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Bm^.

Sib Tburas Bbovki. Km.
brtrail prtserved in tlu Vestry -if St

PMs-ii

fir

^0 irr FRIEND

G. W. W. FIKTH, Esq.

(op nobwich),

THIS VOLUME OF ESSAYS IS AFFECTIONATELY

AND ADMIBINaLY DEDICATED.

443

PREFACE.

I HE indulgent readet will be kind

4 enough to take tbe sub-title of tbese

5 Bibliographic Essays in a somewhat
* restricted sense. The celebrated

books discussed in them are widely known by
name, but with the majori^ of them it ie by
name only. And to the, general reader not only
would their rarity be a hindrance to perusal, but,
should he by chance procure them, the taak of
wading through the thick folios might be found
tiresome or distasteful.

But here he may find something of great causes,
men, and books, in a Tolnme which be can carry
to the chimney comer or read on a journey, some-
thing which it is hoped may induce him to seek
after the treasures which lie hidden in the dnsty
and often but dimly-remembered originals.

THE ANGELIC DOCTOR.

BOOKS CONSULTED.

Sumnta Hieohfficaj Sancti ThonuB Acquinatis Dimncb Voluntatis inter-
pretis; Sctcrij Ordinig Pr^edicatorum. In qua eccleti4B CatholiMB
doctrina univer$a et quicquid in veterum Patrum numumentis eat
dignum ohservatu; quicquid etiam vel olim voaUum est, vel hodie
vacatur ab hareticis in controversiam ; in omne ut erudite saUde, et
dilucide ita pie atque Jideliter expKcaiur; in tres partes ab auctore
suo digtrHntta, Parisiis, M.D.c.xxxyui.

Bulter*8 Lives of the Saints. Dolmao, 1854, 12 vols. 8vo. vol. iii.
7th March. Article : S. Thomas of Aquioo, D.C.

Penny CychpoBdia, Vol. xiii. Article: Aqainas.

An Historical and Critical Dictionary. By Monsiesr Bayle. Vol. i.
Article: Albertus Magnus ; other articles have been consulted.

MeduBval Philosophy; or, a Treatise on Moral and Metctphysical
Philosophy from the bih to the \4th Centuries. By Frederick
Denison Maurice, M.A. London and Glasgow, 1848.

Nouvelle Biographic G4nira2e, Article : St. Thomas D. Aquin.

Philobiblon. By Richard de Bury, 1832. Notes to, on Aquinas.

Miscellaneous Works of Pope. London, 1741. Memoirs of Mar-
tinus Scriblerus, where a selection of theses is given in imitation
of Aquinas's style.

THE ANGELIC DOCTOR.

A.D. 1227—1274.

U a huge brown Mo eometimeB
ith, notliiDg less than the celebrated
m " of Thomas Aquinas, which has
i perfect harbour of reiiige for all
Roman Catholic doubters erer eince it was written, and
which has had its effect on Protestant minds, and will yet
do 80, no doubt, for years to come. It contains somewhat
more than eighteen hundred pages of closely-printed matter
in double columns, and resolves, or affects to resolve — reaUy,
to say the truth, it is lor the most part a very manly, pMn-
spoken book — all the doubts, ethical, philosophical, or re-
UgiouB, that a reader, be he priest or layman, can possibly
entertain. This great work Aquinas did not live to finish ;
but, like the Cathedral of Cologne, or the Ppamid of Cheops,
althotfgh unfinished, it is still a wonder. Mr. Maurice, in
fact, believes that, if Aquinas had conceived and entertained
only half the doubts that he has ao boldly expressed, he
would not have lived till ho waB thirty, much less till he

4 VAEIA.

was nearly fifty. But these doubts never made a lodg-
ment within his breast; and hence he was called the
Angelic Doctor, as Bonaventm'a was named the Seraphic
Doctor, He is full of calm consciousness of Faith. Those
who rank him amongst the infidels, again to quote Mr.
Maurice, can have but little acquaintance with his writings.
Yet his book is a storehouse of infidel opinions. " The
reasoner against almost any tenet of the Eoman Catholic
Church can be furnished on a short notice with any kind
of weapon out of the armoury of the great Doctor.'* *

To return to our book. Infidel or not infidel, the Church
has always regarded St, Thomas as one of its great doctors
and champions ; and the very copper-plate .engraving
which is inlaid in the title-page of my copy pictures what
was at once almost a miracle and a conveyance to the
Doctor of the applause and approval of his church. The
Doctor is represented as kneeling in prayer, with his hands
widely spread, and with a most humble expression of
countenance; above him a little Cupid lifts from his
studious brows his square doctor's cap, so that a nimbus,
an aureole, a divine coronet of light, which, if we may
believe artists, saints commonly wore, may have room to
play, in a will-o'-the-wisp fashion, above his head. Before
him, and in the midst of a large church of Palladian or
Eoman architecture, appears the Saviour, in clouds, in the
midst of which clouds also are certain cherubic angels, mere
heads and wings disporting. From the mouth of the

* Maurice's ** Medieeval Philosophy."

THE ANQELIC DOCTOR. 5

Saviour issues a label, on which are the words of approval :
" Bene scripsisti de me, Thoma ;" — " Well hast thou
written concerning me, O Thomas." Perhaps the force
of approval could no further go.

We shall have to refer to this legend in the hfe of the
saint, and may therefore, without further parley, proceed
to consider who this great writer was; this great hull,
this ox, the bellowing of whose learning has reached down
the ages and affects us yet.

The 7th of March is consecrated by the Roman Church
to the memory of Saint Thomas of Aquino, doctor and
confessor, by us known as Thomas Aquinas. Few men
were more important in their day, and his reputation has
not died out, but has been permanent and widely spread.
The period to which he belonged was one of great mental
activity ; of an activity, not to say restlessness, indeed,
much greater than many of the modem school would be
disposed to allow. The first dawn of the Reformation had
not yet, it is true, become manifest, but a spirit of inquiry
was prevalent, which was the sure precursor of an intellec-
tual revolution. To quote Lord Brougham, speaking of a
totally distinct but somewhat similar period : " The soldier
might be abroad, but there was another person abroad who
would make himself heard; yes! the schoolmaster was
abroad; and while he was busy, what cared we for
soldiers ?" The ancient philosophers and poets had again
taken root in the human mind ; Aristotle had been called
the enemy of Christianity ; Plato had been read, cited, and
loved ; the Bible itself had been, to the priests at least, if

6 VAEIA.

not to the laity, unlocked. There was also a great latitude
of speculation; and, although not a learned age in the
sense in which we now use the term, it is prohahle that
there was much more originality of thought, if less of
scholarship, than in the succeeding century.

As before remarked, there was scarcely any formal
opposition to the claims of the Eoman Catholic Church.
But the thirteenth century was not distinguished by any
exaggerated spirit of submission. In England our own
King John yielded reluctantly to the Papal claims — a
measure to which he was forced rather by his own extreme
unpopularity than by any excess of sympathy on the part
of his subjects with the spiritual power.

In Germany the Swabian dynasty held the imperial
crown for a long series of years, and the emperors of that
family were engaged in constant strife with the court of
Kome. Seldom had the person of the pontiff been viewed
with less respect — seldom had he been hated so completely
as a secular prince. The ecclesiastical power gained
ascendency at last ; and the death of the young Conradin,
and the accession of the house of Anjou to the throne of
Naples, completed the niin of a dynasty fruitful in men
of a restless and aspiring genius.

Thomas of Aquino had not, as Shiel once said, that
bitter chill of poverty in early youth from which the heart
so seldom recovers. He was by birth one of the counts of
Aquino, who ranked among the noblest families of Naples.
"They were allied," says Alban Butler, with a pride
which is perhaps pardonable, but certainly unchristian, " to

THE ANGELIC DOCTOR. 7

the Kings of Sicily and Aragon, to St. Lewis of France,
and many other s(6yereign houses of Europe. Our saint's
grandfather having married the sister of the Emperor
Frederick I, he was himself grand-nephew to that prince,
and second cousin to the Emperor Henry VI, and in the
third degree to Frederick II. His father, Landulph, was
Count of Acquino, and Lord of Loretto and Belcastro : his
mother, Theodora, was daughter to the Count of Theate.
The saint was bom towards the end of the year 1226, or
at the beginning of the ensuing year ; for accounts differ.
St. Austin obserres that the most tender age is subject to
yarious passions, as of impatience, choler, jealousy, and
spite, and the like, which appear in children. No such
thing was seen in Thomas."*

With such a sweet disposition, it was perhaps impossible
not to make a saint ; with such a pedigree, so exalted a
genealogy, it was very difficult to do so. The monastic
life was the result of Thomas's own choice, but it was most
vigorously opposed by all his family. The lustre of the
long line of the Counts of Aquino was not, as they
thought, to be dimmed by the dirty habits, the bare feet,
and the serge gown of a priest. They little dreamed of
the lustre that was to be shed upon it by the aureole of a
saint.

In early life the education of the child had been
intrusted to the Benedictine monks of Monte Cassino.
There is some dispute as to the share the Benedictines are

* Alban Bauer's **Liye8 of the Sainte," vol. iiL pp. 43, 44.

8 VARIA,

entitled to in haying secured so brilliant and acnte an in-
tellect for the service of the Church J and, indeed, it
would seem that he did not entirely determine to give up
the world until he had resided some time at Naples ; when,
after the lapse of a short time, he entered the order of
Saint Dominic.

This decisive step had been long opposed by the whole
force of entreaty, persuasion, threat, trick, cajolery, and
even force, of Aquinas's family. All manner of fond
caresses, entreaties, and prayers were used by his mother
to dissuade him from becoming a monk, and, says Butler,
with a quaint sadness, '^ Nature made her eloquent
and pathetic.'* His sisters, too, pleaded with her ; they
omitted nothing that flesh and blood could inspire on
such an occasion, and represented to him the danger of
causing the death of his mother by grief. But nothing
could move Thomas ; on the contrary, if we may credit his
biographers, he rather moved his sisters than they him,
for they both yielded to the force of his reasons for quit-
ting the world, and by his persuasion devoted themselves
to a sincere practice of piety.

In sweet solitude, Thomas prepared himself for his
future life in company with three books, a Bible, Aris-
totle's Logics, and the works of the Master of the Sentences ;
this quietude, however, enraged his brothers Landulph
and Keynold, who were young and somewhat wild
men, soldiers who had returned from the army of the
emperor, and they sought to obtain that by force which
the mother had failed to gain by entreaties ; they bore

THE ANGELIC DOCTOR. 9

away the young novice, tore up his habit, and shut him
up in a solitary tower. Herein, like the philosopher of
old, he was to undergo a strong temptation, and to succeed
in overcoming it. But Alban Butler shall tell what this
was : ** The devil suggested to these young officers a new
artifice to prevent him from pursuing his vocation. They
secretly introduced into his chamber one of the most
beautiful and most insinuating young strumpets of the
country, promising her a considerable reward in case she
could draw him into sin ; she employed all the arms of
Satan to succeed in so detestable a design. The saint,
alarmed and afirighted at the danger, profoundly humbled
himself, and cried out to God most earnestly for his pro-
tection ; then snatching up a firebrand struck her with it
and drove her out of his chamber. After this victory, not
moved with pride, but blushing with confusion at having
been so basely assaulted, he fell on his knees and thanked
God for his merciful preservation."

The story would hardly be complete without a vision.
Falling asleep, he dreamt that two angels tied him round
the loins with a cord, or, if we like it better, two angels did
really visit him, and girded him so tightly with a cord
that they awakened him and made him cry out. His
guards ran in, but he kept the secret to himself. One
heroic victory of this kind, adds Butler, sometimes obtains
of God a recompense and a triumph. As St. Paul was
let down from the city walls in a basket, so was Thomas
from his tower by his sister, who knew that his mother,
the countess, no longer opposed his being a monk. He

10 VAEIA.

was received with joy by his brethren the Dominicans of
Naples, and from that time he was suffered to pursue his
desires in peace.

Albertus Magnus was then teaching at Cologne^ and
the two orders of St. Francis and St. Dominic were as yet
in the full vigour of youth. Almost every man of intellect
was in that day a priest, although perhaps only a priest in
name ; and one cannot wonder at the unremitting watch-
fulness and care with which his future career was marked
out by the chiefs of this powerful spiritual corporation.

The Benedictines, however, are no doubt entitled to
some credit in forming the mind of the youthful aspirant.
His biographers are never weary of boasting how pious
and how modest he was from the time of his earliest
youth. His great talent and gentle disposition seem to have
attra<$ted considerable notice, and no pains were probably
spared to secure such abilities for the service of the Church.

Ee this as it may, St. Thomas of Aquino has been
always recognized as one of the glories of the Dominican
order. Under the care of the general of this order, he was
sent to Paris, and from Paris to Cologne ; there he first
listened to Albert the Great, a man small in stature and
weak in body, but great indeed in mind. He ranked
amongst the most learned men of the age, and was en-
dowed with a wonderful vivacity and quickness of intellect.
Like most of the learned of his day, he attempted to reach
the extreme limits of the knowable, and to him was at-
tached, in the minds of the vulgar at least, the credit of
being a magician.

THE ANGELIC DOCTOR. 11

iC

I could easily belieye/' says Bayle, speaking of this
charge^ '^ that, as he understood mathematics^ he had made
a head the springs whereof might form some articulate
sounds ; but what a folly to found an accusation of magic
on this I"* Polydore Vergil, Pope Sylvester, Eobert of
Lincoln, and Friar Bacon had like heads. Naude tells
us that Albertus Magnus was more ingenious than these
people ; for he formed a whole man, having worked for
thrice ten years with the greatest diligence to forge him
under the divers constellations, which the credulous reader,
if he look into Old Moore's or Zadkiel's almanacs of the
present day, will find govern the various parts of the
body. Some of the writers of the time say that this
man was made of flesh,t but by art, and not by nature ;
a fact "judged impossible by modem writers/' It was
called the Androis of Albertus Magnus ; and the tale is
only introduced here because it is said, to his lionour, that
Thomas Aquinas broke it in pieces, he being, we are told,
" irritated at its great tittle-tattle." If any such figure did
exist, more probably he did so from a belief that such an
image was wickedly imagined and made. Albertus was
accused of turning winter into spring, of possessing magical
books, of being the first man-midwife, and, by certain
magical performances, of preserving his own body from
corruption. In a note Bayle quotes Father Raynaud, who
asserts that St. Thomas never said that he broke the

* Bajle*s Dictionary, article ''Albertus Magnus.*'

t Bayle quotes Henri de Assia and Bartholomew Sybilla.

12 VARIA.

brazen head of Albertus, and that the asserted miracles
are false exaggerations or wholly fictitious.*

Aquinas was, if not the favourite, the most celebrated
scholar of Albertus ; . but, as Alban Butler tells us, his
humility prevented him from showing how really advanced
he was in learning. His fellow-scholars called him the
Great Sicilian, the Dumb Ox. One day, however, the
master observed, in the hearing of all, " We call him the
great Sicilian ox, but that ox will make his lowings heard
throughout Christendom." It is also said that one of his
companions proposed, out of pity to his supposed inca-
pacity, to go over his lessons and explain them to him.
The saint submitted, through meekness, to this ari'ange-
ment. It happened one day, however, that his friend
found something which he was unable to understand,
much less to explain. Thomas solved the difficulty in
the most lucid manner, and his fellow-student hence-
forward was content to learn from him. This story seems
to accord with what we know of his character. Every
allowance must be made for the tendency of ecclesiastical
biographers to magnify the virtues of the spiritual hero
whose character they are depicting. But, after making
every possible deduction for party-spirit, enough remains
to render it doubtful whether any of the doctors of the
Reformed Church were actuated at any time by a more

* Hyems in veris amcenitatem versa et caput SBnenm articulate
luquens . . . sunt ableganda tanquam conficta et falso jac-
tdta de tanto viro ; libri autem magicii suut supposititii, &c.

THE ANQELIQ DOCTOR. 13

Christian spirit than that which inspired the Dominican
monk, of whose life and works we are endeavouring to
give some brief notice.

His master, Albertus Magnus, was a man of very
different character. He waa less of a theologian, and
more of a philosopher. Some hints were occasionally thrown
out, even in his lifetime, that he was an ardent student
of the occult sciences. Being associated with the Angelic
Doctor, St. Thomas, for so many years, he doubtless exer-
cised great influence in the development of his young
Mend's character, and this, perhaps, would account for
many of the doubts expressed in Aquinas's great work.
He survived his pupil seven years.

A legend which was current concerning Albertus
Magnus shows how widely he differed from the Angelic
Doctor. Many years before his death he refrained from
teaching. The reason for this was given in this wise :
" When young, he had a diflficulty even in mastering the
most elementary studies necessary for the ecclesiastical
profession. He was almost in despair, when the Holy
Virgin appeared to him and asked him in which branch
of learning he most wished to excel ,t — ^in theology or
in philosophy. Albert made choice of philosophy. His
request was granted; but the Virgin added that, as a
punishment for not choosing theology, before his death
he would relapse into his former stupidity. This accord-
ingly happened three years before his death. He sud-
denly stopped short while he was delivering a lecture,
and, being unable to collect his ideas, he at length under-

14 VARIA.

stood that the time had airiTed wfaoi the predictioii should
be iblfined."

This stoiy is prohablj £d>o]oii]s ; we qoote it to show
that, in the opinion of his age, Albertns Magnns was
less a theologian than a jdulosopher. It was peihaps
fortunate for his pnpil that sodi hi^peoed to be the
case.

Thomas Aqninas was of a devoot disposition, and had
eyen some tendency to mjsticism. It is probable that his
reasoning powers would scarodj hare been so fullj deye-
loped as thej were, if he had not had a preceptor rather
more secular in his inclinations than himself.

After a few years Albertus Magnus was summoned to
Paris, and his disciple Thomas accompanied him. In
1248 the Dominican order resolved to establish theolo-
gical seminaries in various parts of Europe. Four of
these were, Cologne, Montpellier, Bologna, and Oxford.
Albertus Magnus was appointed to a professorship at
Cologne, and Thomas Aquinas, being then twenty-two
years of age, was also intrusted with the office of teacher.
He now began to compose his first works, which con-
sisted of conmientaries on the Ethics, and other philoso-
phical works, of Aristotle. About this time he appears
to have .been subject to fits of religious enthusiasm. In
saying mass, according to Alban Butler, he seemed to be
in raptures, and often quite dissolved in tears.

It is therefore perhaps to this period of his life that we
must assign the occasion of the miraculous vision which is
illustrated, in the manner already described, on the title-

THE ANQELIC DOCTOR, 15

page of the folio edition of the " Summa Theologiea." It

should be premised, Tocco relates, according to Butler, that

the vision took place somewhat later in the saint's life,

when, indeed, he was at Naples, after haying composed

the first part of his "Summa Theologica" at Bologna;

certain it is, however, that, during the rapt and visionary

state into which fervent prayer frequently threw this good

man, Dominick Caserte " beheld him, while in fervent

prayer, raised from the ground, and heard a voice from

the crucifix directed to him in these words, ' Bene scrip-

sisti de me, Thoma: quam mercedem accipies?' 'Non

aliam, nbi te, Domine.' — * Well hast thou written of me,

O Thomas: what reward wilt thou accept?' 'No other

than thyself, O Lord,' said the devoted priest." Taking

the story at its lowest possible value, and believing that,

like the Egyptian priests, which Alban Butler tells his

readers addressed their devotees from hollow cells made

secretly behind the images, the priests at Naples imposed

upon their devout and learned dupe in order to encourage

him in his wonderful undertaking, we still must admire the

sweet devotion and meekness of the rapt answer.

In 1257, being then thirty-one years old, Aquinas was
admitted Doctor at Paris. It had in the meantime not
gone well with his family. The two young soldiers who
had played the saint so scurvy a trick had become sincere
penitents, and had left the emperor's service, who, in
revenge, burnt Aquino and put Reynold, the younger of
the two, to death, in the year 1250. After Aquinas was
admitted doctor, the professors of the University of Paris,

16 VAEIA.

then disputing about that for which their present successors
would care very little, determined, in the year 1258, to
consult Aquinas upon the ticklish point ^' of the accidents
remaining really, or only in appearance, in the Blessed
Sacrament of the Altar." The young Doctor, not puffed
up by such an honour, wrote the treatise still extant, and
laid it on the altar. While the saint remained in prayer
on this occasion, some of his brethren saw him lifted up
from the ground."*

It is probable that while at Paris the whole mind of
Aquinas, not given to devotion, was concentrated on his
great book, the " Summa Theologica." There is a good
story told of the simplicity of the man, the absence of
mind of the scholar, and the fervour of the saint. The
King of France, St. Lewis, had so great an esteem for the
young Doctor that he often invited him to his table, and
moreover consulted him in his affairs of state. Butler is
careM to tell us that the saint avoided the honom^ of
dining mih. the king as often as he could, and that when
obliged to be at court, " appeared there as recollected (col-
lected ?) as if in the convent," One day, dining with St.
Lewis, the Doctor, with an energetic and triumphant
movement, cried out, " Conclusum est contra Manichseos ;"
" It is conclusively against the Manichees." The prior
of the convent, astonished at these words, bade the priest
be still, and remember where he was. The good king,
however, fearful that the world might lose so valuable an

* Alban Butler, " Lives of the Saints," vol. iii. p. 53.

THE ANQELIG DOCTOR. 17

argument — for the Manichees were not overthrown every
day — ^begged the saint to write it down, or, indeed, accord-
ing to Tocco, caused his secretary to write it down for him.
Eabelais, who in every story seized at once the point
most open to ridicule, alludes to one regarding Aquinas,
which Duchat supplies in the notes to the chapter
(Pantagruel, book iii. chap. 2) where the allusion occurs.
Pan urge delivers a lecture upon the wisdom of eating
green com ; that is, of spending one's revenue before it is
due. " I may very justly say of you, as Cato did of Albidius,
who, after he had by a most extravagant expense wasted
all his goods but one house, fairly set it on fire, that
the better he might cry, Gonsummatum est! Even as
since his time St. Thomas Aquinas did when he had
eaten up the whole lamprey, although there was no neces-
sity for it." This lamprey story arose from an incident
at the table of St. Lewis. Thomas Aquinas was thereto
invited. For the king there was served up a fine lamprey ;
and, says Duchat, " Thomas, whom it seems no other time
but that would serve to compose his hymn on the Holy
Sacrament, had, at the profoundness of his meditation,
eaten up the whole of the lamprey, which was designed for
the king, and had made an end of this hymn and the fish
both together. Thomas, overjoyed at having finished so
elaborate a poem, cried out in an ecstasy, Consummatum
est I ^ It is finished !' The company who had seen Thomas
play a good knife, and lay about him to some tune, but
knew nothing of his mental employment, fancied that these
Latin words related to his gallant performance in demolish-
p c

18 VARIA.

ing the lamprey, and looked upon him as a very profane
person for applying to a piece of unmannerly epicurism
the words which each of them knew to he spoken by our
Saviour when expiring on the cross."*

There is yet another story equally good, and indeed, to a
Protestant mind, more pregnant, which it is needless to say
Alban Butler does not relate. One day, when the learned
and saintly doctor was conversing with Pope Innocent IV,
that Pontiff, on some money being brought in, probably
some large sum which excited the Pope's pride, said, " You
see that age of the Church is past, when she could say,
* Silver and gold have I none.' " " Yes, holy father," an-
swered Aquinas ; " and the day is also past when she could
say to the paralytic, ' Take up thy bed, and walk.'"

Aquinas seems to have been the acknowledged chief
of his party and age. Whatever he did, he did well.
He wrote in verse as well as in prose ; and some of the
hymns yet sung in the Komish Church are by him. His
works were numerous. His commentary on the four
books of Peter Lombard, commonly caljed the Master of
Sentences, is well known. As the claim of Thomas a
Kempis to the authorship of the *' Imitatio Christi" is dis-
puted, and indeed with great reason, so, perhaps with much
less reason, is the claim of Aquinas to the authorship of
the " Summa Theologica." But there is no doubt that the
theological opinions of that work were his ; and perhaps the

* Dachat, Notes to Rabelais' works. Translated by Sir Thomas
Urquhart and Motleux.

THE ANQELIG DOCTOR. 19

most important and most memorable of them is the saint's
assertion of the supreme and irresistible efficacy of the
Divine Grace. This doctrine, surely a biblical one, or, as
our modem phraseology would have it, an evangelical one,
wafi violently opposed by Duns Scotus ; and the followers
of the two teachers disputed amongst themselves for ages,
and do in fact dispute now, being ranked under the names
of their respective leaders as Thomists and Scotists.

In the year 1265 Pope Clement IV became head of the
Church ; but this event produced no change in the regard
shown by the Sovereign Pontiff for, or in the position of,
Aquinas. The new Pope was a man distinguished by great
conscientiousness, if we may judge from a letter written to
one of his relations on his accession to the Papal chair ;
and one of his first acts was to offer to Aquinas the
Archbishopric of Naples.

In 1269 Aquinas returned to Paris, but was soon per-
suaded to revisit Italy, which he never again quitted. The
Swabian dynasty had received its death-blow. The young
Conradin had been executed on a public scaffold, in view
of his own subjects and those of his family, and the for-
tunes of the house of Aquino were in the ascendant.
Charles of Anjou had little mildness or devotion in his
character, and could have had but littie sympathy with a
student and a devotee. He made, however, urgent en-
treaties that Aquinas should return to Italy, and he, pro-
bably influenced by his family, took up his final abode at
Naples.

It was not, however, for long ; hard study and incessant

20 VAEIA.

labour, such as must have been undertaken to produce
only one work out of many, the " Summa Theologica," had
their natural effect upon the ascetic workman, which was
probably hastened by devotional austerities. Not only was
Aquinas a saint in his book and with his pen, but, not
content with such work, with his voice and preaching he
persuaded many. So earnest was he that the tears of the
auditory flowed so abundantly that the preacher oftentimes
was obliged to halt for awhile in his discourse. Nor did
the wonders of the saint stop at mere oracular persuasion.
William of Tocco, who relates that in his prayer Aquinas
was lifted from earth, tells us that, as he one Sunday
came from church, a woman touching merely the edge of
his garment was cured. Two Rabbins were converted
miraculously ; disputing with them one day, and agreeing
to resume the argument on the morrow, Aquinas spent
the night at the foot of the altar. The next morning his
two most obstinate opponents came, not again to dispute,
but to embrace the faith of which their interlocutor was so
ardent a defender. In the year 1263, Aquinas had as-
sisted at the fortieth general chapter of the Dominicans in
London, and soon after had solicited and obtained his dis-
missal from teaching, rejoicing inwardly to be once more
a private religious man."

From the sixth day of December, 1273, to that of his
death, the seventh of March following, Aquinas acted as one
with whom the world had passed away. He neither wrote
nor dictated anything, but gave himself up entirely to
private meditation. Pope Gregory X having called a

THE ANQELIG DOCTOR. 21

general council, with the double purpose of extinguishing
the Greek schism and raising succours to defend the Holy
Land against the Saracens, a brief was directed to
Aquinas ordering him to defend the faith against the
Greek schismatics. But this was not to be. The council
was appointed to meet on the 1st of May, 1274, at Lyons,
and the ambassadors of Michael Pals&ologus, with the
Greek prelates, were to be present. Aquinas, sick in
body, set out on his journey, but was forced to stop at Fossa
Nuova, a famous Cistercian abbey in the diocese of Terra-
cina. Here, practising austerities which neither reason nor
faith could demand in one over-pressed with fever, he
prepared to die. As he was carried into the cloister
whence he never went ahve, he repeated part of the 131st
Psalm, — ** This is my rest for ages without end ;" and he
had continually on his lips a pious sentence from the
Confessions of St. Augustine, wherein that saint professes
his hunger for heaven and the Lord. The monks begged
the Angelic Doctor to dictate an exposition of the Canticles
in imitation of St. Bernard. " Give me," said he, " but
St. Bernard's spirit, and I will obey." He commenced,
however, wearied out by the importunities of the monks,
an exposition of " that most mysterious of all the divine
books," the Canticles, but halted after a few lines, too
weak to proceed any further.

After having received absolution most piously, he
desired the viaticum, and, to receive it, begged to be taken
off his bed and laid in ashes on the floor. Then, in tears, and
with the most tender devotion, he received the sacraments

22 VAEIA.

and stammered out his belief. His last words, after thanks
to the abbot and brethren, were in answer to the question
" How one might always live faithful to God's grace.**
'* R^st assured," said he, " that he who will always walk
faithfully in His presence, always ready to give Him an
account of his actions, shaU never be separated from Him
by consenting to sin."

After this came upon him the change we must all undergo ;
he died in his forty-eighth year. He is described as a
tall, well-proportioned man, active and of great endurance.
His literary labour was immense ; not only are his works
full of much thought, but they are so vast that they extend
to nineteen foho volumes compactly printed. The " Summa
Theologica" alone is a work which is astounding to con-
template. Aquinas, a learned theological chief justice,
hears the pros and cons, and pronounces judgment upon
everything. His book is the great court of conscience,
into which everything is brought. It resembles in some
fashion Jeremy Taylor's " Ductor Dubitantium," but is
written with much more boldness and less doubt. Aquinas
never shuns anything; it is true that he always sums up
favourably to religion, morality, and the Holy Soman
Catholic Church : but there is no getting into holes and
corners, and very little paltering with the truth. There
is no doubt about the mind of the AngeUc Doctor : what
he says he means and believes ; and the chances are that
he made those who read him believe with him.

It seems somewhat curious that Bishop Taylor did
not refer to the work of Aquinas, in the preface to his

THE ANOELIQ DOCTOR. 23

" Ductor Dubitantium," or the " Riile of Conscience in all
her general measures, serring as a great instrument for the
determination of cases of conscience" — a work dedicated,
by the way, to one to whom it should have been of use,
Charles II. But, though the two works provoke a remem-
brance of each other, they are, in reality, very different.
"Some of the Lutherans,'* says Taylor, "have indeed
done something of this kind, which is well ; Balduinus,
Bidenbachius, Dedekanus, Konig, and the abbreviator of
Gerard. But yet one needs remain, and we cannot be well
supplied out of the Eoman storehouses ; for, though there
the staple is, and very many excellent things exposed to
view, yet we have found the merchants to be deceivers,
and the wares too often falsified."*

He then quotes from Emanuel Sa, and remarks that
the Romanists do up " so many boxes of poyson in their
repositories under the same paintings and specious titles,
that few can distinguish ministeries of health from those
of death — for who can safely trust the guide that tells
him *that it is no deadly thing to steal,' -f or privately
to take a thing that is not great from one's father?" But
the Eomanists had made a great advance in casuistry
from the days of simple Thomas Aquinas, who for the
most part palters not nor deceiveth, Nor is the golden-
mouthed preacher, the sweet Shakespeare of divines, him-
self free from too much casuistry. There is something

* Preface to " Ductor Dubitantium," 3rd edition, 1665.
^ Emanuel Sa, Apbor. Y. Furtum.

24 VAEIA.

about lying in his cases of conscience which might be ad-
vantageous to a lawyer or to a careless witness^ but would
surely be condemned by the judge. Equivocation, which
our copy-books have long told us " is the worst of lies,'*
Taylor tells us " may be allowed for great charity," and ia
then '' only a crime when it is against justice and charity"
— that is, he allows it. Certain it is, however, that we
condone Taylor's offence when he tells us his stories;
how one man, a Greek, saved his brother by saying he
lay ou T? vXyi, " somewhere in the wood," when he had hid
him under a wood-pile, and of another, Titius, father of
Caius, who concealed his father in a tub, and told the cut-
throats that pair em in doliolo lateri, the Latin for a
little tub, meaning also a hill near Eome.* But if a man
has a right to ask such questions, such as a magistrate,
says our Ductor, we have no right to answer him ambigu-
ously. Thus, if the magistrate asks if Titius be at home,
we have no right to say Titius non est domi, the est
leading to the inference Titius does not eat at home, using
the word in a right sense, but in a sense less common. The
bishop relates with great indignation also that story of a
Spanish governor who promised a lady to give her her
husband if she would submit to his desires. But, these ob-
tained, the governor gives the husband indeed, but only his
dead body newly slain. The lady complains, and tells her
misfortune to Gonzaga, the Spanish general, who, finding
it to be true, makes the governor marry the lady, that she

* " Ductor Dubitautium," bk. iii. chap. 2, p. 500.

THE ANGELIC DOCTOR. 2b

might be recompensed by bis estate, and tben the same
day causes the governor to lose bis bead, to pay, says the
bishop, '^ for his dishonourable falsehood and bloudy lie.
It waa a justice worthy of a great prince ; and the reward
was justly paid to such cruel equivocation."*

Leaving this disquisition, for which the story cited by
Taylor from worthy John Chokier it is hoped will make
amends, it may be as well to give the reader a specimen of
Aquinas's work. It is one memorable and valuable for
having survived countless mutations, ecclesiastical as well as
temporal, and which really deserves the honour in which
so many ages and scholars of such varied shades of faith
have held it in. The " Summa Theologica " was, according
to the author's own statement, written chiefly for the in-
struction of young students of theology. It was adopted
by the Church of Eome as a text-book, and from the first
considered to be a most masterly exposition of theology.
How little the lapse of centuries has diminished its repu-
tation the following statement will show.

The " Summa'' has never been a scarce book ; in one
form or another it can«at any time be purchased for a mode-
rate sum. The editions in one volume, folio, are perhaps
the most common, but they are not we believe so old as those
in five or six, large duodecimo. This form, however, is of
little value in the eyes of the book-hunter. The first edition
of the entire works of Thomas Aquinas was published at
Rome, in 19 folio volumes, in 1570-71. This contains the

• "Ductor Dubitantium," bk. iii. chap. 2, p. 502.

26 VARIA.

only complete collection of his works. Portions of the
" Summa " had been published long previously, but were
usually sold at a high price. The best edition of the
" Summa Theologica " is that published at Home (1773).
It is beautifully printed, and, besides other matter,
contains the commentaries of the celebrated Thomas
de Vio, Cardinal Cajetan. A very pretty edition of the
work has been lately published at Parma. In 1851-4 a
translation was brought out by the Abbe Drioux. It
seems to be very well executed, and has the formal com-
mendations of his ecclesiastical superiors. Another
version is in progress. It is well also to observe that a
work entitled, '^ Summa, Sancti ThomsB hodiemis Academi-
arum moribus accommodata sive Cursus Theologise juxta
mentem Divi Thomje," has passed through several editions.
I do not know what amount of circulation this work has
enjoyed, or what amount of reputation it possesses. The
fact of its having passed through several editions shows
that it must possess some merit.

Professor Maurice gives, in his " Mediaeval Philosophy,"
an elaborate analysis of the character rather than the con-
tents of the " Summa," which latter really could not be well
done in modem books, since it requires ^ve elaborate in-
dexes to direct the reader to the various questions ; but
Professor Maurice's aim is so different from that of the
present writer, that he cannot quote from his work with
advantage, or he would rather avail himself of the words
of so careful a scholar than of his own. Let us take,
therefore, the first question St. Thomas treats of; it will
show his boldness, and serve us as well as any other.

THE ANQELIC DOCTOR. 27

" The FmsT Question.

Of the holy doctrine ; what it is and how far it extends :

divided into ten articles.
And as our intention is bounded within certain limits,
it is first necessary to investigate the holy doctrine, what
it is, and how far it does extend, about which there are
these ten queries :—
IT Primo, on the necessity of this doctrine.
% Secundo, whether it be a science.
% Tertio, whether it be one or many.
T Quarto, whether it be speculative or practical.
% Quinto, its comparison with other sciences.
% Sexto, whether it be wisdom.
% Septimo, whether God be its subject.
% Octavo, whether it be argumentative.
% Nono, whether it ought to be treated metaphorically

or symbolically.
% Whether the Holy Scriptures are to be expounded
according to the many meanings (jplures sensns)
of this doctrine."

Taking up this, which very fitly opens his book, but of
which modern readers who take the Bible as their guide
will not care to know much, Aquinas puts his case, ad
primum, to the first I answer ; then in another paragraph
he adds, prceterea, moreover there is such and such to be
said ; next he puts the contrary, and very fairly too, sed
contra est ; and finally he sums up under the title Con-
clusio. Each sentence he commences with, Bespondeo dicen-
dum, I answer that it must be held. In his third aiticle.

28 VAEIA.

whether there be a God, Utrum Deus sit, he is very bold ;
nor is he less so when he takes up the question whether
there be a soul, An sit anima. Indeed, this absorbing,
wonderful question he chases up and down and into all sorts
of holes and corners, proves that the soul is not of the body,
triumphs over the Sadducees, and, in short, is in no way
to be confounded with that scholar of our early dramatist,*
who, after puzzling all night as to his soul's being, knew
as little of it as his dog : —

M

Still my spaniel slept,

And still I held converse with Zabarell,

Aquinas, Scotus, and the musty saw

Of Antick Donate : still my spaniel slept.

Still on I went, first an sit anima ;

Then, as it were mortal. O hold, hold; at that

They're at brain buffets, fell by the ears amain

Pell mell together ; still my spaniel slept.

Then -whether it were corporal, or local, fixt,

^x traduce, but whether 't had free will

Or no ; hot philosophers

Stood banding factions, all so strongly propt,

I staggered, knew not which was former part,

But thought, quoted, read, observed, and pried,

Stuft noting books : and still my spaniel slept.

At length he wak'd and yawn*d ; and by yon sky,

For aught I know, he knew as much as I."

Had the scholar held, as he affirms, much converse with
Aquinas, his doubts as to that knotty point, a point which
Moses himself leaves untouched, would surely have been
solved. For a careful reader of the " Summa " will agree

* John Marston, author of the " Malcontent," &c.

THE ANGELIC DOCTOR. 29

that the verdict of Mr. Maurice is not overrated. " So
long," says that acute writer, " as we meet Aquinas on his
own ground he is invincible. When you pass from him
to the actual tumult of the conscience, and to the living
facts of Scripture which respond to them, you are inclined
to pronounce him utterly feeble.'' *

Scarcely should we say utterly feeble, although the
doctrine of the schools may be weak beside the after-ex-
perience of life, or the teachings of the Bible. Aquinas
does not shirk anything, as we have before hinted. Let us
take, for example, Mr. Maurice's own account of his manner
of treating the natural and human questions which occur
to us aU concerning the power of God. There are seven
articles in the first question on the nature of this power.
" The third of these is, and it begs the question which
Hume denied, that of miracles, thus; whether those
things which are impossible to nature are possible to Grod?"
Aquinas gives nine reasons for the negative opinion. The
first is, that, since God is the mover of nature, he cannot
act contrary to nature. The second is, that the first
principle in all demonstration, that affirmatives and ne-
gatives are not true, at the same time applies to nature,
and that God cannot cause a negative and an affirmative to
be true at the same time. The third article is very like
the second : there are two principles subject to God — reason
and nature ; but God cannot do anything which is impos-
sible to reason, therefore he cannot do anything which is

• Maurice's " Mediaeval Philosophy.**

30 VAEIA.

in itself impossible to nature. The fourth is that what
the false and the true are to knowledge, the possible and
the impossible are to work; but that which is false in
nature God cannot know, therefore what is impossible in
nature God cannot work. The fifth is more noble, and
perhaps more quibbling : what is proved of any one thing
is proved of all similar things ; as, if it is demonstrated of
one triangle that its three angles are equal to two right
angles, that is true of all. But there is an impossibility
in God, to wit, that he should be able 'to do a thing, and
Tiot be able to do a thing ; therefore, if there is some im-
possibility in nature which he cannot do, it would seem
that he can do no impossibility. In support of this follow
nine reasons, the ninth resting on quotations from Jerome,
Augustine, and Aristotle.

Then there are eight reasons on the other side ; and
lastly, the Doctor himself appears. He has in this case to
reply both to the defendant's counsel and to the plaintiff's,
and he does this with the utmost skill, and finally delivers
a verdict fi*om which the most orthodox will not dissent.
All subjects he deals with in the same way, with great
brevity, force, and conciseness. Let us now take one
whole article as a specimen of the manner in which he
deals with a question which has perhaps caused more blood-
shed in, and scandal against, the Eoman Church than any
other.

THE ANGELIC DOCTOR. 31

"ABTICIiB VIII.

Whether infidels are to he compelled to embrace tJie faith.

We DOW proceed to the eighth article.* It may be
seen that infidels are by no means to be forced to embrace
the faith. For we are told in the thirteenth of Matthew f
that there was a certain husbandman" — (here, by the way,
rendered by the word made so familiar by Punch, pater-
familias), " in whose fields there were tares sown, and they
sought of him, saying, * Whether shall we go and gather
them ?' and he answered, * No ! lest by chance, as ye
gather the tares, ye should also pull up the wheat.' And
hereon, says Chrysostom, these things saith the Lord,
prohibiting us to slay others. Nor is it right to slay
heretics, because, if you kill them, many of the faithful
saints {sanctorum) must also be overthrown ; therefore it
seemeth, by a like reasoning, that the infidels are by no
means to be compelled to embrace the faith.

IT 2. Moreover, in the Decretals (dis. 45, c. De Judaeis)
it is said, the Holy Synod has thus taught concerning the
Jews, that none shall henceforward be brought to belief
by force. Therefore, by a parity of reason, no other infi-
dels are to be forced to believe.

IT 3. Moreover, Augustin saith that no unwilling man

* That is, of a series of questions all relating to the unfaithful, ad
infideles ; thus Art. YII. is whether one may dispute publicly with
infidels? Art. V. whether there be many kinds of infidelity?

t Matt. xiii. 24, et seq.

32 VARIA.

is able to believe, unless he first become willing ; but it is
not possible to force the will; therefore infidels are not
to be forced to believe.

IF 4. Moreover, Ezekiel xviii. saith, speaking as if he
were God {ex persond Dd), * I do not wish the death of a
sinner;' and we ought, as we have before said, to con-
form our will to the Divine will, therefore we ought not to
wish that infidels should be killed.

But, opposed to this, it is said, Luke xiv : * Go out
into the highways and lanes, and compel them to come in,
that my house may be filled ; ' now men, into the house
of God, that is, into his Holy Church, enter by faith.
Therefore, some are to be compelled to embrace the
faith.

Conclusion.

Infidels who have never embraced the faith, such as Jews
and' Oentil^f are by no means to be compelled to do so ;
heretics and apostates are to be compelled, so that they
may fulfil what they have promised,

I ANSWER that it must be said that there are certain
of the infidels who have never embraced the faith, and are
by no means to be forced to do so, because to believe is an
action of the will, yet they are to be compelled by the
faithful if they have the means of doing so {si adsit faxnd-
tas), that they hinder not the faith, either by blasphemy
or false persuasion, or by open persecution. And it is on
this account that the faithful soldiers of Christ often carry
on war against the infidels, not indeed that they should

THE ANQELIG DOCTOR. 33

compel them to believe (for when they have subdued them
and hold them ca^ire, they leave them free to believe or
not), but on this account, that they may force them not to
hinder the propagation of the faith of Christ. Some, in-
deed, are truly infidels who, when they, have embraced the
faith, profess it merely as heretics and some as apostates,
and these are indeed bodily to be forced and compelled,
that they may fulfil what they have promised, and renew
that which they once undertook."

Then follow four paragraphs, headed, " Ad Primum,"
" Ad Secundum," &c, in which the same reasoning is repre-
sented and insisted on. In the fourth and last the Angelic
Doctor shows that Holy Mother Church, although she can be
meek as a brooding dove to her golden couplets, also holds
in her hand concealed thunder, ready to be launched at the
heretics. "Ad Quartum. Since in the same epistle Augus-
tin saith [he has just quoted the 48th epistle of Augustin],
' Not one of us wishes any of the heretics to perish ; but as
the house of David could not have peace unless his son
Absalom was slain in that war which he carried on against
his father, so the Catholic Church, if she draws together a
remnant {cceteros aliquorum) for perdition, soothes the
grief of her maternal heart by the salvation of so many
people.' " (2nd part of Part Second of the Summa, quest.
10, art. viij.)

Almost every question taken up by Aquinas is of intense
interest. Some of them, perhaps, seem to modern ears to be
mere blasphemies, such is their plainness ; but the Angel
of the Schools smoothes away difficulties, and generally

34 VABIA.

manages to dedde rightly. Thus, in the second article of
the seyenty-ninth question of his first part, he debates
<< Whether the act of sinning comes from God " — that is,
in plainer language, whether Grod be guilty of sin. Of
course he concludes that Grod is guiltless ; but he says that
the will of God is the cause of the act of sinning (ergo
voluntas Dei est causa actus peccati); and he sums up that
the transgressor's act is necessary to God, but the defect is
in the thing created. The whole of the question trenches
upon the most delicate grounds, for which the utmost tact —
and it is but fair to say that Aquinas has shown this — is
necessary to prevent the writer from committing himself.
The question is on the outward causes of sin ; and here the
boldness of the faith of Aquinas, who, believing utterly and
without doubt in the power of God, yet dared to impute to
him evil, is much to be admired. He divides the causes
of sin into four articles — ^first, from God ; secondly, from
the devil ; thirdly, from man.

" Et primd, ex parte Dei. Secundo, ex parte Diaboli.
Tertio, ex parte hominis."

And upon this he builds four questions : —
" IF Prim6, whether God be the cause of sin ?

IF Secundo, whether the sinful act be from God ?

IF Tertio, whether God be the cause of blindness and
hardness of heart.

IF Quarto, whether these things be ordained for the
salvation of those who are blind and hard-hearted."

Let us turn to a less troublesome question. The Angelic
Doctor seems to have thought woman inferior to man, and

THE ANGELIC DOCTOR. 35

adopted, says Bajle, in a note on Dr. Simon Gediccus,
Aristotle's opinion: "BLanc opinionem adoptavit Thomas,"
part I, quest. 92, art. and lib. 3, c. gentes ; but he was
not rude enough to deny with the Italian cited by JBayle
that women have no souls — ckt le donne non hahbino ant"
ma — ^which the author, says the compiler of the " Historical
Dictionary," endeavours to prove by several passages of the
Holy Scriptures, and which he adapts to his fancy. As long
as this book was printed only in Latin the Inquisition was
silent ; but as soon as it was translated into Italian, they
censured and prohibited it. On this opinion the ladies of
Italy put a various construction. Some were sorry for
having no souls, and for being ranked so much below
men, who, for the future, would use them little better than
beasts. Others seemed to be indifferent about the matter,
and to look upon themselves as mere machines, de-
signed to move their wheels so well as to make the men
mad.*

Of course the great bulk of the " Summa " concerns re-
ligion and the soul. Theology is the very atmosphere which
is necessary for the Existence of the Angel of the Schools ;
but every now and then the thoughts seem more modem,
and he debates subjects in a way somewhat similar to our
modern essayists, treating of matters which concern the
heart and mind. Thus the rules Aquinas lays down for the
cultivation of memory are very good. The first is that we

* Bajle, An Historical and Critical Dictionary. Article, Gediccns,
p. 1394.

36 VARIA.

are to call up some images, simtilaeray or likenesses of
the things we wish to rememher, which are not to he too
familiar, hecause those which are rarer excite our ad-
miration the more, and the mind therefore dwells on them
more fixedly. This, the Angelic Doctor would hare it, is the
reason we rememher the things of our hojhood so well, and
hence he places the seat of memory in the sensitive part of
our nature. The second act he teUs us is to dispose of the
things we wish to rememher in order, so that one may
easily suggest another. The third rule he gives us is to
connect the things we wish to" remember with our affec-
tions, so that in very deed, as ^Ir. Maurice has it, we may
Icam by heart. The fourth is that we are frequently to
think and meditate on them, so that they should become
habits of our mind, and a part of its very nature.

Aquinas's treatment of hatred is thoughtful and philoso-
phical, and would afford more than a hint to more rapid,
and sometimes rabid, penmen, who think too little and who
write too much. He asks six questions about it : — 1st.
Whether the cause and object of hatred be evil. 2nd.
Whether hatred be caused by love. 3rd. Whether
hatred be stronger than love. 4th. Whether anybody can
truly hate himself. 5th. Whether anybody can possibly
hate the truth. 6th. Whether anybody can have a uni-
versal and general hatred of everything and everybody.
He sums up that hatred can be caused by love, although
he gives three reasons against it, and says, '* Therefore
love is not the cause of love ;" but immediately afterwards
follow the stern words : —

THE ANQELIC DOCTOR. 37

** Sed contra est that which Augustin saith in the 14th
book, ' De Civitate Dei/ that all affections spring from
love. Therefore even hatred, when it is a certain affection
of the mind, is caused by love." A verdict we feel dis-
posed to agree with, hatred being often perverted love ;
and certainly the hatred which Dr. Johnson, who loved a
good hater, entertained against John Wilkes, sprang from
the very love and deep reverence which Johnson bore to
those things which Wilkes ridiculed and tried to harm.

Looked at through the dim vista of six centuries, the
life and works of Thomas Aquinas are whole, sound, and
beautiful. Such a dedication of a soul to God one sees but
rarely ; so great a faith, so sweet a humility, perhaps even
more rarely still. Beautifrd are his unwavering faith and
devotion and his manly ever-present courage. He had
devoted his mind early to the Church, and he served her
faithfully. Not without reason has his Church ranked
him among her saints and holy men ; not unworthily does
the Anglican Church bestow on him the title of learned.
Sweet is it too, when ambition and gold, trade, place, title,
and position, or even the tinkling of a literary name, have
so large a share of the worship of the world, to turn to one
who sat with kings as a simple monk, rapt in the questions
of divinity or of the schook, imheeding the present pomp
and ceremony, as well as the heavier and more substantial
rewards of riches or of power.

It would be idle to imagine that, in these days of rapid
thinking and reading, many could be found who would sit

38 VARIA.

down to study the works which are here glanced at. But
enough, perhaps, has heen done to show that the scholar
whose mind is engrossed in other pursuits may find much
instruction and some amusement from an occasional
perusal of a question or two as argued out hy St. Thomas.
Compared with other writers, his style may he considered
pleasant; and, although the phraseology of the schools is of
course frequently introduced, yet, bearing in mind the sub-
jects treated, and the immense range of ideas which were
foreign to classical antiquity, it is even easy and flowing.
Lastly, reverting with Professor Maurice to the saying of
Albertus Magnus, we may well say that Aquinas has abun-
dantly fulfilled his master's prophecy concerning him. The
bellowings of that bull have been heard in all countries and
in all generations. There is more than a feeble echo of
them in our own. He has goyerned the schools And
moulded the thoughts of nearly all Eoman Catholic
students, and has given a shape to the speculations of
numbers who have never read any of his writings, and to
whom his name is rather a terror than an attraction.

NOSTEADAMUS.

BOOKS CONSULTED.

Le Propheties de Michel de Nostredame, dont il y en a trois cens qui
n^Ofit jamais encores jamais est^ imprimees. Troves, 1570 (?).

Guir Pronosticon am den savant tneurbed Michel Nostredamus evit
nas bloas, 8^c, Monhoulez (Morlaix, 1831).

Extrait de Propheties des Centuries de M. Nostradamus touchant
V6tat present des affaires, Extract von Prophecyen, 8^c, French
and Dutch. Delft, 1688.

Les Propheties de M* de Michel Nostredamtts, dont il y en a trois
cens qtti n^ont jamais est4 imprimSes, ajoustees de nouveaupar le dit
Autheur, (^Predictions admrables pour les ans cottrans en ce siecle,
recueillies des mSmoires de feu Maistr. M, Nostradamus^. Par Y.
Seve, Lyons, 1698.

Le Propheties de M. M, Nostradamus^ dont il y en a trois cens qui
n'ont jamcUs este imprimSes, ajoustees de nouveau,8^, S^c. Lyons,
1698.

The Wizard ; or, the Whole Art of Divining Dreams, by the help of
which persons, Sfc. on the principles of Nostradamus, 8;c, 1816.

Le Bonheur Public, Prophetic de M. de M. 8^. Par Groranlt de St.
Fargeau. Paris, 1848.

Cabinet Edition of the Encyclopedia Metn^litana. Occult Sciences.
Griffin and Co. 1860.

Miraculous Prophecies, PrecUctions, and Strange Visions of sundry
Eminent Men. London, 1794.

M, Nostredame {Les Propheiks) ses Visions et Songes. Lyons,
1555, A. D.

Nostradamus, some of the Eminent Prophecies of (no place of publi-
cation). 1679.

NOSTRADAMUS.

A.D. IS03— 1566.

sage who, witb the lower and non-
giouB world — as djatinguished from that
ich follows Dr. Gumming — deala chiefly
prophecy, and who now-a-days makes a
large income from prophetic almanacs, is thin year,
perhapa, more lively than ever, and in his latest edition
of "Zadkiel" boldly attacks the press for daring to assert
that astrology was " ejcploded." " Who," he asks, " ex-
ploded it?" and, receiving no answer to his question, he
asserts that, because England does not believe in the voice
of the stars, we see " among the poor want, misery, and
indifference to Religion, Demons of Crime grovelling in
vice— all the horrors of brutd ignorance, and the retro-
grade march of dviljzation ; among the rich, bloated
wealth, sinful and aoul-^nslaving lu:!ury, cruelty, oppres-
sion, and harsh prindples of law advocated

And the kingdoms of Europe, reaping no jruit from
eiperience, but ever ready tfl obey the evil influences of
the martial star, and pour out each other's hearts' blood !

42 VARIA.

These ! These abe the dole evils beafed fbom the
modebx attempts to becby the science of astbo-
LOGY." The capitals are the writer's own.

But Zadkiel has a set-off against unbelief. He can-
not only refer to the Tetrabiblos of Ptolemy, to Plato,
Pythagoras, Nigidius Figulus, and Manilius, Bacon,
Melancthon> Nostradamus, Al Hakim the Wise, and John
Kepler ("here be names, we hope'*), but to the vast
increase of believers of to-day. Cardinal Wiseman told us
that, by the colportage system in France, from eight to nine
millions of volumes were annually distributed ; but, finding
'' that exploded fallacies " of astrology were still preserved
as scientific truths in these books, "the Government
wisely required a stamp," and, of 7600 works examined,
three-fourths were rejected. It is possible, of course, that
the Cardinal's friends wished to keep out some of the
eorpZo^W' fallacies of Protestantism as well as "exploded
fallacies " of astrology ; but Zadkiel chuckles over the free
press in England, and, to show our superiority to France,
gives the returns of the astrological almanacs in the fol-
lowing list : —

" Moore's Almanac sells about • . 600,000

Partridge's about .... 290,000

Zadkiel's about .... 65,000

Orion's, Old Moore's, and others . 60,000

Yearly total . . . 996,070

As each copy may be judged to be perused by six persons,
this gives an aggregate number of readers not much below

NOSTRADAMUS. 43

six millions ! what other branch of literature can surpass
this?" (ZadMeVs Almanac for 1863).

What, indeed ! Perhaps, after all — and this is the most
melancholy part of the matter — ^these returns are not
exaggerated by more than one-third, which, if so, leaves
us four millions of astrological triflers, idlers, believers, or
devotees, out of about ten millions of readers, if we may
boast so many. If this be all that we have reached afler
many years of teaching, the ardent scholar may well ask
with Milton, " What boots it with incessant carQ strictly to
meditate the thankless muse?" and may join with Zadkiel,
£rom another point of view indeed, in lamenting the
retrograde movement of civilization.

Excepting, of course, Bacon and Kepler, many of the
old disciples of astrology were mere puppets. Nostrada-
mus has a sounding name, and he has certainly published
twelve " centuries " (hundreds) of quatrains of prophecy ;
but, after reading most of these carefully, we may fairly
say that, out of the fifty thousand lines, more than half are
so utterly mystical that they cannot be imderstood, and
that, of the remainder, only about one-tenth can be applied.
EQs art is much the same as that practised at the present
day. A direct appUcation he seldom ^ves ; but it is fair
to say — little as it may be — that an ardent believer in his
prophetic spirit could twist, perhaps, twenty of his verses
into some comprehensible application. It is very possible
that no one else would agree to that application ; indeed,
we always, with all prophets, want a key to the prophecy
after it has occurred, and our modem soothsayers take

44

VABIA.

care to supply us with one under the heading of prophe-
cies fulfilled."

Michel Nostradamus, a man prohahly of Jewish descent,*
hut said to have heen of nohle family, " now only remem-
bered," writes a biographer, " as the author of the most
celebrated predictions published in modem times," was in
his own day a skilful physician. He was bom on the
14th December, 1503. His father was a notary public,
and his grandfather a physician. Michel, having studied
at Montpellier, was driven away by the plague there in
1522 ; he then travelled, and, returning to Montpellier,
took his degree. At Agen he became intimate with Julius
Caesar Scaliger, whom he styles a Virgil in poetry, a
Cicero in eloquence, and a Galen in medicine. His
attachment to Scaliger induced him to make some stay in
the town ; and he there married, but lost, at the end of four
years, his wife and the children he had by her. Agen
became insupportable to him, and, after having travelled for
twelve years in Guienne, Languedoc, and Italy, he returned
to Provence, and settled at Salon, where he married a lady
of a very ancient family. He was invited, by a deputation
of the inhabitants of Aix, to visit that town, in conse-
quence of the plague occurring there, and was of such
service, by the invention of a powder, that he received for

* "II s'en glorifiait, et Tavait la pretention d'etre issu de la
triba d'Issachar; il se faisait I'application de ces paroles de Para-
lipom^nes," (I. 12, vers. 32), DeJUiis quoque Issachar, viri enuUti,
qui noverunt singula tempora. Biographic Universelle, KosTSBDAlCB,
par M. W — s.

NOSTRADAMUS. 45

several years a pension in return. In 1547 he succeeded
equaUy well in Lyons ; and, on returning to Salon, where
he had settled, he employed himself, not only in com-
pounding medicines, htit also in studying astrology and the
ai"ts of divination and prophecy. The predictions he
wrote at first in prose, hut afterwards, thinking better of
the matter, he turned them into verse, and in 1555 pub-
lished his first three centuries, with a bombastic dedication
to his son Caesar, then an infant.

Nostradamus did not forget to speak of himself and his
.wonderful gift in this dedication, and, in a superstitious
age, easily set the ball of his own fame rolling. Notwith-
standing the proverb* that a prophet is but poorly received
in his own country, the fame of the arch-seer grew to a
very respectable height ; and, although many called him an
impostor, others declared that ^^ his inspiration came from
God," about which he himself appears to have had the
least doubt of any.

Catherine de Medicis, " the godless regent," who
" trembled at a star," hearing of him, persuaded her son,
Henry II, to send for him to Paris, where he was received
graciously, and sent back to his own country "loaded
with presents ; " that is, the king gave him two hundred
crowns, and despatched him to Blois to foretell the des-
tinies of the two royal children there. Encouraged by
his success, he increased his quatrains to twelve centuries.
Shortly afterwards, the king being slain at a tourna-
ment, all the French world consulted the prophet's book
of quatrains to find whether he had foretold the circum-

46 VABIA.

stances. In the thirtj-fifth quatrain of the fifth century
were found the following lines : —

" Le lion jenne le vieu surmontera ;
£n champ bellique par singulier dnel,
Dans cage d*or lea yens lui crevera
Deux plaies une, pins monrir ; mort cmelle !*'

We presume that the golden cage in which the lion was
to finish his existence referred to the gilded armour of the
king, or the golden bars of the kingly helmet, which her-
alds always represent front-faced and somewhat more open
than that of a nobleman, certainly less protected than that
of a simple esquire. Perhaps in modem days we may
see the difficulty of fully adapting the prophecy ; but with
the French of that day it was otherwise, and the prophet
thereon became very much in request. Emmanuel, Duke
of Savoy, and his wife, Margaret of France, honoured him
with a visit ; Charles IX, on his progress through France,
sent for him, and, it is said — the story is told of other
astrologers — determined to put him to death, and asked
him in bitter jesting if he could foretell the hour of his
own death. "Sire," said the cunning physician, "the
fates have withheld from me the exact hour of my death ;
but, on consulting the stars, I found out thus much, that I
shall die some very short time before your Majesty : our
fates are inseparably connected. You will not long survive
me." It need hardly be added that the superstitious king
did not carry out his intention of slaying the astrologer.
He was, indeed, appointed his physician in ordinary, and
Henry presented him with a purse of two hundred crowns.
His popularity having in the meantime been on the wane

NOSTRADAMUS. 47

in Salon, he begged that he might be treated with more
respect ; hereupon the king stated publicly that *' all ene-
mies of the physician should be reckoned as his own/'

Nostradamus - lived about sixteen months after this,
dying on the 2nd of July, 1566. He was variously esti-
mated as a rogue, a charlatan, a fool, an enthusiast, and a
prophet. Even so lately as 1806 a M. Bouys published a
defence of him,, in which he claims for him the merit of
having foretold the death of our Charles I, that of the Due
de Montmorency, son of Louis XIII, the persecution of
the Christian Church in 1792, the elevation of Napoleon
to the Empire, the duration of his reign, the fact (?) of his
being equally powerful at sea and on land, and the con-
quest of the Corsican hero by the English.

** The people of Salon," says M. Bouche,* " yet be-
lieve that Nostradamus shut himself up alive in his tomb,
with a lamp, paper, ink, pens, and books, and that he
threatens with death any one who shall have the boldness
to open it. This superstitious belief cannot but be very
useful to the speculators who put forth new editions of the
centuries of Nostradamus, with new quatrains adapted to
recent events."

" No one," says a believer in the subject of this paper,
^' should say that he has been at Salon without having
visited the tomb of the great wizard. His monument may
be seen at this day (1816). It is on the right hand of
the traveller as he enters the door of the cloister^ against
the wall. It is nothing more than a projection of marble
of about a foot square, and about the height of a man ;

♦ «

Essai BUT THistoire de Provence/' p. 69.

48 VARIA.

the lower part is in the form of a slope, or shelve. Upon
this tomb is the cast of the wise man ; it represents him
as he was at the age of sixty-two, when he died; his
coat of arms, together with that of his wife, is in a square
of black cloth ; between this cast and that of his ladj is
his epitaph, in Latin."

Of this latter here follows a translation. On^will not fail
to notice the similarity of the wish expressed on the tomb
of Shakspere and on that of Nostradamus.. With him, as
with Michael Scott, is buried his great book of spells ; and
the verses of Scott, in the " Lay of the Last Minstrel,"
might be aptly quoted, should any one, like William of
Deloraine, dare to profane his tomb : —

*' It was iron clasped and iron bound,
And he thought as he took it the dead man frown*d."

HERE REST THE BONES

OP THB ILLUSTRIOUS

MICHAEL NOSTEADAMUS,

The only one worthy in the judgment of all Mankind jto write,
with his almost inspired pen, and according to

THE DIRECTION OF THE STARS,

The Events which should happen upon Earth.
He lived to the age of 62 years, 6 months, and 6 days,

And died at Salon, anno 1566.

Beware you disturb not his repose I

Anne Touche Gemelle, his wife, wishes eternal felicity

TO HER Husband.*

is

* D. M. — Clarissimi ossa Michaelis Nostradami unicus omnium

»»

NOSTRADAMUS. 49

This Anne Touche Gemelle is said to have helped her
husband on the way to eternal felicity bj having poisoned
him. Let us hope that this story is^ as is most probable,
untrue.

Of course those curious about the matter of this paper
will only consult the old editions of Lyons or Troyes,
1568, a small 8yo, and that of Amsterdam, a 12mo, 1668.
There is an edition of his prophecies of which political
capital was largely made against Cardinal Mazarin. This
is its title and date, "Les Vraies Centuries de Michel
Nostradamus expliquees sur les affaires de ce temps,
1652." The prophet of Salon had, like most men who have
attained any celebrity, his opponents as well as supporters.
Ant* Coullard wrote bitterly against him, and Conrad Badius
published in 1562 a satire in verse against him, entitled
" Les Vertus de notre Maitre Nostradamus." But if one
or two attacked him, hundreds have defended him. One
man wrote a commentary on his quatrains, another pub-
lished a concordance to them,* and so late as 1806 Theo-
dore Bouys published with reference to him " New Consi-
derations based upon the instinctive Clairvoyance of Man,
on Oracles, Sybilles, Prophecies, and particularly on Nos-
tradamus."

Here is the prediction about our Charles I, which is at

jndicio digni cujiis penb divino calamo totios orbis ex Astrorum in-
flaza futnri eventns conscriberetur, &€. The name of his wife is
given as Anna Pontia Gemella, a native of Salon.

♦ ** Concordance dea Proph^ties de N" , avec histoire." Guy-

naud, 1693.

£

60 VABIA.

least singular from having been written and printed in the

year 1598 :—

"Gaad et Brnzelles marcheroxit contra Anvers;
S^nat de Londres mettront k mort lenr Roi ;
Le sel et le via lui seront k Penvers,
Pour eux avoir regn^ en d^sarroi.'*

The one which follows, however, is yet more so. In
dedicating his work to Henry II, Nostradamus told that
sovereign that the Church of Eome would suffer much
persecution, '^ et durera ceste cy jusques a I'an mille sept-
cent nonante deux, que I'on cuidera estre une renovation
de si^cle." To appreciate the force of this prediction it
is necessary to remember that in 1792 (Sept. 22) the
French Eepublic decreed the abolition of the old method
of measuring time from the birth of Christ, and that all
public acts were to be reckoned from the new era — in
fact, from the year One.

But, in spite of these lucky guesses, the major part of
the quatrains of Nostradamus are to us as incomprehen-
sible as "Hebrew-Greek" was to Sir John FaJstaff.
What, for instance, can we understand by this, which
relates to our own land ?

** Le Grand Empire fera par AngleterrOj
Le Pempotam des ans plus an trois cents ;
Grands copies passee par mer et terre,
Les Lusitans n'en feront pas contens."

Does it relate to the dissatisfaction which Portugal felt,
and perhaps now feels, at the success of England's
colonies? Again, to what Grecian princess does this
allude ?—

N0STBABAMU8. 51

'' La dame Griacque de beaat^ aydigae,
Henrense faits de ports innumerable,
Hors translate en regne Hispaniqne,
Captive prinse, mourir mort miserable."

This is the seventy-eighth quatrain of the ninth century^
In the following one, printed, as all the other extracts
from the hook, verbatim et literatim, many have pretended
to see a prophecy of the death of Louis XVI : —

'* Pluye, Faim, Guerre en Perse non cess^e,
La foy trop grand trabiri le monarqne ;
Par finie en Ganle commenc^e^
Secret angaste poor a an estre parqne.*'

'' The Rain, Famine, War in Persia not being ended,
Too great credulity shall betray the monarch ;
Being ended there, it shall begin in Franccy
A secret omen to one that he shall die.**

The English translator in 1794 adds, " No sooner had
a peace been settled between Lord Comwallis and Tippoo
Saib, than war was declared against France, which proves
a striking instance of the truth of this prediction." Louis
XVI. was put to death in 1793. The next that we have
to present to the reader forms one, we presume, amongst
the many which may have had a partial fulfilment ; or, on
the other hand, mayhap it has yet to come to pass ; for it
is a striking beauty in Nostradamus, as well as in other
prophets, that their predictions are so widely made that, if
not applicable to one person or age, they are open to fit
another. To take an instance, the modern, so-called
" Zadkiel " having, as it happens, last year prophesied the

62 VARIA.

death of Lord Eussell^ and several others whose great
age would naturally scarcely require a prophet to foretell
a proximate decease, to-day eats his own words, and
declares that the application was wrongly made, and
that, if the Prime Minister do not die this year, he will
" come to much honour in Octoher or November next."
" Truly, there is much virtue in an ' if.' " This is the
quatrain to which we allude : —

*' Regne GaaloU tn seras chang^,
£a lieu estrange est translate I'Empire,
En autre moeurs et lois feras rang4,
Bouan et Chartres te feront bien du pire.'*

Of course Nostradamus has been put to other political
use than that of fulminating against Cardinal Mazarin.
In 1848, when all the French papers were flattering
the French Republic and the French people, a cer-
tain M. Girault de Saint-Fargeau published a folio
broadside called "Le Bonheur Public," a prophecy of
Michel Nostradamus. This " public good " is a curious
paper, and the prophecy translated and given to it by
M. Saint-Fargeau, who has also Frenchified the style so
as to render it more readily understandable (" dont on a
frandse le style pour le rendre plus facile a comprendre "),
is certainly the largest ever made by Michel. The clumsi-
ness in which the style is Frenchified is apparent to all* The
writer goes into statistics, and gives us a crowd of figures,
budgets of expenses. Justice, Worship, Public Instruction,
and Foreign Affairs. In it three gi'eat French Revolutions
are predicted— 1793, 1848, and 1998. There was to be

NOSTRADAMUS. 63

the abolition of the punishment of death, and a general dis-
armament in 1860 by the decision of a congress of all the
States of Europe. .Twenty-five thousand colonists were to
he yearly gratuitously deported from France, and in return
these grateful colonists would send trees, grain, vegetables,
and animals susceptible of being naturalized in France, and
fit also for increasing the means of nourishment for those at
home, and to enlarge the comfortable existence (hien-Stre)
of the indigenous population.

. After having discoursed considerably about matters con-
nected rather with industrial exhibitions and public work-
shops than with anything else, this gentleman who ^'frenchi-
fiea" old Nostradamus exhausts his broadside, and then tells
us that the manuscript — ^which, by the way, was taken in
1847 finom the tomb of Nostradamus, at Salon, in the arron-
dissement of Aix, department of Bouches-du-Ehone — be-
gins to get. imperfect, and offers more than one gap to the
reader, since the last page has been spoilt by the damp.
** Jt is with great trouble," says the romancist, *^ that we
can. decipher the following: —

^^ ^ . • • Europe ... La France the capital
. • , • civilized world • . . . natural limits
the Bhine, the Alps and the Pyrenees , • • ' "

Most readers will remark here, that, as the proverbial
nod is as good as a wink, the damp has done not so much
harm. We are told that we can manage to fill up these
lacunse. The prophecies, indeed, are rather improved than
^' deterior^s par I'humidit^." At least so says M. G. de
Saint-Fargeau. Let us go on : —

54 ' VAItlA.

<i (

. . Germany . . • vast democratic con-
federation . . . Bavaria, Saxony, Austria, Hungary^
. . . another confederation • . . the Netherlands^
Hanover, Prussia and Denmark . . ."'

This seems rather droll and a little out of the right
line just now>; but we do not know what we have yet to
come to— •

" * To Sweden will be united Finland and the district
of Saint Petersburg, of which the town of that name
will become the capital . . . The Bussians . . .
pushed back beyond . . , Dnieper . . • Poland
. . . extends to the Black Sea on the south . . - «
to the Baltic between the Vistula and Dwina on the
north.':'^.. ' .

4

Beally the, damp has been very obliging to the prophet.

'^^ Criniea, Oircassia and Georgia . • • from . • «
descendants of Schamyl . . . Turks . . , swept
back into Asia . . » .. Greece, Candia, Bulgaria,
Albania j Boiimelia . . . . Moldavia and Wallachia
. . of which Constantinople is the capital • .
Italy a federation . , . . . Sicily, Naples, States. of the
Church, Lombardy,. Piedmont.' " ....

Nostradamus, in truth, in 1847, knew something. If
he only comes as near the truth with us as he has done
with others, farewell England !

" * L'Angleterre . . * whose colonies have, been
long made free ... will renounce her Indian posses-
sions ., ., . reduced to the part which her insular
position assigns to her . ■ ... m consequence of the

NOSTRADAMUS. 55

immense development of the commercial navies of the

two Americas . . .'"

Equally as genuine as the above extracts, so far as

having been written by Nostradamus, are the following

lines on the signification of dreams, extracted from the

mighty book of Nostradamus which, we were told, in

1816,* was iron-clasped and iron-bound, and therefore

had not suffered £rom damp.

«
AbtejMe. To dream of any absent friend

Will news of them or ill portend ;
And if at thy bed-aide they seem,
Their death, perhaps, may solve thy dream.

The above is dogmatic ; those which follow are according
to the fashion of interpreters of dreams from Joseph down-
wards — merely symbolic, or simply p«r emtra.

Anchor. See an anchor in yr dream

And certain hope and comfort beam.

Bees. Bees in your dream good friends imply,
Who*ll serve you most indnstrionsly ;
But, if bees sting, it plainly shows
That thou haat busy active foes*

Bdhf. To dream one's belly 's large and great
Predicts a fair and large estate.

Does it? In the name of Sir John Falstaff, that ton of^
man, why so? should it not rather predict dropsy?

BuUs, To dream of bulls is dread and drear :
Some enemies be sure are near.

* The Wizard, p. 15. S^e list of books consulted.

56 VABIA,

(hradle, A cradle means, to maid or wife,
A joyful but a busy life.

Coach. Dream that you in a carriage ride
And poverty shall lower pride.

Death. To dream of death a marriage means ;
So variegated are life's scenes.

Sand, To dream a cold hand is put to you in bed.
Your next news will be a relation is dead.

Onions, To dream of eating onions means
Mnch strife in thy domestic scenes«

Faper* To dream that yon on paper write
Denotes accusers, hate and spite.

SUver, To dream of silver means deceit :

The slippery coin's an emblem meet.

Virgin, A virgin discoursing is good in a dream,
Joy and delight on your house shall beam.

Wound* To dream of a wound is sorrow and grief:
Of dressing a wound is cure or relief.

Writing, Dreaming of writing ever means news
'TwHl grant or deny, will give or refuse.

V

After this, who will deny the wisdom of our ancestors?
As I am unable to find the original of the above " choice "
productions^ it would be absurd to give IS'ostradamus the
credit of them.

IN'ostradamus was, of course, a weather prophet, and
pubUshed daring several years an almanac and many
other works, most of them medical, of which the names
only are remembered. A famous Latin distich, attributed
to Beza^ and also to Jodelle^ contains as much good sense

NOSTRADAMUS. 57

as it does point, and is worthy to be remembered in
connection with this prophet.

" Nostra damns, cbm. falsa damns, nam fallere nostra est ;
£t ctun falsa damns, nil nisi nostra damns.**

A townsman of Michel has published an abridgment of
his life^ and Adelung has placed him amongst his portraits
in the *' Histoire de la Folie Humaine/' a work which, if
it were fully done, would be of the driest and most melan-
choly reading, but surely, also, a story without an end.
It is questionable whether there be any belieyers in the
prophet now alive ; still, many astrologers and alchemists
buy their books of Mr. Millard, in Newgate-street ; and,
as we hare yet amongst us those who believe in Joanna
Southcote and her Shiloh, there may also be those who
puzzle their bemused brains over the Centuries of Michel
l^ostradamus.

THOMAS A KEMPIS AND THE

IMITATIO CHRISTI.

•u^Sv

BOOKS CONStriTED.

De Imiiaiume Christi et Omtewygtu MtauU omnitimque tjns vcauiattan.
Codex de Adooeatit Saculi ziii. Londini, apud Guil. Pickering,
1851.

Imitatum de J^sus- Christ, Traduction Nouodle, Sur V Edition
Latine de 1764. Bewe sur huU MmuscripU, Par M. L'Abb^
Valart MDCCLXVI.

The Christian's Pattern ; or, A Treatise of the Imitation of Christ.
Li foar books. Bj George Stanhope, D.D., Chaplain in Ordinary
to His Majesty. Ninth edition. 1714.

DerimitcOionde Noire' Seigneur JisHS'Christ, Par Jean Geraon,
Ohancelier de I'Universit^ de Paris. Tradoite en Fran9ais, en
GreCy en Anglais, en Allemand, en Italien, en Espagnol, et en
Portngais ; (texte Latin en regarde). Pabli6e sous la direction
de J. B. Monfalcon. Lyon, 1841.

Imitation of Christ, A new translation. Boms, London, 1856.

Imitation of Christ. New edition. 12mo. J. H. & J. Parker,
liondon, 1861.

Sunday at Home, Part for November, 1865.

THOMAS A KEMPIS AND THE

IMITATIO CHRI8TL

QneiBperfectljawaretbatjOfallpoptdar
I, popular in the beet seuBe, and iridelj
d in the fullest, the ImUatio ChrUti
a first ; when we call to mind that Dr.
Johnson s^d of it that it had gone through more editjons
than there had been months since its publication — it
maj seem auomalona to place it amongst the rare books.
But there are drcumstances which render ils position
here perfectly legitimate. The history of the book is
cmioas, and almost every one who reads it becomes ^ther
a Kempisian or an anti-Eempisian, or, in a special sense, a
Tbomist, or an anti-Thomist. Last year an edition* was
published in which the present writer gave a full account
of the three claimants to the anthorship of Ihe celebrated
book, Jean Gerson, Jean Gersen, and Thomas the Monk
of A Eempis, whom scholars now generally presume to
have been a mere copyist. Yet, writing some months after

62 VARFA.

this pabHcation^ Andrew Thomson, D.D., states, in ah
article in the ^'Sunday Magazine," that the weight of
evidence is in favour of A Kempis, and, stranger still, that
" Genm " is merdy an alteration of" Gerson !" Here are
his words : —

" The earliest edition of this religious treatise carries us
back through nearly four centuries, or a hundred years
beyond the Beformation. In the intervening ages, it is
affirmed to have been translated into sixty different lan-
guages, and to have passed through 1800 editions, and
probably to have been more read than any other religious
book, the Bible alone excepted. And that it has in no
degree been indebted to external circumstances connected
with its composition for the hold which it retains of human
interest, may be concluded from the fact, that its author-
ship was, for many ages, the subject of as much discussion
as that of the celebrated letters of Junius, and that the
controversial works which have been expended on this one
subject have occupied a hundred times more space than the
original work itself. It became a national question be-
tween the learned schools of different countries ; and uni-
versities ranged themselves on the side of opposite claimants.
The theologians and literary men of France generally con-
tended that Thomas-a-Kempis was merely the transcriber
of the book, and that John Gerson, a famous chancellor of
the University of Paris, was its real author. Others put
forward the name of John Gersen, whose name has been
found attached to one manuscript; but one is stnyngly
temjpted to suspect that this is only a slight misnomer for

THOMAS A KEMPIS. 63

the CTumeeUor, The Gknaan and Flemish writers who
entered the lists in this long-pending discussion^ declared
themselyes on the side of A-Kempis> and were ultimatelj
supported by the powerful authority of the Sorbonne. The
external evidence on the side of the two principal claimants
seems nearly equal ; but not to speak of a very distinct line
of unbrokoi tradition, the internal eridence turns the scale
in favour of A-Kempis ; for Gerson was never the inmate
of a monastery, which Thomas-ii-Kempis was for seventy
years, and the whole composition bears the indubitable
mark of monastic life, and evidently comes from the pen of
a solitary, though kind-hearted ascetic."

The '^distinctline of unhrohen tradition," alas ! is so faint
that the good doctor would find it hard to trace. Kempis
was a '^ copying" monk ; mauy works are known to have — ^to
use a penny-a-liner's phrase — " proceeded from his pen,"
amongst others, several testaments, old and new ; but no
one ever accused him of writing those books. M. Gence
has described the manuscript of 1425, on which all
A Kempis's claims rest, and all that is therein is this :
that there is on the MS. a note in a strange hand, in
Latin, in which note we are told that it is '^ to be under-
stood that this tractate was written by the upright and ex-
cellent man, Thomas, of Mount St. Agnes, called Thomas
de Kempis ; it was written by the hand of the author in
1425." But this anonymous note, as the editor of the
French Polyglot says, proves nothing.* Nothing, certainly,

* Pr^sente-t-il da moins rdvidence positive de la date de sa

64 VABIA.

in favour of A Kempis ; ^but it intemallj proves this, that
the note was not written by A Kempis if he were Ihe
author. Surely the writer of " Like unto Christ" would
never call himseU prohus et egregius vir. As for the links
of unbroken tradition^ we do not really know where they
are. Thomas Dibdin, M.A., a good bibliopolidt and a
scholar, thought that descrijptus ex manu might be read as
" copied out by," and tells us that which the translator of
the latest edition does, that only solitary books ever bore
A Kempis's name. The edition which attributed the book
to A Kempis is called by M. Monfalcon the editio prin-
ceps (he doubts with Dibdin and Gence the edition of
1468), and was printed in 1472. But in 1474 we have a
certain edition assigning the book to John Gerson ! And
there is an edition without date, which M. de Gregory
places to the year 1470, on the testimony of an old
catalogue which bears this title, <&«, '^ De Imitatione
Christi. . . Incipit liber Magistri Johannis Gerson
de Imitatione Christi." Nay, in 1481 there is an edition
which attributes the work to St. Bernard. *^ Incipit opus

composition en 1425? Non sans donte. Cette date est-elle inscrite
sor le mannscrit lui-meme, et de la main qui a transcrit le texte ?
Point de tout : elle se trouve dans une note anouyme et bien ^yidem-
ment 6crite par une main ^trangere. La voici : — '* Notandum quod
iste tractatus editus est a probo et egregio viro magiatro TTioma de
Monte SanctiB Agnetis et canonicoregulari in Trajeeto Thomas de Kem-
pis dictus, descriptus ex manu auctoris in Trajeeto^ anno 1425, m
societatu provincialatus," Cette note anonyme, et d'un main
6trangfere, ne saurait done avoir Tautorit^ du manuscrit lui-meme."

J. B. Monfalcon, De VAuteur de Vlmitation,

THOMAS A KEMPI8. 65

Beati Bemardi Saluberrimu de Imitatione Xpi et contemptu
mundi quod Johanni Gerson . . . attribuitur." For
many editions after this the name of A Kempis totally
disappears. So much for the chain of evidence.

But Dr. Thomson has told his readers that he fancies
" Gersen'* was a mere misprint for " Gerson" ! Can it be so?
In the year 1638, years after Thomas of Saint Agnes
and Jean Gerson had shared the honours of writing this
excellent tractate, a little edition in 12mo. was published,
carefully collated with ten MSS, in which the book was
boldly placed to the score of John Gersen, Abbot of Ver-
ceil. Here is the title : —

" De Imitatione Christi libri iv. per Franciscum Val-
gravium Angl. benedict. ... J. Gerseni Abbati Ver-
cellensi, italo benedictino ex dena manuscriptortim fide
vindicate, Lutetise, 1638."

Here the English Benedictine vindicates the existence
of the Italian Benedictine, whom Andrew Thomson, D.D.,
has so kindly endeavoured to annihilate, or rather to iden-
tify with the Parisian Chancellor. The fact is that Jean
Gersen of Canabaca, or Cabaliaca,* was Abbot of a Con-
vent of Benedictines in the thirteenth century, from the
year 1220 to 1230 ; and he seems, says M. Monfalcon —
who, perhaps very naturally after all, sums up in favour
of his own countryman, and against the Piedmontese
monk — '" to have much more legitimate right to be con-
sidered the author of the Imitation than A Kempis him-

♦ Now Cavaglia, in the Vercellais (Piedmont).

F

66 VAEIA.

self. For, unless we adduce barbarous Latin (and Italian-
ized words can be set off against Germanized words),
the " Imitatio " presents no internal proof of a German
monk haying written the book, whereas Gersen has one
special proof which argues in his favour, and equally
against A Elempis and Gerson." This was pointed out by
Father Ganganelli, who died as Pope Clement XIV.*

" What has made," wrote Ganganelli to his friend, a
Canon of Orsino, " the Imitation of Jesus Christ so
valuable and affecting is, that the author (Gersen, Abbe
of Yerceil, in Italy) has transfused into it all that holy
charity with which he himself was divinely animated.

" Gerson is commonly confounded with Gersen ; never-
theless it is easy to prove that neither Gerson nor Thomas
h, Kempis were the authors of that matchless book ; and
this, I own, gives me infinite pleasure, because I am de-
lighted with the thought of such an excellent work being
(having been) written by an Italian. There is evident
proof in the fifth chapter of the fourth book that it was
not a Frenchman who wrote the Imitation. It is there
expressed that the priest, clothed in his sacerdotal habit,
carries the cross of Jesus Christ before him ; t iiow all
the world knows that the chasubles (a kind of cope which

* I am quite aware that many look upon these very letters of
Ganganelli as forgeries ; but this does not invalidate the testimony
of the citation, its evidence being internal.

t '' Sacerdos sacris vestibus indutus . . Ante se crucem in casnla
portat, nt Ghristi vestigia diligenter inspiciat, et sequi frequenter
studeat." De Imit, Christi, lib. iv. cap. 5, sec. 3. Codex cte Advo-
eoHsf steculi xiii.

THOMAS A KEMPIS, 67

priests wear at mass) in France differ from those in Italy^
in this, that they wear their cross upon their hacks ; hut
I will not write a dissertation, heing content to assure
you that I am, <fec,"*

This letter is dated Eome, 6th Fehruary, 1749, and
may he at least cited as a proof that such an individual as
Gersen did exist. The similarity of the names is simply
curious, nor is the patronymic so uncommon as to make it
more than that. The hook-learned editor of Nutt's Cata-
logue of Foreign Theological Literature quotes almost the
whole sentence given above, but with the clauses in different
order, and he boldly puts down the dictum to " Clement
XIV." t But, after all, the next paragraph is almost
equally in favour of Grerson the Chancellor. " He is
marked with the cross behind." Post se cruce signattis est, J
There is, however, a wide difference between the phrases
" ante se portat" and " signatus est." Does Ganganelli's
citation allude to the vestments at all ?

The dispute, which probably will never be settled, is a
very interesting one ; but, having nothing further to say, I
may be pardoned for passing on to the title of the book.
The English translation is very awkward-looking and un-

* Letters of Pope Clement XIV (Ganganelli), translated from
the French edition of Sottin le Jeune. Fifth Edition. London,
Baldwin and Go. hdcclzxxi.

t Catalogae of Theological Works. David Kntt, Strand, 1837.
No. 3224 in list, Kempis (Thorn, k).

X ** jRucho'drts itt er mit einem Kreuze bezeichnet 'Oiriffut airtp
Ttf aravpip kff(f>payi(T9Ti" Renderings from the Polyglot edition
of '* Like unto Christ." Lyons, 1841.

68 VABIA.

English. Of course the Latin word, which is admirable,
has been a stumbling-block to all translators. The first,
Mayster William^ who puts forth his version, printed in
London bj Wynkjn de Worde and Eichard Pinson, called
it " The Imitation, or Following of Christ" Edward Hake,*
of Gray's Inn, copied the title, and says that the original
was first written by Thomas Kempise, a Dutchman,
amended and polished by Sebastien Oastalio, an Italian,
and Englished by Edward H. Mr. Thomas Kogers in
1584, William Page in 1639, cited by Dr. Watt in the
Encyclopaedia Britannica as the translator, and Luke
Mil bourne, who, in 1697, turned the book into quaint and
sometimes good rough verse, followed Mayster William
in his long and periphrastic name. Dean Stanhope, who
has his faults as a translator, since ^^ il a mutile le texte ;
tantot il I'abrege, tantot il I'etend outre mesure, et toujoura il
en denature la couleur," — ^yet had sense enough to break
away from the un-English Imitation, and called his ver-
sion the " Christian's Pattern." And finally, in spite of the
dictum of one of my reviewers, that my own version of the
title is " impertinent," I have ventured to call it, in plain
English, " Like unto Christ."

In an age like the present, when we care more for the
comfortable smToimdings of life than for anything else, to
study this book, which has mainly been written with re-
ference to the former, is a bold experiment ; but, because
it is bold, it will be interesting. It will be like walking

* The ImitatioD, or FoUowiDg of Christ. London, 1567, in 8vo.

THOMAS A KEMPIS. 69

in a cool room and a purer atmosphere afl^r being heated
with the scents, music, fine dresses, exercise, and the other
warm accessories of the ball-room. To read in a gold-
seeking and self-seeking age of a man who looked upon
wealth as a curse, who considered place a trial, and who
thought the very friendship and society of women dan-
gerous in the extreme — ^to read of such a one in an age
which runs after the heels of the prettiest and most
showy girl, which elevates her to a goddess and uses her
as a toy, will at least be something novel ; for what must
many of our ladies be when M. Dupin, at Paris, feels con-
strained to publish a pamphlet '^ Sur U lAixe effrene des
Dames'' — on the unbridled luxury (of dress) of women ? —
when at Marseilles men band together not to marry till
women grow less expensive ? — when virtue is laughed at
if poor, and success, even of the most shameful kind, is
honoured, or at least tolerated ? '' 'Sfou see that man :
that's old Johnson of our square. Well, he managed the
estates of three young clients, and somehow they grew
poor, and he grew rich : d'ye see ? He's worth knowing,
he is." Or your friend points out Simkins. " You know
Simkins. What I don't know Simkins ? He made a lot
of money in the Crimean war by selling putrid meat and
bad hay ; not a bad dodge, eh ?" Such conversations as
these are to be heard every day. In New York successful
men are pointed out who have made money in like manner,
" by fair dealing, if possible, but money by any means ;"
and these are the new Democracy, abused by the Press,
but envied by their fellow-citizens. In Paris a new

70 VABIA.

aristocracy has sprung up, which depends upon speculation
for its sudden fortunes, but which has in great measure
supplanted the old titular and territorial nobility. It is an
age of luxury and material wealth ; and nothing succeeds
like success.

The very name of asceticism has almost been forgot-
ten. Our Quakers and Methodist religionists are losing
their hold upon the world. Arts and manufactures have
become luxurious, pleasing, and delightful. The new
philosophy teaches us to enjoy the world ; to make the
most of life, not to despise it ; to use the world, not to
contemn it. Hence asceticism has grown out of fashion ;
for the very spirit of asceticism demands us to control our
passions, to throw away our luxury, to despise riches,
place, and honours, and to exercise ourselves in hardness,
want, endurance, and a noble poverty.

Of all treatises on this religious art, dogma, or inten-
tion, the work which passes under the name of ^* Thomas k
Kempis" is surely the best and most fascinating. It is one
which Dr. Johnson said '* the world had opened its arms
to receive." It is as popular as ^'Eobinson Crusoe" or the
"Pilgrim's Progress." It has been translated into all
tongues, and many times over into French and English.
It is called the "Imitation of Christ," the original title
being " De Imitatione Christi ;" but, in a recent transla-
tion, as has already been mentioned, in which there is a
history of the work, and parallel Scripture passages proving
the perfect Evangelical feeling therein, it is called " like
unto Christ," because its purport is to teach the reader to

THOMAS A KEMPIS. 71

aim at being as nearly as possible truly like our Lord in
life and deed. From the date of the first appearance of
the '^Imitatio" until now there have been, in all languages,
perhaps three thousand editions; and yet no one knows
with certainty who was the author. In fact, the latest
English editor presumes that the book had many authors ;
that it is so good, that the spirit of many men, each
chastened by sorrow and purified by faith, added word
after word, and passage after passage to " the priceless
sentences of Thomas h Kempis," as the Eev. Charles
Kingsley has called them.

Everybody has praised the book. It is one which
Soman Catholics claim, for its author was an Augustine
monk, or a chancellor of a monastery — certainly a priest ;
although it is as free from exclusiveness as the Bible itself.
It was a favourite with Jean Jacques Eousseau, who wept
over its pages ; and yet he was a man who detested
Romanism — ^nay, Christianity itself. A version of it was
edited by John Wesley, and read by WJiitefield, who
abominated stage-players ; another version was put into
verse by Bacine, the celebrated French dramatic poet;
and a copy was carried about by Corneille, the great
comic dramatist. Fontenelle, who wrote the ^' Plurality of
Worlds," and who was suspected of Materialism, said that
it was '' the most excellent book that ever proceeded out
of the hands of man, the Gospel being of Divine original."
Johnson loved the book. Vaughan, author of ^' Hours
with the Mystics," says that it can be " appreciated with-
out taste, and understood without learning," and that

72 VAIIIA.

thousands upon thousands in castle and cloister have for-
gotten their sorrows and dried their tears over its earnest
pages. We have seen that, in the opinion of the Eev. C
Kingsley, the sentences are "priceless;" in that of our
greatest female writer, who assumes the name of George
Eliot, they are inspired utterances, speaking to every soul
and to every age. To come down to the very moment at
which we write, the Literary Churchman, an organ of
the High Church, calls it " this queen of all uninspired
hooks ; this marvellous hook, which can how the hearts
of men and women of every class and creed ;" and the
Nonconformist newspaper speaks of it as the widest, most
spread, and most excellent of all comforting works.

And yet the spirit of this good hook is ascetic, distinctly
and openly so. We have seen that the simple meaning
of asceticism is merely the exercising of the hody and
mind in devout things; hut at times it has included an
obnoxious purpose — ^that is, a separation of oneself from
the world. Whether good or bad in its effect depends
much on its use or abuse. Half the people in the world —
the poorer half — are forced into a kind of asceticism;
their poverty exercises them against their will.

Though the mills of God grind slovrly,
Tet He grinds exceeding small.

Few poor men can go through the mills of trouble, trial,
and misfortune without being brought very nearly to the
dust. But this asceticism has its dangerous side ; and
able men, nay, good men too, have hated it. It produces,
as a natural consequence, the monk's cell and the nun's

THOMAS A KEMPIS. 73

cloister. It makes people put on strange dresses and
purchase beads and crosses, whether thej be Hindus,
Mohammedans, or Christians. It induces the monk to
fast, and the nun to whip herself, and the Brahmin to
clinch his hand for ever till the nails grow through the
back of it, and his limbs are stiif and powerless. At
Benares it makes men run iron hooks through their backs,
and get others to whirl them round like cockchafers on a
string. It forces some to abstain from meats or marriage,
or any simple natural pleasures. It made St. Simeon
Stylites live for thirty years on the top of a pillar, beseech-
ing God daily, and nightly, and hourly, for pardon and
grace, and to cry out that thrice ten years —

In hangers and in thirsts, fevers and colds,

In coughs, aches, stitches, ulcerous throes, and cramps —

A sign betwixt the meadow and the cloud,-—

Patient on this tall pillar, I have borne

Rain, wind, frost, heat, hail, damp, and sleet, and snow.

While my stiff spine can hold my weary head.

Till all my limbs drop piecemeal from the stone.

In the present day it causes people to believe that God

delights in the discomfort of his creatures ; at any rate,

that he pleasingly beholds them torment themselves;

it makes us punish little children with Bible lessons they

cannot comprehend, and terrify them with stories of Og,

King of Bashan, Korah, Dathan, and Abiram, and visions

of hell-fire ; it makes Sunday, dies Dominica, the sweet

Lford's day, a dreaded Sabbath ; it interdicts the Sunday

walk ; it glosses over and blots out the mercies of God with

the roaring thunders of his wrath.

74 VARIA.

Hence asceticism, which in itself is heautiful and need-
ful, has been so misrepresented that men hate it. Gibbon, a
man of colossal intellect, much fairness, and great learning,
wrote thus of it : " The Ascetics who obeyed and abused
the rigid precepts of the Gospel were inspired with a rigid
enthusiasm, which represents man as a criminal and God
as a tyrant. They seriously renounced the business and
pleasures of the age ; abjured the use of wine, of flesh, and
of marriage ; chastised their body, mortified their affec-
tions, and embraced a life of misery as the price of their
eternal happiness."

It is in the last clause of the above sentence that the
mistake of asceticism lies. If we are fools enough to
demand, as Stylites does, " the white robe and the palm "
for the self-inflicted mortifications, we then are judge and
jury on ourselves. And, unfortunately, man will play
those parts. He is good and saintly, pure and charitable,
but he gets filled with spiritual pride. Hence upon works
of asceticism is built the damnable doctrine of works of
supererogation. You have punished yourselves in this
world ; reward yourselves in the next. You have said so
many aves to-day, you need say none to-morrow. You
fasted last week ; you can feast this. There is the carnival,
the farewell to flesh; and the dancing and junketings,
when it may again be eaten. All this is flat against the
words of the Apostles and Christ. The ascetics are upon
the shifting sands of self-pleasing, even in the midst of their
self-torments ; but happily we find little or nothing of this
spirit in " Like unto Christ."

THOMAS A KJEMPIS. 75

This author resemhles Bunjan in his treatment of the
world. He looks upon it as vanity, as Solomon did ; as a
huge Vanity Fair, as the Pilgrim did ; hut he goes on his
way, and eats and drinks, and acts like a reasonahle crea-
ture. All that he does is to lay down rules for our guidance
under trial, and consolations for our sorrows under defeat.
He tells a man not to harass nor to hamper himself, very
much in the words of Marcus Antoninus or Seneca : *^ A
pure, simple, steadfast mind is not distracted with many
duties, hecause it does all things for the glory of God, and,
in itself at ease, strives to he free from self-glory.'* He
tells him, if he is young and sets to work to prepare him-
self to be a man, to fight no baby's battle, no fool's fight.
" Who has a harder battle than the man who tries to con-
quer himself?" He reminds him that, after all, it does not
much matter if he is not very clever or great, for " humble
self-knowledge is a surer road to God than diving into the
depths of science. Science, considered in itself, is not
sinful ; nor is the knowledge of anything that is good ;
it has been ordained of God : but the preference must be
given to a good conscience and a holy life." And, in
Wynkyn de Worde's translation, he asks what has become
of all the learned men long dead : *' Where be now all the
royal poets, with their craftily conveyed poems ; and elegant
orators, with their orations garnished with elegancy ; the
philosophers, with their pregnant reasons and sentences ?"
And the author finishes by assuring us, "^ Truly learned
is he who does the will of God, subduing also his own
desires."

76 VAIIIA.

The prudential maxims of the writer are very well worthy
of heing laid to our heart. A young man is not to open
his heart to everyhody ; to he " no fawner towards the
wealthy, nor to he fond of heing seen with great people ;"
and he is to '' exercise charity towards all, hut intimacy
with very few."

To grow in spiritual progress, a man is especially
warned not to interfere with other people's husiness, not to
trouhle himself with the sayings or doings of others, with
what this one says, and that one thinks. Those matters
do not concern us. " How is it possible," asks the author,
'^for a man to remain long at peace who intermeddles
with other people's cares, who seeks occasions of dis-
quietude abroad, and never examines himself ^t home?"
How, indeed ? If we were " more intent upon self-im-
provement, and less troubled about the outer world, then
we might make some advance in wisdom." He tells us
elsewhere that we should learn early to submit; trouble
not ourselves who is on our side or who is against us ; that
we should humble ourselves, and think ourselves chiefly in
the wrong ; and that, unless we feel that we know worse
of ourselves than of any others, we shall not he making
much progress to the perfect life. If we want to play the
peace-maker, we are to be at peace at home. The
peace-maker is more useful than the learned ; for, " while
the man of violence and passion turns even good to evil,
he who follows peace turns evil to good ;" and so, there-
fore, we are to be peaceful and gentle, and to avoid quar-
rels, and to put up with slights and wrongs, and we shall
be happy.

THOMAS A KEMPIS. 77

"We are advised not to meddle with others, not to be in-
quisitive ; for '^ what is it to thee whether a man does such
and such, or says so and so ? Thou art not required to
answer for others, but for thyself." We are not to care
nor to follow fame, nor the friendship of many, nor the
regard of men, for these things generate distraction and
great darkness of heart. To be thoughtful, watchful in
prayer, and humble at all times, will alone make a man as
he should be. Of self-esteem we are told very truly, as
most men know who have thought much, that we cannot
place too little confidence in ourselves, for we are often
wanting in grace and sense. ^' The light we have is but
small, and that we often lose through negligence. Often-
times our mental blindness we do not perceive ; ofbtimes
we act badly, and then make matters worse by our neg-
ligent excuses. We often think and weigh what we have
to bear through others, but what they have to bear through
us does not occur to us."

As the author of this precious book lived before men
thought much of the suggestion of Duns Scotus, which,
little more than a dozen years ago, the present Pope ex-
alted into a dogma, it is by no means a surprising thing
that A Kempis is utterly free from Mariolatry. He
relies, like the Articles of the Anglican Church, upon
one Name only, and finds none other under heaven given
to man save that of Christ. " The kingdom of God is
within you," he quotes from St. Luke in the beginning of
the second book ; " betake thyself then entirely to God :
love TTinn with all thy heart, with all thy soul, and bid a

78 VARIA.

final adieu to this wretched world, and thou shalt find
sweet content and comfort unspeakahle. Learn to despise
these outward vanities, and seek pure and spiritual satis-
factions. Place all thy hopes, thy happiness, thy thoughts
in them, and thou shalt find this kingdom grow up within
thee, * for the kingdom of God is peace and joy in the
Holy Ghost.' Eom. jdv. 17." This is Stanhope's trans-
lation. It is worthy of remark, also, that there is hardly
a page in the " Imitatio" without its ^ye or six references
to or quotations from Holy Writ: a satisfactory proof
that in the monastery, at least in those days, the Bihle
was diligently and devoutly studied.

Such are a few of A Kempis's priceless sentences
taken almost haphazard. We have said nothing, for our
space will not allow us, upon the religious heauty and fer-
vour of the work. ^Readers will find religion host preached
in the pages of the hook itself; and it is scarcely our pro-
vince to preach religion, although it may he our husiness to
point the way to happiness and peace. The whole inten-
tion of the author or authors is to awaken man to his true
relation with God, the highest Intelligence, and to keep
him from Materialism, the lowest Intelligence. Thus wrote
a true poet : —

Our little lives are kept in equipoise
By struggles of t-wo opposite desires —

The struggle of the instinct that enjoys,
And the more noble instinct that aspires.

DR. JOHN FAUSTUS.

»=S^

BOOKS CONSULTED.

The ffistorie of the damnable life and deserued death of Doctor John
FauMtus. Newly imprinted and in conuent placet amended: ac-
cording to the true copie printed at Franckfort, and trantlated into
English by P. F, GenU Scene cmd allowed. Imprinted at Lon-
don by Thomas Orwin, and are to be solde by Edward White
dwelling at the little North door of Paules, at the signe of the
Gun. 1592.

The Tragical historic of Dr. Faustus. By Christopher Marlowe.
4to. 1604.

Histoire prodigieuse et lamentable de Jean FaustCf grand et horrible
enchanteur, avec sa morte ipouventable* Demiere Edition. A RoveD,
chez Clement Malassis. M.DCLXvn.

Faustus : his Life, Death, and Descent into fftlL Translated from the
German. By George Borrow (this is added in pencil). London.
W. Simpkin and R. Marshal. 1825.

Earlg English Prose Romances, with Bibliographical and Historical
Illustrations, Edited by William J. Thorns, F.S.A. Vol. III.
London. Nattali and Bond. 1858.

Lives of Notorious Cfriminals, including that of Dr. Faustus. Chap>
book. London, 1754.

Die Geschichte vom Faust, in Reimen, nach dem eimigen bekamUen
Exemplar wn 1587, in der KonigUchen Bibliotliek zu Koptnhagen:
Die Deutschen VoUusbUcher von Faust und Wagner, 8^c, Yon I.
Scheible. Stuttgart, 1849.

Festus, a Poem, By Philip James Bailey. Sixth Edition. Chap-
man and Hall. 1860.

DR. JOHN FAUSTUS.

fl HISTORY, or a legend, or a mkture of
B both, which has not only ftirnished a, sub-
U ject for " Marlowe's mighty line," but has
■ given to Goethe the plot of the greatest
poem of the century, or, if wo believe some, of all time, is
worth our attention. When, moreover, this history has
become the eubject of as many volumes as would fill a
goodly bookcase; when our children delight over that
which horrified and astonished our great- great -grand-
fathers, one feels that there must be in it an element of
popularity which is as enduring as it is perhaps difficult
to account for. How many, too, are there who merely
know the name and nothing else of the hero. If, at a
competitive examination, the question, " Who ivas Faustus,
and nhen did he flourish?" were proposed, how few would
be able to answer it. It is not every one who can go to
Mr. Thoms's capital book on early English prose romances,
or to the People's Wonder-Book of Herr Scheible, The
history of Faustus is involved so much in doubt, and at

82 VARIA.

the game time has so many points of interest for as, that
it is worth while spending a few minntes over it.

" Truth is great, and will prerail," is a grand asser-
tion, and one which has often consoled the dying mo-
ments of the martyr ; hut it will scarcely hear the calmer
and closer investigation of the philosopher. Truth differs
from truth, hut not more than it essentially differs from
itself; for, as the well -cut hrilliant, when it comes from,
the hands of the lapidaiy, has its sixty-two facets —
thirty-three ahove the helt, and twenty-nine helow it — so
each truth, after heing handled hy the historian, wouTd
seem to have at least sixty-two aspects, or, indeed, as
many more, perhaps, as there may he people to look at
it. As history is, according to some, a mere collection of
hiographies, biographical truth might be expected to be
the simplest ; but, not excepting that of Shakespeare, of
whom we know little more than the date of his birth, mar-
riage, and death, there is hardly a name in the *' Biogra-
phic Universelle " about whom writers have not wrangled
so much as to make the earnest student repeat the question
of him whom Bacon calls jesting Pilate, and turn away in
disgust. The occupation of the writers of one age seems to
be that of whitewashing the black sheep of a past one —
an employment in which both Mr. Carlyle and Mr. Froude
have made themselves conspicuous; and, as there was
found, soon after his death, one hand at least which scat-
tered flowers on the tomb of Nero, we may possibly soon
meet with an eccentric historian who will prove that both
that emperor and Caligula were men of the highest moral

BB. JOHN FAUSTUS. 83

calibre^ and with reference to whom it were, at any rate,
as well to entertain historic doubts. When a character has
been well blackened, however, it is exceedingly difficult
thoroughly to cleanse it. Notwithstanding Horace Wal-
pole's cleyer tract, and the more acute suggestions of his
successors, we doubt whether Eichard III. will not re-
main to the end of all time the crook-backed tyrant of
Shakespeare, and the politic scoundrel of our sohool his-
tories. Many people are fascinated by the coloured and
sparkling rays thus brightly thrown out by a polished and
cut truth. A. university professor, in his inaugural lecture
some short time back, fairly owned that he rather pre-
ferred his early and more popular ideas, and that,
although some great writer might arise who would under-
take to prove that Henry VIII. was a mild gentleman,
exceedingly ill-used by ladies who deserved their fate, he
would still rather cling to his old faith in the embodiment
of an historic blustering and hectoring Blue Beard. No
doubt many share a like feeling.

One of those characters about whose various biogra-
phies there is just the smallest scintillation of truth, and
who has now fairly become the property of fiction, is Dr.
Faust, known with us as Faustus, a German scholar who
flourished in the beginning of the fifteenth century, and
who has been constantly confused with Fust, the assist-
ant, or, as some say, the patron of Gutenberg, who in-
troduced into Germany moveable types about the same
period. John Fust, who was evidently the capitalist,
joined with Gutenberg and Schoeffer, the inventor of the

84 VARIA.

letter-punches^ and by a law-suit dispossessed Gutenberg
of any benefit from bis discovery. Perhaps, therefore,
any ignominy which may attach to his name he richly
deserves ; in fact, the theory of many is that the illumin-
ators, missal and psalter writers, who were beaten out of the
market by his machinery, invented the legends concerning
him — viz. that he was aided by a personal attendant, a
friendly Devil, who, after serving him for a stated number
of years, at length bore him quick to hell as a payment
for his services. Now, although we have been expressly
warned not to confound the two Fausts, we believe that
they have already been inextricably confounded, and that
what simply belongs to one has been asserted of the other.
The Dr. Faustus was an astrologer and a chemist ; and
it is certainly not unlikely that popular superstition may
have gifted him with a " familiar," just as it did Polydore
Vergil, Jerome Cardan, and Paracelsus; of this latter brag-
gadocio chemist it is said that he had one confined in the
pummel of his sword. It is notable, also, that Faustus's
Christian name, like that of Fust, was Johann. The sub-
ject of our sketch was bom at Knittlingen, in Suabia, of
peasant parents. He studied at Wittenberg ; removed to
Ingoldstadt, where he practised as a physician ; received
a considerable inheritance; was known to Melancthon,
Tritheim, and other men of note of the period; gave
himself up to magic, and died of the plague, in 1466 —
or, as tradition will have it, was carried away, as per con-
tract — at a little village called Eimlich. For this latter,
legendary occurrence, one or more villages, following the

DB. JOHN FAUSTUS. 85

example of the seven towns which contest the honour of
Homer's birthplace, put in a claim — especially Breda, in
Saxonj, a small village on the Elbe, where the blood-
besprinkled waHs of the apartment may be seen, and
where, to quote Jack Cade's friend, the ^^ very bricks are
alive to this day," to testify to the truth.

^^That this hero was no imaginary one," says Mr.
Thorns, " is clearly proved by the testimony of contem-
porary writers. Amongst the most important of these is the
famous Trithemius, who, in a letter to Johann Wedunger,
dated the 20th August, 1507, speaks of the subject of this
notice as one ' qui se principem necromanticorum ausus
est nominare, gyrovagus, battologus et circumcellio est,'
and as having formed for himself this fitting title, ' Magis-
ter Georgius SabeUicus, Faustus junior, Fons Necroman-
ticorum, Astrologus, Magus secundus, Chiromanticus,
Agromanticus, Pyromanticus, in hydra arte secundus.'
In 1539 he is mentioned by Begardo, in his ^ Index Sani-
tatis.' Gastius also alludes to him in his ' Sermones Con-
viviales;' and he is also alluded to by Manilius in his
' Collectanea,' on the authority of Melancthon." Gones tells
us that, though there is much conflicting evidence as to
where he was bom and when he lived and flourished,
there is little doubt of his being an historical personage,
'^ and one who had wit to take advantage of the times in
which he lived," and whose quicker wit ,and boldness saw
through the superstitious fears of his countrymen and
laughed at them.

This quickness of wit and boldness of conception, this

86 VABIA.

superiority to those around him, met with the not unusual
reward of his being exalted into a wizard and of having
dealings with the devil. Nay, like others, he, too, must
have an attendant devil ; and Mephistopheles was called in
early to serve him as a valet, and to transport him, for a
due consideration, whither he chose, and as rapidly as
possible. Thus he travels round the world in eight days,
and sees all the glories, riches, and wonders thereof.

So singular a story seems to have at once seized on
the popular mind. It was quickly dramatized in Germany,
and presented with the other monkish legends and plays ;
and in thirty years from the time our own Marlowe had
formed upon it a splendid work which had been acted with
applause. Since that time, nearly fifty different poems and
dramas have been built upon the story — two of the best,
excepting, of course, Goethe's, being by Klingemann and
Roder. Lastly, Goethe elaborates it into the most re-
markable fiction of modern times, and one which is the
chief corner-stone of his fame. A writer would, one
might suppose, as soon think of re-writing Hamlet as of
rehabilitating" Faust;" but, notwithstanding that we have
thirty-three translations of Goethe's great work, a modem
English poet, James Philip Bailey, has dared it in Festus^
and has spasmodically succeeded ; and a modem play-
wright has yet more recently put the subject on the boards
of the Princess's Theatre as Faust and Marguerite.
What we now propose is, to give the old legend, with some
of its blunt English padding, refeiiing now and then to
" Marlowe's mighty line," to point out what people miss

DB. JOHN FAUSTUS. 87

who neglect our elder dramatists. Marlowe had indeed a
method of throwing ten syllables together in a way as for-
cible and as original as any master of blank verse that ever
lived. Dryden, a great writer, comes somewhat near him
in force ; Webster and Dekker still more closely in rough
and ponderous weight; Milton in majestic diction and
splendid energy: but no one combines all so much as
Marlowe himself in his best verses.

But to return to our Doctor. The author of one of
these little histories begins with a sage remark upon the
difference between ignorance and knowledge ; and, after the
good old manner of Pinnock in his histories, he dabs about
ten lines of very bald verse on the top of his chapter,
which he afterwards translates into prose, to the effect that
we should not attempt to know too much, " as the events
about to be recorded in this history will, in our opinion,
unless we greatly err, fully evince." John Faustus, he
continues, was bom in a small hamlet, in the province of
Wiemar: his father was a poor labounng man, but his
uncle, who lived at Wittenberg, " took the young Faustus
and adopted him, and made him heir to his property. Thus,
instead of being doomed to follow at the plough tail, to
work early and late, and to live upon the most homely fare,
our hero was destined to bask in the sunshine of affluence,
to tread the flowery meads of learning, to drink at the im-
mortal fount, to climb Helicon's bank, and thereby to reach
the tenlple of fame. Young Faustus, now become the
favourite of his uncle, who had a good living in his gift, was
sent to study divinity at Wittenberg, the same place at which

88 VABIA,

* Hamlet, Prince of Denmark ' was educated, and whicli
is rendered immortal by the pen of om* unmatched
Shakspeare."

The '' good living " originated of course from the hand
of our English chap>book maker; but all authorities agree
that Faust went to "Wittenberg. " Son oncle, qui demeura
k Wittenberg," says a French author; and an old ballad in
one of the four thick squat volumes of nearly 1300 pages
each, which Scheible has published in Das Kloster, opens
with the following verses —

Es ist der Doctor Faustns nun
Gewesen eines Bauren Sun :
ZvL Rodt ben Weinmar bUrtig ber,
Zu Wittemberg so bat auch er
Ein Freundschafft gross ; &c. &c.

At this place '^ he prosecuted his studies until he had
exhausted the stores of learning ; he regularly passed " all
the various minor academical degrees with credit to him-
self and honour to his tutors, and ^* was inducted into his
uncle's living, and looked up to as a most impressive and
orthodox preacher." But, alas ! —

Tbe devil cunningly prepares,
And for bis victims spreads bis snares ;
Thus Faustus in a luckless bour
Submitted was to Satan's power.

The fact was, he " consorted with alchemists, a herd of im-
postors, tlie disgrace of the age ;" and, determining to be
the top of the tree, he consulted his oracles, wherein he
'* found it was requisite to undergo a probation of forty
days, during which he must five times every day invoke the

DR, JOHN FAUSTUS. 89

Prince of Darkness, trample on the Bible, seclude himself
from society, and drink morning and evening, repeating
his diabolical lessons^ two spoonfuls of Devil's soup ; he
drew a magical circle on the floor, then set with diligence
getting together the materials of his infernal diet. . . •
With no common degree of fortitude, he began to rummage
the churchyards for bones of a particular description, in the
hollows of which worms of a peculiar shape and colour had
engendered ; he then procured newts of a month old, the
eyes of dead brindled sows, eagles' eggs with five black
spots on them, hoo& of cows that had died of the murrain,
heads and legs of toads, spawn of frogs, genitals of scor-
pions, tongues of crocodiles, livers of male black rats, toes
of nightingales, brains of white boars above three years old,
and spurs of game cocks ; the whole of this was boiled to
a consistence with whale's sperm and snails, to which he
added every morning seventy-three drops of his own blood,
taken from his left arm by himself" ! Having concocted
this devilish potion, which certainly by far exceeds the
milder concoction in Middleton's Wit^ih or Shakespeare's
Macbeth, he in all things conformed himself to his " proba-
tionary state, tearing Bibles to pieces, and treading the
scattered leaves under his feet. He soon knew that he
was rapidly advancing to his desired aim, and having
covered his head with a woollen cap, on which was painted
a skull and cross-bones, together with a figure of the devil,
he began to invoke the devil in Low Dutch."

The next few pages of this imaginative history are
filled with a description which would very well suit the

90 VARIA.

celebrated scene in Der Freischuiz, Faustus is surrounded
by all kinds of terrors. He drinks the soup, and dances
on the leaves of the Bible ; he hears the very thunders of
Hell, sees a frightful dragon with a " three-pronged pitch-
fork,'' a hare chasing a lion, a hyena swallowing little
children, and a little man with a cocked hat, who says,
" Friend Faustus, my master, Lucifer, has sent me here
to ask what wantest thou ?" to whom Faustus truculently
replies that *^ he wants his master, and would see him, if he
were buried in fifty hells deeper than he is*" The messen-
ger disappears, the hurly-burly recommences, and a great
ball of fire runs round and round the circle with incredible
velocity, from which a voice of thunder cries out, " Mortal,
what wantest thou ? " The Doctor, nothing daunted,
" recruited himself with a spoonful of soup," and challenged
the Devil to come forth, upon which the ball of fire opens,
and Beelzebub enters on the scene.

The clever Doctor fancied that he had outwitted the
Prince of Darkness, for, when the latter asked him to be
his, " body and soul," for ever, Faustus said, " Nay, I
will not ; I will have all I desire of thee, but will not be
damned." Upon the Fiend putting this little matter in
the right way, he receives the skin of a human body ; upon
which he agrees to make out certain requisitions, and a
conveyance of his body and soul to the Devil. He goes
home to his study, and diligently draws out these articles,
of which there are nine. The Devil is to be at his command,
to do his bidding, to give him exhaustless wealth, to render
him invisible, to convey him anywhere in one moment, to

DR. JOHN FAUSTUS. 91

raise the dead or bring before him any living person, to
show him the interior of hell, and, finally, " to lay aside his
devilish propensity for lying, and when questioned tell me
nothing but the truth.

(Signed) John Faustus."

The Devil soon, in an awful clap of thunder, sends up a
series of replies, in which the chief requisitions are granted,
but in which the last assertion is very positively denied : —
** I will answer all your questions truly : the world does me
injustice to tax me with want of veracity ; let them ask their
conscience if I ever deceived them, or made them believe
a bad action was a good one ? " A shrewd question truly !

" Moreover" (the deed concludes) " I hereby promise to
let my trusty servant, Mephistoph^les, be ever at your call,
and further, allow you twenty-four years to enjoy the
privileges purchased at so dear a rate.

" Signed, by order of Lucifer, Prince of the Hellish
Regions ; by us. Judges of his Infernal Domain ; and in
his name we say Amen, it shall be so.

" Rhadamanthus.
" Minos.

Here, again, is that mixture of Paganism with modem
belief which seems so necessary for the poet. We should
scarcely have dreamt of the Homeric and Virgilian judges
serving under the Hebraic Satan. Que vouhz-vous ? there
are none other witnesses at hand. The bonds being ex-

92 VABIA.

changed, Mephistopheles is assigned to Faustus. He pre-
sents his new master with one of the keys of Hell, say-
ing : — " Take this : its possession is a favour never before
granted to mortal. Whenever you wish to see me, if you
hold up this key above your head, and say, Olishmaramotk
Teufely I shall instantly appear in the shape you now see
me ;" which was that of a dapper little man dressed in black,
very much like a French abb^ . Next we find related many of
the doings of Faustus, scarcely worth repeating. He was,
we are told, a man of some humour ; and he shows it much
in the same manner as some of our fast young men would
do. He set all the cocks in Wittenberg crowing for three
hours without intermission, and once, ''just as the parson
had mounted the pulpit," got all the pigs within six miles
to come to church — such a grunting and squeaking being
never before heard. Many of these tricks we must put
down to the English fancy of the poor scribe who vamped
up this book. One day he makes all the old maids of
Wittenberg, " each with a penny pie and a tabby cat,"
walk on one side of the street, and the old bachelors on the
other. At another time, " at a grand levee held by the
Emperor of China," all the Mandarins and nobles began
hissing at and thumping each other ; and when the Emperor
blew his nose, he blew out — not his brains, as the American
story has it — ^but nothing but butterflies and worms.
Faustus sets the '' Great Mogul " and all his court sneezing;
and at a sumptuous repast given to the Emperor of Persia
he causes all the wine to flow from decanter to glass con-
tinually. He makes almanacs — ^here we are reminded of

DR. JOHN FAUSTU8. 93

the Doctor — ^and is more successAil than our own Professor
Murphy ; for what he predicted, rain, hail, frost, or snow,
invariably occurred. He wishes to marry, but a fiend with
a fearful name, '^ Ghasthomio," gives him such a whipping
with hot wires and scorpions that he repents. Marriage,
the fiend says, is a holy state, but yet he may have his
desire in another way. He asks where Hell is, and
receives in the answer a curious melange of the Hebrew
Gehenna and the classic Tartarus. It is probable that we
never shall escape the bondage of these ideas : even the
wonderful imagination of Dante is constrained to adopt
them. But the splendid diction and the atmosphere of
Protestant thought in which Marlowe lived saved him from
this ; and to the same question Mephistopheles replies with
a fine anticipation of that subjective view of Hell of which
we have a good deal at present : —

Hell hath no limits, nor is circamscribed
In one self place ; but where we are is hell ;
And where hell is there must we ever be.
And, to be short, when all the world dissolves.
And every creature shall be purified,
All places shall be hell that are not heaven.

<< I think there be no such place as hell," says Faustus,
superciliously ; and his attendant is glad that he thinks so
till he is fully entrapped. Mr. George Borrow indeed
makes the Devil turn the tables on man, and say, with some
humour, as the concluding sentence of his ghastly book : —
"When men wish to represent anything abominable,
they paint the Devil ; let us, therefore, in revenge, when

94 VAEIA.

we wish to represent anything infamous, depict man ; and
philosophers, popes, priests, conquerors, ministers, and
authors (!) shall serve us as models."

Hell is, however, not long a matter of douht to the Doc-
tor, for he visits it ; while, previously to this visit, Mephis-
topheles had descrihed it thus : — " My Faustus, knowe that
Hell is, as thou wouldest thinke with thy selfe, another world,
in the which we have our being, under the earth, and
above the earth, even to the heavens, within the circum-
ference whereof are contained ten kingdomes — namely.

1. Lacus Mortis.

2. Stagnum Ignis.

3. Terra teuebrosa.

4. Tartarus.

5. Terra oblivionis.

6. Gehenna.

7. Herebus.

8. Barathrum.

9. Styx.
10. Acheron.

The which kingdomes are governed by five kings — ^that is,
LtLcifer in the Orient ; Belial in Meridie ; Astaroth in
Occidente ; and Phlegethon in the middest of them all :
whose rule and dominions have none end until the day of
Dome. And thus farre, Faustus, hast thou heard of our
rule and kmgdomes.''

We do not, in the old legends, find many hints towards
the wonderful scenes which Goethe has created. The
tricks of Faustus are clumsy and countrified, and on a
par with the stories related in the " Hundred Merry Tales
of Shakespeare." Of the wonderful scene in the cellar,
illustrated finely by Eetzsch, and our own painter, Theo-
dore von Hoist, there is this mere skeleton :— -

DR. JOHN FAUSTUS. 95

" How Fausttis serued the dronken Olownes,

" Dr. Faustus went into an Inne, wherein were many
tables fiill of Clownes, the which were tippling kan after
kan of excellent wine, and to bee short they were all
dronken^ and as they sate so they sung and hallowed^
that one could not heare a man speake for them; this
angred Doctor Faustus ; wherefore he said to those that
called him in, marke my masters I will shew you a merry
jest. The clownes continuing still hallowing and singing,
he so conjured them, that theire mouthes stood as wide
' open as it was possible for them to holde them, and never
a one of them was able to close his mouthe again : by and
by the noyse was gone, the clownes not withstanding
looked earnestly one upon another, and wist not what
was happened ; wherefore one by one they went out, and
so soon as they came without they were as well as ever
they were; but none of them desired to goe in any
more."

This scene our English dramatist has followed, making
each clown close his sentence with a filthy double entendre,
no doubt for the purpose of tickling the ears of the ground-
lings. He also makes "Fayre Helena" of Greece the
mistress of the Doctor ; " for," says R. P. Gent, ** she
was so beautifull and delightful a peece that Faustus could
not bear to be one moment out of her sight." The Ger-
man poem has a canto, the twenty-sixth, —

** Yon der Helena aua Grichenland ; **
and, indeed, so alluring a subject was not likely to be

96 VABIA.

omitted by the book-makers. It is found in almost all
the copies. Helen bears him a son, called Justus Faustus,
but he, being a succiibiuSf disappears with his phantom
mother. Here is the picture of the fair Helena, showed
by Faustus to the students : " This lady appeared before
them^ in a most rich gown of purple velvet, costly embroi-
dered ; her hair hanging down loose, as fair as the beaten
gold, and of such length that it reached down to her hams ;
having most amorous cole-black eyes ; a sweet and plea-
sant round face, with lips as red as any cherry ; her cheeks
of a rose colour, her mouth small, her neck white as a
swan ; tall and slender of personage ; in sum, there was
no imperfect place in her; she looked round about her
with a rolling hawk's eye, a smiling and wanton counte-
nance, which near hand inflamed the hearts of all the
students, but that they persuaded themselves she was a
spirit, which made them lightly pass away such fancies."

Very beautifully has Marlowe dramatised this scene of
the legend. Helen is made one of the instruments of the
fall of Faustus, and of his temptation by Mephistopheles ;
and, indeed, the German doctor, upon the sight of this
instrument of temptation, falls into a love ecstasy, and
utters one of the most ardent and enthusiastic rhapsodies
on beauty that was ever conceived.

'* Was this fair Helen whose admired worth
Made Greece with ten years* war afflict poor Troy ?'*

asks the second scholar when he sees her ; but the Doctor
speaks not so tamely.

DB. JOHN FAUSTU8. 97

<* Was this the face that laanched a thousand ships.
And burnt the topless towers of Ilium ?
Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss.
Her lips suck forth my soul ! see where it flies ;
Come, Helen, come, give me mj soul again*
Here will I dwell, for heaven is in those lips.
And all is dross that is not Helena.
I will be Paris, and for love of thee.
Instead of Troy shall Wittenberg be sacked ;
And I will combat with weak Menelaus,
And wear thy colours on my plumed crest.
Tea, I will wound Achilles in the heel,
And then return to Helen for a kiss.
Oh, thou art fairer than the evening air,
Clad in the beauty of a ihoutajid stars ;
Brighter art thou than flaming Japiter,
When he appeared to hapless Semele ;
More lovely than the monarch of the sky,
In wanton Arethusa's azure arms ;
And none but thou shalt be my paramour !"

It is worth our while here to glance at the following por-
tions of a hallad, Eoxhurghe Collection (vol. iii. p. 280),
which Mr. Thorns supposes may be a modernized version
of one of 1588, "A Ballad of the life and Death of
Doctor Faustus, the great congerer/' licensed to be printed
bj the learned Aylmer, Bishop of London, and which
it has been pointed out is very little more than an English
version of the German Metrical Volksbuch, put forward
at Tubingen by Alexander Hock, in the same year. The
English ballad, of which we have printed a few verses,
was sung to the tune of Fortune my Foe, a very popular
one at the end of the sixteenth century. .

H

98 VAEIA.

The Just Judgment of God shew'd upon Br, Faustus,

All Christian men give ear a while to me.
How I am plung'd in pain but cannot see :
I liv*d a life the like did none before.
Forsaking Christ, and I am damn'd therefore.

At Wertemburgh, a town in Germany,
There was I bom and bred of good degree,
Of honest stock, which afterwards I sham'd,
Accurst therefore, for Fauahu was I nam*d. *

In learning high my nncle brought np me,
And made me Doctor of Divinity :
And when he dy'd he left me all his wealth,
Which cursed gold did hinder my soul's health.

Then did I shun the Holy Bible book,
Kor on God's word would never after look ;
But studied the accursed conjuration.
Which was the cause of my utter damnation.

At last, when I had but one hour to come,
I tum'd the glass for my last hour to run :
And called in learned men to comfort me,
But Faith was gone, and none could succour me.

Then'presently they came unto the hall,
Whereas my brains were cast against the wall ;
Both arms and legs in pieces they did see,
My bowels gone, there was an end of me.

You conjurors and damned witches all,
Example take by my unhappy fall :
Give not your souls and bodies unto hell,
See that the smallest hair you do not sell.

DB. JOHN FAUSTUS. 99

But hope in Christ his kingdom you may gain,
Where yon shall never fear snch mortal pain ;
Forsake the Devil, and all his crafty ways,
Embrace true Faith that never more decays.

In the Faustus of George Borrow, which is a wild re-
vengeful satire on Popes, Protestants, Kings, People, and
Authors, we find that the Doctor visits England-^nay, in-
deed, that he is more disgusted with our country than with
any other. " Not all the charms of the blooming English-
women could keep him any longer in this cursed isle,
which he quitted with hatred and disgust, for neither in
France nor in Germany had he seen crimes committed
with so much coolness and impunity." As they leave
the island, the Devil venfe a prophecy Mid gives an opinion
on us English which, seeing that it is well to be despised
of the Devil, one may venture to extract : —

*' These people will groan for a time beneath the yoke
of despotism, they will then sacrifice one of their kings
on the scaffold of freedom, in order that they may sell them-
selves to his successor for gold and titles. In hell there
is very little respect paid to these gloomy islanders, who
would suck the marrow from all the putrid carcases in the
universe if they thought they could find gold in the bones.
They boast of their morality and despise all nations, yet
if you were to place what you call virtue in one scale, and
vice with twopence in the other, they would forget their
morality and pocket the money. They talk of their
honour and integrity, but never enter into a treaty without
a firm resolution of breaking it, as soon as a farthing can

100 VABIA.

be gained bj so doing. After deatb they inhabit the
most pestilential marsh in the kingdom of darkness, and
their souls are scourged without mercj. None of the
other damned wiU.haye anything to do with them. If the
inhabitants of the continent could do without sugar and
coffee, the sons of proud England would soon return to the
state in which they were when Julius CaBsar, Canute of
Denmark, and WiUiam the Conqueror did them the honour
to invade them."

Faustus visits the planets, and in Venus amongst other
euriosities meets with women who do not spoil their figures
by bearing children, but depositing eggs in the sun so
hatch them. The Doctor runs through the usual vicious,
foolish course, but at last the twenty-four years expire, and
Mephistopheles in a jovial humour thus accosts him : —

" Come, my Faustus, you have had your career, and a
lewd and merry one it has been ; do not act the coward at
the end."

Which request is indeed of no more comfort than Jack
Ketch offered to a highwayman. The Doctor, seeing no
escape, gives a grand banquet, tells his friends his &te,
and —

*' As the clock struck twelve, the Devil and Gasthomio
appeared ; Faustus made a stout resistance, uttering the
most piercing cries, but the demons soon mastered him ;
when the latter, taking him upon his pitchfork, flew away
with him in a storm of thunder and hghtning."

After this very bare prose, the poetry of Marlowe must

DB. JOEN FAUSTUS. 101

strike everyone. When about to die^ the FauBtus of this
great play utters this fine soliloquy : —

O Faostiu !

Now hast thou but one bare hour to live,

And then thou must be damned perpetually.

Stand still, thou ever moving spheres of heaven.

That time maj cease and midnight never come ;

Fair nature's eye rise, rise again and make

Perpetual day ; or let this hour be but a year,

A month, a week, a natoral day.

That Faustus may repent and save his soul.

O lente lente eurriie nocti* egui!

The stars move still, time runs, the clock will strike,

The Devil will come, and Faustus must be damned.

Then follows a scene of wonderful horror, extracted in the
" Dramatic Specimens" of Charles Lamb, who speaks of
it with a delicate and sweet appreciation. The soul of
Faustus is borne away ; and in the morning the scholars
find in his study his mangled limbs, which they gather up
for decent burial, and as they go out the solemn chorus
pronounces his epitaph : —

Cut is the branch that might have grown fall straight

And burned is Apollo's laurel bough

That some time grew within this learned man.

Faustus is gone ; regard his hellish fall

Whose fiendfal fortune may exhort the wise

Only to wonder at unlawful things,

Whose deepness doth entice such forward wits.

To practise more than heavenly power permits.

Such is the story of our English Faustus. The legend
in Germany seems so suited to the Teutonic mind that it

102 VABIA.

will never be forgotten. The amount of literature, critical,
descriptive, or romantic, expended on the legend is in
itself prodigious. It seems that, as an embodiment of the
history of one who yielded to temptation and finally paid
the penalty of his weakness and wickedness, the story is
admirably suited for the purposes of the satirist or the
moralist, while the variety of scenes and the vast scope
given for the working of the machinery of the romance
have been at once perceived by the inventive and poetic
minds of every age. Hence, starting from almost fresh
standpoints, Goethe and Bailey have, in Faust and Festus,
produced poems each of'which bears not only the impress
of the author's mind, but also of the age in which he lived.
" The intended theme of Goethe's Faust," says Coleridge,
" is the consequences of a misology, or hatred and de-
preciation of knowledge caused by an originally intense
thirst for knowledge baffled. But a love of knowledge
for itself, and pure ends would never produce such mis-
ology, but only a love of it for base and unworthy pur-
poses." Thus philosophically viewing the great cause, it
is not to be wondered at, that before Coleridge had seen
any part of Gt)ethe's Faust,* though of course when I was
familiar enough with Marlowe's, I conceived and drew up
the plan of a drama which was to be, to my mind, what
the Faust was to Goethe's. My Faust was old Michael

* ''The poem was first published in 1790, and forms the com-
mencement of the seventh volume of Goethe's Schrifimy Wkn
und Leipzigy bey S, Stad wtd G, J, GoicheTi, 1 790."— Cbferut^f

'6te»

bfi

DB. JOHN FAUSTUS. 103

Soott ; a much better and more likely original than Faust."
Coleridge then enters into a sketch of his plot, and the
similarity between it and that of Goethe is remarkable.
EGb hero does not love knowledge for itself — ^for its own
exceeding great reward, but in order to be powerful.
" This poison speck infects his mind from the be^nning."
Alas, a poison speck infecting too many minds. Im-
prisoned by the priests, and as he feels unjustly, for five
years, he eyentually escapes and begins his great revenge.
He turns to witchcraft, and at last tries to raise the devil,
and the devil comes at his call. " My devil," writes Cole-
ridge, ^^ was to be, like Goethe's, the universal humourist,
who should make all things vain and nothing worth, by a
perpetual collation of the great with the little in the pre-
sence of the Infinite. I had many a trick for him to play,
some better, I diink, than any in Faust." In the mean-
time Michael is miserable, power does not bring happiness,
and he has to keep the devil perpetually employed by im-
posing the most extravagant tasks, but one thing is to
the devil as easy as another. ^' What next Michael ? is
repeated every day with the most imperious servility." In
the end Coleridge had made Michael Scott triumphant,
and '^ poured peace into his soul in the conviction of salva-
tion to sinners through God's grace."

Many are the works projected or dreamt of by the fertile
brains of English authors, the non-completion of which we
have sadly to regret, and not the least to be deplored is
•this intended drama of Coleridge. One remark its study
has won for us which is worth pondering ; his devil ^' makes

104 VAEIA.

all things vain and nothing worth by a perpetual collation
of the great with the small in the presence of the Infinite/'
This is an old and yet ever new trick of the would-be
philosophical sneerers^ and no one could have better ex-
posed the sophistry of those who use it than Coleridge.
But it is by no means yet played out; indeed we may
imagine that in succeeding centuries Dr. Johann Eaustus
will oft start up^ a fine modem gentleman, with old-new
sneers at the priesthood, at a belief in goodness, virtue,
and God ; and that Mephistopheles, shaped according to
the fashion of the times, will captivate the minds of poetic
youth, by his bold wickedness, his hardihood towards the
Almighty, and his contempt of the creature of whose
damnation he is the agent.

As we look in the British Museum at the beautiful
type, ink, and printing of the Mazarine Bible, so di£B.cult
to an unpractised eye to be distinguished from a manuscript,
which was the first production of Gutenberg and Johann
Eaust, we can understand why the puzzled scribes and
illuminators put their heads together to slander the pro-
ducer. Not comprehending his process, they must have
believed that the Devil aided one who could produce one
hundred bibles or psalters in less than half the time in
which they could produce one. May we not, then, fairly
suppose that, after all, the printer and not the Doctor was
the nucleus around which the most enticing fable of mo-
dern times has been gathered ? Two facts are certain —
both the Eausts lived about the same period, and both
bore the same Christian name.

QFEVEDO

k«^

BOOKS CONSULTED.

SttmondCs Higtorieal View of the LUeratwre of the South of Emnpe,
Translated by Thomas Boscoe, Bohn, 1846.

B<naerwek*8 (DrecL) HUtxtry of Spanieh Literature, Bogae, 1847.

HaUam^s Introduction to the Literature of Europe in the 15<A» I6th,
and 17 th centuries. Fourth edition. John Murray, 1854.

History of Spanish Literature^ wiA OriticiMms on partieular Works,
^. By George Ticknor. Vol. II. Kew Edition. John Murray,
1855.

The Visions of JDom Francisco de Quevedo Vittegast Knight of the
Order of St. James. Made English by Sir Boger L'Estrange,
Knt. The 11th edition corrected. London, printed byW. B.
fbr Richard Saie, near Grays-Inn Gate in Holboum, 1715. (5th
edition, G. B. L., in 1673.)

The Comical Works of Francis de Quevedo, containing the Night
Adventurer f the Life of Paul the Spanish Sharper, ^c. Translated
from the Spanish by J. Stevens. London, 1707.

J7te Controversy cAout Resistance and Non'resisUmee cKscussed in
Moral and Political Seflections on Marcus Brutus, who slew Julius
Ctesar. Written in Spanish by D. F. de Q. Y. Translated into
English and published in defence of Dr. Henry Sachererel, by
order of a noble lord who yoted in his behalf. London, 1710.

Obras de D, Francisco Quevedo' Villegas Coleccion eompiUta, corri-
geda ordenadh 4 iUustrata por Don A. Fernandez Gueira y Orhe
{BibUoteoa de Autores Etpanoles.) Tom, 22, &c 1849.

Obras Escogidcu de D, F. de Quevedo y ViUegas, con notae y una
noticia de su vida y escritos por Don Eugenia de Oehoa, Paris.
Obras serias, obras Jocosas, obras po^tieas, 1842.

QTTETEDO.

A.D. 1580-1645.

all the weapons of the human mtellect
latiie is perhaps the keenest and that which
ospireB the most dread, Of aU, also, its
iffecta have been the widest and the most
beneficial. Happilj ibr us, none but good men have been
snpremelj gifted with this tremendous power. We do
not saj that AristopbiuieB, Horace, Terence, Persins, or
Juvenal were the be»t of men ; or that, speaking of modem
times, BabelaJs, Cervantes, Queredo, Swift, Pope, or
Uoh^re were saints. Satteti, hotj men, that sense of the
word will not hold with them; naj, even if judged h^ the
highest possible standard of excellence, they nere but
fhul and feultj men ; as weak as some of those whom
thej condemned : but we do think that thej, like David,
had continual impulses towarda wisdooi, goodness, and
truth; that thej often embraced these impulses, and that
thej maintained a very high standard of honesty through
poverty and persecution ; that they possessed a courage

108 VAEIA.

which never gave way ; a spirit and a sense of their own
dignity which kept them fix)m heing hase; an ever-re-
curring love of truth and nature ; a helief in the beauty of
humanity, and a wonderful boldness, which constantly
urged them to speak out and smite dishonesty, impurity,
and baseness, even in high places and in the breasts of
the great and powerful of the world. "Without these
feelings, which have of themselves something of the heroic,
a true satirist cannot exist; for a satirist is not to be
degraded to the rank of a scandal-monger, who retails the
stories of a village, or the fatuv pas of a court : but he is
to be regarded as a large-souled well-wisher to humanity,
who, speaking the truth with sharp severity, places it in
that Ught which, if it pains the guilty, yet awakens him
to the enormity of his villanies, and makes him hate the
crime which he has hitherto loved.

It has happened, however, by a natural consequence,
that satire is the most dangerous of all weapons to him
who uses it. It is a hiltless sword which, though it
pierces the antagonist, cuts the hands of him who wields
it. A turn for satire verse has ruined more poets than
one. The truth itself does not please at all times, and it
is certain that truth, sharply told, always wounds. If
from the lips of Divinity it could only urge those who
heard it to ensnare and slay the speaker, we may be sure
that from the mouth of mortality its proximate effects
must be the same. We find this in every case. Defoe
imprisoned and driven half mad ; Swift in disgrace break-
ing his proud heart ; Babelais forced to conceal his ideas

qUEVEDO. 109

•

amidst filth and zanjism ; Cervantes begging his bread ;
Fielding without a friend, Quevedo in a dungeon. Well
may Johnson break forth into strong melancholy verse in
his imitation of Juvenal ; well may he enumerate nothing
but miseries, as he cries out —

What varioiu ills the scholars life assail,
Toil, envy, want, the patron, and the jail.

This incessant toil and thought beget little success ; then
comes the pale envy and the biting cares; then the degra-
dation of seeking a patron ; and lastly, the sad end — the
patron, and the jail. In the life which is before us we
shall find these wayside marks precisely in the succession
in which the noble verse of Johnson has placed them.

The literature of the Spaniards is but imperfectly known
to many Englishmen. A great name has overshadowed
a host of inferior, but of excellent writers. Cervantes is
popular and appreciated, but Calderon, Lope de Vega,
Gareilasco, Ponce de Leon, and Quevedo, authors every
one of them worthy of study, are known but by name. It
is to the history and great work of the latter that we wish
to direct attention.

The era of Philip the Second of Spain resembled, in
too many respects, our own. Catholicism and that shade
worshipped by enthusiasts, monkish devotees. Catholic
unity, were rampant. The question of the Immaculate
Conception would, if then propounded, have been settled
by a Bull. The Inquisition flourished in all its glory (?),
and superstition and luxury went, as they always will and

110 VAEIA.

m

do, hand in hand. The latter vice hore, perhaps, the largest
flower, for it had heen sown in rich ground, and the trea-
sures of the conquered Indies, the pearls and gold of Mexico,
and the silver of Peru, were poured like* liquid manure to
nourish its root. The throne of Spain was, at that time,
the richest in the world, its court or courts the most luxu-
rious and debauched. We say courts advisedly. It had one
at Peru, another at Mexico, a third in Sicily, a fourth at
Naples, and each viceroy tried to outvie his fellows in
show, pomp, and bravery. The manners and morals of
these courts had corrupted the old institutions of the de-
scendants of the Cid. There were too much ease and
luxury, too much gold, too much grandeur ; the country
presented all those signs of decadence which M. Ledru
Bollin had seen in England, and which M. de Mont-
alembert has endeavoured to explain away. The nobles
presented little but vanity, idleness, intrigue, love of pre-
cedent, ceremony, and contempt for the feelings of the
people. Moral sense was all but extinguished: riches
alone were worshipped. The throne was merely the altar
of an empty idol, of a monarchy weakened and buried in
superstition, and covered by the contempt of all who were
noble, good, or free. Favourites reigned, and the basest
dispensed favours from the polluted but still worshipped
" Fountain of Honour."

Abroad, in the country, the same signs presented them-
selves. The artisan was poor and degraded, the peasant
crushed and ignorant, the money-lender flourishing and
rich; gamblers and speculators in plenty, the intriguer

QUEVEDO. Ill

sure of his fortune, tax-gatherers and farmers-general fat-
tening on the gains of iniquity, the exchequer of the state
beggared, the middle classes and lower aristocracy poverty
stricken, and ready to sell their daughters— either through
the Church or without her intervention — to him, not who
loYed them most, but who had the strongest arm or the
longest purse. It is the old history of downfalls. Eome
presented the same signs, and farther back Egypt and
Assyria could, did we know all, tell the same story.

But these signs are not heheld with perfect placidity
by all. However blind a government or a nation may be,
there are those whose hearts are pure, and whose vision is
keen ; those who would seek to stay her in her downward
course. Unfortunately the mass is too blind and foolish,
the people perish for lack of knowledge, the reins are in
the hands of those who are desperate and wicked, and
they who would check the mad career are mocked at like
Liot, or deemed mad like Cassandra. Quevedo was one
of these.

The lives of men, such as he was, are often much more
romantic than romance itself, so that the apothegm of
Lord Byron, anent truth being strange, stranger than
fiction, is completely verified. " If you wish for a ro-
mance," cries a French editor of one of Quevedo's works,
" you shall have one," — ^a romance, indeed, dramatic
enough, but sad, deep, and strange as a tragedy by
JSschylus.

Don Francisco Gomez de Quevedo of Villegas was bom
at Madrid in the year 1580. His family, which was, as

112 VABIA.

every Spaniard's is^ illustrious in its descent, had been
attached to the court, and its members had held several
appointments. Both the parents of the future satirist
died whilst he was young ; but his relative and guardian,
Don Jerome de Yillanueva, placed him in the university of
Alcala, where he made rapid progress, making himself to
be regarded as a perfect prodigy of learning; knowing
Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, Italian, and French.
Nor were his studies ended here : he dipped — ^for to have
mastered all these thoroughly is beyond mortal power-^
into the studies of theology, law, philosophy, the bdles
lettres, natural philosophy, and medicine. No wonder is it
that his college was proud of him, and that the fondness of
his admirers gifted him also with every accomplishment
which could be possessed by the finest cavalier and gentle-
man in the world. In history and biography, just as in the
commencement of inartistic novels, we often find the writers
carried away by an intense admiration of their heroes.
The character of the admirable Crichton seems to suit
every one. Thus our quaint little Quevedo, with a per-
petually active brain, a malformation in his feet, which
renders walking or any martial exercise painful to him,
but with the pride of a high-bom Spaniard, is not only
represented as a learned philosopher, but as '^ an arbiter
in disputed points of honour, preserving with the greatest
delicacy the parties who consulted him from any compro-
mise of character, highly accomplished in arms, and pos-
sessing a courage and an address beyond that of the most
skilful masters." Thus far M. de Sismondi, who does

QUEVEW. 113

not forget an editorial flourish about ''the sanguinary
ordeal/' meaning, we presume, if he mean anything, that
Queyedo was an accomplbhed duellist, and in addition
to his other acquirements, knew the "punto reverso,
the stocata," and all the practice and terms of an art
which taught him to wield his long Spanish rapier, with
its channelled blade, quite as skilfully as he did his
pen.

The reason for all this, which we cannot but regard as
exaggeration, follows. The high souled little man, full
of courage and chivalry, being a poet, and a Spaniard to
boot, walking along the streets of Madrid, is attracted by
the cries of a woman in distress. Bushing to the spot, he
finds a lady struggling with a burly cavalier ; he rescues
her, draws his sword, has a few hurried passes,, probably
with one who knew but ill how to defend himself, and
leaves the lady free, but his adversary, by an unlucky
lunge, dead in those midnight streets of Madrid. Que-
vedo, sheathing his bloody rapier, and bending down over
the body, turns the dying man to the moonlight, and
recognizes the face of one of the most powerful nobles of
Spain. One glance is enough for him. Henceforth,
adieu the reputation of the scholar and the poet : welcome
that of the duellist and brawler : he has kiQed his man,
and must fly. With a strange pang at his heart, a deep
regret, relieved perhaps a little by the thought that this
misfortune arose in his defence of a lady, who will, we
may be sure, hereafter defend his reputation, Quevedo
gets him gone, and flies to Messina ; the Duke d'Ossuna,

114 VABIA.

whom be sligbtlj knew, haying been appointed Viceroy of
Sicily, and holding grand court therein.

To a man of wit, learning, and skill, this forced retire-
ment was not so much a banishment as the beginning of
his fortunes. The fame of Queyedo had preceded him ;
and either at that court, remote from the capital, was
preseryed the ancient yirtue of giying places to men who
really could fill them, or the friendship of the Duke
d'Ossuna preyailed, and Queyedo suddenly noounted into
the seat of the secretary. The skill and wisdom of the
man soon became apparent. He was, in a little space,
the yery right-hand of the Duke. He trayelled from
Genoa to Nice, from Nice to Venice, from Venice to
Madrid, from Palermo to Bome, carrying on important
negotiations, charged with dozens of state secrets, and
with affairs of state, all of which he skilfully executed.
His life, as the life of such a man in such a time naturally
would be, was filled with adyentures. At Nice, being in
possession of a state secret, he suddenly freighted a ship
and sayed the family of his host, who had been proscribed
by the Prince Charles Emanuel. At Venice he became
not only a witness, but an actor, in that pretended con-
spiracy against the senate which furnished our poet Otway
with the plot of his tragedy, " Venice Preserved,^* His-
tory has hitherto belieyed in the actual existence of the
plot, not of the tragedy, but of the Spaniards against
Venice ; but M. Guerra y Orbe has proyed, from au-
thentic sources, that the conspiracy only existed in the
cunning brains of the Venetian senators. The truth seems

QJJEVEDO. 115

to be that the seignorj^ doubting and mistrusting the
influence which Spain was acquiring in her state affairs,
imagined a cabal, found ready dupes, spies, and denoun-
cers ; imprisoned in oubliettes, or assassinated, or cast into
the sea, all to whom their secrets were known, kept amongst
themselves a most profound silence, and left, in the face
of Europe, Spain and the Duke d'Ossuna guilty of an
abortive and odious conspiracy, thus rendering free their
state from further foreign influence, and finding through-
out the whole of Europe a generous and simple credence,
and in Fra Paolo a slavish and complaisant historian.
Such is one of the curiosities of history which time and
patient research bring to light ! But such is the power
of genius over truth, that it is not more certain that Mac-
beth will be judged from the pen of Shakespeare, and that
Eichard the Third will be ever regarded as a demi-devil
rather than a skilful and humane governor, than that the
sorrows of Belvidera and the woes of Jaffier and Pierre
will draw innumerable tears from yet unborn audiences,
and will, as heretofore, excite the hatred of the English
against the pride and treachery of Spain.

We may be assured that Quevedo, the chief secretary
of the Duke d'Ossuna, shared in his disgrace. The secre-
tary had to fly from Venice as a beggar. He reached
Naples to find his master and friend, to aid, and at last to
tire him with his good counsels, and to be dismissed. Not
long afterwards d'Ossuna was disgraced himself, lost his
vice-royalty, and died, perhaps, of pride and a broken heart.
Olivarez succeeded him.

116 VARIA.

The good fortune of Queyedo, not less than his skill
and genius, made him many enemies. He was hesides
more pleasing to the ladies of the court than he was hateful
to the nohles. He somehow acquired the name of a man
of gallantrj. To he so in the sixteenth century, and in
Spain, was to play a very dangerous game. The State
of Venice paid many an assassin to track the clever secre-
tary, and whether by land or by sea, the biographer of
Quevedo assures us his life was in danger from the
dagger of a bravo paid either by some jealous husband or
some Italian lord : all these dangers the satirist escaped,
survived the Duke d'Ossuna, and lived to refuse a proffered
secretaryship from Olivarez.

It is probable that these years, free from business and
the intrigues of court, were the happiest which Quevedo
boasted. He fell in love with a lady whose name was
Esperanza, wrote poetry to her, playing gently and prettily
on the signification of her name, was crowned with success,
married, and, after a year of great happiness, lost, as he
has told us, in admirable and affecting verses, his only
** hope." This misfortune probably made him turn with
more avidity than ever to that which had amused him in
his prosperity. He published some of his poems, and
wrote others. He must have done this largely and at
leisure; for his poetical works fiU three large volumes,
and contain, besides other specimens, upwards of one
thousand sonnets, some of them of great power and beauty.
One of them cited by Sismondi, and we believe translated
(in Bohn's edition) by Wiffen, the translator of Tasso, will
charm the reader by its sombre beauty.

QUEVEDO. 117

A Roma HpuUada en sus rtttiuu.
Buscas en Roma k Roma o peregrino ! &c.

Stranger, 'tis vain ! midst Rome thou seek'st for Rome
In vain ; thy foot is on her throne — her grave :
Her walls are dost ; Time's conquering banners wave

0*er all her hills ; hills which themselves entomb.

Tea ! the proud Aventine is its own womb ;
The royal Palatine is ruin's slave ;
And medals, mouldering trophies of the brave,

Mark but the triumphs of oblivious gloom.
Tiber alone endures, whose ancient tide
Worshipped the Queen of Cities on her throne.

And now, as round her sepulchre, complains.
Rome 1 the stedfast grandeur of thy pride
And beauty, all is fled ; and that alone

Which seemed 90 fleet and fugitive remavw I

Few sonnets in any language^ it seems to us, can sur-
pass this in melancholy and reflective grandeur.

Next to his sonnets the larger portion of poems which
Quevedo has given us consists of what he calls '^ romances."
They are, indeed, short stanzas, and resemhle nothing in
the English language, unless it he those hiting verses of
Swift on his own death, or the more playful melancholy
and irony of Hood. He is very fond of subjecting his
own fortune to the microscope, and he examines and turns
it over with such quaint reflections, such good-humoured
philosophy, that we cannot help at once loving and admiring
the man. We shall shortly have to revert to one of these
*' romances :" at present, we must follow the history of
the author.

His pursuit of literature, which— such was the nature

118 VAJilA.

of the man — could not but with him be very earnest,
brought him into contact with many of the pseudo-litter-
ateurs of the day. It has always been the fate of men of
satiric genius to make enemies amongst their own craft,
and, as Quevedo did not hesitate to attack and blame
those who were ridiculous and yicious in their style, he
soon had a host of enemies amongst the poets^ A school
had been formed about this time, that is, from 1615 to
1621, the style of which was full of false sentiments, long
words, and hyperbole. It seems to us to have been the
prototype of that Delia Oruscan nonsense which Gifbrd
in our fathers' days destroyed by his Baviad and MsBviad.
Gongora and Marini were at the head of this regiment of
false poets, and as in Spain when the Inquisition flourished
it was tio difficult thing to attack a man's faith, some
ridiculous disputes about the patron saint of Spain were
foisted into the quarrel; and Quevedo, attacked on all
sides, succumbed to his enemies. An old inquisitor,
Aliaga, the poet and painter Pacheco, and a '^Gk)ngorist"
Montalyan, Joined their forces, and between them manu-
factured a book full of bitterness and scandal, purposing
to bring to light the secret life of Quevedo, wherein they
dub him a ** heretic, a thief, a robber, a liar without faith,
honesty^ or character; a debauchee spotted over with
vices." Many of these qualities have been imputed to
Quevedo by his biographers, but it does not appear by
what authority, if we except that of this slanderous book.
The " thief" and " heretic " was, at the very time of this
slander; meditating a noble and bold deed. The king-

QUEVEDO. 119

dom was exhausted, the treasury empty, national industry
discouraged, the priests rampant, the king in a state of
servitude, the favourites in full possession of every power
they could wish, quietly pocketing the finances and fat-
tening upon the falling state. Quevedo, with a simplicity
which is naturally ever the concomitant of enthusiasm,
believed in the king, and contrived to place under his
plate at dinner a copy of yerses, folded into the form of a
petition, which revealed these crimes and suggested a
remedy. These verses were without insolence or irony,
perhaps without much polish or epigram, but earnest,
truthful, and full of a biting simplicity. The style, the
measure, the very boldness of the verses, proclaimed the
author ; but it was to a woman that Quevedo owed his
betrayal. A certain lady of the court, a Donna Margarita
— " una astuta mujer y de las famosas de la eorte " —
informed Olivarez of the secret, and one cold winter's
night in 1639, the Alguazils of the court seized Quevedo,
deprived him of his papers, and for a second time in his
life he found himself a prisoner. In the years 1620-21-
22 he had, indeed, been confined to his estates, but this
latter imprisonment was a thousand times more tyrannical
and severe. He was declared to be the author of an
atrocious libel against good morals and government ; was
thrown into the dungeon of a convent, where a stream of
water passed under his bed, producing a pernicious damp-
ness and malaria. His estates were confiscated, and,
during his imprisonment, he was reduced to subsist by
common charity.

120 VABIA.

This was not all, Quevedo was old, nearly sixty years
of age. The dampness and harsh treatment had the
worst possible effeet upon him. He fell dangerously ill ;
but his enemies, wishing nothing so much as his death,
denied him the *Muxury" «f a physician. His teeth
rotted in his head ; his whole frame was full of aches and
agues ; his flesh broke out into great sores : the imprisoned
satmst cauterised these himself.

When they whom he has offended get the better of a
clever man, there is little or no question as to their treat-
ment of him. He must expiate, before their dulness, the
crime of his superior knowledge. He must work out his
certain punishment. There is nothing so cruel as unmiti-
gated stupidity when offended. It is not pleasant to dwell
upon these things ; we must therefore leaye Quevedo to
his fate, and, whilst pitying the man, admire the constancy
of the poet. True, poetic genius finds sermons in the stones
and consolation in the walls of a jail. If, on account of its
sensitive nature, it experiences more sorrow and trouble,
and feels acutely trials which leave the callous man of the
world scatheless, it also finds a precious jewel in adversity,
and an ointment more healing than the balm of Gilead in
the contemplation of its trials. The fable of the ancients
has pourtrayed this very beautifully, and the laws of nature
show us a poetic analogy. You may strike upon the
stubborn oak, and the blow will produce no effect ; nay,
if you cut into its heart the wound only remains dry and
ghastly ; but if you wound the poplar, the nature of the
tree is such that it will weep and distil its innermost

QUEVEDO, 121

juices, and by its own tears at once heal the wound and
form a beautiful and precious gum. So it is with the
satirist and humorous poet. Quevedo bemoans indeed his
own hard fate, and Thomas Hood, whose manner sometimes
reminds one of the Spaniard, comments upon his hard
fortune, but both do it in such a merry brave style that
their verses have become a consolation for thousands of
others. In the 16th " Eomance " of the book Thalia we
find Quevedo exhibiting this manliness and courage very
remarkably, and so finely that we shall do a benefit to the
reader by quoting them : —

. . . My planet has looked on
With such a dark and scowling eye

My fortune, if my ark were gone,
Might lend my pen as black a dye.

No lucky or unlacky turn

Did ever fortune seem to play,
But, ere I'd time to laugh or mourn,

'Twas sure to turn another way.

Ye childless great who want an heir,
Leave all your vast domains to me.

And Heaven will bless you with a fair,
Alas, and numerous progeny.

They bear my effigy about

The village as a charm of power.
If chthed, to bring the sunthme out,

If naked f to bring doum the shower.

Should bravos chance to lie perdu
To break some happy lover's head,

I am their man, whilst he in view
His beauty serenades in bed.

122 VABIA.

A loosened tile is sure to fall

In contact with my head below
Just as I doff my hat. 'Mong all

The crowd a stone still lays me low.

My doctor's remedies alone

Ne*er reach the cause for which they*re given,
And if I ask my iriends a loan,

They wish the poet's soul in Heaven I

The poor man's eye amidst the crowd

Still turns its asking looks on mine ;
Jostled by all the rich and proud,

No path is clear whate'er my line.

Where'er I go I miss my way.

I lose, still lose, at every game ;
Ko friend I ever had would stay,

No foe but still remained the same.

I get no water out at sea.

Nothing but water at my inn ;
3£y pleatureif like my unne, must be

sail mixed with that should NOT be in.

This is the last specimen we shall give of Queredo's
numerous poems ; it is scarcely, indeed, as a poet that he
is rememhered : his sonnets are, as we have seen, some
of them very nohle, and are evidently the production of a
nohle soul. That of Quevedo had need to have been
noble and constant too. He had smitten vice in high
places ; his satire and the revelations of court life which
he had given were not forgotten. He expiated that worst
of crimes in a fallen age, the crime of wishing to make
his country better, by an imprisonment of four years.

qXfEVEDO. 123

every day of which was a martyrdom. He underwent
this punishment with a never-failing hravery and con-
stancy; he turned calmly to that consolation which is
found ahove *, he wrote religious works, the " Life of the
Apostle Paul," and an ''Introduction to a Eeligious
Life;" so, let us hope that hoth he, as well as others,
could say that —

. • . The path of sorrow, and that path alone,
Leads to the world where sorrow is unknown.

One of his religious treatises is curious. There is a trea-
tise upon good and had fortune hy Seneca, ' De Eemediis
utriusque FortunsB,' which ahounds in consolatory and phi-
losophic views of life, views so pure and elevated, that it is
with difficulty that one can helieve them the work of any
hut a Christian. Quevedo translated this, and added an
additional chapter to each, wherein it is easy to see that
he is speaking to, and consoling himself rather than the
reader in his misfcntunes. These works are evidently the
work of an earnest Christian ; yet we shall find that, earnest
as he was, he hated priestcraft with a royal hate.

At last the King of Spain died, and Olivarez, his ra-
pacious minister, fell from power. The few friends of
Quevedo pressed for an examination : it was granted, and
the imprisonment was declared to he a mistake. The real
author of the verses, which were attributed to Quevedo,
was found to be a monk ! That is the way the Govern-
ment accounted for their spite and injustice: the poor
poet, broken in health but not in spirit, was set free.

124 VAItlA.

Madrid was thenceforth hateful to him ; and, for peace
and quietude for religious consolation and reflection, during
the last few weeks of his life, Quevedo dragged himself to
his little estate in the Sierra Morena, where his solitary
dwelling, the tower of St. John the Abhot (Torre de Juan
Ahad)y stood, grim, weather-worn, and half-iniined. The
old walls were of red stone, the construction itself Moorish,
the windows broken and dilapidated, the court-yards over-
grown with aloes, the walls of the little castle clothed with
shrubs and yerdure. His poetry, the source of all his
woe and all his joys, did not forsake him in this last
retreat. He drew between himself and his old tower a
touching and eyident comparison. He wandered, when
he could find strength, about its ancient walks ; he him-
self was but a ruin. He had been worsted in the struggle
with his enemies, he was weak and paralysed, he had lost
his left eye through the miasma of his prison, and he was
nearly blinded.

Dark mined tower, my sad and last retreat,

Where daily I mine own wrecked shadow greet ;

Around me silence, in my heart the grave,

No longer through my heart old passions rave ;

Desire, love, regret, ambition cease

Their constant babblings now. O leave but peace.

Peace lights my soul and makes my heart serene.

When thinking what I've felt and what I've seen.

A poet once, I rivalled the gay birds ;

But, oh I I've shed more tears than uttered words I

These are said to be his last verses. He died a few
days after writing them in his lonely tower of the Sierra

QtTEVEDO. 125

Morena, on the 8th of Septemher, 1645. " Apr^s tout,"
cries his French hiographer, *^ cette vie est complete ; on
serait f&ch^ quelle se fKit ^ooul^ autrement."

Complete, indeed, hut complete as the lives of too many
men of genius have heen* Complete in suffering, in sorrow,
in joy, in tears, in smiles. They run through the whole
circle of thought, they experience the whole world of feeling,
hefore they are permitted to purify themselves hy trial, and
to come, humhly, penitently, and quietly, to the throne of
that great power, who has told us long, long ago, how
futile and empty this world is, and has hidden us, too often
without effect, to wean ourselves from it.

The translation which we have in English of a few
of the visions of Quevedo is the only acquaintance, we
believe, that the unlettered Englishman has with him,
and that is scanty and incorrect. An incident in one
of these visions is noticed by Cowper in the following
lines : —

Quevedo, as he tells his soher tale.

Asked, when in hell, to see the royal jail ;

Approved the method in all other things,

** But where, good sir, do jou. confine your kings?'*

" There," said the guide, ** the group is full in view/'

** Indeed," replied the sage, " there are but few."

The sooty janitor the charge disdained.

** Few, fellow I There are aU that ever reigned.**

Sir Koger L'Estrange, a man of very quick and vivid
genius himself, and the first of that now illustrious body,
" the gentlemen of the press," making literature his pro-

126 VARIA.

fession, ^as too anxious to get money from tlie booksellers
to be very careful about bis translation, NeTertbeless>
tbere is a free, nervous feeling, and perfect appreciation
about bis rendering wbicb makes it capital reading. In
tbe year 1715 it bad passed tbrougb eleven editions, and
was a popular work ; but, in reading it, you would scarcely
know it to be a translation, for Sir Koger batb not only
turned tbe words, but wbere be can, tbe ideas and places ;
tbus tbe Prado at Madrid becomes Pall Mall, tbe Spanish
place of execution Tyburn, &c, but it loses none of the
smartness of Quevedo. Tbe manner in which tbe visions
take place is much the ^ame as in other works of the
same nature. Tbe author happens to see some priests dis-
possess a man held by the devil : he holds converse with
the devil, and afterwards falls asleep and dreams that he
is in tbe infernal regions. Of course therein he meets all
sorts of persons : ladies of quality, kings, doctors, poets,
fiddlers, tailors, judges, lawyers, scriveners, tradespeople,
and pastrycooks. Curiously enough, he is very hard upon
these poor pastrycooks, and he sends them quietly to their
punishment in company " with a cook that was troubled
in conscience for putting off cats for hares." The book
is, in fact, a very humorous satire or invective against all
trades and professions. No one escapes. Like Jacques, in
" As You Like It," Quevedo cries : —

Give me leave
To speak my mind, and I will through and through
Cleanse the foul body of the infected world —
If they will patiently receive my medicine.

QUEVEDO. 127

Hallam has remarked that, although Quevedo was a
variouB writer, he is now only rememhered hy his prose.
'' His visions and his life of the great Tacano were early
translated, and they are hotter than anything in comic
romance, except ' Don Quixote,' that has heen produced
in the 15th century. And yet this commendation is not
a high one. In the picturesque style the life of the great
Tacano is tolerahly amusing, hut Quevedo, like others,
has long heen surpassed. The Suenos, or visions, are
hotter, they show spirit and sharpness, with some origi-
nality of invention." This is hut faint praise. Bouterwek
speaks more highly. '^ Lucian," says he, '^ furnished him
with the original idea of satirical visions ; hut Quevedo's
were the first of their kind in modem literature. Owing
to frequent imitations their faults are no longer disguised
with the charm of novelty, and even their merits have
ceased to interest."

The translation of the '^ Suenos" was undertaken in Eng-
land hy a " person of quality ;" under which title we always
are led to suspect that some nameless hookseller's hack is
at work. In this instance, however, the title is a true one.
The person was one of certain quality, heing no less than
Sir Eoger L'Estrange, who, as Hallam says, takes great
liherties with his text, and ^' endeavours to excel it in art
hy means of frequent interpolation." "Without pausing
to note the curious use of the word " excel " hy Hallam,
we may as well say that the words " made English," ap-
plied to Sir Eoger's translation, really mean all that they
can he supposed to mean. One is no longer in Madrid,

128 VARIA.

but in London ; we hear of Gray's Inn and its pump, of
the Temple, of the Exchange, Hide-Park, as he spells
it, and Spring Gardens. This method adds yivacitj and
freshness to a somewhat sombre work, and it maj be de-
fended ; certainly the English reader gets thereby a more
lively idea of the true spirit and scope of the " Visions."
Of course as an actual translation this English work, which
has been so o^n reprinted, must be regarded as a failure.
*^ All the translations that I have seen are bad," writes
Mr. Ticknor, '' the best is that of L'Estrange, or at least
the most spirited ; but still L'Estrange is not always faith-,
fill when he knew the meaning, and he is sometimes un-
faithful from ignorance. Indeed the great popularity of
his translations was probably owmg in some degree to the
additions he boldly made to his text, and the frequent
accommodations he hazarded of its jests to the scandal and
tastes of his times by allusions entirely local and English."
This is no doubt true, and Mr. Ticknor has been very
lenient to L'Estrange for the yast liberties which he has
taken with his author; but he might have said more in
praise of the masculine and nervous style. Sir Boger's
English is very natural and colloquial, and better than
many far deeper scholars could hare written. Hence
the translation reads pleasantly, and soon became popular.
Here are specimens of it. The first extract is from the
beginning of the book, "the Alguazil, or Catchpole,
possest :" —

" Going t'other Day to hear Mass at a Convent in this
Town, the Door it seems was shut, and a World of People

QUEVEDO. 129

pressing and begging to get in. Upon Enquiry What
the Matter was ; thej told me of a Demoniac to be exor^
cised; (or dispossest) which made me put in for one^ to
see the Ceremony, though to little Purpose ; for when I
had half smothered myself in the Throng, I was e'en glad
to get out again, and bethink myself of my Lodging.
Upon my way homeward, at the Street's-end, it was my
fortune to meet a familiar Friend of mine of the same
Conyent, who told me as before. Taking notice of my
Curiosity, he bad me follow him ; which I did, 'till with
his Passe-jpar-tout, he brought me through a little back-
door into the Church, and so into the Vestry : Where we
saw a wretched kind of a dog-look'd Fellow, with a Tippet
about his Xeck, as ill-ordered as you'd wish ; his Cloaths
all in tatters, his Hands bound behind him, roaring and
tearing after a most hideous manner. Bless me, quoth I,
(crossing my self) what hare we here ? This (says the
good Father who was to do the Feat) is a Man that's pos-
sest with an Evil Spirit. Tha^s a Lye, (with respect of
the Company, cryed the Devil that tormented him) for
this is not a Man possest with a Devil, but a Devil possest
with a Man ; and therefore you should do well to have a
care what you say; for it is most evident, both by the
Question and Answer, that you are but a Company of
Sots. You must understand, that we Devils, never enter
into the Body of a Catchpole, but by force, and in spight of
our Hearts ; and therefore to speak properly, you are to
say, this is a Devil catckpoVd, and not a Catchpole hede-
viVdi And, to give you your Due, you Men can deal

130 VARIA.

better with tis Devils, than with the Catchpoles ; for We
jiye from the Cross ; whereas They make use of it, for a
Cloak for their Villany.

** But though we differ thus in our Humours, we hold a
very fair Correspondence in our Offices ; If we draw Men
into Judgm^ent and Condemnation, so do the Catchpoles ;
w$ pray for an increase of Wickedness in the World, so
do they ; nay and more zealously than we ; for they make
a Livelihood of it, and we do it only for Company, And
in this the Catchpoles are worse than the Devils; they
prey upon their own Kind, and worry one another. For
our parts, we are Angels still, though black ones, and
were turn'd into Devils only for aspiring into an equality
with our Maker : Whereas the very Corruption of Man-
hind is the Generation of a Catchpole. So that, my good
Father, your labour is but lost in plying this Wretch with
Reliques ; for you may as soon redeem a Soul from Hell,
as a Prey out of his Clutches. In fine, your Algouazils
(or Catchpoles) and your Devils are both of an Order, only
your Catchpole-Devils wear Shoes and Stockings, and we
. go barefoot, after the Fashion of this reverend Father ;
and (to deal plainly) have a very hard time on't,

'* I was not a little surpriz'd to find the Devil so great
a Sophister ; but all this notwithstanding, the Holy Man
went on with his Exorcism, and to stop the Spirit's Mouth,
washt his Face with a little Holy-Water; which made
the Demoniac ten iim^es madder than before, and set him
a yelping so horridly, that it deafened the Company, and
made the very Ground under us to ti'emble. And now,

QUEVJEDO. 131

sajs he, jou may, perchance, imagine this Extravagance
to he the Eflfect of your Holy ^ Water ; but let me tell
JOU, that meer Water it self would have done the same
Thing ; for your Catchpole hates nothing in this World
like Water ; [especially that of a Oray's^Inn Pwmj^J\ "

Next follows a humorous discourse ridiculing the
silly, useless, and profane way in which the name of the
devil was and is used by many people wherewith to inter-
lard their discourse. One perusal of the following should
prevent any sensible man from repeating the offence : —

" You must give over that Eoguish way ye have got of
abusing the Devils in your Shews, Pictures and Emblems :
One while forsooth we are painted with Claws or TahnSy
like Eagles or Griffons, Another while we are drest up
with Tails ; and now and then ye shall see a Devil with
a Coxcomb, Now I will not deny but some of us may
indeed be very well taken for Hermits and Philosophers.
If you can help us in this Point, do ; and we shall be
ready to do ye one good Turn for another. I was asking
Michael Angelo here a while ago, why he drew the Devils
in his great Piece of the Last Judgment, with so many
Monkey Faces, and Jack-Pudding Postures. His Answer
was, that he followed his Fancy, without any Malice in
the World, for as then, he had never seen any Devils ; nor
(indeed) did he believe that there were any ; but he has
now learned the contrary to his cost. There's another
thing too we take extreamly ill, which is, that in your
ordinary Discourses, ye are out with your Purse presently
to every Eascal, and calling of him D^l. As for Ex-

132 . VABIA.

ample. Do you see how this Devil of a Taylor has spoil'd
my Sute? How the Devil has made me Wait? How
that Dm? has couzen'd me,4'c. Which is very ill done,
and no small disparagement .'to our Quality, to he rank'd
with Taylors : a Compai^f of Slaves, that serve us only
for Brushwood ; and they are fain to heg hard to he ad-
mitted at all : Though I confess they have Possession on
their sides, and Custoniy which is another Law : Bdng in
Possession of Theft, and stollen Goods ; they make much
more Conscience of keeping your Stuffs than your Holy-
days, grumhling and domineering at every turn, if they
have not the same respect with the Children of the Family.
Ye have another trick too, of giving every thing to the
Devil, that displeases ye ; which we cannot hut take very
unkindly. The Devil take thee, says one: a goodly
Present I warrant ye ; but the Devil has somewhat else
to do, than to take and carry away all that's given him ;
if they'll come of themselvea, let them come and welcome.
Another gives that Whelp of a Lacquey to the Devil ; hut
the Devil will have none of your LatqueySy he thanks you
for your Love ; a pack of Rogues that are commonly worse
than Devils ; and to say the truth, they are good neither
Bost nor Sodden. I give that Italian to the Devil, cryes
a third ; thank you for nothing ; For ye shall have an
Italian will chouse the Devil himself, and take him by the
Nose like Mustard. Some again will be giving a Spaniard
to the Devil ; but he has been so cruel wherever he has
got footing, that we had rather have his room than his
company."

QTTEVEDO. 133

The vision " El Sueno de las Calayeras," which repre-
sents the Last Judgment, has a certain kind of suhlime
grotesqueness ahout it which, alas, Sir Eoger- turns
only into wilder and more awkward fun. It will not
be policy, therefore, to follow his translation in the fol-
lowing extract: —

" I saw in my vision a very handsome youth towering
in the air, and sounding a trumpet ; the severity of his
face did however detract from his beauty. The very
monuments and graves all obeyed this dreadfiil call.
Scarcely had the trumpet sounded, when I perceived that
those who had been soldiers and captains rising in great
haste, for they thought they heard the signal for battle ;
behold, too, the avaricious wretches woke in fear of being
robbed ; and the epicures and idle received it as a call to
dinner or the chase.* This was easily seen by the ex-
pression of their countenances, and I perceived that the
real object of the sound of the trumpet was not understood
by any one. I afterwards saw souls flying from their
former bodies, some in disgust, some in affright. To one
body an arm was wanting, to another an eye. I could
not forbear smiling at the diversity of the figures, and
admiring that Providence which, amidst such a confusion
of limbs, prevented any one from taking the arms or the
legs of his neighbour. I observed only one burial ground

* L'Estrange did not forget his Tory instincts. He translates
this last clause, "the cavoZters cmc{ jimMi /e2/ow< believed tbej had
been going to a horse race or a hunting match.*'

134 VARIA.

where the dead seemed to he changing their heads ; and
I saw a notary (L'Estrange calls this fellow a low aUur-
neye) whose soul was not in a satisfactory state and who, hy
way of excuse, pretended that it had been changed and
was not his own. But what astonished me most was to
see the bodies of two or three tradesmen, who had so
entangled their souls, that they had got their five senses
at the end of their ^^ve fingers. When at last the whole
congregation came to understand that this was the Day of
Judgment, what a shifting and shuffling there was amongst
the wicked."

This vision, "El Sueno de las Calaveras," which
L'Estrange makes the third, is in the ^' Obras Jocosas "
the first ; it is dedicated to Count de Lemos, President of
the Indies, to whom Cervantes had dedicated the second
part of his Quijote, his Comedies, and lOther works.
The few lines which follow will afford some specimen of
the original : — " Y pasando tiempo (aunque fu^ breve),
vi k los que habian side soldados y capitanes levantarse de
los sepulcrps con ira, juz^ndola por sena de guerra : k los
avarientos con ansias y congojas, recelando algun rebato :
y los dados k vanidad y gula, con ser ^pero el son, lo
tuverion por cosa de sarao 6 caza. Esto conocia yo eu los
semblantes de cada uno, y no vi que Uegase el ruido de la
trompeta k oreja, que se persuadiese h, lo que era."

In a smoother version and more faithful translation the
real thought of the author and his deep manner of deal-
ing with his subject is seen: — "Nevertheless, when all
fairly comprehended, for there had before been doubt that

QUEVEDO. 135

this was the Day of Judgment, it was worth beholding
how the voluptuous and lascivious tried to hinder their
eyes from being found for them, so that thej might not
import into the cause witnesses against themselves, how
the malicious avoided their own tongues, and how mur^
derers and robbers seemed willing to run off their feet in
getting out of the way of their own hands. And turning
my head I saw a miser, who, having been embalmed, and
his entrails left afar off, was quietly waiting till his bowels
should arrive, whether, since the dead were to that day arise,
certain money-bags of his were to rise also ? I had great
inclination to laugh at this, but, on the other side of me
I had to pity the extreme eagerness with which a great
crowd of notaries and lawyers was rushing by, flying from
their own ears, in order to escape hearing their own sen-
tence; but none succeeded in this, except those who in
this present world had had their ears cropped off as
thieves ; but these, owing to the neglect of justice ^ were by
DO means in the majority."

Here is satire that hits hard ; indeed the six undoubted
Suenos of Quevedo are full, as Ticknor has said, of the most
truculent sarcasm, '* recklessly cast about by one to whom
the world had not been a friend, nor the world's law." All
that Quevedo has ^trritten indicates, but his Visions most
especially, a bold, honest, earnest, and somewhat careless
spirit. Those who know the world will not blame him
even now ; he hated the falsity, the cruelty, the cowardice
of society,' and he spoke against it ; the difficulty for
such a man in such an age would be not to write a satire.

136 VAEIA.

We have seen that the Spanish world was not inclined to
follow Quevedo's teachings. The corruption was too great
for it to listen to him ; and for more than two centuries
after his death the fate which he foretold, the decay which
he would have prevented, the wretched weakness and in-
testine quarrel, has come upon it. Let us, too, take heed
lest place-hunting and corruption do not send the glory of
England to whistle down the winds as they have done
that of Spain, and let us welcome all such manly, whole-
some satirists as Quevedo, taking their chastisements in
good part, mending ourselves hy their directions, not cry-
ing out upon their peevishness and ill-nature, heing
assured that they fulfil an important mission, and that the
majority of them can say of their writings, as Quevedo did
of his, — " He who rightly comprehends the morality of
this discourse shall never repent the reading of it."

MADAME J. M. B. DE LA MOTHE GUION

AND QUIETISM.

BOOKS CONSULl'ED.

L^Ame amante de 9oh DUu repreaentie daau let emblemes de HermatiuM
lingo atw te» pieux dStirif et dant eeux d*Othon Vcenita nor
V Amour diviHy avec des JIgurea aecompagn6e» de Vera, Cologne,
1716.

JUbycn Court et tres'/adle pour f aire Poraiaon, Lyon, 1688 et 1690.

Itecueil de PoiBiea Spirituellea. Amsterdam, 1689, 5 vols, in 8vo.

Opuacuha Spiritueh, contenant le Moyen cow de /aire roraiaon, le$
Torrenta Spirituela, etc. Cologne, 1704, in 12mo.

Vie de JIT"' Guyon^ 6crite par die-mime (probably a composition by
Poiret from material famished from the Archbishopric of Paris).
Cologne, 1720, 3 vol. 12mo.

The Life of Lady Guion, written hy heraelfy in French, now
abridged and tranalated into Engliah, ^c. ^c. Bristol, S. Farley,
MDCCLXXII.

A ahort and eaay Method of Prayer, Tranalated from the French of
Madame J. M, B. de la Mothe Gidon, By Thomas Digby Brooke.
London, MDCCLXXY.

The Devout CSIimfwm, or the aoul fUed with the ftllneaa of God, Being
extracte from the worka of Lady Gnion, who for her pUma writinga
auffered a aeriea of cruel peraecutiona by the Romi^ ChunA in France
in the 1 7th century, Brighton, 1847 ( ?). By Clericns ( ?).

Life and Experience of Madame Guion, By T. C. Upham. Sampson
Low and Son, 1862.

MADAME J. M. B. DE LA MOTHE GUION

AND QUIETISM.

A.D. 1648— 1717.

A Politique tiree de la Sainto Ecriture."

A NatioDal Policy founded upon Scripture !

Wbat a cry is bere for a politico-religioua

party ! What an admirable solution for all

external and internal differences ; that ia to aaj, if men

would first do two things, i. e. agree as to the kind of

policy mapped out by Scripture, and then be of one mind

in accepting it !

But, alas, although many admirable people hare beeq
ready for this beatified state, so far from realizing it are we
that o»er all the world we seem to see, at the present
time, little else bat the triumph of Force. This is, at
best, unpleasant to those ardent and hopeful souls who
look forward to a reign of peace, gentleness, and love.
Austria and Prussia, having gone against the whole
, sense of Europe, have killed, and have taken possession,
divided the spoils, and now fight for them. Poland is held

140 VARIA.

down, and lies quiet enough, almost as if she were dead.
They who died in a gi'eat cause seem to have failed, and
died in vain. In America the Union is restored and kept
together bj force, and the South is content to accept the
result. The struggle over, the wise and good hail the
abolition of slavery as worth its cost, and moderation in
the hour of victory will cement the tie which binds the
South to the North. In Italy the popular cause has
triumphed, but the Papacy still keeps its ground, and
Austria holds Yenetia; and the only consolation which
the lover' of progress has may be summed up in that
saving advice which the pupil of Gamaliel gave to the
restless Christians of Thessalonica, ** Study to be quiet,
and to do your own business."

In the political world — ^that great world, whose news-
paper is history, and whose years are cycles, or at least
lustrums — ^there is an ebb and flow in the tide of events.
They flow rapidly enough at first, and then they cease,
and rest. We have been going ahead pretty quickly, and
the motion has made us somewhat giddy. The thousand
years of peace which the saints are to enjoy before the
other dead arise, seemed to some ardent souls to have
commenced about fourteen years ago— in 1851, when the
brotherhood of nations and the federation of the world
had set in. The war-drum was to throb no longer ; there
were some millions of swords ready to be beaten up into
ploughshares, and as many guns to be made into «steam-
engines or cylindrical boilers. We saw nothing to fight
with but Kature : waste lands were to be subdued, and
deserts tamed.

MADAME DE LA MOTHE QUION. 141

But, 1852 taught man that, when he thought he had
tamed his heart, he counted without his host. There is
much to be done jet before we reach Dp. Cumming's
millennial rest. Eussia, France, America, Prussia, and
Austria, and, lastly, we may add, England, the last being
certainly the most peaceable, are full of unquiet spirits,
who are too ready to appeal to force, and who, when
people talk of peace, make them ready for war.

If you are on the right side of duty, perhaps it is as
well to be shot out of life as to be cheated out of it.
Perhaps in the sight of God a foetid court in London or
Liverpool, where vice always shoulders Poverty, and Death
hob-a-nobs cheek by jowl with the two, is as sore an evil
as is a battle-field, where a number of men, blinded by
prejudice, and enlisted upon two opposite sides of a prin-
ciple, blow each other to bits, and deface God's image by
the thousand. War is not an unmitigated evil, although
it is no doubt a very sore one. But life itself is a war ;
and the most eloquent of the Apostles has taken up the
whole armour, and told us indeed to be Soldiers having
the shield of Faith, the breastplate of Bighteousness, and
the sword of the Spirit.

Quietism, therefore, hardly holds a place with the
earnestly active good man ; but there are many good men
who are not very active. These are the men who seek
to go out of the world ; who, with Cowper, sigh for —

A lodge in some vast wilderness,

Some boundless contiguity of shade,
Where rumour of oppression and deceit,
Of unsuccessful or successful war,
Might never reach me more.

142 VARIA.

And, with Goldsmith's saddened and defeated ideal of him-
self, are always ready to

Quit, the world where strongs temptations try,
And, since 'tis hard to combat, learn to fl}'.

But it may be doubted whether any one of such men ever
flew far enough ; you change the country, but not the
mind. You may philosophise -with silent Indians, eat
with swinish Hottentots, mate with the lower natures
anywhere, but you will not find peace. You may believe
that when you are teaching a train of village children you
will be away from deceit, and in the very atmosphere of
innocence ; you may bask in a fancied quietness, and all
the time the snake is crawling under the grass^ and the
viper gliding among the flowers.

People with shaken nerves shiver at a noise ; but it is
doubtful whether the publication of their quiet doctrines
and the ventilation of their wishes do not excite the devil
Obstinacy and Opposition to make more "row" than ever.
It was said, with some truth, by the most vivid and bril-
liant of our modern historians, that the deputation of the
three Quakers to Bussia, and the speeches of those emi-
nently quarrelsome men, Messrs. C and B , did

more to plunge us into the disastrous and foolish Bussian

war than anything else. As for Mr. B , we know

how he looked upon war in America, and the whole of his
life has been one state of war. We all admire his eloquent
tongue, but we know very well that it has blown up as
many fierce tongue battles and contests as any battle
trumpet in the world. Mr. B is therefore no quietbt.

MADAME DE LA MOTHE GUION. 143

and probably confesses to bimself tbat little fact at least.
Nor is Quietism consistent with a political life. To be up
and doiugy to trust in one's own labour, not to lie down
and wait for what will turn up; to be up early and at
plough while others sleep ; to look ahead and get before
others in the race ; to fight fairly but earnestly, and, to
take our own part in everything ; these are the ways pf
the anti-quietist and generally bustling and successful
man.

Certainly quietism does not fare well in the world:
activity and continual labour are much better ; and per-
haps the blessing of God follows these last as well as the
first. For, if logically carried out, it seems that the good
would not find their ways very pleasant, but would be
suiTOunded by the wicked, like gaping bulls and wolves,
to which King David, drawing his images from his shep-
herd's life, likens them. Is quietism the right thing then
in religion? Ought we always to suffer all we can, to
submit to all we can, and not to resist wickedness ?

This perhaps is the most important part of the question.
God is so great, and the 'world is to many, if not all, ho
full of mystery, of trial, trouble, and perturbation, that they
would try to leave it as much as they can, and creep into
some lonely comer to die. But surely such a feeling is
morbid and wrong. Although we see it exhibited in
many excellent men, yet it is in those men who are so
physically weak that their weakness amounts to disease.
** I was a wounded stag who left the herd," says Cowper,
plaintively ; but then this '^wounded stag" was so bash-

4fr

144 VABIA.

iul, and of so retiring a nature, that he dared not read ' ^
aloud the minutes of the House of Commons, which his ,
duty as clerk therein required him to do. And when we ^
retire from the world, not, as many dull people saj, fix)m j n
God's world, the material earth, which is beautiful, but
from man's world, which is base, do we not soon begin to
despise and hate man ? ** God made the country, and
man made the town," wrote the same poet. God is grand,
man is vile, say other quietists, always placing God in
opposition to Man, His chief work. But all this is false.
Unless we love man, whom we have seen, how can we love
God, whom we have not seen ? Man made the countiy
out of the materials which God gave him. The smiling
fields of harvest, the decent hedge-rows, the pretty gar-
dens, the wheat in the ear, the bearded barley, the green
rank-leaved turnip, the waving grass, the vetch and sain-
foin ; the sturdy oak, the clinging vine, and the bride-
groom elm, around which it clings, are planted and raised
into beauty by man. Nay, the country — ^a vast, wild
desert, but for man — derives its chief beauty from the
contrasting crowded cities. Strong natures love cities
and crowds and the bustle of life ; weak natures shun
them. Milton, who is, to say the least, as truly religious
a poet as Cowper, presents a fine contrast to his weakness,
when he declares that, far from fleeing to the coimtry —

TowerM cities please us then,

And the busy hum of men,

Where throngs of knights and barons bold,

In weeds of Peace high triumphs hold,

With store of ladies, whose brig^bt eyes

Rain influence, and judge the prize.

MADAME DE LA MOTHE OUION. 145

And jety with melancholy, soft natures, there will always
he a determined love for quietism. Perhaps dyilization
will increase this, just as among the high-hred and mUd
Hindoos, contemplative, not active, religion is the aim and
end of life« Is not a man who does nothing free from
hlame ? Can we do hotter than present ourselves spotless
to God ? How shall we do hotter than think of Blm and
His works for ever? Such may he their questions, and
to them we often return, for they involve the whole spirit
of Quietism — ^they will solve all our douhts whether war
is lawful ; whether England may resist the hullyings of a
triumphant and a hraggart rival or enemy; whether a
Christian man may carry arms ; and whether one who
would lead the gentle life might dare to shoot a hurglar,
or call in a poUceman to a pickpocket.

These queries, and others which will arise out of this
portion of the suhject, may he answered hy the life of the
great modem saint of Quietism, Madame Gxdon, a woman
of very nohle family, and a contemplative religious poetess,
whose hymns many of our people now sing ; for very
beautiful they are, and heautifully have they been trans-
lated by William Cowper.

The name Quietism was ^ven to the doctrines which
this lady enunciated, and upon which she insisted, because
the chief point of religion, she asserted, was to be quiet.
She carried this out considerably further than many
people would think. The chief duty of man, says a writer,
'' was, according to Madame Guion, to be wrapped up in
the continual contismplation and love of God, so as to

146 VASIA.

become totally independent of outward circumstances and
of the influence of the senses ; and Quietists contended
that when a man had arrived at this state of perfection, the
soul had no further occasion for prayer and other external
devotional practices. Quietism is, in fact, the extreme of
asceticism mixed with contemplative devotion," As such
very many souls have felt an impulse to it. When Cole-
ridge had enlisted as " John Comberbatch " in a dragoon
regiment, and made no doubt an awkward sort of fellow in
the awkward squad, his religious thoughts took much
such a turn as this. "From the All-seeing and All-
knowing God," he said, " aught to desire were impotence
of mind;" that is, in Coleridge's then idea, all we had to
do was to sit down and wait. The e3q)ression of desire, or
prayer, was perfectly nonsensical, if desire itself were im-
potence of mind. With the Mohammedans and the Brah-
mins such men not only exist, but take their place, a chief
place, in religion. The Turk has his Eismet, and lets
the cholera march over him : so too many of our village
Methodists were violent against dear, simple, observing
Dr. Jenner, and condemned him as a wicked man because
he prevented the small-pox, and, as they said, interfered
with what they believed was the will of God.

The Church of Home has on her garment (which, as
she boasts, is without a rent or seam) a good many patches
of the queerest colours. Every member believes the same
thing; but not having the liberty of Christ, and being still
under the law, everybody adds something to the belief of
his neighbour. This did Michael Molinos^ a Spanish

MADAME BE LA MOTHE QUION. 147

monk, in the seventeenth century, who, in addition to
being a good Catholic, embodied quietism in his works, and
for it got condemned at Eome, naj, and put into prison,
where he died (1696), having for many years been fur-
nished by his Church with a contemplative retreat.

But what the monk had let fall Madame Guion took
up, and with her, many ladies of rank, many pious people,
let us hope, in a corrupt court. Among them was Madame
de Maintenon, and good Abbe de F^nelon. Madame
Guion, who was a young widow with three children, must
have been able to work great things on others by sym-
pathy, for all near her fell into her crotchets. Her
director, the Father Lacombe, shared her ideas. He
wrote a work. The Analysis of Mental Devotion, in which
the strongest quietist views were put forward. Kneeling
was no use in his views ; confession, prayer, were to be
done away with. Madame Guion, Quietist as she was,
endeavoured to introduce her system into various convents ;
but the bishops very properly told her to leave oiff meddling
with their flocks. What ! disuse kneeling, bowing, cross-
ing oneself, prostration, fasting, and all forms? Monks
and priests were alarmed, and contended, rightly enough,
that *^ it was impossible to keep up the external warmth
of piety without prayer ;" and that " a perpetual state of
contemplation was impossible."

On the other hand, Madame Guion had insisted, and
with truth, that, without internal prayer, all praying with
the lips was useless. She published a book, ''Moyen
court et tres facile de faire Oraison " (A Short and Easy

148 VABIA.

Method of Fraying) ; and this book very nearly revolu-
tionized religious society, and brought about a serious
conflict between two great lights of the Gallican church,
Bossuet and Fenelon.

Madame Jeanne-Marie Bouvier de la Mothe Guion
was born at Montargis, 13th April, 1648, and died on the
9th June, 1717. Her father, a maitre des requStes, was
of a family for many years noted for its severe religion ;
and his Httle girl, who became so celebrated, seems at a
very early age to have, shown that she inherited the fa-
mily proclivity to austere devotion. " My parents," she
says, " made a very high profession of piety, especially
my father, for in his family they reckoned almost as many
saints as persons who composed it."

Like that of Montaigne, who was, if we are to credit
him, an eleven months' child, there was something very
peculiar about Madame Guion's birth. ^^ 1 was bom before
due time ; for my mother, having received a terrible fright,
was delivered of me on the eighth month ; at which time
they say 'tis almost impossible for a baby to live." She
herself nearly proved the truth of the saying ; her father
ran for a priest, and when he came back found the poor
baby without a sign of life, " with only an expiring sigh."
So the priest and the father returned in the greatest dis-
tress, and the Uttle future saint very nearly died without
being baptized. " Had I died then, O my God I " she
writes with an ecstatic piety, " I had never known thee.
These alternatives of death and life were sign-omens of
what was aflierwards to befall me ; one while dying by sin.

MADAME BE LA MOTHE QUION. 149

another while living by grace. Death and life had a com-
bat, but life was victorious. Oh, might I hope that in the
conclusion life will be victorious over death! Doubtless
it will be so, if thou live alone in me, oh my G-od, who
art at present my only life and my only love I "

The translator of the English " Life of Lady Guion,"
who has addressed his work to "Britons and Protestants,"
is very much alarmed because he imagines they will cry
out against him, ^' What ! the life of a Papist, and a Po-
pish woman too ; away with it." But the fact is poor
Madame Guion has very little of the Scarlet Woman in
her. Her piety is so true, so fresh, fervent and beautiful ;
or, to worldly people, so weak, silly, and overpowering, that
we can well understand why the Protestant Cowper trans-
lated her hymns, and why Wesley and Whitefield upheld
her works and her life of singular purity and austere de-
votion. I am not saying that this life was the model life,
the best possible life, or anything like it, but I do say that
it has in it something very courageous, singularly touch-
ing, and beautifully devotional, and that in its determina-
tion to give up every moment, every thought, every feeling
to the Supreme Being, it is much more easily sneered at
than imitated. Moreover, had Madame Guion been bom
in a Protestant country, 'or in the Anglican Church, her
piety would have borne more useful fruit, although her
devotion could not have been more sincere.

The effect of some centuries of Eomish piety in the
little girl was curious. Weak enough in body she was
indeed. Yet hardly fully alive, an imposthume, she says,

150 VAEIA.

was discovered in the lower part of her hack, and this was
cut out, leaving a wound of " prodigious size, so that the
surgeon could put the whole of his hand in it." Poor
baby ; " out of such frightful corruption," she writes, " it
pleased thee to raise me, oh my Saviour." Freed from
this strange malady, " I was seized with a gangrene first
on one thigh and then on the other. Truly my life seemed
hardly anything else but a series of maladies." When a
mere child she had a terrible vision of hell, which frightened
her so much that she woidd go to confess ; but she was so
small that the mistress of the boarders — she was in an
Ursuline convent — ^went with her, and then the poor child
accused herself of having thoughts contrary to the Faith !
The good confessor, smiling, asked her what they were,
and the little baby, she was about four years old then, told
him that '^ I had doubted of hell, but since then I had
seen it, and I now doubted of it no longer."

A very pretty picture this calls up to us, illustrative too
of every-day life in the Church of Bome. We can fancy
the thin, pale, weird face of the child saint, worn with
bodily and mental illness, the bending sister of the Ursulines
expressing wonder at the child, and conveying at the same
time much respect to the father confessor ; and, too, the
quiet smile of the good father, a gentleman perhaps touched
with the Laodicean tendencies of the age, and who won-
dered as he looked down at the girl at the curious effect
of early piety and asceticism. Another picture of an oc-
currence which took place a little before this might also
be made. It is of the visit of Henry IV. to the nuns of

MADAME BE LA MOTHE OUION. 151

Port Eoyal, when Mother Angelique, aged about seven
years and wearing shoes six inches thick to make her look
a little taller, toddled out to meet his jovial majesty, with
her crozier and all the insignia of her rank. No wonder
that the king kissed his hand to the little abbess, and
declared that in his prayers he would remember Mother
Angelique.

At four years of age, then, she had been introduced to
the Benedictines by the Duchess of Montbazon, a relative
of her father's, who was pleased to see her in the habit of
*^ a little nun," and where the little nun loved to sing the
praises of God. One loves to linger over these early
scenes; soon afl;er the vision and confession the child
desired martyrdom, and the young nonettes were not un-
willing (in fiin) to indulge her. " The girls set me on
my knees, on a cloth that was spread, and lifted up a
great cutlass behind me. But I suddenly cried out that
I was not at liberty to die without my father's consent.
They said then that I should be no martyr, and that I
had only made that excuse to free myself from it. And
indeed it was true ! However, I was afterwards much
afflicted. My consolation left me, and something re-
proached me that I wanted courage to go immediately to
heaven." But saint as she was at that age^ and saint as
her father was, the world appears to have entered that
convent. She does not remember that she did anything
amiss " except saying a number of petty pretty little things
to divert those about her," — ^poor baby I But afterwards
she contracted pernicious habits. '' One day my father

152 VARIA.

caught me at play with some diildren in the street, in
a way as ill suited m j rank and quality ! So much was he
mored at the sight, as he tenderly loved me, that without
saying a word to anybody he took me to the UrsuUnesJ*
The little thing was then nearly seyen years of age.

When nearly eight years of age, she met at her fiither's
house the Queen of England, Henrietta Maria, who, upon
a hint given, had some diversion with the child, asking
her many religious questions. The Queen was so pleased
that she begged that she might take the child away with
her as a small maid of honour; but her father resisted this
request, and very luckily, as Madame thought, for her
too. When a month or so older the little giil found out
in the garden a small chapel dedicated to the child Jesus
— this dwarfing of the Man-Christ is the cause of half, if
not all the Eomish follies — and betook herself thither for
devotion ; for some time she used to carry her breakfast
there every morning, and hide it all behind his image,
^' for I was so much a child then," she adds, or her auto-
biographer for her, '^ that I thought I made a considerable
sacrifice in depriving myself of it." After this she fell
into a cesspool, over which some bigger girls had been
dancing, it being covered with boards. ** When the girls
retired I wanted to imitate them ; but the boards broke
under me and I fell into a frightful gaute, yet hanging
by a little bit of timber in such a manner as I was plunged
in the filth without being stifled by it ; a figure of the in*
ward state I had to undergo, when in the horrible pit,
which I was unable of myself to get out of."

MADAME BE LA MOTHE OUION. 153

The little bit of stick whereon, so far as one can make
out, the little girl was caught and sat, was to her as a pro-
vidential interyention ; and lucky is it that it was so, for
the boarders, in true girlish fashion, never tried to help
their little sister, but ran shrieking to alarm the sisters of
the house : and these nuns of course, in the manner of
single women, concluded that the little nun was killed,
and, instead of seeing whether the life of their poor little
friend was extinct in a cesspool, ran to tell Jeanne's sister,
who was then at church and at prayers. One might now
naturally expect that the sister would hurry to the poor
child ; but she did no such thing. '^ She immediately
prayed for me, and (after having invoked the blessed Vir-^
gin) came to me in a half dead state ; but was not a little
surprised when she saw me, in the mire and filth, seated
as on an easy chair." Who can doubt of the earnestness
of faith in people who prefer putting up a prayer to the
Virgin to puUing out with an arm of flesh a poor child who
is being stifled in the filth and ordure of a cesspool ! But,
alas ! the little child herself had something that was not
faith, although it was of it. Not only did she serve the
poor as her Lord and Master did, but she vrrote the name
of Jesus on a piece of parchment, and with ribbons and a
big needle fastened it to her skin in four places, and there
it remained for a long time.

Constant to herself the young lady through many per-
turbations remained. But one must hasten on. She was
little more than fifteen years of age when married to M.
Jaques Guion, the son of that entr^efneur who made the

154 VABIA.

canal of Briace. She lets us know that she was of more
noble a &mil j than her husband, and that her £unilj liyed
in greater style. Saint as she was, she was not displeased
with the idea of marriage, although her Neither and mother,
after the method of their country, made her sign the mar-
riage articles without letting her know what they were.
But she was ** well pleased with the thoughts of marriage,
flattering myself with the hopes of being thereby set at
full liberty, and deliyered from the impious and rough
treatment of my mother^ which I drew on myself from
my want of docility." Her husband, who was thirty-
eight years old, seems to have been a very good man, and
to have shielded her from the tyranny of a mother-in-law
and her henchwoman, who evidently looked upon too much
piety as rather disagreeable. The battles between Saint
Guion and the henchwoman are, when we recollect that
the thorn in the sides of our wives and female-saints is
now-a-days just the same, i.e. the ancUla, are amusing.
Here are some hints of them : —

Chapteb XVI. Her waiting-maid endeavours to pre-
vent her going to worship !

xxiY. Great insolence of her waiting-maid.

X2VI. In the absence of her mother-in-law she turns
her waiting-maid out of doors.

XXX. Her mother-in-law's great affection for her —
not the maid, but Saint Guion. — After her departure
she {la belle mere) dies of grief !

By her husband, who lived with her for twelve years,
Madame Guion had ^ye children^ of whom three only

MADAME DE LA MOTHE QUION. 155

survived. When she lay in of her second daughter>
aflterwards Comtesse de Yaux, and then Duchesse de
Sully, her husband died. In 1780, Madame Guion quitted
her mother-in-law and set out for Paris, having upon her
a strong fit of religious devotion, which enabled her no
doubt to look with an almost worldly coolness upon the
death of her mother-in-law.

It is but justice to say that, although Madame Guion
often seems to complain of her want of " chastity towards
God," and evidently considered after the pernicious ideas
which celibacy must implant, that marriage was rather
sinful than otherwise, she was a good and amiable wife.
Her husband was a man of honour and very fond of her.
When he heard that his mother had been cross with her
he fell into a great rage, and his little wife once thought
of cutting out her own tongue so as not to irritate him.
This is her dictum ; let good wives take heed of it : —

^^ Most men have their passions, and it is the duty of a
reasonable woman to bear them peaceably without irri-
tating them more by cross replies."

The great turning-point of woman's devotion is, how-
ever, generally afforded by one of the opposite sex, and in
this case it was the P^re Lacombe, an austere man, ^' aussi
ardent dans la devotion qu'il avait ^t^ pour les plaisirs dans
sa jeunesse," * met her and became her director. To
him she communicated all her reveries, how she had seen

* M. L. Louyel, NouvelU Biographie Umvenelle, Vol. 22, Article
Gnyon.

156 VABIA.

the devil in a yision; how, when she rose to pray, Beel-
zehuh, or ApoUyon, or some smaller fiend, palled away the
sheets and tumhled the hed. These visions were very
much like those of Luther, against whom the Eomanists
cry out. He, we know, at Erfurt, launched an inkstand
at the head of the devil, who annoyed him a-cracking
nuts.* One priest at least believed in Madame Gtdon,
and that was her director. He listened with attention,
nay, with fervour, and his disciple became his teacher,
whilst he filled her with an inner strength. ^^ Dieu," she
says, " m'a fait la grace de m^ohamhrer par le Pere La-
combe." She was indeed overshadowed by the grace of
her confessor, but she in her turn had a distinct influence
on Father Lacombe. Three generations of an extraordi-
nary piety, a childhood spent in a mystical and, as it
seems to us, too often an empirical devotion, had already
produced an effect permanent and ine£Faceable upon the
mind of Jeanne-Marie Bouviers. She who had at the age
of four years desired a small martyrdom, who had through
her whole life given such proof of her ecstatic devotion,
needed not to have been overshadowed by Father La-
combe to take unto herself the place of a prophetess of a
new sect — a place which she had been enthusiastically
sighing for all her life.

We must also look back to the early and, through her
own fault, unhappy marriage of this young saint, to explain
that curious bias towards worldly or fleshly sensuousness

* On this story Coleridge in his Friend has some excellent re-
marks.

MADAME BE LA MOTHE OUION. 157

which is shown in her writings. In the hest models of
Christian fervour, eloquence, and even rapture, in Chrysos-
tom, Jeremy Taylor, in Massillon and Bossuet, or, to go at
once to the fountain-head, in the writings of the Apostles
we find no approach to these sexual similitudes, and, as
many helieve, almost errotic wanderings which we too oftien
gather from the writings^ of Bomish saints, and which
Sydney Smith foimd and commented on in those of Pro-
testant Methodists. Why should Madame Guion have
tried the difficult task of expoundiug the Canticles ? Why
should she have lingered with distressing fondness over
such passages as this : —

^^ Osculetur me osculo oris sui : quia meliora sunt
ubera tui vino ? Cant, c, i. t. i."

It is quite true that the verse may portray the mystic
longing of the Spouse for his bride the Church; but it is
equally true that the passage might have been written —
and indeed has been written — ^by Hafiz, or any other of
the amorous poets of Persia. We can understand why
Father Tartu£fe, in Moli^re's comedy, should, with his
peculiar feelings, wish to express himself mystically ; nor,
to say the truth, can we Anglicans quite admire a young
vddow lady who could pen such prayer-raptures as the
following : —

" L'Union Essbntibllb, et le haiser de la h<mche, est
le mariage spirituel, ou il y a tmion d'essence k essence,
et communication de substances ou Dieu prend I'Sme pour
son epouse, et se I'unit, due.

" Alors c'est le haiser de la houche et la, possession reele
et parfaite. C'est une jouissance, qui n'est point sterile,

158 VABTA,

ni infructueuse; puis qu'elle ne s'entend k rien moins
qu'^ la communication du Verbe de Dieu k I'ame."

At another point she adds, " Toutes ses unions sont
&inbra$semens divins;" and she uniformly italicises her most
ardent words. But all these raptures were to be gained
by silent prayer. One was not to even try to articulate a
word, but to remain as quiet as a Brahmin who perpetually
squints in a holy rapture at the end of his nose ! No
wonder that there was soon a division in the camp of the
Quietists, almost as soon as the sect, if one can so call it,
had been established. There was a true as well as a false
method, and many, her biographers tell us, objected, " sans
fondement," to pure passivity or Quietism. How Madame
Guion could make her passivity agree with the raptures
of the Song of Songs, one can hardly say at this time.
In verse 14, which I will print in Madame Guion's own
language, there are expressions which find much favour in
her eyes.

" Que vous etes belle, ma bien aimee ; que vous etes
belles I vous yeux resemblent ceux des colombes."*

And a very pretty verse it is ; the simile has been used
for ages, and descended, in all its freshness, to Beranger
and Paul Dupont. . But Madame Guion reads the matter
with great innocence, and says that this dove-like simpli-
city is the surest mark of the advancement of a soul ; for
using neither turnings nor artifice, it is led in the straight
path by the Spirit of God."t Surely one hardly needed

* Le Cantique des CantiqueSy c. i. v. 14.

t Opuscales Spirituels de Mad. Gujod, p. 379.

MADAME DE LA MOTHE QUION, 169

this gloss from the pen of a lady saint. Of other verses,
such as the sixth of the second chapter, ^' L^era ejus sub
capite meo, et dextra illios amplexabitur me." She remarks,
*^ Ceci est ties-reel, et sera avoiie de toutes les personnes
d'experience." She might surely have left these curious
eastern poems alone and have contented herself with a sin-
cere acceptance of the mystic interpretation put upon them
by her Church. In short, a profounder respect for St.
Paul's last adjuration to the Thessalonians, '' Study to be
qiiiety and mind your own business," would perhaps have
spared us Madame GKiion and Quietism as well.

In the court of the French king there can be no wonder
that such doctrines spread like wildfire. To remain in a
rapt state must have been a novelty as well as a rest to
the Maintenon and her court. Inward silenc^, says Ma-
dame, is absolutely indispensable, because the Word is
essential and eternal, and necessarily requires dispositions
in the soul in some degree correspondent to his nature.
The Quietism of Guion became a fashion, people dressed
like devotees and went to prayers instead of to plays, psalms
were sung in the place of love-songs, and with the greater
zest because these psalms very often were possessed of a
dovhle entendre even more passionate than the love-song
itself.

If any observer and prayer will look, in the calm lights
of mild philosophy, upon the following verses of Madame
Qxiion, he will no doubt not only become alarmed for the
writer's sanity, but imagine that Guion has anticipated
Beranger and others- in celebrating the beauties of some
earthly goddess, and the ardour which those beauties in-

160 VABIA.

spire. The accompanying illustration by Otho Voenius is
curious ; a Cupid with the wings and quiver of Eros him-
self, but with the nimbus of the Saviour, offers to a female
child of about the same size a vase to smell. The motto is
'^ Jucundum spirat odorem," and the verses on the theme
as follows: —

Ah tirez-moi ! mon Dieu, mon nnique esp^rance,

Par T08 parfums si pr6cieuz :
D^jk je me sentois tomber en d^faillance,

Mais ce baume d^icieux,
Fortifiant mon coeor, Ini donne le courage
De conrir aprfes voos, d'y conrir en tons lienz:
• « ♦ « •

Retirez-YOQS, doncenrs, plaisirs, fiivenrs, caresses;

O Dien ! c'est vous seal que je venx,
Yoiis Stes toot mon bien, ma force, ma richesses,

Yons senl ponvez me rendre henrenx.
Je sens qne ce parfam est d'un force eztr^e.

In another version she adopts the very language of the
Canticles : —

L'odenr de tes parfdms, si ravissans, si dooz,
Enl^vera les coeurs de ces vierges pndiqnes.

The English tongue is too manly for this eastern imagery of
love. It is better in Latin or in French : " Fulcite me
floribus, stipate me malis : quia amore langueo." '^ Fortifiez
moi avec des^ pommes: parceque je languis d'amour."
This seems to us hardly the language of prayer to a jealous
God. The Guion breaks out yet more warmly : —

Ne m*abandonnez pas, mes Soenrs,
Environnez-moi de ces pommes

MADAME DE LA MOTHE OUION. 161

Qu'on trouve aa jardin de I'Epoax,
Ah t cachez-moi de tons les homines ;
£t que je sois seale avec vous.

It must be confessed that this ecstatic poetry treads
very closely on the heels of the amorous productions of
the profanest of worldly minstrels.

No doubt there was much good to the dreamer and the
ecstatic visionary in her book ; and, if taken in the simple
sense, it might have benefited all ; but as it was, it was
calculated to do evil. The Church of Kome is more
active than our own ; and the great Bossuet publicly
condemned Guion's book, and (1695) imprisoned her in
a convent ; there he compelled her to explain away her
chief passages, which she readily did. Let out of the
convent, the Archbishop of Paris confined her in the Bas-
tille, and condemned her books as containing '' a mon-
strous and diabolical system." Fenelon defended her, and
himself was condemned by Kome (1699); and it may be
after all that Kome was right.

What Guion felt right for herself was wrong and
foolish as a system. What is required to carry on God's
world is not the sluggish inactivity of the cocoon or the
sloth. We want the patience (suffering) of the saint, but
the activity of the hero joined with it. Contemplation is
necessary and good ; but too much of it defeats its own
end. Perhaps one of the most instructive things about
this amiable but lazy type of religionists is the fact that
they have been before condemned, in anticipation, by the
Founder of the Gentlest Faith of all, in the parable of the

162 VARIA.

Talonta. The man who did not waste, spend, deatroj,
nor Boil his talent, hid it, free from mat and damp, in a
napkin, and laid it in the earth, because he knew he had a
taskmaster who reaped that which he had not sown, and
took that up which he had not laid down. We know what
oondemnatioD followed on this man, who in one sense may
be called a Hebrew Quietist.

AUEEOLUS PHILIPPUS THEOPHRASTUS

PARACELSUS, BOMBAST OF

HOHENHEIM.

«^§jS^

BOOKS CONSULTED.

A. Tlieophrcuii Paracdn de Preaagiis, VaHcinuSy et DiviitationiJlna.
Stronondca item Astrologiea fragmenta lectu jucunda et utUia.
BasileaB, 1569.

Archidoxorum A, P. T, Paracelri de SeeretU Nature Master its Kbri
teptem, ^c. Basilete, 1570.

Dictionarium T, Paracehi continent obtcuriorum voaxbtdorum, quibus
in suit tcriptit . . . utitur dejtnitionenu Francoforti, 1 584.

Let xiv livret de Paragraphet de Ph, T. Paracelte, o« tont contewut
en ipitonu tet skcrett ctdmircibles, tcmt phitiquet qite chirurgiquet
pour la curaHon tret certaine des maladiet ettimket incurabkt ; a
tcavoir la L^re, VEpiUptie, HydropiUe, Paredine, Fievret et
autret,8fc, Paris, 1631.

Bombatt wm Hohenheim, Phil, Aureol. Theop. called Paraceltut, of
the Supreme Mytteriet of Nature; of tiie Spiritt of the Planett ;
Occult Philotophy; the Magical, Sympathtticalf and Antipatiie-
tical Cure of Woundt 8f Diteatet, Englished by R. Turner.
$iXo/ia9)}£. London, 1656.

PhilowphyReformedandlmprovedfin four profound tractaUt. Made
English for the increase of learning and tme knowledge, Londoii,
printed for Lodowick Lloyd at the Castle in Cornhill, 1657.

Three JBookt of Philosophy written to the Atheniant by that famout^
mott excellent, and approved Philotf^pher and Phititian AureaL
Philip. Theop. Bombast of Hohenheim, commonly called Paracelsut,
Done into English for the increase of the knowledge and the
fear of God. By a young seeker of truth and holines. London,
1657.

Secretum omnium Secretorvm, d<u itt, fwn der Heimlichkeit aUer
Heimlichkeiten {attributed to Paraceltut). 1676.

Paracelsut, By Robert Browning {A Poem), London, Effingham
Wilson, 1835.

AUEEOLtJS PHILIPPUS THEOPHRASTUS

PAUACELSUS, BOMBAST OF

HOHENHEIM.

'E is ooe reason irhj we may wish
itualism to be true, that thereby we
fit clum acquaJDtance with the dead.
B man shall not have lived long before
he shall have passed the grand meridian, and may num-
ber more acquaintance with the dead than the liviug.
More tiian this, if he be a reading man, there will be
many with whom he would like to couverae: he might
wish to hob-a-Dob with Bobert Herrick ; to drink deep
draughts with Ben Jonson; to have really "anichtwi'
Burns." There be surely more of the dead than of the
living whom we should care to know ; for, in spite of the
gruff Doctor's assertion, that a reasonable man of the
world would rather dine with a great lord than with the
greatest genius, we would rather have a quiet meal with
Shakespeare than feast with twenty lords, and would
delight to take our bread and cresses with Plato, St. John,
and Bunyan. Such " an hour with the mystics," Spenser

166 VABIA.

and Heine dropping in, with Goethe in the company, such
would outhid even a lord-mayor's supper, followed by a
nightmare into the bargain. But of all men — ^more
especially as they live in their own works, and we can
enjoy them en famiUe without the intervention of the new
light — ^those with whom one would choose chiefly to gossip
would be Sir Thomas Browne, Peter Bayle, Montaigne,
Hazlitt, and Coleridge, forming a select circle of ^' Friends
in Council."

An evening, these being with us, might well be given
to Nostradamus, Michael Scot, and Paracelsus. The
last has had a singular fate. Unknown to many, his
fame with some transcends that of any votary of science
of his day, and, clothed in a nebulous mystery, looms
largely in the far distant middle ages, ages receding
rapidly from us, more rapidly every day. His portrait it
would be difficult to portray fully. His boldness, loud
boasting, and his dark history have made a great im-
pression on the mind of one of our greatest, perhaps our
greatest poet, who, £rom a poor original, has produced an
ideal enchanter, a devotee of true science whom the world
vrill not willingly let die. Pictured by himself, or by
what remains of him, the physician is one who would in
the garden of Paradise have plucked not one apple only,
but a whole branch of the tree of knowledge, and would
have greedily eaten the fruit thereof. But, after all, his
is a face behind a veil, seen but faintly; '^clothed in
white samite, mystic, wonderful," and never to be fully
portrayed, or to be hawked about in one-and-sixpenny slides

PAEACELSUS. 167

for the world's stereoscopes. But others have loyed him
as well as I. A poet^ whom the world rates not jet as he
wSi be rated, hath written of him, painted him in the
ideal, a knowledge-seeker, '' one who desired to know,"
and did not care in what way he attained his end.

^^That profomid Philosopher and Phisytion Am*eol*
Fhilippus Theophrastus Paracelsus Bombast of Hohen-
heim, who was pojsned y* 47th yeare of his age," — we
quote from the imprint of his liyely Portraicture prefixed
to a little Dryasdustian brown book, — ^was bom of a noble
father, noble extra thorum, Wilhelm Bombast von Hohen-
heim, about the year 1493. He added sometimes to his
long name that of Eremus, and some dozen oi other
sounding titles, finishing all up with the words tUriusque
MedicincB Doctor. Paracelsus was educated as a phy-
sician ; what that education was it is not easy now to say.
He had to grope his way amongst uncertainties, to
swallow what we now know to be the veriest nonsense of
old wives' tales, — ^to plunge into the mysteries of the
cabala, to walk in darkness, to depend upon monkish
tradition, and to mutter charms. Mystery and mysticism
were his daily food in those denk ages ; but he went for-
ward boldly, and as boldly affirms that he had penetrated
all secrets, had gone through the whole curriculum of
philosophy, and had arrived at the knowledge of the secret
things of life and the hidden virtues of nature. It is
only by placing ourselves in his situation, before the birth
of inductive philosophy, that we can arrive at any kind of
stock-taking of our present knowledge. Little enough,

168 VABTA.

in good faith, do we ourselves know ; weak, blind, and
foolish is humanity now: but then, then, when all the
Tulgar errors Sir Thomas Browne has so well discoursed
of were each texts and theorems, — ^then the darkness of
ignorance must have been dense indeed !

Far afield went our " physition " to arrive even at the
dawn. He travelled for ten years, between 1513 and
1523-4, visiting every celebrated college in Europe, and,
like Plato and Pythagoras, wending eastward and looking
to Egypt for his lore. He penetrated into Arabia, and
conversed with sages and magicians ; he tells us, in his
own rich and gorgeous style, that he "turned over the
leaves of Europe, Asia, Africa, and in so doing suffered
much hardship ; he fell into captivity, and bore arms as a
soldier." More particularly did he traverse Spain, Ger-
many, Italy, Denmark, Hungary, Muscovy, and then
Asia. He spent some time in Persia, was taken prisoner
by the Tartars, and carried before the Cham, by whom
he was sent on a mission to Constantinople.

He studied the works of Baymond LuUius, of Villanova,
and other adepts. Great was he upon transmutation of
metals ; he had found the aurum potabile, and talked with
Jews, quacks, wizards and witches, boatmen, bathmen,
and beggars. He boasts, as well he might, that he learnt
more from strollers and gipsies than from the learned
doctors of the schools. He gave and took ; and, in return
for knowledge thus acquired, cured hopeless maladies and
desperate diseases — ^gout, dropsy, leprosy, and fevers of
all kinds. He was received everywhere as the learned

PARACELSUS. 169

doctor ; and, vagabond and true Bohemian as he was, had
acquired a fame which far outran him and reached his
native country before its owner. But he was still poor,
until a lucky chance led him to Basil, where Jacob Fro-
ben, a learned printer, lay suffering from an acute pain in
his right foot, which no present leech could cure. This
torture Froben had endured so long that he could neither
eat nor sleep. Paracelsus was called in, attended to and
bathed the patient's foot, and then exhibited his grand
specific, which, as we may gather, was laudanum ; three
little black balls — tres jpillulas nigras — did Froben swal-
low with, to him, immense service. He slept, his faith
in physic was restored, and in a short time he was a
sound man. He died, however, some months after. of
apoplexy. "He could not be persuaded to follow the
advice of his judicious physician. The man, in fact, was
old and apoplectic, and he died, careless of consequences."
So says Erasmus, who believed in very little ; but, to the
glory of Paracelsus, he believed in him, and in his magis-
trale arcanum, his grand specific.

The cure of this apoplectic printer raised Paracelsus to
a pinnacle of glory. He was elected to the chair of
medicine of Basil, and in this position gave vent to some of
that grandiloquent spirit which seems to have inflated the
old alchemists, as it did that magnificent creation of Ben
Jonson, Sir Epicure Mammon. To the strange weird
teaching of Paracelsus — ^to that apotheosis of mundane
knowledge and intellect, when the lay mind of the age,
for a moment freed from the priests, seemed about to

170 VARIA.

arise in its strength, and snatch new triumphs from the
sky, — to this teaching flocked the youth of Germany, of
France, and Italy. The minstrel and the poet, the free-
lance and jongleur, the sucking physician and the lawyer,
the unfrocked monk and the layman, in quest of more
than the priestly schools could teach them, were alike
ready to listen, to admire, to applaud. There is in the
museum at Antwerp a strange painting of the period of
which we are writing, representing the procession to the
crucifixion of our Lord. There, too, all the trades of the
world are seen — types of all the people who aided in the
cruel work — ^flocking forwards to the sight. There come
the pedlars and tinkers, musician, artist, and handicrafts-
man ; there, too, the scholar and priest, joking, thickly
pressed together, pushing each other, chaffing, laughing,
full of life, eager to watch for the Death, — ^there they are,
the yery images of the townsmen and countrymen of the
painter, who has taken care — surely not in ignorance,
hut with some meaning* — ^to picture the ruffians of the
Jewish moh in the costume of his own age. What kind
of import and signification would such a crucifixion have
painted in the costumes of our day : with our high or low
church curate, our dean and doctor, sleek tradesman,
smug hishop, and ladies with ample crinoline ? Would it
not hring the reality home to men's husiness and hosoms ?

* Thus, in Bernard Zan*s piece of Abraham about to sacrifice his
son Isaac with a horse-pUtol^ the anachronism is at once great and
exceedingly droll, but surely intended.

PARACELSUS. 171

Such a mob^ as portrayed bj the, to me, unknown painter,
listened to the orations of Paracelsus. He discarded the
learned tongue, and lectured in German. He sent a new
thrill through the untaught bosoms of the people. He
was not one to hide his light under a bushel ; but, as he
poured forth his words, told his audience freely that he
knew more than aU the old school put together. Shouting
aloud in the plenitude of his self-love, he took, in the
sight of his audience, a brazen vase, from which flames
darted, and in which he placed nitre and sulphur; and
when the lurid flame blazed up, he cast in the works of
Galen, Avicenna, and the Arab doctors, shouting out at
the same time, "Thus, doctors, shall ye bum in ever-
lasting fire! Behind me!" he continued; "get thee
behind me,-—arriere-moi, Chrec, Latin, Arab ! Ye have
told hitherto but old wives' tales. The secret of all
nature belongs to me."

It is not alone Paracelsus who has railed at his brothers
in the healing art, not he alone has called their shops col'
hwies jusculorum — slop-receptacles ; but whoever has done
so has, we may well know, braved the hatred of all the
rest of the pulse- feeling tribe. The possibility of a doc-
tor making the sick man worse is no novelty in our own
day ; nor was it in his. We can trace it down through
ages. Martial has a good epigram, one out of nearly thirty,
against the tribe : —

I slightly ailed ; a hundred doctors come
(With finger icy-tipp*d and gelid thumb).
Prescribe their nostrums vile, to purge or bleed : —
At first I ailed ; but now I*m sick indeed.

172 VARIA.

And we may remember that Sir Grodfre j offered to take
anything of Dr. Radcliffe save his physic ; and Grarrick
would accept any present of Sir John Hill save his pro-
fessional advice^ which he contemned. But, notwithstand-
ing these quips and cranks, it is a bold thing to raise one's
voice against the kiDing and draughting tribe ; and Pa-
racelsus raised a host of enemies by his outcry against
established favourites. He was like Ishmael; but he
laid about him fiercely, and had salt in him.

A recent writer on the subject has noticed the obvious
fact that, — " In the time of Paracelsus patients were even
more unfortunate than in our days. Materia medica, or
the arsenal from which the physicians drew their weapons,
contained a mass of heterogeneous substances, the selec-
tion of which the most grotesque fancy, rather than the
wisdom of the sage, appeared to have regulated. Thera-
peutics resembled one of those armouries in which toma-
hawks and arms from Patagonia are laid by the side of
the more effective weapons used in modem warfare. If
the human body is a chemical laboratory, it was then in-
trusted with transmutations which modern science has
rejected as impossible. The old pharmaceutical cata-
logues present horrors far surpassing those of Bluebeard's
forbidden chamber ; for in those lists are seen scattered
about, not the limbs of poets, not the headless trunks of
lovely women, but the different parts of apes, lions, bats,
serpents, toads — of almost all known European beasts, and
of many exotic animals besides, changed * from their ordi-
nance to monstrous quality ' — ^to remedies given, not on

PARACELSUS. 173

account of any empiricallj beneficial effect of theirs, but
solely because of the mystical correspondence supposed to
exist between them and the diseases they were made to
combat. In affections of the liver, for instance, a dned
wolf's Urer was prescribed, or a donkey's liver, pounded
in honey. Scorpions and spiders were ingurgitated whole.
Zwelfer extolled the virtues of the toad against the plague.
Moles on the face could be cured by being touched with a
dead man's hand, which was to be kept on the face till it
became warm. Van Helmont, having almost been stared
to death by a toad, recovered by the use of treacle and the
powder of vipers. The medicine of those days, half su-
perstitious, half scientific, resembles those illustrations in
old medical books, which display a strange mixture of
stem and sentimental occurrences, which represent a sur-
geon boring a patient's head with a gouge, while surround-
ing ladies are wringing their hands, crying, or praying ;
while, by a touch of satirical symbolism, a cat is portrayed
devouring a mouse in a corner. AMiat would a modern
patient say, if, having succeeded in deciphering his doc-
tor's prescription, he read, * mw« comhustus ' ? He would
probably like to be allowed eggs for breakfast, but scarcely
< eggs of frog or lizard.' A lady in hysterics might not
perceive the efficacy of * deer's tears, dried ' ! Consump-
tive persons might object to ^pulmones pr&parati,^ pre-
pared lungs of fox. Pale persons would scarcely relish
an infusion of the blood of 'bat,' 'rhinoceros,' 'rat,' <fec.
And yet all these things were prescribed and taken in the
* good old times.' But there were many more remedies —

174 VARIA.

' Abominable, nnntterable, and worse.'

Every organ, every secretion or excretion of every strange
animal was used in medicine. The ludicrous and gro-
tesque sometimes give place to the horrihle in these no-
menclatures. Thus we find that the fat of a hanged man
was good ; powder of human skull had many virtues, and
cured Boyle 'radically' of a hleeding of the nose. A
heheaded man's hlood was heneficial when drunk yet warm;
a human skin, well tanned, worn, used as a helt, had a re-
storative efficacy."

But our physician himself, although he ahused his bre-
thren, seems to have been but little wiser. Let the fol-
lowing extracts from one of his books* bear this testimony
at least. The first is a somewhat long dissertation on the
virtues of the herb Persicariay or water-pepper, to which
liberal shepherds, as well as our EngHsh translator, ^'^ve
a grosser name."

'^ But now to show you the virtues of this herb : as soon
as you have pulled it out of the ground, draw it through
water, or through the streams of a river or a spring, which
is best of all, then lay it upon that part which is to be
cured so long as you may be eating half an egg, then take
it away and bury it in a moist place, where it may rot,

* In consequence of the long list of books consolted in this ar-
ticle, we have given the title of this one in a note : — ** Paracelsus
his Dispensatory and Ghimgery (the Dispensatory contains the
choisest of his Physical remedies, and all that can be desired of his
Chimgery, you have in the treatises of Wounds, Ulcers, and Apos-
thumes). Faithfully Englished by W. D. London, 1656."

PARACELSUS. 1 75

and as it putriiies the sore heals ; some do sign the signe
of the crosse and use a kind of prayer for it ; but such
doings are impertinent and absurd ; for the operation of
the herb is natural, not superstitious or magical." But at
other times he can use the magical and supernatural way
of cure freely, and in his Celestial Medicines he speaks
thus of preserving the sight without physic : —

'^ Make thee a round lamen of the best lead in the hour
of $, the > being in the signe c^y and in the same hour,
to wit in the hour of $, engrave the signes and letters
which you will see written in the foUowiug figure. After-
wards in the hour of ^ make a copper lamen of the same
quantity and form as the leaden one ; when > is in the
signe yp, the characters which you will see in the figure
are to be engraven thereon, <Sz;c. These are to be en-
closed in wax, so that they receive no moisture, sewn in a
piece of silk, and hung about the neck of a patient in the
day and hour of g ." This, Paracelsus assures us, is the
best remedy to recover the sight of the eyes and to pre-
serve the eyes from pain and disease. '^ It preserveth the
sight in old age as perfect as it was in youth." One lamen
in the engraving is about the size of a penny piece of
George III ; the smaller about the circumference of one
of the godless florins of Victoria.

While venting such stuff as this, in which it is hard to
believe that he himself could have had any faith, Paracel-
bus does not forget to attack his opponents ; and, after treat-
ing of the spider, "a hateful creature," he says, "Having
done with these hateful and poysonous creatures, now I

176 VARIA.

ynW speak concerning other common and contemptible
small creatures; and I hope I shall not be blamed for
this, nor shall these things I speak be esteemed as famed
tales, as false physicians do who will not use any common
medicines, such as may be gotten cheaply and easily, not
remembering this, that God hath created nothing in vain,
but that even the least and most contemptible things have
their peculiar virtues according to His divine pleasure."
No doubt this severe recital served our physician well ; he
pretended by lowly study to have penetrated the secrets
of Nature and to be able to instruct mankind. That the
present generation may not miss his great gift, it will be
as well to transcribe firstly a cure for warts, which our
schoolboy readers can easily try ; and secondly, an infal-
lible cure for any wound, which will ser^e both our sol-
diers, our volunteers, and but too often our civilians.

" To cure warts. Take oyl of juniper berries one ounce,
th oyl of spike two drams, oleum laterinum, or buck oyl,
seven drams ; mix them, and with this anoint the warts."

" A potion which being drunk wiU cure any wound !
Take of adder's tongue three handfuls, of periwinkle the
lesser one handful, of honeysuckle one handful and a half,
of rheubarbe one ounce, of rhaponticke three ounces : put
them into two gallons of water, boyl it to six quarts, or
put them into new ale or new beer four or five (lays, then
let the patient drink of it."

We may laugh at Paracelsus now ; but in skill he was
ahead of his rivals. He cured a judge, saved the life of a
canon residentiary with three black pellets, — ires murmi

PARACELSUS, 177

stercoris pillulas, — some say compounded of his secret
medicine, opium, which, we presume, he got from the East.
When the canon was cured, he would not pay the fee : the
dose was so small, the charge so large. Paracelsus sum-
moned his patient hefore the judges. They, stupid fellows !
only ordered the ordinary fee ; and our magical doctor, in
a torrent of indignant eloquence, abused the judges. Few
can help siding with him now. Nor, indeed, was our phy-
sician to blame. Bayle has remarked that in the middle
ages the fees of physicians were enormous. In his article
on Petrus Aponensis he tells us that that clever man, who,
like Paracelsus, was suspected of magic, would not go out
of town to visit the sick under 150 francs a day ; a large sum,
since the money was worth at least fifteen times as much
as it is now. Being sent for by the Pope Honorius IV,
Aporius, or Aponensis, demanded four hundred ducats a
day. Vander Linden relates the same thing, but without
naming the patient. Bayle quotes another physician
mentioned by Lancelot de Perouse as claiming 100
crowns a day, and as returning firom the Pope richer
by 10,000 crowns. The same story, with some varia-
tion, is told of Paul Freher, professor of medicine at Bo-
logna, that he was sent for from all parts of Italy, but
never left his town under fifty crowns a day, and that for
curing Honorius he received 1000 crowns. Variations
enough, says Bayle, truly ; Honorius must have paid his
physicians highly, and Paracelsus may plead precedents.
What evil has been done by weak and incompetent pur-
veyors of the law from Pontius Pilatus down^saxds ! MaiTy^

N

178 VARIA.

is this the law ? No wonder that Paracelsus devoted his
judges to that place wherein he had already deposited the
doctors. No wonder also, when the officers looked for
him the next day, that he, dreading the ire of the mag-
nates, had fled.

He left at Basil his chemicals, tests, and laboratory, in
charge of Oporinus, his scholar and friend, who filled to-
wards him the place which Wagner does to Faustus in
Marlowe's play ; and it is from this Oporinus, an ungrate-
ful apostate, and afterwards — therefore perhaps, O world !
— a rich and highly-respected citizen of Basil, that we
learn something of the inner life of Paracelsus. With
Oporinus, then a young and hungry scholar, the great
master also left his magistrale arcanum, laudanum, which
some time afterwards saved his life. It is possible, we hope
probable, for the sake of the physician, that the relation of
Oporinus is greatly exaggerated. " Adeo erat totis diebus
et noctibus, dum ego familiariter per biennium fere con-
vixi, ebrietati et crapulee deditus," <fec. " Thus, whilst I
chummed with him for nearly two years, was he both by
night and day given to gluttony and drunkenness. Hardly
was he sober for one hour, whilst he went forth from Basil
to Alsatia amongst the noble rustics and the rustic nobles,
healing them and teaching them, and everywhere received
like another iEsculapius. He was a wonder to and the
admiration of all. In the mean time, in his most drunken
moments, he would return home, and dictate to me
some of his wUd philosophy. Nor did he ever put off
his clothes in the night-time during the two years I was

PARACELSUS. 179

with him; but, girt about with his sword, which, he
boasted, had been that of some executioner, he would lie
down on his couch, drunken with wine, towards the small
hours of the morning. In a short time he would arise in
the dead waste of darkness, and lay about him with his
naked sword ; now striking the bed, the floor, the door-
posts, or the walls, in so wild a manner that I more than
once feared for the safety of my head (ut ego non semel
capvti amputatum iri metiterem)^'

Melchior Adam tells us, in addition to this, that he
would often embrace this man-slaying sword, boasting
that in the pommel of it was enclosed his Azoth, his
familiar imp,* and that with this imp he would hold
conversation, and talk wildly; but Melchior Adam
states that perhaps he had only a bit of the true stone
therein.

Possessed, then, of " that thirsty devil whose name is
Quaff," to quote Luther, when speaking of his own coun-
trymen, we need not wonder that the respectabilities of the

* Bumbastes kept a deviKs bird
Shut in the pummel of his sword,
That taught him all the cunning pranks
Of past and future mountebanks.

Hudihroi, part ii. cant. 3.

Ne yet of guacum one small stick, Sir,
Nor Raymond LuUy's great elixir ;
Ke had he known the Danish foxwort,
Or Paracelsus with his long sword.

JoQSon's Vblponet act ii. sc, 2.

180 VAMIA.

various towns in which he stayed did not consort with hiin.
He had offended the lawyers and the doctors, and he waa
ahout to insult the third great power — ^the clerics. He is
a strong man who, in this roundahout world, dare fight
against law, physic, and divinity. Paracelsus attempted
it, and was wofully heaten. Called in one day to a dying
peasant, he observed with him a priest, who held some-
thing to his lips. "Has the patient taken anything?"
asked Theophrastus. "Nothing," answered the priest;
" I was about to give him the Corpus Christi." " If he
has called in another physician," returned the leech, " he
doth not need me ; " and he forthwith departed.

"Whatever excuse may be made for this hasty and,
looked at from a religious point, very profane speech, —
whether the maker perceived that his patient was beyond
help, or whether he only girded at the priest, — we know
not ; but the outcry raised against him was immense, and
he was again about to fly. Oporinus joined the great
body of respectables, taking with him what he could of
his master's secrets, by which soon after, it is related, he
saved his own life ; and arose to be professor of Greek at
Basil. He afterwards devoted his life to the profession of
a printer, and died, fiill of years and honour, in 1568.

With his magic drug, his Azoth and Astoroth, and his
great, bold, braggadocio heart, Paracelsus again set forward
in life. He spent some time in Bavaria, where he healed
a nobleman ; some months in Poland, where he cured
the king's physician. Everywhere he and his potent drug
became celebrated, but he grew not rich. He was bom

PARACELSUS. 181

out of his time,— after or before it, what matters ? He
was a wanderer, a Bohemian, a crapulous and drunken
man — drunken with great passions and a strong scorn of
the world. He who could have achieved everything which
the world then thought great, threw away his time, and did
little. Towards the end of his life some small honours
were forced upon him. In 1536 he dedicated his Chirur-
gia Major to the Emperor of Germany, vindicated the
character of his father and his own right to the succession
of the property left by him, ruffled it with the nobles,
talked with and astonished priests, made a convert of the
Archbishop of Salzburg, and was by him persuaded to
settle in that city. But he did not long enjoy his settle-
ment, dying, after a lingering illness, in 1541, aged forty-
eight years. The portrait affixed to the little brown book
affirms, in the legend under it, that he " was poysned "
in the forty-seventh year of his age ; upon what authority
we know not. They who assert that Paracelsus boasted
of having discovered the Elixir of Life, add, no doubt for
the sake of antithesis, that he *^ died with a bottle of his
immortal Catholicon in his pocket ;" but, as these worthies
must be aware that there are some complaints in which
laudanum, his Catholicon, cannot be exhibited, they might
charitably have supposed that he died of one of these.
He left a very full and particular will ; and with a portion
of his fortune his executors built the hospital of St. Sebas-
tian, in Salzburg, where his tablet is yet to be seen, en-
titling him an " insignis doctor," curer of leprosy, gout,
and dropsy, who left his goods to the poor, and on the

182 VAEIA.

date mentioned exchanged this life for a hetter, vitam
cum morte miUavit His portrait was painted hy Tinto-
retto, and shows us a hold hard face, with a good forehead,
a prominent nose, a determined chin, and heroic hearing,
hull-throated, hroad-shouldered, sic occtdos, sic ora tulit.*
This portrait we have engraved on our title-page.

It will now he as well to glance at this master's works.
The translator of the two tracts of Paracelsus and Croillus
has told us, truly enough, that in hoth we shall meet with
" some uncouthe and unusuall words," which for better
'^understandinge" he has taken upon himself to explain.
Thus the Adecte, he tells us, is the invisible and inward
man, which shapeth those things in the mind that are after-
wards done with the hands. This is an explanation of
the connection between the wUl and the muscles not at
present dreamt of. The world also stands, we are told,
upon the Archaltes, pillars or supports something like
those of Hercules: whereon these pillars rest even this
prince of "physitions" does not inform us. We may
judge, however, that the world is as flat as the dial of a
watch, and that the Yankee's wish, that he could walk
right away to the edge and peep over, is not impracticable.

But with what curious and wondrous dreams did not our
early chemists lull themselves to sleep ! As the knight
rode through the crowds of water-spirits in Ta Motte
Fouque's story, and as St. Anthony in the old paintings
is surrounded by troops of spirits, so also myriads swarmed

* £pig. by Christ. Manlius*

PARACELSUS. 183

round the brain of the old alchemiats. Archeus was the
chief invisible spirit, the occult virtue, the artificer in
every one. Dases was the secret vapour, the spirit from
which wood grows; and from the occult vapour Enur
stones were formed and grew in water. HagsB were
spirits who knew the secret things of men ; the Gnomes,
made popular by Pope's poem, were little men scarce half
a foot high, spirits, but living under the earth ; and the
Lemures were either the spirits and elements of water, or
those of the dead come to life again. By the Penates our
physician understood, not those household gods with whom
our early lessons in Virgil made us acquainted, but spirits
of the earth and of the element of fire ; the Sylps were
pigmies or dwarfs ; the Travames, the actions of the spirits
and ghosts of dead men, heard but not seen.

Surrounded by these and by others, the philosopher of
the middle ages, or indeed the priest, nun, or peasant with
any imagination, could not have lived a very quiet life.
No wonder at their ghosts and midnight fears and horrors.
No wonder that darkness terrified them out of their wits.
We should not love to be subject to the continued interrup-
tion of any of the above ; nay, nor to be courted by the
Melosinee, " despairing women now living in a phantasta-
ticall bruittish body, nourished by the elements into which
they will be changed, unless they chaunce to marrie with a
manne."

Let us first ascertain this accomplished physician's
manner of accounting for the creation, a subject which
puzzles great philosophers even now. He divides his mat-

184 VARIA.

ter into texts ; and the first, by a marginal note, we find is
this : " The great mysterie is the mother of all things.*'
This ejaculation is expanded in the text in this manner :
" All created things are of a fraill and perishing nature,
and had all at first but one only principle or beginning.
In this principle all things under the cope of heaven were
enclosed and lay hid ; which is thus to be understood, that
ail things proceeded out of one matter, and not every par-
ticular thing out of its own private matter by itselfe. This
common matter of all things is the Oreate Mysterie, which
no certain essence or prefigured or formed idea coi|)d com-
prehend, nor could it comply with any property, it being
altogether void of colour and elementary nature. The
scope of this greate mysterie is as large as the firmament.
And the greate mysterie was the mother of all the ele-
ments, and the grandmother of all the Starrs, trees, and
carnall creatures. As children are born of a mother, so
all created things, whether sensible or insensible, all things
whatsoever were uniformly brought out of the great mys-
terie. So that the greate Mysterie is the one mother of
all perishing things, out of which they all sprung, not in
order of succession or continuation, but they came forth
together and at once, in one creation, substance, matter,
form, essence, nature and inclination." After this we are
not much wiser than before ; but it must be owned that
Paracelsus has a certain grand manner of venting nothing.
That water is a compound of oxygen and hydrogen, two
measures of the latter to one of the former, every reader
of the most elementary treatise on natural philosophy now

PARACELSUS. 185

knows. The following will perhaps therefore serve as well
as any other citation to help us to ascertain the amount of
true chemical science possessed by Paracelsus. Text 17
is on " the various complexions of water," and is as fol-
lows : " Nor did water obtaine one kind of complexion
onely. For there were infinite waters in that Element,
which yet were all truly waters. The Phylosopher cannot
understand that the Element of water is onely cold and
moyst of it selfe. It is an hundred times more cold, and
not more moyst, and yet it is not to be refer'd as well to
the h«4iesse as the coldnesse. Nor doth the element of
water live and flourish onely in cold and moyst in one de-
gree: no neither is it fully and wholly of one degree.
Some waters are fountaines, which are of many sorts.
Some are seas, which also are many and divers. Other
are streams and rivers and none of which is like another.
Some watry elements were disposed of into stones, as Berill,
Chrystal, Calcedony, Amethyst. Some into plants, as Co-
rall, &c. Some into juyce, as the liquor of life. Many
in the earth, as the moysture of the ground. These are
the Elements of water, but in a manifold sort. For that
which groweth out of the earth, from the seed that was
sown, that also belongs to the element of water. So what
was fleshy as the Nymphs belong also to the element of
water. Though in this case we may conceive that the
element of water was changed into another complexion,
yet it doth never put off or passe from that very nature of
the element from which it proceeded. Whatsoever is of
the water, tumeth again to water : that which is of fire

186 VAEIA.

into fire ; that of earth into earth ; and that of aire into
aire." From which it is very plain that our physician
did not know what fire or water was.

Nor is he any wiser as to the electricity and electric
storms of the air ; for ** thunder," ho writes, " comes from
the procreations of the firmament, hecanse that consisteth
of the element of fire. Thunder is, as it were, the harvest
of the stars at the very instant of time when it was ready
to work according to its nature. Magicall tempests rise
out of the aire and there end" This is poetically grand.
^\liat follows has much more of the comic elem^it in its
floundering hraggadocio. " Many things proceed out of
the store (i.e. of nature) through mistake, or in (un)due
time. Deformed men, wormes, and many more such like
generations, proceed from the impressions. The infection
of countries, the plague and famine, is from the fatall
stormes. Beetles, cankers, dalnes (?), breed in dung. To
the elements did there but four special kindes of the great
mystery belong, so they had but four principles. But men
had six hundred. Crump-feeted men had one, the Ci-
elopes another. Gyants another, the Medchili another.
So had they that dwell in the earth, in the aire, in the
water, and in the fire. Things that also grow had every
one its own proper mysterie in the Greate Mysterie whence
came out so many kinds of creatures. So many trees, so
many men, so many mysteries too.''

Even when Paracelsus leaves his windy discourse on
things of which he knows nothing, for a few moments,

PARACELSUS. 187

and tells us that " Earthy men are not happy," as he does
in the eleventh text of the second hook of his philosophy,
he is sensible only for a short time. The following sen-
tence might have been written by Sir Thomas Browne or
have been penned by Euskin: *'It is a silly and vain
philosophy to place all happiness and eternity in our ele-
ment of earth. A foolish opinion is it to boast that we
only are of all creatures the most noble. There are more
worlds than one; nor are there none besides us in our
own. But this ignorance is much more capitall that we
know not those men that are of the same element with us,
as the Nocturnals, Gnomes, <fec. who, though they live
not in the clear glory of heaven, nor have any light of the
firmament, but hate what we love, and love what we hate,
and though they are not like us in form, essence, or sus-
tentation ; yet is there no cause of wonder. For they
were made such in the great mystery. We are not all
that are made; there are many more whom we know
not of."

Would that all that Paracelsus had written were like to
this, but, alas ! his medical writings are full of credulity or
imposture. He believed, or pretended to believe, that
man could himself create or make a child resembling
those bom of women, only smaller and weaker, and his
directions for this strange proceeding are, says a critic
very justly, "too absurd and indecent to be quoted."
He tells us that '^ Stannar is the mother of metals, and
that metals are nothing but thickened smoke from

188 VARTA,

stannar; tliat man is composed of smoke, 'Man is a
coagulated fiime/ and that the coagulation of the sper-
matick matter is made of nothing but the seething
vapours and spermatick members of the body. We see
nothing in our own selves but thickened smoke made
up into a man by humane predestination." More-
over, " fiery dragons and ghosts proceed from stones ;"
and "things invisible eat and are nourished as well
as things visible," about which, at least, he could know
nothing. He attempts closely to explain the analogy
which he supposes to exist between the Macrocosmos or
external world and the Microcosmos or human body, and
believed that every physician ought to be able to point
out in man the east and west and the signs of* the Zodiac,
according, indeed, to that ancient catalogue still printed
in Zadkiel's and Moore's almanacs. He tells us that
the human body contains, or rather consists of nothing
but mercury, sulphur, and salt. He recommends people,
in curing a wound, to use the verba constellata, or astro-
logical and cabalistic words, which would effect a certain
cure when all other methods had failed.

" He made great use of cabalistic writers," says
Tennemann (" Manual of Philosophy"), ** which he endea-
voured to render popular, and expounded with a lively
imagination." He belonged to the school of the Mystics,
and has himself founded a school. His mystic notions
were many, chief amongst them are those of an emana-
tion from the Deity, of an internal illumination, of the
influence of the stars, of the vitality of the elements,

PARACELSUS. 189

which, as we have before seen, he thought were fed and
nourished, and of the universal harmony of all things.

In the notes to his wonderful poem, which the public at
first received somewhat coldly,* Browning asserts that the
Azoth of Paracelsus shut in the pommel of his sword was
merely his specific laudanum ; and Brande, in his " Manual
of Chemistry," tells iis " that through his discoveries,
original discoveries were few and unimportant ; his great
merit lies in the boldness and assiduity which he displayed
in introducing chemical preparations into the ' Materia
Medica,' and in subduing the prejudices of the Galenical
physicians against the productions of the laboratory.
But, though we can fix upon no particular discovery on
which to found his merits as a chemist, and though his
writings are deficient in the acumen and knowledge dis-
played by several of his contemporaries and immediate
successors, it is undeniable that he gave a most important
turn to pharmaceutical chemistry, and calomel, with a
variety of mercurial and antimonial preparations, as like-
wise opium, came into general use."

* I have a copy of the first edition, of which probably only a
very small number were printed. The preface is dated March, 1835,
and the book was published by Effingham Wilson. A list of Mr.
Moxon's books, dated 1846, is stitched up with it, and reveals the
fact that eleven years had passed away, but that the first edition
of one of the most remarkable poems written had not passed out of
print. To compare this neglect with the present estimation of
Browning will be both instructive and consolatory to unsuccestifal
poets.

190 VAfilA.

The notices which Mr. Hallam accords to Paracelsus
are by no means few, but they are very unfavourable.
He regards him in his truest light, that of a poetical
quack. " Germany," which Hallam truly says " is the
native soil of mysticism in Europe, is fond of the unin-
telligible dreams of the school of Paracelsus." The ten-
dency to reflex observation in the German mind was at
that time accompanied with a profound sense of the
presence of Deity; "yet one which, acting on their
thoughtful spirits, became rather an impression than an
intellectual judgment, and settled into a mysterious in-
definite theopathy, when it did not evaporate in pan-
theism." The tendency to evaporate in pantheism is
shown in the philosophy of Paracelsus, by his account
of gnomes, sylphs, Sylvesters, montanes, and tonnets, of
which I have before spoken, and to the creation of which,
long before Pope had used the machinery for his poem,
Paracelsus has as much a right to be credited as any
one. He was followed by a whole school of mystics,
in which Jacob Boehm and even Swedenborg may be
classed.

"His chemical theories," Hallam says, "descended
from Paracelsus through Van Helmont, and were propa-
gated chiefly by Sylvius, a physician of Holland. His
leading principle was that a perpetual fermentation goes
on in the human body, from the deranged action of which
diseases proceed ; most of them from an excess of acidity,
though few are of alkaline origin." " He degraded the
physician," says Sprengel, " to the level of a distiller or a

PARACELSUS. 191

•
brewer.'^* There are many who will even now question

whether this theory be not the true one after all ; if so,

medicine does indeed owe much to Paracelsus, even in

spite of his followers the Hosicrucians. These held that

a man who was a true Eosicrucian had only to look at a

patient to cure him. This seems to be merely the first

faint budding forth of the doctrine of magnetic cure.

" All things," says Croillus, or Croll, of Hesse, a theoso-

phist after Paracelsus' own heart, " in the Macrocosm are

found also in the Microcosm. The inward and actual

man is Gaballis, from which the science is named. This

Gaballis or imagination is as a magnet to external objects,

which it thus attracts. Medicines act by a magnetic

force.'*t

This Gabalistic force or 'art which produces by natural
imagination and faith, " per fidem naturalem ingenitam,"
all magical operations, and indeed all those wonderful
changes that man can wish for in health or disease within
his Microcosm, is descanted upon continually by Paracelsus.
Man has two elements in his body, a sidereal and material
element ; and this actual or sidereal part of him survives
after death, and will explain the apparitions of the dead :
but it is useless to again refer to his assertions, and, indeed,
I may conclude with our chief literary historian, perhaps
too much has been said about paradoxes so absurd and
mendacious : but literature is a gardeu of weeds as well

* Hallam, Literature of Europe, vol. lii. p. 599.
t Sprengel, iii. 362, quoted also by Hallam.

192 VABIA.

as of flowers ; and Paracelsus forms a link in the history
of opinion which should not he overlooked.

Syllvesters, satjres, montans and ton nets, undens and
melogens, yulcanals, salamanders, tumdel, and luperi, are
now all laid, thank Heaven, to sleep, unless they shall he
again brought into fashion by our modem rapparees. It
needs this peep into mediseval darkness to assure us that we
live in an age of progress and of light. We have, like Lear
in the storm, thrown off these fantastic lendings — ^these
rags and remnants of the mythology which the Greeks
and Eomans left us. If Paracelsus believed in them,
which we doubt, seeing that he was mystic above all
things, he yet believed in mercury and laudanum, two
of the most powerful props of modem medical science.
He should be honoured, therefore, even whilst we recall,
with Coleridge, the old belief in gnomes and spirits : —

Oh, never rudely will I blame his faith

In the might of stars and angels

For still the heart doth need a language ; still
Doth the old instinct bring back the old names.
Spirits or gods, that used to share this earth
With man as with their friend ; and to the lover
Yonder they move, from yonder visible sky
Shoot influence down : and even at this day
'Tis Jupiter who brings whate*er is great,
And Venus who brings everything that's fair.

This poetical superatition seems just now to be flickering
up for the last time, the same in spirit, but corporeally
audible in knocks, cracks, and jumping chairs and tables.
After all, until this dies out, it were better perhaps to go

PARACELSUS. 193

back to the unadulterated spirit-world of Paracelsus — ^to
his Lemures, his Azoth, his Catholicon, and his Elixir Vitse.

Referring to the death of Paracelsus, an author who
is more picturesque and starding than his facts warrant
him to he, tells us that Paracelsus " died, after a few
hours' illness, with a bottle of his immortal Catholicon in
his pocket." Of this statement nothing is known, save
that the illAess was not sudden. His will, executed St.
Matthew's day, September 21st, 1541, says that the testa-
tor is sick in body but sound in mind. It is dated from
his chamber in the inn, the " White Horse," where he
then resided. He is described as " the venerable and
most learned Doctor Theophrastus ab Hohenheim." Ready
money, rings, precious stones, plate, books, and clothes,
some of the curiosities and antiquities gathered in his
travels, made up the chief part of his property, which, with
the exception of some legacies to his friends and nearest
of kin, he ordered to be expended in charitable purposes ;
and his executors carried out his wishes by bestowing it
on the Hospital of St. Sebastian, in the precincts of which
he desired to be buried.

On a mural tablet in the chapel of the Hospital is the
following memorial of the once famous doctor : —

Condi tur hie

PHILIPPUS THEOPHRASTUS,

Insignia Medicinss Doctor,

Qui

dira ilia valnera

Lepram, Podagram, Hjdropisin,

o

194 VARIA.

aliaque insanabilia corporis contagia

mirifica arte sustulit ;
ac bona Baa in panperes collocanda
distribaendaq : erogavit.
Anno MDZZXXi. die xxiv, Septembris,
yitam cum morte mntavit.*

Possibly there is little in the history of the real Para-
celsus to bear out the noble aspiration of Browning iu his
Ideal ; but there can be no question of the purity of that
poet's ideal, nor of the beauty of the language in which it
is apostrophized. The spirit of Bombast yon Hohenheim
must have been pleased by this address : —

Men look up to tbe sun !
For after-ages shall retrack thy beams,
And pat aside the crowd of busy ones,
And worship thee alone — the master-mind.
The thinker, the explorer, the creator !
I recognise thee first ;

I saw thee rise, I watched thee early and late,
And though no glance revealed thou dost accept
My homage— thus no less I proffer it,
And bid thee enter gloriously thy rest !

* It may be as well here to add the epigram on the engraying
Arom which our portrait is taken. It was supplied by Christopher
Manlius of Gorlitz, and may be received as a testimony to the
fidelity of the painter, just as Ben Jonson's lines on the Droeshont
portrait of Shakespeare prove that its fidelity was as great as its
art was small ; otherwise the epigram, especially the second verse,
which we omit, is but a versification of names and dates.

Stemraate nobilium genitus Paracelsus ayorum,
QaA yetus Helvetia claret Eremus humo :

Sic oculos, nc ora tulit, cum plurima longum
Discendi studio per loca fecit iter.

HOWELL THE TRAVELLEK.

-«2fe>-

BOOKS CONSULTED.

JSpiitola Ho'JEliatue; Familiar LeiterSy Domutic and Foreign, tUmded
tHto Four BookSy partly HitUtrietdy PoUticaly Phihsophicaly tqwn
Emergent Octasiang. By James Howell. 1688.

JEpittola Ho-EUana ; Familiar LetterM, Domestic and Forren, His-
toricaly Politiedl^ and Phjflosophical, upon Emergent Occasions.
By James Howel, Esq., one of the Clerkes of His Majesties' Most
Honourable Privy Council. 7tli edition. 1 705.

IUtroq)ective Review. Art. 1. Howell's Familiar Letters. Yd. IV.
Part 2. 1821.

HOWELL THE TRAVELLER.
EPISTOL^-HO-ELIAN.S!.

^SECHDEACON PALET said that the best
SJ^jBi letter was that which (Same most directlj to
1 the purpose; aod his definition is a sound
I one. The polite inrolutione, curious turns,
quaint images, and hjperholical compliments with which
our grandfathers tickled the fancies of our grandmothera
and great-aunts, should be, and luckilj have been, swept
awaj. Letter-writing te some is a pastime; to many
it is a passion. With ladies this passion soon grows into
a disease, and when they are under its infiuence it is asto-
nishing what long letl«rs they will write upon theslightest
subject, and how, if encouraged, a perennial spring of
correspondence will gush from them. If suffering badl;
from this mania, they are always " gushing;" but since
the disease would appear to be inevitable, it may be well
that they should take it in the best possible form ; and, if

198 VAEIA.

a doctor be careful of the vims he chooses for vaccinationy
surely we should be particular in the choice of the " Fa-
miliar " letter writer from which our relatives first " take
the venom of a lady's pen." Basing ourselves upon Paley's
dictum, we may be somewhat astonished to find that, in an
age of euphemistic periphrasis, James Howell arrived at
once at the highest point of excellence. His familiar letters,
on subjects the enumeration of even a few of which would
occupy too much of our space, are models of what letters
should be — humorous or serious, affectionate or severe, as
the case may require, but practical, clear, concise, and
always direct and to the point. There is something also
very manly and delightfiil in their style ; and the reading,
good-humour, and knowledge of life they display are
immense. Hence, of upwards of forty different publica-
tions by this clever travelled gentleman, his letters alone
remain to us : and these are read again and again, each
time with a greater zest and pleasure by the true lover of
old literature.

Travelling, in Howell's days, was as fashionable, if not
as easy, an amusement as it is now. We leave it to the
black letter critics to determine the important question
whether Shakespeare had ever been to Scotland, or to
Paris, or had '^ swum in a gondola." His descriptions of
Italian scenery are sufficiently accurate to warrant the
supposition that he had visited the latter country. But if
he was not actually a traveller, the majority of the more
fortunately bom and richer gentlemen of his day were, as
well as the poor scholars, who, mustering their few gold

HOWELL THE TRAVELLER. 199

pieces^ went afoot like William Lithgow, for '^ thirtie and
sixe thousande of miles, perfitting his long nineteen years
travel by surveying forty-eight kingdoms, twenty-one re-
publics, ten absolute principalities, and two hundred
islands," said William, finishing his journeys (and being
himself finished, poor fellow !) by torture at Malaga, where
he was arrested as an English spy. Of greater education
than he was a son of the Archbishop of York, William
Sandys, an accomplished gentleman, scholar, and tra-
veller ; to which titles James Howell also may lay claim.
Bom in Carmarthenshire in 1596 (one child of fifteen, as
he tells us incidentally), Howell was educated at Hereford
and Oxford, and repaired to London in 1617. There is
abundant evidence that graduates of the Universities and
gentlemen of good family were not averse to trade in
that age; and, although the dramatists and courtiers
satirized the citizens, still the sons of knights and noble-
men sought employment of the merchants and chief traders
for their sons. James Howell was appointed steward of
a London glass factory, and in 1619 went abroad in
that capacity to perfect his knowledge and engage '^ gentle-
men workmen." He travelled till 1621, corresponding
in the meantime with high dignitaries and noblemen (one
of his brothers was Bishop of Bristol), and on his return
still followed his stewardship. This connection of business
with literature, which undoubtedly did him good, lasted for
some time. Upon its cessation he became a travelling
companion ; then a Government agent to Spain — where
he was witness to " Babie's " and " Steenie's " romantic

200 VABIA.

attempt at a Spanish marriage. Next he hecame Secre-
tary to Lord Scrope as President of the North ; was then
elected memher for Eichmond, in which post he remained
nearly four years ; and afterwards went to Copenhagen
as Secretary to the British Amhassador. In 1640 he
was made Clerk of the Council hy Charles I, and three
years afterwards was, hy the Parliament, imprisoned in
the Fleet, where he maintained himself hy translating and
working for the hooksellers. After the King's death he
was released, and at the Kestoration was made our first
" historiographer royal," in which position he continued
using his pen till the year of the great fire, 1666, when
he died.

From so husy a life we should expect much ; and we are
not disappointed. Howell's thick volume of upwards of
five hundred pages is full of ohservation, and is as amusing
as the essays of Montaigne. His letters are addressed
to all sorts of people — to the King, Lord Herbert of Cher-
bury, Lady Digby, Secretary Conway, Sir Eobert Mansell,
Sir Sacvil Trevor, Captain Francis Ba^on, Mr. Ben Jonson,
Mr. Ed. Noy, and others. We are inclined to think that,
with the method of a tradesman, he kept copies of all his
letters ; for, although some assert that he compiled them
from memory when in the Fleet, they are often too full of
amusing trivialities, of local touch and colouring, the most
evanescent of qualities — in short, have too great an air of
freshness to have originated in any other manner. They
are, as we have before hinted, supposed to be the earliest
specimens of epistolary literature in our language. Howell's

HOWELL THE TRAVELLER. 201

style seems to have been based upon the precept contained
in his motto : —

Ut clavis portam, «ic pandit Epistola pectus ;
Claudetor hsc cera, claadetur ilia sera.

As keys do open chests,
So Lettert open breasts.

He dedicates his letters to the King in a " Poem Eoyal,"
dated Oalendis Jammrii, 1641, which contains some
strong and excellent lines. He brings, he sajs : —

No medals ot rich stuff of Tyrian dye,

No costly bowh of frosted argentry,

Ko Roman perfumes, buffs, or cordovans

Made drunk with amber by Moreno's hands.

. . . but something I will bring

To handsel the new year to Charles, my Kino,

And usher in bifronted Janus, —

in a word, his book of letters. In his very first page he
defines what an epistle should be, in one written to Sir J.
S. (John Smith) at Leeds Castle : —

" It was a quaint difference the ancients did put 'twixt
a letter and an oration — that the one should be attir'd
like a woman, the other like a man ; the latter of the two
is allowed large side-robes, as long periods, parentheses,
similes, examples, and other parts of rhetorical flourishes ;
but a letter or epistle should be short-coated and closel j-
couch'd; a hungerlin [a short scanty coat] becomes a letter
more handsomely than a gown. Indeed, we should write
as we speak ; and that's a true familiar letter which expres-
seth one's mind, as if he were discoursing with the party

202 VARIA.

to whom he writes in short and succinct terms. The
tongue and the pen are both interpreters of the mind ; bat
I hold the pen to be the more faithful of the two. The
tongue, in udo posita, being seated in a moist slippery
place, may fail and falter in her sudden extemporal ex-
pressions ; but the pen, having the greater advantage of
premeditation, is not so subject to error. Xow, letters,
though they be capable of any subject, are commonly
either narratory, objurgatory, monitory, or congratula-
tory. There are some who, in lieu of letters, write Ho-
melies ; they preach when they should epistolize. There
are others that turn them into tedious tractats ; and others
that must go fraighted with meer Bartholomew ware, with
trite and trivial phrases only, lifted with pedantic shreds
of schoolboy verses."

Really, Mr. Howell must have been reading, by pro-
phetic vision, some of the vacation and lady-tourists'
letters which are now-a-days issued. He is equally se-
vere on the elder Balzac and the letter-writers of our
" transmarine " neighbours : " Loose flesh without sinews,
simpering lank hectic expressions, a bombast of words
made up of finical and affected compliments, I cannot away
with such sleazy stuff;" and luckily he has backbone enough
to prevent his committing the faults which he so ardently
condemns. In an early epistle to his father he tells us that,
had he remidned steward of the glass-house in Broad
Street, he should *^ have melted away to nothing amidst
those hot Venetians." Captain Francis Bacon succeeded
him in Broad Street, whilst Howell was taken into the

HOWELL THE TRAVELLER. 203

employment of Sir Eobert Mansell, who, with " my Lord
of Pembrook and divers others of the Prime Lords of the
Oow*t, had got a sole patent for the making of glass from
pit-coal, only to save the huge loads of wood formerly used
in the furnaces." Here is the first hint of the improve-
ment in the blast of our furnaces ; but it would seem that
the patent did not succeed. In the same letter he tells
us something of the rise of the haughty Buckingham : —

" The new favorit Sir George ViUiers tapers up a pace,
and grows strong at Court. His predecessor, the Earl of
Somerset, has got a lease of ninety years for his life, and
so hath his Articulate lady ; so called, because she articu-
lated against the frigidity and impotence of her former
lord. [This was the notorious Countess of Somerset cele-
brated in our State Trials.] She was afraid that Coke,
the Lord Chief Justice, who had used extraordinary art
and industry in discovering all the circumstances in the
poysoning of Overhury, would have made white hroth of
them ; but the Prerogative kept them from the pot. Yet
the subservient instruments, the lesser flies, could not
break thorow ; amongst others, Mistriss Turner, the in-
ventress of yellow starch, was executed in a cobweb lawn
ruff of that colour at Tyhum, and with her, I believe, will
disappear that yellow starch, which so much disfigured our
nation and rendered them so ridiculous and fantastic."

In the same letter Howell tells us of the execution of
Sir Gervas Elway, Lieutenant of the Tower, who, on being
hanged on Tower Hill as an accessory to the murder of
Overbury, declared that ibe reason he suffered was through

204 VAEIA.

a rash vow, for when in the Low Countries he swore an
oath that he would not play ahove a certain sum. If he
did^ might he he hanged! and hanged he was, surely
enough. In chronicling a crime let us, when we can,
append a virtue to it — that, for instance, of Lord William
Pemhrook, to whom the King gave all Sir Gervas Elway's
estate (ahove a thousand per annum), and who at once
hestowed it on the widow and her children. In a letter to
Sir James Crofts, Howell tells us of the prohahle fate of Sir
Walter Ealeigh, who had just returned from " his myne
in Guiana, which at first promised to he a hopeful boon
voyage " (it is worth while remarking that we now use the
last adjective with only one noun, i.e., companion), " hut,"
adds the writer, " it seems that that golden myne is proved
a meer chymcera, an imaginary airy myne ; indeed, TTia
Majesty had never any other conceit of it." Howell
wonders why Sir Walter ever came hack to the clutches of
his enemy, and tells an a propos story of a king and his
jester. Gondomar, the Spanish amhassador, is introduced
in a wonderfully characteristic huffling, hraggadocio way : —

" Count Qondamar desired audience with His Majesty
— ^he had hut one word to tell him. His Majesty won-
dering what might be delivered in one word, when he
came before him, he said only Pyrats, Pyrats, Pyrats,
and so departed.''

This Gondomar seems, like the Count von Bismarck,
to have been a man of some humour. There is in Kirby
Street, Hatton Garden, a public^house which retains the
name of the " Hole in the Wall ;^" and to antiquaries the

HOWELL THE TRAVELLER. 205

memory of Lady Hatton is preserved in the street called
Hatton Garden, close by. This proud lady, the wife of
Sir Edward Coke, had thereat a wicket gate, which led
from the garden into the fields beyond, leading to the
village of Clerkenwell, its green and may-pole. Count
Gondomar, who lived next door to Lady Hatton at Ely
House, begged for a key to this private door^ which the
lady refused. " She," says HoweU, " put him off with a
compliment ; " whereupon Gondomar, in a private audience
with the Xing, exposed the whole affair, and more than
hinted at the tyranny exercised by Lady Hatton on her
cringing husband. '^ Lady Hatton," says he, ^' is a strange
lady, for she will not suffer her husband. Sir Edward Coke,
to come into her house at her front door, nor him, Gbn-
domar, to go out in the fields at her back door ; and so
related the whole business." The smoke and dinginess
of London, and the sickly glare of the sun therein as
compared to Spain, are well hit off in a sentence by the
witty Spaniard : —

*^ He was despatching a Post lately to Spain, and the
Post having received his packet, and kiss'd his hands, he
call'd him back and told him he had forgot one thing,
which was, that when he came to Spain, Tie should com-
mend him to the sun, for he had not seen him a great
while, and in Spain he should he sure to find him"

Travelling to the Hague, Amsterdam, and Paris,
Howell draws a picture of the latter which shows how
little removed it was from a city of the middle ages.
ItB streets were close, mean, and dirty, except some few

206 VABIA.

new houses built of stone, and the Louvre, with its great
gallery, wherein " the king might place 3,000 men in the
very heart of this great mutinous city.*' The streets
stank like those of Cologne, in Coleridge's epigram, and
were so narrow that two coaches or carts passing would
create a block. The mud was so black and greasy (filled
with oyly says Howell) that no washing could cleanse it
from some colours ; so that an ill name, he says, is like
the crot of Paris, indelible. The stench of Paris might
be perceived with the wind in one's face many miles off.
At night-time the city was full of thieves ; by which the
lives of night travellers were constantly endangered : —

" Coming late to our lodgings (near the Bastille) a crew
of FU0U8 or night rogues surpriz'd and drew on us, and
we exchanged some blows. It pleased Gbd that the Cheva-
lier du Ouet (a night patrol) came by and so rescued us ;
but Jack White was hurt, and I had two thrusts in my
cloake. There's never a night passes by but some rob-
bery or murder is committed in this town."

In a subsequent letter Howell relates the assassination
of King Henry IV. by Eavaillac, and the horrid tortures
to which that wretch was put.

It is Henry, says Howell, who amassed a heap of gold
as high as a lance, and who levied a huge army of 40,000
men, "whence comes the saying, the King of France
with forty thousand men^ Of course, Howell did not
see the murder of the king, but he relates it circumstan-
tially and minutely, as from the lips of an eye-witness, a
French friend of his.

HOWELL THE TRAVELLER. 207

'^ Going to the Bastile to see his treasure and ammu-
nition, his coach stopped suddenly, hj reason of some col-
liers and other carts that were in that street ; whereupon
one RaviUaCf a lay Jesuit (who had a whole twelvemonth
watched an opportunity to do the act), put his foot boldly
upon one of the wheels of the coach, and with a long
knife stretched himself over their shoulders who were in
the boot of the coach, and reached the king at the end,
and stabb'd him right in the left side to the heart, and,
pulling out the fatal steel, he doubl'd his thrust. The king,
with a ruthful voice, cri'd 'Je suis hlesse ' (I am hurt), and
suddenly the Blood issued out of his mouth : the Begicide
villain was apprehended, and command given that no
violence should be offered him, that he might be reserved
for the Law and some exquisite Torture. The Queen
grew half distracted here upon, who had been crown'd
Qusen of France the day before in great triumph ; but a
few days after she had something to countervail, if not
overmatch, her sorrow ; for, according to St. Lewis's law,
she was made Queen Begent of France during the king's
minority, who was then but about ten years of age. Many
consultations were held how to punish Eavillac, and there
were some Italian physicians that undertook to prescribe
a torment that should last a constant torment for three
days ; but he 'scaped only with this. His body was pull'd
between four horses, that one might hear his bones crack,
and after dislocation they were set again, and so he was
carried in a cart half naked, with a torch in that hand
which had committed the murder, and in the place where

208 VARIA.

the act was done it was cut off, and a Gauntlet of hot Oyl
was clapped on the place to staunch the blood, whereat he
gave a doleful shriek ; then was he brought upon a stage,
when a new pair of boots was provided for him, half filled
with bojling Oyl, then his Body was pincered, and hot
Oyl poured into the holes. In all the extremity of this
torture he scarce shewed any sense of pain but when the
gauntlet was clap'd upon his arm to staunch the flux, at
which time of reaking blood he gave a shrike only. He
bore up against all these Torments for about three hours
before he died. All the confession that could be drawn
from him was, ITiat Tie tkought to have done God good
Service^ to take away that king which would have em-
hroiled all Chrestendom in an endless War J'

Arrived at Venice, he found there " the best gentlemen
workmen that ever blew crystal," and was aided, in his
attempt to get some of these gentlemen workmen to
England, by Sir Henry Wotton, the English ambas-
sador and the author of two famous mots. The first was
a retort to a Venetian nobleman, who had asked him
"where the Protestant religion was before the Refor-
mation." " Signer," said he, " where was your face
this morning before it was washed ?'' The second is the
celebrated definition of an ambassador — " A gentleman
sent to lie abroad for the good of his country." Howell
praises Venice glass exceedingly. The makers thereof
were gentlemen ipso facto, and, after their work, dressed
in silks and buckled on their swords like the gallants
painted by Vandyke ; but the lasses and glasses of Venice,

HOWELL THE TEAVELLEE. 209

Howell says, were alike brittle. Venice, he adds, was so
clean that it might be walked " in a Silk Stokin and Sat-
tin Slippers ;" and with these and other of his observa-
tions he mingles story, history, and philosophical remark
in a very charming way.

Howell, when in London, appears to have lived very
close to Ben Jonson, in Westminster, near Tothill Fields ;
for, from the pleasant gardens there, we find him in July,
1629, sending to Sir Arthur Ingram " a hamper of me-
lons, the best that I could anywhere find of Tothill Fields
gardens." Sir Arthur had asked Howell to stay some
time with him at his noble new house at Temple Newsam.
In thanking him for this courteous invitation our familiar-
letter writer anticipates Joe Miller in one of his very
sound old jests, which he sets down to a Norfolk country-
man who had a " sute " before Sir Edward Coke, who,
asking him how he called a certain river, answered, " My
lord, I need not call her, for she is forward enough to
come of herself." " So I may say that you need not call
me to any house of yours, for I am forward enough to come
without calling." In the next extract, a letter which we
give whole to show fiilly Howell's style, we learn that Ben
Jonson narrowly escaped being burnt out of house and
home. In it he addresses rare Ben, as did many of his
contemporaries, as his poetical sire.

" To my Father Mr. Ben Jonson.

<* Father Ben, — Nullum sit magnum ingenium sine
miMura demmtioi, there's no great wit without some mix-

p

210 VAEIA,

ture of madness, so saith the philosopher ; nor was he a
fool that answered, nee parvum sine mixtura stultitice, nor
small wit without some aUay of foolishness. Touching
the first, it is verified in you, for I find that you have bin
often mad when you writ your Fooc, and madder when
you writ your Alchemist; you were mad when you writ
your CatUiny and stark mad when you writ S^anus ; but
when you writ your Epigrams and the Manetick Lady
you were not so mad : insomuch that I perceive there are
degrees of madness in you. Excuse me that I am so free
with you. The madness I mean is that divine Fury,
that heating and heightening spirit which Ovid speaks of.

** Est deus in nobisy agitante calesscimus illo : that true
enthusiasm which transports and elevates the souls of
poets above the middle region of vulgar conceptions, and
makes them soar up to heaven and touch the stars with
their laurelled heads, to walk in the Zodiac with ApoUo
himself, and command Mercury upon their errand.

" I cannot yet light upon Dr. Davies his Welsh Gram-
mar ; before Christmas I am promised one. So, desiring
you to look better hereafter to your charcoal fire and
chimney, which I am glad to be one that preserved it
from burning, this being the second time that Vulcan has
threatened you — it may be because you have spoken ill of
his wife, and been too busy with his horns — I rest, Your
son and contiguous neighbour y J. H,

"Westminster, 27 June, 1629."

We have little space left ; but it is hard to part with
a pudding from which so many plums may be picked.

HOWELL TEE TRAVELLER. 211

Howell has always plenty to say. He will tell you a
facetious tale of a " Porter," or an anecdote about the
** Election of Pope," or will discourse on the " Chemistry
of Glass," " The Excise," '' Prayer and Praise," " Auto-
logy," "Of a hideous serpent lately found in a young
gentleman's heart in Holbom," <* Of Wiving," " Of Peter
Vfin Heyn's mighty Plate Prize," " Of what befel Wal-
stein [Wallenstein] in Germany last year :" "All sorts of
Stories." He writes of William Lily, the astrologer, of
the death of Mr. Attorney-General Noy, of that of Lord
Bacon, and seyeral times to his poetic or mental father,
Ben Jonson, "dear father Ben," who was of a rugged
but fine nature, and too often

At the Sao,

The Dogge or triple Tun —

as full of drink as of the poetic afflatus. We cannot pass
without extracting Howell's epitaph on Jonson, and part
of his letter to the Lord Bishop of Chichester, Dr. Duppa,
on Ben's death. " My Lord," he writes, " It is well
becoming and very worthy that you are about not to suffer
Mr. Ben Jonson to go so silently to his grave or rot so
suddenly. Being newly come to town, and understanding
that your Johnsonus Virhius was in the press, upon the
solicitation of Sir Thomas Hawkins, I suddenly fell upon
the insuing Decastich, which, if your Lordship please, may
have room among the rest.

Upon my honoured Friend and F., Mr. Ben Jonson.

A ND is thy glass ran out, is that oyl spent

Which light to such strong sinewy labours lent ?

212 VARIA.

Well, Sen, I now perceive that all the Nine,
Though they their utmost forces should combine,
Cannot prevail 'gainst Nights three daughters, but
One still must Spin, one Wind, the other Cut.
Yet, in despight of distaffe, clue and knife,
Thou in thy strenuous lines hast got a life.
Which like thy Bays shall flourish ev'ry age, 1

While Soc or Buskin shall attend the stage. t

Sic Vaticinaiur Hoellus." i

He writes a long letter on the death of the King, and '
tells us that the city was much "annoyed at the Court '

huying the mourning all in white cloth, and haying it dyed '

hlack." This was a shrewd stroke of business, owing,
we should guess, to the citizens having, on the proximate I

death of the Sovereign, bought up all the black cloth, so
as to monopolize it, and charge their own price.

Howell always writes well, and perhaps never better than
when he gives an account of his daily life. In his index he
calls this narration the " Self-travel of one of the Wayes
that lead us to Heaven."

" Though there be rules and rubrics in our Liturgy suf-
ficient to guide us in the performance of all holy duties,
yet I believe every one hath some mode, or model, or
formulary of his own especially for his private or cubicular
devotions;, for myself, on Saturday evening I fast, on
which I have fasted ever since I was a youth, for being
delivered from a very great danger. On Sunday morning
I rise earlier, to prepare myself for the sanctifying of it ;
nor do I use barber, taylor, shoe-maker, or any other
mechanic that morning. Whatever lets may hinder me

HOWELL THE TRAVELLER. 213

the week before, I never miss, but in case of sickness, to
repair to Good's house that day before prayers begin, and
to prepare myself by previous meditation to take the whole
service with me. I prostrate myself in the humblest and
decentest way of genuflexion I can imagine ; nor do I be-
lieve there can be any excess of exterior humility in that
place, therefore I do not like unseemly squatting, bold
postures on one's tail, or muffling one^s face with one's
hat, but with bended knee I fix my eyes on the East part
of the church and on Heaven. ... I endeavour to
apply every tittle of the service to myself, to. the service of
my own conscience ; and I believe the want of this, with
the huddling and careless reading of some ministers, make
many undervalue and take a surfeit (i. e. at the length)
of our public service. For the reading and singing of
Psalms, whereas most of them are either petitions or
Eucharistical ejaculations, I listen to them more attentively
and make them my own : when I stand at the Creed,
I think upon the custom they have in Poland, and else-
where, for gentlemen to draw their swords all the while,
intimating thereby they will defend it with their lives and
blood : and for the Decalogue, where others rise, I even
kneel in the humblest and trembling'st posture of all,
craving remission for the breaches of God's holy com-
mandments. I love a holy and devout sermon, that first
checks and then chears the conscience, that begins with
the law and ends with the Gospel, but I never prejudicate
or judge any preacher, taking him as I find him.

^* And now that we are not only adulted hui ancient

214 VABIA.

Christians, I believe the most acceptable sacrifice we can
send up to Heaven is Prayer and Praise, and that Ser-
mons are not so essential as either of them to the true
practice of devotion. The rest of the holy sabbath, I
sequester my body and my mind as much as I can from
worldly affairs.

"Upon Monday mom I have a particular prayer of
thanks ; and every day I knock thrice at Heaven's gate,
besides prayers at meals, and other occasional ejaculations,
as upon the putting on of a clean shirt, washing my hands,
and lighting the candles. Upon "Wednesday night I
fast and perform some extraordinary acts of devotion,
as also upon Friday night, and on Saturday morn
when, as soon as my senses are unlocked, I am up. And
in the summer time I am often up abroad, in some private
field, there to attend the rising of the sun ; and as I pray
thrice a day, so I fast thrice a week. Before I go to bed
I make a scrutiny of what peccant humours have reigned
in me that day, and strike a tally in Heaven's Exchequer
for my quietus est, ere I close my eyes, and so leave no
burden on my conscience. I use not to rush madly into
prayer Difference in opinion may work a disaf-
fection in me, not a detestation. I rather pity than hate
a Turk or an Infidel, for they are of the same metal, and
bear the same stamp as I do, though the inscriptions
differ. If I hate any, it is those schismatics that puzzle
the sweet peace of our Church. I thank God that I have
this fruit of my foreign travels, that I can pray unto him
every day in the week in a several language, and upon

HOWELL THE TRAVELLER. 21e5

Sunday in seven, which in orisons of my own I punctu-
ally perform in my private Pomeridian devotions : —

Et sic ffitemam contendo attiogere vitam.''

Few men will quarrel with such a method of doing
God service, which is surely a peaceful and Christian
one. Serious and calm writing like this strongly reminds
us of the best passages in Sir Thomas Browne's " Religio
Medici."

The letter just quoted is dated July, 1635. It re-
sembles Sir Thomas Browne's style so much that one may
doubt whether Howell had not seen the MS. of the
" Religio Medici," which in that year was written, or, it
may be, was written before and circulated in manuscript.
It was not given to the world until 1642. Dr. Johnson
says, " About the year 1634, he (Sir Thomas Browne) is
supposed to have returned to London, and the next year
to have written his celebrated treatise called * Religio
Medici,' the religion of a physician, which he declares
himself never to have intended for the press. Dr. Kippis,
says Simon Wilkin in a note on this passage, seems to
have proved that * Religio Medici ' was written in 1 635.
In Wilkin's additional memoir of Browne we are told that
he returned to England after having obtained his degree
of M.D. at Leyden, in 1633. He then returned at once
to England, and settled as a physician at Shepden Hall,
near Halifax, where he had enforced leisure enough to
meditate upon his past life and to write the ^ Religio Me-

216 VABIA.

dici,' ODB of the fturest moDumente of the English mind."
If this were so, and in 1634 tlie MS. was iu circulation
amongst litenuy people, il is posmble HoweU, the friend
of Ben JoDsOD, looked at it and, intentionallj^ or uninten-
tional];, reprodnced its stjie.

MICHAEL SCOT

>=««>

BOOKS CONSULTED.

Debrio. Ditquisiiiones Magica, Proloquium. Mogantiae, 1612.

Boyle, Dictionncdre higtorique et critique, revu par Prosp, Marchand.
Rotterdam, 1720.

Scot, Michael. Liher physiognomic. Opusctda. Lyons, 1531.

Scotty Sir Walter. Lay of the Last Minetrd (Notes to).

Dante, Tutte le Opere di Dante, con vane annot. e copiosi rami, S^.
dal Conte Don Christ. Zapata de Cisneroi, In Yenetia, 1757.

Dante, Translated by Henry Cary.

MICHAEL SCOT.

JMONGST those who have obtained a very
I great iame npon an UDBolid foundation,"
I Baya a modem writer, " Michael Scot holds
a very distinguished place." Hallam, who
appears to have read everything, and to have neglected
nothing, has very little about him, and that little is ud-
satisfactory, to hb friends at least. It is contained in a
note in Hallam's iirst volume, and here it is: "Michael
Scot, ' the Wizard of dreaded fame,' pretended to translate
Aristotle, but is charged with having appropriated the
labours of one Andrew, a Jew, as his own." Scot's fame
was, therefore, purchased at little expense, for his singular
learning in Greek, or rather the reputation of it, imposed
upon many people.

We have seen, iu the article on Faustus, that Coleridge
had intended to vmte a drama upon Michael Scot aAer
the manner of " Faust." It is well that he did not carry
out his determination with so knavish a hero, for even
biographers of hia own country can scarcely keep their

220 VABIA.

hands from belabouring him^ and, groping in the dark-
ness of medieeval literature, are evidentlj enraged to find
that the heroic figure described by Sir Walter, the great
magician and learned man to whom even Lord Eldon was
proud to trace his ancestry,* is a mere windbag, a charla-
tan, a fellow of yast pretensions, possessed of the slenderest
basis of support, the smallest nucleus of reality, round
which is wound the biggest possible ball of hypothesis,
conjecture, and fable.

The celebrated and poetical character who grew up to
be regarded as

A wizaid of such dreaded fame,
That when in Salamanca's cave
Him listed his magic wand to wave,

The bells would ring in N6tre-Dame,

was bom in an era particularly well adapted for the growth

* " When the late Lord Eldon was elevated to the peerage, the
arms of the Scots of Balwearie were added to his own ; and we are
told that the Lord Chancellor felt a pride in his descent from the
renowned Scottish magician. As nothing but modern evidence is
produced in support of this connection of Michael with any family
now in existence, we may be allowed to withhold belief from this
story. The members of ancient families are always willing to con-
nect their pedigree with some man of intelligence in past times. . .
If Michael had been a poor philosopher living in Lord Eldon's own
day, the prudent Chancellor would have taken particularly good
care not to have given him a sixpence to buy bread with ; but the
son of the Newcastle coal merchant was willing enough to attest
the antiquity of his own extraction by counting kin with a cele-
brated man of the thirteenth century." — Livet of Eminent Men of
Fife.

MICHAEL SCOT. 221

of an empiric fame. Michael the Scotsman^ Scotus, is
certainly claimed as a Scotsman, and is inserted amongst
the celebrated men of Fife by Mr. James Bruce, who
does not seem very well pleased with him for being a
Scotsman at all. But he is also claimed as an English-
man. Leland asserts that he was English, and Ball and
Pitts, who both quote Leland, and cannot therefore be
taken as authorities, assert the same thing. They also,
says Mr. Bruce, indignantly claim *' Duns Scotus as an
Englishman ;" and, indeed, there is better authority for
Anglicising Duns than Michael. We take it, however,
that the primary and very heavy proof that Duns and
Michael were both Scots is that they were called so.
When Leland quotes a passage from an unpublished trea-
tise of Bacon, wherein the names of " Qerardus Cremo-
Tiensis, Michael Scotius, Aluredus Anglicanus, Herman-
nus Alemannvs '' occur, we feel that there is no reason to
disturb the distinctive titles given to each. Let Hermann
be a German and Michael a Scotsman by all means, even
though Leland does say that the magician was bom and
educated in the county of Durham. What does it
matter ?

At Balwearie, in the close neighbourhood of Eaith,
now in the parish of Abboteshall, Michael was born in
1214 — so many authorities tell us ; but as, in 1230, Koger
Bacon says that certain portions of Aristotle's writings
(librorum Aristotelis partes aliqucis de naturalihus et
mathematicis) had become known through the translation
of Michael Scot, it seems evident that his birth should

222 VARIA.

be placed earlier^ perhaps as far back as 1200 or 1190.
He flourished as the astrologer to the Emperor Frederic
II. in 1233, and was contemporary with our Henry III,
Louis VIII. of France, and Alexander II. of Scotland,
and it is firstly to his (?) translation of Aristotle and the
fame acquired thereby that he owed his elevation to the
service of Frederic, and secondly to his astrological predic-
tions that he owes his present fame and enduring celebrity.
Of a roving and curious disposition, the son of a poor
Scottish knight, Scot crossed the border and resided for
some time at Oxford, to perfect himself in the learning of
the day. He went to Paris and studied there, and after
some time made his appearance at Padua, where he lec-
tured on astrology. He seems to have been bom a
favourite of literary men, and to have been accepted in that
learned city, not as a mere pupil in, but as a master of,
the art of magic. Boccaccio introduced his name to his
thousands of readers, and calls him a great master of
necromancy ; and when once thus placed, it is evident that
his hme was made. In the eighth day, and the ninth
novel of the "Decameron," there is an amusing story
of two painters, Messires Bruno and Buffalmacco, who,
under the pretext of introducing one Master Simon, a
physician, into a gay society, throw him into a cesspool,
where they leave him to get out as he best can. It is in
speaking to Master Simon of the society which they fre-
quent, of course a fictitious one, that the painters introduce
the name Michael. " After having sworn the physician to
secrecy, ^ You must know,' continued Bruno, ' that twelve

MICHAEL SCOT. 22S

or thirteen years ago there arrived in this town a famous
necromancer called Michael Scot, because he was from
Scotland, (the French translator prints it Michael Lescot).*
He was received with very great honours and distinction
by the best known gentlemen of Florence, who now are
almost all dead. And when he left this place, he left also
at their soHcitation two of his disciples, whom he com-
manded to render to those gentlemen, who had so well
received him, all those services which depended upon them
and their art. These two necromancers served the said
nobles, not only in their aflfairs of gallantry, but also in
other things, and became so accustomed to the climate,
that they determined to fix their residence here. They
bound themselves by ties of friendship to several persons
of character and personal merit, without inquiring whether
they were noble or roturiers, poor or rich, and these out
of regard for their two friends, formed a Uttle society, of
about ^ye and twenty men, who assemble together twice
a month in a place they themselves have previously
named." ' t

One needs not to say, since the story is by Boccaccio,
that the Society meets for the most immoral purpose.
Courtesans of the greatest beauty and of the highest rank
are there to enjoy these gay feasts with them ; indeed the

* ** Egli non ha ancora guari, che in questa citt& fu nn gran
maestro in negromanzia, 11 quale ebbe nome Michele Scotto, percio
che di Scozia era." — Boccaccio, Dec. Giom. yiii. Nov. ix.

t Boccaccio, Decameron, Giom, Ottaoa, Novella ix.

224 VABIA,

magic of the Decromancers summoned these from the most
distant parts of the earth. If the persons were two thou-
sand leagues off, the potent magic taught by Michael Scot
eould compel them to Qome in two minutes. Bruno gives
to these grand ladies some grand names. " There is,"
he tells the simple physician, who is in the end rightly
punished for his wicked desires, " the Lady of Barbanico,
the Queen of Basque, the wife of the Sultan, the Empress
of Osbeck, the Schinchimurro of Prester- John, the Chian-
Chianfere of Norway, the Semistance of Berlinson, and
the Scalpedre of Narsia.'* But Bruno was highly favoured
as well as his friend, the favourite mistress of the first
being the Queen of England, while Buffalmacco pos-
sessed the favours of the Queen of France.

It will be useless to follow this tale to its catastrophe,
which is in the usual style of Boccaccio. The story was
written about one hundred years after our hero had been
in Florence, and shows that his fame as a magician sur-
vived. Scot was, however, the hero not only of the jovial
tale but the mystic romance, so much so, that Dante
thought fit to introduce him in tbe Inferno, canto xx.

Queir altro che ne' fianchi e cosi poco
Michele Scotto fa, che veramente
Delle magicbe frodo seppe il giucco.

This portrait of him, very vividly rendered by Gary, is
extremely Dantesque. We see the man, thin and girt
round the loins, broad in his shoulders for his size, but
weird and wild looking and small in his flanks. There is,
it is said, a portrait of him, on vellum, amongst the Ca-

MICHAEL SCOT. 225

nonici MSS. in the Bodleian, and this agrees with Dante's

vigorous lines. The poet has placed the necromancer in

the eighth circle with others hecause they had presumed

to practise divination and astrology, Upon Dante in-«

quiring who the spirits were, they are thus introduced by

his guide : —

That spirit, from whose cheek
The heard sweeps o'er his shoulders hrown, what time
Grsecia was emptied of her males, that scarce
The cradldS were supplied, the seer was he
In Aulis, who, with Calchas, gave the sign
When first to cut the cable. Him they named
Eurypilus : so sings mjr magic strain,
In which majestic measure well thou knowest.
Who know'st it all. That o^ier round the loins
So slender of his shape, was Michael Seat,
Practised in every sleight of magic tnll.

Slender, short, dark-haired, and weird in look, Michael
might well pass for a wizard. We are told, in certain
Macaronic verses, published in 1519, that he was won-
derfully clever in philtres and sorceries that could secure
the love of women. He could also ** call devils from the
vasty deep," ride on an enchanted horse, wrap his small
figure round in an invisible cloak, sail in a ship without
rudder, sails, or other motive power but that with which
he supplied it, and walk about, like Peter Schlimmel,
without the inconvenience or convenience of a shadow.

" He has been placed," says Bayle, in his article
Scotus, " in the catalogue of magicians, and we are told
that he frequently invited several people to dine with
him without providing anything for them ; but when his

226 VAEIA.

guests sat down to table he forced the sphits to bring him
meat from all parts; and when it was come he told the
compauy, ' Gentlemen, this comes from the kitchen of
the King of Finance, and this from the kitchen of the
King of Spain ; this comes from England/ &c. The
poet Dante adopted the common error." Here Bayle
quotes the lines I have given, and adds that ^^ John Bacon,
an English Carmelite and the Prince of the Averroists, is
more to be credited; he quotes Michael Scottis as a
great divine. Pitseus, who commends him very much, is
also a more credible author. This Pitseus is the Pitts
who claims Scot as an Englishman, and who says, that,
though Michael was accounted a magician by the mob
and the ignorant people, wise men passed another judg-
ment on him.* " However," concludes Bayle, in his very
short notice, " 'tis said that this pretended magician fore-
saw that he should die, and foretold the place where the
Emperor Frederic should lose his life."

But it was, after all, not by magic but by astrology that
Michael foretold the death of his patron. Probably, in
reference to this circumstance, and certainly to the science
of astrology, our good Martin Luther once gave the fol-
lowing opinion, which is so sound and wise that modern
science can add nothing to it, and which should, at least
with all Lutherans, have set at rest any belief in as-
trology.

In the year 1538, the Seigneur Von Minckwitz made

* Prudentuin tamen et cordatorum hominum longe aliad fait
jadiciani.

MICHAEL SCOT, 227

a public oration in honour of astrology^ wherein he
sought to prove that the sentence in Jeremiah, chap, x,
'^ Be not dismayed at the signs of heaven/' applied not
to astrology, but to the images of the Gentiles. Luther
said hereupon, '' These passages may be quibbled with,
but not overthrown. Jeremiah speaks, as Moses did, of
all the signs of heaven, earth, and sea ; the heathen were
not so silly as to be afraid of the sun or moon, but they
feared and adored prodigies and miraculous signs. As-
trology is no art ; it has no principle, no demonstration
whereupon we may take sure footing ; 'tis all haphazard
work. Philip Melancthon, against his will, admits unto
me, that though, as he says, the art is extant, there are ^
none that understand it rightly. They set forth, in their
almanacs, that we shall have no snow in summer time, no
thunder in winter ; and this the country clowns know as
well as the astrologers.

'^ Philip Melancthon says : ' That such people as are
bom in ascendente LibrH, in the ascension of Liber,
towards the south, are unfortunate people.' Whereupon
I said, ' The astrologers are siUy creatures, to di*eam
that their crosses and mishaps proceed not from God, but
from the stars ; 'tis hence they are not patient in their
troubles and adversities.'

'' Astrology is uncertain, and as the predicamenta
are feigned words in dialectica, even so astronomy has
feigned astrology ; as the ancient and true divines knew
nothing of the fantasies and divinity of the school-
teachers, so the ancient astronomers knew nothing of

228 VABIA.

astrology. The natiyities of Cicero and of others were
shown me. I said, ' I hold nothing thereof, nor attri-
hute anything unto them. I would gladly have the
astrologers answer me this: Esau and Jacoh were horn
together, of one father and one mother, at one time, and
under equal planets, yet they were wholly of contrary
natures, kinds, and minds.'

'^ What is done hy God ought not to be ascribed to the
stars. The upright and true Christian rehgion opposes
and con^tes all such fables. The way of casting na-
tivities is like the proceedings in Popedom, whose outward
ceremonies and pompous ordinances are pleasing to hu-
man wit and wisdom, as the consecrated water, torches,
organs, cymbals, singing, ringing, but withal there's no
certain knowledge.

" An astrologer or horoscope-monger is Uke one that
sells dice and balls. * Behold, here I have dice that
always come up to 12.' If once or twice their conjectures
tell, they cannot sufficiently extol the art ; but as to the
infinite cases where they fail, they are altogether silent.

" Astronomy, on the contrary, I like ; it pleases me
by reason of her (sic) manifold benefits.

'^ General prophecies and declarations which declare
generally what in future shall happen, accord not upon
individuals and particular things.

" When, at one time, many are slain in battle, no man
can affirm that they are born under one planet, yet they
die altogether in one hour, yea in one moment."*

* Luther, CoUoquia Mensalia,

MICHAEL SCOT. 229

These two points, of the many slain in battle^ and of
the birth of Esau and Jacob, would, no doubt, be easily
met by modem astrologers, let us say Lieutenant Morri-
son, but they are, in fact, irrefragable. However, in
Scot's time there were many who believed in the false
science, if he himself did not. The story of his feasting
his friends from the tables of the various kings of Europe
may have been the foundation of the more wonderful
story of producing queens and beautiful ladies from the
same places, as Boccaccio tells us, for the position of
England and France are in both stories about the same.
But Scot certainly gave vent to various prophecies which
came true, or, like those of Nostradamus, were twisted
into something like their realization. Thus Villain tells
us that " Master Michael Scot" said of Padua, a long
time before it happened, " Paduce magnatum plorahunt
filii necem diram et horrendam, datam catuloque Yero-
namJ^ " The sons of Padua will weep the dire and
horrid slaughter of her nobles, and Verona will be given
to the dog," which was, of course, fulfilled when El Can
Grande, the great dog, entered Verona.

With the pretended prediction of the death of his
patron Frederic, a man — ^aa it is more than probable
Michael was himself — given to licentious pleasures, the list
of the wizard's prophecies may be closed. It will be
noticed by the reader that all these pretended prophetic
utterances are of the same family, capable of the widest
interpretation, and, if they do not prove true at one time,
are warranted to keep fresh for a few years 5 or if the

230 VABIA.

place be mentioned whereat a death is to take place, we
find names are suddenly changed to suit the occurrence.
Thus Michael Scot is said to have predicted that Us
patron should die at the iron gates in Florence, whereon
the Emperor resolved to enter that town. But according
to Francisco Pepino the prophecy came true in this way.
" In the last day, therefore, of his life, when he was sick
at Samnio, in a town the name of which was Florentinum,
a bed was made for him in a chamber beside the walls of
the tower, which the head of the bed touched. The gate
of the town in the wall was built up, but the iron posts
remained within. The Emperor caused the tower to be
examined to see what it was like inside. It was told him
that in that part of the wall where he lay there was a gate
with iron posts shut up. Hearing this, he began to
meditate and said, * This is the place of my decease already
foretold to me. Here shall I die. God's will be done.'"*

The story, according to Muratori, has the appearance of
a lie, told probably of Frederic because he never did enter
Florence. The prediction is after all one made by a pal-
tering fiend, taking it at its best, and allowing both it and
its fulfilment to be true. A prophecy which is twisted into
a true solution in that manner is worth very little to
any one.

It is curious that a similar story is told of one of our
kings, Henry IV, and that it has been used with admirable

* Chron. F, Frandsci Pipini, cap. x1 ; apnd Muratori, quoted
also by Mr. James Bruce.

MICHAEL SCOT. 231

effect by Shakespeare. King Henry, historians tell us, was
praying before the shrine of Edward the Confessor in
Westminster Abbey, when he was seized with a fit. His
attendants carried him to the apartments of the abbot, and
he lay down to die in the Jerusalem chamber, the name of
which is said to have recalled an old prophecy, with the
notion that he had once entertained that he should make
an attempt for the recovery of the holy city. It is prob-
able that the visit of Michael Paleologus to France and
England, to beg aid of the western monarchs against
Bajazet and the Turks, may have suggested to the
vigorous king the notion of resuscitating the almost for-
gotten crusades, and that the prophecy was vented to hin-
der him from the undertaking. Shakespeare, who omits
the praying at the shrine, makes Henry swoon when, at his
council, after a time he asks : —

King. Doth any name particalar belong

Unto the lodging where I first did swoon ?

War. *Tis called Jerusalem, my noble Lord.

Kino. Laud be to Heaven ! even there my life must end.
It hath been prophesied to me many years,
I should not die but in Jerusalem ;
Which vainly I supposed the Holy Land : —
But bear me to that chamber, there I'll lie ;
In that Jerusalem shall Harry die.*'*

He did in effect die in the Jerusalem chamber at West-
minster Abbey on the 20th March, 1413, in the forty-
seventh year of his reign.

* King Henry IV, Part IT, Act rv. Scene iv.

232 VABIA.

To return to Michael Scot. According to traditional
history he left the court of the Emperor Frederic before
the end of that monarch's reign, and, arriying in England,
was hospitably received by Edward I. But chronology
would make this twenty years after the death of Frederic, as
Edward was crowned in 1271. He then went to Scotland,
and was sent to Norway in 1290 to bring over, as one of the
ambassadors, the Princess Margaret. On his return to
Scotland he took up his residence there, the scenes of his
magic feats being partly in Ettrick and in Koxburghshire.
One version of the manner of his death is that it took place
while he was engaged in devotional exercises; but Sir
Walter tells a different story, and one that might have
suggested to Tennyson his very beautiful and exquisitely
pictured scene between Vivien and Merlin. " His wife or
concubine elicited from him a secret, that his art could
warn off any danger except the poisonous qualities of broth
made of the flesh of a hreme sow. Such a mess was accord-
ingly administered to the wizard, who died in consequence
of eating it; sumving, however, long enough to put
to death his treacherous confidante."

He was buried, some people say, at Melrose, where it
suits Sir Walter to place his grave, others assert that the
wizard rests at Home Coltrame, in Cumberland. The be-
lief in his magic continued long ; so late as the year 1614,
when George Sempill, minister of Killelau, was tried
before the Presbytery of Glasgow, for practising magic, it
was brought forward as evidence against the unhappy man,
and deposed to by one John Huchesoun, one of the bail-

MICHAEL SCOT. 233

lies of Paisley^ that be had seen George Sempill buy an
Albertus Magnus, and that he had in his possession and
frequently read a book of unlawful arts by Michael Scot.
It may be, indeed, that this book was the cause of Sempill's
prosecution.

Besides the fame recently acquired by Michael in con-
sequence of Sir Walter Scott's " Lay of the Last Minstrel,"
the wizard was again called into prominent notice by a
romance by Allan Cunninghame, bearing his name,
" Michael Scot ;" the romance is, however, now forgot-
ten. Coleridge, as we have seen in the article on Faustus,
contemplated a drama, of which Scot was to be the hero,
and numberless chap-books and children's story-books have
spread the name and fame of the wizard far and wide.

The fame of this man, if taken for what it is worth, is
worth but little. His name alone survives ; of his learning,
the means whereby to determine his position in letters
and science, we have little left. Eoger Bacon thought
very meanly of him ; but Leland, Pitts, Dempster, and
David Buchanan have, according to Mr. Bruce, " endowed
him, as they do every other man of whom they write, with
all the accomplishments in the world. ' He ascended,' says
Leland, * to the very summits of theology.' According to
David Buchanan, he was particularly eminent as a physi-
cian." Mr. Bruce's rebuke of the writers he names applies
to many biographers; and it would seem that David
Buchanan, simply because Michael was a Scotsman, not
only endowed his hero with the skill of curing leprosy, gout,
dropsy, and other incurable diseases, but has '^ heaped

234 VARIA.

upon Michael the knowledge of Greek, Hebrew, Arabic,
and Chaldee," while his real acquirements were not merely
little Latin and less Greek, but Latin only, with a yerj im-
perfect acquaintance with Arabic. Equally with his con-
temporaries he could know little of Greek. What he did
know was ** through the unfaithful medium of the
Arabians." " The writers," continues Mr. Bruce, " whom
he quotes in his principal work are Hippocrates, Galen, and
Pamphilus, amongst the ancients, and Constantinus Afer
among the modems. There is not an allusion to a
Iloman classic in the whole work."

Michael Scot's reputation seems to us a splendid in-
stance of the omne ignotum pro magnifico. If we try to
read any of his works we soon grow tired with the bold
assertions, the groundless surmises, and the nonsense of
them. He is great on sneezing, and tells us why a certain
number of sneezes made on entering on business is lucky;
and that one from any member of the family during the
night is good, while two is bad. In rising in the morning
one is good, but two bad, &c.* Of dreams, of births, of
the height of men, the soles of the feet of women, of a
dozen other galimatias, he discourses to his readers ; but
it is doubtful whether he recounts one fact won by his own
observation,t or one wise deduction from the facts of

♦ The head of the chapter is as follows : — " Stemuto stematas, est
▼erbum et significat sternutare ; et hsBC stemutatio nugus nominis
ipse idem est actus et quasi dicitur stemutatio.*'

t That is, in the book quoted. Liber PJusiimomU Magubri
MichaeKs Scot, cited by James Bruce.

MICHAEL SCOT. 235

others. As a specimen of his deductions he will tell us
that a child is horn with his head foremost in order that
he maj see the world, that a hoy's first cry is O. A, as if
he said, O ! Adam, why didst thou sin ? While a girl
child cries O. E, or O ! Eve, why wast thou guilty,
through thee I endure a miserable life in this world."

In his Llher Physionomie, cap. xiy, Michael discusses a
variety of questions which are indicative of his time, just
as those discussed by Sir Thomas Browne, in his " Vulgar
Errors," tell us exhibit to us fairly his view of such mat-
ters in his day. Michael tells us why people love their
children more than their children love them ; why they
love the eldest more than the rest ; why they love an only
son more than one of several ; why a man loves his friend
better than a stranger ; why a Christian does not love a
Saracen ; why a man likes a dog better than a cat ; and
a horse better than an ass ; a beast of any kind more than
a stone ; earth more than water, and fire more than air.

In the second book he solemnly warns us of the
danger of meeting or keeping company with a man
wanting an eye, or a leg, or an arm, as being unlucky ;
and he says that there is not a creature which, if it be
deprived of a member, does not change its nature into
better or worse than ordinary, rarely better, he adds, if it
live long.

Shortly, we may conclude with his countryman, Mr. James
Bruce, that the fame of Michael Scot is without any real
foundation, although *' from writers in the present day he
has received abundance of eulogiums." f^ These writers,"

236 VABIA.

continues Mr. Bruce, " have concluded, in utter iguorance of
ntlier his woi^ or his character, that, as in rude ages philo-
sophers and men of true science have been looked upon as
magicians, therefore Michael, having been regarded as a
magician, must have been a philosopher and a man of
science. This is the logic of all the useful knowledge
writers of the nineteenth century, and is quite satisfacl«r;
to their readers."

LODOWICK MUGGLETON.

,<SJtJ)y

BOOKS CONSULTED.

A Remonstrance from the Eternal God ; declaring several Spiritual
Transactions unto the Parliament and Commonwealth of JSnglcmdj
^c, 8fc. By John Reeve and Lodowick Maggleton. 1651.

The New Witnesses proved Old Heretics, By William Penn, 4to.
London, 1672.

A True Representation of the Absurd and Mischievous Frinciples of
the Sect commonly known by the name of MuggUtonians, London,
1694.

LODOWICK MUGGLETON.

BONTENELLE in hia " Dialogues of the
I Dead " — a reproductiaa of a familiar Bub-
al ject which Laador's " Imaginary Conver-
3 sation " haa rendered more familiar still —
brings the ehode of Montaigne, that instant dismiaaed from
the earth, to meet with that of Soci-ates, lonely and nnac-
cwmpauied, in Hades. The gossiping essayist is delighted
to see one from whom he has so often quotetl, and begs the
philosopher to tell him of the grand age in which he lired,
and of the great men by whom be was surrounded — of
Plato and Phodon, Periclea and Alcibiades, "to whom,"
says Montaigne, " the men of lus own days formed so piti-
able a contrast." To which Socrates — in a method by do
means Socratic — replies, that Montaigne is altogether
miataken, that the age in which be lived waa by no means
grand, that people then did not by any means make the
fuss over him which they do now, that distance and time,
both grand enchanters, had tuagniSed its virtues and

240 VARIA.

buried its finilts ; and that, finaOj, the ages do not degene-
rate, the world being always about the same compound of
fools and wise men.

This, which is not particnlarlj new, is not particolarly
tme. Ages do differ considerably, especiallj in outward
forms, whether the proportion of wise men and fools be
about the same or not. We differ so much, for instance,
from the age of John Bun jan, Milton, and the more earnest
thinkers of their day, that it is quite difficult to realize the
men of their stamp. In the comedies of Beaumont and
Fletcher, of Jonson, Massinger, and Shakerly Marmion,
we find an extinct species of bully, soothsayer, spendthrift,
puritan, or swaggerer, as interesting to the student of
character as a bone of an icthyosaurus is to Mr. Water-
house Hawkins. The fact is, that ages do change and
characters die out. Perhaps Sam Weller and Becky
Sharp may appear as strange to our descendants a^ do the
" Copper Captain " and the " Eoaring Girl '* to us — ^in
whom we can, indeed, trace scarcely one modem female
trait, except that the young lady '' dranke tobacco," and
that the leaders of fashion imitated her, out of politeness
no doubt, when entertained a few years ago on board the
Pacha's yacht.

But strangest of all strange characters was the fanatic
and Puritanic professor of religion, with whom Buder has
made us somewhat familiar. It no doubt suited the
cavaliers to represent these people as always hypocrites ;
but they were, in fact, as thoroughly in earnest as any
body of men in the world : and one proof of this is that

LODOWICE MUQGLETON, 241

they carried the world with them. Everyhodj joined in
the religious crj : —

The oyster-women lock'd their fish up.
And tmdg'd away to cry no bishop ;
The mousetrap men laid savealls by,
And 'gainst evil counsellors did cry.
Some cry'd the Covenant instead
Of pudding-pies and gingerbread ;
Botchers left old clothes in the lurch,
And fell to torn and patch the Church.

Carried away and carrying others away as violently as
any in this crowd of prophets — as earnest, and at the
time more successful than their opponents, George Fox and
William Penn — were two ohscure men, John Beeve and
Lodowick Muggleton, who achieved the honour of he-
coming the founders of a sect of Christians which has hut
recently expired, after a duration of two hundred years.
As every false prophet must have his first aider and abet-
tor — ^as Mahomet had his Ahubeker, and Joseph Smith
his brother Hiram, so John Eeeve had his fervent disciple,
Lodowick Muggleton, a mad tailor, whom he joined with
him in his peculiar ministry, and pronounced to be his
" mouth." About the year 1651 these two came promi-
nently before the English people, already disturbed enough
by so-called prophets, and for some time favoured the
people every year or so with Epistles and Gospels which
bear certainly a very distant resemblance to the Apostolic
and Evangelic writings. The first of these is entitled :
<' A Eemonstbance from the Etebnal God ; declaring

242 VAEIA.

several spiritual transactions unto the Parliament and
Commonwealth of England j unto His Excellency the Lord
General Cbomwell, the Council of State, the Council of
Wab, d^. dbc. By John Eeeve and Lodowick Muggle-
ton, the two Last Witnesses and true Prophets imprisoned
for the Testimony of Jesus Christ in Old Bridewell."

Mad as have been many of the indwellers of Old Bride-
well, it never held a madder pair. It appears that in the
year 1651 there were many Hichmonds in the field in the
shape of prophets. To the first of these, one John Tanee,
who had afiirmed that there was '^ no Personal God/' John
Eeeve and his '< mouth " went, by virtue of a commission
which they had received from the Omnipotent, and with
well-chosen and hard texts so puzzled and belaboured him
that he was £a,in to be still. Still they gave him no
quarter, declaring that he and the Banters were ''the
cursed children of the Dragon-Devil Cain, sporting them-
selves in all fleshly filthiness, as the people of Sodom and
Qomorrah did, that they may justly be danmed in them-
selves in the great day of the Lord. And so much for all
ungodly Eanters and John Tanee their king." This is
hard measure surely for the despised people called Ean-
ters, of whom it will be remembered John Bunyan, pious
and godly, was once one. Eanter — ^firom the Dutch randenj
randien, delilare, says Eichardson — is one who tears a
passion to tatters, to very rags, and was at that time
almost a new name. Eichardson's earliest citations are
from Cowley and Bishop Hall's Satires ; but certainly we do
not hear that the Eanters were by any means a vicious

LODOWICK MUOGLETON. 243

people. It seems, however, to have been the peculiar pro-
vince of Eeeve and Muggleton to '^ deal damnation round
the land," for the next prophet whom they damned was
John Bobbins, then in the New. Prison ; and him they ap-
proached for the express purpose of pronouncing a sentence
of eternal death against. And here we learn that the word
Prophet, used after this time by Milton as meaning a
preacher, had assumed a far more important meaning.
** For this person," says Eeeve, " many people honoured as
a God, for they fell on their faces before him at his feet, and
called him their Lord and their God ; likewise he was
pray'd unto, as unto a God. Moreover he gave them a law,
commanding them not to mention the name of any other
God but him (his) only."

This madman might have been deemed by far too mad to
yield to the two " commissionated prophets," as he had not
yielded to the magistrates. Yet, after hearing the sen-
tence, he bowed his head saying, " It is finished, the Lord's
will be done ;" and " so much for John Robbins." After
this the two prophets were moved to deliver a general
damning warning to all clergymen and ministers, forbid-
ding them to preach unless commissioned by the two. As
the Clergymen, Banters, Shakers, Independents, and
Quakers, did not pay the least attention to these warnings,
B«eve and Muggleton proceeded to further acts, and were
straight '^ seized, aj^rehended, and committed to Newgate
for our faith, by the Lord Mayor ;" upon which they at
once damned the Lord Mayor and the " London Jewry "
(the Mansion House was then in the Old Jewry), especially

244 VABIA.

one Alderman Andrews. This occurred on October 15,
1653 ; and being thus made martyrs, there was a great
outpouring of that peculiar grace which made many
believe in Beeve and '^ his Mouth," Muggleton.

Their next production is ^' A Greneral Epistle from the
Holy Spirit," dated from " Great Trinity Lane, at a
Chandler's Shop, over against one Mr. Millis, a Brown
Baker, near Bow Lane End, London ;" and in it they
plainly assume to be the two last witnesses spoken of in
the Revelation. They were^ undoubtedly, well read in the
Bible ; and, like John Bunyan, they took care to stick
closely by it, never being without a text to quote in their
support. An epistle of the Prophet Keeve which follows,
opens up somewhat more of their peculiar doctrines, which
are, however, very undefined and foggy. The soul of man,
they assert, is inseparably united to the body, with which
it dies and will rise again. The sin against the Holy
Ghost is the rejection of the truth as preached by Muggle-
ton and Eeeve. Gk>d has the real body of a man, and it
is blasphemous to assert that he is an impersonal God or
Spirit. The Trinity is only a variety of names for Grod,
who Himself came down to earth and suffered death,
during which time Elias was His representative in heaven.

The founders of a sect very little less erroneous than
their own were the most violent opponents of the new
prophets. The State having, notwithstanding their flattery
of Oliver Cromwell, whom they represented as " Mortal
Hebrew Jew " to whom all were to bow down, and whose
acts in putting to death the king and assuming the Pro-

LODOWIGK MUQQLETON. 245

tectorate tliey approved, quietly put them in prison, and
left them there unnoticed, punishing them, indeed, hj
whippings for their cursings and hlasphemies, hut doing no
more. William Penn and Greorge Fox, who claimed for
themselves a Divine revelation, set upon them with their
pens, and would indeed, have taken more carnal weapons to
them if they could. These works continued for nearly
twenty years, William Penn leading the way in a tract called
" The New Witnesses proved Old Heretics" (4to. 1672),
and another hand closing it by '^ A True Bepresentation of
the Absurd and Mischievous Principles of a Sect commonly
called the Muggletonians '' (4to. London, 1694). Three
years after this date, Muggleton, who had long survived
his companion, died in great sanctity at the patriarchid
age of eighty-eight.

Perhaps, as little causes determine great events, it is
only to his peculiar surname that Lodowick owes the
honour of naming the sect — ^perhaps it was because he was
the more energetic and the longer liver of the two. His
other opponents, for there were many, for the honour of
being the two last witnesses of the 11th chapter of Keve*
lation, made no mark on the world. Who now hears of
Bull and Yarnum, of John Tanee and John Bobbins ?
The people appear to have accepted, on good faith, the as-
sertions of John Beeve and his Mouth, and, in the midst
of dumb instructors, to have listened to any rash madman
who choose to cry out loud enough. As Oliver Cromwell
had been pronounced a *^ Mortal and Spiritual Jew, a
natural Lion of the tribe of Judah, according to the flesh,"

246 VABIA.

to whom Muggleton was " commissionated " to give advice
— which, to be fair, was very good of its kind — so also the
people were told, ^* You that are spiritual may know that
the Moman Gentiles spoken of by John, are those people
by men called CavUeers], whose princely Kace sprang from
the loins of King Herod, that bloody persecutor of the
Lord of Glory, and so streamed into the line of the tyran-
nical Roman Empire, or Popedom,^* Whether this satis^
fied candid inquirers we are not able to say. Some, in-
deed, suggested that the Caviliers were Deyil-hom, and
that Laud was Old Kick himself, just as others made
Oliver and his Parliament derive all their spirit from the
same diabolical source.

A writer in one of the encyclopiedias, who tells us that
a complete set of the works of Eeeve a.nd Muggleton was
published by some of their modem followers in 1832 (it is
far frt)m complete), adds that these men held very singular
and not very intelligible doctrines concerning angels and
devils^ According to them '^ihe soul of man is united
inseparably with the body, with which it dies, and will rise
again." This doctrine may be a mere expansion of the
belief in the Church of England, which declares in its
creed the resurrection of the body — an apostolic article of
belief. The question therefore of what became of the soul
during the interval between death and judgment was not
unreasonably solved by Muggleton, supposing that it lay
torpid and rose again to reanimate the body and to receive
its due punishment or its gracious reward. As the doctrine
of purgatory, to which perhaps our High Church people pre^^

LOBOWIGK MUGGLETON, 247

senUj maj tend, was, and is by the Thirty-nine Articles
declared to be a fond superstition and damnable error,
having no warrantry in Scripture, where indeed there is
not the shadow of the shade of a sentence (the book of
the Maccabees being out of court) to be quoted in its
favour. Muggleton's supposition that the soul subsides or
is withdrawn from the body for a time, is not without
reason. Not one of us knows anything about it ; the
question asked Lazarus* is still left unanswered; there
lives no record of reply. Doctor Johnson arguing upon Kit
Smart's madness, said that one charge against him was
that he asked people to pray with him in the street, and
said the doctor, *^ I'd as lief pray with Kit Smart as with
anybody else." So we may as lief believe with Lodowick
Muggleton as to the indivisibility of the body and soul.
Not so with his anthropomorphism.

On the whole, Lodowick, if a blasphemous heretic, as
William Fenn called him, was infinitely purer and less
mischievous than such prophets as Joseph Smith, Orson
Pratt, and the rest of the Mormons. There is and there
ever has. been in the human mind a credulous disposition

♦

** Where wert thou, brother, those four days?"
There lives no record of reply,
Which telling what it is to die.
Had surely added praise to prabe.

Behold a man raised up by Christ !

The rest remaineth unreveal'd ;

He told it not ; or something 8eal*d
The lips of that evangelist.

Tbnntsoit, In Memoriam, xxxi-

248 VAEIA.

to believe in men of strong will who have the madness or
boldness to declare that the heavens have been opened to
them, and the decrees of God made plain. Muggleton and
Beeve declared, indeed, that thej were the last aadible
prophets from the Court of God ; but every age since their
time has seen its dozens of like prophets, of whom the
world happily takes no heed, save when breaking the
Queen's peace they render themselves amenable to the
laws of that society which they pretend to purify.

Muggleton, whilst he spread many errors, combated
others. He was greatly opposed to those who believed
only iu King* Jesus and his " Personal Keign " here
on earth. " It is," he says, " rank folly to believe
that men can read the designs of the Lord, and point out
the day, the year, or the century in which the Lord's
reign shall begin." But being himself '^ commissionated,"
he is permitted to know the names of the two last
witnesses, and the time of their call. These were of course
" Self and Co.;" and one part of their proof was that the
witnesses were not to be clothed like citizens, Lord Mayors,
and Aldermen, in sUk and plush, but in sackcloth. Also,
they were to be put to death ; and we greatly mistake the
temper of the mad self-styled prophets if the very fact of
their being permitted to die quietly in their beds was not
the unkindest cut which they could receive from an un-
grateful and an unbelieving world.

The most curious work which they have left for the
benefit of the spiritual discerning reader is called, " A
Divine Looking-glass, or the Third and Last Testament
of Our Lord, <&c, whose personal Eesidence is seated on

LODOWICK MUGOLETON. 249

his Throne of Glory in another "World." We omit many
repetitions of the sacred names in giving these titles, for
the two last Prophets were as fond of calling them out as
is a Mussulman Fakir. In this last Testament the
authors soIyc many scriptural riddles. They tell us of the
form and nature of God from all eternity. They answer
'^the highest Querico concerning the eternal state of
mankind." They assert that there is " no reason in God,"
and of what suhstances earth and water were&om eternity.
They tell us, hut in so loose a manner that we are no wiser
than hefore, of what form and nature angels were, and
how they were created, and who Antichri^ is ; and they
are especially learned ahout '^ the Serpent that tempted
Eve," who, they assert, was a yery heautiful and graceful
young angel in the form of man, who certainly did not offer
to our common mother ** a mere apple from a wooden tree,"
hut, in fact, seduced her from her allegiance to Adam, and
thus hecame actually the Father of Cain, and through him
of all the wicked people or sons of the devil upon earth.
But unfortunately we have heard all this hefore. <^ I
should never have done," says Bayle, " were I to relate all
the fictions that are to he found in hooks concerning Eve
and the Serpent ;" and, indeed, from Josephus to Cajetan,
Lanjado and Nicholas de Lyra, there have heen some
pretty theories broached, none more so than those by the
over curious in the first and second centuries of the Church.
" "We are not to believe, therefore," sneers Bayle, " all
the fine compliments which Alcimus Avitus reports to have
passed on both sides ; for according to the narrative of
Moses, this great affair was ended in a few words."

250 VAEIA.

The remainder of the last Testament of these two
prophets is filled with a great deal of what Mr. Carljle
terms " clotted nonsense." The authors flounder from
Trinitarianism to Unitarianism, and in and out of each ;
they condemn the unlawfulness of cutting off the head
magistrate, and jet praise Cromwell ; the j propagate more
errors than they preach against ; they are ever ready with
a '^ damnation to all eternity " for their opponents ; and,
in short, they act like the wild, mad, hot Gospellers they
were. Their hooks have a saddening effect on us. They
prove how easily a little incoherent hut vivid assertion with-
out proof will attract the faith of man, without even an ap-
peal to his cupidity or to his haser passions, such as have
heen made hy other false prophets from Mohammed to Joe
Smith the Mormon. Muggleton and Eeeve are singularly
free from any such hase appeals, nor do they make any ex-
orbitant promises to their spiritually discerning brethren —
never being, to use their own trope, at variance with what
they thought to be true, ** any more than WilUam Lily and
his learned brethren, in the astrologian figure, dare say the
sun and moon were with themselves." Perhaps it is to this
want of mixture of the worst traits of human folly in their
scheme that they owe the decay of their sect. So late as
1832 some of their followers reprinted in three volume^ the
Episties and Gospels according to Muggleton ; but in the
Census of 1851, their names had disappeared from the
classification of sects and faith in the prophet Muggleton
was not found upon the earth.

SIR THOMAS BROWNE.

BOOKS CONSULTED.

Reliffio Medici. The Eighth Edition, corrected and amended. With
Annotations, never before published, upon all the obscure pas-
sages. London, 1682.

Obiervaiiona on Religio Medici. By Sir Kenelm Digby. First
Edition. 1682.

Works of Sir Thomas Broume. Edited by Simon Wilkin, F.L.S.
Three volumes. London, 1852.

Um Burial, Christian Morals, and Miscellanies. By Sir Thomas
Browne. Edinburgh, 1825.

The Retrospective Review* Art. vii. Vol. 1. Article, Sir Thomas
Browne. London, 1820.

The Eclectic Review. No. Ixii. New Series. Article, Sir Thomas
Browne.

SIB THOMAS BROWNE,

SJIR THOMAS BROWNE ia one of those
li writera who Btand quite tilone. Thei'e is no
Jl one like him either in the Kteratnre which he
g adorned, or in that of anj other country. He
ia alao one of whom we are never tired of hearing or of
speculating, one whose verj weaknesses are so peculiar
that we would not part with them, and whose faults shine,
in the eyes of some, with a lustre that surpasses the virtues
of less original writers. His effect upon English litera-
ture has been very great indeed ; he seems to have inspired
half-a-doaen at least of our most weighty preachers : and
it WAS upon his style that Dr. Johnson formed his own , — a
style upon which many of the most thoughtful and weighty,
one indeed might soy heavy, of our Qnarlorly reviewers and
leader writers, yet build their own, and which descended
to, and was admired when practised by, Dr. Farr, aJtbough
with him remained only the nodosities of the oak with-

254 VABIA.

oat its strength.* And we must remember that even
Johnson's best English was but an imitation, and many
hold but a feeble imitation, of the splendour and
piled-up grandeur which abounds in almost every work or
pamphlet written by the Norwich physician. And yet few
people read Browne's works, few, or comparatively few.
They are, it is true, appreciated in America, where fine
old English literature seems to have struck a new root,
and to flourish with the luxuriance of plants which are
happy in a virgin soul, and whose people, descendants of
our own, of a freer and more reflective growth, often appre-
ciate those writers whom we most neglect, as is the case
with Mr. Herbert Spencer ; but in England Browne may
well be classed as one who is but rarely read. A puWic
writer and reviewer in conversation mistook him for Tom
Brown, the facetious author of the " Laconics ;*' and a lady,
hearing the name, suggested that he might be a living
author, and writer of Mr. Hughes's fresh and excellent
book, ** Tom Brown's School-days."t

* Speaking of Croft's imitation of Johnson's style, Burke said,
*^ No, no, it is not a good imitation of Johnson ; it has all his pomp
without his force ; it has all the nodosities of the oak without its
strength ; it has all the contortions of the sybil without the inspira-
tion."— Prior'* Life of Burke.

t How calmly ignorant some authors may be is seen in
Lord Campbell's <* Life of Chief Justice Hale." Hale believed in
witchcraft, and tried and condemned, in 1665, very unrighteously
alas, for direct evidence went in favour of their innocence, Amy
Denny and Rose Cullender, two poor old women, who were accused
of dealings with the devil. Sir Thomas Browne was an important
witness in this trial ; bat, as the ** Eclectic Review *' points out.

SIE THOMAS BBOWNE. 255

A paper upon such a writer will therefore he surely not
out of the way in this collection of hihliographic essays.

*' According to the common fate of orphans," says Dr.

Johnson, in a hiography of this excellent writer, " Thomas

Browne, when a minor, was defrauded hy the lawyers and

trustees of much of the fortune which was left him hy his

father, a rich merchant* of London, where his celehrated

son was horn in the year 1605. The family was a good

one, for there then ohtained none of that despicahle and

silly contempt for trade which is so hurtful to those who

feel and express it, and to those who endure it, since that

which we openly despise soon degrades itself to the level

of our contempt. When proud people look down upon

tradesmen they are not philosophical enough to perceive

that they are absolutely inviting those very tradesmen,

whom they ask to bow and cringe, to repay themselves

for their servility by a golden plaster for their wounded

pride. Certainly like Erasmus and others, Browne suffered

jfrom his guardians, but was enabled to be educated first in

London, then at Winchester, and finally at Broadgate

Hall, now Pembroke College, Oxford, which he entered

when he was of age, and after due time took his degree

of M.A. June 11th, 1629."

Lord Campbell " either knew nothing about him or did not recognize
him, for he is, as usaal, inaccurate in his details, and throughout
misspells his name, calling him Dr. Brown."

* So Johnson ; but it would appear that this merchant was a rich
tradesman, like Izaak Walton, a mercer, but a gentleman of good
family in Cheshire. — See European Magazine^ xi. p. 89.

256 VARIA.

Hi8 mother had iDarried Sir Thomas Dutton, probably
bj the inducement of her fortmie. Bays Johnson, and it
may well have been so, for as the plays of Beaumont and
Fletcher, and other contemporary writers, sufficiently prove,
certain poor knights were ready enough to come into the
city to pick up a golden cargo; and to marry a rich widow,
as they would carry away an ugly picture, merely for the
golden frame which surrounded it. Browne's mother,
lady Dutton, took as her fortune three thousand pounds, a
sum equal at least to twelve thousand pounds now, leaving
her son, '^ by consequence, six thousand (this would be
correct had he been an only child, but he had a brother
and two sisters), a large sum for a man destined to learn-
ing at that time, when commerce had not filled the nation
unth nominal riches.'* So speaks his pupil and admirer,
Samuel Johnson. It is perhaps lucky for us that Sir
Thomas Dutton and the rich widow, aided by the gen-
tlemen of the long robe, made Sir Thomas Browne's for-
tune somewhat less than it was. But it does not appear
that the rapacity of his guardian, of which Johnson
speaks, was ever resented by Browne. After taking his
degree he settled in Oxfordshire, and practised physic ; but
soon afterwards he quitted his settlement and accompanied
his father-in-law, who had some employment in Ireland, in
a visitation of the forts and castles, which the state of
Ireland made necessary.

. He then left Britain altogether, and went to Montpelier
and Padua, celebrated schools for physic, and, indeed, for
the arts of astrology and necromancy. Eetuming home

SIB THOMAS BROWNE. 257

about the year 1633, he visited Lejden, where he took
his degree of Doctor of Physic, or, as Johnson has it,
caused himself to be created doctor, no very difficult thing
in those days for a graduate of Oxford.

About the year 1634 he returned to London, and the
next year he wrote his celebrated work, " The Eeligion of
a Physician " {Religio Medici), which he declares himself,
although one can scarcely believe him, was never intended
for the press. It is but an unnatural thing for an author
to write without any wish or desire for a public, and cer-
tainly our doctor created around him a fit audience, though
few, for he lent his essay to several friends, and one of
these kind souls had it surreptitiously copied and printed.
He suflfered them (the MSS.) to wander from hand to
hand, says Johnson, '^ till at last, without his own consent,
they were, in 1642, given to a printer. This has, 'perhaps,
sometimes befallen others ; and this I am willing to believe
did really happen to Dr. Browne : but there is surely some
reason to doubt the truth of the complaint so frequently
made of surreptitious editions."

Beason enough, but this does not concern us now. Let
us be thankful that we have a whole and sound book, and
one that the world would not willingly let die. Upon this
book his fame principally rests, and indeed, with three or
four other tractates included with it, such is the richness
of our English literature, the "Eeligio Medici" would be
all that one, who could not afford a large library, would
demand. For this book contains specimens of all his
beauties, his noble faith, bordering, in fact, on superstition,

s

258 VARIA.

as if indeed that were a necessary supplement to a bold and
noble faith, founded on the dictum of Tertullian, Cerium est
quia impossihile est, and demanding a difficulty to exercise
its strength, his tenderness, grandeur, pathos, wild sub-
limity, richness of thought and word, are all there, as also
his many latinising and quaint obscurities, and his some-
times teasing paradoxes.

Presuming the " Keligio '' to haye been written in 1635,
its author was then settled at Norwich, where his practice
was very extensive, and where many patients resorted to
him. He had there settled, says Wood, in the AthencR
Ooconienses, by the persuasion of Doctor Lushington, his
tutor at Oxford, who was rector of Bumham Westgate, in
the neighbourhood. In 1637 he was incorporated Doctor
of Physic in Oxford, and in 1641 he married the daughter
of Edward Mileham, Esq. of . Burlingham, in Norfolk.
With that county and town our London-bom physician is
eternally connected; one almost wishes that he was in-
deed Norfolk-born, so thoroughly do the best and most
learned inhabitants of the county and city appreciate the
fame which their illustrious indweller has shed over
them.

Brovme's marriage called down upon him some raillery
from contemporary wits, for his book had been much read
and very widely criticised. In Howell's Letters, Book I,
No. 4, there is some rather broad fiin made with a man
who had expressed a very vivid, and no doubt an earnest
wish that the generations of man might be carried on like
those of plants and trees, and who had said some rude

SIB THOMAS BROWNE. 269

things of woman ; but it must be confessed in merely a
humorous way. *' The whole world was made for man,
but only a twelfth part of man for woman ;" and *' man is
the whole world, but woman only the rib or crooked part
of him." These are sentences that will not break any
woman's peace of mind, any more than will Tennyson's
true-hearted declaration that " Woman is the lesser man."
By his wife, Dame Dorothy Browne, Sir Thomas had a
large family, and all these " turned out," as the world has
it, very well. Dr. Edward, the eldest, was physician to
St. Bartholomew's hospital and to the king, and five
years before his death became President of the Col-
lege of Physicians, to which he presented that portrait
of his father lately exhibited at South Kensington.
Thomas, the second son, died at the age of twenty-one,
after having proved himself to be an able officer in a
king's ship. The daughters were well married, and living
peaceably at Norwich. The kind and patient physician to
Bishop Kail, the most notable citizen of that ancient city,
and distinguished above his fellow-citizens by being
knighted by Charles II. when he visited Norwich, Sir
Thomas Browne, ripened in age, wisdom, and fame, and

ft

died in 1682, like Shakespeare in this one point, that he
deceased on his birthday, after a violent attack of the
cholic, to which he had been a short time subject. He
seems to have died as he had lived and grown old,
very gracefully and nobly. He had asserted in his best
book, when he was but thirty, that he could endure pain,
even the cutting off of an arm without much noise ; so he

260 VABIA.

endured the pain of the cholic and fever with as " much
patience as hath heen seen in any man/' says a biographer,
copying his style, " without any pretence of animosity,
stoical apathy, or vanity of not being concerned thereat,
or suffering no impeachment of happiness. Nihil agis
dolor. I visited him near his end, when he had not
strength to hear or speak much ; the last words which I
did hear from him were, besides some expressions of dear-
ness, that he did freely submit to the will of God, being
without fear."

His remains were buried in the church of St. Peter's, Man-
croft, in Norwich — Le Neve, who says the cathedral, is mis-
taken — ^a handsome old church above the market hill, which
has (1866) recently been repaired and restored. His wife.
Dame Dorothy Browne, who had been his true helpmeet for
forty-one years, placed a Latin inscription on a mural tablet
of the south pillar near the altar, which recites that there lies
the body of Thomas Browne, M.D. et Miles, that he was a
learned physician, very skilled in his art, that he was the
author of " Religio Medici," ** Pseudodoxia Epidemica,"
and other works, that he was well-known aU over the
world, per orhem notissimus, that he was most religious,
honest, and learned, and that his most sorrowful wife
(*' Da. Doroth. Br.") had piously placed that tablet to his
memory. An English inscription, shorter, but to the same
effect, is also added ; and on the opposite side of the chancel
is the tomb which completes the history, that of Dame
Dorothy Browne, his true wife, who survived her husband
little more than two years. Of his coffin and its inscription,

SIB THOMAS BROWNE. 261

and other matters which have lately come to light, we shall
have something to add at the conclusion of this paper.

The publication of the " Keligio Medici/' was followed
at due intervals by those of " Pseudodoxia Epidemica, or
Vulgar Errors," in seven books, of " Hydriotaphia, or Urn
Burial," of the " Garden of Cyrus," of *' A Letter to a
Friend upon the Occasiou of the Death of a Friend," and
the " Miscellany Tracts," some of which are very curious
and quaint, as, for instance, that of the '^ MuseeumClausum,"
or "Bibliotheca Abscondita," wherein the author discourses
of certain books and pictures which do not exist, and revels
in the parade of a very curious learning. But the " Keligio
Medici," as it was his first, will always be considered his
chief work. It jumped suddenly into fame. The Earl of
Dorset recommended this book to Sir Kenelm Digby, and
Digby, in twenty-four hours, part of which were spent in
procuring and in reading the book, returned it, not with a
letter, but with a book, in which there are " some just re-
marks, acute censures, and profound speculations."* Such
a review as that, issued by Sir Kenelm Digby, and ad-
dressed to the Earl of Dorset, was enough to sell any
work, the public read it with avidity, and booksellei*s
showed an equal eagerness in pirating, with hack authors
in imitating, it. So that in 1682, the year of his death, it
had reached the eighth edition, which lies before me, the
last published during the author's lifetime, but which is in
reality the eleventh. It has a curious frontispiece of a

♦ Dr. Johnson's Life of Browne.

262 VAEIA.

man falling from a high rock into the sea^ but upheld by
a hand from heaven; written near his body are the words
A Codo Saltis (there is safety, or salvation, fix)m above),
and beneath the plate an inscription, referring to the book
only, which states that a copy was surreptitiously printed
before under the same tide, but that it is imperfect.

It is well to be thus particular, because this frontispiece,
which Simon Wilkin does not appear to have seen, indi-
cates very fully the religious tendencies of Sir Thomas
Browne's mind. But just as hasty readers of prejudiced
reviews could accuse the author of " Ecce Homo '* of
Atheism, so the enemies which his success raised up
accused Browne also of that sin. And whatever may be said
of either work, that it proceeded ftt)m an Atheistic mind
is utterly absurd and untrue. Good and orthodox Chris-
tians, like Dr. Johnson himself, have long ago received
Browne as amongst themselves. It were an insult even
to do as Dr. Johnson has done, namely, to select passages
from the work to defend the author. The whole work is
its best defence ; the whole life of the author, who every
day went to church, and took the Sacrament every month,
is the best answer to this cruel Ijing scandal. Beyond ibis
the book suffered from imitations, the '^ Eeligion of a Phy*-
sician, the Religion of a Layman" (Lord Herbert);
"Religio Jurisconsulti " — the Beligion of a Lawyer;
the Religion of a Physician" (Browne's title, but in
English), by Edmund Gayton; the " Religion of a Stoic;"
" Religio Clerici ; or, A Short Discourse on Atheism,"
by Sir G. M. ; and the " Religio Philosophi Peripatetici

SIB THOMAS BROWNE. 263

discutienda" — the Eeligion of a Peripatetic Philosopher
(this was an earlier work, not an imitation); ^'Beligio
Militis " — the Layman's Religion ; " A Gentleman's Eeli-
gion," in three parts ; and *' Religio Bibliopolee " — ^the
!Beligion of a Bookseller^ written by a hack writer, Mr.
Benjamin Bridgewater, of Trinity Coll. Camb. M.A.
** Alas ! " says Dunton, " love and wine were the ruin of
this ingenious gentleman;" possibly we may add to these
two causes that of oyerwork thrust upon the poor fellow
by the booksellers.*

The occasion of the open avowal of Browne's faith was
to refute the general scandal of his profession^ which as-
serts that where there are three physicians two are Atheists,
tibi tres medid duo Athei, and a wish to recite the causes of
his belief, and to show, as he nobly says, that *' I dare with-
out usurpation assume the honourable style of a Christian ;"
that he does not only owe that name to the font, nor to
his education, but that he has examined and believed in
his riper years and his confirmed judgment. It is curious
that after such a declaration any one should have been so
bold as to declare Browne an infidel; still more curious
does it appear after reading such very beautiful, such
wide and truly reverential sentences as these: —

'' Thus there are two Books from whence I collect my
Divinity ; besides that written one of God, another of his
servant Kature^ that universal and publick manuscript, that

* See Simon Wilkin's preface to his edition of Browne's Works,
where these and other imitations are mentioned.

264 VARIA.

lies ezpans'd unto the eyes of ail^ those that never saw
him in the one have discovered him in the other; this
was the Scripture and Theology of the Heathens; the
natural motion of the Sun made them more admire him,
than its supernatural station did the Children of Israel ; the
ordinary effects of nature wrought more admiration in them
than in the other all his Miracles ; surely the Heathens
knew hotter how to joyn and read these mystical Letters,
than we Christians, who cast a more careless Eye on these
common Hieroglyphicks, and disdain to suck Divinity from
the flowers of Nature. Nor do I so forget God as to adore
the name of Nature ; which I define not with the Schools
to he the principle of motion and rest, hut that streight
and regular line, that settled and constant course the wis-
dom of God hath ordained the actions of His creatures
according to their several kinds. To make a revolution
every day is the Nature of the Sun, hecause of that neces-
sary course which God hath ordained it, from which it
cannot swerve, hy a faculty from that voice which first did
give it motion. Now this course of Nature God seldome
alters or perverts, hut like an excellent Artist hath so con-
trived his work, that with the self-same instrument, with-
out a new creation, he may effect his ohscurest designs.
Thus he sweetneth the Water with a Word, preserveih the
creatures in the Ark, which the hlast of his mouth might
have as easily created ; for G^d is like a skilful Geome-
trician, who when more easily and with one stroak of his
Compass, he might descrihe or divide a right line, had yet
rather do this in a circle or longer way ; according to the

SIB THOMAS BROWNE. 2^

constituted and fore-laid principles of his art, yet this rule
of his he doth sometimes pervert, to acquaint the World
with his Prerogative, lest the arrogancy of our reason
should question his power, and conclude he could not ; and
thus I call the effects of Nature the works of God, whose
hand and instrument she only is; and therefore to
ascribe his actions unto her is to devolve the honour of the
principal agent, upon the instrument ; which if with reason
we may do, then let our hammers rise up and boast they
have built our houses, and our pens receive the honour of
our writing. I hold there is a general beauty in the
works of God, and therefore no deformity in any kind of
species of creature whatsoever; I cannot tell by what
Logick we call a Toad, a Bear, or an Elephant ugly, they
being created in those outward shapes and figures, which
best express those actions of their inward forms. And
having past that general Visitation of God who saw that
all that he had made was good, that is comformable to his
Will, which abhors deformity, and is the rule of order and
beauty ; there is no deformity but in Monstrosity, wherein
notwithstanding there is a kind of Beauty. Nature so in-
geniously contriving the irregular parts, as they become
sometimes more remarkable than the principal Fabrics. To
speak yet more narrowly, there was never anything ugly
or mis-shapen but the Chaos ; wherein notwithstanding to
speak strictly there was no deformity, because no form,
nor was it yet impregnant by the voice of God; now
nature is not at variance with Art, nor Art with Nature, they
being both servants of his Providence ; Art is the perfection

266 - VAEIA.

of Nature : were the World now as it was the sixth day,
there were yet a Chaos. Nature hath made one World, and
Art another. In brief, all thing are artificial ; for Nature
is the Art of Ood," — Beligio Medici, pp. 31-33.

He afterwards tells us that which must have bitterly
offended the Puritans, while, on the other hand, much that
he has written must have been equally unpalatable to the
Romanists. . He must have been regarded as a trimmer,
because he steered clear of excesses on either side. But
Sir Thomas was true to himself. In after-life he was the
firm friend of Bishop Hall, who had, in his " Shaking
of the Olive-tree'* bewailed " the (Puritan) pulling up of
brasses from the walls and graves, the destruction of
painted glass, the breaking of monuments,'the demolishing
of curious stone work that had not any representation in
the world, but only the fancy of the founder and the skill
of the mason, the breaking up of the organs, and the toting
and piping upon the destroyed organ pipes, and the hideous
and sacrilegious rout and burning in the market place."
Who would not bewail such work? And who will not so be-
wail such other work when the excess of ritualism provokes
it ? Against the good contained in the Eomish Church,
however, neither did Sir Thomas Browne, nor will any
true Christian set himself. Browne writes thus nobly : —

'^ Yet have I not so shaken hands with those desperate
Besolvers ;* who had rather venture at large their decayed
bottom, than bring her in to be new trimm'd in the Dock ;

* In all editions this word is printed ** resolutions ;** wbich, as not
being a proper antecedent to the relative, I have taken the liberty
of altering.

SIR THOMAS BROWNE. 267

who had rather promiscuously retain all than abridge any,
and obstinately be what they are, than what they have been,
as to stand in Diameter and Swords point with them ; we
have reformed from them not against them ; for omitting
those Improperations and Terms of Scurrility betwixt us,
which only difference our Affections, and not our Cause,
there is between us, one common Name and Appellation, one
Faith and necessary body of Principles common to us both,
and therefore I am not scrupulous to converse and live
with them, to enter their Churches in defect of ours, and
either pray with them or for them ; I could never perceive
any rational Consequence from those many Texts which pro-
hibit the Children of Israel to pollute themselves with the
Temples of the Heathens ; we being all Christians, and not
divided by such detested impieties as might prophane our
Prayers, or the place wherein we make them ; or that a
resolved Conscience may not adore her Creator anywhere,
especially in places devoted to his Service ; where if their
Devotions offend him, mine may please him ; if theirs pro-
fane it, mine may hallow it: Holy- water and Crucifix
(dangerous to the common people) deceive not my judg-
ment, nor abuse my devotion at all : I am I confess
naturally inclined to that which misguided Zeal terms
Superstition. My common couversation I do acknowledge
austere, my behaviour fiill of rigour, sometimes not with-
out morosity ; yet at my Devotion I should violate my own
arm rather than a Church, nor willingly defame the name
of Saint or Martyr.

" At the sight of a Cross or Crucifix I can dispense with

268 VABIA.

my hat, but scarce with the thought or memory of my
Saviour ; I cannot laugh at, but rather pity the fruitless
journeys of Pilgrims, or contemn the miserable condition of
Fryars ; for though misplaced in Circumstances, there is
something in it of Devotion. I could never hear the Ave-
Mary Bell without an elevation, or think it a sufficient war-
rant because they erred in one circumstance, for me to err
in all, that is, in silence and dumb contempt ; whilst there-
fore they direct their Devotions to Her I offered mine to
God, and rectifie the Errors of their Prayers by rightly
ordering mine own/'

It is in the curious and nice questions of faith, in ques-
tions old as the first opponents of Christianity, and new as
Dr. Colenso's book, that Browne revels. These afford
him strong nuts to try the teeth of his faith upon. He
himself "could show a catalogue of doubts," he adds, "never
yet imagined or questioned, as I know, which are not re-
solved at the first hearing ; not fantastick queries or ob-
jections of air, for I cannot hear of atoms in divinity. I
can read the history of the pigeon that was sent out of the
ark and returned no more, yet not question how she found
out her mate that was left behind; that Lazarus waa
raised from the dead, and yet not demand where in the
interim his soul awaited. Whether Eve was framed out
of the rib of Adam I dispute not ; because I stand not yet
assured which is the right side of man. That she was
edified out of the rib of Adam I believe; yet raise no
question who shall rise vrith that rib at the resurrection.
Likewise whether the world was created in autumn, sum-

SIR THOMAS BROWNE. 269

mer, or the spring ; because it was created in them all :
for whatever sign the sun possesseth, those four seasons
are actually existent." So he continues, and then grandly,
as Samson broke the withies that bound him, he throws
these doubts away. " There are (sic) a bundle of curiosities,
not only in philosophy, but in divinity, proposed and dis-
cussed by men of most supposed abilities, which indeed
are not worthy our vacant hours, much less our serious
studies. Pieces fit only to be placed in Fantagruel's
library, or bound up with Tartaretus' De Modo Cacandi"

It is in the " Letter to a Friend " that Sir Thomas
achieves the most sublime heights ; and truly when read-
ing these we find that the praise of Coleridge was not
excessive, hardly, indeed, sufficient, when applied to the
knight. For he is indeed " rich in various knowledge,
exuberant in conceptions and conceits; contemplative,
imaginative, oflen truly great and magnificent in his style
and diction, though, doubtless, too often big, stiff, and
hyper-Latinistic. He is a quiet and sublime enthusiast,
with a strong tinge of the fantast : the humourist constantly
mingling with and flashing across the philosopher, as the
darting colours in shot silk play upon the main dye." The
following solemn passage, in which this sublime fantast
meditates on a dying man, and resolves how he himself
will pass away, is worthy of all the praise that Coleridge
bestows upon his style : —

''In this deliberate and creeping progress unto the
grave, he was somewhat too young and of too noble a
mind, to fall upon that stupid symptom observable in

270 VABIA.

dirers persona near tlieir journey's end, and whicli may be
reckoned among the mortal symptoms of their last disease;
that is to become more narrow-minded, miserable, and
tenacious, unready to part with anything, when they are
ready to part with all, and afraid to want when they
have no time to spend; meanwhile physicians who
know that many are mad but in a single depraved imagi-
nation, and one preyalent decipiency ; and that beside and
out of such single deliriums, a man may meet with sober
actions and good sense in bedlam ; cannot but smile to see
the heirs and concerned relations gratulating themselves on
the sober departure of their friends ; and though they be-
hold such mad covetous passages, content to think they die
in good understanding and in their sober senses.

" Avarice which is not only infidelity but idolatry, either
from covetous progeny or questuary education, had no root
in his breast, who made good works the expression of his
faith, and was big with desires unto public and lasting
charities ; and surely where good wishes and charitable
intentions exceed abilities, theoretical beneficency may be
more than a dream. They build not castles in the air
who would build churches on earth ; and though they
leave no such structures here, may lay good foim-
dations in heaven. In brief, his life and death were such
that I could not blame them who wished the like, and
almost to have been himself; almost, I say ; for though
we may wish the prosperous appurtenances of others,
or to be another in his happy accidents, yet so intrin-
sical is every man unto himself, that some doubt may

SIR THOMAS BROWNE. 271

be made^ whether any would exchange his being or sub-
stantially become another man.

** He had wisely seen the world at home and abroad, and
thereby observed under what variety men are deluded in
the pursuit of that which is not here to be found. And
although he had no opinion of reputed felicities below and
apprehended men widely out in the estimate of such happi-
ness, yet his sober contempt of the world, wrought no demo-
critism or cynicism, no laughing or snarling at it, as well
understanding there are not felicities in this world to satisfy
a serious mind, and therefore, to soften the stream of our
lives, we are fain to take in the reputed contentions of this
world, to unite with the crowd in their beatitudes, and to
make oui*selves happy by consortion, opinion, or co-existi-
mation ; for strictly to separate from received and custo-
mary felicities, and to confine unto the rigour of realities,
were to contract the consolation of our beings unto too
uncomfortable circumscriptions.

" Not to fear death, nor desire it, was short of his resolu-
tion : to be dissolved, and be with Christ, was his dying
ditty. He conceived his thread long, in no long course
of years, and when he had scarce outlived the second life
of Lazarus, esteeming it enough to approach the years of
his Saviour, who so ordered his own human state, as not
to be old upon earth. But to be content with death may
be better than to desire it ; a miserable life may make us
wish for death, but a virtuous one to rest in it ; which is
the advantage of those resolved Christians, who, looking
on death not only as the sting, but the period and end of

272 VABIA.

em, the horizon and isthmus between this life and a better,
and the death of this world but as a nativity of another, do
contentedly submit unto the common necessity, and envy
not Enoch or Ellas.

'^ Not to be content with life is the unsatisfactory state of
those who destroy themselves, who, being afraid to live,
run blindly upon their own death, which no man fears by
experience, and the stoics had a notable doctrine to take
away the fear thereof, that is, in such extremities, to
desire that which is not to be avoided, and wish what
might be feared, and so make evils voluntary, and to suit
with their own desires, which took off the terror of them.

" But the ancient martyrs were not encouraged by such
fallacies, who, though they feared not death, were afraid
to be their own executioners, and therefore thought it
more wisdom to crucify their lusts than their bodies, to
circumcise than stab their hearts, and to mortify than kill
themselves."

Sir Thomas is very great in the art of approaching a
climax, and leads us gently onwards till we are astonished
with the force of the simple English words. And though
the sublime fantast is seen everywhere even more than the
careful builder-up of sentences, yet his careful research,
his personal observation, his painstaking labour, and his
finished accuracy should be especially noted by the student.
" I take little pleasure," he says somewhere, " to drink the
waters of knowledge, instar canis ad If Hum, like a dog at
the Nile, as the proverb — a lick and away." Hence in
his " Vulgar Errors," although there are some absurdities

SIE THOMM BROWNE. 273

doubtless which he still believes, yet there are numbers of
errors which he corrects from his own observation, such
as that of the Death Watch, the insect occasioning which
noise he had observed and noted ; nor has modem science
added, in that instance, much to our knowledge, save the
Linnsean name. The absurdity of some of these errors
is, of course, as a critic says, " obvious." And the critic
cites some heads from Browne's note-book as particularly
foolish, such as, " Whether children before they are forty
days old laugh upon tickling? Whether possession be
not often mistaken for witchcraft, and many now thought to
be bewitched that are indeed possessed ? " Now, from a
physician who had very minutely studied his art, a question
when children really laugh, an act betokening intelligence,
* or may grin spasmodically, is not so very ridiculous. The
other matter is much deeper, and gives us the keynote to
Sir Thomas Browne's character. We have seen that he
has been accused of atheism by the unthinkers ; the truth
is, his mind was so sincerely religious, and so truly devout,
that in every word he wrote, and in every action of his
life, we behold, as it were, a reference to the ever-present
God. As he believed in a God, so he believed in a devil.
Hence his undoubted faith in witchcraft, his by no means
ridiculous query, whether possession be not often mistaken
for witchcraft, and many now thought to be bewitched
that are indeed possessed? Curiously, the resuscitated
belief in spirits recalls this very powerfully, and assures
us that Sir Thomas was, as usual, not ridiculous, but only
much more serious and deep Ihan his accusers. The ex-

T

274 VABIA.

perienees of Professor De Morgan, the attestations of tlie
Howitts, of Mrs. S. 0. Hall and her husband, and of a
very well-known band of writers, the assertions of persons,
of whom the present writer has seen some hundreds in a
room, who could hardly be all rogues and dupes, assure us
that there is something now abroad which answers very
closely to demoniacal possesion. A very philosophical
writer indeed, if one little known, has asserted, after a seven
years' study of the subject, that spiritualism is diabolism,
and has traced very lucidly the similarity of agencies in
the cases of witchcraft and spiritualism. Be that as it
may, all that we wish here to maintain is that the mind of
Sir Thomas Browne was of far too high a class for any
reviewer to pronounce him ridiculous. We have seen that
he believed in witchcraft, and in the year 1665, when
Amy Duny and Kose Cullender, two old women of Lowe-
stoft, were tried at Bury St. Edmund's upon the charge
of bewitching people, he, then Dr. Thomas Browne,
attested *' that the devil did work upon the bodies of men
and women in a natural foundation, that is, he did stir up
and excite such humours superabounding in their bodies
to a great excess, whereby he did in an extraordinary
manner afflict them with such distempers as their bodies
were most subject to." Truly a philosophical and Brownish
view of witchcraft. Chief Justice Hale presided, and
charged the jury, when, alas, there was but too good a
reason to acquit, to convict the prisoners ; for, as a writer
observes, '^ there is a vast difference between a witness
who honestly deposes to abstract principles, and a judge

SIB THOMAS BROWNE. 275

and jury who carelessly apply those principles to the
prisoners at the har."

In 1716, Archdeacon Jeffery printed, at Camhridge, a
work of Browne's, which, although heard of, had hitherto
lain hidden from the puhlic, and which had, indeed part
of it, appeared in his *' Letter to a Friend :" this is his
** Christian Morals." The sonorous heauty of the sentences
is quite unsurpassed in the English language, and the
paradoxical quaintness of many, serves to fix them on one's
memory, and to make the little hook a gold^i one for
Boher thinkers. The first sentence, which, hy the way,
began the closing reflections in the " Letter to a Friend,"
will at once arrest the reader : —

** Tread softly and circumspectly in this funambulatory*
track and narrow path of goodness; pursue virtue virtu-
ously; leaven not good actions, nor render virtue dis-
putable.

" In this virtuous voyage of thy life hull not about like
the ark, without the use of rudder, mast, or sail, and
bound for no port. Let not disappointment cause des-
pondency, nor difficulty despair.

" Measure not thyself by thy morning shadow, but by
the extent of thy grave, and reckon thyself above the
earth by the line thou must be contented with when under it.

" \^en God forsakes us Satan also leaves us ; for such
offenders he looks upon as sure and sealed up, and hia
temptations then needless unto them.

• Narrow, like the walk of a rope dancer.— Dr. Johnson.

276 VARIA.

*^ The sick man's saerifiee is but a lame oblation.

'^ Let the fruition of things Uess the possession of them^
and think it more aatisfactioii to Hto richly than to die
rich.

^' Trost not to the omnipoteney of gold^ and say not
unto it, Thou art my confidence. Kiss not thy hand to
that terrestrial Sun, nor bore thy ear nnto its servitude.
A slare unto mammon makes no servant onto Gk)d.

^' Persons lightly dipt, not grained in generous honesty,
are but pale in goodness and faint hued in integrity.

" Let not the law of thy country be the non-ultra of thy
honesty ; nor think that always good enough whidi the
law will make good. Narrow not the law of charity,
equity, mercy. Jom gospel righteousness with legal
right. Be not a mere Gamaliel in the faith, but let thy
Sermon in the Mount be thy targum unto the law of
Sinai.

"Let not the Sun in Capricorn* go down npon thy
wrath, but write thy wrongs in ashes. Draw the curtain
of night upon injuries, shut them up in the tower of
oblivion, and let them be as though they had not been."

These are noble sentences, full of a true poetic ring; prose
i;hat, with very little transposition, might make verse worthy
of Shakespeare himself. A critic, in a paper which assumes
much, quarrelled with the present writer^s interpfetation
of diabolism from AiajSaXXo), I calmnniate, deceive, tra-«
duce : what will the learned £centleman say to Sir Thomas
Browne's derivation and injunction?

^ Wlien the days are sliortest.

8IE THOMAS BROWNE. 277

^' While thou 80 Hotly diselaimest the deyil^ be not
guilty of diabolism. Fall not into one name with that
unclean spirit, nor act his nature whom tiiou so much
abhorrest ; that is, to accuse, calumniate, backbite, whisper,
detract, or sinistrously interpret others. Degenerous de-
pravities and narrow-minded vices! not only below St.
Paul's noble Christian, but Aristotle's true gentleman."

The ^' Musieum Olausum ; or, Bibliotheca Abscondita "
has been well characterized as ^^ the sport of a singular
scholar." Emulating the singularity of others. Sir Thomas
Browne appears to have rivalled Babelais in his ** Cata-
logue of Books in the Library of St. Victor.'' The tract
is but a bare list of books, not those that we have, but
those that we ougkt to have. They are indeed, as he
terms them, '^remarkable books, antiquities, pictures,
and rarities of several kinds, scarce or never seen by any
man Uving." The first is, '^ A Poem of Ovidius Naso,
written in tiie Gethick language during his exile at
Tomos," Ae. Then follows ^'A lett^ of Quintus Cicero,
which he wrote in answer to his brother, Marcus Tullius,
desiring him an account of Britany, wherdn are described
the country, state, and manners of the Britans of that
age.'' ^'A Submarine Herbal, describing the several
vegetables found on the rocks, valleys, meadows at the
bottom of the sea, with many sorts of alga, fiicus, quercus,
polygonum, gramen, and others not yet described." This
has been partially done. '^ Seneca's Epistles to St. Paul "
is certainly a book much to be desired, so are the '' ' Duo
Cffisaris Anti-Catones ; ' two notable book? of Julius

278 VABIA.

Caesar against Cato, mentioned by livy," and mach to be
lamented is the loss of King Solomon's treatise '^De
Umbris Idearum," which Chicus ABCulanus in his com-
ment upon Sacrobosco would have us believe he saw in
the library of the Duke of Bavaria." The " rarities " we
do not so much desire, but a list of them opens to us a
curious chamber in the knight's mind. Why should he
desire '* A neat crucifix made out of the cross-bone on a
frog's head," or the " Homeric battle of frogs and mice
neatly described upon the chisel-bone of a pike's jaw,"
or '^ the skin of a snake bred out of the spinal marrow
of a man." He who knows where all this treasure is,
Browne concludes drily, ^^ is a great Apollo ; I am sure I
am not he."

In his domestic correspondence Browne proves himself a
very affectionate, careful, and indulgent father, looking after
not only the temporal but the spiritual welfare of his sons.
"Honest Tom," he writes to his son Thomas travelling in
France, " I hope by this time thou art got somewhat he-
jond jplaist'il, and ouy Monsieur, and durst ask a question
and give an answer in French, and therefore now I hope
you goe to the Protestant church to which must not be
backward, for tho' their church order and discipline be
different from ours, yet they agree with us in doctrine and
the main of religion. Pray be careful to serve God in
the first place. Thy writing is much mendedy hut stUl
you forget to make jpoints, I shall be glad if you get a
handsome garb and gait. Be temperate and sober the
whole course of your life ; keep no bad or uncivil company ;
be courteous and humble in your conversation, still shun-

SIE THOMAS BROWNE. 279

ning pndor rusticus." The wise Polonius* could not
have given better advice. We have seen that the sons
lived to his credit, and that Dr. Edward Browne, Presi-
dent of the Soyal College of Surgeons, cherished the
memory of his illustrious father. Now and then we find
a sign in letters from that father that Edward may have
been slightly extravagant. " Espargnez vous," he writes
in old French, " spare us as much as you can, for I am
grown old, and have much anxiety and trouble to support
my family," To us there is something very delicate in
the old Knight's running into a foreign language when he
would hint that his favourite son was not to make too
heavy a pull upon his purse. With that son's son, " little
Tommy," to amuse him — ^a little boy whom he loved ex-
ceedingly and indulged in all sorts of childish amuse-
ments, a pretty picture in a silver box from Flanders,
Punch and his Wife, a show king and queen and ladies
of honour, and a tumbler, a wooden fellow that turns his
heels over his head," — Sir Thomas grew pleasantly old, and
died, as we have seen, boldly and manftiUy when his time
came. He was not unaddicted to verse, and had written
that which Bishop Ken has imitated in his beautiful even-
ing hymn : — f

* A character always or almost always, mistaken by the players,
and often by critics, as a mere maxim-babbler, with a touch of the
pantaloon in him.

f Teach me to live that I may dread
The grave as little as my bed ;
Teach me to die, so that I may
Rise glorious at the awful day.

280 VAjRIA.

Sleep is a death, O let me try
By sleeping what it is to die I
And as gently lay my head
On my grave as on my bed.
Howe*er I rest, great God, let me
Awake again at last with Thee.

Alas ! the bones of the good knight have rested not with-
out disturbance in their grave. His skull, which I have
handled, adorns the Museum of Surgery in Norwich,
rescued from private hands, and there deposited by G. W.
W. Firth, Esq., to whom I am indebted for the following
narrative of its invention by Mr. Bobert Fitch, F.C.S.

** In August, 1840, some workmen, who were employed
in digging a vault in the chancel of the Church of St.
Peter's, Mancroft, Norwich, accidentallj broke, with a
blow of the pick-axo) the lid of a coffin, which proved to
be that of one whose residence within its walls conferred
honour on Norwich in olden times. This circumstance
afforded me an opportunity of inspecting the remains.
The bones of the skeleton were found to be in good pre-
servation, particularly those of the skull, the forehead was
remarkably low and depressed, the head unusually long,
the back part exhibiting an uncommon appearance of
depth and capaciousness; the brain was considerable in
quantity, quite brown and unctuous ; the hair profuse and
perfect, of a fine auburn colour, similar to that in the
portrait presented to the Institute in 1847, and which is
carefully preserved in the vestry of St. Peter's, Mancroft.
The coffin plate, which was also broken, was of brass, in
the form of a shield, and bore the following : —

SIR THOMAS BROWNE. 281

Amplissimus Yir

D°' Thomas Browne Miles, Medicin»

D' Annos Natos 77 Denatns 19 Die

Mensis Octobris, Anno D°J 1682, hoc

Locolo indormiens, Corporis Spagy-

rici palvere plumbum in aurum

Convertit.*

I succeeded in taking a few impressions from the plate,
and have presented one, with a counter impression, to the
Institute, to he deposited amongst the collection of the
society. There was another singular circumstance con-
nected with the discovery, the lead of which the coffin was
made was completely decomposed, and changed to a
carhonate, crumhling at the touch. Sir Thomas' mural
monument is fixed to the south pillar of the altar, and
opposite to this, upon the north pillar, is another mural
monument to his lady, Dorothy Browne, who died three
years a^r her hushand ; the inscription is in verse, pro-
hahly written hy their eldest son Edward, the physician to
Charles the II, and president to the College of Physicians,
as was also probahly the inscription on the coffin plate of
Sir Thomas Browne, of which the discoyery has been
described." t

• Which I (G. F.) render thus:—

" The very distinguished man, Sir Thomas Browne, Knight, Doctor
of Medicine, aged 77 years, who died on the 19th of October, in the
year of our Lord 1682, sleeping in this coffin of lead, by the dust
of his alchemic body transmutes it into a coffer of gold.*'

f From the proceedings of the Archseological Institute at the
Annual Meeting held at Norwich in 1847.

282 VABIA.

Mr. Firth has pointed out to me, in Sir Thomas Browne's
"Urn-Burial," two passages, which, if not regarded as
prophetic, haye yet obtained a curious significance from
the despoiling of the author's resting-place : — '

1. " But who knows the fate of his bones, or how often
he is to be buried? Who hath the oracle of his ashes,
or whither they are to be scattered ? "

2. " To be knaved * out of our graves, to have our skulls
made drinking bowls, and our bones turned into pipes to
delight and sport our enemies, are tragical abominations,
escaped in burning burials." t

Much learned dust was raised even about the meaning
of the epitaph, written doubtlessly by Dr. Edward BrowncJ

• Wilkins's ed. has ** gnawed." — I have no doubt incorrectly. —
G. W. W. F.

t Sir Thomas, it is almost needless to say, was wisely in favour
of incremation.

{ I subjoin part of a letter from Mr. Fitch, who has taken great
interest in the matter, in answer to a captious critic in the Norfolk
Chronicle, who for " Spagyrici/' would read ** Stagyricss ** («c) : —

"To Editor of Norfolk Chrmich.

*^ Dear Sir, — Having furnished you with the inscription upon Sir
Thomas Browne's coffin plate, permit me to reply to your corres-
pondent S. N.'s emendations of it, which appear to me to serve no other
purpose than to mystify a very clear passage. The word Spagyrici
may not be classical, but it was much used in Browne's time by the
writers in his profession. Boyle used it ; Johnson quotes it (surely
no mean authorities), and it is the only word capable of expressing
the sense intended. Your correspondent admits that the passage
has allusion to the doctrine of the Alchemists, and yet singularly

Sm THOMAS BROWNE. 283

Neither the dictionary of Forcellini or of Freund, no, nor
even that of Dr. Smith, which professes to include medisBval
and chemical words, contains the adjective spagyricus,
and many persons have desired to alter and emendate the
inscription. Dr. Johnson gives the word " Spagyrick,
from Lot, spagyrieus ; and adds that it was a word coined
hy Paracelsus from the Teutonic spaker, a searcher. The
meaning he gives as " chymical." Spagyriat is therefore
a chymist; and Johnson cites a passage from Boyle
wherein that meditative philosopher has used it to signify
an experimentaUser, "though," says he, speaking of
a chemical change, "many naturalists cannot easily
believe it, among the more curious spagyrists it be very
well known."

So here let us leave this spagyrical writer ; the spade
of the sexton may have grated against that dear head, but
it hurt not the busy brain. Curious eyes may gaze upon
the brown emblem of mortality, and note the vast length
and strangely small depth of skuU, and materialists may
laugh at the exploded rhetoric of a loving son, that the very
coffin which held the rare old thinker was by an alchemic
touch turned into gold; but they who love our noble
English literature well know that the boast has been frd-
filled in regard to the best and undying portion of Sir

rejects the onlj word by which they conld have been described.
The phrase is simple : * sleeping in this coffin, by the dust of his
alchemic body he transmuteth lead into gold,' — viz. renders the
base metal precious by making it the repository of his honoured
remains, and thus doing what the alchemists vainly pretended to do."

284

VARIA.

Thomas Browne^ and that his thoughts, transmitted to
paper, have indeed tamed to something &r nobler, more
spiritual and imperishable than gold when received into the
hearts of docile readers and teachable disciples.

GEORGE PSALMANAZAR.

BOOKS CONSULTED.

Mtmoin of * * * commonly knoum by the name of George
Ptcdmanazar, a reputed notice of Formosa^ toritten by ktmuif, in
order to be published after his death, 8fc, 8fc, He was the author
of the ** Jewish History," and "The Life of Christ in the Uniyersal
History " (added in MS. of the time on the title-page). Dablin,
printed for J. Wilson, J. Exshaw, E. Watts, S. Cotter, J. Potts,
and J. Williams. 1765.

An Historical and Geographical Description of Formosa^ an Island
subject to the Emperor of Japan, Giving an Account of the Sdigiomj
Manners, Customs, Sfc, of the Inhabitants, Together with a rela-
tion of what happened to the author in his travels, Sfc. Second
edition. By George Psalmanaazaoar, a native of the island, wno
in London. Adorned unth cuts, to which are added a map and a
figure of an idol, not in the former edition, London, printed for
Mat. Wotton, Abel Boper, and B. Lintot, in Fleet Street. 1705.
Price 6s.

Anecdotes of Dr. Johnson, 8^c. By Sir John Hawkins, Knight,
(Johnsoniana.) London, 1859.

Anecdotes of Dr, Johnson, By Mrs. Piozzi, (Johndoniana).
London, 1859.

Curiosities of Literature. By Isaac D'Israeli. A new edition, with
Memoir and Notes, by his Son, the Right Hon. B. Disraeli. Yol.
iii. (and note, vol. i.) London, 1859.

GEORGE PSALMANAZAR.

£. YOUN^G to an excellent poem has pre-
fixed a telling title, " The Universal Pas-
sion, lioveoframe;" and he cites JuTenal'a
tenth satire, " that the thirst for Fame ex-
ceeds by far the thirst for yirtue." Perhaps both of these
satirists are, after all, somewhat in the wrong, ^though it
is a bold thing to say. The love of Fame is a grand pas-
sion, too grand to be widely felt. It is the last infirmity
of great minds, as Milton telb us. It combines in itself
too many noble feelings to be miivereal ; but what really
is universal is that minor itching to be talked of and
about — that wish to rise to sudden notoriety, that reatiess
longing to become the head of a small circle, that amall-
beer ambition of being the chief in a parish, the leader in
a deputation — in short, to be a notorious rather than a
note-worthy man. All this, which is universal enough,
may be put down rather to an ill-governed vanity than to
a love of fome. The man who will be talked about does
not much care whether his name be amongst the most

288 . VARIA. •

fraudulent of bankrupts or in the list of recipients of the
Victoria Cross, published in the same Gazette. Perhaps,
as a matter of safety, he would have preferred the latter,
with the exception that he would have had previonslj to
have exposed his precious body to an almost certain death.
Even when enduring the punishment which his crime
brings with it, the victim of a voracious vanity exults
that his name is before the world. Mrs. Catharine Wilson
was, we are told, particularly anxious to know what the
papers said of her ; it was the only anxiety she showed.
Pullinger said that no one had excelled him in his gigan-
tic fraud. Fauntleroy, a short lime before he was executed,
called for a glass, and when he saw the reflection of his
face, was anxious that his portrait should not then be
taken. " My God !" said he, " can this be the once hand-
some, the notorious Henry Fauntleroy ? " And in our own
time, the unctuous Sunday-school teacher Hocker, in
reading some notes after his condemnation, remarked that
" he was not then the gay young man which the world had
known him." In short, there are very few foolishly bad
men who could not be adduced as examples of this hungry
vanity, or, as Wickliff and Chaucer would more properly
call it, vain-glory.

Forgers of manuscripts and literary impostors are es-
pecially the dupes of this vain-glory ; and we are about to
glance over one of the most extraordinary examples —
namely, George Psalmanazar, the pretended native of
Formosa; a man whose real name, so far as we can learn,
is still buried in obscurity — who, himself learned for the

OEORQE PSALMANAZAR. 289

#

age in which he lived, deceived some of the hest scholars
of his time, and died at an advanced age, a true penitent,
and a useful member of society. Whatever may have
been his name, George was bom somewhere about the
year 1650, and in Europe. His parents' names, and the
place of his birth, he concealed, for a very good reason,
whilst he was pretending to be a native of Formosa ; and
for a stUl better, when he became a repentant man. He
never divulged them, lest his sin and folly should bring
disgrace on his family. We presume him to have been a
native of Switzerland, or the South of France. " Out of
Europe," he says, " I was not bom, nor educated, nor
even travelled, nor even went further northward than the
Rhine in Germany, or Yorkshire in England." He was
suspected of being a German, a Swede, or a Dane, nay,
even an Englishman ; but he denied that he was a native
of any of these countries. His parents were Eoman
Catholics, but somewhat biassed in favour of Protestantism,
which would seem to argue that they lived where Protest-
antism existed. His mother was a pious good woman, but
before he was five years old he left her, and was taken many
miles away bj^ Franciscan monk to be educated. This
monk, who did not know much, recognised George's capa-
cities, put him into a high class, pushed him forward, and,
indeed, found that the boy possessed great talent in ac-
quiring languages, and a tremendous ambition to excel.

As he increased in years, our hero fell into the hands
most fitted to teach him to deceive. Taught by a Domi-
nican, he was well versed in all the subtleties of Thomas

u

290 VAEIA.

Aquinas ; he soon found, like many other boys in thosef
days, that he knew more than his masters ; and at last,
dazed with the philosophy of Aquinas, he left his teachers,
and came to a great city, where he was welcomed and
made much of, and learned to use his edged tools of argu-
ment. Determining to employ these, and pushed on by
ambition, he began to read the Eoman Catholic theology,
with which he soon got disgusted, and proceeded to Avig-
non to take the place of a tutor. Here he met with a
hypocritical priest, who proved to him that many of the
clergy no more believed in the doctrines of their Church
than they did in the Grand Lhama of Thibet. The people
were poor, the priests dissolute, and the honest Lutherans
whom he met in the country and small towns very badly
off ; their " priests," as he calls them, being forced to
keep small cabarets — ^some, no doubt, for mere subsistence,
others, perhaps, as a pretence to get their followers to
meet them under the cloak of going to a public-house.
The young scholar found much distress and misery about,
and discovered that it was, indeed, hard to rise in the world,
either by talent or learning. He had no influence and
little patience, and he resolved to try his fortunes in the
world in a different way. He visited his parents, and, upon
leaving them, determined to assume the character of an
Irish pilgrim, who had been maltreated and turned out of
England for his religion. "With a long staff and a black
gown the pretended pilgrim left home with rather a heavy
heart. His direct route lay past the very university
where he had studied theology; and he necessarily,
therefore, turned out of the way. The road he took,

GEORGE PBALMANAZAR. 291

-although '^ a considerable high road/' contained objects
not calculated to reassure him, and its description may be
quoted as exhibiting the state of the Continent at that
time : " Now and then, at some lonely place, lay the
carcass of a man rotting and stinking on the ground by
the wayside, with a rope about his neck, which was fas-
tened to a post about two or three yards distant ; and
there were the bodies of highwaymen, or rather of soldiers,
sailors, mariners, or even galley-slaves, disbanded after
the peace of Eyswick, who, hanng neither home nor oc-
cupation, used to infest the roads in troops, plunder
towns and villages, and when taken were hanged at the
county town by dozens, or even scores sometimes, after
which, their bodies were thus exposed along the high-
way, in terrorem. At other places one met with crosses,
either of wood or stone, the highest not above two or three
feet, with inscriptions to this purport : * Pray for the soul
of A.B., or, of a stranger who was found murdered near
this spot.'"* So that Callot's wild pictures of the Mis-
eries of War, wherein the trees bear the most plenteous
crop of hanging ruffians that can be imagined, are true
enough. Nay, even the exaggerated atrocities depicted
in the modern illustrations of Gustavo Dore are not by
many shades too black. These ^* deterring objects" made
our pilgrim associate himself with many people on the

* Perhaps as fine a qtuisi contemporary picture as ever was
drawn — and Thackeray excelled in the art of local and time colour-
ing — is a picture somewhat similar to this and other passages in
Psalmauazar, in the '* Memoirs of Barry Lyndon, Esq.," one of
Thackeray's earliest and best books.

292 VARLL

road ; and^ as an Oliistratioii of fais ▼anitj, it maj be re-
marked that he nerer <moe begged whilst his little store cf
monej lasted, bat spent that recklesslj, like a gendeman,
till the exigencies of the case threw him again on die pub-
lic. At Lyons, where he hopes to meet with a harrest, an
officer asks him whether he wants a viaticum j and Geoige,
not knowing the consequences of refusal, simply answers
'^ yes ;" whereon the officer '^ claps twopence in his hand,
and walks him about the city, seeing many grand objects,
to observe which he was not allowed to linger." At last
he came to the opposite gate, whereat the officer pointing
told him to take himself off, for there was his journey ; if
he came back he would be punished. Plainly, therefore,
the good people of- Lyons were quite awake to the merits
of pilgrims, real or pretended, a4d struck a balance be-
tween charity and severity by providing them with a vicM-
cum of twopence, and showing them the door as quickly as
possible. Our pilgrim was in great fear whether or do
this conduct would be repeated at every gi-eat city, but he
found that this was not the case. Sometimes he fared well,
and even sumptuously ; he danced with beggars at fairs,
and enjoyed himself in his wild way, for he was yet but a
young man, and one cannot read his very dry, and some-
what sorrowful narrative, without having the love of adven-
ture stirred within one, and determining to follow Mr.
CoUins's example, to take a " cruise upon wheels."

It is but fair to the impostor to state that, every now
and then, he seems to be filled with sorrow and trouble for
what he has done. The path of the most successful

OEORQE PSALMANAZAR. 293

roguery is, alter all, not a path of roses. All around the
pretender was evidentlj an atmosphere of religious hum-
bug, relieyed only now and then by some bright spots,
and these few and far between. If he saw one of these,
he was led to regret that he ever passed himself off as an
Irish Papist ; and when questioned on his sufferings, he is
led to inyent them. Dirt and low company had, besides,
inflicted on him that disease which, in the time of John
Wilkes, was popularly supposed to be natural with Scotch-
men, and fi*om this he can by no means escape. A Dutch
officer at Liege engages him for some little time as a kind
of general servitor and minor buUy at a gaming-house,
one also of general entertainment ; and, to make him do
credit to the virtuous establishment, has him bled, phy-
sicked, bathed, and scrubbed, but to no purpose. The
'^ scabious disease" still clings to him. In one particular
it is absolutely beneficial to him. About Liege there was
a kind of pretended Beguin nuns,* who assumed that
sacred habit merely for the sake of being procuresses to
the fine, idle ladies of the town, the virtue of these fair
Liegoises being evidently that of the ladies of the Count
of Grammont, or of the dames described by M. Le Comte
Bussy Babutin; and, as our pilgrim or servitor was a
good-looking young fellow, these " pretended Beguines ''
often made overtures to him, which were, of course, cut
short by a nearer inspection of his hands and skin. The
life with the Dutch officer at last proves hateful to him,

* He speaks well of the real " Beguines, '' as he calls them, and
says that they were noted for prayerfulness and charity.

294 VAEIA.

and he escapes from hiniy and flies from the '^seeming
grandeur" of his house, and joins some soldiers, with
whom he learns to dnuk, swear, dice, and fight.

Having still an ear for curious learning, he one day
listens to some Jesuit priests, who are talking of Japan,
India, and China, the wondrous Insula Formosa, and the
ravishing islands of the East. It is now impossible to
realize the wild ideas which the hare mention of these
unknown lands stirred up in the hearts of the hearers.
The bombastic Pistol, when he wishes greatly to interest
his audience, does not hesitate to ^' speak of Africa and
golden joys." As every countryman, before the days of
stage-coaches, used to credit the hyperbolical expressioD
that London streets were paved with gold, so, to the
Western mind, the vision opened up by the name of the
East was truly gorgeous. George felt this, and, had he
loved Fame truly, he would have gone thither ; as he was
only inflated by vainglory, he commenced forming his
scheme of deception. He carefully treasured up what he
had heard, and, knowing that he could not learn the
language, undertook the immense task of making one.
He invented names for the letters of his alphabet, formed
upon it a new nomenclature, divided the year into twenty
months, and laid the foundation of his imposture.

In the meantime, some monks with whom he is wish
to use him as a tool, and beg him to become " converted "
— he was then a swearing soldier. ** They took me," he
says, "to a Capuchin of some piety who had been apprised
of the intended visit and the purport of it. When we came

OEOROE PSALMANAZAR. 295

to the monastery, we found the good old Capuchin sitting
on the bench, in an outer room of it, facing the gate, with a
lusty young woman kneeling before him, barking like a dog,
and making a great many other antic postures and noises ;
upon which I was told that she was possessed, and that the good
father was exorcising the evil spirit out of her. Whether she
was sent there on purpose or not, I know not; but I remem-
ber to have seen her at some processions, and once or twice

»

in church, in the same unaccountable attitudes."

The power of face or of faith that these good priests
were possessed of must have been immense. How could
it have faQed to have happened that, tickled by some
gross part of their own humbug, both possessed and
exorcist did not burst into a long and loud fit of uncon-
trollable laughter? Surely, if such was not sometimes
the case, hypocrisy must have driven away, as it always
does, the Divine Spirit of Humour, which in this world is
one of its most skilM and dreaded opponents.

Arrested, after again wandering at the gate of the town,
George finds an officer who takes a liking to him, and to
him and upon him he first puts forth his grand lie. ** He
passed with him," he writes, "as a Japonese and a
heathen, and was entered in his company under the name
of Salamanazar, which since my coming to England I have
altered by a letter or two, to make it somewhat difierent
from that mentioned in the Book of Kings,* but whether

* 2 Kings c. xvii. v. 3 — The King of Assyria who subdned
Hoshea. '* And he (Hoshea) did that which was evil in the sight
of the Lord, but not as the Kings of Israel that were before him

296 VAEIA.

mj new captain believed or not what I told him^ I was a
great fayourite with him." The officer was a Colonel
Lauder, of the garrison of SIujb, and G^rge, who bad
been more than once a soldier, and knew how to trail a
pike, enlisted; still, however, pretending to be a Por-
mosan native bom, and once a bitter hater of Chiisti-
anity, but since converted by the Jesuits. The simple
Scotch Colonel appears to have believed all ; but amoagst
his officers was a chaplain of the name of Innes, a nan
utterly unprincipled, and desirous of escaping from his
position and gaining preferment in the Church. This
man, as acute as he was unprincipled, detected the im-
posture at an early stage; but, nevertheless, persuaded
his Colonel to take George Psahnanazar to London and to
introduce him to the learned there as a precious convertiie.

Here, then, was the crucial experiment, and the geniis
of the impostor for a long time carried him through it
successfully. He affected strange habits. He threw him-
self on the pity of men. He declared that his love for
our holy religion had caused him to undergo unheard-of
cruelties, and afterwards to fly from his native land. And
thus in his false narrative does he account for his conver-
sion, which Innes, who had suspected the imposition all
along, forced him to make so that the convert might
thereby increase the popularity of the Eev. Mr. Innes.

" Being thus (to my eternal Happiness I hope) con-

Against him came up Shalmaneser, King of Assyria ; and Hoshea
became his servant and gare him presents." The impostor's way of
spelling the name looks even more Assyrian than this way.

QEOBQE PSALMANAZAE. 297

yinc'd of the truth of the ChristiaD Eeligion^ and being
thorowly sfltisfied of the primitive purity of the Church of
Englandy I earnestly desir'd to be a Member of that Com-
munion. Then the Ministers who unsuccessfully disputed
with me gave out, that my good Guide Mr. Innes did not
convert me by strength of Arguments^ but by large
promises^ or some other indirect means, which God knows
is false. To stop these uncharitable reports, Mr. Innes
and I went to Mr. Hattinga (the eldest Minister of Sluyse)
and desired him to call a Consistory, and publickly ex-
amine me about the reasonableness of my Conversion.
Mr. Hattinga promised there should be a Consistory at
seven of the Clock that Evening. Accordingly Mr. Innes
and I went again at that hour and found the Consistory
sitting ; it was composed of the two Dutch and one French
Minister, the rest of the members were Wine-sellers,
Apothecaries and other Tradesmen ; hither also my Coll-
onel. Captain, and the Captain-Lieutenant came to hear
me ; but because I could not very readily express my self
in Dutch (and none of them understood Latin, except Mr.
Hattinga, and he indeed knew very little of it) they chose
Monsiemr UAmalvy, the Frefnch Minister, to discourse me
in Freifwh; who said to me, * Sir, the whole Consistory in
general, and I in particular, rejoyce to see you resolv'd to
be baptiz'd into the Christian Church, but I hope your
conversion doth not proceed from any other motive than a
true and conscientious Conviction.'

" Mr. Innes and I both thought that this speech did not
savour much of Charity ; and therefore I reply'd, ' Sir, I

298 VARIA.

came hither on purpose to declare the Keasons of mj
ConyersioD, if the Consistoij please to hear me.' Then we
were ordered to withdraw ; and heing called in, Monsieur
IfAmalvy told me, * That indeed they were very glad to
see me so desirous to emhrace Christianity, but that it was
a little too soon for me to give an account of my Conversion :
You should (says he) converse with us for three Weeks or
a Month, and then we will publickly baptize you in our
Great Church, where a rational account of your conversion
may be much to the edification of the Congregation.' But
I perceiving their design answer'd, ' If it be not too soon
for you to hear me, I am sure it is time for me to speak,
I am thorowly convinc'd of the Truth of the Christian
Beligion, and am not willing the initiating Sacrament of
Baptism should be long defcrr'd ; wherefore if you think it
not fit to hear me now, you must not take it amiss if I
make all the haste I can to obtain the blessing of Baptism,
whereby I may he made a Member of Christ, a Child of
God, and an Inheritor of the Kingdom of Heaven,^ Then
they again desir'd us to withdraw, and when we came in,
they advis'd me to follow their directions before given, and
that they had nothing to add. So we took our leaves of
them ; and in my way home, I agreed Mr. Innes should bap-
tize me, without taking any more notice of the Consistory,
But they, mistrusting what we intended, went to Brigadier
Lauder (the Governour of Sluyse) and told him, that 'since
Mr. Innes is of a different Communion from what is estab-
lish'd in our Country, he ought not to Baptise the Convert.'
The Brigadier reply'd, ' I am no Bishop, neither wiU I

GEORGE PSALMANAZAR. 299

meddle with Churcli- Affairs ; however, I will send for this
Formosan, and if he will consent, one of you shall haptize
him.' Accordingly I was sent for and ask'd whether I
would be baptiz'd by one of these Ministers ? I reply'd,
* Had I been, or if I intended to be, a Member of their
Communion, then I would desire Baptism from their
Hands ; but since Mr. Innes was the only Guide to whom
I ow'd my Conversion, I hoped he might be allow'd to
baptize me.' The Dutch Ministers answer'd, ' You say
well, but the laws of our Country will not permit it.' To
which I reply'd, * 'Tis true I don't understand your Laws,
but had the Jews of this place converted me to Jvdaism, I
can't think you would have circumcis'd me.' Thus finding
they could not prevail, they went away, telling Mr. Innes
that they would complain to the States of Holland. A Uttle
while after came Deputies from the States to view our
Garrison and Fortification ; then the complaint was made
that Mr. Innes, a Minister of the Church of England, had
taken the liberty there to haptize a Pagan that he had
converted : But their Highnesses only smil'd at the Com-
plaint.

" In the mean while the Chaplain of our Eegiment
hearing of the contest thought to put an end to it, by
saying to the Brigadier, * Sir, I have one favour to beg of
you, that you would please to hinder your Chaplain from
Baptizing the Formosan he has converted, for that privilege
no man can claim but my self, because I am Chaplain to
the Eegiment. But my Captain being present reply'd,
^ You are our Chaplain and the Convert my Soldier, but

300 VARIA.

since (to your shame) yoa never attempted to conyert him,
I see no reason why yon should haptize him.' Upon this
the Chaplain went in a pet to the CoUonel and desir'd him
to imprison me. * Why,' answer'd the CoUonel, ^what evil
has he done?' ' None that I know of,' reply'd the Chaplun,
' hut I would have him so confined that nohody might speak
to him hut my self, for the Brigadier's Chaplain who
oonyerted him intends to haptize him, which would he a
reproach to me.' But my CoUonel was so far from com-
plying with his request, that he told him ^He was an
ignorant young man and knew not what he ask'd ; for says
he, I would much rather Mr. Innes should haptize him
than give offence to a new convert hy such scandalous
practises.'

'' So at last aU ohstades heing remoVd, hy the grace of
God, at ahout seven of the clock in the Evening, in the
French Church, some of our officers and some of the Burg-
hers heing present, the Honourahle Brigadier Lavder was
my God-father and desir'd I might he christen'd hy the
name of George,

" The next day I set ahout writing the Grounds and
reasons of my Conversion to Christianity, the Ohjections
I made, and the convincing solutions I received from Mr.
Innes to hring me with him into England, in order to send
me to the most celebrated University of Oxford ; as soon
as my good Guide made this known, my God-father gave
me a man out of his own Company to serve in my room
and I was discharg'd; the officers and the Consistory
giving me the foUowing Testimonium ; the Original any

GEORGE PSALMANAZAB.

301

Man shall see that will give himself the trouhle to come
and see me : —

NOUS soiusign^s certifions que
George Paalmanazaarj Na-
tif de ville nomm^ la Belle
Jsle, dans la Japony le quel a
aervi dans le Regiment de Bock-
guhall pendant quelque terns,
s'est converti a la Religion
Chr^tienne & en estredevable
aoz soins & aux Instructions
de. Monsieur InneSf Aumdnier da
Regiment de Lauder; Dien
aiant b^ni ses justes desseins, le
dit George a renonc^ tres sin-
c^rement & I'ldolatrie Paienne
pour croire en J^aue Christ nostre
Redemptenr.

Depuis la Conversion 11 a y^u
comme un bon Chretien doit
yivre, & a edifi^ par sa bonne
conduite tout ceux qui en ont
6t6 t^moins.

Nous done uant reconnu en
loi nne droiture de Coeur, &
beaucoup d'autres qualit^s qui
le rendent recommandable, prions
tons les gens de bien de lui
donner les secours dontil pourra; a
avoir besoin dans la Creance que
nous avons quMl sera de toutes les
mani^res un digne Membre de
I'Eglise de J^sus Christ. Fait

W£ whose names are under'
written do certify^ That
George Ptelmanaazaar, a Native
of the Isle called Formosa near
Japan, and who has for some time
been a soldier in the Begiment of
Buchwald, is now converted to
the C^iristian Religion by the
Charitable care and instruction
of Mr. Innes, Chaplahi to the
Begimeni of Lauder, God having '
so blessed his just designs^ tiuU
the said George with all sincerity
hath renounced his Pagan Idol-
atry and believed in Jesus Christ
our Bedeemer,

And that since his Conver-
sion he hath behaved himself
like a good Christian, and that
his example has been edifying
to all who have seen him.

We then observing his In-
tegrity and many other of his good
qualities, think him worthy to be
recommended to all good people,
and we pray them to succour and
assist him in all his necessities,
hoping that he will always be a
true member of the Church of
Christ. Dated at Sluyse the
23rd of May, 1703.

a VEcluse le 23 de Mai, 1703.

Signed and Seal'd by
D*Buckwald, CoUonel, De Van- G. Ijouder, Brigadier, Abdias
deutV, Lieutenant -Collonel, W. ITa^'n^fo, Minister of Sluyse, in
F, Wamsdoff, Major. the name of the Consistory."

The Bishop of London, to whom he was introduced, he-
lieyed all he said, and in pitying zeal extended hoth notice
and protection to the fugitive. Innes, we helieve, was re-

302 VAEIA,

warded. By favour of the Bishop of Oxford, convenient

apartments were prepared at that University^ so that

Psalmanazar might improve himself in his studies. He

drew up in Latin an account of the island of Formosa, a

not very inconsistent and entertaining work, which was

translated, passed through the press, had a rapid sale, and

was quoted without suspicion hy Buffon and other more

popular naturalists.

To keep up the sham, Psalmanazar, as we may now

call him, humt candles in his rooms all night, slept in an
arm-chair, not in his hed, ate roots and herhs, and drank
only water, and was, perhaps, much more Japanese, in the
English idea, than the Japanese themselves. His genius
for imposture, and his immense memory, saved him for a
long time from detection, although the keen scepticism of
Doctors Halley, Mead, and Woodward, and the exceeding
regularity and western style of his grammar, called down
virulent and earnest denunciations of the imposition, and
caused the learned to hattle amongst themselves. In ex-
cuse of the Bishops and others who were deceived, it must
he remembered that Japan was a terra incognita, and
that what was known of it, Psalmanazar had picked up
and embodied in his account. He came back from Oxford
to London with a version of the Church Catechism " in
his native tongue," which was examined, and by the
learned of the time pronounced to be — as it was — a real
language, regular, grammatical, and capable of great elo-
quence and beauty. He placed the order of letters very
differently from our own, but it is significant that his

GEORGE PSALMANAZAB. 303

alphabet fonns a jargon easy to be remembered, and that
the first letter of each name is our actual letter ; thus Am,
Mem, Neu, Taph, Lamdo, Samdo, Yomera, Bagdo,
Pedlo, are A, M, N, T, L, S, V, B, and P. The figures of
these signs, of which there are only twenty, are partly
like Hebrew, and partly formed like Uncial letters, pro-
bably haphazard. He translated the Apostles' Creed, the
Ten Commandments, and the Lord's Prayer, while the Eev.
Mr. Innes must have grinned a satiric approval of the sub-
jects chosen for translation. So strong was Psalmanazar's
memory that he baffled the ordinary methods of detection.
He would translate, vivd voce, a long list of English
words, and when these were marked down, it is said,
without his knowledge, he would affix the same terms to
them three, six, or even twelve months afterwards. A
greater effort of memory has, perhaps, never been heard of.
At the full tide of success he gained both money and noto-
riety ; and one of his contemporaries hints that he led an
extravagant, and, sometimes, even an immoral life ; of
such, however, we have little proof.

It is now known that the Kev. Chaplain of Lauder's
regiment had found him tripping in his vocabulary, and thus
discovered his imposture. Doctors Meade, Halley, and
others did not cease in their attacks ; but it is doubtful
whether or not they would have prevailed. Innes, who
knew all about his imposture, was the one who pulled the
strings of the puppet. This man, who more resembles the
villainous chaplains of Fielding, Hogarth, and Congreve
than an English clergyman, had made Psalmanazar his

304 VARIA.

tool. TaJdng a passage of Cicero's " De Natura Deorum"
he made Greorge translate it into Formosan, and then
after some days read it into Latin. The plan of Psal-
manazar was unripe, and his dismay assured the cleric, who
afterwards made use of him ; hy his introduction he was
made Chaplain General to the Forces in Portugal, a place
wherein he indulged his *' inveterate passion for wine and
women." On his return to England he found Psal-
manazar reformed and the puhUc tired of him. Dr. Innes
— his degree had heen obtained of a Scotch Uniyersity —
then quietly appropriated a work of some merit, called
" A modest Inquiry after Moral Virtue," which one might
fancy a racy satire on such a man, and on the strength of
the book obtained, from the Bishop of London, the liying of
Braintree, in Essex. The real author of the " Inquiry,"
an "Episcopal Clergyman of Scotland," finding out the
fraud, made Dr. Innes disgorge the " copy money" of the
book, and write an apology ; after which, exit Innes frx)m
these memoirs, living quietly at his illgotten living at
Braintree, and, it is to be hoped, reforming.

The Eomanists, as George Psalmanazar was of the
Anglican creed, went virulently against him, but others as
warmly defended him. Advertisements in his &vour
were published in the " London Gazette ;" but in the
meantime the impostor had become no longer one. He
withdrew from life, became penitent upon reading Law's
" Serious Call," and withdrew from society, not so much
discovered and disgraced, as that he gradually dropped out
of the view of the public.

OEORGE PSALMANAZAR. 305

When Psalmanazar at last folly awoke to a foil conscious-
ness of his degraded position, he was only thirty-two years
of age, and he lived upwards of ^ftj years after that ; and,
so far as we can judge, during all that time he was a peni-
tent man. He, at least, never paraded his penitence, hut
supported himself hy writing for the hooksellers ; and as
those gentry did not pay their poor hacks very heavily,
he must have had much difficulty in keeping hody and soul
together. Yet he never seems to have complained. He
worked on periodical publications ft'om seven in the morn-
ing till seven at night, drinking nothing but tea, and a
little weak punch as soon as he left off writing ; was em-
ployed in the dry and laborious undertaking of a universal
history, to execute which he conscientiously fitted himself,
learning Hebrew, translating the Psalms, consulting
various Hbraries, and, above all, saving his employers more
than a hundred pounds in books by reading at Sion Col-
lege ; and, although he did not openly confess his impos-
ture, it is said he often owned it to his friends with sighs
and tears. He had made other pretences, which perhaps
irritated his medical opponents — ^these he also confessed.
He pretended to heal himself of the gout by laudanum, yet
he confesses he " had not the least tendency thereto ;" he
took opium, and said that he had a secret method of strip-
ping it of its pernicious effects by acids, " particularly the
juice of Seville oranges." AU these rogueries he rehearses
in his last will and testament, published with his life after
his death, in which he speaks of himself as '^ a poor, weak,
sinful, and worthless creature, commonly known as George

X

306 VARIA.

Psalmanazar." He only once attempts to excuse himself,
and that weakly : — *' I was, in some measure, unavoid-
ably led into the base and shameful posture of passing my-
self off as a native of Formosa, and a convert to Christianity,
all of which was hatched out of my own brain, without re-
gard to truth and honesty." Finally, he says, ''I desire
to be buried in the common burial-ground, in some obscure
comer of it, in the lowest and cheapest manner, without
coffin; laid in the earth, with nothing to hinder it ftom
covering me all round." Such stand as his last words. As
we read them we cannot but believe him to have been a sin-
cere penitent ; and, whilst we abhor his deception, we must
yet be struck with the originality and boldness of its con-
ception, and the vast acquirements which it called forth,
and the tact, cleverness, and nerve which the deceiver
exhibited.

His will is dated " Ironmonger Row, in the parish of
St. Luke's, Middlesex, April 23, 1762, O. S.," and in the
seventy-third year of the writer's age. It was about this
time that Dr. Johnson knew him and offcen visited him.
" When I asked," says Mrs. Piozzi, " who was the best man
he had ever known. Dr. Johnson replied unexpectedly,
^ Psalmanazar.' He said also, that, ' though a native of
France, he possessed more of the English language than
any one of the other foreigners who had fallen in his way.' "
Piozzi adds that Psalmanazar's '* pious and patient endur-
ance of a tedious illness, ending in an exemplary death,
confirmed the strong impression his merit had made on Dr.
Johnson." " It is so very difficult," said he, " for a sick

OEOBOE PSALMANAZAB. 307

man iMt to be a scoundrel. Oh, set the pillows soft, here is
Mr. Gmmbler'a-coming.. Ah ! let no air in for the world,
Mr. Grumbler will be here presently."

Mrs. Piozzi imagines that Fsalmanazar had studied,
adorned, and disgraced many religions, forgetting that the
Formosan faith was quite a creature of his own brain, just
as much as the religion of the inhabitants of Utopia
was imagined by More, and that of Atlantis by Lord
Bacon.

From " Ejiight Hawkins," as Carlyle has it, we have
another glimpse of Fsalmanazar, as well as a proof of the
exceeding dehcacy of feeling of Dr. Johnson, which, in
spite of his brusquerie to fine ladies and beaux, must have
kept him always a gentleman. He, the doctor, said he
had never seen the close of the life of any one that he
wished so much his own to resemble as that of Fsalmana-
zar, for its purity and devotion. He told many anecdotes of
him, and said that he supposed him, by his accent, to have
been a Gascon ; ^* but that he spoke English with the city
accent, and coarse enough." He for some years used to
smoke his pipe and spend his evenings at a public-house
near Old Street, where many people, and among them Dr.
Johnson, who was admitted to his private friendship, went
to see him. When the Doctor was asked if he had ever con-
tradicted him, he said, ^' I should as soon thought of con-
tradicting a bishop." When he was asked if he had ever
mentioned Formosa before him, the Doctor exhibited that
fine feeling we allude to, and said, '' Sir, I was unwilling, I
was afraid even to mention China."

308 VARTA.

It was on one of Johnson's visits to this interesting old
man that, having adjourned to the puhlic-house duh, the
Doctor took occasion, prohahly speaking of the acquire-
ment of the Hehrew tongue, and much various learning hv
Psalmanazar, to remark, that the '^ human mind had a
necessary tendency to improvement, and that it would fre-
quently anticipate instruction and enable ingenious minds
to acquire knowledge." " ' Sir,' said a master tailor sit-
ting by, * that I deny ; I have had many apprentices, but
never one that could make a coat till I had taken great
pains in teaching him." This objection to his dogmatac
and rather vapourish assertion must have struck Johnson,
for he mentioned it many years afterwards to Sir John
Hawkins.

The will of Psalmanazar is dated, as we have seen,
from Ironmonger Eow, 1752. Ten years afterwards he
ratified it in these terms, being then in expectation of a
speedy release from this world : — " January 1, 1762, being
the day of the Circumcision of our Divine Lord, then,
blessed be God, quite sound in my mind, but weak in my
body, I do ratify and confirm the above particulars of
my last will made." A few days after this he died, in the
eighty-fourth year of his age, and so calmly that all who
witnessed his dissolution were at once edified and awe-
struck. A strange ending; strange, because happily so
much at variance with the beginning of his life.

THE HIGHWAYMAN— REAL AND

IDEAL.

^xS]t2^

BOOKS CONSULTED.

The Life of John JEverett, who kept the Cock Taoen^ m Fleet Street,
and wtu executed alt TybwrUy 20(A Fdruaryy 1729. Written bj
Himself. London, 1730.

Eugene Aram : An Unfinithed Tragedy. Bj Bnlwer. 1849.

The Chronicles of Crime; or, the New Newgate Calendar. By Gam-
den Pelham, of the Liner Temple, Barrister-at-law. London, W.
Tegg, 1851.

Mot^twood: A Somanee, By William Harrison Ainsworth. London,
1857.

Paml Cliffords By Sir £. L. Bnlwer. London, 1862.

THE HIGHWAYMAN— REAL AND
IDEAL.

THING ia at once bo vulgar, so pernicioua,
)r BO outrageous in its results as imagina-
;ion without taste. When combined, the
most delightful worka will be the re-
sult ; when separate, we can only expect falsehood,
exaggeration, and the horribly grotesque, as well as too
frequently that which is simply vicious. To Fancy,
combined with taste, we may trace Milton's " Alle-
gro " and " Penaeroso," Shakespeare's " Tempest," Puck,
Ariel, and a thousand delightful creations — the hest works
of the punter, the purest forms and idealisms of the sculp-
tor. To the same power, uninformed, we owe the ghastly
fancies of the Spanish painters, the grotesque vulgar cari-
catures of the Germans ; we also owe to it the circumstance
that with us murder is treated as one of the Fine Arts,
and that thieves, highwaymen, common burglars, footpads,
and prostitutes are elevated into the heroes and heroines of
romance. We hardly know whether to pity or blame the
authors of such books : where Nature has stayed her hand

312 VAEIA.

and left out due knowledge, we must commiserate their
condition ; if, on the other hand, they were capahle of
hotter, and turned it to the worse simplj on account
of vulgar taste, we hold that they are greatly to he
condemned. We hear of one author who, very rightly,
will not permit his own hooks to enter his own house ; and
if others have any conscience, surely their old age will he
made miserable by remembering that they have used the
precious moments of their youth in inditing not a good
matter, but a contemptible fiction, which the further it
penetrates the more deeply will it corrupt.

This worship of highwaymen, for instance, once all the
rage, is a modem invention, and proceeded from one of
the most conceited and foolish of brains. We shall not
argue upon the matter, because we have only to place the
real and ideal side by side to show that the writer is
as foolish as false. Take honest Henry Fielding from the
shelf, and people will find in his day, at least, the robber
was painted in his true colours as a ruffian of the lowest
type — of too low a calibre for any but the most brutal pas-
sions and the most vulgar selfishness. But take ** Paul
Clifford '* or " Jack Shephard,*' the creations of more
modern brains, in hand ; we shall find that these low
wretches are gifted with the sentimental feelings of the
hero of romance, and often ejaculate sentences worthy of
the cynic philosophy of a Rochefoucauld or a Chesterfield.*

* Thus, for instance, in Bulwer*s romance, which in his mature,
or rather more than mature age, he has determinatelj defended, we
find a highwayman speaking in the high^polite style*

THE HIGHWATMAN. 313

The true hero of Mr. Ainsworth's "Rookwood" is
Kichard Turpiiiy and all the art of the writer is spent upon
descrihing the celebrated ride to York and the equally
wonderful Black Bess. In the Valhalla of highwaymen,
Dick is permitted to share an immortality with this fine
horse, and finds, like Pope's Indian, that —

admitted to that equal sky,
His faithful mare shall bear him company.

Dick, too, has much of the kingly bearing and magna-
nimity of the hero, and when, after saving him by her
fleetness, his mare dies, he weeps like a man of true feeling.

" Dick's eyes were blinded as with rain. His triumph,
though achieved, was forgotten, his own safety disregarded.
He stood weeping and swearing like one beside himself.

" ' And art thou gone, Bess ? ' cried he, in a voice of
agony, lifting up his courser's head, and kissing her lips,
covered with bloodflecked foam. ^ Gone, gone ! and I
have killed the best steed that I ever crossed I And for
what?' added Dick, beating his brow with his clenched
hand— ^ for what ? for what?'"

The illustrious author himself has told us how he felt
when he wrote that celebrated passage. The feelings
of Gibbon at Lausanne, afber having written the last
line of his magnum opus, were small compared with those
of Ainsworth. After informing the public on the impor-
tant point where he "achieved" this — at the Elms at
Kilbum — he continues : — " Well do I remember the
fever into which I was thrown during the time of compo-
sition. My pen literally scoured over the pages. So

314 VARIA.

thoroughly did I identify myself with the flying highway-
man, that once started I found it impossible to halt.
Animated by kindred enthusiasm, I cleared every object
in my path with as much facility as Turpin disposed of
the impediments that beset his flight. In his company,
I mounted the hill-side, dashed through the bustling vil-
lage, swept over the desolate heath, threaded the silent
street, plunged into the eddying stream, and kept an on-
ward course— without pause, without hindrance, without
fatigue. With him I shouted, sang, laughed, exulted, wepU
Nor did I retire to rest till, in imagination, I heard the
bell of York Minster toll forth the knell of poor Black
Bess."

This is fine writing, ^' a'most too fine," as the mufiSn-
loving law stationer of Cook's court, so admirably described
by Dickens, would say. It is to be hoped that all popular
authors are not thrown into such ecstasies, or their land-
ladies would simply wait, like Dick Swiveller's landlady,
outside their doors from five in the morning till half-past
eight to give them warning when they came out. It is a
pity, too, to spoil such fine writing by declaring that Tur-
pin never rode to York, and that Black Bess never existed,
save in the brain of the penny chap-book from which the
great author probably obtained the creation. Let us see
what the really dashing highwayman was. We must, in
deference to space, ask our readers to call on their
memories for the picture of the ideal. We quote from the
" New Newgate Calendar," a trustworthy compilation by a
Barrister of the Inner Temple, for that of the real. high-
wayman.

THE HIGHWATMAN. 315

Turpin, says this genUeman, ''was a petty pilferer, a
heartless plunderer, a bratal morderer ;" he was the son
of an Essex farmer, and early distinguished himself for the
brutality of his disposition. Apprenticed to a butcher, he
set up in that trade, and his earHest known essays in dis-
honesty were those of stealing his neighbours' cattle, cut-
ting them up, and thus underselling his rivals. The
servants of Mr. Giles,, of Plaistow, having by watching
discovered him stealing two oxen, obtained a warrant for
him ; but his wife giving him notice, he escaped from the
back door while the officers were detained at his front.
His wife then frimished him with money, and he hid in the
hundreds of Essex, joining gangs of poachers and smug-
glers, and often brutally illtrealing his faithfrd wife. His
brave companions — the Zoroaster, Jerry Juniper, and
other ruffiers, with the Knight of Malta ('' to his side was
girt a long and doughty sword, which he termed, in knightly
phrase, Excalibur," <fec.) — ^were a set of poor cowardly
rogues whose bold plan was for one of them to knock at
the doors of lone houses, ask for charity, and then the whole
troop, rushing in, would rob and abuse the helpless in-
mates. Old men and women were Turpin's especial vic-
tims. One old woman at Loughton "he threatened to set
on the fire if she did not make immediate discovery (of her
gold). She refused to give the desired information, on
which the villain actually placed her on the fire, where he
held her till the tormenting flames compelled her to dis-
cover her hidden treasure.*' This was above four hundred
pounds. Murder, arson, and rape were frequently com-
mitted by this gang ; and, having made the county too hot

816 VABIA.

for him, Turpin stole a horse, and took to the road. Here
he met with Tom King, with whom he robhed in concert^
and of whom he is represented in romance as the £ast
friend, whilst King is the jfldus Achates of the ^neas of
the road. But we cannot too ofton refute the foolish old
saw of there being honour amongst thieves. King being
arrested, and crying out for help, Turpin deliberately shot
his friend, so that he should not " peach " (give informa-
tion against him). '' Dick," cried King, thinking that the
shot was meant for the officer, " you have killed me."
Nevertheless, he lived for a week, and long enough to give
information of his friend's hiding-place at Hackney-Marsh.
Turpin then, to use the euphuism of this historian, *' re-
moved into Yorkshire," where he supported himself by a
cunning mixture of horse stealing and horse dealing.
Taken at last under his assumed name of John Palmer,
found out by a returned letter, of which he had not paid the
postage, he was tried, condemned, and executed. Finely as
they dress this hero on the stage, he was so shabbily dressed
— ^no sticking-plaster boots, silver-hilted swords, gold-laced
hats, or velvet coats — ^that he bought " a new pair of
pumps and a fustian frock to wear at the time of his death."
He lefr a ring and some other articles to a '^ married
woman," not his wife, with whom he had been cohabiting,
trembled and turned white when he came to the ladder,
stamped his foot with some bravado, mounted the ladder,
and there " conversed with the executioner for half an hour
before he threw himself off."

Now fitted the halter, now traversed the cart.
And often took leave, bat seemed loath to depart.

THE HIQHWATMAN. 317

We find we have made the trifling omission of a murder
and a round dozen of brutalities in this short sketch, but
such trifles are of little moment in the life of a hero. ^^ It
is needless to add that the story of the ride to York,"
writes the barrister, with some contempt, '^and of the
wondrous deeds of the highwayman's steed. Black Bess,
are like many other tales of this fellow (!), the fabrications
of some poetical brain."

That Turpin was but the ordinary highwayman, a vulgar
fellow, who lived in constant dread of being taken by the
thief-catcher, and who generally went to the gallows be-
wailing his hard fate, and repenting of " burnt brandy and
bad women," as the &cetious Thomas Brown puts it, will
be next shown by our extracts from the life of Mr. John
Everett, wherein we see, to quote Thackeray's "Irish
Sketch Book," speaking of Freeny, a notorious Irish foot-
pad, "the exceeding inconvenience as well as hazard of
the heroic highwayman's Ufe, which a certain Ainsworth,
in company with a certain Cruikshank, have (has) repre-
sented as so poetic and brilliant, so prodigal of delightful
adventure^ so adorned with champagne, gold lace, and
brocade."

The gold lace and brocade, we may here remark, fade
away altogether in the criminal trials, where copper-headed
whips, tarnished silvered lace, and brass-hilted hangers
purchased at Monmouth Street, adorn the thieves not much
longer than a theatrical suit is worn by a stage highway-
man. Even these poor suits, which rendered the vulgar
faces and figures of the thieves all the more hideous, were

318 VARIA.

loon exchaoged for ihe old wig worth " about twopence,"
the rug coat or wrap-raecal, the old shoes and hajhand
stockings, in which thej perpetrated their robberies. Mr.
Everett was a soldier, he had *^ listed in the Foot-Gnards
of mj Lord Albemarle's company, as a precaution against
misfortune." Wliilst there, he met with a companion,
Richard Bird, and thej agreed to desert and take to the
road. One of their many adventures was to '^ stop a
coach in the evening on Hounslow heath, in which,
amongst other passengers, wei'e two precise but courageous
Quakers, who had the assurance to call us sons of violence,
and, refusing to comply with our reasonable demands^
jumped out of the coach to give battle, whereon we began
a sharp engagement, and showed them that the arm of
flesh was too strong for the spirit, which seemed to
move very powerfully within them. After a sharp contest

they submitted As they were stout fellows,

and men every inch of them, we scorned to abuse them,
but contented ourselves with rifling them of the mammon
of unrighteousness which they had about them, which
amounted to thirty or forty shillings, and their watehes.
There was a circumstance in this affair which created a
little diversion. The precisians for the most part, though
they are plain in their dress, wear the best of commodities,
and though a smart toupee is an abomination, yet a bob or
a natural of six or seven guineas' price is the modest cover-
ing allowed by the saints. One of the prigs was well
furnished in this particular ; and flattering myself it would
become me, I resolved to make it lawful plunder. Without
further ceremony than alleging that exchange was no rob-

THE HIQEWATMAN. 319

berj, / napped his poU and dressed him in masquerade
with an old black tie which I had purchased the day before
of an antiquated Chelsea pensioner for half-a-crown. The
other company, though in the doleful dumps for the loss of
the coriander seed, could not forbear grinning at the
metamorphosis ; for our Quaker looked more like a deyil
than a saint."

After this, and " tipping " the coachman and guard (too
often confederates) a " twelver to drink their healths," the
highwaymen brushed off. Everett, after several adventures,
was apprehended, and remained three years in prison.
He was even promoted, to be turnkey, but he left this pro-
fession to keep a thieves' alehouse, and to make up his
brewer's bill again took to the road, purchasing " a brace
of pistols, a hanger, a red rug coat, and a hat with a cock
and a copper edging." Although he had '^a nag that
would fly like a hare and leap Uke a greyhound," he was
taken at his first job, robbing a chariot with two ladies in
it, — " the husband and miss's sweetheart," who were be-
hind, pursuing him. He was condemned and hung, and
confesses, naively enough, all his guilt, especially one
^* wilful perjuration,'^

** ' I had,' says this gallant soldier, * for some time en-
tertained implacable hatred against one Picket, a cooper,
and to satiate my revenge, though the poor man was
entirely innocent of the fact laid to his charge, I swore it
upon him, and appeared on evidence against him at the
Old Bailey, iFor which wicked crime I hope God will forgive
me for thirsting after innocent blood.' "

Such an incident as this swearing away a man's life is

320 VAEIA.

Teiy heroic, aod we oommend it to the novelist who can
dish it np in a most romantic way ; as has heen done with
other crimes. Even his sworn fiiend is hetrajed hj Everett.
When taken up, he thinks it '* hotter to hang twenty than
get squeezed myself; so after some relactancy, I im-
peached my fellow man, Kichard Bird. I was brought
safe to Chelmsford gaol, where I appeared as evidence
against my fellow man. He was capitaUy convicted, and
suffered accordingly."

The poor cowardly shifts, the meanness, the dirt and
misery of these poor wretches are seen. very well in the
original Old Bailey Sessions papers. In proving the chain
of life, how one animal depends on another, nay, often
feeds on it, a professor the other day quoted Dr. Swift's
well-known verse ; —

Big fleas have little fleas

Upon tbeir backs to bite 'em ;
And little fleas have still less fleas,

And so cut injinitum.

The wretched highwayman had around him more wretched
accomplices — horrible women, who oft«n betrayed him, —
Jews, informers, publicans, and a whole tribe of harpies.
He himself was often only the creature of the thief-taker,
who, for mere blood-money, would put him up to a
robbery, inform against him, and hang him in due course.
This was well understood by Jonathan Wild's gang, and
constantly peeps out in the old trials.

We have filled so much space in stripping the lace off

THE HIGHWAYMAN. 321

the lugliway, that we have little to say about the philoso-
phic robber or murderer of Sir E. L. Bulwer Lytton. A
more monstrous creation never proceeded from any brain.
Horace's maxim is outraged. A man commits a murder
— a low, brutal, cowardly murder — and Sir Edward thus
defended it : — " The burning desires I have known — ^the
resplendent visions I have mused — the sublime aspirings
that have lifted me so often from sense and clay : these tell
me, that whether for good or ill, I am a thing of immor-
tality, the creature of a God .... [After this
profanity follows the excuse]. I have destroyed a man
noxious to the world ! with the wealth by which he had
afflicted society I have been the means of blessing many."

Can the folly and wickedness of perverted imagination
go further ? Well may one of our satirists say, parodying
the baronet's style: — "I would not have this doctrine
vulgarly promulgated, for its general practice might chance
to do harm. Think what would be the world's condition,
were men without any Yearning after the Ideal to attempt
to Re-organize Society, to re-distribute Property, and to
Avenge Wrong."

Quitting satire, and remarking that every boy, in some
sort or another, does truly worship the heroic, can we ima-
gine what amount of harm must have been done by placing
before youth the robber and the murderer as heroes, and
not only palliating these crimes, but representing them as
virtues ? To this base literature for how many Robsons
and Redpaths is society indebted ? Nor have the faults
of taste of the higher or richer novelists stayed with them-

322 VAS.IA.

selves. Their imitators are, indeed, numerous. From
the time when it was first published until now there have
been fifteen variations of "Jack Sheppard;" indeed, id
one form or another, that book is perpetnallj reprodsced.
Hundreds of "Knights of the Road" and "Blueskiss"
have also appeared, and will appear. In vain the police
attest day after day that youflifiil thieves are arrested
with bundles of such literature in their boxes or pockets.
The cheap press still teems with the nauseous stuff. We
desire to recall this the more forcibly, because by far the
cleverest sinner in this way, Bulwer, now by a grateful
ministry made Lord Lytton, declares that, from " real or
affected ignorance of the morality of fiction, a few critics
r^terate the charge of selecting heroes from Newgate or
investing murderers with interest " against him, and de-
fends himself in a lofty way, as if he were right and the

THE SPIRIT WORLD AND ITS

9

LITERATURE.

BOOKS CONSULTED.

Apparitions^ a New Theory, By Newton Crosland, second edition,
reviaed and enlarged. London : Effingham Wilson. 1856.

Footfalls on the Boundary of Another World, with narrative illustra-
tions bj Robert Dale Owen, formerly Member of Congress and
American Minister to Naples. London : TrQbner and Co. 1860.

Outlines of Ten Tears* Investigations into the Phenomena of Modem
Spiritualism, By Thomas P. Barkas. London: F. Pitman.
1862.

The Life of Wesley and the Rise and Progress of Methodism, By
Bobert Southey, Esq., LL.D. A new edition, with notes, by
Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Edited by the Rev. C. Cuthbert
Southey, M.A. London, 1864.

THE SPIRIT WORLD AND ITS

LITERATURE.'

N KOBKY, a pupil of the astrODOmer
it, b one whose doubt and recantation
d be &mou8. He doubted, in tbe face

ery proof, that the planet Jupiter had

four eatellites. " The earth," said Martin, " has only one ;
why should Jupiter have four ? I never will concede his
four phmets to that Italian from Fadua." So also the
cardinals in full conclave vrould not concede to Galileo the
movemeDt of the earth ; and as they were in the strongest
place, they tore up his treatises, made him swallow them
and recant. He did bo, but again asserted; a second
time he had to swallow his theses and recant : but, as the
old man rose, the celebrated words burst forth, " E phi si
muove!" He was right, but for being right he had

* Amongit modern books which will eventually become very rare,
tbe litentnre of the Spirit World it ao carioua that 1 have thought
it worth while to iadode thia article. It is to 1m hoped the reader
wiU thinic with me.

326 VAEIA.

thenceforward to spend his life in prison. The religious
oondaye never dreamt of conceding that they might have
heen mistaken, and in this case they were inferior to Martin
Korky, who very sincerely repented. " I have taken him
again into favour/* wrote Kepler to Galileo, " upon this
express condition, to which he haa agreed, that I am to
show him Jupiter's satellites, and he is to see them, and
own that they are there."

Presuming every kind of scepticism were as easily laid
as that of Martin, it would not do much harm. But Truth,
like the Syhil's hooks, often grows smaller and smaller,
whilst still the same price is demanded. God only can
know the results of a determined and stupid ignorance
which refuses to he taught. The effect of such does not
end in only one generation, hut, like a circle in the water,
which never ceases to enlarge itself, so ignorance and error
spread, with this difference — ^hy wide spreading the circle
is hrought to nothing, while the error increases. Great,
however, as is the evil of incredulity, on the other hand
the evils of credulity are quite as had. K we have on one
side Scylla, we have on the other Oharyhdis. We may he
in the frying-pan in one ; in the other we are surely in
the fire. What are we to helieve and what to reject ? these
are the questions ; for every age deals in the marvellous,
every person is naturally greedy of novelty. The modern
world is not unlike that of Athens in the time of the
Apostles : people go ahout seeking what they may wonder
at. It is so pleasant to indulge Wonder! Its organ,
phrenologists tell us, is close to that of Hope, and the one

THE SPIRIT WORLD. 327

excites the other. If the faculty be pleasant, we cannot
be surprised at its abuse. We can all talk learnedly about
the unknown. Dr. Dash and the Beverend Blank can grow
perfectly eloquent upon the glories of the world to come.
It does not need the genius of Bunyan, who knew, by the
way, when to drop the curtain, to expatiate on the wonders
of the shining city ! That which we are told eye hath not
seen, becomes as familiar to the oily tongue of the eloquent
preacher as Begent Street, and as well trodden as White-
chapel ; nor can we deny his statements. Wisdom holds
her tongue, but fools rush in to describe. The voluble Miss
Smith hurries off into ecstasies. ''But might we not
suppose, dear doctor?" cried one of the class to Dr.
Johnson. '' Madam," said the honest old thinker, '' we may
suppose everything, but we know nothing." Taken in this
light, we may honestly guard ourselves with a little in-
credulity, and say with the Poet Laureate that

There lives more faith in honest donbt,
Believe me, than in half the creeds ;

especially if half, or more than half the creeds are wrong ;
for we must remember creeds arise and die out as well as
other mundane matters. The creeds of some of our early
Christian sects have gone as utterly as the worship of Isis,
and popular religious delusions have numbered their thou-
sands and hundreds of thousands of adherents, and now are
only known from the answers which learned schoolmen
thought fit to give to their errors. Beligious error is
almost immortal; its dissolution before perfect light and

328 VARIA.

knowledge will synchronize with that of the world ; but for
that very reason we should guard against it as much as we
can ; and, if we are ready to crush a budding error, we
should be just as ready to help to raise a struggling truth.

Some such remembrances as these are necessary before
we enter into the consideration of our subject. It is
therefore incumbent upon us to treat this matter firmly,
but as wisely as we can, seeing that there are but yerj
few indeed who have not read of the modem assertions,
that disembodied spirits have the power of conversing with
human beings, that they can make noises, play upon
instruments, break flowers and carry them about the
room, carry large tables to a great height, lift (as in
the case with Mr. Home) a heavy man up in his chair, so
that he shall float in the air about the ceiling, pinch peo-
ple's legs, squeeze their hands, touch their lips, and ex-
hibit their own forms (partiaUy) as to white and dark
hands, and (as it is asserted was done at the Tuileries)
lift the warm and delicate hand of a disembodied spirit (?)
to the lips of an Emperor for him to kiss.

These are very startling facts to assert in the nine-
teenth century, that boasted epoch of all knowledge. The
assertions little more than two hundred years ago would
have procured one's condemnation to a death by fire. Fifty
years ago the asserter would, had he property, have been
consigned to a mad-house. Twenty years ago he would
have been laughed at as a dupe, or avoided as a charlatan ;
to-day he is run after, listened to, applauded^ and gains
disciples. Amongst a people descendants of our own,

THE 8PIEIT WORLD. 329

but more acutely nervous, the Spiritualists, as thej call
themselyes, number nearly half a million ; and it is said
that solemn and keen merchants keep a medium for the
purpose of consulting him or her as to their success in
business during the day. Certainly the Faith counts upon
twenty periodicals in that free land, upon several in our
own, and can number amidst its triumphs the production
of such a work as the one second on our list, written
by a man high in office, — an ambassador, in fact, of a
first-rate power. Amongst its most prominent defenders
and apostles are men and women of genius — artists,
preachers, Hterary men, (that is, those of the trade of
letters,) popular physicians, doctors, empirics, pub-
lishers, and lawyers, comic writers, actors, and dissenting
ministers. This is strange — certainly stranger than fic-
tion. Whatever the cause may have been, the effect is
remarkable.

Now there are three points upon which we can stand.
Either all these disciples are liars, and their productions
lies and collusions ; or, secondly, they are all deceived
themselves, but honest victims who deceive others; or,
thirdly, the narrations are true, and are worthy of our
deep and grave consideration ; and, as it appears to us,
** Footfalls on the Boundary of another World," one of the
most important productions of the body, is written to prove
this last.

The way in which Mr. Eobert Dale Owen, who, it
must be remembered, is the son of our old friend of ec-
centric memory, Bobert Owen, proceeds to establish the

330 VAEIA.

tnith of spiritual interference in the matters of this world,
is very straightforward and very simple. He asserts^ and
easily proves his assertion , that we do not know all things ;
that there are more things in Heaven and earth than are
dreamt of in our philosophy, and that to declare that
certain occurrences do not take place because we under-
stand them not, is narrow and foolish. It is to place the
extent of the world at the horizon of our vision. But, as
we know there are lands and places beyond our vision, so
we know there are matters which surpass our knowledge
and our understanding. Our pleader next deprecates the
expression of a judgment before we have thought on the
matter ; for that is simply prejudgment or prejudice. We
are not to contradict an assertion because it is strange,
but rather, as a stranger, give it welcome. Exposure of
an error must come aflber investigation, never before it.
We are told in the Proverbs that " He that answereth a
matter before he heareth it, it is folly and shame unto him."
To deny actual phenomena is not the proper mode to
win over a misled or diseased mind. Nothing can be
more true than this. Had we always thus proceeded, we
should have far advanced in philosophic inquiry ; but we
and Mr. Dale Owen must remember that there are many
uselesa semi-philosophic assertions which we can hardly
disprove, although we feel that we know that they are false
and useless. Many of the opponents of Paracelsus knew
that his assertion that he had a familiar spirit in the
pommel of his sword was perfectly untrue ; but, as they
had never seen the sword, they could not disprove it.

THE SPIRIT WORLD. 331

When Lord Cochrane brought Lord Gambier to a court-
martial, prejudice, ignorance, and incompetence triumphed
over valour and knowledge, because the latter could not
disprove assertions of the former, and Lord Cochrane lost
his case. So also Admiral Byng was shot, while the
Crimean blunders were left unpunished.

The deduction from Mr. Owen's candid inquiries is
that we should be seekers rather than judges, and that we
should accept that which we cannot disprove; and this
being conceded, he proves abundantly and easily that
spirits and "ultra-mundane," or other- world interferences,
have been talked of from the beginning ; that every age
furnishes many well-authenticated narratives of these ap-

ances, but constantly affirms them; that history, sacred
and profane, gives instances of them, such as the ap-
pearance of Samuel to Saul, CsBsar's wife's (Calphumia's)
dream, and the visit of Caesar's ghost or wraith to Brutus ;
and that, as we cannot overthrow the testimony of such a
cloud of witnesses, we are bound in honour to accept it as
we would accept that of others in a court of law, and
therefore believe in spiritual interference. We presume
that these arguments have gained for Mr. Owen's book
the praise of some contemporary critics, when they say
that Mr. Owen's reasons are acute and logical, which we
do not deny, that being certainly logical enough, only
they simply prove what we already know as surely as that
two and two make four. What other churches may say we
know not, but every Christian community believes in

332 VABIA.

spiritual interferences. Our Church and that of Kome
constantly affirm it ; the New Testament owes its vitality
to the assertion. We belieye in the orders of angels ; we
agree that there are innumerable devils; we talk of the
host of Heaven, and of the multitude of the damned ; we
pray against the machinations of the devil or man, and
that " as Thy Holy angels do Thee service in Heaven, so
they may succour and aid us here on earth." To an edu-
cated Christian the possibility of spiritual interference,
therefore, is as weU known and recognised as the ex-
istence of a world of spirits. Mr. Owen is consequently
doing a perfectly unnecessary work as regards an English
audience when he proves over again a spiritual existence ;
so far we are with him. We agree entirely as to his pre-
mises, but we must await his conclusions before we give
him our judgment.

After having set forth his argument, our spiritualist pro-
duces his proofs ; and these are the gist of the book. They
are perhaps the best collection of well-authenticated ghost
stories ever written. There is not one, perhaps, which is
entirely new, but every single one is entrancing in its
interest, and the book deserves to be read, if only for its
central portion. There is that narrative of the Wesley
ghost, a spirit-rapping which pursued John Wesley's
father for years at Epworth rectory, which knocked as .
loudly in the kitchen **as a huge piece of coal being
broken to pieces," which pushed against Wesley's Neither,
and which was heard over and over again by dozens of
witnesses, and which used to be called " Old Jeffrey " by

THE SPIRIT WORLD, 333

one of the little girls ; nay, which would play with her,
running and knocking from corner to corner, and which
always knocked loudest when the good clergyman's family
prayed for the king; the account of this is very suc-
cinctly given, and abridged from Doctor Adam Clarke's
memoirs of the Wesley family, where it covers forty-six
pages. Then there is the story of the Wynyard ghost, ■
that of Neville Norman's murder, and the dream at sea,
Count Felkesheim's story of the " Iron Stove," that of
Goethe's grandfather, of Mrs. Hewitt's dream, and of a
very curious dream of the widow of Greneral Torrens ante-
cedent to the Indian mutiny. These, as one will see, are
not only old stories — ^not those of " the oldest aunt telling
the saddest tale " — ^but of well-authenticated (and many
modem) ghost narratives, and as such they deserve at-
tention.

While we are quite ready to concede the possibility of
spiritual interference in the matters of this world, and have
shown this belief to be no new thing, which scarcely needed
the heavy lumbering of logical reasoning to prove it, we
must at once deny our credence in the common spirits of
the day, spirits which appear for no end, or merely to excite
vulgar curiosity or village scandal. We cannot admit that
the spirit of Shakespeare can be summoned at will to rap
out nonsense or verses on the drawing-room table of a
grocer at Clapham, nor that the spirit of Washington will
be made to utter platitudes about liberty in the back room
of a store in New York. If spirits are summoned from
the vasty deep, they must come for more than that. We

334 VABIA,

must remember tliat the recognised spiritual appearances
were all for some evident purpose which they accomplished
— ^that they all took place at some crisis in the world's
history. The appearance of the apparition to Saul, the
waking up of the dead at Jerusalem at the crucifixion,
that solemn warning which Brutus had — ^all have left their
marks on the world's history. The few other authenticated
appearances throughout past ages have only been sufficient
to keep alive the faith in the immortality of the soul^ and
Christians of every denomination have been quite justified
in believing that since the times of the Apostles spiritual
interference in worldly matters has ceased. Indeed the
Founder of Christianity himself gave the death-blow to
ghostly revelation. Nothing can be more plain than his
declaration of the inutility of such; and, as usual, the
teachings of the highest intelligence will be found coni^nant
with common reason, common experience, and common
sense. In the parable of Dives and Lazarus, the rich man
in torments is represented still clothed in his fancied supe-
riority, but touched with pity for his own kin, begging
Abraham to send Lazarus to warn his brethren. But the
spiritual re-appearance on earth of the beggar at the rich
man's beck and call is strictly forbidden.

It is useless to warn people by spiritual interference.
" They have Moses and the prophets ; if they hear not
ihem, neither will they be persuaded though one rose from
the dead.'^ We cannot doubt this Divine dogma. The
dead, if commonly and often appearing, would and could
have no power over us ; and if appearing to one, why not

THE SPIRIT WOBLB. 335

to another ? Why should not each have a special revela-
tion ? Some of our north country families have an especial
spirit, some of the Irish their own hanshee. Why should
not each family, rich and poor, keep its own ghost ? This
would he the common deduction. To the Spiritualists it
is the reductio ad ahsurdum ; and the ghosts, too, might
have a word in it. They might say with Bulwer, in The
CaxUmSy " The kingdom of the dead is wide — why should
the ghosts jostle us ? " Why, indeed ? Yet they have
jostled us, and are continually doing so in print, and have
"jostled" the peace of many a private family away, and
as many hundreds into madness. The commencement of
this is worth inquiry; the time of it is remarkahle. It
is nothing less than in the very centre of the nineteenth
century, an era of boasted civilisation and progress.. The
spirits first rapped in 1848, about the same time when
Odillon Barrot, Ledru BoUin, and Louis Blanc were rap-
ping down the throne of Louis Philippe, and three years
before the century, culminating in the glory of the Exhibi-
tion of 1851, became over-glorious of its own progress and
advancement. That Exhibition, like the numbering of
the people, made us conscious of our own strength. We
took stock of what we knew, and fancied that we knew
everything. We had machines of all kinds, from the
steam hammer to the cradle-rocking machine, and the
sewing apparatus to the expanding man. It was a grand
apotheosis of human intellect; but in the midst of our
natural congratulations and bragging, those who did not
believe in progress could point to great foUy^ and show us

336 VABIA.

that, much as we had done, the weakness of superstition
had not yet died out of the mind of man ; and that, amidst
believing Christians and philosophic materialists, whilst
Stephenson was bridging space, and Faraday resolving the
elements, there were those who were as ready to believe in
a senseless Fetishism — if we may so term it — as any wooUy-
headed negro in St. Kitts.

Acting on the already existing belief in spiritualism, or
duped by some designing persons, a poor family in an
obscure village in America was the first to promote the
new schism, which has since distracted thousands. A small
farmer, Mr. John D. Fox, resided in a wooden dwelling
not far from Newark, in the county of Wayne, State of
New York. The house is " a storey and a half high,"
whatever that may be. Mr. Fox was married, and had a
family ; his wife and wife's sister were dreamers, and had
visions. Soon after they had taken the house in January
1848, they heard rappings, like the hammering of a shoe-
maker; sometimes the door was shut with a slam, or a
hand was laid upon the persons of people, and chairs were
moved. Altogether the members of this excitable family
were not very pleasant people to live with. The children
cried out that a dog was lying on them, but it was gone
before the mother could see it. . Mr. Fox rose every night,
but could not find out the ghost ; and so the matter con-
tinued for about four months, when Kate Fox, " a lively
child," cried out as she snapped her fingers, " Here old
Splitfoot, do as I do ! " The knocking instantly responded.
That was the very commencement, says Mr. Owen,

'S

. THE SPIRIT WORLD. 337

solemnly ; who can tell where the end will be ? Where,
indeed, of this flood of nonsense ? The lively child and the
family also hit upon the method of the alphabet, and the
ghost spelt out its name, and the letters inferred, or the
Foxes did for them, that the spirit's name was Charles B.
Hosma, that he (or it) was a pedler, who had been murdered
by Mr. Bell, a former occupant, and buried in the cellar.

This was pleasant for Mr. Bell; and a servant girl
came forward and confirmed the statement that a pedler
called, but that she had been sent out of the way for the
night. The cellar was dug up, but nothing was found but
about three bones, one of a skull, two from the hands ;
but these might have been bones found, as they are
everywhere, on the- banks of a river. Mr. Bell came
forward with an attestation of his character, signed by
forty people, nearly all in Hydesville, that he was in-
capable of such a crime, and so nothing came of it.
Himdreds of people surrounded the house, as they did the
cellar of the Cock Lane ghost, but the spirit would not
rap till nearly dark. Books were published about it ; the
Foxes may be said to have made their fortunes, and were
engaged as media, or, as they call them, " mediums," that
is, as professional rappers. Mr. Bell left the country with
his character in his pocket, and the house has been taken
by a farm-labourer, who never hears the raps, lives peace-
ably, and " does not believe in spooks " (spirits). Such
was the lame and impotent conclusion of a Heavenly, or at
least spiritual interference. But the news of course spread,,
and was taken up by hundreds of believers.

338 VAEIA.

It is a pleasant sensation to believe in something new.
Hundreds have believed in Joanna Southcott, Thorn of
Canterbury^ and Joe Smith. These prophets have had
their martyrs and their victims ; the new dogma of spiritual
interferences for the slightest purposes, or for no purposes
at all^ was to have its martyrs also. The first result of the
Fox spirits was, that a young pedler, with a waggon and
two horses, known to be possessed of several hundred
dollars, disappeared. Public opinion at once said he had
been murdered. An enthusiastic spiritualist had the sur-
mise confirmed by raps. Through the same medium the
credulous inquirer was told where the body lay in the
canal. Several spots were dragged, but to no purpose.
The dupe's wife was required to go to the same spot,
where she nearly lost her life.; but some months after the
alleged victim reappeared. He had departed secretly to
Canada, to avoid his creditors, and by cheating them^ had
made capital out of the new belief. It does great credit
to Mr. Owen to state that he frequently in his book brings
forward these matters against the creed, as well as instances
in its favour.

The spirits were soon everywhere rampant, and people
of a nervous and excitable temperament, those who could
be easily acted upon by mesmerism, and put into a state
of coma or mesmeric sleep, were found to be the media.
The most enthusiastic believers in them have never denied
that the spirits told an enormous number of lies. They
also exhibited an alarming state of ignorance. Shakespeare
writes nonsense verses when in the spirit. Bacon makes

THE SPIRIT WORLD. 339

monstrous mistakes ; Plato talks the veriest commonplaces,
and Cicero is not eloquent. Had any great man departed,
his spirit was at once summoned. Fathers called up through
these media the spirits of their lost children^ mothers con-
versed by rapping with their daughters, children with their
parents, husbands with their wives. Did anything happen
to be revealed or guessed at, at all consonant with truth, a
great fuss was made, and the fact published far and wide ;
was nothing evolved or anything mistaken, and falsehoods
alleged, it was said that the *' spirits " were not in a good
humour, or that they purposely deceived.

Mr. Owen quotes some pertinent lines, which show us
how far they were to be credited. They are in the form
of a remonstrance with the spirits : —

If in your new estate you cannot rest,
Bat must return, oh ! grant us this request ;
Come with a noble and celestial air,
And prove your titles to the names you bear ;
Give some clear token of your heavenly birth ;
Write as good English as you wrote on earth ;
And, what were once superfluous to advise,
Don't tell, I beg you, such egregious lies.

But, in spite of lies and mistakes, the number of disciples
every day grew larger, and the printing press was called
in to expand the doctrine. It must be said, greatly to the
honour of the press and the pulpit, that both have written
and preached against the folly ; but there were many not
proof against the tickling vanity of wishing to believe.
And many disappointed and second-rate writers and
preachers went over to the camp of Eappers. In England;

340 VARIA.

as well as the rest of the world, they made head-waj.
Tables were turned, keys and Bibles flew about the room ;
and, if testimony is of any value, men were lifted up and
carried to the ceiling, spirit hands plucked flowers, com-
posed tunes, and played them ; painted pictures of Heaven's
flowers, read books through their covers, and two years
after Sir John Franklin's death, a clairvoyant medium
described him as alive and well, but very sad, sitting with
his companions on the ice I We now know how true that
was.

To sum up all, we may add that now spirit-rapping
seems as lively as ever. In our own circle of friends we
number many believers, but they one and all add that tiiey
do not see any use in the creed. The raps are supra-mun-
dane, and therefore not likely to be put to worldly use.
There are many media in London, but they are generally
illiterate, and will not perform-— or the spirits will not — ^till
after dusk ! They live on the credulity of the incredulous ;
for it must be added that the majority of educated spirit-
ualists were religious sceptics before they grasped at this
shadow. The unbelievers in the matter seem divided as
to the character of these raps, some holding that they are
the work of the devil, others that they are all a sham and
a delusion. The plain, straightforward Christian is pre-
pared and forearmed in either case. He cannot beUeve
that the souls of the departed can be called up to entertain
a party of ladies in a drawing-room, or of curious nobodies
in a public-house tap-room, nor that a divinely-visited
woman, like Mrs. Marshal, would be permitted to let out

THE SPIRIT WORLD. 341

her inspiration for ten shillings a night, and while deliver-
ing the yery oracles of Heaven, would speak had English.
Mr. Barkas, whose hook is the most philosophical, and
whose enquiries seem to have heen the most regular and
properly disciplined of those of any one spiritual writer,
holds that the phenomena result from a very low form of
diaholism. This is conceding part of their claim, and this
concession we are unwilling to make. If it he necessary
that spirits should manifest themselves, we can wait till
the matter culminates, and helieve it possible when it does
do so. Till then we can rest upon our own creed, firmly
convinced that in this doctrine of playing with a future
state there is but one step from the sublime to the wicked
and ridiculous, and that the Bappers have taken it ; for
very surely, if we may jtidge of immortality from the
manifestations made public, our souls must revolt thereat,
since, if they be true, death is degradation.

THE END.

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" We never saw such a book published at such a price." — Examiner.

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HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY

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INDIA, AMERICA, AND THE COIiONIES.

HISTORY of the Discovery and Exploration of
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The Colony of Victoria : its History, Commerce, and Gold
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Canada and its Besources. Two Prize Essays, by Hogan and
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List of Publications. 1 1

SCIENCE AND DISCOVERY.

DICTIONARY of Photography, on the Basis of
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Captain Maury enlists our attention^ or charms us with ervlanations and
theories^ replete with originaUty and genius. His is indeed a nauticcU
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that beats upon our shores; and it cannot fail to awaken in both sailors
and landsmen a craving to know more intimately the secrets of that won'
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rica is incalculable." — Blackwood's Magazine.

The Structure of Animal Life. By Louis Agassiz. With 46
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The Eedge Anchor ; or, Toung Sailor's Assistant, by William
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Archaiaj or, Studies of the Cosmogony and Natural History of
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Ichnographs, from the Sandstone of the Connecticut River,
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The Eecent Progress of Astronomy, by Elias Loomis, LL.D.
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TRADE, AGRICUIiTURE, DOMESTIC

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The Bubbles of Finance : the Revelations of a City Man. Fcap.
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THEOLOGY.

HE VICARIOUS SACRIFICE; grounded on Prin-

ciples of Universal Obligation. By Horace Bushnell, D.D.,
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price 7s. 6d.

" An important contribution to theological literature^ whether we regard
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Christ and His Salvation. 6s.
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List of Publications, 13

The Light of the World : a most True Relation of a Filgrimess
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to be read, understood, and considered hj all who desire to be saved.
Reprinted from the edition of 1696. Beantifullj printed bj Clay on
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The Mission of Great Sufiferings. By Elibu Burritt. Crown Syo.

Faith's Work Perfected. The Rise and Progress of the Orphan
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Christian Believing and Living. By F. D. Huntington, D.D.-
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Life and Experience of Madame de la Mothe Guyon. By Pro-
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LAIV AND JURISPRUDENCB.

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