Part 17

One of the amusements of 1718 was the juggling exhibition of a fire-eater, whose name was De Hightrehight, a native of the valley of Annivi in the Alps. This tremendous person ate burning coals, chewed flaming brimstone and _swallowed_ it, licked a red-hot poker, placed a red-hot heater on his tongue, kindled coals on his tongue, suffered them to be blown, and broiled meat on them, ate melted pitch, brimstone, bees-wax, sealing-wax, and rosin, with a spoon; and, to complete the business, he performed all these impossibilities five times _per diem_, at the Duke of Marlborough's Head, in Fleet-street, for the trifling receipts of 2s. 6d., 1s. 6d., and 1s. Master Hightrehight had the honour of exhibiting before Lewis XIV., the Emperor of Germany, the King of Sicily, the Doge of Venice, and an infinite number of princes and nobles--and the Prince of Wales, who had nearly lost this inconceivable pleasure by the envious interposition of the Inquisition at Bologna and in Piedmont, which holy office seemed inclined to try _their mode of burning_ on his _body_, leaving to him the care of resisting the flames and rendering them harmless; but he was preserved from the unwelcome ordeal by the interference of the Dutchess Royal Regent of Savoy and the Marquis Bentivoglia.

THE TRIUMPHS OF SCIENCE AND PERSEVERANCE.

Distance seems not to have entered into the calculations of the engineers who built those monuments of human skill--carriage-roads over the Alps. They were after a certain grade, and they obtained it, though by contortions and serpentine windings that seem almost endless. Thus the Simplon averages nowhere more than one inch elevation to a foot, and, indeed, not quite that. Thirty thousand men were employed on this road six years. There are six hundred and eleven bridges in less than forty miles, ten galleries, and twenty houses of refuge, while the average width of the road is over twenty-five feet. The Splugen presents almost as striking features as the Simplon. From these facts, some idea may be gathered of the stupendous work it must be to carry a carriage-road over the Alps.

CHRISTMAS PIE.

The following appeared in the _Newcastle Chronicle_, 6th January, 1770:--

"Monday last was brought from Howick to Berwick, to be shipped for London, for Sir Henry Grey, bart., a pie, the contents whereof are as follows:--2 bushels of flour, 20 lbs. of butter, 4 geese, 2 turkeys, 2 rabbits, 4 wild ducks, 2 woodcocks, 6 snipes, 4 partridges, 2 neats' tongues, 2 curlews, 7 blackbirds, and 6 pigeons: it is supposed a very great curiosity, was made by Mrs. Dorothy Patterson, housekeeper at Howick. It was near nine feet in circumference at bottom, weighs about twelve stones, will take two men to present it at table; it is neatly fitted with a case, and four small wheels to facilitate its use to every guest that inclines to partake of its contents at table."

THE UPAS, (POISON) TREE.

We give here an instance of the extravagancies of ancient travellers, this tissue of falsehoods being taken from "Foersch's Description of Java:"--

The _Bohon Upas_ is situated in the Island of Java about twenty-seven leagues from Batavia, fourteen from Soulis Charta, the seat of the Emperor, and between eighteen and twenty leagues from Tinkjoe, the present residence of the Sultan of Java. It is surrounded on all sides by a circle of high hills and mountains; and the country round it, to the distance of ten or twelve miles from the tree, is entirely barren. Not a tree, nor a shrub, nor even the least plant or grass is to be seen. I have made the tour all around this dangerous spot, at about eighteen miles distant from the centre, and I found the aspect of the country on all sides equally dreary. The easiest ascent of the hills is from that part where the old Ecclesiastick dwells. From his house the criminals are sent for the poison, into which the points of all warlike instruments are dipped. It is of high value, and produces a considerable revenue to the Emperor. The poison which is procured from this tree is a gum that issues out between the bark and the tree itself, like the _camphor_. Malefactors, who for their crimes are sentenced to die, are the only persons who fetch the poison; and this is the only chance they have of saving their lives. After sentence is pronounced upon them by the Judge, they are asked in Court, whether they will die by the hands of the executioner, or whether they will go to the Upas-tree for a box of poison? They commonly prefer the latter proposal, as there is not only some chance of preserving their lives, but also a certainty, in case of their safe return, that a provision will be made for them in future by the Emperor. They are also permitted to ask a favour from the Emperor, which is generally of a trifling nature, and commonly granted. They are then provided with a silver or tortoise-shell box, in which they are to put the poisonous gum, and are properly instructed how to proceed while they are upon their dangerous expedition. They are always told to attend to the direction of the wind, as they are to go towards the tree before the wind; so that the effluvia from the tree is always blown from them. They go to the house of the old ecclesiastick who prepares them by prayers and admonitions for their future fate; he puts them on a long leathern cap with two glasses before their eyes, which comes down as far as their breast; and also provides them with a pair of leather gloves. They are conducted by the priest, and their friends, and relations, about two miles on their journey. The old Ecclesiastick assured me that in upwards of thirty years, he had dismissed above seven hundred criminals in the manner described, and that scarcely two out of twenty have returned. All the Malayans consider this tree as an holy instrument of the great prophet to punish the sins of mankind, and, therefore, to die of the poison of the Upas is generally considered among them as an honourable death. This, however, is certain, that from fifteen to eighteen miles round this tree, not only no human creature can exist, but no animal of _any kind_ has ever been discovered, there are no fish in the waters, and when any birds fly so near this tree that the effluvia reaches them, they drop down dead.

DEATH CAUSED BY SUPERSTITION.

In Hamburg, in 1784, a singular accident occasioned the death of a young couple. The lady going to the church of the Augustin Friars, knelt down near a Mausoleum, ornamented with divers figures in marble, among which was that of Death, armed with a scythe, a small piece of the scythe being loose, fell on the hood of the lady's mantelet. On her return home, she mentioned the circumstance as a matter of indifference to her husband, who, being a credulous and superstitious man, cried out in a terrible panic, that it was a presage of the death of his dear wife. The same day he was seized with a violent fever, took to his bed, and died. The disconsolate lady was so affected at the loss, that she was taken ill, and soon followed him. They were both interred in the same grave; and their inheritance, which was very considerable, fell to some very distant relations.

ST. PAUL AND THE VIPER.--THE CHURCH AT MALTA.

Not far from the old city of Valetta, in the island of Malta, there is a small church dedicated to St. Paul, and just by the church, a miraculous statue of the Saint with a viper on his hand; supposed to be placed on the very spot on which he was received after his shipwreck on this island, and where he shook the viper off his hand into the fire, without being hurt by it. At which time the Maltese assure us, the Saint cursed all the venomous animals of the island, and banished them for ever; just as St. Patrick treated those of his favourite isle. Whether this be the cause of it or not, we shall leave to divines to determine, though if it had, St. Luke would probably have mentioned it in the Acts of the Apostles; but the fact is certain, that there are no venomous animals in Malta.

THE FIRST HERMITS--WHY SO-CALLED.

Hermits, or _Eremites_, (from the Greek [Greek: _eremos_], a desert place,) were men who retired to desert places to avoid persecution; they lodged in caves and cells:--

"Where from the mountain's grassy side, Their guiltless feast they bring; A scrip with herbs and fruit supply'd, And water from the spring."

The first hermit was Paul, of Thebes, in Egypt, who lived about the year 260; the second, was St. Anthony, also of Egypt, who died in 345, at the age of 105.

ST. JAMES'S SQUARE.

The author of _A Tour through the Island of Great Britain_ (Daniel Defoe), second edition, 1738, gives us the following particulars of this aristocratic locality:--"The alterations lately made in St. James's Square are entitled to our particular notice. It used to be in a very ruinous condition, considering the noble houses in it, which are inhabited by the first quality. But now it is finely paved all over with heading-stone; a curious oval bason full of water, surrounded with iron rails on a dwarf wall, is placed in the middle, mostly 7 feet deep and 150 diameter. In the centre is a pedestal about fifteen feet square, designed for a statue of King William III. The iron rails are octagonal, and at each angle without the rails, is a stone pillar about 9 feet high, and a lamp on the top. The gravel walk within the rails is about 26 feet broad from each angle to the margin of the basin. It was done at the expense of the inhabitants by virtue of an act of parliament. The house that once belonged to the Duke of Ormond, and since to the Duke of Chandos, is pulled down and makes three noble ones, besides fine stables and coach-houses behind, and two or three more good houses in the street leading to St. James's Church. This noble square wants nothing but to have the lower part of it, near Pall Mall, built of a piece with the rest, and the designed statue to be erected in the middle of the basin.

"His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales has taken the Duke of Norfolk's house, and another adjoining to it, which are now (October, 1737), actually repairing for his town residence; Carlton House being too small for that purpose."

THE MORAYSHIRE FLOODS.

In the month of August, 1829, the province of Moray and adjoining districts were visited by a tremendous flood. Its ravages were most destructive along the course of those rivers which have their source in the Cairngorm mountains. The waters of the Findhorn and the Spey, and their tributaries, rose to an unexampled height. In some parts of their course these streams rose fifty feet above their natural level. Many houses were laid desolate, much agricultural produce was destroyed, and several lives were lost. The woodcut in our text represents the situation of a boatman called Sandy Smith, and his family, in the plains of Forres. "They were huddled together," says the eloquent historian of the Floods, "on a spot of ground a few feet square, some forty or fifty yards below their inundated dwelling. Sandy was sometimes standing and sometimes sitting on a small cask, and, as the beholders fancied, watching with intense anxiety the progress of the flood, and trembling for every large tree that it brought sweeping past them. His wife, covered with a blanket, sat shivering on a bit of a log, one child in her lap, and a girl of about seventeen, and a boy of about twelve years of age, leaning against her side. A bottle and a glass on the ground, near the man, gave the spectators, as it had doubtless given him, some degree of comfort. About a score of sheep were standing around, or wading or swimming in the shallows. Three cows and a small horse, picking at a broken rick of straw that seemed to be half-afloat, were also grouped with the family." The account of the rescue of the sufferers is given with a powerful dramatic effect, but we cannot afford space for the quotation. The courageous adventurers who manned the boat for this dangerous enterprise, after being carried over a cataract, which overwhelmed their boat, caught hold of a floating hay-cock, to which they clung till it stuck among some young alder-trees. Each of them then grasping a bough, they supported themselves for two hours among the weak and brittle branches. They afterwards recovered the boat under circumstances almost miraculous, and finally succeeded in rescuing Sandy and his family from their perilous situation.

TREATMENT AND CONDITION OF WOMEN IN FORMER TIMES.

From the subversion of the Roman Empire, to the fourteenth or fifteenth century, women spent most of their time alone, almost entire strangers to the joys of social life; they seldom went abroad, but to be spectators of such public diversions and amusements as the fashions of the times countenanced. Francis I. was the first who introduced women on public days to Court; before his time nothing was to be seen at any of the Courts of Europe, but grey-bearded politicians, plotting the destruction of the rights and liberties of mankind, and warriors clad in complete armour, ready to put their plots in execution. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries elegance had scarcely any existence, and even cleanliness was hardly considered as laudable. The use of linen was not known; and the most delicate of the fair sex wore woollen shifts. In Paris they had meat only three times a week; and one hundred livres, (about five pounds sterling,) was a large portion for a young lady. The better sort of citizens used splinters of wood and rags dipped in oil, instead of candles, which, in those days, were a rarity hardly to be met with. Wine was only to be had at the shops of the Apothecaries, where it was sold as a cordial; and to ride in a two-wheeled cart, along the dirty rugged streets, was reckoned a grandeur of so enviable a nature, that Philip the Fair prohibited the wives of citizens from enjoying it. In the time of Henry VIII. of England, the peers of the realm carried their wives behind them on horseback, when they went to London; and in the same manner took them back to their country seats with hoods of waxed linen over their heads, and wrapped in mantles of cloth to secure them from the cold.

HOMER IN A NUTSHELL.

Huet, Bishop of Avranches, thus writes in his autobiography:--"When his Highness the Dauphin was one day confined to his bed by a slight illness, and we who stood round were endeavouring to entertain him by pleasant conversation, mention was by chance made of the person who boasted that he had written Homer's Iliad in characters so minute, that the whole could be enclosed in a walnut shell. This appearing incredible to many of the company, I contended not only that it might be done, but that I could do it. As they expressed their astonishment at this assertion, that I might not be suspected of idle boasting, I immediately put it to the proof. I therefore took the fourth part of a common leaf of paper, and on its narrower side wrote a single line in so small a character that it contained twenty verses of the Iliad: of such lines each page of the paper could easily admit 120, therefore the page would contain 2400 Homeric verses: and as the leaf so divided would give eight pages it would afford room for above 19,000 verses, whereas the whole number in the Iliad does not exceed 17,000. Thus by my single line I demonstrated my proposition."

AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF CHARING CROSS AND CHEAPSIDE CROSS.

The following interesting "Autobiographies" of the Old London Crosses, are extracted from Henry Peacham's _Dialogue between the Crosse in Cheap and Charing Cross, confronting each other, as fearing their fall in these uncertaine times_, four leaves, 4to. 1641.

"_Charing Cross._--I am made all of white marble (which is not perceived of euery one) and so cemented with mortar made of the purest lime, Callis sand, whites of eggs and the strongest wort, that I defie all hatchets and hammers whatsoever. In King Henry the Eighth's daies I was begged, and should have been degraded for that I had:--Then in Edward the Sixe, when Somerset-house was building, I was in danger; after that, in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, one of her footmen had like to have run away with me; but the greatest danger of all I was in, when I quak'd for fear, was in the time of King James, for I was eight times begged:--part of me was bespoken to make a kitchen chimney for a chiefe constable in Shoreditch; an inn-keeper in Holborn had bargained for as much of me as would make two troughes, one to stand under a pumpe to water his guests' horses, and the other to give his swine their meate in; the rest of my poore carcase should have been carried I know not whither to the repaire of a decayed stone bridge (as I was told) on the top of Harrow-hill. Our royall forefather and founder, King Edward the First you know, built our sister crosses, Lincolne, Granthame, Woburne, Northampton, Stonie-Stratford, Dunstable, Saint Albanes, and ourselves here in London, in the 21st yeare of his raigne, in the yeare 1289."

"_Cheapside Cross._--After this most valiant and excellent king had built me in forme, answerable in beauty and proportion to the rest, I fell to decay, at which time one John Hatherley, maior of London, having first obtained a licence of King Henry the Sixt, anno 1441, I was repaired in a beautiful manner. John Fisher, a mercer, after that gave 600 markes to my new erecting or building, which was finished anno 1484, and after in the second yeare of Henry the Eighth, I was gilded over against the coming in of Charles the Fift Emperor, and newly then gilded against the coronation of King Edward the Sixt, and gilded againe anno 1554, against the coronation of King Philip. Lord, how often have I been presented by juries of the quest for incombrance of the street, and hindring of cartes and carriages, yet I have kept my standing; I shall never forget how upon the 21st of June, anno 1581, my lower statues were in the night with ropes pulled and rent down, as in the resurrection of Christ--the image of the Virgin Mary, Edward the Confessor, and the rest. Then arose many divisions and new sects formerly unheard of, as Martin Marprelate, _alias_ Penrie, Browne, and sundry others, as the chronicle will inform you. My crosse should have been taken quite away, and a _Piramis_ errected in the place, but Queen Elizabeth (that queen of blessed memory) commanded some of her privie councell, in her Majesties name, to write unto Sir Nicholas Mosely, then Maior, to have me againe repaired with a crosse; yet for all this I stood bare for a yeare or two after: Her Highness being very angry, sent expresse word she would not endure their contempt, but expressly commanded forthwith the crosse should be set up, and sent a strict command to Sir William Rider, Lord Maior, and bade him to respect my antiquity; for that is the ancient ensigne of Christianity, &c. This letter was dated December 24, anno 1600. Last of all I was marvellously beautified and adorned against the comming in of King James, and fenced about with sharp pointed barres of iron, against the rude and villainous hands of such as upon condition as they might have the pulling me down, would be bound to rifle all Cheapside."

It is scarcely necessary to say that both crosses have long since disappeared, and their sites become uncertain, although the name of Charing Cross still distinguishes an important London district.

SOMETHING LIKE A FEAST.

Leland mentions a feast given by the Archbishop of York, at his installation, in the reign of Edward IV. The following is a specimen:--300 quarters of wheat, 300 tuns of ale, 100 tuns of wine, 1,000 sheep, 104 oxen, 304 calves, 304 swine, 2,000 geese, 1,000 capons, 2,000 pigs, 400 swans, 104 peacocks, 1,500 hot venison pasties, 4,000 cold, 5,000 custards hot and cold. Such entertainments are a picture of manners.

EGYPTIAN TOYS IN THE BRITISH MUSEUM.

The truth of the old proverb, that "there is nothing new under the sun," will be recognised on an examination of the interesting group which forms the subject of our engraving. Here are dolls of different shapes, some of them for good children, and some, perhaps, for bad; foot-balls, covered with leather, &c., the stitches in parts still firmly adhering; models of fishes and fruit; and round pellets, which the "small boys" of the present day would call "marbles." These toys have been played with by little Egyptians who have been dead and buried three or four thousand years.

Many of the toys that hold places in the English and other markets are, so far as fashion is concerned, of considerable antiquity, having been made, without any alteration in pattern, by certain families for several generations. In the mountainous districts of the Savoy and Switzerland, large numbers, both of children and grown persons, are constantly employed in the manufacture of Noah's-arks, milkmaids &c. Some of the animals carved in wood, and sold here for small prices, show considerable skill in the imitation of the forms of nature, and could only be produced at their present cost, owing to the cheapness of living in those districts, and to the systematic division of labour.

Near the birthplace of Prince Albert is a very large manufactory of military toys, such as drums, trumpets, helmets, &c.; and in parts of Holland--

"----The children take pleasure in making What the children of England take pleasure in breaking."

THE PYRAMIDS OF EGYPT.

The Pyramids of Egypt, especially the two largest of the Pyramids of Jizeh, are the most stupendous masses of building, in stone, that human labour has ever been known to accomplish. The Egyptian Pyramids, of which, large and small, and in different states of preservation, the number is very considerable, are all situated on the west side of the Nile, and they extend, in an irregular line, and in groups, at some distance from each other, from the neighbourhood of Jizeh, in 30 deg. N. lat. as far south as 29 deg. N. lat., a length of between 60 and 70 miles. All the Pyramids have square bases, and their sides face the cardinal points.

The Pyramids of Jizeh are nearly opposite to Cairo. They stand on a plateau or terrace of limestone, which is a projection from the Libyan mountain-chain. The surface of the terrace is barren and irregular, and is covered with sand and small fragments of rock; its height, measured from the base of the Great Pyramids, is 164 feet above the Nile in its low state, taken at an average of the years 1798 to 1801. The north-east angle of the Great Pyramid is 1700 yards from the canal which runs between the terrace and the Nile, and about five miles from the Nile itself.

Herodotus was informed by the priests of Memphis that the Great Pyramid was built by Cheops, King of Egypt, about 900 B. C., or about 450 years before Herodotus visited Egypt. He says that 100,000 men were employed twenty years in building it, and that the body of Cheops was placed in a room beneath the bottom of the Pyramid, surrounded by a vault to which the waters of the Nile were conveyed through a subterranean tunnel. A chamber under the centre of the Pyramid has indeed been discovered, but it does not appear to be the tomb of Cheops. It is about 56 feet above the low-water level of the Nile. The second Pyramid was built, Herodotus says, by Cephren, or Cephrenes, the brother and successor of Cheops; and the third by Mycerinus, the son of Cheops.

TEST OF COURAGE IN A CHILD.

In the education of their children, the Anglo-Saxons only sought to render them dauntless and apt for the two most important occupations of their future lives--war and the chase. It was a usual trial of a child's courage, to place him on the sloping roof of a building, and if, without screaming or terror he held fast, he was styled a stout herce, or brave boy.--_Howel._