than Adam Littleton's interpretation.

“_Qu'on ne me parle plus de_ NATURE MORTE, says M. de Custine, in his
youth and enthusiasm, writing from Mont-Auvert; _on sent ici que la
Divinité est partout, et que les pierres sont pénétrées comme
nous-mêmes d'une puissance créatrice! Quand on me dit que les rochers
sont insensibles, je crois entendre un enfant soutenir que l'aiguille
d'une montre ne marche pas, parce qu'il ne la voit pas se mouvoir._”

Do not, said our Philosopher, when he threw out a thought like this,
do not ask me how this can be! I guess at every thing, and can account
for nothing. It is more comprehensible to me that stocks and stones
should have a sense of devotion, than that men should be without it. I
could much more easily persuade myself that the birds in the air, and
the beasts in the field have souls to be saved, than I can believe
that very many of my fellow bipeds have any more soul than, as some of
our divines have said, serves to keep their bodies from putrefaction.
“God forgive me, worm that I am! for the sinful thought of which I am
too often conscious,—that of the greater part of the human race, the
souls are not worth saving!”—I have not forgotten the look which
accompanied these words, and the tone in which he uttered them,
dropping his voice toward the close.

We must of necessity, said he, become better or worse as we advance in
years. Unless we endeavour to spiritualize ourselves, and supplicate
in this endeavour for that Grace which is never withheld when it is
sincerely and earnestly sought, age bodilizes us more and more, and
the older we grow the more we are embruted and debased: so manifestly
is the awful text verified which warns us that “unto every one which
hath shall be given, and from him that hath not, even that he hath
shall be taken away from him.” In some the soul seems gradually to be
absorbed and extinguished in its crust of clay; in others as if it
purified and sublimed the vehicle to which it was united. _Viget
animus, et gaudet non multum sibi esse cum corpore; magnam oneris
partem sui posuit._[1] Nothing therefore is more beautiful than a wise
and religious old age; nothing so pitiable as the latter stages of
mortal existence—when the World and the Flesh, and that false
philosophy which is of the Devil, have secured the victory for the
Grave!

[Footnote 1: SENECA.]

“He that hath led a holy life,” says one of our old Bishops, “is like
a man which hath travelled over a beautiful valley, and being on the
top of a hill, turneth about with delight, to take a view of it
again.” The retrospect is delightful, and perhaps it is even more
grateful if his journey has been by a rough and difficult way. But
whatever may have been his fortune on the road, the Pilgrim who has
reached the Delectable Mountains looks back with thankfulness and
forward with delight.

And wherefore is it not always thus? Wherefore, but because as
Wordsworth has said,

The World is too much with us, late and soon
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers.

“Though our own eyes,” says Sir Walter Raleigh, “do every where behold
the sudden and resistless assaults of Death, and Nature assureth us by
never failing experience, and Reason by infallible demonstration, that
our times upon the earth have neither certainty nor durability, that
our bodies are but the anvils of pain and diseases, and our minds the
hives of unnumbered cares, sorrows and passions; and that when we are
most glorified, we are but those painted posts against which Envy and
Fortune direct their darts; yet such is the true unhappiness of our
condition, and the dark ignorance which covereth the eyes of our
understanding, that we only prize, pamper, and exalt this vassal and
slave of death, and forget altogether, or only remember at our
cast-away leisure, the imprisoned immortal Soul, which can neither die
with the reprobate, nor perish with the mortal parts of virtuous men;
seeing God's justice in the one, and his goodness in the other, is
exercised for evermore, as the everliving subjects of his reward and
punishment. But when is it that we examine this great account? Never,
while we have one vanity left us to spend! We plead for titles till
our breath fail us; dig for riches whilst our strength enableth us;
exercise malice while we can revenge; and then when time hath beaten
from us both youth, pleasure and health, and that Nature itself hateth
the house of Old Age, we remember with Job that ‘we must go the way
from whence we shall not return, and that our bed is made ready for us
in the dark.’ And then I say, looking over-late into the bottom of our
conscience, which Pleasure and Ambition had locked up from us all our
lives, we behold therein the fearful images of our actions past, and
withal this terrible inscription that ‘God will bring every work into
judgement that man hath done under the Sun.’

“But what examples have ever moved us? what persuasions reformed us?
or what threatenings made us afraid? We behold other mens tragedies
played before us; we hear what is promised and threatened; but the
world's bright glory hath put out the eyes of our minds; and these
betraying lights, with which we only see, do neither look up towards
termless joys, nor down towards endless sorrows, till we neither know,
nor can look for anything else at the world's hands.—But let us not
flatter our immortal Souls herein! For to neglect God all our lives,
and know that we neglect Him; to offend God voluntarily, and know that
we offend Him, casting our hopes on the peace which we trust to make
at parting, is no other than a rebellious presumption, and that which
is the worst of all, even a contemptuous laughing to scorn, and
deriding of God, his laws and precepts. _Frustrà sperant qui sic de
misericordiâ Dei sibi blandiuntur;_ they hope in vain, saith Bernard,
which in this sort flatter themselves with God's mercy.”

CHAPTER CLXXXV.

EVOLVEMENTS. ANALOGIES. ANTICIPATIONS.

MASSINGER.

I forget what poet it is, who, speaking of old age, says that

The Soul's dark mansion, battered and decayed,
Lets in new light through chinks that time has made;

a strange conceit, imputing to the decay of our nature that which
results from its maturation.

As the ancients found in the butterfly a beautiful emblem of the
immortality of the Soul, my true philosopher and friend looked, in
like manner, upon the chrysalis as a type of old age. The gradual
impairment of the senses and of the bodily powers, and the diminution
of the whole frame as it shrinks and contracts itself in age, afforded
analogy enough for a mind like his to work on, which quickly
apprehended remote similitudes, and delighted in remarking them. The
sense of flying in our sleep, might probably, he thought, be the
anticipation or forefeeling of an unevolved power, like an aurelia's
dream of butterfly motion.

The tadpole has no intermediate state of torpor. This merriest of all
creatures, if mirth may be measured by motion, puts out legs before it
discards its tail and commences frog. It was not in our outward frame
that the Doctor could discern any resemblance to this process; but he
found it in that expansion of the intellectual faculties, those
aspirations of the spiritual part, wherein the Soul seems to feel its
wings and to imp them for future flight.

One has always something for which to look forward, some change for
the better. The boy in petticoats longs to be drest in the masculine
gender. Little boys wish to be big ones. In youth we are eager to
attain manhood, and in manhood matrimony becomes the next natural step
of our desires. “Days then should speak, and multitude of years should
teach wisdom;” and teach it they will, if man will but learn, for
nature brings the heart into a state for receiving it.

_Jucundissima est ætas devexa jam, non tamen præceps; et illam quoque
in extremâ regulâ stantem, judico habere suas voluptates; aut hoc
ipsum succedit in locum voluptatum, nullis egere. Quam dulce est,
cupiditates fatigasse ac reliquisse!_[1] This was not Dr. Dove's
philosophy: he thought the stage of senescence a happy one, not
because we outgrow the desires and enjoyments of youth and manhood,
but because wiser desires, more permanent enjoyments, and holier hopes
succeed to them,—because time in its course brings us nearer to
eternity, and as earth recedes, Heaven opens upon our prospect.

[Footnote 1: SENECA.]

“It is the will of God and nature,” says Franklin, “that these mortal
bodies be laid aside when the soul is to enter into real life. This is
rather an embryo state, a preparation for living. A man is not
completely born until he be dead. Why, then, should we grieve that a
new child is born among the immortals, a new member added to their
happy society? We are spirits. That bodies should be lent us, while
they can afford us pleasure, assist us in acquiring knowledge, or in
doing good to our fellow-creatures, is a kind and benevolent act of
God. When they become unfit for these purposes, and afford us pain
instead of pleasure, instead of an aid become an encumbrance, and
answer none of the intentions for which they were given, it is equally
kind and benevolent, that a way is provided by which we may get rid of
them. Death is that way.”

“God,” says Fuller, “sends his servants to bed, when they have done
their work.”

This is a subject upon which even Sir Richard Blackmore could write
with a poet's feeling.

Thou dost, O Death, a peaceful harbour lie
Upon the margin of Eternity;
Where the rough waves of Time's impetuous tide
Their motion lose, and quietly subside:
Weary, they roll their drousy heads asleep
At the dark entrance of Duration's deep.
Hither our vessels in their turn retreat;
Here still they find a safe untroubled seat,
When worn with adverse passions, furious strife,
And the hard passage of tempestuous life.

Thou dost to man unfeigned compassion show,
Soothe all his grief, and solace all his woe.
Thy spiceries with noble drugs abound,
That every sickness cure and every wound.
That which anoints the corpse will only prove
The sovereign balm our anguish to remove.
The cooling draught administered by thee,
O Death! from all our sufferings sets us free.
Impetuous life is by thy force subdued,
Life, the most lasting fever of the blood.
The weary in thy arms lie down to rest,
No more with breath's laborious task opprest.
Hear, how the men that long life-ridden lie,
In constant pain, for thy assistance cry,
Hear how they beg and pray for leave to die.
For vagabonds that o'er the country roam,
Forlorn, unpitied and without a home,
Thy friendly care provides a lodging-room.
The comfortless, the naked, and the poor,
Much pinch'd with cold, with grievous hunger more,
Thy subterranean hospitals receive,
Assuage their anguish and their wants relieve.
Cripples with aches and with age opprest,
Crawl on their crutches to the Grave for rest.
Exhausted travellers that have undergone
The scorching heats of life's intemperate zone,
Haste for refreshment to their beds beneath
And stretch themselves in the cool shades of death.
Poor labourers who their daily task repeat,
Tired with their still returning toil and sweat,
Lie down at last; and at the wish'd for close
Of life's long day, enjoy a sweet repose.

Thy realms, indulgent Death, have still possest
Profound tranquillity and unmolested rest.
No raging tempests, which the living dread,
Beat on the silent regions of the dead:
Proud Princes ne'er excite with war's alarms
Thy subterranean colonies to arms.
They undisturbed their peaceful mansions keep,
And earthquakes only rock them in their sleep.

Much has been omitted, which may be found in the original, and one
couplet removed from its place; but the whole is Blackmore's.

CHAPTER CLXXXVI.

LEONE HEBREO'S DIALOGI DE AMORE.—THE ELIXIR OF LIFE NO OBSTACLE TO
DEATH.—PARACELSUS.—VAN HELMONT AND JAN MASS.—DR. DOVE'S OPINION OF A
BIOGRAPHER'S DUTIES.

There's a lean fellow beats all conquerors!

OLD FORTUNATUS.

In Leone Hebreo's Dialogi de Amore, one of the interlocutors says,
“_Vediamo che gli huomini naturalmente desiano di mai non morire;
lagual cosa è impossibile, manifesta, e senza speranza._” To which the
other replies, “_Coloro chel desiano, non credeno interamente che sia
impossibile, et hanno inteso per le historie legali, che Enoc, et
Elia, et ancor Santo Giovanni Evangelista sono immortali in corpo, et
anima: se ben veggono essere stato per miracolo: onde ciascuno pensa
che à loro Dio potria fare simil miracolo. E però con questa
possibilita si gionta qualche remota speranza, laquale incita un lento
desiderio, massimamente per essere la morte horribile, e la
corruttione propria odiosa à chi si vuole, et il desiderio non è d'
acquistare cosa nuova, ma di non perdere la vita, che si truova;
laquale havendosi di presente, è facil cosa ingannarsi l'huomo à
desiare che non si perda; se ben naturalmente è impossibile: chel
desiderio di ciò è talmente lento, che può essere di cosa impossibile
et imaginabile, essendo di tanta importantia al desiderante. Et ancora
ti dirò chel fondamento di questo desiderio non è vano in se, se bene
è alquanto ingannoso, però chel desiderio dell' huomo d'essere
immortale è veramente possibile; perche l'esentia dell' huomu, (come
rettamente Platon vuole) non è altro che la sua anima intellettiva,
laquale per la virtu, sapientia, cognitione, et amore divino si fa
gloriosa et immortale._”

Paracelsus used to boast that he would not die till he thought proper
so to do, thus wishing it to be understood that he had discovered the
Elixir of life. He died suddenly, and at a time when he seemed to be
in full health; and hence arose a report, that he had made a compact
with the Devil, who enabled him to perform all his cures, but came for
him as soon as the term of their agreement was up.

Wherefore indeed should he have died by any natural means who so well
understood the mysteries of life and of death. What, says he, is life?
_Nihil meherclè vita est aliud, nisi Mumia quædam Balsamita conservans
mortale corpus à mortalibus vermibus, et eschara cum impressâ liquoris
salium commisturâ._ What is Death? _Nihil certe aliud quam Balsami
dominium, Mumiæ interitus, salium ultima materia._ Do you understand
this, Reader? If you do, I do not.

But he is intelligible when he tells us that Life may be likened to
Fire, and that all we want is to discover the fuel for keeping it
up,—the true Lignum Vitæ. It is not against nature, he contends, that
we should live till the renovation of all things; it is only against
our knowledge, and beyond it. But there are medicaments for prolonging
life; and none but the foolish or the ignorant would ask why then is
it that Princes and Kings who can afford to purchase them, die
nevertheless like other people. The reason says the great Bombast von
Hohenheim is that their physicians know less about medicine than the
very boors, and moreover that Princes and Kings lead dissolute lives.
And if it be asked why no one except Hermes Trismegistus has used such
medicaments; he replies that others have used them, but have not let
it be known.

Van Helmont was once of opinion that no metallic preparation could
contain in itself the blessing of the Tree of Life, though that the
Philosopher's stone had been discovered was a fact that consisted with
his own sure knowledge. This opinion however was in part changed, in
consequence of some experiments made with an aurific powder, given him
by a stranger after a single evening's acquaintance; _(vir peregrinus,
unius vesperi amicus:)_ these experiments convinced him that the stone
partook of what he calls Zoophyte life, as distinguished both from
vegetative and sensitive. But the true secret he thought, must be
derived from the vegetable world, and he sought for it in the Cedar,
induced, as it seems, by the frequent mention of that tree in the Old
Testament. He says much concerning the cedar,—among other things, that
when all other plants were destroyed by the Deluge, and their kinds
preserved only in their seed, the Cedars of Lebanon remained uninjured
under the waters. However when he comes to the main point, he makes a
full stop, saying, _Cætera autem quæ de Cedro sunt, mecum sepelientur:
nam mundus non capax est._ It is not unlikely that if his mysticism
had been expressed in the language of intelligible speculation, it
might have been found to accord with some of Berkeley's theories in
the _Siris_. But for his reticence upon this subject, as if the world
were not worthy of his discoveries, he ought to have been deprived of
his two remaining talents. Five he tells us he had received for his
portion, but because instead of improving them, he had shown himself
unworthy of so large a trust, he by whom they were given had taken
from him three. “_Ago illi gratias, quod cum contulisset in me quinque
talenta, fecissemque me indignum, et hactenus repudium coram eo factus
essem, placuit divinæ bonitati, auferre à me tria, et relinquere adhuc
bina, ut me sic ad meliorem frugem exspectaret. Maluit, inquam, me
depauperare et tolerare, ut non essem utilis plurimis, modò me
salvaret ab hujus mundi periculis. Sit ipsi æterna sanctificatio._”

He has however informed posterity of the means by which he prolonged
the life of a man to extreme old age. This person whose name was Jan
Mass, was in the service of Martin Rythovius, the first Bishop of
Ypres, when that prelate, by desire of the illustrious sufferers,
assisted at the execution of Counts Egmond and Horn. Mass was then in
the twenty-fifth year of his age. When he was fifty-eight, being poor,
and having a large family of young children, he came to Van Helmont,
and entreated him to prolong his life if he could, for the sake of
these children, who would be left destitute in case of his death, and
must have to beg their bread from door to door. Van Helmont, then a
young man, was moved by such an application, and considering what
might be the likeliest means of sustaining life in its decay, he
called to mind the fact that wine is preserved from corruption by the
fumes of burnt brimstone; it then occurred to him that the acid liquor
of sulphur, _acidum sulfuris stagma_, (it is better so to translate
his words than to call it the sulphuric acid,) must of necessity
contain the fumes and odour of sulphur, being, according to his
chemistry, nothing but those fumes of sulphur, combined with, or
imbibed in, its mercurial salt. The next step in his reasoning was to
regard the blood as the wine of life; if this could be kept sound,
though longevity might not be the necessary consequence, life would at
least be preserved from the many maladies which arose from its
corruption, and the sanity, and immunity from such diseases, and from
the sufferings consequent thereon, must certainly tend to its
prolongation. He gave Mass therefore a stone bottle of the distilled
liquor of sulphur, and taught him also how to prepare this oil from
burnt sulphur. And he ordered him at every meal to take two drops of
it in his first draught of beer; and not lightly to exceed that; two
drops, he thought, contained enough of the fumes for a sufficient
dose. This was in the year 1600; and now, says Helmont, in 1641, the
old man still walks about the streets of Brussels. And what is still
better, _(quodque augustius est,)_ in all these forty years, he has
never been confined by any illness, except that by a fall upon the ice
he once broke his leg near the knee; and he has constantly been free
from fever, remaining a slender and lean man, and always poor.

Jan Mass had nearly reached his hundredth year when this was written,
and it is no wonder that Van Helmont, who upon a fantastic analogy had
really prescribed an efficient tonic, should have accounted by the
virtue of his prescription for the health and vigour, which a strong
constitution had retained to that extraordinary age. There is no
reason for doubting the truth of his statement; but if Van Helmont
relied upon his theory, he must have made further experiments; it is
probable therefore that he either distrusted his own hypothesis, or
found upon subsequent trials that the result disappointed him.

Van Helmont's works were collected and edited by his son Francis
Mercurius, who styles himself _Philosophus per Unum in quo Omnia
Eremita peregrinans_, and who dedicated the collection as a holocaust
to the ineffable Hebrew Name. The Vita Authoris which he prefixed to
it relates to his own life, not to his father's, and little can be
learnt from it, except that he is the more mystical and least
intelligible of the two. The most curious circumstances concerning the
father are what he has himself communicated in the treatise entitled
his Confession, into which the writer of his life in Aikin's Biography
seems not to have looked, nor indeed into any of his works, the
articles in that as in our other Biographies, being generally compiled
from compilations, so as to present the most superficial information,
with the least possible trouble to the writer and the least possible
profit to the reader,—skimming for him not the cream of knowledge, but
the scum.

Dr. Dove used to say that whoever wrote the life of an author without
carefully perusing his works acted as iniquitously as a Judge who
should pronounce sentence in a cause without hearing the evidence; nay
he maintained, the case was even worse, because there was an even
chance that the Judge might deliver a right sentence, but it was
impossible that a life so composed should be otherwise than grievously
imperfect, if not grossly erroneous. For all the ordinary business of
the medical profession he thought it sufficient that a practitioner
should thoroughly understand the practice of his art, and proceed
empirically: God help the patients, he would say, if it were not so!
and indeed without God's help they would fare badly at the best. But
he was of opinion that no one could take a lively and at the same time
a worthy interest in any art or science without as it were identifying
himself with it, and seeking to make himself well acquainted with its
history: a Physician therefore, according to his way of thinking ought
to be as curious concerning the writings of his more eminent
predecessors, and as well read in the most illustrious of them, as a
general in the wars of Hannibal, Cæsar, the Black Prince, the Prince
of Parma, Gustavus Adolphus, and Marlborough. How carefully he had
perused Van Helmont was shown by the little landmarks whereby after an
interval of—alas how many years,—I have followed him through the
volume,—_haud passibus æquis_.

CHAPTER CLXXXVII.

VAN HELMONT'S WORKS, AND CERTAIN SPECIALITIES IN HIS LIFE.

_Voilà, mon conte.—Je ne sçay s'il est vray; mais, je l'ay ainsi ouy
conter.—Possible que cela est faux, possible que non.—Je m'en rapporte
à ce qui en est. Il ne sera pas damné qui le croira, ou décroira._

BRANTÔME.

“The works of Van Helmont,” Dr. Aikin says, “are now only consulted as
curiosities; but with much error and jargon, they contain many shrewd
remarks, and curious speculations.”

How little would any reader suppose from this account of them, or
indeed from any thing which Dr. Aikin has said concerning this once
celebrated person, that Van Helmont might as fitly be classed among
enthusiasts as among physicians, and with philosophers as with either;
and that like most enthusiasts it is sometimes not easy to determine
whether he was deceived himself or intended to deceive others.

He was born at Brussels in the year 1577, and of noble family. In his
Treatise entitled _Tumulus Pestis_ (to which strange title a
stranger[1] explanation is annexed) he gives a sketch of his own
history, saying, “_imitemini, si quid forte boni in eâ occurrerit._”
He was a devourer of books, and digested into common places for his
own use, whatever he thought most remarkable in them, so that few
exceeded him in diligence, but most, he says, in judgement. At the age
of seventeen, he was appointed by the Professors Thomas Fyenus, Gerard
de Velleers, and Stornius, to read surgical lectures in the Medical
College at Louvain. _Eheu_, he exclaims, _præsumsi docere, quæ ipse
nesciebam!_ and his presumption was increased because the Professors
of their own accord appointed him to this Lectureship, attended to
hear him, and were the Censors of what he delivered. The writers from
whom he compiled his discourses were Holerius, Tagaultius, Guido,
Vigo, Ægineta, and “the whole tribe of Arabian authors.” But then he
began, and in good time, to marvel at his own temerity and
inconsiderateness in thinking that by mere reading, he could be
qualified to teach what could be learnt only by seeing, and by
operating, and by long practice, and by careful observation: and this
distrust in himself was increased when he discovered that the
Professors could give him no further light than books had done.
However at the age of twenty-two he was created Doctor of Medicine in
the same University.

[Footnote 1:

Lector, titulus quem legis, terror lugubris, foribus affixus,
intus mortem, mortis genus, et hominum
nunciat flagrum. Sta, et inquire, quid hoc?
Mirare. Quid sibi vult
Tumuli Epigraphe Pestis?
Sub anatome abii, non obii; quamdiu malesuada invidia
Momi, et hominum ignara cupido,
me fovebunt.
Ergo heic
Non funus, non cadaver, non mors, non sceleton
non luctus, non contagium.
ÆTERNO DA GLORIAM
Quod Pestis jam desiit, sub Anatomes proprio supplicio.]

Very soon he began to repent that he, who was by birth noble, should
have been the first of his family to choose the medical profession,
and this against the will of his mother, and without the knowledge of
his other relations. “I lamented, he says, with tears the sin of my
disobedience, and regretted the time and labour which had been thus
vainly expended: and often with a sorrowful heart I intreated the Lord
that he would be pleased to lead me to a vocation not of my own
choice, but in which I might best perform his will; and I made a vow
that to whatever way of life he might call me, I would follow it, and
do my utmost endeavour therein to serve him. Then, as if I had tasted
of the forbidden fruit, I discovered my own nakedness. I saw that
there was neither truth nor knowledge in my putative learning; and
thought it cruel to derive money from the sufferings of others; and
unfitting that an art founded upon charity, and conferred upon the
condition of exercising compassion, should be converted into a means
of lucre.”

These reflections were promoted if not induced by his having caught a
disorder which as it is not mentionable in polite circles, may be
described by intimating that the symptom from which it derives its
name is alleviated by what Johnson defines tearing or rubbing with the
nails. It was communicated to him by a young lady's glove, into which
in a evil minute of sportive gallantry he had insinuated his hand. The
physicians treated him, _secundum artem_, in entire ignorance of the
disease; they bled him to cool the liver, and they purged him to carry
off the torrid choler and the salt phlegm, they repeated this
clearance again and again, till from a hale strong and active man they
had reduced him to extreme leanness and debility without in the
slightest degree abating the cutaneous disease. He then persuaded
himself that the humours which the Galenists were so triumphantly
expelling from his poor carcase had not preexisted there in that state
but were produced by the action of their drugs. Some one cured him
easily by brimstone, and this is said to have made him feelingly
perceive the inefficiency of the scholastic practice which he had
hitherto pursued.

In this state of mind he made over his inheritance to a widowed
sister, who stood in need of it, gave up his profession, and left his
own country with an intention of never returning to it. The world was
all before him, and he began his travels with as little fore-knowledge
whither he was going, and as little fore-thought of what he should do,
as Adam himself when the gate of Paradise was closed upon him; but he
went with the hope that God would direct his course by His good
pleasure to some good end. It so happened that he who had renounced
the profession of medicine as founded on delusion and imposture was
thrown into the way of practising it, by falling in company with a man
who had no learning, but who understood the practical part of
chemistry, or pyrotechny, as he calls it. The new world which Columbus
discovered did not open a wider or more alluring field to ambition and
rapacity than this science presented to Van Helmont's enthusiastic and
enquiring mind. “Then” says he, “when by means of fire I beheld the
_penetrale_, the inward or secret part of certain bodies, I
comprehended the separations of many, which were not then taught in
books, and some of which are still unknown.” He pursued his
experiments with increasing ardour, and in the course of two years
acquired such reputation by the cures which he performed, that because
of his reputation he was sent for by the Elector of Cologne. Then
indeed he became more ashamed of his late and learned ignorance, and
renouncing all books because they sung only the same cuckoo note,
perceived that he profited more by fire, and by conceptions acquired
in praying. “And then,” says he, “I clearly knew that I had missed the
entrance of true philosophy, on all sides obstacles and obscurities
and difficulties appeared, which neither labour, nor time, nor vigils,
nor expenditure of money could overcome and disperse, but only the
mere goodness of God. Neither women, nor social meetings deprived me
then of even a single hour, but continual labour and watching were the
thieves of my time; for I willingly cured the poor and those of mean
estate, being more moved by human compassion, and a moral love of
giving, than by pure universal charity reflected in the Fountain of
Life.”

INTERCHAPTER XX.

ST. PANTALEON OF NICOMEDIA IN BITHYNIA—HIS HISTORY, AND SOME FURTHER
PARTICULARS NOT TO BE FOUND ELSEWHERE.

_Non dicea le cose senza il quia;
Che il dritto distingueva dal mancino,
E dicea pane al pane, e vino al vino._

BERTOLDO.

This Interchapter is dedicated to St. Pantaleon, of Nicomedia in
Bithynia, student in medicine and practitioner in miracles, whose
martyrdom is commemorated by the Church of Rome, on the 27th of July.

_Sancte Pantaleon, ora pro nobis!_

This I say to be on the safe side; though between ourselves reader,
Nicephorus, and Usuardus, and Vincentius and St. Antoninus
(notwithstanding his sanctity) have written so many lies concerning
him, that it is very doubtful whether there ever was such a person,
and still more doubtful whether there be such a Saint. However the
body which is venerated under his name, is just as venerable as if it
had really belonged to him, and works miracles as well.

It is a tradition in Corsica that when St. Pantaleon was beheaded, the
executioner's sword was converted into a wax taper, and the weapons of
all his attendants into snuffers, and that the head rose from the
block and sung. In honour of this miracle the Corsicans as late as the
year 1775 used to have their swords consecrated, or charmed,—by laying
them on the altar while a mass was performed to St. Pantaleon.

But what have I, who am writing in January instead of July, and who am
no papist, and who have the happiness of living in a protestant
country, and was baptized moreover by a right old English name,—what
have I to do with St. Pantaleon? Simply this, my new pantaloons are
just come home, and that they derive their name from the aforesaid
Saint is as certain,—as that it was high time I should have a new
pair.

St. Pantaleon though the tutelary Saint of Oporto (which city boasteth
of his relics) was in more especial fashion at Venice: and so many of
the grave Venetians were in consequence named after him, that the
other Italians called them generally Pantaloni in derision,—as an
Irishman is called Pat, and as Sawney is with us synonymous with
Scotchman, or Taffy for a son of Cadwallader and votary of St. David
and his leek. Now the Venetians wore long small clothes; these as
being the national dress were called Pantaloni also; and when the
trunk-hose of Elizabeth's days went out of fashion, we received them
from France, with the name of pantaloons.

Pantaloons then as of Venetian and Magnifico parentage, and under the
patronage of an eminent Saint, are doubtless an honourable garb. They
are also of honourable extraction, being clearly of the Braccæ family.
For it is this part of our dress by which we are more particularly
distinguished from the Oriental and inferior nations and also from the
abominable Romans whom our ancestors, Heaven be praised! subdued.
Under the miserable reign of Honorius and Arcadius, these Lords of the
World thought proper to expel the Braccarii, or breeches-makers, from
their capitals, and to prohibit the use of this garment, thinking it a
thing unworthy that the Romans should wear the habit of
Barbarians:—and truly it was not fit that so effeminate a race should
wear the breeches.

The Pantaloons are of this good Gothic family. The fashion having been
disused for more than a century was re-introduced some five and twenty
years ago, and still prevails so much—that I who like to go with the
stream, and am therefore content to have fashions thrust upon me, have
just received a new pair from London.

The coming of a box from the Great City is an event which is always
looked to by the juveniles of this family with some degree of
impatience. In the present case there was especial cause for such
joyful expectation, for the package was to contain no less a treasure
than the story of the Lioness and the Exeter Mail, with appropriate
engravings representing the whole of that remarkable history, and
those engravings emblazoned in appropriate colours. This adventure had
excited an extraordinary degree of interest among us when it was
related in the newspapers: and no sooner had a book upon the subject
been advertised, than the young ones one and all were in an uproar,
and tumultuously petitioned that I would send for it,—to which,
thinking the prayer of the petitioners reasonable, I graciously
assented. And moreover there was expected among other things _ejusdem
generis_, one of those very few perquisites which the all-annihilating
hand of Modern Reform has not retrenched in our public offices,—an
Almanac or Pocket-Book for the year, curiously bound and gilt, three
only being made up in this magnificent manner for three magnificent
personages, from one of whom this was a present to my lawful
Governess. Poor Mr. Bankes! the very hairs of his wig will stand
erect,

Like quills upon the fretful porcupine,

when he reads of this flagrant misapplication of public money; and Mr.
Whitbread would have founded a motion upon it, had he survived the
battle of Waterloo.

There are few things in which so many vexatious delays are continually
occurring, and so many rascally frauds are systematically practised,
as in the carriage of parcels. It is indeed much to be wished that
Government could take into its hands the conveyance of goods as well
as letters, for in this country whatever is done by Government is done
punctually and honourably;—what corruption there is lies among the
people themselves, among whom honesty is certainly less general than
it was half a century ago. Three or four days elapsed on each of which
the box ought to have arrived. Will it come to day Papa? was the
morning question: why does not it come? was the complaint at noon; and
when will it come? was the query at night. But in childhood the delay
of hope is only the prolongation of enjoyment; and through life
indeed, hope if it be of the right kind, is the best food of
happiness. “The House of Hope,” says Hafiz, “is built upon a weak
foundation.” If it be so, I say, the fault is in the builder: Build it
upon a Rock, and it will stand.

_Expectata dies_,—long looked for, at length it came. The box was
brought into the parlour, the ripping-chissel was produced, the nails
were easily forced, the cover was lifted, and the paper which lay
beneath it was removed. There's the pantaloons! was the first
exclamation. The clothes being taken out, there appeared below a paper
parcel, secured with string. As I never encourage any undue
impatience, the string was deliberately and carefully untied. Behold,
the splendid Pocket-Book, and the history of the Lioness and the
Exeter Mail,—had been forgotten!

O St. Peter! St. Peter!

“Pray, Sir,” says the Reader, “as I perceive you are a person who have
a reason for every thing you say, may I ask wherefore you call upon
St. Peter on this occasion.”

You may Sir.

A reason there is and a valid one. But what that reason is, I shall
leave the commentators to discover; observing only, for the sake of
lessening their difficulty, that the Peter upon whom I have called is
not St. Peter of Verona, he having been an Inquisitor, one of the
Devil's Saints, and therefore in no condition at this time to help any
body who invokes him.

“Well Papa, you must write about them, and they must come in the next
parcel,” said the children. Job never behaved better, who was a
scriptural Epictetus; nor Epictetus who was a heathen Job.

I kissed the little philosophers; and gave them the Bellman's verses,
which happened to come in the box, with horrific cuts of the Marriage
at Cana, the Ascension and other portions of gospel history, and the
Bellman himself,—so it was not altogether a blank. We agreed that the
disappointment should be an adjourned pleasure, and then I turned to
inspect the pantaloons.

I cannot approve the colour. It hath too much of the purple; not that
imperial die by which ranks were discriminated at Constantinople, nor
the more sober tint which Episcopacy affecteth. Nor is it the bloom of
the plum;—still less can it be said to resemble the purple light of
love. No! it is rather a hue brushed from the raven's wing, a black
purple; not Night and Aurora meeting, which would make the darkness
blush; but Erebus and Ultramarine.

Doubtless it hath been selected for me because of its alamodality,—a
good and pregnant word, on the fitness of which some German whose name
appears to be erroneously as well as uncouthly written Geamoenus, is
said to have composed a dissertation. Be pleased Mr. Todd to insert it
in the interleaved copy of your dictionary!

Thankful I am that they are not like Jean de Bart's full dress
breeches; for when that famous sailor went to court he is said to have
worn breeches of cloth of gold, most uncomfortably as well as
splendidly lined with cloth of silver.

He would never have worn them had he read Lampridius, and seen the
opinion of the Emperor Alexander Severus as by that historian
recorded: “_in lineâ autem aurum mitti etiam dementiam judicabat, cum
asperitati adderetur rigor._”

The word breeches has, I am well aware, been deemed ineffable, and
therefore not to be written—because not to be read. But I am
encouraged to use it by the high and mighty authority of the
Anti-Jacobin Review. Mr. Stephens having in his Memoirs of Horne Tooke
used the word small-clothes is thus reprehended for it by the
indignant Censor.

“His _breeches_ he calls _small-clothes_;—the first time we have seen
this bastard term, the offspring of gross ideas and disgusting
affectation in print, in any thing like a book. It is scandalous to
see men of education thus employing the most vulgar language, and
corrupting their native tongue by the introduction of illegitimate
words. But this is the age of affectation. Even our fishwomen and
milkmaids affect to blush at the only word which can express this part
of a man's dress, and lisp _small-clothes_ with as many airs as a
would-be woman of fashion is accustomed to display. That this folly is
indebted for its birth to grossness of imagination in those who evince
it, will not admit of a doubt. From the same source arises the
ridiculous and too frequent use of a French word for a part of female
dress; as if the mere change of language could operate a change either
in the thing expressed, or in the idea annexed to the expression!
Surely, surely, English women, who are justly celebrated for good
sense and decorous manners, should rise superior to such pityful, such
paltry, such low-minded affectation.”

Here I must observe that one of these redoubtable critics is thought
to have a partiality for breeches of the Dutch make. It is said also
that he likes to cut them out for himself, and to have pockets of
capacious size, wide and deep; and a large fob, and a large allowance
of lining.

The Critic who so very much dislikes the word small-clothes, and
argues so vehemently in behalf of breeches, uses no doubt that edition
of the scriptures that is known by the name of the Breeches Bible.[1]

[Footnote 1: The Bible here alluded to was the Genevan one, by Rowland
Hall, A.D. 1560. It was for many years the most popular one in
England, and the notes were great favorites with the religious public,
insomuch so that they were attached to a copy of King James'
Translation as late as 1715. From the peculiar rendering of Genesis,
iii. 7, the Editions of this translation have been commonly known by
the name of “Breeches Bibles.”—See Cotton's Various Editions of the
Bible, p. 14, and Ames and Herbert, Ed. Dibdin, vol. iv. p. 410.]

I ought to be grateful to the Anti-Jacobin Review. It assists in
teaching me my duty to my neighbour, and enabling me to live in
charity with all men. For I might perhaps think that nothing could be
so wrong-headed as Leigh Hunt, so wrong-hearted as Cobbett, so foolish
as one, so blackguard as the other, so impudently conceited as
both,—if it were not for the Anti-Jacobin. I might believe that
nothing could be so bad as the coarse, bloody and brutal spirit of the
vulgar Jacobin,—if it were not for the Anti-Jacobin.

Blessings on the man for his love of pure English! It is to be
expected that he will make great progress in it, through his
familiarity with fishwomen and milk-maids; for it implies no common
degree of familiarity with those interesting classes to talk to them
about breeches, and discover that they prefer to call them
small-clothes.

But wherefore did he not instruct us by which monosyllable he would
express the female garment, “which is indeed the sister to a
shirt,”—as an old poet says, and which he hath left unnamed,—for there
are two by which it is denominated. Such a discussion would be worthy
both of his good sense, and his decorous stile.

For my part, instead of expelling the word _chemise_ from use I would
have it fairly naturalized.

Many plans have been proposed for reducing our orthography to some
regular system, and improving our language in various ways. Mr.
Elphinstone, Mr. Pinkerton, and Mr. Spence, the founder of the
Spensean Philanthropists, have distinguished themselves in these
useful and patriotic projects, and Mr. Pytches is at present in like
manner laudably employed,—though that gentleman contents himself with
reforming what these bolder spirits would revolutionize. I also would
fain contribute to so desirable an end.

We agree that in spelling words it is proper to discard all reference
to their etymology. The political reformer would confine the attention
of the Government exclusively to what are called truly British
objects; and the philological reformers in like manner are desirous of
establishing a truly British language.

Upon this principle, I would anglicize the orthography of _chemise_;
and by improving upon the hint which the word would then offer in its
English appearance, we might introduce into our language a distinction
of genders—in which it has hitherto been defective. For example,

Hemise and Shemise.

Here without the use of an article, or any change of termination we
have the needful distinction made more perspicuously than by _ó_ and
_ń_, _hic_ and _hæc_, _le_ and _la_, or other articles serving for no
other purpose.

Again. In letter-writing, every person knows that male and female
letters have a distinct sexual character, they should therefore be
generally distinguished thus,

Hepistle and Shepistle.

And as there is the same marked difference in the writing of the two
sexes I would propose

Penmanship and Penwomanship.

Erroneous opinions in religion being promulgated in this country by
women as well as men, the teachers of such false doctrines may be
divided into

Heresiarchs and Sheresiarchs,

so that we should speak of

the Heresy of the Quakers
the Sheresy of Joanna Southcote's people.

The troublesome affection of the diaphragm, which every person has
experienced, is upon the same principle to be called according to the
sex of the patient

Hecups or Shecups,

which upon the principle of making our language truly British is
better than the more classical form of

Hiccups and Hæccups.

In its objective use the word becomes

Hiscups or Hercups,

and in like manner Histerics should be altered into Herterics, the
complaint never being masculine.

So also instead of making such words as agreeable, comfortable, &c.
adjectives of one termination, I would propose,

Masculine agreabeau, Feminine agreabelle
comfortabeau comfortabelle
miserabeau miserabelle,
&c. &c.

These things are suggested as hints to Mr. Pytches, to be by him
perpended in his improvement of our Dictionary. I beg leave also to
point out for his critical notice the remarkable difference in the
meaning of the word misfortune, as applied to man, woman, or child: a
peculiarity for which perhaps no parallel is to be found in any other
language.

But to return from these philological speculations to the Anti-Jacobin
by whom we have been led to them, how is it that this critic, great
master as he is of the vulgar tongue, should affirm that breeches is
the only word by which this part of a man's dress can be expressed.
Had he forgotten that there was such a word as galligaskins?—to say
nothing of inexpressibles and dont-mention 'ems. Why also did he
forget pantaloons?—and thus the Chapter like a rondeau comes round to
St. Pantaleon with whom it began,

_Sancte Pantaleon, ora pro nobis!_

“Here is another Chapter without a heading,”—the Compositor would have
said when he came to this part of the Manuscript, if he had not seen
at a glance, that in my great consideration I had said it for him.

Yes, Mr. Compositor! Because of the matter whereon it has to treat, we
must, if you please, entitle this an

ARCH-CHAPTER.

A Frenchman once, who was not ashamed of appearing ignorant on such a
subject, asked another who with some reputation for classical
attainments had not the same rare virtue, what was the difference
between Dryads and Hamadryads; and the man of erudition gravely
replied that it was much the same as that between Bishops and
Archbishops.

I have dignified this Arch-Chapter in its designation, because it
relates to the King.

Dr. Gooch, you are hereby requested to order this book for his
Majesty's library,

_C'est une rare pièce, et digne sur ma foi,
Qu'on en fasse présent au cabinet d'un roi._[1]

[Footnote 1: MOLIERE.]

Dr. Gooch I have a great respect for you. At the time when there was
an intention of bringing a bill into Parliament for emancipating the
Plague from the Quarantine Laws, and allowing to the people of Great
Britain their long withheld right of having this disease as freely as
the small pox, measles and any other infectious malady, you wrote a
paper and published it in the Quarterly Review, against that insane
intention; proving its insanity so fully by matter of fact, and so
conclusively by force of reasoning, that your arguments carried
conviction with them, and put an end, for the time, to that part of
the emancipating and free trade system.

Dr. Gooch, you have also written a volume of medical treatises of
which I cannot speak more highly than by saying, sure I am that if the
excellent subject of these my reminiscences were living, he would, for
his admiration of those treatises have solicited the pleasure and
honour of your acquaintance.

Dr. Gooch, comply with this humble request of a sincere, though
unknown admirer, for the sake of your departed brother-in-physic, who,
like yourself, brought to the study of the healing art, a fertile
mind, a searching intellect and a benevolent heart. More, Dr. G. I
might say, and more I would say, but—

Should I say more, you well might censure me
(What yet I never was) a flatterer.[2]

[Footnote 2: BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER.]

When the King (God bless his Majesty!) shall peruse this book and be
well-pleased therewith, if it should enter into his royal mind to call
for his Librarian, and ask of him what honour and dignity hath been
done to the author of it, for having delighted the heart of the King,
and of so many of his liege subjects, and you shall have replied unto
his Majesty, “there is nothing done for him;” then Dr. Gooch when the
King shall take it into consideration how to testify his satisfaction
with the book, and to manifest his bounty toward the author, you are
requested to bear in mind my thoughts upon this weighty matter, of
which I shall now proceed to put you in possession.

Should he generously think of conferring upon me the honour of
knighthood, or a baronetcy, or a peerage, (Lord Doncaster the title,)
or a step in the peerage, according to my station in life, of which
you Dr. Gooch can give him no information; or should he meditate the
institution of an Order of Merit for men of letters, with an intention
of nominating me among the original members, worthy as such intentions
would be of his royal goodness, I should nevertheless, for reasons
which it is not necessary to explain, deem it prudent to decline any
of these honours.

Far be it from me, Dr. Gooch, to wish that the royal apparel should be
brought which the King useth to wear, and the horse that the King
rideth upon, and the crown royal which is set upon his head; and that
this apparel and horse should be delivered to the hand of one of the
King's most noble princes, that he might array me withal; and bring me
on horseback through the streets of London, and proclaim before me,
thus shall it be done to the man whom the King delighteth to honour!
Such an exhibition would neither accord with this age, nor with the
manners of this nation, nor with my humility.

As little should I desire that his Majesty should give orders for me
to be clothed in purple, to drink in gold and to sleep upon gold, and
to ride in a chariot with bridles of gold, and to have an head-tire of
fine linen, and a chain about my neck, and to eat next the King,
because of my wisdom, and to be called the King's cousin. For purple
garments, Dr. Gooch are not among the _propria quæ maribus_ in England
at this time; it is better to drink in glass than in gold, and to
sleep upon a feather bed than upon a golden one; the only head-tire
which I wear is my night-cap, I care not therefore for the fineness of
its materials; and I dislike for myself chains of any kind.

That his Majesty should think of sending for me to sit next him
because of my wisdom, is what he in his wisdom will not do, and what,
if he were to do, would not be agreeable to me, in mine. But should
the King desire to have me called his Cousin, accompanying that of
course with such an appanage as would be seemly for its support, and
should he notify that most gracious intention to you his Librarian,
and give order that it should be by you inserted in the Gazette,—to
the end that the secret which assuredly no sagacity can divine, and no
indiscretion will betray, should incontinently thereupon be
communicated through you to the royal ear; and that in future editions
of this work, the name of the thus honoured author should appear with
the illustrious designation, in golden letters of, “by special command
of his Majesty,

COUSIN TO THE KING.”

A gracious mandate of this nature, Dr. Gooch, would require a severe
sacrifice from my loyal and dutiful obedience. Not that the respectful
deference which is due to the royal and noble house of Gloucester
should withhold me from accepting the proffered honour: to that house
it could be nothing derogatory; the value of their consanguinity would
rather be the more manifest, when the designation alone, unaccompanied
with rank, was thus rendered by special command purely and singularly
honourable. Still less should I be influenced by any apprehension of
being confounded in cousinship with Olive, calling herself Princess of
Cumberland. Nevertheless let me say, Dr. Gooch, while I am free to say
it,—while I am treating of it paulo-post-futuratively, as of a
possible case, not as a question brought before me for my prompt and
irrevocable answer,—let me humbly say that I prefer the incognito even
to this title. It is not necessary, and would not be proper to enter
into my reasons for that preference; suffice it that it is my humour
(speaking be it observed respectfully, and using that word in its
critical and finer sense), that it is the idiosyncrasy of my
disposition, the familiar way in which it pleases me innocently to
exercise my privilege of free will. It is not a secret which every
body knows, which nobody could help knowing and which was the more
notoriously known because of its presumed secresy. Incognito I am and
wish to be, and incognoscible it is in my power to remain:

He deserves small trust,
Who is not privy councillor to himself,

but my secret, (being my own) is, like my life (if that were needed)
at the King's service, and at his alone;

_Τοῖς κυρίοις γὰρ πάντα χρὴ δηλοῦν λόγον._[3]

[Footnote 3: SOPHOCLES.]

Be pleased therefore Dr. Gooch, if his Majesty most graciously and
most considerately should ask, what may be done for the man (—meaning
me,—) whom the King delighteth to honour;—be pleased, good Dr. Gooch,
to represent that the allowance which is usually granted to a retired
Envoy, would content his wishes, make his fortunes easy, and gladden
his heart;—(Dr. Gooch you will forgive the liberty thus taken with
you!)—that “where the word of a King is, there is power,”—that an
ostensible reason for granting it may easily be found, a sealed
communication from the unknown being made through your hands;—that
many Envoys have not deserved it better, and many secret services
which have been as largely rewarded have not afforded to the King so
much satisfaction;—finally that this instance of royal bounty will not
have the effect of directing public suspicion toward the object of
that bounty, nor be likely to be barked at by Joseph Hume, Colonel
Davies, and Daniel Whittle Harvey!

CHAPTER CLXXXVIII.

FOLLY IN PRINT, REFERRED TO, BUT (N.B.) NOT EXEMPLIFIED. THE FAIR MAID
OF DONCASTER. DOUBTS CONCERNING THE AUTHENTICITY OF HER STORY.
THEVENARD AND LOVE ON A NEW FOOTING. STARS AND GARTERS, A MONITORY
ANECDOTE FOR OUR SEX, AND A WHOLESOME NOVELTY IN DRESS RECOMMENDED TO
BOTH.

They be at hand, Sir, with stick and fiddle,
They can play a new dance, Sir, called hey, diddle, diddle.

KING CAMBYSES.

You have in the earlier chapters of this Opus, gentle Reader, heard
much of the musical history of Doncaster; not indeed as it would have
been related by that thoroughly good, fine-ear'd, kind-hearted,
open-handed, happiest of musicians and men, Dr. Burney the first; and
yet I hope thou mayest have found something in this relation which has
been to thy pleasure in reading, and which, if it should be little to
thy profit in remembrance, will be nothing to thy hurt. From music to
dancing is an easy transition, but do not be afraid that I shall take
thee to a Ball,—for I would rather go to the Treading Mill myself.

What I have to say of Doncaster dancing relates to times long before
those to which my reminiscences belong.

In a collection of Poems entitled “Folly in Print”—(which title might
be sufficiently appropriate for many such collections)—or a Book of
Rhymes, printed in 1667, there is a Ballad called the Northern Lass,
or the Fair Maid of Doncaster. Neither book or ballad has ever fallen
in my way, nor has that comedy of Richard Broome's, which from its
name Oldys supposed to have been founded upon the same story. I learn
however in a recent and voluminous account of the English Stage from
the Revolution (by a gentleman profoundly learned in the most
worthless of all literature, and for whom that literature seems to
have been quite good enough,) that Broome's play has no connection
with the ballad, or with Doncaster. But the note in which Oldys
mentions it has made me acquainted with this Fair Maid's propensity
for dancing, and with the consequences that it brought upon her. Her
name was Betty Maddox; a modern ballad writer would call her
Elizabeth, if he adopted the style of the Elizabethan age; or Eliza if
his taste inclined to the refinements of modern euphony. When an
hundred horsemen wooed her, says Oldys, she conditioned that she would
marry the one of them who could dance her down;

You shall decide your quarrel by a dance,[1]

but she wearied them all; and they left her a maid for her pains.

_Legiadria suos fervabat tanta per artus,
Ut quæcunque potest fieri saltatio per nos
Humanos, agili motu fiebat ab illâ._[2]

[Footnote 1: DRYDEN.]

[Footnote 2: MACARONICA.]

At that dancing match they must have footed it till, as is said in an
old Comedy, a good country lass's capermonger might have been able to
copy the figure of the dance from the impressions on the pavement.

For my own part I do not believe it to be a true story; they who
please may. Was there one of the horsemen but would have said on such
occasion, with the dancing Peruvians in one of Davenant's operatic
dramas,

Still round and round and round,
Let us compass the ground.
What man is he who feels
Any weight at his heels,
Since our hearts are so light, that, all weigh'd together,
Agree to a grain, and they weigh not a feather.

I disbelieve it altogether, and not for its want of verisimilitude
alone, but because when I was young there was no tradition of any such
thing in the town where the venue of the action is laid; and therefore
I conjecture that it is altogether a fictitious story, and may
peradventure have been composed as a lesson for some young spinster
whose indefatigable feet made her the terror of all partners.

The Welsh have a saying that if a woman were as quick with her feet as
her tongue, she would catch lightning enough to kindle the fire in the
morning; it is a fanciful saying, as many of the Welsh sayings are.
But if Miss Maddox had been as quick with her tongue as her feet,
instead of dancing an hundred horsemen down, she might have talked
their hundred horses to death.

Why it was a greater feat than that of Kempe the actor, who in the age
of odd performance danced from London to Norwich. He was nine days in
dancing the journey and published an account of it under the title of
his “Nine Day's Wonder.”[3] It could have been no “light fantastic
toe” that went through such work; but one fit for the roughest game at
football. At sight of the aweful foot to which it belonged, Cupid
would have fled with as much reason as the Dragon of Wantley had for
turning tail when Moor of Moor Hall with his spiked shoe-armour
pursued him. He would have fled before marriage, for fear of being
kicked out of the house after it. They must have been feet that
instead of gliding and swimming, and treading the grass so trim, went
as the old Comedy says lumperdee, clumperdee.[4]

[Footnote 3: Webster's Westward Ho. Act. v. Sc. i.—Anno 1600.]

[Footnote 4: RALPH ROISTER DOISTER.]

The Northern Lass was in this respect no Cinderella. Nor would any
one, short of an Irish Giant have fallen in love with her slipper, as
Thevenard the singer did with that which he saw by accident at a
shoe-maker's, and enquiring for what enchanting person it was made,
and judging of this earthly Venus as the proportions of Hercules have
been estimated _ex pede_, sought her out, for love of her foot,
commenced his addresses to her, and obtained her hand in marriage.

The story of Thevenard is true, at least it has been related and
received as such; this of the Fair Maid of Doncaster is not even _ben
trovato_. Who indeed shall persuade me, or who indeed will be
persuaded, that if she had wished to drop the title of spinster and
take her matrimonial degree, she would not have found some good excuse
for putting an end to the dance when she had found a partner to her
liking? A little of that wit which seldom fails a woman when it is
needed, would have taught her how to do this with a grace, and make it
appear that she was still an invincible dancer, though the Stars had
decreed that in this instance she should lose the honour of the dance.
Some accident might have been feigned like those by which the ancient
epic poets, and their imitators contrive in their Games to disappoint
those who are on the point of gaining the prize which is contended
for.

If the Stars had favoured her, they might have predestined her to meet
with such an accident as befel a young lady in the age of minuets. She
was led out in a large assembly by her partner, the object of all
eyes; and when the music began and the dance should have began also,
and he was in motion, she found herself unable to move from the spot,
she remained motionless for a few seconds, her colour changed from
rose to ruby, presently she seemed about to faint, fell into the arms
of those who ran to support her, and was carried out of the room. The
fit may have been real, for though nothing ailed her, yet what had
happened was enough to make any young woman faint in such a place. It
was something far more embarrassing than the mishap against which
Soame Jenyns cautions the ladies when he says,

No waving lappets should the dancing fair,
Nor ruffles edged with dangling fringes wear;
Oft will the cobweb ornaments catch hold
On the approaching button, rough with gold;
Nor force nor art can then the bonds divide
When once the entangled Gordian knot is tied.
So the unhappy pair, by Hymen's power
Together joined in some ill-fated hour,
The more they strive their freedom to regain,
The faster binds the indissoluble chain.

It was worse than this in the position in which she had placed herself
according to rule, for beginning the minuet, she was fastened not by a
spell, not by the influence of her malignant Stars, but by the hooks
and eyes of her garters. The Countess of Salisbury's misfortune was as
much less embarrassing as it was more celebrated.

No such misfortunes could have happened to that Countess who has been
rendered illustrious thereby, nor to the once fair danceress, who
would have dreaded nothing more than that her ridiculous distress
should become publicly known, if they had worn _genouillères_, that is
to say, knee-pieces. A necessary part of a suit of armour was
distinguished by this name in the days of chivalry; and the article of
dress which corresponds to it may be called kneelets, if for a new
article we strike a new word in that mint of analogy, from which
whatever is lawfully coined comes forth as the King's English. Dress
and cookery are both great means of civilization, indeed they are
among the greatest; both in their abuse are made subservient to luxury
and extravagance, and so become productive of great evils, moral and
physical; and with regard to both the physician may sometimes
interfere with effect, when the moralist would fail. In diet the
physician has more frequently to oppose the inclinations of his
patient, than to gratify them; and it is not often that his advice in
matters of dress meets with willing ears, although in these things the
maxim will generally hold good, that whatever is wholesome is
comfortable, and that whatever causes discomfort or uneasiness is more
or less injurious to health. But he may recommend kneelets without
having any objection raised on the score of fashion, or of vanity; and
old and young may be thankful for the recommendation. Mr.
Ready-to-halt would have found that they supported his weak joints and
rendered him less liable to rheumatic attacks; and his daughter
Much-afraid, if she had worn them when she “footed it handsomely,”
might have danced without any fear of such accidents as happened to
the Countess of old, or the heroine of the minuet in later times.

Begin therefore forthwith, dear Lady-readers, to knit _genouillères_
for yourselves, and for those whom you love. You will like them better
I know by their French name, though English comes best from English
lips; but so you knit and wear them, call them what you will.

CHAPTER CLXXXIX.

I could be pleased with any one
Who entertained my sight with such gay shows,
As men and women moving here and there,
That coursing one another in their steps
Have made their feet a tune.

DRYDEN.

The Doctor was no dancer. He had no inclination for this pastime even
in what the song calls “our dancing days,” partly because his activity
lay more in his head than in his heels, and partly perhaps from an
apprehension of awkwardness, the consequence of his rustic breeding.
In middle and later life he had strong professional objections, not to
the act of dancing, but to the crowded and heated rooms wherein it was
carried on, and to the late hours to which it was continued. In such
rooms and at such assemblies, the Devil, as an old dramatist says,
“takes delight to hang at a woman's girdle, like a rusty watch, that
she cannot discern how the time passes.”[1] Bishop Hall in our
friend's opinion spake wisely when drawing an ideal picture of the
Christian, he said of him, “in a due season he betakes himself to his
rest. He presumes not to alter the ordinance of day and night; nor
dares confound, where distinctions are made by his Maker.”

[Footnote 1: WEBSTER.]

Concerning late hours indeed he was much of the same opinion as the
man in the old play who thought that “if any thing was to be damned,
it would be Twelve o'clock at night.”

These should be hours for necessities,
Not for delights; times to repair our nature
With comforting repose, and not for us
To waste these times.[2]

He used to say that whenever he heard of a ball carried on far into
the night, or more properly speaking, far into the morning, it
reminded him with too much reason of the Dance of Death.

Rise with the lark, and with the lark to bed:
The breath of night's destructive to the hue
Of ev'ry flow'r that blows. Go to the field,
And ask the humble daisy why it sleeps
Soon as the sun departs? Why close the eyes
Of blossoms infinite, long ere the moon
Her oriental veil puts off? Think why,
Nor let the sweetest blossom Nature boasts
Be thus exposed to night's unkindly damp.
Well may it droop, and all its freshness lose,
Compell'd to taste the rank and pois'nous steam
Of midnight theatre, and morning ball.
Give to repose the solemn hour she claims
And from the forehead of the morning steal
The sweet occasion. O there is a charm
Which morning has, that gives the brow of age
A smack of earth, and makes the lip of youth
Shed perfume exquisite. Expect it not,
Ye who till noon upon a down-bed lie,
Indulging feverous sleep.[3]

[Footnote 2: SHAKESPEARE.]

[Footnote 3: HURDIS' VILLAGE CURATE.]

The reader need not be told that his objections were not puritanical,
but physical. The moralist who cautioned his friend to refrain from
dancing, because it was owing to a dance that John the Baptist lost
his head, talked, he said, like a fool. Nor would he have formed a
much more favourable opinion of the Missionary in South Africa, who
told the Hottentots that dancing is a work of darkness, and that a
fiddle is Satan's own instrument. At such an assertion he would have
exclaimed a fiddlestick![4]—Why and how that word has become an
interjection of contempt, I must leave those to explain who can. The
Albigenses and the Vaudois are said to have believed that a dance is
the Devil's procession, in which they who dance break the promise and
vow which their sponsors made for them at their baptism that they
should renounce the Devil and all his works, the pomps and vanities of
this wicked world,—(not to proceed further,)—this being one of his
works, and undeniably one of the aforesaid vanities and pomps. They
break moreover all the ten commandments, according to these fanatics;
for fanatics they must be deemed who said this; and the manner in
which they attempted to prove the assertion by exemplifying it through
the decalogue, shows that the fermentation of their minds was in the
acetous stage.

[Footnote 4: The explanation following is given in Grose's Classical
Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue. FIDDLESTICK'S END. Nothing: the ends
of the ancient fiddlesticks ending in a point: hence metaphorically
used to express a thing terminating in nothing.]

Unfortunately for France, this opinion descended to the Huguenots; and
the progress of the Reformation in that country was not so much
promoted by Marot's psalms, as it was obstructed by this prejudice, a
prejudice directly opposed to the temperament and habits of a
mercurial people. “Dancing,” says Peter Heylyn, “is a sport to which
they are so generally affected, that were it not so much enveighed
against by their straight-laced Ministers, it is thought that many
more of the French Catholicks had been of the Reformed Religion. For
so extremely are they bent upon this disport, that neither Age nor
Sickness, no nor poverty itself, can make them keep their heels still,
when they hear the Music. Such as can hardly walk abroad without their
Crutches, or go as if they were troubled all day with a Sciatica, and
perchance have their rags hang so loose about them, that one would
think a swift Galliard might shake them into their nakedness, will to
the Dancing Green howsoever, and be there as eager at the sport, as if
they had left their several infirmities and wants behind them. What
makes their Ministers (and indeed all that follow the Genevian
Discipline) enveigh so bitterly against Dancing, and punish it with
such severity when they find it used? I am not able to determine, nor
doth it any way belong unto this discourse. But being it is a
Recreation which this people are so given unto, and such a one as
cannot be followed but in a great deal of company, and before many
witnesses and spectators of their carriage in it; I must needs think
the Ministers of the French Church more nice than wise, if they choose
rather to deter men from their Congregations, by so strict a Stoicism,
than indulge any thing unto the jollity and natural gaiety of this
people, in matters not offensive, but by accident only.”[5]

Sweet recreation barr'd, what doth ensue,
But moody and dull melancholy,
Kinsman to grim and comfortless despair;
And at their heels, a huge infectious troop
Of pale distemperatures and foes to life.[6]

[Footnote 5: The Rector of a Parish once complained to Fenelon of the
practice of the villagers in dancing on Sunday evenings. “My good
friend,” replied the prelate, “you and I should not dance, but
allowance must be made to the poor people, who have only one day in
the week to forget their misfortunes.”]

[Footnote 6: SHAKESPEARE.]

It is a good natured Roman Catholic who says, “that the obliging vices
of some people are better than the sour and austere virtues of
others.” The fallacy is more in his language than in his morality; for
virtue is never sour, and in proportion as it is austere we may be
sure that it is adulterated. Before a certain monk of St. Gal, Iso by
name, was born, his mother dreamt that she was delivered of a
hedge-hog; her dream was fulfilled in the character which he lived to
obtain of being bristled with virtues like one. Methinks no one would
like to come in contact with a person of this description. Yet among
the qualities which pass with a part of the world for virtues, there
are some of a soft and greasy kind, from which I should shrink with
the same instinctive dislike. I remember to have met somewhere with
this eulogium past upon one dissenting minister by another, that he
was a lump of piety! I prefer the hedge-hog.

A dance, according to that teacher of the Albigenses whose diatribe
has been preserved, is the service of the Devil, and the fiddler, whom
Ben Jonson calls Tom Ticklefoot, is the Devil's minister. If he had
known what Plato had said he would have referred to it in confirmation
of this opinion, for Plato says that the Gods compassionating the
laborious life to which mankind were doomed, sent Apollo, Bacchus and
the Muses to teach them to sing, to drink, and to dance. And the old
Puritan would to his own entire satisfaction have identified Apollo
with Apollyon.

“But shall we make the welkin dance indeed?”[7]

[Footnote 7: SHAKSPEARE.]

Sir John Davies, who holds an honourable and permanent station among
English statesmen and poets deduces Dancing, in a youthful poem of
extraordinary merit, from the Creation, saying that it

then began to be
When the first seeds whereof the world did spring,
The fire, air, earth, and water did agree,
By Love's persuasion, Nature's mighty king,
To leave their first disordered combating;
And in a dance such measure to observe,
As all the world their motion should preserve.

He says that it with the world

in point of time begun;
Yea Time itself, (whose birth Jove never knew,
And which indeed is elder than the Sun)
Had not one moment of his age outrun,
When out leapt Dancing from the heap of things
And lightly rode upon his nimble wings.

For that brave Sun, the father of the day,
Doth love this Earth, the mother of the Night,
And like a reveller in rich array,
Doth dance his galliard in his leman's sight.

* * * * *

Who doth not see the measures of the Moon,
Which thirteen times she danceth every year?
And ends her pavin thirteen times as soon
As doth her brother, of whose golden hair
She borroweth part, and proudly doth it wear;
Then doth she coyly turn her face aside,
That half her cheek is scarce sometimes descried.

And lo the Sea that fleets about the land
And like a girdle clips her solid waist,
Music and measure both doth understand.
For his great crystal eye is always cast
Up to the Moon, and on her fixed fast;
And as she danceth in her pallid sphere,
So danceth he about the centre here.

This is lofty poetry, and one cannot but regret that the poet should
have put it in the mouth of so unworthy a person as one of Penelope's
suitors, though the best of them has been chosen. The moral
application which he makes to matrimony conveys a wholesome lesson:

If they whom sacred love hath link'd in one,
Do, as they dance, in all their course of life;
Never shall burning grief, nor bitter moan,
Nor factious difference, nor unkind strife,
Arise betwixt the husband and the wife;
For whether forth, or back, or round he go,
As the man doth, so must the woman do.

What if, by often interchange of place
Sometimes the woman gets the upper hand?
That is but done for more delightful grace;
For on that part she doth not ever stand;
But as the measure's law doth her command,
She wheels about, and ere the dance doth end,
Into her former place she doth transcend.[8]

[Footnote 8: It is remarkable that Sir John Davies should have written
this Poem, which he entitled the Orchestra, and that very remarkable
and beautiful one on the Immortality of the Soul.]

This poem of Sir John Davies's could not have been unknown to Burton,
for Burton read every thing; but it must have escaped his memory,
otherwise he who delighted in quotations and quoted so well, would
have introduced some of his stanzas, when he himself was treating of
the same subject and illustrated it with some of the same similitudes.
“The Sun and Moon, some say,” (says he) “dance about the earth; the
three upper planets about the Sun as their centre, now stationary, now
direct, now retrograde, now _in apogæo_, then in _perigæo_, now swift,
then slow; occidental, oriental, they turn round, jump and trace
[symbol for venus] and [symbol for mercury] about the Sun, with those
thirty-three _Maculæ_ or Burbonian planets, _circa Solem saltantes
cytharedum_, saith Fromundus. Four Medicean stars dance about Jupiter,
two Austrian about Saturn, &c. and all belike to the music of the
spheres.”

Sir Thomas Browne had probably this passage in his mind, when he said
“acquaint thyself with the _choragium_ of the stars.”

“The whole matter of the Universe and all the parts thereof,” says
Henry More, “are ever upon motion, and in such a dance as whose traces
backwards and forwards take a vast compass; and what seems to have
made the longest stand, must again move, according to the modulations
and accents of that Music, that is indeed out of the hearing of the
acutest ears, but yet perceptible by the purest minds, and the
sharpest wits. The truth whereof none would dare to oppose, if the
breath of the gainsayer could but tell its own story, and declare
through how many Stars and Vortices it has been strained, before the
particles thereof met, to be abused to the framing of so rash a
contradiction.”

CHAPTER CXC.

DANCING PROSCRIBED BY THE METHODISTS. ADAM CLARKE. BURCHELL'S REMARKS
ON THE UNIVERSALITY OF THIS PRACTICE. HOW IT IS REGARDED IN THE
COLUMBIAN PHILOSOPHY.

_Non vi par adunque che habbiamo ragionato a bastanza di questo? A
bastanza parmi, rispose il Signor Gasparo; pur desidero io d'intendere
qualche particolarità anchor._

IL CORTEGIANO.

The Methodist Preachers in the first Conference (that is Convocation
or Yearly Meeting) after Mr. Wesley's death, past a law for the public
over which their authority extends, or in their own language made a
rule, that “schoolmasters and schoolmistresses who received
dancing-masters into their schools, and parents also who employed
dancing-masters for their children, should be no longer members of the
Methodist Society.” Many arguments were urged against this rule, and
therefore it was defended in the Magazine which is the authorized
organ of the Conference, by the most learned and the most judicious of
their members, Adam Clarke. There was however a sad want of judgement
in some of the arguments which he employed. He quoted the injunction
of St. Paul, “whatsoever ye do in word or deed, do all in the name of
the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God and the Father by him,” and he
applied the text thus. Can any person, can any Christian _dance_ in
the name of the Lord Jesus? Or, through him, give thanks to God the
Father for such an employment?

Another text also appeared to him decisive against dancing and its
inseparable concomitants; “woe unto them who chaunt unto the sound of
the viol, and invent unto themselves instruments of music, as did
David.” The original word which we translate _chaunt_, signifies
according to him, _to quaver, to divide, to articulate,_ and may, he
says, as well be applied to the management of the feet, as to the
modulations of the voice. This interpretation is supported by the
Septuagint, and by the Arabic version; but suppose it be disputed, he
says, “yet this much will not be denied, that the text is pointedly
enough against that without which dancing cannot well be carried on, I
mean, instrumental music.” He might have read in Burton that “nothing
was so familiar in France as for citizens wives, and maids to dance a
round in the streets, and often too for want of better instruments to
make good music of their own voices and dance after it.” Ben Jonson
says truly “that measure is the soul of a dance, and Tune the
tickle-foot thereof,” but in case of need, the mouth can supply its
own music.

It is true the Scripture says “there is a time to dance;” but this he
explains as simply meaning “that human life is a variegated scene.”
Simple readers must they be who can simply understand it thus, to the
exclusion of the literal sense. Adam Clarke has not remembered here
that the Psalms enjoin us to praise the Lord with tabret and harp and
lute, the strings and the pipe, and the trumpet and the loud cymbals,
and to praise his name in the dance, and that David danced before the
Ark. And though he might argue that Jewish observances are no longer
binding, and that some things which were _permitted_ under the Jewish
dispensation are no longer lawful, he certainly would not have
maintained that any thing which was _enjoined_ among its religious
solemnities, can now in itself be sinful.

I grant, he says, “that a number of motions and steps, circumscribed
by a certain given space, and changed in certain quantities of time,
may be destitute of physical and moral evil. But it is not against
these things abstractedly that I speak. It is against their
concomitant and consequent circumstances; the undue, the improper
mixture of the sexes; the occasions and opportunities afforded of
bringing forth those fruits of death which destroy their own souls,
and bring the hoary heads of their too indulgent parents with sorrow
to the grave.”

So good a man as Adam Clarke is not to be suspected of acting like an
Advocate here, and adducing arguments which he knew to be fallacious,
in support of a cause not tenable by fair reasoning. And how so wise a
man could have reasoned so weakly, is explained by a passage in his
most interesting and most valuable autobiography. “_Malâ ave_, when
about twelve or thirteen years of age, I learned to _dance_. I long
resisted all solicitations to this employment, but at last I suffered
myself to be overcome; and learnt, and profited beyond most of my
fellows. I grew passionately fond of it, would scarcely walk but in
_measured time_, and was continually _tripping_, moving and
_shuffling_, in all times and places. I began now to value myself,
which, as far as I can recollect, I had never thought of before; I
grew impatient of control, was fond of company, wished to mingle more
than I had ever done with young people; I got also a passion for
_better clothing_, than that which fell to my lot in life, was
discontented when I found a neighbour's son _dressed better_ than
myself. I lost the spirit of _subordination_, and did not _love work_,
imbibed a spirit of _idleness_, and in short, drunk in all the
brain-sickening effluvia of _pleasure_; dancing and company took the
place of _reading_ and _study_; and the authority of my parents was
feared indeed, but not respected; and few serious impressions could
prevail in a mind imbued now with frivolity, and the love of pleasure;
yet I entered into no disreputable assembly, and in no one case, ever
kept any improper company; I formed no illegal connection, nor
associated with any whose characters were either tarnished or
suspicious. Nevertheless _dancing_ was to me a _perverting influence_,
an _unmixed moral evil_; for although by the mercy of God, it led me
not to depravity of manners, it greatly weakened the _moral
principle_, drowned the voice of a well instructed conscience, and was
the first cause of impelling me _to seek my happiness in this life_.
Every thing yielded to the disposition it had produced, and every
thing was absorbed by it. I have it justly in abhorrence for the moral
injury it did me; and I can testify, (as far as my own observations
have extended, and they have had a pretty wide range,) I have known it
to produce the same evil in others that it produced in me. I consider
it therefore as a branch of that _worldly education_, which leads from
heaven to earth, from things spiritual to things sensual, and from God
to Satan. Let them plead for it who will; I know it to be _evil_, and
that _only_. They who bring up their children in this way, or send
them to these schools where _dancing_ is taught, are consecrating them
to the service of Moloch, and cultivating the passions, so as to cause
them to bring forth the weeds of a fallen nature, with an additional
rankness, deep rooted inveteracy, and inexhaustible fertility. _Nemo
sobrius saltat_, ‘no man in his senses will dance,’ said Cicero, a
heathen; shame on those Christians who advocate a cause by which many
_sons_ have become profligate, and many _daughters_ have been ruined.”
Such was the experience of Adam Clarke in _dancing_, and such was his
opinion of the practice.[1]

[Footnote 1: It is old Fuller's observation, that “people over
strait-laced in one part will hardly fail to grow awry in another.”
Over against the observations of Adam Clarke may be set the following,
from the life of that excellent man—Sir William Jones. “Nor was he so
indifferent to slighter accomplishments as not to avail himself of the
instructions of a celebrated dancing master at Aix-la-Chapelle. He had
before taken lessons from Gallini in that trifling art.”—Carey's Lives
of English Poets. Sir William Jones, p. 359.]

An opinion not less unfavourable is expressed in homely old verse by
the translator of the Ship of Fools, Alexander Barclay.

Than it in the earth no game is more damnable;
It seemeth no peace, but battle openly,
They that it use of minds seem unstable,
As mad folk running with clamour, shout and cry
What place is void of this furious folly?
None; so that I doubt within a while
These fools the holy Church shall defile.

Of people what sort or order may we find,
Rich or poor, high or low of name
But by their foolishness and wanton mind,
Of each sort some are given unto the same.
The priests and clerks to dance have no shame.
The friar or monk, in his frock and cowl,
Must dance in his dortour, leaping to play the fool.

To it comes children, maids, and wives,
And flattering young men to see to have their prey;
The hand-in-hand great falsehood oft contrives.
The old quean also this madness will assay;
And the old dotard, though he scantly may
For age and lameness stir either foot or hand,
Yet playeth he the fool, with others in the band.

Then leap they about as folk past their mind,
With madness amazed running in compace;
He most is commended that can most lewdness find,
Or can most quickly run about the place,
There are all manners used that lack grace,
Moving their bodies in signs full of shame,
Which doth their hearts to sin right sore inflame.

Do away your dances, ye people much unwise!
Desist your foolish pleasure of travayle!
It is methinks an unwise use and guise
To take such labour and pain without avayle.
And who that suspecteth his maid or wives tayle,
Let him not suffer them in the dance to be;
For in that game though size or cinque them fayle
The dice oft runneth upon the chance of three.

The principle upon which such reasoning rests is one against which the
Doctor expressed a strong opinion, whenever he heard it introduced.
Nothing, he thought, could be more unreasonable than that the use of
what is no ways hurtful or unlawful in itself, should be prohibited
because it was liable to abuse. If that principle be once admitted,
where is it to stop? There was a Persian tyrant, who having committed
some horrible atrocity in one of his fits of drunkenness, ordered all
the wine in his dominions to be spilt as soon as he became sober, and
was conscious of what he had done; and in this he acted rightly, under
a sense of duty as well as remorse, for it was enjoining obedience to
a law of his religion, and enforcing it in a manner the most
effectual. But a Christian government which because drunkenness is a
common sin shall prohibit all spirituous liquors, would by so doing
subject the far greater and better part of the community to an unjust
and hurtful privation, thus punishing the sober, the inoffensive and
the industrious, for the sake of the idle, the worthless and the
profligate.

Jones of Nayland regarded these things with no puritanical feeling.
“In joy, and thanksgiving,” says that good and true minister of the
Church of England, “the tongue is not content with speaking, it must
evoke and utter a song, while the feet are also disposed to dance to
the measures of music, as was the custom in sacred celebrities of old
among the people of God, before the World and its vanities had
engrossed to themselves all the expressions of mirth and festivity.
They have now left nothing of that kind to religion; which must sit by
in gloomy solemnity, and see the World with the Flesh and the Devil
assume to themselves the sole power of distributing social happiness.”

“Dancing,” says Mr. Burchell, “appears to have been in all ages of the
world, and perhaps in all nations, a custom so natural, so pleasing,
and even useful, that we may readily conclude it will continue to
exist as long as mankind shall continue to people the earth. We see it
practised as much by the savage as by the civilized, as much by the
lowest, as by the highest classes of society; and as it is a
recreation purely corporeal, and perfectly independent of mental
qualification, or refinement, all are equally fitted for enjoying it:
it is this probably which has occasioned it to become universal. All
attempts therefore at rendering any exertion of the mind necessary to
its performance, are an unnatural distortion of its proper and
original features. Grace and ease of motion are the extent of its
perfection; because these are the natural perfections of the human
body. Every circumstance and object by which man is surrounded may be
viewed in a philosophical light; and thus viewed, dancing appears to
be a recreative mode of exercising the body and keeping it in health,
the means of shaking off spleen, and of expanding one of the best
characters of the heart,—the social feeling. When it does not affect
this, the fault is not in the dance, but in the dancer; a perverse
mind makes all things like itself. Dancing and music, which appears to
be of equal antiquity, and equally general among mankind, are
connected together only by a community of purpose: what one is for the
body, the other is for the mind.”

The Doctor had come to a conclusion not unlike this traveller's
concerning dancing,—he believed it to be a manifestation of that
instinct by which the young are excited to wholesome exercise, and by
which in riper years harmless employment is afforded for superfluous
strength and restless activity. The delight which girls as well as
boys take in riotous sports were proof enough, he said, that Nature
had not given so universal an inclination without some wise purpose.
An infant of six months will ply its arms and legs in the cradle, with
all its might and main, for joy,—this being the mode of dancing at
that stage of life. Nay, he said, he could produce grave authorities
on which casuists would pronounce that a probable belief might be
sustained, to prove that it is an innate propensity and of all
propensities the one which has been developed in the earliest part of
mortal existence; for it is recorded of certain Saints, that on
certain holidays, dedicated either to the mystery, or to the heavenly
patron under whose particular patronage they were placed, they danced
before they were born, a sure token or presage of their future
holiness and canonization, and a not less certain proof that the love
of dancing is an innate principle.

Lovest thou Music?
Oh, 'tis sweet!
What's dancing?
E'en the mirth of feet.[2]

[Footnote 2: From a Masque quoted by D'ISRAELI.]

CHAPTER CXCI.

A SERIOUS WORD IN SAD APOLOGY FOR ONE OF THE MANY FOOLISH WAYS IN
WHICH TIME IS MIS-SPENT.

COWPER.

Hunting, gaming and dancing are three propensities to which men are
inclined equally in the savage and in the civilized,—in all stages of
society from the rudest to the most refined, and in all its grades;
the Doctor used to say they might be called semi-intellectual. The
uses of hunting are obvious wherever there are wild animals which may
be killed for food, or beasts of prey which for our own security it is
expedient to destroy.

Indeed because hunting, hawking and fishing (all which according to
Gwillim and Plato are comprised in the term Venation) tend to the
providing of sustenance for man, Farnesius doth therefore account them
all a species of agriculture. The great heraldic author approves of
this comprehensive classification. But because the more heroic hunting
in which danger is incurred from the strength and ferocity of the
animals pursued, hath a resemblance of military practice, he delivers
his opinion that “this noble kind of venation is privileged from the
title of an Illiberal Art, being a princely and generous exercise; and
those only, who use it for a trade of life, to make sure thereof, are
to be marshalled in the rank of mechanics and illiberal artizans.” The
Doctor admired the refinement of these authors, but he thought that
neither lawful sporting, nor poaching could conveniently be
denominated agricultural pursuits.

He found it not so easy to connect the love of gaming with any
beneficial effect; some kind of mental emotion however, he argued, was
required for rendering life bearable by creatures with whom sleep is
not so compleatly an act of volition, that like dogs they can lie down
and fall asleep when they like. For those persons therefore who are
disposed either by education, capacity, or inclination to make any
worthier exertion of their intellectual faculties, gaming, though
infinitely dangerous as a passion, may be useful as a pastime. It has
indeed a strong tendency to assume a dangerous type, and to induce as
furious an excitement as drunkenness in its most ferocious form, but
among the great card-playing public of all nations, long experience
has produced an effect in mitigating it analogous to what the practice
of inoculation has effected upon the small-pox. Vaccination would have
afforded our philosopher a better illustration if it had been brought
into notice during his life.

Pope has assigned to those women who neither toil or spin, “an old age
of cards,” after “a youth of pleasure.” This perhaps is not now so
generally the course of female life, in a certain class and under
certain circumstances, as it was in his days and in the Doctor's. The
Doctor, certainly was of opinion that if the senescent spinsters and
dowagers within the circle of his little world, had not their cards as
duly as their food, many of them would have taken to something worse
in their stead. They would have sought for the excitement which they
now found at the whist or quadrille table, from the bottle, or at the
Methodist Meeting. In some way or other, spiritual or spirituous they
must have had it;[1] and the more scandalous of these ways was not
always that which would occasion the greatest domestic discomfort, or
lead to the most injurious consequences. Others would have applied to
him for relief from maladies which by whatever names they might be
called, were neither more nor less than the effect of that _tædium
vitæ_ which besets those who having no necessary employment have not
devised any for themselves. And when he regarded the question in this
light he almost doubted whether the invention of cards had not been
more beneficial than injurious to mankind.

[Footnote 1: It happened during one of the lamented Southey's visits
here at the Vicarage, West-Tarring, that a cargo of spirits was run
close by. His remark was—“Better spirituous smuggling than spiritual
pride.”]

It was not with an unkind or uncharitable feeling, still less with a
contemptuous one that Anne Seward mentioning the death of a lady “long
invalid and far advanced in life,” described her as “a civil social
being, whose care was never to offend; who had the spirit of a
gentlewoman in never doing a mean thing, whose mite was never withheld
from the poor; and whose inferiority of understanding and knowledge
found sanctuary at the card-table, that universal leveller of
intellectual distinctions.” Let not such persons be despised in the
pride of intellect! Let them not be condemned in the pride of self
righteousness!

“Our law,” says the Puritan Matthew Mead, “supposes all to be of some
calling, not only men but women, and the young ladies too; and
therefore it calls them during their virgin state spinsters. But alas,
the viciousness and degeneracy of this age hath forfeited the title.
Many can _card_, but few can spin; and therefore you may write them
_carders_, _dancers_, _painters_, _ranters_, _spenders_, rather than
spinsters. Industry is worn out by pride and delicacy; the comb and
the looking-glass possess the place and the hours of the spindle and
the distaff; and their great business is to curl the locks, instead of
twisting wool and flax. So that both male and females are prepared for
all ill impressions by the mischief of an idle education.”

“There is something strange in it,” says Sterne, “that life should
appear so short _in the gross_, and yet so long _in the detail_.
Misery may make it so, you'll say;—but we will exclude it,—and still
you'll find, though we all complain of the shortness of life what
numbers there are who seem quite overstocked with the days and hours
of it, and are constantly sending out into the highways and streets of
the city, to compel guests to come in, and take it off their hands: to
do this with ingenuity and forecast, is not one of the least arts and
business of life itself; and they who cannot succeed in it, carry as
many marks of distress about them, as bankruptcy itself could wear. Be
as careless as we may, we shall not always have the power,—nor shall
we always be in a temper to let the account run thus. When the blood
is cooled, and the spirits which have hurried us on through half our
days before we have numbered one of them, are beginning to
retire;—then wisdom will press a moment to be heard,—afflictions, or a
bed of sickness will find their hours of persuasion:—and should they
fail, there is something yet behind:—old age will overtake us at the
last, and with its trembling hand, hold up the glass to us.”

CHAPTER CXCII.

_Ou tend l'auteur à cette heure?
Que fait-il? Revient-il? Va-t-il? Ou s'il demeure?_

L'AUTEUR.

_Non, je ne reviens pas, car je n'ai pas été;
Je ne vais pas aussi, car je suis arrété;
Et ne demeure point, car, tout de ce pas même
Je pretens m'en aller._

MOLIERE.

The passage with which the preceding Chapter is concluded, is
extracted from Sterne's Sermons, one of those discourses in which he
tried the experiment of adapting the style of Tristram Shandy to the
pulpit;—an experiment which proved as unsuccessful as it deserved to
be. Gray however thought these sermons were in the style which in his
opinion was most proper for the pulpit, and that they showed “a very
strong imagination and a sensible head. But you see him, he adds,
often tottering on the verge of laughter, and ready to throw his
perriwig in the face of his audience.”

The extract which has been set before the reader is one of those
passages which bear out Gray's judgement; it is of a good kind, and in
its kind so good, that I would not weaken its effect, by inserting too
near it the following Epigram from an old Magazine, addressed to a
lady passionately fond of cards.

Thou, whom at length incessant gaming dubs,
Thrice honourable title! Queen of Clubs,
Say what vast joys each winning card imparts,
And that, too justly, called the King of Hearts.
Say, when you mourn of cash and jewels spoil'd,
May not the thief be Knave of Diamonds stil'd?
One friend, howe'er, when deep remorse invades,
Awaits thee Lady; 'tis the Ace of Spades!

It has been seen that the Doctor looked upon the love of gaming as a
propensity given us to counteract that indolence which if not thus
amused, would breed for itself both real and imaginary evils. And
dancing he thought was just as useful in counteracting the factitious
inactivity of women in their youth, as cards are for occupying the
vacuity of their minds at a later period. Of the three
semi-intellectual propensities, as he called them which men are born
with, those for hunting and gaming are useful only in proportion, as
the earth is uncultivated, and those by whom it is inhabited. In a
well ordered society there would be no gamblers, and the Nimrods of
such a society, must like the heroes in Tongataboo, be contented with
no higher sport than rat-catching: but dancing will still retain its
uses. It will always be the most graceful exercise for children at an
age when all that they do is graceful; and it will always be that
exercise which can best be regulated for them, without danger of their
exerting themselves too much, or continuing in it too long. And for
young women in a certain rank, or rather region of life,—the temperate
zone of society,—those who are above the necessity of labour, and
below the station in which they have the command of carriages and
horses,—that is for the great majority of the middle class;—it is the
only exercise which can animate them to such animal exertion as may
suffice

“To give the blood its natural spring and play.”[1]

[Footnote 1: SOUTHEY.]

Mr. Coleridge says (in his Table Talk) “that the fondness for dancing
in English women is the reaction of their reserved manners: it is the
only way in which they can throw themselves forth in natural liberty.”
But the women are not more fond of it in this country, than they are
in France and Spain. There can be no healthier pastime for them, (as
certainly there is none so exhilarating, and exercise unless it be
exhilarating is rarely healthful)—provided,—and upon this the Doctor
always insisted,—provided it be neither carried on in hot rooms, nor
prolonged to late hours. They order these things, he used to say,
better in France; they order them better indeed anywhere than in
England, and there was a time when they were ordered better among
ourselves.

“The youth of this city,” says the honest old chronicler and historian
of the metropolis his native place, “used on holidays, after evening
prayers, to exercise their basters and bucklers, at their master's
doors; and the maidens, one of them playing on a timbrel, to dance for
garlands hanged athwart the streets, which open pastimes in my youth,
being now suppressed, worser practises within doors are to be feared.”

Every one who is conversant with the Middle Ages, and with the
literature of the reigns of Elizabeth, James and Charles I. must have
perceived in how much kindlier relations the different classes of
society existed toward each other in those days than they have since
done. The very word independence had hardly found a place in the
English language, or was known only as denoting a mischievous heresy.
It is indeed, as one of our most thoughtful contemporaries has well
said, an “unscriptural word,”—and “when applied to man, it directly
contradicts the first and supreme laws of our nature; the very essence
of which is universal dependence upon God, and universal
interdependence on one another.”

The Great Rebellion dislocated the relations which had for some
centuries thus happily subsisted; and the money getting system which
has long been the moving principle of British society, has, aided by
other injurious influences, effectually prevented the recovery which
time, and the sense of mutual interest, and mutual duty, might
otherwise have brought about. It was one characteristic of those old
times, which in this respect deserve to be called good, that the
different classes participated in the enjoyments of each other. There
were the religious spectacles, which, instead of being reformed and
rendered eminently useful as they might have been, were destroyed by
the brutal spirit of puritanism. There were the Church festivals, till
that same odious spirit endeavoured to separate, and has gone far
toward separating, all festivity from religion. There were tournaments
and city pageants at which all ranks were brought together: they are
now brought together only upon the race-course. Christmas Mummers have
long ceased to be heard of. The Morris dancers have all but
disappeared even in the remotest parts of the kingdom. I know not
whether a May-pole is now to be seen. What between manufactures and
methodism England is no longer the merry England which it was once a
happiness and an honour to call our country. Akenside's words “To the
Country Gentlemen of England,” may be well remembered.

And yet full oft your anxious tongues complain
That lawless tumult prompts the rustic throng;
That the rude Village-inmates now disdain
Those homely ties which rul'd their fathers long.
Alas, your fathers did by other arts
Draw those kind ties around their simple hearts.
And led in other paths their ductile will;
By succour, faithful counsel, courteous cheer,
Won them their ancient manners to revere,
To prize their countries peace and heaven's due rites fulfil.

My friend saw enough of this change in its progress to excite in him
many melancholy forebodings in the latter part of his life. He knew
how much local attachment was strengthened by the recollection of
youthful sports and old customs; and he well understood how little men
can be expected to love their country, who have no particular
affection for any part of it. Holidays he knew attached people to the
Church, which enjoined their observance; but he very much doubted
whether Sunday Schools would have the same effect.

In Beaumont and Fletcher's Play of the Prophetess, the countrymen
discourse concerning the abdicated Emperor who has come to reside
among them. One says to the other,

Do you think this great man will continue here?

the answer is

Continue here? what else? he has bought the great farm;
A great man[2] with a great inheritance
And all the ground about it, all the woods too
And stock'd it like an Emperor. Now all our sports again
And all our merry gambols, our May Ladies,
Our evening dances on the green, our songs,
Our holiday good cheer; our bagpipes now, boys,
Shall make the wanton lasses skip again,
Our sheep-shearings and all our knacks.

[Footnote 2: Southey has inserted a query here. “Qy Manor or Mansion.”
It is usually printed as in the text.—See Act v. Sc. iii.]

It is said however in the _Cortegiano, che non saria conveniente che
un gentilhuomo andasse ad honorare con la persona sua una festa di
contado, dove i spettatori, et i compagni fussero gente ignobile._
What follows is curious to the history of manners. _Disse allhor' il
S. Gasparo Pallavicino, nel paese nostro di Lombardia non s'hanno
queste rispetti: anzi molti gentil'huomini giovani trovansi, che le
feste ballano tuttol' di nel Sole co i villani, et con esti giocano a
lanciar la barra, lottare, correre et saltare; et io non credo che sia
male, perche ivi non si fa paragone della nobiltà, ma della forza, e
destrezza, nelle quai cose spesso gli huomini di villa non vaglion
meno che i nobili; et par che que quella domestichezza habbia in se
una certa liberalità amabile._—An objection is made to this; _Quel
ballar nel Sole, rispose M. Federico, a me non piace per modo alcuno;
ne so che guadagno vi si trovi. Ma chi vuol pur lottar, correr et
saltar co i villani, dee (al parer mio) farlo in modo di provarsi, et
(come si suol dir) per gentilezza, non per contender con loro, et dee
l'huomo esser quasi sicuro di vincere; altramente non vi si metta;
perche sta troppo male, et troppo è brutta cosa, et fuor de la dignità
vedere un gentilhuomo vinto da un villano, et massimamente alla lotta;
però credo io che sia ben astenersi almano in presentia di molti,
perche il guadagno nel vincere è pochissimo, et la perdita nell' esse
vinto è grandissima._

That is, in the old version of Master Thomas Hoby; “it were not meet
that a gentleman should be present in person, and a doer in such a
matter in the country, where the lookers-on and the doers were of a
base sort. Then said the Lord Gasper Pallavicino, in our country of
Lombardy these matters are not passed upon; for you shall see there
young gentlemen, upon the holydays, come dance all the day long in the
sun with them of the country, and pass the time with them in casting
the bar, in wrestling, running and leaping. And I believe it is not
ill done; for no comparison is there made of nobleness of birth, but
of force and slight; in which things many times the men of the country
are not a whit inferior to gentlemen: and it seemeth this familiar
conversation containeth in it a certain lovely freeness.” “The dancing
in the sun,” answered Sir Frederick, “can I in no case away withal;
and I cannot see what a man shall gain by it. But whoso will wrestle,
run and leap with men of the country, ought, in my judgement, to do it
after a sort; to prove himself, and (as they are wont to say) for
courtesy, not to try mastery with them. And a man ought (in a manner)
to be assured to get the upper hand, else let him not meddle withal;
for it is too ill a sight, and too foul a matter, and without
estimation, to see a gentleman overcome by a carter, and especially in
wrestling. Therefore I believe it is well done to abstain from it, at
the leastwise in the presence of many; if he be overcome, his gain is
small, and his loss in being overcome very great.”

This translation is remarkable for having a Sonnet, or more correctly
speaking, a quatorzain by Sackville prefixed to it, and at the end of
the volume a letter of Sir John Cheke's to the translator, curious for
its peculiar spelling, and for the opinion expressed in it that our
language ought as much as possible to be kept pure and unmixed.

“I have taken sum pain,” he says, “at your request, cheflie in your
preface; not in the reading of it, for that was pleasaunt unto me,
boath for the roundnes of your saienges and welspeakinges of the saam,
but in changing certein wordes which might verie wel be let aloan, but
that I am verie curious in mi freendes matters, not to determijn, but
to debaat what is best. Whearin I seek not the bestnes haplie bi
truth, but bi mijn own phansie and sheo of goodnes.

“I am of this opinion that our own tung shold be written cleane and
pure, unmixt and unmangeled with borowing of other tunges; wherein if
we take not heed bi tijm, ever borowing and never payeng, she shall be
fain to keep her house as bankrupt. For then doth our tung naturallie
and praiseablie utter her meaning, when she boroweth no conterfectness
of other tunges to attire her self withall, but useth plainlie her own
with such shift as nature, craft, experiens, and folowing of other
excellent doth lead her unto; and if she went at ani tijm (as being
unperfight she must) yet let her borow with suche bashfulnes, that it
mai appear, that if either the mould of our own tung could serve us to
fascion a woord of our own, or if the old denisoned wordes could
content and ease this neede, we wold not boldly venture of unknoven
wordes. This I say, not for reproof of you, who have scarslie and
necessarily used, whear occasion serveth, a strange word so, as it
seemeth to grow out of the matter and not to be sought for; but for
mijn our defens, who might be counted overstraight a deemer of
thinges, if I gave not thys accompt to you, my freend and wijs, of mi
marring this your handiwork.

“But I am called awai. I prai you pardon mi shortnes; the rest of my
saienges should be but praise and exhortacion in this your doinges,
which at moar leisor I shold do better.

From my house in Wood street

the 16 of July 1557.

Yours assured

JOAN CHEEK.”

Sir John Cheke died about two months after the date of this letter:
and Hoby's translation was not published till 1561, because “there
were certain places in it, which of late years being misliked of some
that had the perusing of it, the Author thought it much better to keep
it in darkness a while, then to put it in light, imperfect, and in
piecemeal, to serve the time.” The book itself had been put in the
list of prohibited works, and it was not till 1576 that the Conte
Camillo Castiglione, the author's son, obtained permission to amend
the obnoxious passages and publish an expurgated edition.

It would have vexed Sir John if he had seen with how little care the
printer, and his loving friend Master Hoby observed his system of
orthography, in this letter. For he never used the final e unless when
it is sounded, which he denoted then by doubling it; he rejected the
y, wrote u when it was long, with a long stroke over it, doubled the
other vowels when they were long, and threw out all letters that were
not pronounced. No better system of the kind has been proposed, and
many worse. Little good would have been done by its adoption, and much
evil, if the translators of the Bible had been required to proceed
upon his principle of using no words but such as were true English of
Saxon original. His dislike of the translation for corrupting as he
thought the language into vocables of foreign growth, made him begin
to translate the New Testament in his own way. The Manuscript in his
own hand, as far as it had proceeded, is still preserved at Bene't
College,[3] and it shows that he found it impracticable to observe his
own rule. But though as a precisian he would have cramped and
impoverished the language, he has been praised for introducing a short
and expressive style, avoiding long and intricate periods, and for
bringing “fair and graceful writing into vogue;” he wrote an excellent
hand himself, and it is said that all the best scholars in those times
followed his example, “so that fair writing and good learning seemed
to commence together.”

[Footnote 3: This has been since printed with a good Glossary by the
Rev. James Goodwin, Fellow and Tutor of Corpus Christi Coll.
Cambridge, and is very curious. All that remains is the Gospel
according to St. Matthew. As an instance of Cheke's Englishisms I may
refer to the rendering of _προσήλυτον_ in c. xxiij. _v._ 15, by
_freschman_. Some little of the MS. is lost.—See Preface, p. 10.]

O Soul of Sir John Cheke, thou wouldst have led me out of my way, if
that had been possible,—if my ubiety did not so nearly resemble
ubiquity, that in Anywhereness and Everywhereness I know where I am,
and can never be lost till I get out of Whereness itself into Nowhere.

CHAPTER CXCIII.

MASTER THOMAS MACE, AND THE TWO HISTORIANS OF HIS SCIENCE, SIR JOHN
HAWKINS AND DR. BURNEY. SOME ACCOUNT OF THE OLD LUTANIST AND OF HIS
“MUSIC'S MONUMENT.”

This Man of Music hath more in his head
Than mere crotchets.

SIR W. DAVENANT.

Thou wast informed, gentle Reader, in the third Volume and at the two
hundred and sixth page of this much-hereafter-to-be-esteemed Opus,
that a _Tattle de Moy_ was a new-fashioned thing in the Year of our
Lord 1676. This was on the authority of the good old Lutanist, whom, I
then told you, I took leave of but for a while, bethinking me of
Pope's well known lines,

But all our praises why should Lords engross?
Rise, honest Muse! and sing the MAN OF ROSS.

And now gentle reader, seeing that whether with a consciousness of
second sight or not, Master Mace, praiseworthy as the Man of Ross, has
so clearly typified my Preludes and Voluntaries, my grave Pavines and
graver Galliards, my Corantoes and Serabands, my Chichonas, and above
all my Tattle-de-Moys, am I not bound in gratitude to revive the
memory of Master Mace; or rather to extend it and make him more fully
and more generally known than he has been made by the two historians
of his science Sir John Hawkins and Dr. Burney. It is to the honour of
both these eminent men, who have rendered such good services to that
science, and to the literature of their country, that they should have
relished the peculiarities of this simple-hearted old lutanist. But it
might have been expected from both; for Dr. Burney was as
simple-hearted himself, and as earnestly devoted to the art: and Sir
John who delighted in Ignoramus and in Izaak Walton, could not fail to
have a liking for Thomas Mace.

“Under whom he was educated,” says Sir John, “or by what means he
became possessed of so much skill in the science of music, as to be
able to furnish out matter for a folio volume, he has no where
informed us; nevertheless his book contains so many particulars
respecting himself, and so many traits of an original and singular
character, that a very good judgement may be formed both of his temper
and ability. With regard to the first, he appears to have been an
enthusiastic lover of his art; of a very devout and serious turn of
mind; and cheerful and good humoured under the infirmities of age, and
the pressure of misfortunes. As to the latter his knowledge of music
seems to have been confined to the practice of his own instrument; and
so much of the principles of the science as enabled him to compose for
it; but for his style in writing he certainly never had his fellow.”

This is not strictly just as relating either to his proficiency in
music, or his style as an author. Mace says of himself, “having said
so much concerning the lute, as also taken so much pains in laying
open all the hidden secrets thereof, it may be thought I am so great a
lover of it, that I make light esteem of any other instrument besides;
which truly I do not; but love the viol in a very high degree; yea
close unto the lute; and have done much more, and made very many more
good and able proficients upon it, than ever I have done upon the
lute. And this I shall presume to say, that if I excel in either, it
is most certainly upon the viol. And as to other instruments, I can as
truly say, I value every one that is in use, according to its due
place; as knowing and often saying, that all God's creatures are good;
and all ingenuities done by man, are signs, tokens, and testimonies of
the wisdom of God bestowed upon man.”

So also though it is true that Thomas Mace stands distinguished among
the writers on Music, yet it could be easy to find many fellows for
him as far as regards peculiarity of style. A humourist who should
collect odd books might form as numerous a library, as the man of
fastidious taste who should confine his collection to such works only
as in their respective languages were esteemed classical. “The
singularity of his style,” says Sir John, “remarkable for a profusion
of epithets and words of his own invention, and tautology without end,
is apt to disgust such as attend less to the matter than manner of his
book; but in others it has a different effect; as it exhibits, without
the least reserve all the particulars of the author's character, which
was not less amiable than singular.”—“The vein of humour that runs
through it presents a lively portraiture of a good-natured, gossipping
old man, virtuous and kind-hearted.”—The anxious “precision with which
he constantly delivers himself, is not more remarkable than his eager
desire to communicate to others all the knowledge he was possessed of,
even to the most hidden secrets.”—“The book breathes throughout a
spirit of devotion; and, agreeable to his sentiments of music is a
kind of proof that his temper was improved by the exercise of his
profession.”—There is no pursuit by which, if it be harmless in
itself, a man may not be improved in his moral as well as in his
intellectual nature, provided it be followed for its own sake: but
most assuredly there is none however intrinsically good, or beneficial
to mankind, from which he can desire any moral improvement, if his
motive be either worldly ambition, or the love of gain.—_Ἀδύνατον ἐκ
φαύλης ἀφορμῆς ἐπὶ τὸ τέλος ἐυδραμεῖν._[1]

[Footnote 1: IAMBLICHUS.]

To give an account of “Music's Monument,” which Dr. Burney calls a
matchless book, not to be forgotten among the curiosities of the
seventeenth century! will be to give the character of Thomas Mace
himself, for no author ever more compleatly embodied his own spirit in
his writings.

It is introduced with an Epistle Dedicatory, which by an easy
misrepresentation has been made to appear profane.

To Thee, One-Only-Oneness, I direct
My weak desires and works.
Thou only art The Able True Protector;
Oh be my shield, defender and director,
Then sure we shall be safe.
Thou know'st, O Searcher of all hearts how I,
With right, downright, sincere sincerity,
Have longed long to do some little good,
(According to the best I understood)
With thy rich talent, though by me made poor,
For which I grieve, and will do so no more,
By thy good Grace assisting, which I do
Most humbly beg for. Oh, adjoin it to
My longing ardent soul; and have respect
To this my weak endeavour, and accept,
In thy great mercy, both of it and me,
Even as we dedicate ourselves to Thee.

An Epistle, in verse, follows “to all Divine Readers, especially those
of the Dissenting Ministry, or Clergy, who want not only skill, but
good will to this most excelling part of divine service, viz. singing
of psalms, hymns and spiritual songs, to the praise of the Almighty,
in the public Assemblies of his Saints: and yet more particularly, to
all great and high Persons, Supervisors, Masters, or Governors of the
Church, (if any such there should be) wanting skill, or good will
thereunto.”

He says to those “high men of honour,” that

Example is the thing;
There's but one way, which is yourselves to sing.
This sure will do it; for when the vulgar see
Such worthy presidents their leaders be,
Who exercise therein and lead the van,
They will be brought to't, do they what they can.
But otherwise for want of such example,
Tis meanly valued, and on it they trample;
And by that great defect, so long unsought,
Our best Church Music's well-nigh brought to nought.
Besides,
No robes adorn high persons like to it;
No ornaments for pure Divines more fit.

That Counsel given by the Apostle Paul
Does certainly extend to Christians all.
Colossians the third, the sixteenth verse;
(Turn to the place:) that text will thus rehearse,
Let the word of Christ dwell in you plenteously,
(What follows? Music in its excellency.)
Admonishing yourselves, in sweet accord,
In singing psalms with grace unto the Lord,
_Sed sine arte_, that cannot be done,
_Et sine arte_, better let alone.

Having thus “fronted this Book with the divine part, and preached his
little short sermon” upon the last of St. Paul, he says that his first
and chief design in writing this book was only to discover the occult
mysteries of the noble lute, and to shew the great worthiness of that
too much neglected and abused instrument, and his good will to all the
true lovers of it, in making it plain and easy, giving the true
reasons why it has been formerly a very hard instrument to play well
upon, and also why now it is become so easy and familiarly pleasant.
“And I believe,” says he, “that whosoever will but trouble himself to
read those reasons,—and join his own reason, with the reasonableness
of those reasons, will not be able to find the least reason to
contradict those reasons.”

He professed that by his directions “any person, young or old, should
be able to perform so much and so well upon it, in so much or so
little time, towards a full and satisfactory delight and pleasure,
(yea, if it were but only to play common toys, jigs or tunes,) as upon
any instrument whatever; yet with this most notable and admirable
exception, (for the respectable commendation of the lute,) that they
may, besides such ordinary and common contentments, study and practice
it all the days of their lives, and yet find new improvements, yea
doubtless if they should live unto the age of Methusalem, ten times
over; for there is no limitation to its vast bounds and bravery.” It
appears that the merit of this book in this respect is not overstated,
one of his sons attained to great proficiency on this instrument by
studying the book without any assistance from his father; and Sir John
Hawkins affirms on his own knowledge that Mr. John Immyns, lutanist to
the Chapel Royal, has the like experience of it. “This person who had
practised on sundry instruments for many years, and was able to sing
his part at sight, at the age of forty took to the lute, and by the
help of Mace's book alone, became enabled to play thorough base, and
also easy lessons on it; and by practice had rendered the tablature as
familiar to him, as the notes of the scale.”

The notation called the tablature is minutely explained in the work.
It has not the least relation to the musical character; the six
strings of the lute are represented by as many lines, “and the several
frets or stops by the letters a, b, c, d, e, f, g, h, y (a preference
to i as being more conspicuous) k; the letter _a_ ever signifying the
open string in all positions.” Many persons have been good performers
on the lute, and at the same time totally ignorant of the notes of the
Gamut. His printer, he said, “had outdone all music work in this kind
ever before printed in this nation; and was indeed the only fit person
to do the like, he only having those new materials, the like to which
was never had made before in England.” They might have been more
distinct, and more consistent;—five being common English characters,
the _c_ more resembling the third letter in the Greek alphabet than
any thing else, the _b_ reversed serving for _g_, and the _d_ in like
manner for _e_.

The characters for the time of notes he compares to money, as
supposing that most people would be ready enough to count them the
better for that. Considering therefore the semi-breve as a groat, the
minim becomes two pence, the crotchet a penny, the quaver a
half-penny, and the semi-quaver a farthing. Trouble not yourself for
the demi-quaver, he says, till you have a quick hand, it being half a
semi-quaver.

But besides these, there are marks in his notation for the fifteen
graces which may be used upon the lute, though few or none used them
all. They are the Shake, the Beat, the Back-fall, the Half-fall, the
Whole-fall, the Elevation, the Single Relish, the Double Relish, the
Slur, the Slide, the Spinger, the Sting, the Tutt, the Pause and the
Soft and Loud Play, “which is as great and good a grace as any other
whatever.”

“Some,” says Master Mace, “there are, and many I have met with, who
have such a natural agility in their nerves, and aptitude to that
performance, that before they could do any thing else to purpose, they
would make a shake rarely well. And some again can scarcely ever gain
a good shake, by reason of the unaptness of their nerves to that
action, but yet otherwise come to play very well. I, for my own part,
have had occasion to break both my arms; by reason of which, I cannot
make the nerve-shake well, nor strong; yet by a certain motion of my
arm, I have gained such a contentive shake, that sometimes my scholars
will ask me, how they shall do to get the like? I have then no better
answer for them, than to tell them, they must first break their arm,
as I have done; and so possibly after that, by practice, they may get
my manner of Shake.”

Rules are given for all these graces, but observe he says “that
whatever your grace be, you must in your farewell express the true
note perfectly, or else your pretended grace, will prove a disgrace.”

“The Spinger is a grace very neat and curious, for some sort of notes,
and is done thus: After you have hit your note, you must just as you
intend to part with it, dab one of your rest fingers lightly upon the
same string, a fret or two frets below, (according to the air,) as if
you did intend to stop the string, in that place, yet so gently, that
you do not cause the string to sound, in that stop, so dab'd; but only
so that it may suddenly take away that sound which you last struck,
yet give some small tincture of a new note, but not distinctly to be
heard as a note; which grace, if well done and properly is very taking
and pleasant.”

The Sting is “another very neat and pretty grace,” it makes the sound
seem to swell with pretty unexpected humour, and gives much
contentment upon cases.

The Tut is easily done, and always with the right hand. “When you
would perform this grace, it is but to strike your letter which you
intend shall be so graced, with one of your fingers, and immediately
clap on your next striking finger upon the string which you struck; in
which doing, you suddenly take away the sound of the letter; and if
you do it clearly, it will seem to speak the word, _Tut_, so plainly,
as if it were a living creature, speakable!”

While however the pupil was intent upon exhibiting these graces, the
zealous master exhorted him not to be unmindful of his own, but to
regard his postures, for a good posture is comely, creditable and
praiseworthy, and moreover advantageous as to good performance. “Set
yourself down against a table, in as becoming a posture, as you would
choose to do for your best reputation. Sit upright and straight; then
take up your lute, and lay the body of it in your lap across. Let the
lower part of it lie upon your right thigh, the head erected against
your left shoulder and ear; lay your left hand down upon the table,
and your right arm over the lute, so that you may set your little
finger down upon the belly of the lute, just under the bridge, against
the treble, or second string: and then keep your lute stiff, and
strongly set with its lower edge against the table-edge; and so,
leaning your breast something hard against its ribs, cause it to stand
steady and strong, so that a bystander cannot easily draw it from your
breast, table, and arm. This is the most becoming, steady and
beneficial posture.”

“Your left hand thus upon the table, your lute firmly fixed, yourself
and it in your true postures,—bring up your left hand from the table,
bended, just like the balance of a hook, all excepting your thumb,
which must stand straight and span'd out; your fingers also, all
divided out from the other in an equal and handsome order; and in this
posture, place your thumb under the neck of the lute, a little above
the fret, just in the midst of the breadth of the neck; all your
four-fingers in this posture, being held close over the strings on the
other side, so that each finger may be in a readiness to stop down
upon any fret. And now in this lively and exact posture, I would have
your posture drawn, which is the most becoming posture I can direct
unto for a lutanist.”

“Know that an old lute is better than a new one.” Old instruments
indeed, are found by experience to be far the best, the reasons for
which Master Mace could no further dive into than to say, he
apprehended, “that by extreme age, the wood and those other adjuncts,
glue, parchment, paper, linings of cloth, (as some used) but above all
the varnish, are by time very much dried, limped, made gentle,
rarified, or to say better, even airified; so that that stiffness,
stubbornness, or _clunguiness_ which is natural to such bodies, are so
debilitated and made pliable, that the pores of the wood, have a more
free liberty to move, stir or secretly vibrate; by which means the air
(which is the life of all things both animate and inanimate) has a
more free and easy recourse to pass and repass, &c. Whether I have hit
upon the right cause, I know not, but sure I am that age adds goodness
to instruments.”

The Venice lutes were commonly good; and the most esteemed maker was
Laux Malles, whose name was always written in text letters. Mace had
seen two of his lutes, “pitiful, old, battered, cracked things;” yet
for one of these, which Mr. Gootiere, the famous lutanist in his time
showed him, the King paid an hundred pounds. The other belonged to Mr.
Edward Jones, one of Gootiere's scholars; and he relates this “true
story” of it; that a merchant bargained with the owner to take it with
him in his travels, on trial; if he liked it, he was on his return to
give an hundred pounds for it; otherwise he was to return it safe, and
pay twenty pounds “for his experience and use of it.”—He had often
seen lutes of three or four pounds a piece “more illustrious and
taking to a common eye.”

The best shape was the Pearl mould, both for sound and comeliness, and
convenience in holding. The best wood for the ribs was what he calls
air-wood, this was absolutely the best; English maple next. There were
very good ones however of plum, pear, yew, rosemary-air, and ash.
Ebony and ivory, though most costly and taking to a common eye were
the worst. For the belly the finest grained wood was required, free
from knots or obstructions; cypress was very good, but the best was
called Cullen's-cliff, being no other than the finest sort of fir, and
the choicest part of that fir. To try whether the bars within, to
strengthen and keep it straight and tight, were all fast, you were
gently to knock the belly all along, round about, and then in the
midst, with one of your knuckles; “if any thing be either loose in it,
or about it, you may easily perceive it, by a little fuzzing or
hizzing; but if all be sound, you shall hear nothing but a tight plump
and twanking knock.”

Among the aspersions against the lute which Master Mace indignantly
repelled, one was that it cost as much in keeping as a horse. “I do
confess,” said he, “that those who will be prodigal and extraordinary
curious, may spend as much as may maintain two or three horses, and
men to ride upon them too if they please. But he never charged more
than ten shillings for first stringing one, and five shillings a
quarter for maintaining it with strings.”

The strings were of three sorts, minikins, Venice Catlins, and Lyons,
for the basses; but the very best for the basses were called Pistoy
Basses; these, which were smooth and well-twisted strings, but hard to
come by, he supposes to be none others than thick Venice Catlins, and
commonly dyed of a deep dark red. The red strings however were
commonly rotten, so were the yellow, the green sometimes very good;
the clear blue the best. But good strings might be spoilt in a quarter
of an hour, if they were exposed to any wet, or moist air. Therefore
they were to be bound close together, and wrapt closely up either in
an oiled paper, a bladder, or a piece of sere cloth, “such as often
comes over with them,” and then to be kept in some close box, or
cupboard, but not amongst linen (for that gives moisture,) and in a
room where is usually a fire. And when at any time you open them for
your use, take heed they lie not too long open, nor in a dark window,
nor moist place; for moisture is the worst enemy to your strings.

“How to choose and find a true string, which is the most curious piece
of skill in stringing, is both a pretty curiosity to do, and also
necessary. First, draw out a length, or more; then take the end, and
measure the length it must be of, within an inch or two, (for it will
stretch so much at least in the winding up,) and hold that length in
both hands, extended to reasonable stiffness: then, with one of your
fingers strike it; giving it so much liberty in slackness as you may
see it vibrate, or open itself. If it be true, it will appear to the
eye, just as if they were two strings; but if it shows more than two,
it is false, and will sound unpleasantly upon your instrument, nor
will it ever be well in tune, either stopt or open, but snarl.” Sir
John Hawkins observes that this direction is given by Adrian Le Roy in
his instructions for the lute, and is adopted both by Mersennus and
Kircher. Indeed this experiment is the only known test of a true
string, and for that reason is practised by such as are curious at
this day.

In his directions for playing, Master Mace says, “take notice that you
strike not your strings with your nails, as some do, who maintain it
the best way of play; but I do not; and for this reason; because the
nail cannot draw so sweet a sound from the lute as the nibble end of
the flesh can do. I confess in a concert it might do well enough,
where the mellowness, (which is the most excellent satisfaction from a
lute) is lost in the crowd; but alone, I could never receive so good
content from the nail as from the flesh.”

Mace considered it to be absolutely necessary that all persons who
kept lutes should know how to repair them; for he had known a lute
“sent fifty or sixty miles to be mended of a very small mischance,
(scarce worth twelve pence for the mending) which besides the trouble
and cost of carriage, had been broken all to pieces in the return, and
so farewell lute and all the cost.” One of the necessary tools for
this work is “a little working knife, such as are most commonly made
of pieces of broken good blades, fastened into a pretty thick haft of
wood or bone, leaving the blade out about two or three inches;” “grind
it down upon the back,” he says, “to a sharp point, and set to a good
edge; it will serve you for many good uses, either in cutting,
carving, making pins, &c.”

His directions for this work are exceedingly minute; but when the lute
was in order, it was of no slight importance to keep it so, and for
this also he offers some choice observations. “You shall do well, ever
when you lay it by in the day-time, to put it into a bed that is
constantly used, between the rug and blanket, but never between the
sheets, because they may be moist.” “This is the most absolute and
best place to keep it in always.” “There are many great commodities in
so doing; it will save your strings from breaking, it will keep your
lute in good order, so that you shall have but small trouble in tuning
it; it will sound more brisk and lively, and give you pleasure in the
very handling of it; if you have any occasion extraordinary to set up
your lute at a higher pitch, you may do it safely, which otherwise you
cannot so well do, without danger to your instrument and strings: it
will be a great safety to your instrument, in keeping it from decay,
it will prevent much trouble in keeping the bars from flying loose and
the belly from sinking: and these six conveniences considered all
together, must needs create a seventh, which is, that lute-playing
must certainly be very much facilitated, and made more delightful
thereby. Only no person must be so inconsiderate as to tumble down
upon the bed whilst the lute is there, for I have known, said he,
several good lutes spoilt with such a trick.”

I will not say of the reader, who after the foregoing specimens of
Music's Monument has no liking for Master Mace and his book that he

Is fit for treasons, stratagems and spoil,

but I cannot but suspect that he has no taste for caviare, dislikes
laver, would as willingly drink new hock as old, and more willingly
the base compound which passes for champagne, than either. Nay I could
even suspect that he does not love those “three things which persons
loving, love what they ought,—the whistling of the wind, the dashing
of the waves, and the rolling of thunder:” and that he comes under the
commination of this other triad, “let no one love such as dislike the
scent of cloves, the taste of milk and the song of birds.” My Welsh
friends shall have the pleasure of reading these true sayings, in
their own ancient, venerable and rich language.

_Tri dyn o garu tri pheth à garant à ddylaint; gorddyan y gwgnt, boran
y tònau, ac angerdd y daran._

_Tri pheth ma chared neb a 'u hanghara: rhogleu y meillion, blâs
llaeth, a chân adar._

CHAPTER CXCIV.

A MUSIC LESSON FROM MASTER THOMAS MACE TO BE PLAYED BY LADY FAIR:—A
STORY, THAN WHICH THERE IS NONE PRETTIER IN THE HISTORY OF MUSIC.

THOMAS MACE, TO ALL DIVINE READERS.

O Lady fair, before we say,

Now cease my lute; this is the last
Labour that thou and I shall waste,
And ended is that we begun;
My lute be still, for I have done:[1]

before we say this, O Lady fair, play I pray you the following lesson
by good Master Mace. It will put you in tune for the story “not
impertinent” concerning it, which he thought fit to relate, although,
he said, many might chuse to smile at it. You may thank Sir John
Hawkins for having rendered it from tablature into the characters of
musical notation.

[Illustration: music score.]

[Footnote 1: SIR THOMAS WYAT.]

“This Lesson,” says Master Mace, “I call my Mistress, and I shall not
think it impertinent to detain you here a little longer than ordinary
in speaking something of it, the occasion of it, and why I give it
that name. And I doubt not, but the relation I shall give may conduce
to your advantage in several respects, but chiefly in respect of
Invention.

“You must first know, That it is a lesson, though old; yet I never
knew it disrelished by any, nor is there any one lesson in this Book
of that age, as it is; yet I do esteem it (in its kind) with the best
Lesson in the Book, for several good reasons, which I shall here set
down.

“It is, this very winter, just forty years since I made it—and yet it
is new, because all like it,—and then when I was past being a suitor
to my best beloved, dearest, and sweetest living Mistress, but not
married, yet contriving the best, and readiest way towards it; And
thus it was,

“That very night, in which I was thus agitated in my mind concerning
her, my living Mistress,—she being in Yorkshire, and myself at
Cambridge, close shut up in my chamber, still and quiet, about ten or
eleven o'clock at night, musing and writing letters to her, her
Mother, and some other Friends, in summing up and determining the
whole matter concerning our Marriage. You may conceive I might have
very intent thoughts all that time, and might meet with some
difficulties, for as yet I had not gained her Mother's consent,—so
that in my writings I was sometimes put to my studyings. At which
times, my Lute lying upon my table, I sometimes took it up, and walked
about my chamber, letting my fancy drive which way it would, (for I
studied nothing, at that time, as to Music,)—yet my secret genius or
fancy, prompted my fingers, do what I could, into this very humour. So
that every time I walked, and took up my Lute, in the interim, betwixt
writing and studying, this Air would needs offer itself unto me
continually; insomuch that, at the last, (liking it well, and lest it
should be lost,) I took paper and set it down, taking no further
notice of it at that time. But afterwards it passed abroad for a very
pleasant and delightful Air amongst all. Yet I gave it no name till a
long time after, nor taking more notice of it, in any particular kind,
than of any other my Composures of that nature.

“But after I was married, and had brought my wife home to Cambridge,
it so fell out that one rainy morning I stay'd within, and in my
chamber my wife and I were all alone, she intent upon her needlework,
and I playing upon my Lute, at the table by her. She sat very still
and quiet, listening to all I played without a word a long time, till
at last, I hapned to play this lesson; which, so soon as I had once
played, she earnestly desired me to play it again, ‘for,’ said she,
‘That shall be called my Lesson.’

“From which words, so spoken, with emphasis and accent, it presently
came into my remembrance, the time when, and the occasion of its being
produced, and I returned her this answer, viz. That it may very
properly be called your Lesson, for when I composed it you were wholly
in my fancy, and the chief object and ruler of my thoughts; telling
her how, and when it was made. And therefore, ever after, I thus
called it MY MISTRESS, and most of my scholars since call it MRS.
MACE, to this day.

“Thus I have detained you (I hope not too long,) with this short
relation; nor should I have been so seemingly vain, as to have
inserted it, but that I have an intended purpose by it, to give some
advantage to the reader, and doubt not but to do it to those who will
rightly consider what here I shall further set down concerning it.

“Now in reference to the occasion of it, &c. It is worth taking
notice, That there are times and particular seasons, in which the
ablest Master of his Art, shall not be able to command his Invention
or produce things so to his content or liking, as he shall at other
times; but he shall be (as it were,) stupid, dull, and shut up, as to
any neat, spruce, or curious Invention.

“But again, at other times, he will have Inventions come flowing in
upon him, with so much ease and freedom, that his greatest trouble
will be to retain, remember, or set them down, in good order.

“Yet more particularly, as to the occasion of this Lesson, I would
have you take notice, that as it was at such a time, when I was wholly
and intimately possessed with the true and perfect idea of my living
Mistress, who was at that time, lovely, fair, comely, sweet, debonair,
uniformly-neat, and every way compleat; how could, possibly, my fancy
run upon anything at that time, but upon the very simile, form, or
likeness, of the same substantial thing.

“And that this Lesson doth represent, and shadow forth such a true
relation, as here I have made, I desire you to take notice of it, in
every particular; which I assure myself, may be of benefit to any, who
shall observe it well.

“First, therefore, observe the two first Bars of it, which will give
you the Fugue; which Fugue is maintained quite through the whole
lesson.

“Secondly, observe the Form, and Shape of the whole lesson, which
consists of two uniform, and equal strains; both strains having the
same number of Bars.

“Thirdly, observe the humour of it; which you may perceive (by the
marks and directions) is not common.

“These three terms, or things, ought to be considered in all
compositions, and performances of this nature, viz. Ayres, or the
like.

“The Fugue is lively, ayrey, neat, curious, and sweet, like my
Mistress.

“The Form is uniform, comely, substantial, grave, and lovely, like my
Mistress.

“The Humour is singularly spruce, amiable, pleasant, obliging, and
innocent, like my Mistress.

“This relation to some may seem odd, strange, humorous, and
impertinent; but to others (I presume) it may be intelligible and
useful; in that I know, by good experience, that in Music, all these
significations, (and vastly many more,) may, by an experienced and
understanding Artist, be clearly, and most significantly expressed;
yea, even as by language itself, if not much more effectually. And
also, in that I know, that as a person is affected or disposed in his
temper, or humour, by reason of what object of his mind soever, he
shall at that time produce matter, (if he be put to it,) answerable to
that temper, disposition, or humour, in which he is.

“Therefore I would give this as a caveat, or caution, to any, who do
attempt to exercise their fancies in such matters of Invention, that
they observe times, and seasons, and never force themselves to
anything, when they perceive an indisposition; but wait for a fitter,
and more hopeful season, for what comes most compleatly, comes most
familiarly, naturally, and easily, without pumping for, as we use to
say.

“Strive therefore to be in a good, cheerful, and pleasant humour
always when you would compose or invent, and then, such will your
productions be; or, to say better, chuse for your time of Study, and
Invention, if you may, that time wherein you are so disposed, as I
have declared. And doubtless, as it is in the study and productions of
Music, so must it needs be in all other studies, where the use and
exercise of fancy is requirable.

“I will therefore, take a little more pains than ordinary, to give
such directions, as you shall no ways wrong, or injure my Mistress,
but do her all the right you can, according to her true deserts.

“First, therefore, observe to play _soft_, and _loud_, as you see it
marked quite through the Lesson.

“Secondly, use _that Grace_, which I call the _Sting_, where you see
it set, and the _Spinger_ after it.

“And then, in the last four strains, observe the _Slides_, and
_Slurs_, and you cannot fail to know my _Mistress's Humour_, provided
you keep _true time_, which you must be extremely careful to do in all
lessons: FOR TIME IS THE ONE HALF OF MUSIC.

“And now, I hope I shall not be very hard put to it, to obtain my
pardon for all this trouble I have thus put you to, in the exercise of
your patience; especially from those, who are so ingenious and
good-natured, as to prize, and value, such singular and choice
endowments, as I have here made mention of in so absolute and compleat
a subject.”

MY MISTRESS OR MRS. MACE.

[Illustration: musical score.]

THOMAS MACE.

There is no prettier story in the history of Music than this; and what
a loving, loveable, happy creature must he have been who could thus in
his old age have related it!

CHAPTER CXCV.

ANOTHER LESSON WITH THE STORY AND MANNER OF ITS PRODUCTION.

_Οὐδεὶς ἐρεῖ ποθ᾽, ὡς ὑπόβλητον λόγον,
———ἔλεξας, ἀλλὰ τῆς σαυτῦ φρενός._

SOPHOCLES.

Master Mace has another lesson which he calls Hab-Nab; it “has neither
fugue, nor very good form,” he says, “yet a humour, although none of
the best;” and his “story of the manner and occasion of Hab-Nab's
production,” affords a remarkable counterpart to that of his favourite
lesson.

“View every bar in it,” he says, “and you will find not any one Bar
like another, nor any affinity in the least kind betwixt strain and
strain, yet the Air pleaseth some sort of people well enough; but for
my own part, I never was pleased with it; yet because some liked it, I
retained it. Nor can I tell how it came to pass that I thus made it,
only I very well remember, the time, manner, and occasion of its
production, (which was on a sudden,) without the least premeditation,
or study, and merely accidentally; and, as we use to say, _ex
tempore_, in the _tuning of a lute_.

“And the occasion, I conceive, might possibly contribute something
towards it, which was this.

“I had, at that very instant, when I made it, an agitation in hand,
viz. The stringing up, and tuning of a Lute, for a person of an
ununiform, and inharmonical disposition, (as to Music,) yet in herself
well proportioned, comely, and handsome enough, and ingenious for
other things, but to Music very unapt, and learned it only to please
her friends, who had a great desire she should be brought to it, if
possible, but never could, to the least good purpose; so that at the
last we both grew weary; _for there is no striving against such a
stream_.

“I say, this occasion possibly might be the cause of this so
inartificial a piece, in regard that that person, at that time, was
the chief object of my mind and thoughts. I call it inartificial,
because the chief observation (as to good performance,) is wholly
wanting. Yet it is true Music, and has such a form and humour, as may
pass, and give content to many. Yet I shall never advise any to make
things thus by hab-nab,[1] without any design, as was this. And
therefore I give it that name.”

[Footnote 1: _Hab-Nab_ is a good old English word, derived from the
Anglo-Saxon. Skinner is correct enough. “Temerè, sine consilio _ab_
AS. _Habban_ Habere, _Nabban_, non Habere, addito scilicet _na_, non,
cum apostropho.” Will-nill, i.e. Will ye, or will ye not, is a
parallel form. Every one will recollect the lines of Hudibras, (Part
ii. Canto iii.)

With that he circles draws, and squares,
With cyphers, astral characters:
Then looks 'em o'er to understand 'em
Although set down, _hab nab_, at random.

Dr. Grey illustrates the expression from Don Quixote, “Let every man,”
says Sancho Pancha, “take care what he talks or how he writes of other
men, and not set down _at random_, _hab-nab_, _higgledy-piggledy_,
what comes into his noddle.” Part ii. c. iii.

On referring to the original it will be seen that the Translator has
used three words for one. “Cada uno mire como habla o' como escriba de
las presonas, y no ponga _à troche moche_ lo primero que le viene al
magin.”]

“There are abundance of such things to be met with, and from the hands
of some, who fain would pass for good composers; yet most of them may
be traced, and upon examination, their things found only to be snaps
and catches; which they,—having been long conversant in Music, and can
command an Instrument, through great and long practice, some of them
very well,—have taken here and there (hab-nab,) from several airs and
things of other men's works, and put them handsomely together, which
then pass for their own compositions.

“Yet I say, it is no affront, offence, or injury, to any Master, for
another to take his Fugue, or Point to work upon, nor dishonour for
any Artist so to do, provided he shew by his Workmanship, a different
Discourse, Form, or Humour. But it is rather a credit and a repute for
him so to do; for by his works he shall be known. It being observable,
That great Master Composers may all along be as well known by their
Compositions, or their own compositions known to be of them, as the
great and learned writers may be known by their styles and works.”

CHAPTER CXCVI.

FURTHER ACCOUNT OF MASTER THOMAS MACE,—HIS LIGHT HEART, HIS SORROWS,
AND HIS POVERTY,—POORLY, POOR MAN, HE LIVED, POORLY, POOR MAN, HE
DIED—PHINEAS FLETCHER.

The sweet and the sour,
The nettle and the flower,
The thorn and the rose,
This garland compose.

SMALL GARLAND OF PIOUS AND GODLY SONGS.

Little more is known of Thomas Mace than can be gathered from his
book. By a good portrait of him in his sixty-third year, it appears
that he was born in 1613, and by his arms that he was of gentle blood.
And as he had more subscribers to his book in York than in any other
place, (Cambridge excepted) and the name of Henry Mace, Clerk, occurs
among them, it may be presumed that he was a native of that city, or
of that county. This is the more likely, because when he was
established at Cambridge in his youth, his true love was in Yorkshire;
and at that time his travels are likely to have been confined between
the place of his birth and of his residence.

The price of his book was twelve shillings in sheets; and as he
obtained about three hundred subscribers, he considered this fair
encouragement to publish. But when the work was compleated and the
accounts cast up, he discovered that “in regard of his unexpected
great charge, besides his unconceivable care and pains to have it
compleatly done, it could not be well afforded at that price, to
render him any tolerable or reasonable requital.” He gave notice
therefore, that after it should have been published three months, the
price must be raised; “adding thus much, (as being bold to say) that
there were several pages, yea several lessons in this book, (according
to the ordinary value, esteem, or way of procuring such things) which
were every one of them of more value than the price of the whole book
by far.”

It might be truly said of him, that

Poorly, poor man, he lived, poorly, poor man he died.[1]

for he never attained to any higher preferment than that of being “one
of the Clerks of Trinity College.” But it may be doubted whether any
of those who partook more largely of the endowment of that noble
establishment, enjoyed so large a portion of real happiness. We find
him in the sixty-third year of his age, and the fortieth of his
marriage, not rich, not what the world calls fortunate, but a
contented, cheerful old man; even though “Time had done to him this
wrong” that it had half deprived him of his highest gratification, for
he had become so deaf that he could not hear his own lute. When Homer
says of his own blind bard that the Muse gave him good and evil,
depriving him of his eyes, but giving him the gift of song, we
understand the compensation;

_Τὸν πέρι Μοῦσ᾽ ἐφίλησε, δίδου δ᾽ ἀγαθόν τε κακόν τε,
Ὀφθαλμῶν μὲν ἄμερσε, δίδου δ᾽ ἡδεῖαν ἀοιδήν·_

but what can compensate a musician for the loss of hearing! There is
no inward ear to be the bliss of solitude. He could not like
Pythagoras _ἀῤῥήτῳ τινὶ καὶ δυσεπινοήτῳ θειότητι χρώμενος_, by an
effort of ineffable and hardly conceivable divinity retire into the
depths of his own being, and there listen to that heavenly harmony of
the spheres which to him alone of all the human race was made audible;
_ἑαυτῷ γὰρ μόνῳ τῶν ἐπὶ γῆς ἀπάντων συνετὰ καὶ ἐπήκοα τὰ κοσμικὰ
φθέγματα ἐνόμιζεν ἀπ᾽ αὐτῆς τῆς φυσικῆς πηγῆς καὶ ῥίζῆς._[2] Master
Mace had no such supernatural faculty, and no such opinion of himself.
But the happy old man devises a means of overcoming to a certain
degree his defect by inventing what he called a Dyphone, or Double
Lute of fifty strings, a representation of which is given in his book,
as “the one only instrument in being of that kind, then lately
invented by himself, and made with his own hands in the year 1672.”

[Footnote 1: PHINEAS FLETCHER.]

[Footnote 2: IAMBLICHI Liber de Pythagoricâ, Vitâ c. xv.]

“The occasion of its production was my necessity; viz. my great defect
in hearing; adjoined with my unsatiable love and desire after the
Lute. It being an instrument so soft, and past my reach of hearing, I
did imagine it was possible to contrive a louder Lute, than ever any
yet had been; whereupon, after divers casts and contrivances, I
pitched upon this order, the which has (in a great degree) answered my
expectation, it being absolutely the lustiest or loudest Lute that I
ever yet heard. For although I cannot hear the least twang of any
other Lute, when I play upon it, yet I can hear this in a very good
measure, yet not so loud as to distinguish every thing I play, without
the help of my teeth, which when I lay close to the edge of it,
(there, where the lace is fixed,) I hear all I play distinctly. So
that it is to me (I thank God!) one of the principal refreshments and
contentments I enjoy in this world. What it may prove to others in its
use and service, (if any shall think fit to make the like,) I know
not, but I conceive it may be very useful, because of the several
conveniences and advantages it has of all other Lutes.”

This instrument was on the one side a theorbo, on the other lute,
having on the former part twenty-six strings, twenty-four on the
latter. It had a fuller, plumper and lustier sound, he said, than any
other lute, because the concave was almost as long again, being hollow
from neck to mouth. “This is one augmentation of sound; there is yet
another; which is from the strange and wonderful secret, which lies in
the nature of sympathy, in unities, or the uniting of harmonical
sounds, the one always augmenting the other. For let two several
instruments lie asunder at any reasonable distance, when you play upon
one, the other shall sound, provided they be both exactly tuned in
unisons to each other; otherwise not. This is known to all curious
inspectors into such mysteries. If this therefore be true, it must
needs be granted, that when the strings of these two twins,
accordingly put on, are tuned in unities and set up to a stiff lusty
pitch, they cannot but more augment and advantage one the other.”

Some allowances he begged for it, because it was a new-made instrument
and could not yet speak so well as it would do, when it came to age
and ripeness, though it already gave forth “a very free, brisk,
trouling, plump and sweet sound,” and because it was made by a hand
that never before attempted the making of any instrument. He concludes
his description of it, with what he calls a Recreative Fancy: saying,
“because it is my beloved darling, I seemed, like an old doting body,
to be fond of it; so that when I finished it, I bedecked it with these
five rhymes following, fairly written upon each belly.

“First, round the Theorboe knot, thus,

I am of old, and of Great Britain's fame,
Theorboe was my name.

Then next, about the French Lute knot, thus,

I'm not so old; yet grave, and much acute;
My name was the French lute.

Then from thence along the sides, from one knot to the other, thus,

But since we are thus joined both in one,
Henceforth our name shall be the Lute Dyphone.

Then again cross-wise under the Theorboe-knot, thus,

Lo here a perfect emblem seen in me,
Of England and of France, their unity;
Likewise that year they did each other aid,
I was contrived, and thus compleatly made.

viz. When they united both against the Dutch and beat them soundly,
A.D. 1672.

“Then lastly, under the French Lute knot, thus,

Long have we been divided, now made one,
We sang in sevenths; now in full unison.
In this firm union, long may we agree,
No unison is like Lute's harmony.

Thus in its body, tis trim, spruce and fine
But in its sp'rit, tis like a thing divine.”

Poor Mace formed the plan of a Music-room, and hoped to have erected
it himself; “but it pleased God,” says he, “to disappoint and
discourage me several ways, for such a work; as chiefly by the loss of
my hearing, and by that means the emptiness of my purse, (my meaning
may easily be guessed at,) I only wanted money enough but no good will
thereunto.” However he engraved his plan, and annexed a description of
it, “in hopes that at one time or other, there might arise some
honourable and truly nobly-spirited person, or persons, who may
consider the great good use and benefit of such a necessary
convenience, and also find in his heart to become a benefactor to such
an eminent good work,—for the promotion of the art and encouragement
of the true lovers of it; there being great need of such a thing, in
reference to the compleating and illustrating of the University
Schools.”

What he designed was a room six yards square, having on each side
three galleries for spectators, each something more than three yards
deep. These were to be one story from the ground, “both for advantage
of sound, and also to avoid the moisture of the earth, which is very
bad, both for instrument and strings;” and the building was to be “in
a clear and very delightful dry place, both free from water, the
overhanging of trees, and common noises.” The room was for the
performers, and it was to be “one step higher on the floor than the
galleries the better to convey the sound to the auditors:”—“being thus
clear and free from company, all inconvenience of talking, crowding,
sweating and blustering, &c. are taken away; the sound has its free
and uninterrupted passage; the performers are no ways hindered; and
the instruments will stand more steadily in tune, (for no lutes,
viols, pedals, harpsicons, &c. will stand in tune at such a time; no,
nor voices themselves;) For I have known,” says he, “an excellent
voice, well prepared for a solemn performance, who has been put up in
a crowd, that when he has been to perform his part, could hardly
speak, and by no other cause but the very distemper received by that
crowd and overheat.”

The twelve galleries, though but little, would hold two hundred
persons very well; and thus the uneasy and unhandsome accommodation,
which has often happened to persons of quality, being crowded up,
squeezed and sweated among persons of an inferior rank, might be
avoided, “which thing alone, having such distinct reception for
persons of different qualities, must needs be accounted a great
conveniency.” But there was a scientific convenience included in the
arrangement; for the lower walls were to be “wainscoted, hollow from
the wall, and without any kind of carved, bossed, or rugged work, so
that the sound might run glib and smooth all about, without the least
interruption. And through that wainscot there must be several
conveyances all out of the room—by grooves, or pipes to certain
auditor's seats, where the hearer, as he sate, might at a small
passage, or little hole, receive the pent-up sound, which let it be
never so weak in the music-room, he, (though at the furthest end of
the gallery) should hear as distinctly as any who were close by it.”
The inlets into these pipes should be pretty large, a foot square at
least, yet the larger the better, without all doubt, and so the
conveyance to run proportionably narrower, till it came to the ear of
the auditor, where it need not be above the wideness of one's finger
end. “It cannot,” says he, “be easily imagined, what a wonderful
advantage such a contrivance must needs be, for the exact and distinct
hearing of music; without doubt far beyond all that ever has yet been
used. For there is no instrument of touch, be it never so sweet, and
touched with the most curious hand that can be, but in the very touch,
if you be near unto it, you may perceive the touch to be heard;
especially of viols and violins: but if you be at a distance, that
harshness is lost, and conveyed unto the air, and you receive nothing
but the pure sweetness of the instrument; so as I may properly say,
you lose the body, but enjoy the soul or spirit thereof.”

Such a necessary, ample and most convenient erection would become, he
thought, any nobleman, or gentleman's house; and there might be built
together with it as convenient rooms for all services of a family, as
by any other contrivance whatever, and as magnificently stately. Were
it but once experienced, he doubted not, but that the advantages would
apparently show themselves, and be esteemed far beyond what he had
written, or that others could conceive.

The last notice which we have of good Master Mace is an advertisement,
dated London, 1690, fourteen years after the publication of his book.
Dr. Burney found it in the British Museum, in a collection of
title-pages, devices and advertisements. It is addressed “to all
Lovers of the best sort of Music.”

Men say the times are strange;—tis true;
'Cause many strange things hap to be.
Let it not then seem strange to you
That here one strange thing more you see.

That is, in Devereux Court, next the Grecian Coffee House, at the
Temple back gate, there is a deaf person teacheth music to perfection;
who by reason of his great age, viz. seventy-seven, is come to town,
with his whole stock of rich musical furniture; viz. instruments and
books, to put off, to whomsoever delights in such choice things; for
he has nothing light or vain, but all substantial and solid MUSIC.
Some particulars do here follow.

“First, There is a late invented Organ, which, for private use,
exceeds all other fashioned organs whatever; and for which,
substantial artificial reasons will be given; and, for its beauty, it
may become a nobleman's dining-room.

“Second, There belongs to it a pair of fair, large-sized consort
viols, chiefly fitted and suited for that, or consort use; and 'tis
great pity they should be parted.

“Third, There is a pedal harpsicon, (the absolute best sort of consort
harpsicon that has been invented; there being in it more than twenty
varieties, most of them to come in with the foot of the player;
without the least hindrance of play,) exceedingly pleasant.

“Fourth, Is a single harpsicon.

“Fifth. A new invented instrument, called a Dyphone, viz. a double
lute; it is both theorboe and French lute compleat; and as easy to
play upon as any other lute.

“Sixth, Several other theorboes, lutes and viols, very good.

“Seventh, Great store of choice collections of the works of the most
famous composers that have lived in these last hundred years, as
Latin, English, Italian and some French.

“Eighth, There is the publishers own Music's Monument; some few copies
thereof he has still by him to put off, it being a subscribed book,
and not exposed to common sale. All these will be sold at very easy
rates, for the reasons aforesaid; and because, indeed, he cannot stay
in town longer than four months, exactly.”

He further adds, “if any be desirous to partake of his experimental
skill in this high noble art, during his stay in town, he is ready to
assist them; and haply, they may obtain that from him, which they may
not meet withal elsewhere. He teacheth these five things; viz. the
theorboe, the French lute, and the viol, in all their excellent ways
and uses; as also composition, together with the knack of procuring
invention to young composers, (the general and greatest difficulty
they meet withal;) this last thing not being attempted by any author,
(as he knows of,) yet may be done, though some have been so wise, or
otherwise to contradict it:

_Sed experientia docuit._

“Any of these five things may be learned so understandingly, in this
little time he stays, by such general rules as he gives, together with
Music's Monument, (written principally to such purposes,) as that any,
aptly inclined, may, for the future, teach themselves, without any
other help.”

This is the last notice of poor Mace: poor he may be called, when at
the age of seventy-seven he is found in London upon the forlorn hope
of selling his instruments and his books, and getting pupils during
this stay. It may be inferred that he had lost the son of whose
musical proficiency he formerly spoke with so much pleasure; for
otherwise this professional collection and stock in trade would hardly
have been exposed to sale, but it appears that the good old man
retained his mental faculties, and his happy and contented spirit.

Dr. Burney recommends the perusal of what he calls his matchless book
“to all who have taste for excessive simplicity and quaintness, and
can extract pleasure from the sincere and undissembled happiness of an
author, who with exalted notions of his subject and abilities,
discloses to his readers every inward working of self-approbation in
as undisguised a manner, as if he were communing with himself in all
the plenitude of mental comfort and privacy.”

CHAPTER CXCVII.

QUESTION PROPOSED, WHETHER A MAN BE MAGNIFIED OR MINIFIED BY
CONSIDERING HIMSELF UNDER THE INFLUENCE OF THE HEAVENLY BODIES, AND
ANSWERED WITH LEARNING AND DISCRETION.

DR. JOHN SCOTT.

Is man magnified or minified by considering himself as under the
influence of the heavenly bodies,—not simply as being

Moved round in earth's dismal course
With rocks and stones and trees;[1]

but as affected by them in his constitution bodily and mental, and
dependent on them for weal or woe, for good or evil fortune; as
subjected, that is, according to astrological belief to

The Stars, who, by I know not what strange right,
Preside o'er mortals in their own despite,
Who without reason, govern those who most,
(How truly, judge from thence!) of reason boast;
And by some mighty magic, yet unknown,
Our actions guide, yet cannot guide their own.[2]

Apart from what one of our Platonic divines calls “the power of astral
necessity, and uncontrollable impressions arising from the
subordination and mental sympathy and dependence of all mundane
causes,” which is the Platonist's and Stoic's “proper notion of
fate;”[3] apart, I say, from this, and from the Calvinist's doctrine
of predestination, is it a humiliating, or an elevating consideration,
that the same celestial movements which cause the flux and reflux of
the ocean, should be felt in the pulse of a patient suffering with a
fever: and that the eternal laws which regulate the stars in their
courses, should decide the lot of an individual?

[Footnote 1: WORDSWORTH.]

[Footnote 2: CHURCHILL.]

[Footnote 3: JOHN SMITH.]

Here again a distinction must be made,—between the physical theory and
the pseudo-science. The former is but a question of more or less; for
that men are affected by atmospherical influence is proved by every
endemic disease; and invalids feel in themselves a change of weather
as decidedly as they perceive its effect upon the weather-glass, the
hygrometer, or the strings of a musical instrument. The sense of our
weakness in this respect,—of our dependence upon causes over which we
have no controul, and which in their operation and nature are
inexplicable by us, must have a humbling and therefore a beneficial
tendency in every mind disposed to goodness. It is in the order of
Providence that we should learn from sickness and adversity lessons
which health and prosperity never teach.

Some of the old theoretical physicians went far beyond this. Sachs von
Lewenheimb compared the microcosm of man with the macrocosm in which
he exists. The heart in the one, he said, is what the ocean is in the
other, the blood has its ebbing and flowing like the tide, and as the
ocean receives its impulse from the moon and the winds, the brain and
the vital spirits act in like manner upon the heart. Baillet has
noticed for censure the title of his book in his chapter _Des prejugés
des Titres des Livres_; it is _Oceanus Macro-Micro-cosmicus_. Peder
Severinsen carrying into his medical studies a fanciful habit of mind
which he might better have indulged in his younger days when he was a
Professor of Poetry, found in the little world of the human body,
antitypes of every thing in the great world, its mountains and its
vallies, its rivers and its lakes, its minerals and its vegetables,
its elements and its spheres. According to him the stars are living
creatures, subject to the same diseases as ourselves. Ours indeed are
derived from them by sympathy, or astral influence, and can be
remedied only by those medicines, the application of which is denoted
by their apparent qualities, or by the authentic signature of nature.

This fancy concerning the origin of diseases is less intelligible than
the mythology of those Rosicrucians who held that they were caused by
evil demons rulers of the respective planets, or by the Spirits of the
Firmament and the Air. A mythology this may more properly be called
than a theory; and it would belong rather to the history of Manicheism
than of medicine, were it not that in all ages fanaticism and
imposture have, in greater or less degree, connected themselves with
the art of healing.

But however dignified, or super-celestial the theoretical causes of
disease, its effect is always the same in bringing home, even to the
proudest heart, a sense of mortal weakness: whereas the belief which
places man in relation with the Stars, and links his petty concerns
and fortunes of a day with the movements of the heavenly bodies, and
the great chain of events, tends to exalt him in his own conceit. The
thriftless man in middle or low life who says, in common phrase, that
he was born under a threepenny planet, and therefore shall never be
worth a groat, finds some satisfaction in imputing his unprosperity to
the Stars, and casting upon them the blame which he ought to take upon
himself. In vain did an old Almanack-maker say to such men of the
Creator, in a better strain than was often attained by the professors
of his craft.

He made the Stars to be an aid unto us,
Not (as is fondly dream'd) to help undo us;
Much less without our fault to ruinate
By doom of irrecoverable Fate.
And if our best endeavours use we will,
These glorious Creatures will be helpful still
In all our honest ways: for they do stand
To help, not hinder us, in God's command,
Who doth not only rule them by his powers
But makes their glory servant unto ours.
Be wise in Him, and if just cause there be
The Sun and Moon shall stand and wait on thee.

On the other hand the lucky adventurer proceeds with superstitious
confidence in his Fortune; and the ambitious in many instances have
devoted themselves, or been deceived to their own destruction. It is
found accordingly that the professors of astrology generally in their
private practice addressed themselves to the cupidity or the vanity of
those by whom they were employed. Honest professors there were who
framed their schemes faithfully upon their own rules; but the greater
number were those who consulted their own advantage only, and these
men being well acquainted with human nature in its ordinary character,
always took this course.—Their character has changed as little as
human nature itself in the course of two thousand years since Ennius
expressed his contempt for them, in a passage preserved by Cicero.

_Non habeo denique nauci Marsum augurem,
Non vicanos haruspices, non de circo astrologos,
Non Isiacos conjectores, non interpretes somnium.
Non enim sunt ii aut scientiâ aut arte, divini,
Sed superstitiosi vates, impudentesque harioli,
Aut inertes, aut insani, aut quibus egestas imperat:
Qui sibi semitam non sapiunt, alteri monstrant viam.
Quibus divitias pollicentur, ab iis drachmam ipsi petunt.
De his divitiis sibi deducant drachmam, reddant cætera._

Pompey, Crassus, and Cæsar were each assured by the Chaldeans that he
should die in his own house, in prosperity, and in a good old age.
Cicero tells us this upon his own knowledge: _Quam multa ego Pompeio,
quam multa Crasso, quam multa huic ipsi Cæsari à Chaldeis dicta
memini, neminem eorum nisi senectute, nisi domi, nisi cum claritate
esse moriturum! ut mihi permirum videatur, quemquam extare, qui etiam
nunc credat iis, quorum prædicta quotidie videat re et eventis
refelli._

And before the age of Ennius, Euripides had in the person of Tiresias
shewn how surely any such profession, if the professor believed in his
own art, must lead to martyrdom, or falsehood. When the blind old
Prophet turns away from Creon, he says, in words worthy of Milton's
favourite poet,

_Τὰ μὲν παρ᾽ ἡμῶν πάντ᾽ ἔχεις· ἡγοῦ, τέκνον,
Πρὸς οἶκον· ὅστις δ᾽ ἐμπύρῳ χρῆται τέχνῃ,
Μάταιος᾽ ἢν μὲν ἐχθρὰ σημήνας τύχῃ,
Πικρὸς καθέστηχ᾽, οἷς ἂν οἰωνοσκοπῇ,
Ψευδῆ δ᾽ ὑπ᾽ οἴκτου τοῖσι χρωμένοις λέγων,
Ἀδικεῖ τὰ τῶν θεῶν. Φοῖβον ἀνθρώποις μόνον
Χρῆν θεσπιωδεῖν, ὃς δέδοικεν οὐδένα._

The sagacity of the poet will be seen by those who are versed in the
history of the Old Testament; and for those who are not versed in it,
the sooner they cease to be ignorant in what so nearly concerns them,
the better it may be for themselves.

Jeremy Taylor says that he reproves those who practised judicial
astrology, and pretended to deliver genethliacal predictions, “not
because their reason is against religion, for certainly, said he, it
cannot be; but because they have not reason enough in what they say;
they go upon weak principles which they cannot prove; they reduce them
to practice by impossible mediums; they argue about things with which
they have little conversation. Although the art may be very lawful if
the stars were upon the earth, or the men were in heaven, if they had
skill in what they profess, and reason in all their pretences, and
after all that their principles were certain, and that the stars did
really signify future events, and that those events were not overruled
by every thing in heaven and in earth, by God, and by our own will and
wisdom,—yet because here is so little reason and less certainty, and
nothing but confidence and illusion, therefore it is that religion
permits them not; and it is not the reason in this art that is against
religion, but the folly or the knavery of it; and the dangerous and
horrid consequents which they feel that run a-whoring after such idols
of imagination.”

In our days most of those persons who can afford to employ the greater
part of their thoughts upon themselves, fall at a certain age under
the influence either of a physical or a spiritual director, for
Protestantism has its _Directeurs_ as well as Popery, less to its
advantage and as little to its credit. The spiritual professors have
the most extensive practice, because they like their patients are of
all grades, and are employed quite as much among the sound as the
sick. The astrologer no longer contests the ascendancy with either.
That calling is now followed by none but such low impostors, that they
are only heard of when one of them is brought before a magistrate for
defrauding some poor credulous creature in the humblest walks of life.
So low has that cunning fallen, which in the seventeenth century
introduced its professors into the cabinets of kings, and more
powerful ministers. An astrologer was present at the birth of Louis
XIV, that he might mark with all possible precision the exact moment
of his nativity. After the massacre of St. Bartholomew's day,
Catherine de Medici, deep in blood as she was, hesitated about putting
to death the king of Navarre and the prince of Condé, and the person
of whom she took counsel was an astrologer,—had she gone to her
Confessor their death would have been certain. Cosmo Ruggieri was an
unprincipled adventurer, but on this occasion he made a pious use of
his craft, and when the Queen enquired of him what the nativities of
these Princes prognosticated, he assured her that he had calculated
them with the utmost exactness, and that according to the principles
of his art, the State had nothing to apprehend from either of them. He
let them know this as soon as he could, and told them that he had
given this answer purely from regard for them, not from any result of
his schemes, the matter being in its nature undiscoverable by
astrology.

The Imperial astrologers in China excused themselves once for a
notable failure in their art, with more notable address. The error
indeed was harmless, except in its probable consequences to
themselves; they had predicted an eclipse, and no eclipse took place.
But instead of being abashed at this proof of their incapacity the
ready rogues complimented the Emperor, and congratulated him upon so
wonderful and auspicious an event. The eclipse they said portended
evil, and therefore in regard to him the Gods had put it by.

An Asiatic Emperor who calls himself Brother to the Sun and Moon,
might well believe that his relations would go a little out of their
way to oblige him, if the Queen of Navarre could with apparent
sincerity declare her belief that special revelations are made to the
Great, as one of the privileges of their high estate, and that her
mother, that Catherine de Medici, whose name is for ever infamous, was
thus miraculously forewarned of every remarkable event that befell her
husband and her children, nor was she herself, without her share in
this privilege, though her character was not more spotless in one
point than her mother's in another. _De ces divins advertissemens_,
she says, _je ne me veux estimer digne, toutesfois pour ne me taire
comme ingrate des graces que j'ay receües de Dieu, que je dois et veux
confesser toute ma vie, pour luy en rendre grace, et que chacun le
loue aux merveilles des effets de sa puissance, bonté, et misericorde,
qu'il luy a plû faire en moy, j'advoueray n'avoir jamais esté proche
de quelques signalez accidens, ou sinistres, ou heureux, que j'en aye
eu quelque advertissement ou en songe, ou autrement; et puis bien dire
ce vers,_

_De mon bien ou mon mal, mon esprit m'est oracle._

CHAPTER CXCVIII.

_Seguite dunque con la mente lieta,
Seguite, Monsignor, che com' io dico,
Presto presto sarete in su la meta._

LUDOVICO DOLCE.

Peter Hopkins had believed in astrology when he studied it in early
life with his friend Grey; his faith in it had been overthrown by
observation and reflection, and the unperceived influence of the
opinions of the learned and scientific public; but there was more
latent doubt in his incredulity than had ever lurked at the root of
his belief.

He was not less skilled in the kindred, though more trivial art of
Chiromancy, Palmistry, or Manual Divination, for the divine origin of
which a verse in the Book of Job was adduced as scriptural proof; “He
sealeth up the hand of every man, that all men may know his work.” The
text appears more chiromantical in the Vulgate. _Qui in manu omnium
hominum signa posuit._ Who has placed signs in the hand of all men.
The uses of the science were represented to be such, as to justify
this opinion of its origination: “For hereby,” says Fabian Withers,
“thou shalt perceive and see the secret works of Nature, how aptly and
necessarily she hath compounded and knit each member with other,
giving unto the hand, as unto a table, certain signs and tokens
whereby to discern and know the inward motions and affections of the
mind and heart, with the inward state of the whole body; as also our
inclination and aptness to all our external actions and doings. For
what more profitable thing may be supposed or thought, than when a man
in himself may foresee and know his proper and fatal accidents, and
thereby to embrace and follow that which is good, and to avoid and
eschew the evils which are imminent unto him, for the better
understanding and knowledge thereof?”

But cautioning his readers against the error of those who perverted
their belief in palmistry and astrology, and used it as a refuge or
sanctuary for all their evil deeds, “we ought,” said he, “to know and
understand that the Stars do not provoke or force us to anything, but
only make us apt and prone; and being so disposed, allure as it were,
and draw us forward to our natural inclination. In the which if we
follow the rule of Reason, taking it to be our only guide and
governor, they lose all the force, power and effect which they by any
means may have in and upon us: contrariwise, if we give ourselves over
to follow our own sensuality and natural dispositions, they work even
the same effect on us—that they do in brute beasts.”

Farther he admonishes all “which should read or take any fruit of his
small treatise, to use such moderation in perusing of the same that
they do not by and by take in hand to give judgement either of their
own, or other men's estates or nativities, without diligent
circumspection and taking heed; weighing and considering how many ways
a man may be deceived; as by the providence and discretion of the
person on whom he gives judgement, also, the dispensation of God, and
our fallible and uncertain speculation.” “Wherefore,” he continues,
“let all men in seeking hereby to foresee their own fortune, take heed
that by the promise of good, they be not elate, or high-minded, giving
themselves over to otiosity or idleness, and trusting altogether to
the Natural Influences; neither yet by any signs or tokens of
adversity, to be dejected or cast down, but to take and weigh all
things with such equality and moderation, directing their state of
life and living to all perfectness and goodness, that they may be
ready to embrace and follow all that which is good and profitable; and
also not only to eschew and avoid, but to withstand and set at nought
all evil and adverse fortune, whensoever it may happen unto them.”

Whoever studies the history of opinions, that is, of the aberrations,
caprices and extravagancies of the human mind, may find some
consolation in reflecting upon the practical morality which has been
preached not only by men of the most erroneous faith, but even by
fanatics, impostors and hypocrites, as if it were in the order of
Providence that there should be no poison which had not also some
medicinal virtue. The books of palmistry have been so worn by perusal
that one in decent preservation is now among the rarities of
literature; and it may be hoped that of the credulous numbers who have
pored over them, many have derived more benefit from the wholesome
lessons which were thus unexpectedly brought home to them, than they
suffered detriment from giving ear to the profession of a fallacious
art.

The lesson was so obvious that the Spaniards expressed it in one of
their pithy proverbs, _es nuestra alma en nuestra palma._ The thought
has been expanded into a sonnet by Bartolome Leonardo de Argensola, a
poet whose strains of manly morality have not been exceeded in that
language.

_Fabio, pensar que el Padre soberano
En esas rayas de la palma diestra
(Que son arrugas de la piel) te muestra
Los accidentes del discurso humano;
Es beber con el vulgo el error vano
De la ignorancia, su comun maestra.
Bien te confieso, que la suerte nuestra,
Mala, o buena, la puso en nuestra mano.
Di, quién te estorvará el ser Rey, si vives
Sin envidiar la suerte de los Reyes,
Tan contento y pacifico en la tuya,
Que estén ociosas para ti sus leyes;
Y qualquier novedad que el Cielo influya,
Como cosa ordinaria la recibes?_

Fabius, to think that God hath interlined
The human hand like some prophetic page,
And in the wrinkles of the palm defined
As in a map, our mortal pilgrimage,
This is to follow, with the multitude
Error and Ignorance, their common guides,
Yet Heaven hath placed, for evil or for good,
Our fate in our own hands, whate'er betides
Being as we make it. Art thou not a king
Thyself my friend, when envying not the lot
Of thrones, ambition hath for thee no sting,
Laws are to thee as they existed not,
And in thy harmless station no event
Can shake the calm of its assured content.

“Nature” says a Cheirologist, “was a careful workman in the creation
of the human body. She hath set in the hand of man certain signs and
tokens of the heart, brain and liver, because in them it is that the
life of man chiefly consists, but she hath not done so of the eyes,
ears, mouth, hands and feet, because those parts of the body seem
rather to be made for a comeliness or beauty, than for any necessity.”
What he meant to say was that any accident which threatened the three
vital parts was betokened in the lines of the palm, but that the same
fashioning was not necessary in relation to parts which might be
injured without inducing the loss of life. Therefore every man's palm
has in it the lines relating to the three noble parts, the more minute
lines are only found on subjects of finer texture, and if they
originally existed in husbandmen and others whose hands are rendered
callous by their employments, they are effaced.

It was only cheirologically speaking that he disparaged what sailors
in their emphatic language so truly call our precious eyes and limbs,
not that he estimated them like Tippoo Sultan, who in one of his
letters says, that if people persisted in visiting a certain person
who was under his displeasure, “their ears and noses should be
dispensed with.” This strange tyrant wrote odes in praise of himself,
and describes the effect of his just government to be such, that in
the security of his protection “the deer of the forest made their
pillow of the lion and the tyger, and their mattress of the leopard
and the panther.”

Tippoo did not consider ears and noses to be superfluities when in
that wanton wickedness which seldom fails to accompany the possession
of irresponsible power he spoke of dispensing with them. But in one
instance arms and legs were regarded as worse than superfluous. Some
years ago a man was exhibited who was born without either, and in that
condition had found a woman base enough to marry him. Having got some
money together, she one day set this wretched creature upon a
chimney-piece, from whence he could not move, and went off with
another man, stripping him of every thing that she could carry away.
The first words he uttered, when some one came into the room and took
him down, were an imprecation upon those people who had legs and arms,
because, he said they were always in mischief!

The Mahommedans believe that every man's fate is written on his
forehead, but that it can be read by those only whose eyes have been
opened. The Brahmins say that the sutures of the skull describe in
like manner the owner's destined fortune, but neither can this
mysterious writing be seen by any one during his life, nor decyphered
after his death. Both these notions are mere fancies which afford a
foundation for nothing worse than fable. Something more extraordinary
has been excogitated by W. Y. Playtes, Lecturer upon the Signs of the
light of the Understanding. He announces to mankind that the prints of
the nails of the Cross which our Lord shewed Thomas, are printed in
the roots of the nails of the hands and feet of every man that is born
into the world, for witnesses, and for leading us to believe in the
truth of all the signs, and graven images and pictures that are seen
in the Heavenly Looking Glass of Reflection, in the Sun and the Moon
and the Stars. This Theosophist has published a short Prospectus of
his intended work entitled the Horn Book for the remembrance of the
Signs of Salvation, which Horn Book is (should subscriptions be
forthcoming) to be published in one hundred and forty-four numbers,
forming twelve octavo volumes of six hundred pages each, with fifty
plates, maps and tables, and 365,000 marginal references,—being one
thousand for every day in the year. Wonder not reader at the extent of
this projected work; for, says the author, “the Cow of the Church of
Truth giveth abundance of milk, for the Babes of Knowledge.” But for
palmistry there was a plausible theory which made it applicable to the
purposes of fraud.

Among the odd persons with whom Peter Hopkins had become acquainted in
the course of his earlier pursuits, was a sincere student of the
occult sciences, who, being a more refined and curious artist,
whenever he cast the nativity of any one, took an impression from the
palm of the hand, as from an engraved plate, or block. He had thus a
fac-simile of what he wanted. According to Sir Thomas Browne, the
variety in the lines is so great, that there is almost no strict
conformity. Bewick in one of his works has in this manner printed his
own thumb. There are French deeds of the 15th century which are signed
by the imprint of five fingers dipt in ink, underwritten _Ce est la
griffe de monseigneur._[1]

[Footnote 1: The Reader, who is curious in such matters, may turn to
Ames and Herbert, (Dibdin, ii. 380.) for the hands in Holt's Lac
Puerorum, emprynted at London by Wynkyn de Worde.]

Hopkins himself did not retain any lurking inclination to believe in
this art. You could know without it, he said, whether a person were
open-handed, or close-fisted, and this was a more useful knowledge
than palmistry could give us. But the Doctor sometimes made use of it
to amuse children, and gave them at the same time playful admonition,
and wholesome encouragement.

CHAPTER CXCIX.

CONCERNING THE GREAT HONOURS TO WHICH CERTAIN HORSES HAVE ATTAINED,
AND THE ROYAL MERITS OF NOBS.

_Siento para contarlas que me llama
El á mi, yo á mi pluma, ella á la fama._

BALBUENA.

There have been great and good horses whose merits have been recorded
in history and in immortal song as they well deserved to be. Who has
not heard of Bucephalus? of whom Pulteney said that he questioned
whether Alexander himself had pushed his conquests half so far, if
Bucephalus had not stooped to take him on his back. Statius hath sung
of Arion who when he carried Neptune left the winds panting behind
him, and who was the best horse that ever has been heard of for taking
the water,

_Sæpe per Ionium Libycumque natantibus ire
Interjunctus equis, omnesque assuetus in oras
Cæruleum deferre patrem._

* * * * *

Tramp, tramp across the land he went,
Splash, splash across the sea.

But he was a dangerous horse in a gig. Hercules found it difficult to
hold him in, and Polynices when he attempted to drive him made almost
as bad a figure as the Taylor upon his ever memorable excursion to
Brentford.

The virtues of Caligula's horse, whom that Emperor invited to sup with
him, whom he made a Priest, and whom he intended to make Consul, have
not been described by those historians who have transmitted to us the
account of his extraordinary fortune; and when we consider of what
materials, even in our days, both Priests and Senators are sometimes
made, we may be allowed to demur at any proposition which might
include an admission that dignity is to be considered an unequivocal
mark of desert. More certain it is that Borysthenes was a good horse,
for the Emperor Adrian erected a monument to his memory, and it was
recorded in his epitaph that he used to fly over the plains and
marshes and Etrurian hills, hunting Pannonian boars; he appears by his
name to have been like Nobs, of Tartaric race.

Bavieca was a holy and happy horse,—I borrow the epithets from the
Bishop of Chalons's sermon upon the Bells. Gil Diaz deserved to be
buried in the same grave with him. And there is an anonymous Horse, of
whom honorable mention is made in the Roman Catholic Breviary, for his
religious merits, because after a Pope had once ridden him, he never
would suffer himself to be unhallowed by carrying a woman on his back.
These latter are both Roman Catholic Houyhnhnms, but among the
Mahometans also, quadrupedism is not considered an obstacle to a
certain kind of canonization. Seven of the Emperor of Morocco's horses
have been Saints, or Marabouts as the Moors would call it; and some
there were who enjoyed that honour in the year 1721 when Windus was at
Mequinez. One had been thus distinguished for saving the Emperor's
life: “and if a man,” says the Traveller, “should kill one of his
children, and lay hold of this horse, he is safe. This horse has saved
the lives of some of the captives, and is fed with _cuscuru_ and
camel's milk. After the Emperor has drank, and the horse after him,
some of his favourites are suffered to drink out of the same bowl.”
This was probably the horse who had a Christian slave appointed to
hold up his tail when he was led abroad, and to carry a vessel and
towel—“for use unmeet to tell.”

I have discovered only one Houyhnhnm who was a martyr, excepting those
who are sometimes burnt with the rest of the family by Captain Rock's
people in Ireland. This was poor Morocco, the learned horse of Queen
Elizabeth's days: he and his master Banks, having been in some danger
of being put to death at Orleans, were both burnt alive by the
Inquisition at Rome, as magicians.—The word martyr is here used in its
religious acceptation: for the victims of avarice and barbarity who
are destroyed by hard driving and cruel usage are numerous enough to
make a frightful account among the sins of this nation.

Fabretti the antiquary had a horse who when he carried his master on
an antiquarian excursion, assisted him in his researches; for this
sagacious horse had been so much accustomed to stop where there were
ruins, and probably had found so much satisfaction in grazing, or
cropping the boughs among them at his pleasure, that he was become a
sort of antiquary himself; and sometimes by stopping and as it were
pointing like a setter, gave his master notice of some curious and
half-hidden objects which he might otherwise have past by unperceived.

How often has a drunken rider been carried to his own door by a
sure-footed beast, sensible enough to understand that his master was
in no condition either to guide him, or to take care of himself. How
often has a stage coach been brought safely to its inn after the
coachman had fallen from the box. Nay was there not a mare at Ennis
races in Ireland (Atalanta was her name) who having thrown her rider,
kept the course with a perfect understanding of what was expected from
her, looked back and quickened her speed as the other horses
approached her, won the race, trotted a few paces beyond the post,
then wheeled round, and came up to the scale as usual? And did not
Hurleyburley do the same thing at the Goodwood races?

That Nobs was the best horse in the world I will not affirm. Best is
indeed a bold word to whatever it be applied, and yet in the
shopkeeper's vocabulary it is at the bottom of his scale of
superlatives. A haberdasher in a certain great city is still
remembered, whose lowest priced gloves were what he called Best, but
then he had five degrees of optimism; Best, Better than Best, Best of
all, Better than Best of all, and the Real Best. It may be said of
Nobs then that he was one of the Real Best: equal to any that Spain
could have produced to compare with him, though concerning Spanish
horses, the antiquary and historian Morales, (properly and as it were
prophetically baptized Ambrosio, because his name ought ever to be in
ambrosial odour among his countrymen) concerning Spanish horses, I
say, that judicious author has said, _la estima que agora se hace en
todo el mundo de un caballo Español es la mas solemne cosa que puede
haber en animales._

Neither will I assert that there could not have been a better horse
than Nobs, because I remember how Roger Williams tells us, “one of the
chiefest Doctors of England was wont to say concerning strawberries,
that God could have made a better berry, but he never did.” Calling
this to mind, I venture to say as that chiefest Doctor might, and we
may believe would have said upon the present occasion, that a better
horse than Nobs there might have been,—but there never was.

The Duchess of Newcastle tells us that her Lord, than whom no man
could be a more competent judge, preferred barbs and Spanish to all
others, for barbs, he said, were like gentlemen in their kind, and
Spanish horses like Princes. This saying would have pleased the
Doctor, as coinciding entirely with his own opinions. He was no
believer in equality either among men or beasts; and he used to say,
that in a state of nature Nobs would have been the king of his kind.

And why not? if I do not show you sufficient precedents for it call me
FIMBUL FAMBI.

CHAPTER CC.

A CHAPTER OF KINGS.

FIMBUL-FAMBI _heitr
Sá er fatt kann segia,
That er ósnotvrs athal._

_Fimbul-fambi (fatuus) vocatur
Qui pauca novit narrare:
Ea est hominis insciti proprietas._

EDDA, _Háva Mál_.

There are other monarchies in the inferior world, besides that of the
Bees, though they have not been registered by Naturalists, nor studied
by them.

For example, the King of the Fleas keeps his court at Tiberias, as Dr.
Clarke discovered to his cost, and as Mr. Cripps will testify for him.

The King of the Crocodiles resides in Upper Egypt; he has no tail, but
Dr. Southey has made one for him.

The Queen Muscle may be found at the Falkland Islands.

The Oysters also have their King, according to Pliny. Theirs seems to
be a sort of patriarchical monarchy, the King, or peradventure the
Queen, Oyster being distinguished by its size and age, perhaps
therefore the parent of the bed; for every bed, if Pliny err not, has
its sovereign. In Pliny's time the diver made it his first business to
catch the royal Oyster, because his or her Majesty being of great age
and experience, was also possessed of marvellous sagacity, which was
exercised for the safety of the commonweal; but if this were taken the
others might be caught without difficulty, just as a swarm of Bees may
be secured after the Queen is made prisoner. Seeing, however, that his
Oyster Majesty is not to be heard of now at any of the Oyster shops in
London, nor known at Colchester or Milton, it may be that liberal
opinions have, in the march of intellect, extended to the race of
Oysters, that monarchy has been abolished among them, and that
republicanism prevails at this day throughout all Oysterdom, or at
least in those parts of it which be near the British shores. It has
been observed also by a judicious author that no such King of the
Oysters has been found in the West Indian Pearl fisheries.

The King of the Bears rules over a territory which is on the way to
the desert of Hawaida, and Hatim Tai married his daughter, though the
said Hatim was long unwilling to become a Mac Mahon by marriage.

“I was told by the Sheikh Othman and his son, two pious and credible
persons,” says the traveller Ibn Batista, “that the monkies have a
leader whom they follow as if he were their King, (this was in
Ceylon). About his head is tied a turban composed of the leaves of
trees, (for a crown;) and he reclines upon a staff, (which is his
sceptre). At his right and left hand are four Monkies with rods in
their hands, (gold sticks), all of which stand at his head whenever
the leading Monkey, (his Majesty) sits. His wives and children are
daily brought in on these occasions, and sit down before him; then
comes a number of Monkies (his privy council) which sit and form an
assembly about him. After this each of them comes with a nut, a lemon
or some of the mountain fruit, which he throws down before the leader.
He then eats (dining in public, like the King of France) together with
his wives, and children, and the four principal Monkies: they then all
disperse. One of the Jogres also told me, that he once saw the four
Monkies standing in the presence of the leader, and beating another
Monkey with rods; after which they plucked off all his hair.”

The Lion is the King of Beasts. Hutchinson, however, opines that Bulls
may be ranked in a higher class; for helmets are fortified with their
horns, which is a symbol of pre-eminence. Certainly he says, both the
Bull and Lion discover the King, but the Bull is a better and more
significant representative of a King than the Lion. But neither Bull
nor Lion is King of all Beasts, for a certain person whose name being
anagrammatized rendereth Johnny the Bear, is notoriously the King of
the Bears at this time: even Ursa Major would not dispute his title.
And a certain honourable member of the House of Commons would by the
tottle of that whole House be voted King of the Bores.

The King of the Codfish frequents the shores of Finmark. He has a sort
of chubbed head, rising in the shape of a crown, his forehead is
broad, and the lower jaw bone projects a little, in other parts he
resembles his subjects, whom he leads and directs in their migrations.
The Laplanders believe that the fisherman who takes him, will from
that time forth be fortunate, especially in fishing; and they shew
their respect for his Cod-Majesty when he is taken, by hanging him up
whole to dry, instead of cutting off his head as they do to the common
fish.

In Japan the Tai, which the Dutch call Steenbrassem, is the King of
Fish, because it is sacred to their sea-god Jebis, and because of its
splendid colours, and also, perhaps, because of its exorbitant price,
it being so scarce, that for a court entertainment, or on other
extraordinary occasions, one is not to be had under a thousand
cobangs.

Among the Gangas or Priests of Congo, is one whose official title is
Mutuin, and who calls himself King of the Water, for by water alone he
professes to heal all diseases. At certain times all who need his aid
are assembled on the banks of a river. He throws an empty vessel in,
repeats some mysterious words, then takes it out full and distributes
the water as an universal medicine.

The Herring has been called the King of Fish, because of its
excellence, the Herring, as all Dutchmen know, and as all other men
ought to know, exceeding every other fish in goodness. Therefore it
may have been that the first dish which used to be brought to table in
this country on Easter Day, was a Red Herring on horseback, set in a
corn sallad.

Others have called the Whale, King of Fish. But Abraham Rees, D.D. and
F.R.S. of Cyclopedian celebrity, assures us that the whale
notwithstanding its piscine appearance, and its residence in the
waters, has no claim to a place among fishes. Uncle Toby would have
whistled Lillabullero at being told that the Whale was not a fish. The
said Abraham Rees, however, of the double Dees, who is, as the
advertisement on the cover of his own Cyclopedia, informs us, “of
acknowledged learning and industry, and of unquestionable experience
in this (the Cyclopedian) department of literary labour,” candidly
admits that the Ancients may surely be excused for thinking Whales
were fish. But how can Abraham Rees be excused for denying the Whale's
claim to a place among the inhabitants of the Great Deep,—which was
appointed for him at the Creation.

But the Great Fish who is undoubtedly the King of Fish, and of all
creatures that exist in the sea, Whales, Mermen-and-Maids included, is
the fish Arez, which Ormuzd created, and placed in the water that
surrounds Hom, the King of Trees, to protect that sacred arboreal
Majesty against the Great Toad sent there by Ahriman to destroy it.

It is related in the same archives of cosmogony that the King of the
Goats is a White Goat, who carries his head in a melancholy and
cogitabund position, regarding the ground,—weighed down perhaps by the
cares of royalty; that the King of the Sheep has his left ear
white,—from whence it may appear that the Royal Mutton is a black
sheep, which the Royal Ram of the Fairy Tales is not: that the King of
the Camels has two white ears: and that the King of the Bulls is
neither Apis, nor John Bull, but a Black Bull with yellow ears.
According to the same archives, a White Horse with yellow ears and
full eyes is King of the Horses;—doubtless the Mythological Horse King
would acknowledge Nobs for his Vicegerent. The Ass King is also white:
his Asinine Majesty has no Vicegerent. The number of competitors being
so great that he has appointed a regency.

The King of Dogs is yellow. The King of Hares red.

There are Kings among the Otters in the Highland waters, and also
among their relations the Sea Otters. The royal Otter is larger than
his subjects, and has a white spot upon the breast. He shuns
observation, which it is sometimes provident for Kings to do,
especially under such circumstances as his, for his skin is in great
request, among soldiers and sailors; it is supposed to ensure victory,
to secure the wearer from being wounded, to be a prophylactic in times
of contagious sickness, and a preservative in shipwreck. But it is not
easy to find an Otter King, and when found there is danger in the act
of regicide, for he bears a charmed life. The moment in which he is
killed proves fatal to some other creature, either man or beast, whose
mortal existence is mysteriously linked with his. The nature of the
Otter monarchy has not been described, it is evident, however, that
his ministers have no loaves to dispose of,—but then they have plenty
of fishes.

The Ant, who, when Solomon entered the Valley of Ants with his armies
of Genii and men and birds, spoke to the nation of Ants, saying, O
Ants, enter ye not your habitations, lest Solomon and his host tread
you under foot, and perceive it not,—that wise pismire is said by
certain commentators upon the Koran to have been the Queen of the
Ants.

Men have held the Eagle to be the King of Birds; but notwithstanding
the authority of Horace, the Gods know otherwise, for they appointed
the Tchamrosch to that dignity, at the beginning. Some writers indeed
would have the Eagle to be Queen, upon the extraordinary ground that
all Eagles are hens; though in what manner the species is perpetuated
these persons have not attempted to shew.

The Carrion Crows of Guiana have their King, who is a White Crow
_(rara avis in terris)_ and has wings tipt with black. When a flight
of these birds arrive at the prey which they have scented from afar,
however ravenous they may be, they keep at a respectful distance from
the banquet, till his Carrion Majesty has satisfied himself. But there
is another Bird, in South America, whom all the Birds of prey of every
species acknowledge for their natural sovereign, and carry food to him
in his nest, as their tribute.

The King of the Elks is so huge an elk that other elks look like
pismires beside him. His legs are so long, and his strength withal
such, that when the snow lies eight feet deep it does not in the least
impede his pace. He has an arm growing out of his shoulder, and a
large suite who attend upon him wherever he goes, and render him all
the service he requires.

I have never heard anything concerning the King of the Crickets except
in a rodomontade of Matthew Merrygreeks, who, said Ralph Roister
Doister,

bet him on Christmas day
That he crept in a hole, and had not a word to say.

Among the many images of Baal, one was the form or representation of a
Fly, and hence, says Master Perkins, he is called Baalzebub the Lord
of Flies, because he was thought to be the chiefest Fly in the world.
That is he was held to be the King of the Flies. I wish the King of
the Spiders would catch him.

The King of the Peacocks may be read of in the Fairy Tales. The
Japanese name for a crane is Tsuri and the common people in that
country always give that bird the same title which is given to their
first secular Emperor, Tsiri-sama—my great Lord Crane.

The Basilisk, or crowned Cockatrice, who is the chick of a Cock's egg,
is accounted the King of Serpents. And as it has been said that there
is no Cock Eagle, so upon more probable cause it is affirmed that
there is no female Basilisk, that is no Henatrice, the Cock laying
only male eggs. But the most venomous of this kind is only an earthly
and mortal vicegerent, for the true King of Serpents is named
Sanc-ha-naga, and formerly held his court in Chacragiri, a mountain in
the remote parts of the East, where he and his serpentine subjects
were oppressed by the Rational Eagle Garuda. In the spirit of an
imperial Eagle, Garuda required from them a serpent every day for his
dinner, which was regarded by the serpents as a most unpleasant
tribute, especially by such as were full grown and in good condition;
for the Rational Eagle being large and strong enough to carry Vishnu
on his back, expected always a good substantial snake sufficient for a
meal. Sanc-ha-naga, like a Patriot King endeavoured to deliver his
liege subjects from this consuming tyranny; the attempt drew upon him
the wrath of Garuda, which would soon have been followed by his
vengeance, and the King of Serpents must have been devoured himself,
if he and all the snakes had not retired, as fast as they could
wriggle to Sanc-ha-vana, in Sanc-ha-dwip, which is between Cali and
the Sea; there they found an asylum near the palace of Carticeya, son
of the mountain goddess Parvats, and Commander of the Celestial
Armies. Carticeya is more powerful than Garuda, and therefore the
divine Eagle is too rational to invade them while they are under his
protection. It would have been more fortunate for the world if the
King of Serpents had not found any one to protect him; for whatever
his merits may be towards his subjects, he is a most pestilent
Potentate, the breath of his nostrils is a fiery wind which destroys
and consumes all creatures and all herbs within an hundred _yojanas_
of his abode, and which in fact is the Simoom, so fatal to those who
travel in the deserts. The sage Agastya for a time put a stop to this
evil, for he, by the virtue of his self-inflection, obtained such
power, that he caught Sanc-ha-naga, and carried him about in an
earthen vessel. That vessel however must have been broken in some
unhappy hour, for the fiery and poisonous wind is now as frequent as
ever in the deserts.

The Hindoos say that whoever performs yearly and daily rites in honour
of the King of the Serpents, will acquire immense riches. _This_ King
of the Serpents, I say, to wit Sanc'-ha-naga,—(or Sanc' ha-mucha, as
he is also called from the shape of his mouth resembling that of a
shell)—because there is another King of the Serpents, Karkotaka by
name, whom the sage Narada for deceiving him, punished once by casting
him into a great fire, and confining him there by a curse till he was
delivered in the manner which the reader may find related in the 14th
book of Nela and Damarante, as translated by Mr. Milman from the
Sanscrit.

The Locusts according to Agur in the Book of Proverbs have no King,
although they go forth all of them by bands. Perhaps their form of
government has changed, for the Moors of Morocco inform us that they
have a sovereign, who leads forth their innumerable armies; and as his
nation belongs to the Mahometan world, his title is Sultan Jereed.

The Rose is the Queen of the Garden

_plebei cedite flores;
Hortorum regina suos ostendit honores._[1]

[Footnote 1: RAPIN.]

Bampfield Moore Carew was King of the Beggars; and James Bosvill, was
King of the Gypsies. He lies buried in Rossington Churchyard, near
Doncaster, and for many years the gypsies from the south visited his
grave annually, and among other rites poured a flagon of ale upon it.

There was a personage at Oxford who bore in that University the
distinguished title of Rex Rafforum. After taking his degree he
exchanged it for that of the Reverend.

The _Scurræ_,—(we have no word in our language which designates men
who profess and delight in indulging an ill-mannered and worse-minded
buffoonery,)—the _Scurræ_ also have their King. He bears a Baron's
coronet.

The throne of the Dandies has been vacant since the resignation of the
personage dignified and distinguished by the title of Beau Brummel.

By an advertisement in the Times of Friday, June 18, 1830, I learn
that the beautiful and stupendous Bradwell Ox, is at present the
“truly wonderful King of the Pastures,” the said King Ox measuring
fourteen feet in girth, and sixteen feet in length, being eighteen
hands high, and five years and a half old, and weighing four thousand
five hundred pounds, or more than five hundred and sixty stone, which
is nearly double the size of large oxen in general.

Under the Twelve Cæsars, (and probably it might deserve the title long
after them,) the Via Appia was called the Queen of Roads. That from
Hyde Park Corner is _Regina viarum_ in the 19th century.

Easter Sunday has been called the King of Days, though Christmas Day
might dispute the sovereignty, being in Greek the Queen day of the
Kalendar. _Ἡ βασιλίσσα ἡμέρα_ Justin Martyr calls it.

Who is King of the Booksellers? There is no King among them at this
time, but there is a Directory of five Members, Longman, Rees, Orme,
Brown and Green in the East; the Emperor Murraylemagne, whom Byron
used to call the Grand Murray, reigned alone in the West, till Henry
Colburn divided his empire, and supported the station which he had
assumed by an army of trumpeters which he keeps in constant pay.

If the Books had a King that monarchy must needs be an elective one,
and the reader of these volumes knows where the election would fall.
But literature being a Republic, this cannot be the King of Books.
Suffice it that it is a BOOK FOR A KING, or, for our SOVEREIGN LADY
THE QUEEN.

INTERCHAPTER XXI.

MEASURE FOR MEASURE.

_Le Plebe è bestia
Di cento teste, e non rinchiude in loro
Pur oncia di saper._

CHIABRERA.

The Public, will, I very well know, make free with me _more suo_, as
it thinks it has a right to do with any one who comes before it with
anything designed for its service, whether it be for its amusement,
its use, or its instruction. Now my Public, I will _more meo_ make
free with you—that we may be so far upon equal terms.

_οὐδὲν δεῖ παραμπέχειν λόγους._[1]

You have seldom or never had the truth spoken to you when you have
been directly addressed. You have been called the enlightened Public,
the generous Public, the judicious Public, the liberal Public, the
discerning Public, and so forth. Nay your bare title THE PUBLIC,
oftentimes stands alone _par excellence_ in its plain majesty like
that of the king, as if needing no affix to denote its inherent and
pre-eminent importance. But I will speak truth to you my Public.

Be not deceived! I have no bended knees,
No supple tongue, no speeches steep'd in oil,
No candied flattery, nor honied words![2]

[Footnote 1: EURIPIDES.]

[Footnote 2: RANDOLPH'S ARISTIPPUS.]

I must speak the truth to you my Public,

_Sincera verità non vuol tacersi._[3]

Where your enlightenedness (if there be such a word) consists and your
generosity, and your judgement, and your liberality, and your
discernment, and your majesty to boot,—to express myself as Whitfield
or Rowland Hill would have done in such a case (for they knew the
force of language)—I must say, it would puzzle the Devil to tell. _Il
faut librement avec verité francher ce mot, sans en estre repris; ou
si l'on est, c'est très-mal à propos._[4]

[Footnote 3: CHIABRERA.]

[Footnote 4: BRANTOME.]

I will tell you what you are; you are a great, ugly, many headed
beast, with a great many ears which are long, hairy, ticklish,
moveable, erect and never at rest.

Look at your picture in Southey's Hexameters,—that poem in which his
laureated Doctorship writes verses by the yard instead of the foot,—he
describes you as “many headed and monstrous,”

with numberless faces,
Numberless bestial ears, erect to all rumours, and restless,
And with numberless mouths which are fill'd with lies as with
arrows.

Look at that Picture my Public!—It is very like you!

For individual readers I profess just as much respect as they
individually deserve. There are a few persons in every generation for
whose approbation,—rather let it be said for whose gratitude and
love,—it is worth while “to live laborious days,” and for these
readers of this generation and the generations that are to follow,—for
these

Such as will join their profit with their pleasure,
And come to feed their understanding parts;—
For these I'll prodigally spend myself,
And speak away my spirit into air;
For these I'll melt my brain into invention,
Coin new conceits, and hang my richest words
As polished jewels in their bounteous ears.[5]

[Footnote 5: BEN JONSON.]

Such readers, they who to their learning add knowledge, and to their
knowledge wisdom and to their wisdom benevolence, will say to me

_ὦ καλὰ λέγων, πολὺ δ᾽ ἄμεινον᾽ ἔτι τῶν λόγων
ἐργασάμεν᾽, εἴθ᾽ ἐπέλ—
θοις ἅπαντά μοι σαφῶς·
ὡς ἐγώ μοι δοκῶ
κἂν μακρὰν ὁδὸν διελθεῖν ὥς᾽ ἀκοῦσαι.
πρὸς τάδ᾽ ὦ βέλτιστε θαῤῥήσας λέγ᾽, ὡς ἃ—
παντες ἡδόμεσθά σοι._[6]

But such readers are very few. Walter Landor said that if ten such
persons should approve his writings, he would call for a division and
count a majority. To please them is to obtain an earnest of enduring
fame; for which, if it be worth any thing, no price can be too great.
But for the aggregate any thing is good enough. Yes my Public, Mr.
Hume's arithmetic and Mr. Brougham's logic, Lord Castlereagh's syntax,
Mr. Irving's religion and Mr. Carlisle's irreligion, the politics of
the Edinburgh Review and the criticism of the Quarterly, Thames water,
Brewer's beer, Spanish loans, old jokes, new constitutions, Irish
eloquence, Scotch metaphysics, Tom and Jerry, Zimmerman on Solitude,
Chancery Equity and Old Bailey Law, Parliamentary wit, the patriotism
of a Whig Borough-monger, and the consistency of a British cabinet;
_Et s'il y a encore quelque chose à dire, je le tiens pour dit;_—

[Footnote 6: ARISTOPHANES.]

Yes my Public,

Nor would I you should look for other looks,
Gesture, or compliment from me.[7]

[Footnote 7: BEN JONSON.]

_Minus dico quam vellem, et verba omninò frigidiora hæc quam ut satis
exprimant quod concipio:_[8] these and any thing worse than these,—if
worse than what is worst can be imagined, will do for you. If there be
any thing in infinite possibility more worthless than these, more
floccical-naucical, nihilish-pilish, assisal-teruncial, more good for
nothing than good for nothingness itself, it is good enough for you.

[Footnote 8: PICUS MIRANDULA.]

INTERCHAPTER XXII.

VARIETY OF STILES.

_Qualis vir, talis oratio._

ERASMI ADAGIA.

Authors are often classed, like painters, according to the school, in
which they have been trained, or to which they have attached
themselves. But it is not so easy to ascertain this in literature as
it is in painting; and if some of the critics who have thus
endeavoured to class them, were sent to school themselves and there
whipt into a little more learning, so many silly classifications of
this kind would not mislead those readers who suppose in the
simplicity of their own good faith, that no man presumes to write upon
a subject which he does not understand.

Stiles may with more accuracy be classed, and for this purpose metals
might be used in literature as they are in heraldry. We might speak of
the golden stile, the silver, the iron, the leaden, the pinchbeck and
the bronze.

Others there are which cannot be brought under any of these
appellations. There is the Cyclopean stile, of which Johnson is the
great example; the sparkling, or micacious, possessed by Hazlitt, and
much affected in Reviews and Magazines; the oleaginous, in which Mr.
Charles Butler bears the palm, or more appropriately the olive branch:
the fulminating—which is Walter Landor's, whose conversation has been
compared to thunder and lightning; the impenetrable—which is sometimes
used by Mr. Coleridge; and the Jeremy-Benthamite, which cannot with
propriety be distinguished by any other name than one derived from its
unparellelled and unparallellable author.

_Ex stilo,_ says Erasmus, _perpendimus ingenium cujusque, omnemque
mentis habitum ex ipsâ dictionis ratione conjectamus. Est enim tumidi,
stilus turgidus; abjecti, humilis, exanguis; asperi, scaber;
amarulenti, tristis ac maledicus; deliciis affluentis, picturatus ac
dissolutus; Breviter, omne vitæ simulacrum, omnis animi vis, in
oratione perinde ut in speculo repræsentatur, ac vel intima pectoris,
arcanis quibusdam vestigiis, deprehenduntur._

There is the lean stile, of which Nathaniel Lardner, and William Coxe
may be held up as examples; and there is the larded one, exemplified
in Bishop Andrews, and in Burton, the Anatomist of Melancholy; Jeremy
Taylor's is both a flowery and a fruitful stile: Harvey the
Meditationist's a weedy one. There are the hard and dry; the weak and
watery; the manly and the womanly; the juvenile and the anile; the
round and the pointed; the flashy and the fiery; the lucid and the
opaque; the luminous and the tenebrous; the continuous and the
disjointed. The washy and the slap-dash are both much in vogue,
especially in magazines and reviews; so are the barbed and the
venomed. The High-Slang stile is exhibited in the Court Journal and in
Mr. Colburn's novels; the Low Slang in Tom and Jerry, Bell's Life in
London, and most Magazines, those especially which are of most
pretensions.

The flatulent stile, the feverish, the aguish, and the atrabilious are
all as common as the diseases of body from which they take their name,
and of mind in which they originate; and not less common than either
is the dyspeptic stile, proceeding from a weakness in the digestive
faculty.

Learned, or if not learned, Dear Reader, I had much to say of stile,
but the under written passage from that beautiful book, Xenophon's
Memorabilia Socratis, has induced me, as the Latins say, _stilum
vertere_, and to erase a paragraph written with ink in which the gall
predominated.

_Ἐγὼ δ᾽ οὖν καὶ αὐτὸς, ὦ Αντιφῶν, ὥσπερ ἄλλός τις ἢ ἵππῳ ἀγαθῷ ἢ κυνὶ
ἢ ὂρνιθι ἥδεται, οὕτω καὶ ἒτι μᾶλλον ἥδομαι τοῖς φίλοις ἀγαθοῖς· καὶ,
ἐάν τι σχῶ ἀγαθὸν διδάσκω, καὶ ἄλλοις σύνιστημι, παρ᾽ ὧν ἂν ἡγῶμαι
ὠφελήσεσθαί τι αὐτοὺς εἰς ἀρετήν᾽ καὶ, τοὺς θησαυροὺς τῶν πάλι σοφῶν
ἀνδρῶν, οὕς ἐκεῖνοι κατέλιπον ἐν βιβλίοις γράφεντες, ἀνελίττων κοινῆ
σὺν τοῖς φίλοις διέρχομαι· καὶ ἄν τι ὁρῶμεν ἀγαθὸν, ἐκλεγόμεθα, καὶ
μέγα νομίζομεν κέρδος, ἐὰν ἀλλήλοις ὠφέλιμοι γιγνώμεθα._

INTERCHAPTER XXIII.

A LITTLE ADVICE BESTOWED UPON THE SCORNFUL READER IN A SHORT
INTERCHAPTER.

No man is so foolish, but may give another good counsel sometimes; and
no man is so wise, but may easily err, if he will take no other's
counsel but his own.

BEN JONSON.

I will now bestow a little advice upon the scornful reader.

And who, the Devil, are you exclaims that reader, who are impertinent
enough to offer your advice, and fool enough to suppose that I shall
listen to it?

Whatever your opinion may be, Sir, concerning an Evil Principle,
whether you hold with the thorough-paced Liberals, that there is no
Principle at all, (and in one sense, exemplify this in your own
conduct,) or with the Unitarians that there is no Evil one; or whether
you incline to the Manichean scheme of Two Principles, which is said
to have its advocates,—in either case the diabolical expletive in your
speech is alike reprehensible: you deserve a reprimand for it; and you
are hereby reprimanded accordingly.—Having discharged this duty, I
answer your question in the words of Terence, with which I doubt not
you are acquainted, because they are to be found in the Eton grammar:
_Homo sum, nihil humani à me alienum puto._

And what the Devil have the words of Terence to do with my query?

You are again reprimanded Sir. If it be a bad thing to have the Devil
at one's elbow, it cannot be a good one to have him at ones tongue's
end. The sentence is sufficiently applicable. It is a humane thing to
offer advice where it is wanted, and a very humane thing to write and
publish a book which is intended to be either useful or delightful to
those who read it.

A humane thing to write a book!—Martin of Galway's humanity is not a
better joke than that!

Martin of Galway's humanity is no joke, Sir. He has began a good work,
and will be remembered for it with that honour which is due to all who
have endeavoured to lessen the sum of suffering and wickedness in this
wicked world.

Answer me one question, Mr. Author, if you please. If your book is
intended to be either useful or delightful, why have you filled it
with such a parcel of nonsense?

What you are pleased to call by that name, Mr. Reader, may be either
sense or nonsense according to the understanding which it meets with.
_Quicquid recipitur, recipitur in modum recipientis._ Look in the
seventh Chapter of the second book of Esdras, and at the twenty-fifth
verse you will find the solution of your demand.

And do you suppose I shall take the trouble of looking into the Bible
to please the humour of such a fellow as you?

If you do not, Sir, there are others who will; and more good may arise
from looking into that book,—even upon such an occasion,—than either
they or I can anticipate.

And so, scornful reader, wishing thee a better mind, and an
enlightened understanding, I bid thee gladly and heartily farewell!

END OF VOL. VI.

W. Nicol, 60, Pall Mall.

*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "The doctor, &c., vol. 6 (of 7)" ***

Home