CHAPTER XXV.

One day that Mrs. Wells was somewhat disordered, and keeping her room, and I was sitting with her, her husband came to fetch me into the parlor to an old acquaintance, he said, who was very desirous for to see me. "Who is it?" I asked; but he would not tell me, only smiled; my foolish thinking supposed for one instant that it might be Basil he spoke of, but the first glance showed me a slight figure and pale countenance, very different to his whom my witless hopes had expected for to see, albeit without the least shadow of reason. I stood looking at this stranger in a hesitating manner, who perceiving I did not know him, held out his hand, and said,

"Has Mistress Constance forgotten her old playfellow?"

"Edmund Genings!" I exclaimed, suddenly guessing it to be him.

{644}

"Yea," he said, "your old friend Edmund."

"Mr. Ironmonger is this reverend gentleman's name now-a-days," Mr. Wells said; and then we all three sat down, and by degrees in Edmund's present face I discerned the one I remembered in former years. The same kind and reflective aspect, the pallid hue, the upward-raised eye, now with less of searching in its gaze, but more, I ween, of yearning for an unearthly home.

"O dear and reverend sir," I said, "strange it doth seem indeed thus to address you, but God knoweth I thank him for the honor he hath done my old playmate in the calling of him unto his service in these perilous times."

"Yea," he answered, with emotion, "I do owe him much, which life itself should not be sufficient to repay."

"My good father," I said, "some time before his death gave me a token in a letter that you were in England. Where have you been all this time?"

"Tell us the manner of your landing," quoth Mr. Wells; "for this is the great ordeal which, once overpassed, lets you into the vineyard, for to work for one hour only sometimes, or else to bear many years the noontide heat and nipping frosts which laborers like unto yourself have to endure."

"Well," said Edmund, "ten months ago we took shipping at Honfleur, and, wind and weather being propitious, sailed along the coast of England, meaning to have landed in Essex; but for our sakes the master of the bark lingered, when we came in sight of land, until two hours within night, and being come near unto Scarborough, what should happen but that a boat with pirates or rovers in it comes out to surprise us, and shoots at us divers times with muskets! But we came by no harm; for the wind being then contrary, the master turned his ship and sailed back into the main sea, where in very foul weather we remained three days, and verily I thought to have then died of sea-sickness; which ailment should teach a man humility, if anything in this world can do it, stripping him as it does of all boastfulness of his own courage and strength, so that he would cry mercy if any should offer only to move him."

"Ah!" cried Mr. Wells, laughing, "Topcliffe should bethink himself of this new torment for papists, for to leave a man in this plight until he acknowledged the queen's supremacy should be an artful device of the devil."

"At last," quoth Mr. Genings, "we landed, with great peril to our lives, on the side of a high cliff near Whitby, in Yorkshire, and reached that town in the evening. Going into an inn to refresh ourselves, which I promise you we sorely needed, who should we meet with there but one Radcliff?"

"Ah! a noted pursuivant," cried Mr. Wells, "albeit not so topping a one as his chief."

"Ah!" I cried, "good Mr. Wells, that is but a poor pun, I promise you. A better one you must frame before night, or you will lose your reputation. The queen's last effort hath more merit in it than yours, who, when she was angry with her envoy to Spain, said, 'If her royal brother had sent her a goose-man, [Footnote 94] she had sent him in return a man-goose.'"

[Footnote 94: Guzman.]

Mr. Genings smiled, and said:

"Well, this same Radcliff took an exact survey of us all, questioned us about our arrival in that place, whence we came, and whither we were going. We told him we were driven thither by the tempest, and at last, by evasive answers, satisfied him. Then we all went to the house of a Catholic gentleman in the neighborhood, which was within two or three miles of Whitby, and by him were directed some to one place, some to another, according to our own desires. Mr. Plasden and I kept together; but, for fear of suspicion, we determined at last to separate also, and singly to commit ourselves to the protection of God and his good angels. Soon after we had thus {645} resolved, we came to two fair beaten was, the one leading north-east, the other south-east, and even then and there, it being in the night, we stopped and both fell down on our knees and made a short prayer together that God of his infinite mercy would vouchsafe to direct us, and send us both a peaceable passage into the thickest of his vineyard."

Here Mr. Genings paused, a little moved by the remembrance of that parting, but in a few minutes exclaimed:

"I have not seen that dear friend since, rising from our knees, we embraced each other with tears trickling down our cheeks; but the words he said to me then I shall never, methinks, forget. 'Seeing,' quoth, he, 'we must now part through fear of our enemies, and for greater security, farewell, sweet brother in Christ and most loving companion. God grant that, as we have been friends in one college and companions in one wearisome and dangerous journey, so we may have one merry meeting once again in this world, to our great comfort, if it shall please him, even amongst our greatest adversaries; and that as we undertake, for his love and holy name's sake, this course of life together, so he will of his infinite goodness and clemency make us partakers of one hope, one sentence, one death, and one reward. And also as we began, so may we end together in Christ Jesus.' So he; and then not being able to speak one word more for grief and tears, we departed in mutual silence; he directing his journey to London, where he was born, and I northward."

"Then you have not been into Staffordshire?" I said.

"Yea," he answered, "later I went to Lichfield, in order to try if I should peradventure find there any of mine old friends and kinsfolks."

"And did you succeed therein?" I inquired.

"The only friends I found," he answered, with a melancholy smile, "were the gray cloisters, the old cathedral walls, the trees of the close; the only familiar voices which did greet me were the chimes of the tower, the cawing of the rooks over mine head as I sat in the shade of the tall elms near unto the wall where our garden once stood."

"Oh, doth that house and that garden no more exist?" I cried.

"No, it hath been pulled down, and the lawn thereof thrown into the close."

"Then," I said, "the poor bees and butterflies must needs fare badly. The bold rooks, I ween, are too exalted to suffer from these changes. Of Sherwood Hall did you hear aught, Mr. Genings?"

"Mr. Ironmonger," Mr. Wells said, correcting me.

"Alas!" Edmund replied, "I dared not so much as to approach unto it, albeit I passed along the high road not very far from the gate thereof. But the present inhabitants are famed for their hatred unto recusants, and like to deal rigorously with any which should come in their way."

I sighed, and then asked him how long he had been in London.

"About one month," he replied. "As I have told you. Mistress Constance, all my kinsfolk that I wot of are now dead, except my young brother John, whom I doubt not you yet do bear in mind--that fair, winsome, mischievous urchin, who was carried to La Rochelle about one year before your sweet mother died."

"Yea," I said, "I can see him yet gallopping on a stick round the parlor at Lichfield."

"'Tis to look for him," Edmund said, "I am come to London. Albeit I fear much inquiry on my part touching this youth should breed suspicion, I cannot refrain, brotherly love soliciting me thereunto, from seeking him whom report saith careth but little for his soul, and who hath no other relative in the world than myself. I have warrant for to suppose he should be in London; but these four weeks, {646} with useless diligence, I have made search for him, leaving no place unsought where I could suspect him to abide; and as I see no hopes of success, I am resolved to leave the city for a season."

Then Mr. Wells proposed to carry Edmund to Kate's house, where some friends were awaiting him; and for some days I saw him not again. But on the next Sunday evening he came to our house, and I noticed a paleness in him I had not before perceived. I asked him if anything had disordered him.

"Nothing," he answered; "only methinks my old shaking malady doth again threaten me; for this morning, walking forth of mine inn to visit a friend on the other side of the city, and passing by St. Paul's church, when I was on the east side thereof, I felt suddenly a strange sensation in my body, so much that my face glowed, and it seemed to me as if mine hair stood on end; all my joints trembled, and my whole body was bathed in a cold sweat. I feared some evil was threatening me, or danger of being taken up, and I looked back to see if I could perceive any one to be pursuing me; but I saw nobody near, only a youth in a brown-colored cloak; and so, concluding that some affection of my head or liver had seized me, I thought no more on it, but went forward to my intended place to say mass."

A strange thinking came into mine head at that moment, and I doubted if I should impart to him my sudden fancy.

"Mr. Edmund," I said, unable to refrain myself, "suppose that youth in the brown cloak should have been your brother!"

He started, but shaking of his head said:

"Nay, nay, why should it have been him rather than a thousand others I do see every day?"

"Might not that strange effect in yourself betoken the presence of a kinsman?"

"Tut, tut, Mistress Constance," he cried, half kindly, half reprovingly; "this should be a wild fancy lacking ground in reason."

Thus checked, I held my peace, but could not wholly discard this thought. Not long after--on the very morning before Mr. Genings proposed to depart out of town--I chanced to be walking homeward with him and some others from a house whither we had gone to hear his mass. As we were returning along Ludgate Hill, what should he feel but the same sensations he had done before, and which were indeed visible in him, for his limbs trembled and his face turned as white as ashes!

"You are sick," I said, for I was walking alongside of him.

"Only affected as that other day," he answered, leaning against a post for to recover himself.

I had hastily looked back, and, lo and behold I a youth in a brown cloak was walking some paces behind us. I whispered in Mr. Genings's ear:

"Look, Edmund; is this the youth you saw before?"

"O my good Lord!" he cried, turning yet more pale, "this is strange indeed! After all, it may be my brother. Go on," he said quickly; "I must get speech with him alone to discover if it should be so."

We all walked on, and he tarried behind. Looking back, I saw him accost the stranger in the brown cloak. And in the afternoon he came to tell us that this was verily John Genings, as I had with so little show of reason guessed.

"What passed between you?" I asked.

He said:

"I courteously saluted the young man, and inquired what countryman he was; and hearing that he was a Staffordshireman, I began to conceive hopes it should be my brother; so I civilly demanded his name. Methought I should have betrayed myself at once when he answered Genings; but as quietly as I could, I told him I was {647} his kinsman, and was called Ironmonger, and asked him what had become of his brother Edmund. He then, not suspecting aught, told me he had heard that he was gone to Rome to the Pope, and was become a notable papist and a traitor both to God and his country, and that if he did return he should infallibly be hanged. I smiled, and told him I knew his brother, and that he was an honest man, and loved both the queen and his country, and God above all. 'But tell me,' I added, 'good cousin John, should you not know him if you saw him?' He then looked hard at me, and led the way into a tavern not far off, and when we were seated at a table, with no one nigh enough to overhear us, he said: 'I greatly fear I have a brother that is a priest, and that you are the man,' and then began to swear that if it was so, I should discredit myself and all my friends, and protested that in this he would never follow me; albeit in other matters he might respect me. I promise you that whilst these harsh words passed his lips I longed to throw my arms round his neck. I saw my mother's face in his, and his once childish loveliness only changed into manly beauty. His young years and mine rose before me, and I could have wept over this new-found brother as Joseph over his dear Benjamin. I could no longer conceal myself, but told him truly I was his brother indeed, and for his love had taken great pains to seek him, and begged of him to keep secret the knowledge of my arrival; to which he answered: 'He would not for the world disclose my return, but that he desired me to come no more unto him, for that he feared greatly the danger of the law, and to incur the penalty of the statute for concealing of it.' I saw this was no place or time convenient to talk of religion; but we had much conversation about divers things, by which I perceived him to be far from any good affection toward Catholic religion, and persistent in Protestantism, without any hope of a present recovery. Therefore I declared unto him my intended departure out of town, and took my leave, assuring him that within a month or little more I should return and see him again, and confer with him more at large touching some necessary affairs which concerned him very much. I inquired of him where a letter should find him. He showed some reluctance for to give me any address, but at last said if one was left for him at Lady Ingoldsby's, in Queen street, Holborn, he should be like to get it."

After Mr. Genings had left, I considered of this direction his brother had given him, which showed him to be acquainted with Polly's mother-in-law, and then remembering the young gentleman I had met at her house, I suspected him to be no other than John Genings. And called back to mind all his speeches for to compare them with this suspicion, wherein they did all tally; and some days afterward, when I was walking on the Mall with Sir Ralph and Polly, who should accost them but this youth, which they presently introduced to me, and Polly added, she believed we had played at hide-and-seek together when we were young. He looked somewhat surprised, and as if casting about for to call to mind old recollections; then spoke of our meeting at Lady Ingoldsby's; and she cried out,

"Oh, then, you do know one another?"

"By sight," I said, "not by name."

Some other company joining us, he came alongside of me, and began for to pay me compliments in the French manner.

"Mr. John Genings," I said, "do you remember Lichfield and the close, and a little; girl, Constance Sherwood, who used to play with you, before you went to La Rochelle?"

"Like in a dream," he answered, his comely face lighting up with a smile.

"But your brother," I said, "was my chiefest companion then; for at that age we do always aspire to the notice of such as be older than {648} condescend to such as be younger than ourselves."

When I named his brother a cloud darkened his face, and he abruptly turned away. He talked to Polly and some other ladies in a gay, jesting manner, but I could see that ever and anon he glanced toward me, as if to scan my features, and, I ween, compare them with what memory depicted; but he kept aloof from me, as if fearing I should speak again of one he would fain forget.

On the 7th of November, Edmund returned to London, and came in the evening to Kate's house. He had been laboring in the country, exhorting, instructing, and exercising his priestly functions amongst Catholics with all diligence. It so happened that his friend, Mr. Plasden, a very virtuous priest, which had landed with him at Whitby, and parted with him soon afterward, was there also; and several other persons likewise which did usually meet at Mr. Wells's house; but, owing to that gentleman's absence, who had gone into the country for some business, and his wife's indisposition, had agreed for to spend the evening at Mr. Lacy's. Before the company there assembled parted, the two priests treated with him where they should say mass the following day, which was the Octave of All Saints. They agreed to say their matins together, and, by Bryan's advice, to celebrate it at the house of Mr. Wells, notwithstanding his absence; for that Mistress Wells, who could not conveniently go abroad, would be exceeding glad for to hear mass in her own lodging. I told Edmund of my meeting with his brother on the Mall, and the long talk ministered between us some weeks ago, when neither did know the other's name. Methought in his countenance and conversation that night there appeared an unwonted consolation, a sober joy, which filled me almost with awe. When he wished me good-night, he added, "I pray you, my dear child, to lift up your soul to heaven ere yon sleep and when you wake, and recommend to heaven our good purpose, and then come and attend at the holy sacrifice with the crowd of angels and saints which do always assist thereat." When the light faintly dawned in the dull sky, Muriel and I stole from our beds, quietly dressed ourselves, and slipping out unseen, repaired as fast as we could, for the ground was wet and slippery, to Mr. Wells's house. We found assembled in one room Mr. Genings, Mr. Plasden, another priest, Mr. White, Mr. Lacy, Mistress Wells, Sydney Hodgson, Mr. Mason, and many others. Edmund Genings proceeded to say mass. There was so great a stillness in the room a pin should have been heard to drop. Albeit he said the prayers in a very low voice, each word was audible. Mine ears, which are very quick were stretched to the utmost. Each sound in the street caused me an inward flutter. Methought, when he was reading the gospel I discerned a sound as of the hall-door opening, and of steps. Then nothing more for a little while; but just at the moment of the consecration there was a loud rush up the stairs, and the door of the chamber burst open. The gentlemen present rose from their knees. Mistress Wells and I contrariwise sunk on the ground. I dared not for to look, or move, or breathe, but kept inwardly calling on God, then present, for to save us. I heard the words behind me: "Topcliffe! keep him back!" "Hurl him down the stairs!" and then a sound of scuffling, falling, and rolling, followed by a moment's silence.

The while the mass went forward, ever and anon noises rose without; but the gentlemen held the door shut by main force all the time. They kept the foe at bay, these brave men, each word uttered at the altar resounding, I ween, in their breasts. O my God, what a store of suffering was heaped into a brief space of time! What a viaticum was that communion then received by thy doomed priest! {649} "_Domine, non sum dignus_," he thrice said, and then his Lord rested in his soul. "_Deo gratias_" None could now profane the sacred mysteries; none could snatch his Lord from him. "_Ite missa est_." The mass was said, the hour come, death at hand. All resistance then ceased. I saw Topcliffe hastening in with a broken head, and threatening to raise the whole street. Mr. Plasden told him that, now the mass was ended, we would all yield ourselves prisoners, which we did; upon which he took Mr. Genings as he was, in his vestments, and all of us, men and women, in coaches he called for, to Newgate. Muriel and I kept close together, and, with Mistress Wells, were thrust into one cell. Methinks we should all have borne with courage this misfortune but for the thinking of those without--Muriel of her aged and infirm father; Mistress Wells of her husband's return that day to his sacked house, robbed of all its church furniture, books, and her the partner of his whole life. And I thought of Basil, and what he should feel if he knew of me in this fearful Newgate, near to so many thieves and wicked persons; and a trembling came over me lest I should be parted from my companions. I had much to do to recall the courageous spirit I had heretofore nurtured in foreseeing such a hap as this. If I had had to die at once, I think I should have been more brave; but terrible forebodings of examinations--perchance tortures, long solitary hours in a loathsome place--caused me inward shudderings; and albeit I said with my lips over and over again, "Thy will be done, my God," I passionately prayed this chalice might pass from me which often before in my presumption--I cry mercy for it--I had almost desired to drink. Oh, often have I thought since of what is said in David's Psalms, "It is good for me that thou hast humbled me." From my young years a hot glowing feeling had inflamed my breast at the mention of suffering for conscience' sake, and the words "to die" had been very familiar ones to my lips; "rather to die," "gladly to die," "proudly to die;" alas, how often had I uttered them! O my God, when the foul smells, the faint light of that dreadful place, struck on my senses, I waxed very weak. The coarse looks of the jailers, the disgusting food set before us, the filthy pallets, awoke in me a loathing I could not repress. And then a fear also, which the sense of my former presumption did awaken. "Let he that thinketh he standeth take heed lest he fall," kept running in mine head. I had said, like St. Peter, that I was ready for to go to prison and to death; and now, peradventure, I should betray my Lord if too great pain overtook me. Muriel saw me wringing mine hands; and, sitting down by my side on the rude mattress, she tried for to comfort me. Then, in that hour of bitter anguish, I learnt that creature's full worth. Who should have thought, who did not then hear her, what stores of superhuman strength, of heavenly knowledge, of divine comfort, should have flowed from her lips? Then I perceived the value of a wholly detached heart, surrendered to God alone. Young as she was, her soul was as calm in this trial as that of the aged resigned woman which shared it with us. Mine was tempest-tossed for a while. I could but lie mine head on Muriel's knee and murmur, "Basil, O Basil!" or else, "If, after all, I should prove an apostate, which hath so despised others for it!"

"'Tis good to fear," she whispered, "but withal to trust. Is it not written, mine own Constance, 'My strength is sufficient for thee?' and who saith this but the Author of all strength--he on whom the whole world doth rest? He permitteth this fear in thee for humility's sake, which lesson thou hast need to learn. When that of courage is needed, be not affrighted; he will give it thee. He bestoweth not graces before they be needed."

{650}

Then she minded me of little St. Agnes, and related passages of her life; but mostly spoke of the cross and the passion of Christ, in such piercing and moving tones, as if visibly beholding the scene on Calvary, that the storm seemed to subside in my breast as she went on.

"Pray," she gently said, "that, if it be God's will, the extremity of human suffering should fall on thee, so that thy love for him should increase. Pray that no human joy may visit thee again, so that heaven may open its gates to thee and thy loved ones. Pray for Hubert, for the queen, for Topcliffe, for every human soul which thou hast ever been tempted to hate; and I promise thee that a great peace shall steal over thy soul, and a great strength shall lift thee up."

I did what she desired, and her words were prophetic. Peace came before long, and joy too, of a strange unearthly sort. A brief foretaste of heaven was showed forth in the consolations then poured into mine heart. When since I have desired for to rekindle fervor and awaken devotion, I recall the hours which followed that great anguish in the cell at Newgate.

Late in the evening an order came for to release Muriel and me, but not Mrs. Wells. When this dear friend understood what had occurred, she raised her hands in fervent gratitude to God, and dismissed us with many blessings.

The events which, followed I will briefly relate. When we reached home Mr. Congleton was very sick; and then began the illness which ended his life. Kate was almost wild with grief at her husband's danger, and we fetched her and her children to her father's house for to watch over them. On the next day all the prisoners which had been taken at Mr. Wells's house (we only having been released by the dealings of friends with the chief secretary) were examined by Justice Young, and returned to prison to take their trials the next session. Mr. Wells, at his return finding his house ransacked and his wife carried away to prison, had been forthwith to Mr. Justice Young for to expostulate with him, and to demand his wife and the key of his lodgings; but the justice sent him to bear the rest company, with a pair of iron bolts on his legs. The next day he examined him in Newgate; and upon Mr. Wells saying he was not privy to the mass being said that day in his house, but wished he had been present, thinking his name highly honored by having so divine a sacrifice offered in it, the justice told him "that though he was not at the feast, he should taste of the same."

The evening I returned home from the prison a great lassitude overcame me, and for a few days increased so much, joined with pains in the head and in the limbs, that I could scarcely think, or so much as stand. At last it was discerned that I was sickening with the small-pox, caught, methinks, in the prison; and this was no small increase to Muriel's trouble, who had to go to and fro from my chamber to her father's, and was forced to send Kate and her children to the country to Sir Ralph Ingoldsby's house; but methinks in the end this proved for the best, for when Mr. Lacy was, with the other prisoners, found guilty, and condemned to death on the 4th of December, some for having said, and the others for having heard, mass at Mr. Wells's house, Kate came to London but for a few hours, to take leave of him, and Polly's care of her afterward cheered the one sister in her great but not very lasting affliction, and sobered the other's spirits in a beneficial manner, for since she hath been a stayer at home, and very careful of her children and Kate's also, and, albeit very secretly, doth I hear practise her religion. Mr. Congleton never heard of his son-in-law and his friend Mr. Wells's danger, the palsy which affected him having numbed his senses so that he slowly sunk in his grave without suffering of body or mind. From Muriel I heard the course of the trial. How many bitter words and scoffs were used by the {651} judges and others upon the bench, particularly to Edmund Genings, because of his youth, and that he angered them with his arguments! The more to make him a scoff to the people, they vested him in a ridiculous fool's coat which they had found in Mr. Wells's house, and would have it to be a vestment. It was appointed they should all die at Tyburn, except Mr. Genings and Mr. Wells, who were to be executed before Mr. Wells's own door in Gray's Inn Fields, within three doors of our own lodging. The judges, we were told, after pronouncing sentence, began to persuade them to conform to the Protestant religion, assuring them that by so doing they should obtain mercy, but otherwise they must certainly expect to die. But they all answered "that they would live and die in the true Roman and Catholic faith, which they and all antiquity had ever professed, and that they would by no means go to the Protestant churches, or for one moment think that the queen could be head of the Church in spirituals." They dealt most urgently with Edmund Genings in this matter of conformity, giving him hopes not only of his life, but also of a good living, it he would renounce his faith; but he remained, God be praised, constant and resolute; upon which he was thrust into a dark hole within the prison, where he remained in prayer, without food or sustenance, till the hour of his death. Some letters we received from him and Mr. Wells, which have become revered treasures and almost relics in our eyes. One did write (this was Edmund): "The comforts which captivity bringeth are so manifold that I have rather cause to thank God highly for his fatherly dealings with me than to complain of any worldly misery whatsoever. Custom hath caused that it is no grief to me to be debarred from company, desiring nothing more than solitude. When I pray, I talk with God--when I read, he talketh with me; so that I am never alone." And much more in that strain. Mr. Wells ended his letter thus: "I am bound with gyves, yet I am unbound toward God, and far better I account it to have the body bound than the soul to be in bondage. I am threatened hard with danger of death; but if it be no worse, I will not wish it to be better. God send me his grace, and then I weigh not what flesh and blood can do unto me. I have answered to many curious and dangerous questions, but I trust with good advisements, not offending my conscience. What will come of it God only knoweth. Through prison and chains to glory. Thine till death." This letter was addressed to Basil, with a desire expressed we should read it before it was sent to him.

On the day before the one of the execution, Kate came to take leave of her husband. She could not speak for her tears; but he, with his usual composure, bade her be of good comfort, and that death was no more to him than to drink off the caudle which stood there ready on his table. And methinks this indifferency was a joint effect of nature and of grace, for none had ever seen him hurried or agitated in his life with any matter whatsoever. And when he rolled Topcliffe down the stairs and fell with him--for it was he which did this desperate action--his face was as composed when he rose up again, one of the servants who had seen the scuffle said, as if he had never so much as stirred from his study; and in his last speeches before his death it was noticed that his utterance was as slow and deliberate, and his words as carefully picked, as at any other time of his life. Ah me! what days were those when, hardly recovered from my sickness, only enough for to sit up in an armed-chair and be carried from one chamber to another, all the talk ministered about me was of the danger and coming death of these dear friends. I had a trouble of mine own, which I be truly ashamed to speak of; but in this narrative I have resolved above all things to be truthful; and if I have ever had {652} occasion, on the one hand, to relate what should seem to be to mine own credit, on the other also I desire to acknowledge my weaknesses and imperfections, of which what I am about to relate is a notable instance. The small-pox made me at that time the most deformed person that could be seen, even after I was recovered; and the first time I beheld my face in a glass, the horror which it gave me was so great that I resolved Basil should never be the husband of one whom every person which saw her must needs be affrighted to look on; but, forecasting he would never give me up for this reason, howsoever his inclination should rebel against the kindness of his heart and his true affection for me, I hastily sent him a letter, in which I said I could give him no cause for the change which had happened in me, but that I was resolved not to marry him, acting in my old hasty manner, without thought or prudence. No sooner had I done so than I grew very uneasy thereat, too late reflecting on what his suspicions should be of my inconstancy, and what should to him appear faithless breach of promise.

It grieved me, in the midst of such grave events and noble sufferings, to be so concerned for mine own trouble; and on the day before the execution I was sitting musing painfully on the tragedy which was to be enacted at our own doors as it were, weeping for the dear friends which were to suffer, and ever and anon chewing the cud of my wilful undoing of mine own, and it might prove of Basil's, future peace by my rash letter to him, and yet more rash concealment of my motives. Whilst I was thus plunged in grief and uneasiness, the door of my chamber of a sudden opened, and the servant announced Mr. Hubert Rookwood. I hid my face hastily with a veil, which I now did generally use, except when alone with Muriel. He came in, and methought a change had happened in his appearance. He looked somewhat wild and disordered, and his face flushed as one used to drinking.

"Constance," he said abruptly, "tidings have reached me which would not suffer me to put off this visit. A man coming from France hath brought me a letter from Basil, and one directed to you, which he charged me to deliver into your hands. If it tallies with that which he doth write to me--and I doubt not it must be so, for his dealings are always open and honorable, albeit often rash--I must needs hope for so much happiness from it as I can scarce credit to be possible after so much suffering."

I stretched out mine hand for Basil's letter. Oh, how the tears gushed from mine eyes on the reading of it! He had received mine, and having heard some time before from a friend he did not name of his brother's passion for me, he never misdoubted but that I had at last yielded to his solicitations, and given him the love which I withdrew from him.

Never was the nobleness of his nature more evinced than in this letter; never grief more heartfelt, combined with a more patient endurance of the overthrow of his sole earthly happiness; never a greater or more forgiving kindness toward a faithless creature, as he deemed her, with a lingering care for her weal, whom he must needs have thought so ill deserving of his love. So much sorrow without repining, such strict charges not to marry Hubert if he was not a good Catholic and truly reconciled to the Church. But if he was indeed changed in this respect, an assent given to this marriage which had cost him, he said, many tears and many prayers for to write, more than if with his own heart's blood he had traced the words; but which, nevertheless, he freely gave, and prayed God to bless us both, if with a good conscience we could be wedded; and God forbid he should hinder it, if I had ceased for to love him, and had given to Hubert--who had already got his birthright--also a more precious treasure, the heart once his own.

{653}

"What doth your brother write to you?" I coldly said; and then Hubert gave me his letter to read.

Methinks he imagined I concealed my face from some sort of shame; and God knoweth, had I acted the part he supposed, I might well have blushed deeper than can be thought of.

This letter was like unto the other--the most touching proof of love a man could give for a woman. Forgetting himself, my dearest Basil's only care was my happiness; and firm remonstrances were blended with touching injunctions to his brother to treasure every hair of the head of one who was dearer to him than all the world beside, and to do his duty to God and to her, which if he observed, he should, mindless of all else, for ever bless him.

When I returned the missive to him, Hubert said, in a faltering voice, "Now you are free--free to be mine--free before God and man."

"Yea," I answered; "free as the dead, for I am henceforward dead to all earthly things."

"What!" he cried, startled; "your thinking is not, God shield it, to be a nun abroad?"

"Nay," I answered; and then, laying my hand on Basil's letter, I said, "If I had thought to marry you, Hubert; if at this hour I should say I could love you, I ween you would leave the house affrighted, and never return to it again."

"Is your brain turned?" he impatiently cried.

"No," I answered quietly, lifting my veil, "my face only is changed."

I had a sort of bitter pleasure in the sight of his surprise. He turned as pale as any smock.

"Oh, fear not," I said; "my heart hath not changed with my face. I am not in so merry a mood, God knoweth, as to torment you with any such apprehensions. My love for Basil is the same; yea, rather at this hour, after these noble proofs of his love, more great than ever. Now you can discern why I should write to him I would never marry him."

Hiding his face in his hands, Hubert said, "Would I had not come here to embitter your pain?"

"You have not added to my sorrow," I answered; "the chalice is indeed full, but these letters have rather lightened than increased my sufferings."

Then concealing again my face, I went on, "O Hubert, will you come here to-morrow morning? Know you the sight which from that window shall be seen? Hark to that noise! Look out, I pray you, and tell me what it is."

He did as I bade him, and I marked the shudder he gave. His face, pale before, had now turned of an ashy hue.

"Is it possible?" he said; "a scaffold in front of that house where we were wont to meet those old friends! O Constance, are they there to die?--that brave joyous old man, that kind pious soul his wife?"

"Yea," I answered; "and likewise the friend of my young years, good holy Edmund Genings, who never did hurt a fly, much less a human creature. And at Tyburn, Bryan Lacy, my cousin, once your friend, and Sydney Hodgson, and good Mr. Mason, are to suffer."

Hubert clenched his hands, ground his teeth, and a terrible look shot through his eyes. I felt affrighted at the passion my words had awakened.

"Cursed," he cried, in a hoarse voice,--"cursed be the bloody queen which reigneth in this land! Thrice accursed be the tyrants which hunt us to death! Tenfold accursed such as lure us to damnation by the foul baits they do offer to tempt a man to lie to God and to others, to ruin those he loves, to become loathsome to himself by his mean crimes! But if one hath been cheated of his soul, robbed of the hope of heaven, debarred from his religion, thrust into the company of devils, let them fear him, yea, let them fear him, I say. Revenge is not impossible. What shall stay the {654} hand of such a man? What shall guard those impious tempters if many such should one day league for to sweep them from earth's face? If one be desperate of this world's life, he becomes terrible. How should he be to be dreaded who doth despair of heaven!"

With these wild words, he left me. He was gone ere I could speak.

TO BE CONTINUED.

From Chambers's Journal.

RESIGNED.

When my weary spinning's done, And the shades of eve grow deep, And by the bright hearthstone The old folk sit asleep; My heart and I in secret talk, when none can see me weep.

Ofttimes the driving rain, And sometimes the silent snow, Beat on the window-pane, And mingle sad and low With the hopes and fears, the smiles and tears, of a time long, long ago;

Till they act the tales they tell, And a step is on the floor, And a voice I once loved well Says: "Open me the door." Then I turn with a chill from the mocking wind, which whispers "Nevermore!"---

To the little whitewashed room In which my days are spent; And, journeying toward the tomb, My companions gray and bent. Who haply deem their grandchild's life not joyous, but content.

Ah me! for the suns not set, For the years not yet begun, For the days not numbered yet, And the work that must be done, Before the desert path is crossed, and the weary web is spun!

Like a beacon in the night, I see my first grey hair; And I scarce can tell aright If it is from age or care, For time glides silent o'er my life, and leaves no landmark there.

But perchance 'tis for the best. And I must harder strive, If life is little blest. Then not for life to live. For though a heart has nought to take, it may have much to give.

{655}

And they are old and poor. And bread is hard to win. And a guest is at the door Who soon must enter in, And to keep his shadow from their hearth, I daily toil and spin.

My sorrow is their gain, And I show not by a tear How my solitude and pain Have bought their comfort dear. For the storm which wrecked my life's best hope has left me stranded here.

But I hear the neighbors say, That the hour-glass runs too fast, And I know that in that glad day, When toil and sorrow are past, The false and true shall receive their due, and hearts cease aching at last.

From The Month.

SAINTS OF THE DESERT.

BY THE REV. J. H. NEWMAN. D.D.

1. A sportsman fell in with Abbot Antony, when pleasantly conversing with his brethren, and was scandalized.

The old man said: "Put an arrow on the string, and bend your bow." He did so.

Then Antony said: "Bend it more;" and he bent it more.

Antony said: "More still." He answered: "I shall break it."

Then said Antony: "This will befal the brethren, if their minds are always on the stretch."

2. It is told of Abbot Arsenius, how he was used to remain all night without sleep.

Then, when morning broke, and he needed rest, he used to say to sleep: Come, you good-for-nothing.

Then he took a nap, as he sat; and soon woke up again.

3. A brother said to Abbot Theodore, "Say some good word to me, for I am perishing."

He answered: I am in jeopardy myself, and what can I say to _thee?_

4. A brother said to Abbot Pastor: "I have done a great sin; give me a three years' penance." The abbot answered; "It is too much."

The brother said, "Give me a year." The old man said again, "It is too much."

The brothers round him asked, "Should it be forty days?" Still he answered, "It is too much."

For, said he, whoso doth penance with his whole heart, and never does the sin again, is received by God even on the penance of three days.

5. A brother had sinned, and the priest bade him leave the church.

Bessarion rose, and went out with him, saying: And I too am a sinner.

6. Abbott Macarius said: Never chide an erring brother angrily; for you are not bid save another's soul at the loss of your own.

7. Abbot Nilus said: If you would pray as you ought, beware of sadness; else you will run in vain.

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From All The Year Round.

UP AND DOWN CANTON.

Canton is a genuine Chinese city, and one of the most extraordinary places in the world. There are four American steamers which ply between Hong-Kong and Canton. They are fast commodious vessels, in fact floating hotels, such as ply on the large American rivers. The voyage occupies about eight or nine hours. Of these, five or six are on the open sea, sheltered mostly under the lee of precipitous bluffs and lofty rocky islets; and the rest, from the "Bocca Tigris," up the Canton river. The fog in the winter season lies so dense over the flats and extensive swamps bordering the river that steamers have to proceed with great caution, going "dead slow," and sounding the steam-whistle, while the little fishing-junks, which are sure to be scattered by dozens in the way, eagerly beat their gongs, to make known their whereabout. As the steamer ascends the river, a noble stream, some five or six miles broad near the mouth, she gets gradually clear of the fog. The wide marshy flats, and the bold rocks on the left bank, crowned with odd-looking Chinese stone batteries, come into view, to be succeeded by paddy-fields, sugar-cane cultivation, orchards, gardens, roads, and villages, that become, on both banks, more and more numerous, until they blend with the vast suburbs of Canton. Charming little pagodas, and fanciful buildings, painted and carved, the residences of mandarins, peep from the shades of groves, and every village is surmounted by two or more lofty square towers, the nature of which puzzles a stranger, until he is told they are pawnbrokers shops. These shops are so fashioned for the greater security of the articles pledged, because the broker is made heavily responsible for their safe-keeping. The security is meant to be not only against thieves, but also against fire. Half-way to Canton, on the right, or west bank, is a little English settlement at the town of Whampo. It consists of some ship-chandlers' stores, warehouses, and a dock for repairing vessels which discharge their cargoes here, being unable to proceed higher up the stream. Whampo is, in fact, the seaport of Canton, and was a flourishing place as such till Hong-Kong diverted the trade. From Whampo upward, the river becomes more and more crowded with junks and Chinese boats. Some of the junks, men-of-war, differ from the rest only in being larger, and in having several unwieldy guns on their decks, mounted on uncouth carriages: in many instances with their muzzles not pointed through portholes, but grinning over the bulwarks at an angle of forty-five degrees, like huge empty bottles.

When the steamer has slowly and cautiously threaded her way among these numerous vessels, and dropped anchor, the rush of "tanka-boats" round her is astonishing. These are broad bluff crafts, something of the size and shape of the sampans, but impelled chiefly by women; one sweeping, the other sculling with a large steering oar. They close round the ship in hundreds, yelling, screaming, struggling, and fighting for the gangways, till every passenger or article of light freight has left. The women are warmly and comfortably dressed in dark-blue linen shirts and wide drawers, with red and yellow bandanas round their heads and faces. They are often young and good-looking, with bright laughing eyes, white {657} teeth, and jolly red cheeks. They are, unlike the "flower-boat" girls, honest and well conducted. Their boats are roofed over, with snug neat cabins nicely painted, and bedizened with flowers, old-fashioned pictures, and looking-glasses. A low cushioned bench runs round three sides, and the passenger sits down pleasantly enough, looking through the entrance, and face to face with the sturdy nymph, who, with a "stamp and go," is rowing him along, while at the stern, behind his back, another lusty Naiad steers him on his way.

The river divides the great city into two parts; that on the left bank, which is by far the larger, being Canton, and the opposite smaller town "Honan." On the Honan side, a few European gentlemen still live and carry on business, as branches of several firms in Hong-Kong; but the principal European quarter is a fine level plain on the Canton side, presenting to the river a revetted wall. A pretty church and some handsome houses, including the British consulate, have been already completed within the land, which is called the "Shámeen." It adjoins the portion formerly allotted for the Hongs, or warehouses and offices of foreign (European) merchants, which were burnt down by the Chinese mob before the last war.

At ten in the morning, one day in the month of February, I started from the Honan side, under the guidance of a Chinese cicerone, who spoke a language somewhat better than the gibberish known by the name of "pigeon" (business) English, to explore the city of Canton. We crossed the river in a tanka-boat, and after threading, jostling, and pushing our way through swarms of small craft in every variety, landed at the custom-house stairs, close to a small office in which presides an English functionary, in the pay of the Chinese government. The strand is crowded with mean dirty hovels, in which, and about the muddy road, and on board innumerable boats, packed closely along the bank, men, women, and children, filthy and ragged, were crowding in swarms. We passed a short way up the strand, by some large shops, crammed with clothing and ship chandlery, and, striking inland, traversed an open space, scattered with the relics of the European Hongs burnt before the last war (a space, by-the-by, which Europeans have altogether deserted, preferring the "Shámeen" land, and which the Chinese government appear unwilling to resume, so that it remains altogether untenanted). We then entered the bazaar, or strictly commercial portions of the town.

The day was unusually sultry for the time of year; the streets (so to call passages of six or seven feet width), entirely paved with flag-stones, were muddy and greasy from rain that had fallen the day before. The air was stagnant from the confinement of closely packed and overhanging houses, and heated by swarms of people hurrying to and fro, while an insupportable stench from sewers, neglected drains, and putrid fish and flesh, with a horrible odor of stale cabbage water, pervaded the suffocating atmosphere. I became faint at times, fatigued and heated beyond endurance, so that my estimate of the extent of this enormous labyrinth through which I plodded for four hours before I could get a sedan-chair, is one rather, of the feelings than of the judgment I walked--stepping now and then into shops, to examine them more closely--and rode in a sedan-chair up one street and down another, from about half-past ten in the morning until four in the afternoon, and had to leave unvisited about half the bazaar, to get a hasty glimpse of a few temples, gardens, and mandarin-houses before dusk.

The streets are flagged, and about six or seven feet broad. They appear to be innumerable, crossing each other at right angles at every two or three hundred yards. The houses {658} on each side are narrow-fronted, but extending considerably to the rear. There are no windows, for the centre of each front is, open, merely consisting of carved and painted framework, like the proscenium of a theatre, and displaying the contents of the shop on each hand, like side scenes. The back is closed by a large panelling, in which figures of gods, men, animals, and flowers are painted, with a vast deal of gilding and finery. In short, each shop looks like a little theatre. A few houses have upper stories, reached by pretty carved and balustraded stairs. And as every article for which space can be found is hung up for display, both inside the shop and around its front, the spectator, as he enters the bazaar, feels as if he were diving into an ocean of cloths, silks, flags, and flutters.

My guide was a sharp fellow, who thoroughly knew all the sights of Canton. As he had been often employed as cicerone by the ship captains, he immediately put me down as one of that jolly fraternity, frequent intercourse with whom had given a slightly nautical twang to his discourse. We had not gone far before he addressed me, "I say, cappen: you come along o' me and see jewelers' shops. Here's first-rate shop--number one jeweler this chap--cappen want to buy anything? Heave along!" The jewelers' shops were numerous, and I saw many very beautiful specimens of carving and filigree-work. Some of the shops sold articles of European design, others ministered only to the native beauty and fashion of Canton. These contained many articles of considerable beauty and real taste. The most notable were the "bird's feather ornaments," which consist of gold or gilt head combs, brooches, ear-rings, and the like, on which are firmly fixed, with glue, strips of the bright blue feathers of the kingfisher (Halcyon Smyrnensis), cut into small patterns, through which the gold ground appears; the whole effect being exactly like that of enamel work. The kingfisher is not, I think, found in China, but is imported in great numbers from Burmah and India. I asked the price of one skin lying on the counter, and was told half a dollar (two shillings and threepence). The bird was probably procured in India for three-halfpence. Ivory shops are in great number, but the Chinese ivory yields, in my opinion, to that of the Japanese. I went into several porcelain shops, and saw in each ten or a dozen languid-looking youths painting away, slowly and laboriously, at leaves, flowers, insects, and so forth, on plates. Each lad had a small bowl of one color, and when he had painted in all the parts of the design intended to be of that color, he passed the plate on to his neighbor, who added his color, and so on all round the room till the pattern was completely colored. The result is stiff and mechanical. There is no attempt at artistic effect, nothing like the beautiful pictures painted in the factories at Worcester or Dresden. Dyers and weavers are numerous. The silk shops are the finest in the bazaar, but their contents are excessively dear, and are not very good. Indeed, the Canton silks are considered by the Chinese themselves to be, inferior to those made in the northern provinces of the empire. I have seen silk dresses and pieces from Pekin brought into India via Nepaul, of a quality which I was assured by a competent judge could not be procured at Canton. This was five-and-twenty years ago, and it is possible that our present widely different connection with China may have introduced a better article into Shanghae, which is so near Pekin. But the Chinese were very jealous formerly about exporting their finest silks, and those I allude to were brought by the members of a mission, sent every three years with a tribute from Kathmandoo to the Emperor of China, as a friendly return present from the emperor to the Rajah of Nepaul.

{659}

The Chinese shopkeepers are fat comfortable-looking fellows, with pleasant, good-humored faces. They showed me their curiosities very willingly, and none the less courteously exchanged a smiling "chin-chin" with me if I left the shop without purchasing anything.

Tea-shops are numberless. They are piled up with chests such as we see in England, and with open baskets of coarse and inferior tea for the poor. The cheapest kind is made in thin round cakes or large wafers, strung upon slips of bamboo. It partially dissolves in hot water, and is flavored with salt by those who drink it. Of this form of brick tea I have never seen any mention in the books published by travellers.

There are poulterers' shops, with fowls roasted and raw; and there are vegetable sellers' stalls, and fish in baskets, dead and not over-fresh, or alive in large tubs of water. They were all of the carp family, including réhos, mïrgals, and kutlas, so familiarly known in India, also several species of the siluroids, called vulgarly "catfish." The fish brought from the sea are salted and sun-dried, and, with strong aid from immense festoons of sharks' fins, set up a stench that it is not easy to walk through.

After inspecting shops and elbowing and being elbowed in the crowd till afternoon, when I was ready to drop with heat and fatigue, my pilot steered me to a small square, flagged with stone, on which the sun shone fiercely. He called it "Beggars' square," and told me that all the destitute and abandoned sick in the city crawled, if they could, to this spot, because those who died there received burial at the expense of government. While he spoke, my eyes were fixed upon some heaps of dirty tattered clothes on the ground, which presently began to move, and I discovered to my horror three miserable creatures, lean and covered with odious filth, lying in different stages of their last agony on the bare stones, exposed to the burning rays of the sun. They came here to die, and no one heeded them, or gave them a drop of water, or a morsel of food, or even a little shelter from the noontide glare. I had seen shocking things of this sort in India, but nothing so horrible. To insure a climax of disgusts, my guide led me straight to a dog butcher's shop, where several of the nasty fat oily carcases of those animals were hanging for sale. They had not been flayed, but dangled there with their smooth shining skins, which had been scalded and scraped clean of hair, so that at first I took them for sucking-pigs. There were joints of dog, ready roasted, on the counter, and in the back of the shop were several cages in which live dogs were quietly sitting, lolling their tongues out, and appearing very unconcerned. I saw several cats also, in cages, looking very demure; and moreover I saw customers, decorous and substantial-looking householders, inspect and feel the dogs and cats, and buy those which they deemed fittest for the table. The cats did not like being handled, and mewed loudly. "What cappen think o' that?" said my guide. "Cappen s'pose never eat dog?--dog very good, very fat, very soft. Oh, number one dinner is dog!" "And are cats as good?" I asked. "Oh, Chinaman chowchow everything. Chowchow plenty cat. Chinaman nasty beast, I think, cappen, eh?" My cicerone had been so long mixed up with European and American ship captains and missionaries, that he had learnt to suit his ideas to his company, if his ideas had not actually undergone great modification, as is the case in India with those educated natives of the present day known to us as specimens of "Young Bengal."

Before quitting the bazaar, I was ushered into two gambling-shops. These are licensed by the Chinese government, the owners paying a considerable tax. Both were tolerably full of players, and in both the same kind of game was being played--a simple one enough, if I understood it. {660} A player staked a pile of cash or dollars; the croupier staked a similar one; and then another member of the establishment dipped his hand into a bag and drew out a handful of counters; if they were in even fours, the bank won; if they were uneven, the player won, and the croupier's stake was duly handed over to him--rather ruefully, it struck me, by the banker, who sat on the counter raised above the rest. This game appears about as intrinsically entertaining as pulling straws; but I may have overlooked or misunderstood parts of it of a more intellectual nature. In the first house I visited, the players were of the lower class, and the stakes were copper cash. One man, quite a youth, left the room evidently cleaned out; his look revealed it, and I suppose he went away to the opium shop, the usual consolation of a Chinaman under the circumstances. As we entered the second gambling-house, my guide informed me, "This rich house. Number one fellow play here--mandarin chap." And truly I saw in the room goodly piles of dollars heaped up before a better-dressed assembly. The game appeared to be the same, and money changed hands rapidly. I "chin-chinned" to the banker and to the company, and was civilly allowed to look on. The room led through a filigreed doorway to another apartment, where cakes, loaves, tea, and pipes were spread out, and where long-tailed gentlemen were lounging and discussing the news of the day.

Being in want of cash, and having only dollar notes with me, I asked my guide what I should do? He straightway led me to a money-changer's, where I was at once furnished with change for my notes at par. As this was an unusual accommodation, I asked the reason of such generosity, and was informed that the dollars given me were all light, and that the changer would obtain full-weight dollars for the notes by-and-by. I was assured, however, that in all the shops the dollars I had received would be received at the full value; and this I found to be the case. All the time I was in the money-changer's, I saw three or four people telling, examining, and stamping dollars. So defaced and mutilated does the coin become by bearing the "chop" or mark of every banker or dealer into whose possession it passes, that it as nearly as possible returns to that state of bullion which the Chinaman prefers to minted coin. As it was, the only small change I could procure for a dollar was in fragments of silver; in the weighing out of which I was of course at the mercy of the shopman.

A chair having been with great difficulty procured for me, and another for my guide, we were about emerging from the bazaar when I had the honor of meeting a mandarin and suite. My bearers had just time to squeeze into the entrance of a side-alley, when the cavalcade was down upon us. Funny-looking soldiers with spears and muskets indiscriminately, musicians and drummers or tom-tom beaters, and an amazing figure in red and gold apparel of a loose flapping cut, with a sword in his hand, mounted upon an inexcusable pony--a Chinese Rosinante. In the centre of this cortege the mandarin was borne along, a placid fat dignitary, in a richly embroidered purple velvet and golden dress, seated in a gaudy sedan.

It was a great relief to emerge from the crowded bazaar, pass through the gateway in the massive city wall, and proceed through comparatively airy lanes to one or two Chinese gentlemen's houses and gardens, which my guide most unceremoniously entered, marshalling me in without a word of introduction or apology, and making me feel rather ashamed of myself. These dwellings, as well as the joss-houses or temples, have been so often described, that I will not inflict them again on the reader. Not the slightest objection was raised by the priests to my exploring every part of the temples, the vergers showing the altars, the various images, the cloisters {661} and refectories, with great alacrity, and extending their hands afterward for a fee. The only undescribed fact connected with these worthies which I was informed of is, that they sell their finger-nails to any foreigner desirous of purchasing such curiosities. These nails are suffered to grow uncut, and attain a length of three or four inches, looking remarkably unlike finger-nails, and forming curiosities much coveted, said my guide, by foreign gentlemen and "cappens." Among other religious edifices I visited a Mohammedan temple, a singular jumble of Islamism and Buddhism. Extracts from the Koran wore an odd appearance emblazoned on Chinese architecture. There were no priests visible here; only children and begging old women.

Want of time prevented my visiting the camp or barracks of the Chinese soldiers, on the heights outside the eastern suburbs of the town. A large garden, attached to a temple on the Honan side, was the only other object I had time that day to inspect. The garden was principally stocked with orange-trees, also loquats and lychees, hundreds of which were on sale for the benefit of the good fathers, who are supported by the produce of the garden and the contributions of the piously disposed. On each side of the centre walk, beyond a little dirty pond, was a shed, with shelves, on which were ranged pots containing the ashes of the priests ("priests' bones," my guide irreverently called them); their bodies, after decease, undergoing incremation in an adjoining pit. Names, ages, and dates of decease are duly preserved, cut into slabs of stone on the concave face of a semicircular screen of masonry in the garden. Before leaving the garden I was not a little surprised by the appearance of a veritable magpie, identical, as it seemed to me, with our British bird, that I had not seen for many years.

After guiding me safely to my quarters--for so labyrinthine is every part of Canton and Honan that it would be hopeless to attempt to find one's way alone--my pilot left me and departed to his own home, which was, he told me, on the Canton side. The language he spoke is, as may be gathered from the specimens here given, not the ordinary "pigeon English" of Chinese servants; a style of gibberish which it is lamentable to think has become the ordinary channel of communication with all Chinamen. These sharp and intelligent people would soon learn to speak and understand better English than such sentences has "You go top-side and catchee one piecee book"--"You tell those two piecee cooly go chow-chow, and come back chop-chop." (Go up-stairs and fetch a book--Tell those two coolies to go to their dinner, and return quickly.) The good effects of the tuition afforded by schoolmasters and missionaries in China are much marred by the jargon used conventionally, with irrational adherence to defect, in all ordinary transactions of business, by masters and mistresses in intercourse with their servants, and by commercial men with their native assistants.

About seven hours' run, in one of the American steamers before mentioned, carries the passenger from Canton to Macao. The mouth of the river is cleared in four hours, and the rest of the voyage is over an open sea, which, with a fresh southerly breeze, is rather rough for a flat-bottomed steamer: the islands to eastward, though numerous, being too remote to check the swell of the Chinese ocean. After running for about an hour along the bold rocky peninsula at the point of which Macao is built, the steamer rounds in, and, entering a partially land-locked harbor between the town and some rocky islets to its south, anchors in smooth water. The town has a quaint picturesque look. Its old-fashioned houses extend to the water's edge. They are all of stone or brick, covering the face of the bold coast: the heights of which are crowned by castles, forts, batteries, and convents, and from whose ancient walls the last rays of a setting sun were fading as we entered the harbor. The {662} inhabitants are entirely Portuguese, Chinese, and a breed between the two. The jealousy of the Portuguese government effectually excludes foreigners from settling; a miserable policy, by which trade is almost extinct, the revenue being derived chiefly from licensing of gambling-houses. In front of the house of the governor I saw a guard of soldiers. They wore able-bodied, smart-looking young fellows in neat blue uniforms, detailed from a regiment in the fort. These soldiers, and a few half-castes, looking like our office keranies in India, together with some strangely dressed females, in appearance half aya, half sister of charity, were all that I saw of the Portuguese community. The non-military Portuguese looked jaded and lazy, almost every man with a cheroot in his mouth. The town, indeed, struck me as a very "Castle of Indolence."

Abridged from The Dublin University Magazine.

GLASTONBURY ABBEY, PAST AND PRESENT.

One of the most subtle operations of time is the tendency it has to transform the facts of one age into the phantasies of another, and to cause the dreams of the past to become the realities of the present. Far away in the remote distance of history, when a lonely monk in his cell mused of vessels going without sails and carriages without horses, it was a dream--a mere dream, produced probably by a brain disordered by over study, long vigils, and frequent fasts, but that dream of the thirteenth century has become the most incontrovertible fact of the nineteenth, a fact to whose influence all other hitherto immovable facts are giving way, even the great one, the impregnability of the Englishman's castle; for we find that before the obstinate march of one of these railway facts a thousand Englishmen's castles fall prostrate, and a thousand Englishmen are evicted, their avocations broken up, and themselves turned out upon the world as a new order of beings--outcasts with compensation.

The monastic life, so commonly regarded in these later times as a phantasy, was once a fact, a great universal fact; it was a fact for twelve or thirteen centuries; and when we remember that it extended its influence from the sunny heights of Palestine, across Europe, to the wild, bleak shores of western Ireland; that it did more in the world for the formation and embellishment of modern civilization than all the governments and systems of life the accompanied it in its course; that the best portions of ancient literature, the materials of history, the secrets of art, are the pearls torn from its treasure-house, we may form some idea of what a fact the monastic life must have been at one time, and may venture to assert that the history of that phase of existence, as in frock and cowl it prayed, and watched, and fasted; as in its quiet cloisters it studied, and copied, and labored; as outside its walls it mingled its influence with the web of human destiny, and as in process of time, becoming wealthy and powerful, it degenerated, and went the way of all human things--we say that the history of the development of this extinct world, however defective the execution of that history may be, will include in its review some of the most interesting portions of our national career, will furnish a clue to many of the mazes of historical speculation, or at least may be suggestive {663} to some more able intellect of a course of investigation which has been very little followed, and a mine of truth which to a great extent still remains intact.

At a time when laws were badly administered, and the country often torn by internal contentions, and always subject to the violence of marauders, it was absolutely necessary that there should be some asylum for those thoughtful, retiring spirits who, unable or unwilling to take part in the turmoil of the times, were exposed to all its dangerous vicissitudes. In an age, too, when the country possessed no literature, the contemplative and the learned had no other means of existence than by retiring to the cloister, safe out of the reach of the jealous superstition of ignorance and the wanton barbarity of uncouth violence. The monastery then was the natural home of these beings--the deserted, the oppressed, the meek spirit who had been beaten in the world's conflict, the untimely born son of genius, the scholar, the devotee, all found a safe shelter and a genial abode behind the friendly walls of these cities of refuge. There, too, lay garnered up, as a priceless hoarding for future ages, the sacred oracles of Christianity, and the rescued treasures of ancient lore; there science labored at her mystic problems; and there poetry, painting, and music were developed and perpetuated; in fine, all that the world holds as most excellent, all that goes toward the foundation and adornment of modern society, treasured up in the monastery as in an ark, rode in safety over the dark flood of that mediaeval deluge until the waters subsided, and a new world appearing from its depths, violent hands were laid upon those costly treasures, which were torn from their hiding-places and freely scattered abroad, whilst the representatives of those men who, in silence and with prayer, had amassed and cherished them, were branded as useless idlers, their homes broken up, and themselves dispersed, with no mercy for their errors and no gratitude for their labors, to seek the scanty charities of a hostile world. Beside being the cradle of art and science, the monastery was a great and most efficient engine for the dispensation of public charity. At its refectory kitchen the poor were always cheerfully welcomed, generously treated, and periodically relieved; in fine, the care of the poor was not only regarded as a solemn duty, but was undertaken with the most cheerful devotion and the most unremitting zeal. They were not treated like an unsightly social disease, which was to be cured if possible, but at any rate kept out of sight; they were not handed over to the tender sympathies of paid relieving officers, nor dealt with by the merciless laws of statistics, but they were treated gently and kindly in the spirit of the Great Master, who when on earth bestowed upon them the larger share of his sympathy, who, in the tenderness of his pity, dignified poverty and sanctified charity when he declared that "inasmuch as ye have done it unto the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me." Whatever may have been the vices of the monastic system or the errors of its ritual, its untiring charity was its great redeeming virtue.

It will not perhaps be an unfitting introduction to our investigation into the rise and influence of this system upon our national life if we resuscitate from the grave of the past one of these great monasteries, the oldest and most powerful which sprang up in our country, and which, compared with others at the time when they fell before the great religious convulsion of the sixteenth century, had, in the midst of general corruption, maintained its purity, and suffered less from its own vices than from the degeneracy of the system to which it belonged, and of which it was the most distinguished ornament. We shall endeavor to portray the monastery as it was in all its glory, to pass through its portals, to enter reverently {664} into its magnificent church, to listen to its gorgeous music, to watch its processions, to wander through its cloisters, to visit its domestic domains, to penetrate into the mysteries of its refectory, the ascetic simplicity of its dormitory, the industry of its schoolhouse and fratery, the stores of its treasury, the still richer stores of its library, the immortal labors of its Scriptorium, where they worked for so many centuries, uncheered and unrewarded, for a thankless posterity, who shrink even now from doing them justice; we shall visit the gloomy splendors of its crypt, wander through its grounds, and marvel at its strange magnificence. After having thus gazed, as it were, upon the machine itself in motion, we shall perhaps be the better enabled subsequently to comprehend the nature and value of its work.

In the early part of the sixteenth century the ancient abbey of Glastonbury was in the plenitude of its magnificence and power. It had been the cynosure for the devotees of all nations, who, for nearly eleven centuries, flocked in crowds to its fane--to worship at its altars, to venerate its relics, to drink in health at its sacred well, and to gaze in rapt wonder at its holy thorn. And even now, in these later days, though time has wasted it, though fierce fanaticism has played its cannon upon it, though ruthless vandalism in blind ignorance has despoiled many of its beauties, it still stands proud in its ruined grandeur, defiant alike of the ravages of decay, the devastation of the iconoclast, and the wantonness of the ignorant. Although not a single picture, but only an inventorial description, is extant of this largest abbey in the kingdom, yet, standing amidst its silent ruins, the imagination can form some faint idea of what it must have been when its aisles were vocal with the chant of its many-voiced choir, when gorgeous processions moved grandly through its cloisters, and when its altars, its chapels, its windows, its pillars, were all decorated with the myriad splendors of monastic art. Passing in at the great western entrance, through a lodge kept by a grave lay-brother, we find ourselves in a little world, shut up by a high wall which swept round its domains, inclosing an area of more than sixty acres. The eye is arrested at once by a majestic pile of building, stretching itself out in the shape of an immense cross, from the centre of whose transept there rises a high tower. The exterior of this building is profusely decorated with all the weird embellishments of medieval art. There, in sculptured niche, stands the devout monarch, sceptred and crowned; the templar knight, who had fallen under an oriental sun fighting for the cross; the mitred abbot, with his crosier; the saint with his emblem; the martyr with his palm; scenes from Sacred Writ; the apostles, the evangelists; petrified allegories and sculptured story; and then, clustering around and intertwining itself with all these scenes and representations of the world of man, were ornamental devices culled from the world of nature. A splendid monument of the genius of those mediaeval times whose mighty cathedrals stand before us now like massive poems or graven history, where men may read, as it were from a sculptured page, the chivalrous doings of departed heroes, the long tale of the history of the Church--of her woes, her triumphs, her martyrs, and her saints--a deathless picture of actual existence, as though some heaven-sent spirit had come upon the earth, and with a magic stroke petrified into the graphic stillness of stone a whole world of life and living things. The length of the nave of this church, beginning from St. Joseph's chapel (which we shall presently notice, and which was an additional building) up to the cross, was 220 feet, the great tower was 40 feet in breadth, and the transepts on either side of it each 45 feet in length, the choir was 150 feet; its entire length from east to west was {665} 420 feet; and if we add the appended St. Joseph's chapel, we have a range of building 530 feet in length.

Turning from the contemplation of this external grandeur, we come to a structure which forms the extreme west of the abbey--a chapel dedicated to St. Joseph of Arimathea. The entrance on the north side is a masterpiece of art, being a portal consisting of four semicircular arches, receding and diminishing as they recede into the body of the wall, the four fasciae profusely decorated with sculptured representations of personages and scenes, varied by running patterns of tendrils, leaves, and other natural objects. The first thing that strikes the attention upon entering is the beautiful triarial-mullioned window at the western extremity, with its semicircular head; opposite, at the eastern end, another, corresponding in size and decoration, throws its light upon the altar. On both the north and south sides of the church are four uniform windows, rising loftily till their summits nearly touch the vaulting; underneath these are four sculptured arches, the panelling between them adorned with painted representations of the sun, moon, stars, and all the host of heaven; the flooring was a tesselated pavement of encaustic tiles, each bearing an heraldic device, or some allegorical or historical subject. Beneath this tesselated pavement is a spacious crypt, eighty-nine feet in length, twenty feet in width, and ten feet high, provided with an altar, and when used for service illuminated by lamps suspended from the ceiling. St. Joseph's chapel, however, with its softly-colored light, its glittering panels, its resplendent altars, and its elegant proportions, is a beautiful creation; but only a foretaste or a prelude of that full glare of splendor which bursts upon the view on ascending the flight of steps leading from its lower level up to the nave of the great abbey church itself, which was dedicated to St. Mary. Arrived at that point, the spectator gazes upon a long vista of some four hundred feet, including the nave and choir; passing up through the nave, which has a double line of arches, whose pillars are profusely sculptured, we come to the central point in the transept, where there are four magnificent Gothic arches, which for imposing grandeur could scarcely be equalled in the world, mounting up to the height of one hundred feet, upon which rested the great tower of the church. A portion of one of these arches still exists, and though broken retains its original grandeur. In the transept running north and south from this point are four beautifully decorated chapels, St. Mary's, in the north aisle; St. Andrew's, in the south; Our Lady of Loretto's, on the north side of the nave; and at the south angle that of the Holy Sepulchre; another stood just behind the tower, dedicated to St. Edgar: in each of these are altars richly adorned with glittering appointments, and beautiful glass windows, stained with the figures of their patron saints, the apostles, scriptural scenes or episodes from the hagiology of the Church; then, running in a straight line with the nave, completing the gigantic parallelogram, is the choir, where the divine office is daily performed. The body is divided into stalls and seats for the abbot, the officers, and monks. At the eastern extremity stands the high altar, with its profusion of decorative splendor, whilst over it is an immense stained-glass window, with semicircular top, which pours down upon the altar, and in fact bathes the whole choir, when viewed from a distance, in a sea of softened many-colored light. The flooring of the great church, like that of St. Joseph's, is composed of encaustic Norman tiles, inscribed with Scripture sentences, heraldic devices, and names of kings and benefactors. Underneath the great church is the crypt--a dark vault divided into three compartments by two rows of strong massive pillars, into which, having descended from the church, the spectator {666} enters; the light of his torch is thrown back from a hundred different points, like the eyes of serpents glittering through the darkness, reflected from the bright gold and silver nails and decorations of the coffins that lie piled on all sides, and whose ominous shapes can be just faintly distinguished. This is the weird world, which exerts a mysterious influence over the hearts of the most thoughtless--the silent world of death in life; and piled up around are the remains of whole generations long extinct of races of canonized saints, pious kings, devout queens, mitred abbots, bishops, nobles who gave all their wealth to lie here, knights who braved the dangers of foreign climes, the power of the stealthy pestilence, and the scimitar of the wild Saracen, that they might one day come back and lay their bones in this holy spot. There were the gilded coffins of renowned abbots, whose names were a mighty power in the world when they lived, and whose thoughts are still read with delight by the votaries of another creed--the silver crosiers of bishops, the purple cloth of royalty, and the crimson of the noble--all slumbering and smoldering in the dense obscurity of the tomb, but flashing up to the light once more in a temporary brilliancy, like the last ball-room effort of some aged beauty--the aristocracy of death, the coquetry of human vanity, strong even in human corruption. Amongst the denizens of this dark region are--King Arthur and his queen Guinever, Coel II., grandfather of Constantine the Great, Kentwyn, king of the West Saxons, Edmund I., Edgar and Ironsides, St. David of Wales, and St. Gildas, beside nine bishops, fifteen abbots, and many others of note. Reascending from this gloomy cavern to the glories of the great church, we wander amongst its aisles, and as we gaze upon the splendors of its choir, we reflect that in this gorgeous temple, embellished by everything that art and science could contribute, and sanctified by the presence of its holy altar, with its consecrated host, its cherished receptacle of saintly relics, and its sublime mysteries, did these devout men, seven times a day, for centuries, assemble for prayer and worship. As soon as the clock had tolled out the hour of midnight, when all the rest of the world was rocked in slumber, they arose, and flocked in silence to the church, where they remain in prayer and praise until the first faint streaks of dawn began to chase away the constellations of the night, and then, at stated intervals through the rest of the day, the appointed services were carried on, so that the greater portion of their lives was spent m this choir, whose very walls were vocal with psalmody and prayer. It was a grand offering to the Almighty of human work and human life. In that temple was gathered as a rich oblation everything that the united labor of ages could create and collect; strong hands had dug out its foundations in the bowels of the earth, had hewn stubborn rocks into huge blocks, and piled them up high in the heavens, had fashioned them into pillars and arches, myriads of busy fingers had labored for ages at its decoration until every column, every cornice, and every angle bore traces of patient toil; the painter, the sculptor, the poet, had all contributed to its embellishment, strength created it, genius beautified it, and the ever-ascending incense of human contrition, human adoration, and human prayer completed the gorgeous sacrifice which those devotees of mediaeval times offered up in honor of him whose mysterious presence they venerated as the actual and real inhabitant of their holy of holies.

Retracing our steps once more to the nave, we turn to take one lingering glance at the scene: and here the full beauty and magnificence of the edifice bursts upon the view, the eye wanders through a perfect stony forest whose stately trees, taken at some moment when their tops, bending toward each other and interlacing {667} themselves, had been petrified into the natural beauty of the Gothic arch; here and there were secluded spots where the prismatic light from painted windows danced about the pillars like straggling sunbeams through the thick foliage of a forest glade. The clusters of pillars resembled the gnarled bark of old forest trees, and the grouped ornaments of their capitols were the points where the trunk itself spread off into limbs and branches; there were groves and labyrinths running far away into the interior of this sculptured wood, and towering high in the centre were those four kings of the forest, whose tops met far up in the heavens--the true heart of the scene, from which everything diverged, and, with which everything was in keeping. Then, as the spectator stands, lost in the grandeur of the spectacle, gazing in rapt wonder at the sky-painted ceiling, or at some fantastic gnarled head grinning at him from a shady nook, the passing whim of some mediaeval brain--a faint sigh, as of a distant wind, steals along those stony glades, gradually increasing in volume, until presently the full, rich tones of the choir burst forth, the organ peals out its melodious thunder, add every arch and every pillar vibrates with undulations of harmonious sound, just as in the storm-shaken forest every mighty denizen bends his massive branches to the fierce tempest-wind, and intones his deep response to the wild music of the storm. Before the power of that music-tempest everything bowed, and as the strains of some Gregorian chant or the dirge-like melody of some penitential psalm filled the whole building with its pathos, every figure seemed to be invested with life, the mysterious harmony between the building and its uses was manifested, the painted figures on the windows appeared to join in the strain, a celestial chorus of apostles, martyrs, and saints; the statues in their niches threw back the melody; the figures reclining on the tombs seemed to raise their clasped hands in silent response to its power, as though moved in their stony slumber by a dream of solemn sounds; the grotesque figures on the pillars and in nooks and corners chanted the dissonant chords, which brought out more boldly the general harmony; every arch, with its entwined branches and sculptured foliage, shook with the stormy melody: all was instinct with sympathetic life, until, the fury of the tempest dying away in fitful gusts, the last breeze was wafted, the painted forms became dumb, the statues and images grew rigid, the foliage was still, all the sympathetic vitality faded away, and the sacred grove fell into its silent magnificence.

Attached to the great church were two offices--the sacristy and church treasury. In the former were kept the sacred vestments, chalices, etc., in use daily; and in the latter were kept all the valuables, such as sacred relics, jewels and plate not in use, with mitres, crosiers, cruces, and pectorals; there was also a confessional for those who wished to use it before going to the altar. The care of these two offices was committed to a monk elected by the abbot, who was called the sacrist. Coming out of the church we arrive at the cloisters, a square place, surrounded by a corridor of pillars, and in the centre of the enclosure was a flower-garden--this was the place where the monks were accustomed to assemble at certain hours to walk up and down. In one of the alleys of the cloister stood the chapter-house, which, as it was the scene of the most important events in their monotonous lives, deserves a description. In this spot the abbots and officers of the monastery were elected, all the business of the house as a body was discussed, faults were openly confessed, openly reproved, and in some cases corporal punishment was awarded in the presence of the abbot and whole convent upon some incorrigible offender, so that, beside being an assembling room, it was a court of complaint and correction. One {668} brother could accuse another openly, when the matter was gone into, and justice done. In all conventual institutions it was a weekly custom, and in some a daily one, to assemble in the chapter-house after one of the morning services (generally after primes), when a sentence from the rule was read, a psalm sung, and business attended to. It was also an envied burying-place; and the reader, as he stood at his desk in the chapter-house of Glastonbury Abbey, stood over the body of Abbot Chinnock, who himself perfected its building, which was commenced in 1303 by Abbot Fromont. In the interior, which was lit up by a magnificent stained-glass window, there were three rows of stone benches one above another. On the floor there was a reading-desk and bench apart; in a platform raised above the other seats was the abbot's renowned elbow-chair, which extraordinary piece of monastic workmanship excited so much curiosity at the great Exhibition of 1851. In the middle of the hall was a platform called the Judgment, being the spot where corporal punishment, when necessary, was inflicted; and towering above all was a crucifix, to remind the brethren of the sufferings of Christ. In another alley of the cloisters stood the fratery, or apartment for the novices, which had its own refectory, common room, lavatory, and dormitory, and was governed by one of the priors. Ascending the staircase, we come to a gallery in which are the library, the wardrobe, the common house, and the common treasury. The library was the first in England, filled with choice and valuable books, which had been given to the monastery from time to time in its history by kings, scholars, and devotees of all classes; many also were transcribed by the monks. During the twelfth century, although even then of great renown in the world, it was considerably augmented by Henricus Blessensis, or Henry of Blois (nephew of Henry I. and brother of Stephen), who was abbot. This royal scholar had more books transcribed during his abbacy than any of his predecessors. A list is still extant--"_De libris quos Henricus fecit transcribere_," in which are to be found such works as Pliny "_De Naturali Historia_," a book in great favor at that time; "_Originem super Epistolas Pauli ad Romanos_," "_Vitas Caesarum_," "_Augustinum de Trinitate_," etc.

Here, too, as in every monastic library in the kingdom, was that old favorite of conventual life, and still favorite with many a lonely student, "_Boethius de Consolatione Philosophiae_," and many a great work from the grim solitude of a prison cell, cherished, too, as the link which connected the modern Latinists with those of the classic age. Housed up in that lonely corner of the island, the Glastonbury library was the storehouse of all the learning of the times; and as devotees bent their steps from all climes toward the Glastonbury relics and the Glastonbury shrine, so did the devotees of genius lovingly wander to the Glastonbury library. Leland, the old gossipping antiquarian, has testified to its glory, and given us an amusing account of the reverential awe with which he visited it not long before the fatal dissolution of the monastery. In the preliminary observations to his "_Collectanea de Rebus Britannicis_," [Footnote 95] he has put the following upon record:--"Eram aliquot ab hinc annis Glessoburgi Somurotrigum ubi antiquissimum simul et famosissimum est totius insulaes nostrae caenobium, animumque longo studioram labore fessum, favente Ricardo Whitingo, [Footnote 96] ejusdem loci abbate, recreabam donee novus quidam cum legendi tum discendi ardor me inflammaret. Supervenit autem ardor ille citius opinione; itaque statim me contuli ad bibliothecam non omnibus perviam at sacras sanctae vetustatis reliquias quarum tantus ibi numerus quantus nollo {669} alio facile Britanniae loco diligentissime evolverem. Vix certo limen intraveram cum antiquissimorum librorum vel solus conspectus, religionem nescio an stuporem, animo incuteret meo, eaqae de causa pedem paululum sistebam. Deinde salutato loci numine per dies aliquot onmes forulos curiosissime excussi."

[Footnote 95: "Collect Reb. Brit." vi., page 87, Hearne's edition.]

[Footnote 96: Richard Whiting, the last Abbot.]

But attached to the library was a department common to all the Benedictine monasteries, where, during long centuries of ignorance, the materials of modern education were preserved and perpetuated; this office was called the scriptorium, or _domus antiquariorum_. Here were assembled for daily labor a class of monks selected for their superior scholarship and writing ability; they were divided into two classes, the _antiquarii_ and the _librarii_: the former were occupied in making copies of valuable old books, and the latter were engaged in transcribing new ones, and works of an inferior order. The books they copied were the Scriptures, always in process of copying; missals, books for the service of the Church, works on theology, and any of the classics that fell into their hands. St. David, the patron saint of Wales, is said to have devoted much time to this work, and at the period of his death had begun to transcribe the gospel of St. John in letters of gold with his own hand. [Footnote 97]

[Footnote 97: _Giraldus Cambren, vitâ Davidis Angl. Sac, ii._, 635.]

The instruments used in the work of the scriptorium were pens, chalk, pumice-stone for rubbing the parchment smooth; penknives, and knives for making erasures, an awl to make dots, a ruler and inkstand. The greatest care was taken by the transcriber, the writing was always beautifully clear, omissions were most scrupulously noted in the margins, and all interlineations were mentioned and acknowledged. In an old manuscript belonging to the Carmelites, the scribe adds, "I have signed it with the sign following, and made a certain interlineation which says '_redis_' and another which says '_ordinis_,' and another which says '_ordini_,' and another which says '_circa_.'" So great was the care they took to preserve the text accurately, and free from interpolations. In these secluded studies sprang up that art, the most charming which the middle ages have handed down to us, the art of illumination, so vainly imitated by the artists of the present day, not from want of genius, but from want of something almost indescribable in the conception and execution, a tone and preservation of color, and especially of the gilding, which was essentially peculiar to the old monks, who must have possessed some secret both of combination and fixing of colors which has been lost with them. This elaborate illumination was devoted to religious books, psalms, missals, and prayer-books; in other works the first letters of chapters were beautifully illuminated, and other leading letters in a lesser degree. The scribe generally left spaces for these, as that was the duty of another; in the spaces were what were called "leading letters," written small to guide the illuminator; these guide-letters may still be detected in some books. So great was the love of this art, that when printing displaced the labors of the scribe, it was customary for a long time to have the leading letters left blank for illumination. Such were the peculiar labors of the scriptorium, and to encourage those who dedicated their time to it, a special benediction was attached to the office, and posterity, when satirizing the monastic life, would do well to remember that the elegance of the satire may be traced back again to these labors, which are the materials for the education and refinement of modern thought; we got our Bible from them, we got our classics from them, and had not such ruthless vandalism been exercised by those over-zealous men who effected their dispersion, it is more than probable that the learned world would not have had to lament over, the lost Decades of Livy. It is the peculiarity of ignorance to be barbarous. There {670} is very little difference between the feeling which prompted a Caliph Omar to burn the Alexandrian Library or a Totila to destroy the achievements of Roman art; and the feeling had only degenerated into the barbarity, without the bravery, when it revived again in the person of our arch-iconoclast, Cromwell, of church-devastating memory, who, however great his love of piety many have been, must have had a thorough hatred of architecture. The care of the library and the scriptorium was intrusted to the librarian. The next department in the gallery was the lavatory, fitted up with all the appliances for washing; and adjoining this room was one arranged for shaving, a duty to which the monks paid strict attention, more especially to preserve the tonsure. The next room was the wardrobe, where their articles of clothing and bedding were stored, and in an inner chamber was the tailory, where a number of lay brethren, with a vocation for that useful craft, were continually at work, making and repairing the clothes of the community. These two rooms and the lavatory were in charge of the camerarius, or chamberlain. The last abbot who sat in the chair of Glastonbury was, as we shall see, elevated from this humble position to that princely dignity. The common room was the next office, and this was fitted up with benches and tables for the general use of the monks; a fire was also kept burning in the winter, the only one allowed for general purposes. The last chamber in the corridor was the common treasury, a strong receptacle for ready money belonging to the monastery, charters, registers, books, and accounts of the abbey, all stored up in iron chests. In addition to being the strong room of the abbey, it had another important use. In those uncertain times it was the custom for both nobles and gentry to send their deeds, family papers, and sometimes their plate and money, to the nearest monastery, where, by permission of the abbot, they were intrusted to the care of the treasurer for greater security; in the wildest hour, when the castle was given up to fire and sword, the abbey was always held in reverence; for, independently of its sacred character, it was endeared to the people by the free-handed charity of its almonry and refectory kitchen. Retracing our steps along the corridor, and ascending another flight of stairs, we come to the dormitory, or dortoir, a large passage with cells on either side; each monk had a separate chamber, very small, in which there was a window, but no chimney, a narrow bedstead, furnished with a straw bed, a mattress, a bolster of straw, a coarse blanket, and a rug; by the bedstead was a prie-Dieu, or desk, with a crucifix upon it, to kneel at for the last and private devotions; another desk and table, with shelves and drawers for books and papers; in the middle was a cresset, or stone-lantern, with a lamp in it to give them light when they arose in the middle of the night to go to matins; this department also was under the care of the chamberlain. One more chamber was called the infirmary, where the sick were immediately removed, and treated with the greatest attention; this was in the charge of an officer called the infirmarius. We now descend these two flights of stairs, issue from the cloisters, and, bending our steps to the south-west, we come to the great hall, or refectory, where the whole convent assembled at meals. At Glastonbury there were seven long tables, around which, and adjoining the walls, were benches for the monks. The table at the upper end was for the abbot, the priors, and other heads, the two next for the priests, the two next for such as were in orders, but not priests, and such as intended to enter into orders; the lower table on the right hand of the abbot was for such as were to take orders whom the other two middle tables could not hold, and the lower table on the left of the abbot was reserved for the lay brethren. In a convenient place was a pulpit, where one of the monks, at the {671} appointment of the abbot, read portions of the Old and New Testament in Latin every day during dinner and supper. The routine of dinner, as indeed the routine of all their meals, was ordered by a system of etiquette as stringent as that which prevails in the poorest and smallest German court of the present day. The sub-prior, who generally presided at the table, or some one appointed by him, rang the bell; the monks, having previously performed their ablutions in the lavatory, then came into the great hall, and bowing to the high table, stood in their places till the sub-prior came, when they resumed their seats; a psalm was sung, and a short service followed by way of grace. The sub-prior then gave the benediction, and at the end they uncovered the food, the sub-prior beginning; the soup was then handed round, and the dinner proceeded; if anything was wanted it was brought by the cellarer, or one of his assistants, who attended, when both the bringer and receiver bowed. As soon as the meal was finished the cellarer collected the spoons; and so stringent was the etiquette, that if the abbot dined with the household (which he did occasionally) he was compelled to carry the abbot's spoon in his right hand and the others in his left; when all was removed the sub-prior ordered the reading to conclude by a "Tu antem," and the reply of "Dei gratias;" the reader then bowed, the remaining food was covered, the bell was rung, the monks arose, a verse of a psalm was sung, when they bowed and retired two by two, singing the "Miserere."

A little further toward the south stood the guest-house, where all visitors, from prince to peasant, were received by the hospitaller with a kiss of peace, and entertained. They were allowed to stay two days and two nights; on the third day after dinner they were expected to depart, but if not convenient they could procure an extension of their stay by application to the abbot. This hospitality, so generously accorded, was often abused by sons of donors and descendants of benefactors, who saddled themselves and their retinues upon the monasteries frequently, and for a period commensurate with the patience of the abbot; and to so great an extent did this evil grow that statutes were enacted to relieve the abbeys so oppressed. Not far from the refectory, toward the west, stood the abbot's private apartments, and still further to the west the great kitchen, which was one of the wonders of the day; its capacity may be imagined when we reflect that it had frequently to provide dinner for four or five hundred guests; but the arrangements and service of the kitchen deserve notice. Every monk had to serve as hebdomadary, or dispenser, whose duty it was to appoint what food was to be dressed and to keep the accounts for the week. Upon taking office he was compelled to wash the feet of the brethren, and upon yielding it up to the new hebdomadary he was obliged to see that all the utensils were clean. St. Benedict strictly enjoined this rule upon them, in order that, as Christ their Lord washed the feet of his disciples, they might wash each others' feet, and wait upon each others' wants. The Glastonbury kitchen is the only building which still remains entire; it was built wholly of stone, for the better security from fire; on the outside it is a four-square, and on the inside an eight-square figure; it had four hearths, was twenty feet in height to the roof, which ran up in a figure of eight triangles; from the top hung suspended a huge lantern. [Footnote 98]

[Footnote 98: Strange vicissitudes of kitchens--in 1667 this Glastonbury Abbey kitchen was hired by the Quakers as a meeting-house; in the fulness of time, where monasticism cooked its mutton Quakerdom sat in triumph.]

Attached to the kitchen was the almonry, or eleemosynarium, where on Wednesdays and Fridays the poor people of Glastonbury and its neighborhood were liberally relieved. This duty was committed to a grave monk, who {672} was called the almoner, or eleemosynarius, and who had to inquire after the poor and sick. No abbots in the kingdom were more liberal in the discharge of these two duties of their office, hospitality and almsgiving, than the abbots of Glastonbury. It was not an unusual thing for them to entertain 500 guests at a sitting, some of whom were of the first rank in the country, and the loose charge of riotous feasting which has been thoughtlessly made against the monastic life by hostile historians becomes modified when we recollect that in that age there were scarcely any wayside inns in the country, and all men, when travelling, halted at the monastery and looked for refreshment and shelter as a matter of right; neither had that _glorious_ system of union work-houses been thought of, and therefore the sick and the poor fell at once to the care of the monastery, where they were cheerfully relieved and tenderly treated. Last, but not least, was the department for boys--another little detached community, with its own school-room, dormitory, refectory, hall, etc. One of the monks presided over them. They were taught Christian doctrine, music, grammar, and, if any showed capacity, the subjects necessary for the university. They were maintained free, and had to officiate in the church as choristers; a system maintained almost to the letter up to the very present moment. William of Malmesbury records that in the churchyard of Glastonbury Abbey stood some very ancient pyramids close to the sarcophagus of King Arthur. The tallest was nearest the church, twenty-six feet in height, consisting of five stories, or courses; in the upper course was the figure of a bishop, in the second of a king, with this inscription--HER. SEXI. and BLISVVERH. In the third the names WEMCRESTE, BANTOMP, WENETHEGN. In the fourth--HATE, WVLFREDE, and EANFLEDE. In the fifth, and last, the figure of an abbot, with the following inscription--LOGVVOR, WESLIELAS and BREGDENE, SVVELVVES HVVINGENDES, and BERNE. The other pyramid was eighteen feet in height, and consisted of four stories, whereon were inscribed in large letters HEDDE Episcopus BREGORRED and BEORVVALDE. William of Malmesbury could give no satisfactory solution to the meaning of these inscriptions beyond the suggestion that the word BREGDENE must have meant a place then called "Brentacnolle," which now exists under the name of Brent Knowle, and that BEORWALDE was Beorwald, the abbot after Hemigselus. He concludes his speculation, however, with the sentence--"Quid haec significent non temere diffinio sed ex suspicione colligo eorum interius in cavatis lapidibus contineri ossa quorum exterius leguntur nomina." [Footnote 99]

[Footnote 99: Guliel. Malms. Hist. Glaston.]

The man who ruled over this miniature world, with a state little short of royalty, was endowed with proportionate dignities; being a member of the upper house of convocation and a parliamentary baron, he sat robed and mitred amongst the peers of the country; in addition to his residence at the abbey he had four or five rural retreats at easy distances from it, with parks, gardens, fisheries, and every luxury; his household was a sort of court, where the sons of noblemen and gentlemen were sent to be trained and educated. When at home he royally entertained his 300 guests, and when he went abroad he was attended by a guard of 100 men. The rent-roll of the monastery has been computed to amount to more than £300,000 per annum, which in these days would be equal to nearly half a million. Up to the year 1154 he ranked also as First Abbot of England, and took precedence of all others; but Adrian the Fourth, the only Englishman who ever ascended the papal chair, bestowed that honor upon the Abbot of St. Albans, where he had received his education. The church, and different offices which clustered round it, formed a kingdom, {673} over which he ruled with absolute power. This description of the buildings and adjuncts of the abbey may not be inaptly closed by giving a sketch of the outline of a monastic day, which will assist the reader to form a clearer idea of the monastic life. At two in the morning the bell tolled for matins, when every monk arose, and after performing his private devotions hastened to the church, and took his seat. When all were assembled fifteen psalms were sung, then came the nocturn, and more psalms; a short interval ensued, during which the chanter choir and those who needed it had permission to retire for a short time if they wished; then followed lauds, which were generally finished by six A.M., when the bell rang for prime; when this was finished the monks continued reading till seven o'clock, when the bell was rung and they returned to put on their day clothes. Afterward, the whole convent having performed their ablutions and broken their fast, proceeded again to the church, and the bell was rung for tierce at nine o'clock. After tierce came the morning mass, and as soon as that was over they marched in procession to the chapter-house for business and correction of faults. This ceremony over, the monks worked or read till sext, twelve A.M., which service concluded, they dined; then followed the hour's sleep in their clothes in the dormitory, unless any of them preferred reading. Nones commenced at three P.M., first vespers at four, then work or reading till second vespers at seven, afterward reading till collation; then came the service of complin, confession of sins, evening prayers, and retirement to rest about nine P.M.

That was the life pursued at Glastonbury Abbey, according to the Benedictine rule, from the time of its establishment there until the dissolution of the monastery, nearly ten centuries. With our modern training and predilections, it is a marvel to us that men could be found willing to submit to such a monotonous career--ten hours a day spent in the church, beginning in the middle of the night, winter and summer. And yet the monastery was always full. We read of no breaking up of institutions for want of devotees, and we are driven to the conclusion that in the age when the monastic life was in its power and purity these men could have been actuated by none other than the motive of strong religious fervor--a fervor of which we in modern times have neither conception nor example. The operation of the influence of that life upon the history of these islands can only be contemplated by watching it in the various phases of its action upon the politics, literature, and art by which it was surrounded, and for that purpose we have selected this oldest and grandest specimen of English monasticism, so faintly described, the mother Church of our country, in whose career so brilliant, so varied, and so tragically ended, we hope to be able to show wherein was the glory, the weakness, and the ruin of the system, as it rose, flourished, and fell in England.

We have endeavored to conjure up from the shadowy realms of the past some faint representation of what Glastonbury Abbey was in the days of its glory; let us now transfer ourselves from the age of towered abbeys, wandering pilgrims, monks, cloisters, and convent bells to this noisy, riotous, busy time in the year of grace 1865--from the Glastonbury Abbey of the sixteenth century to the Glastonbury Abbey of to-day.

It is only within the last ten years that the deep slumber of that quiet neighborhood has been disturbed by the noise and bustle of this busy life--that a railroad has gone out of its way to upset the sedate propriety of ecclesiastical Wells, or the peaceful repose of monasterial Glastonbury; hitherto the stillness and quiet of that lovely country was the same as when mass was sung in the superb cathedral of the one place, and the palmer or the {674} penitent bent his steps to the holy well of the other. But alas! the life of the nineteenth century has broken in upon it; the railway has dashed through that beautiful valley with its sacrilegious march; and at Wells, the cathedral of Ina, with its matchless front, studded with apostles and martyrs, kings, bishops, knights, and mystic emblems, vocal as it were with history, now frowns upon the contentions of two rival companies; whilst at Glastonbury there is a railway station erected almost over the very bones of the saints. Alighting from this, we make our way to the ruins; but as we go, will just view their past history. After the dissolution of the abbey there was an effort made to restore it in the time of Mary, but unavailingly; from that period it was allowed to fall into decay. It is difficult to estimate whether the hand of man or the hand of time has been busier about its spoliation. At the period of Cromwell, who loved to worship God in the "ugliness of holiness," it must have been nearly entire, but that hero could not pass the town without putting a shot through those unoffending ruins in the name of the Lord, which act, however appropriate as an expression of Puritan feeling, was sadly detrimental to the architecture of Glastonbury Abbey. Then in 1667, as we have already alluded to, the Quakers got possession of the kitchen, hired at a nominal rent, paid in hard Quaker money--that glorious kitchen, sanctified by so much saintly cookery--for their grim assemblies. There is a great deal of what is aptly called the "romance" of history in this fact if we only had time to think about it--that it should come to this, monasticism with its princely head, its grand religions life and ceremonies, its painting and staining, its chanting and intoning, itself in all its glory, driven from the face of the country, and modern Quakerdom sitting silent in its ruined kitchen waiting to be "moved." It has suffered much, also, from the gross vandalism of the people themselves. Naturally a simple people, they of course knew nothing of antiquarianism, although that science is irreverently said to master many simples among its votaries. For years then it was their practice to use the materials of the abbey for building purposes, and it is not difficult to find scattered for miles around the country, in farmhouses and even in hovels, portions of sculpture over doorways and fireplaces which speak of mediaeval workmanship. But a worse degradation still befel the place, and the walls which at one time would have been regarded as invested with the odor of sanctity, and even now are sacred to us as a priceless historical monument, were actually sold as materials for mending the roads, to the lasting shame of overseerdom and the powers that were at Glastonbury. But the day for building huts or mending roads with ecclesiastical sculpture is gone, and the little that remains of Glastonbury Abbey has found its way into the hands of those who appear to know how to preserve it, and have the intention to do so. After all this decay and vandalism very little is left of the old abbey--some portions of St. Joseph's church with the crypt--some walls of the choir of the great church; the two east pillars of the tower, forming a grand broken arch, a lasting memento of the original splendor; there are portions, also, of some of the chapels and the abbot's kitchen, the most complete of all. The eye is at once arrested by the portals of St. Joseph's church, which still remain in a tolerable state of preservation, sufficient to enable one to form an idea of what a triumph of decorative art they were. Nothing could be more profusely ornamented than the northern portal; it was composed of semi-circular arches, receding in succession and diminishing in size as they recede into the body of the building; the exterior arch being about twelve feet by eleven, and the interior nine feet by six. The four fasciae are covered with sculptured representations supposed to be {675} commemorations of royal and noble people connected with the monastery--saints, pilgrims, and knights. The forms graven on these fasciae are interpreted in Warner's History of Glastonbury to represent the following subjects. The uppermost fascia is almost obliterated, though still showing a running pattern of tendrils and leaves interspersed with figures of men and animals; toward the centre the sculpture is much mutilated, though something can be traced like the effigy of a person in long robes seized on the shoulder by a furious animal. Beyond him are indistinct remains of three or four upright figures, and the rest is filled up by foliage. The second fascia is made up of eighteen separate ovals, each of which contained a distinct subject; the two first are defaced; the third contains a person apparently kneeling; the fourth, a female with a head-dress sitting on a conch; the fifth, a female on horseback; the sixth, a man on horseback; the seventh, a crowned personage on horseback; the eighth, the body of a deceased person stretched on a couch, with a canopy over it, the corpse covered, and the head resting on a pillow; nine and ten the same; eleven, a knight in a coat of chain armor, with a pointed shield charged with the cross, indicative of a crusader; twelve, a regal personage with a flowing beard and in long robes, crowned, and sitting on a throne; thirteen, a knight in chain armor falling from his horse as if wounded; fourteen, a figure like the former, the right arm stretched out and holding a sword which impales an infant; fifteen, the upright figure of a female with a veil, apparently in male costume; sixteenth, another body stretched out on a couch; seventeen, unintelligible; eighteen, a figure of a pilgrim. The intervals between all these ovals are sculptured into foliage. There can be very little doubt that the subjects contained in these ovals were the representations of monarchs, knights, persons, and events connected with the history of the abbey. The fourth fascia is much mutilated; but Warner thinks it referred to some act of munificence, from the canopied couch it displays, with a figure recumbent upon it and representations of angels guarding it. The portal toward the south was on a similar plan to the northern, but with five instead of four fasciae. One, two, and five are covered with finely chiseled foliage; the third is plain; the fourth only partially worked. According to the authority already mentioned, the only two ovals which are complete represent in the first the creation of man, and in the second the eating of the fruit. In the former is to be seen an upright figure with a nimbus or glory round its head, designating the Almighty in the act of calling man into being, and at his feet is man himself. In the latter there is the tree with Satan behind it, and Adam and Eve sitting with the apples. The appearance of these two portals, independent of the interest lent them by Warner's speculations as to their import, is very striking. In their perfection they must have been masterpieces of that exquisite taste and minute labor which the men of that age devoted to the embellishment of the church. Taking the ruins in a mass, it would be difficult to find anywhere such a specimen of broken grandeur. Standing upon the spot at the extreme east, where was the high altar of the church, the eye wanders down a grand vista of some five hundred feet, relieved in the midst by that solitary, magnificent, broken arch towering up high in the air, with rich festoons of ivy hanging about it in lavish luxuriance like the tresses of some gigantic beauty, and far down in the distance are the crumbling remains of St. Joseph's chapel, the gem of the whole, with its arched windows and profuse decoration, the tops of its walls covered over with straggling parasites, which curl over its brow like the scanty locks of sere old age. And as we reflect that this sacred spot was the cradle of our {676} Christianity; that this building was the mother of our Church; that far back in the bygone ages of barbarism vagrant missionaries wandered foot-sore and worn to this very spot; planted with their own hands the cross of Christ; built up with those hands the rude rush-covered shed which served as the first temple raised to God in these islands; spent their lives here in preaching that good tidings to a benighted pagan people, laid their bones down by the side of the work of their hands, and left their mission to their successors; that in process of time this little community became a mighty power, and that rush-covered shed a splendid temple, whose history is collateral with that of the country for nearly twelve centuries, and now it lies all battered and broken, crumbling away and wasting like human life itself--the mind shrinks appalled at the thought of the vicissitude which brought about so complete a ruin.

"O who thy ruine sees, whom wonder doth not fill With our great father's pompe, devotion, and their skill? Thou more than mortall power (this judgment rightly waid) Then present to assist at that foundation laid; On whom for this sad waste, should justice lay the crime? Is there a power in fate? or doth it yield to time? Or was this error such that thou could'st not protect Those buildings which thy hands did with their zeal erect? To whom did'st thou commit that monument to keepe? That suffereth with the dead their memory to sleepe. When not great Arthur's tombe, nor Holy Joseph's grave, From sacrilege had power their sacred bones to save; He who that God-in-Man to his sepulchre brought, Or he which for the faith twelve famous battles fought; What? did so many Kings do honour to that place For avarice at last so vilely to deface?" [Footnote 100]

[Footnote 100: Drayton's Polyolbion]

In the neighborhood of the town is a hill known all over the world by the name of Wearyall Hill, so called (according to the chronicles) because St. Joseph and his companions sat down here to rest themselves, weary with their journey. As the legend goes St. Joseph is said to have stuck his staff in the earth and left it there, when lo! it took root, grew, and constantly budded on Christmas Day! This was the legendary origin of the far-famed holy thorn. Up to the time of Queen Elizabeth it had two trunks or bodies, and so continued until some nasal psalm-spoiler of Cromwell's "crew" exterminated one, leaving the other to become the wonder of all strangers, who even then began to flock to the place. The blossoms of this remaining branch of the holy thorn became such a curiosity that there was a general demand for them from all parts of the world, and the Bristol merchants, then very great people in their "line," turned this relic of the saint into a matter of commercial speculation, and made goodly sums of money by exporting the blossoms to foreign countries. There are trees from the branches of this thorn growing at the present moment in many of the gardens and nurseries round about Glastonbury, nay, all over England, and in various parts of the Continent. The probability is, as suggested by Collinson in his "History of Somerset," that the monks procured the tree from Palestine, where many of the same sort flourish.

In the abbey church-yard, on the north side of St Joseph's chapel, there was also a walnut tree which, it was said, never blossomed before the feast of St. Barnabas (the 11th June). This is gone. These two trees, the holy thorn and the sacred walnut, were held in high estimation even long after the monasteries had disappeared from the land. Queen Anne, King James, and many of the nobility of the realm are said to have given large sums of money for cuttings from them; so that the "odor of sanctity" clung about the old walls of Glastonbury long after its glory had departed; nay, even the belief in its miraculous waters lingered in the popular mind, and was even revived by a singular {677} incident so late as the year 1751. The circumstances are somewhat as follows:--One Matthew Chancellor, of North Wootton, had been suffering from an asthma of thirty years' standing, and on a certain night in the autumn of 1750, having had an usually violent fit of coughing, he fell asleep, and, according to the depositions taken upon his oath, dreamed that he was at Glastonbury, somewhere above the chain gate, in a horse track, and there found some of the clearest water he ever saw in his life; that he knelt down and drank of it and upon getting up, fancied he saw some one standing before him, who, pointing with his finger to the stream, thus addressed him: "If you will go to the freestone shoot, and take a clean glass, and drink a glassful fasting seven Sunday mornings following, and let no person see you, you will find a perfect cure of your disorder, and then make it public to the world." He asked him why he should drink it only on Sunday mornings, and the person replied that "the world was made in six days, and on the seventh day God rested from his labor, and blessed it: beside, this water comes out of the holy ground where a great many saints and martyrs have been buried." The person also told him something about Christ himself being baptized, but this he could not distinctly remember when he awoke. Impelled by this dream, the man kept the secret to himself, and went on the Sunday morning following to Glastonbury, which was three miles from the place where he lived, and found it exactly according to his dream; but being a dry time of the year, the water did not run very plentifully; however, dripping his glass three times in the pool beneath the shoot, he managed to drink a quantity equal to a glassful, giving God thanks at the same time. This he continued to do for seven times, according to the injunction of the dream, at the end of which period he had entirely lost his complaint. The effect of this story is remarkable. As soon as it was noised abroad, thousands of people of all sects came flocking to Glastonbury from every quarter of the kingdom to partake of the waters of this stream. Every inn and house in the town, and for some distance round, was filled with lodgers and guests; and it is stated upon reliable authority that during the month of May, 1751, the town contained upward of ten thousand strangers. Even to this day, there is a notion amongst the peasantry, more especially the _old women of both sexes_, that the water is good for the "rheumatiz."

After the scenes of violence, the ruthless vandalism, which this old abbey has gone through, it cannot be a matter of surprise that so little remains of all its grandeur; but it is a fact much to be lamented, because, as it was in its time one of the grandest ecclesiastical edifices in the country, so, if it had been preserved intact like its old rival, the cathedral at Wells, it would have been one of the most important and valuable items in the monumental history of England; that broad page where every nation writes its own autobiography; how valuable we find it in our researches as to the life of bygone times; and yet how little do we appear to do in this way as regards our own fame; how little do we cultivate our monumental history. One of the most lasting evidences of greatness which a country can leave behind it for the admiration and instruction of posterity, is the evidence of its national architecture--its architecture in the fullest sense of the term, not its mere roofs and walls, but the acts which it writes upon those walls, its statues and monuments. There are only two agencies by which national fame can be perpetuated--literature and art. The pen of the historian or the poet may give the outline of national manners and the description of national achievements, but art, as it exists in the extant monuments of the architecture of that nation, gives the {678} representation of the actual life as it was, fills up the outline, and presents us with something like the substance: it does not describe, but illustrate; it is, in fact, the petrified manifestation of the very life itself. We have read much about the splendor of those extinct civilizations of the Pharaohs, and of the marvels of Babylonish grandeur, but what a flood of light was thrown upon our dim conceptions by the resuscitated relics of a buried Nineveh! In Grecian poets and Grecian historians we make the acquaintance of the heroes and the heroism of that heroic existence; but in the Elgin marbles we see the men and the deeds in all their natural grandeur, petrified before us in the graphic sublimity of motionless life. To come a little nearer our own times and to the mother of our civilization, what a confirmation of the historic tradition of the Rome of our studies have we found under that hardened lava which for centuries has formed the tombstone of Herculaneum and Pompeii. What vivid illustrations of Roman life and Roman manners are continually being discovered in those buried cities; and so of every nation and time it is its history which narrates its glory, but it is its architecture alone which must illustrate and confirm it. There is no fear of the present age of our country leaving no evidence of its power behind it. That evidence is written in indelible characters deep even to the very bowels of the earth itself, through the heart of mountains, over broad rivers, across plains, its scroll has been the broad bosom of the country, upon which it has engraven its character truly with a pen of iron; but there is a danger that we shall leave very little monumental history behind us in our architecture. . . . .

Protestantism, too, was an iconoclast as regards Catholicism, but it contented itself with desecrating temples, pulling down altars, tearing away paintings, but it substituted nothing in their place; it would admit of no allurements in the Church but that of genuine piety, and supplied no attractions for the thoughtless, the careless, the unbelieving, but its bare walls and cold ministrations. This feeling is now undergoing a marked change; we are beginning to see that plainness in externals may conceal a considerable amount of pride and worldliness, and thus Quakers are leaving off their curious garb, and Methodists are building temples; it is beginning to dawn upon men's minds, at last, that ugliness is one of the most inappropriate sacrifices man can offer to his God, that as in the olden times the patriarchs used to offer up the first-fruits of the field, so in these later times we should offer up the first-fruits of our achievements; the choicest productions of art, science, and every form of human genius should be presented to him who is the God of all humanity. As we raise up temples to his honor and glory, where we may come with our supplications for his mercy, our adoration of his power, where we may bring our purest thoughts, our noblest hopes, our highest aspirations, and our best emotions; so let us decorate that temple with the best works of our hands as we hallow it with the best feelings of our hearts. The reason given by Solomon for exerting all the power and wealth of his kingdom to decorate the temple was simply, "This house which I build is great, for great is our God above all gods;" [Footnote 101] and the approval and acceptance of it by him for whom it was built is recorded in his own words: "Now mine eyes shall be open, and mine ears attent unto the prayer that is made in this place, for now have I chosen and sanctified this house, that my name may be there for ever, and mine eyes and mine heart shall be there perpetually."

[Footnote 101: 2 Chron. ii. 5.]

And that we may not go to the other extreme, as some churches have done and do in our day, and imagine that if we decorate our temple with all the choicest offerings we can bring it is enough, and God will be satisfied with the mere offering, there is, following {679} immediately upon his gracious acceptance and approval of Solomon's temple, the solemn warning in his own words: "But if ye turn away and forsake my statutes and my commandments, which I have set before you, and shall go and serve other gods, and worship them, then will I pluck them up by the roots out of my land which I have given them; and this house which I have sanctified for my name will I cast out of my sight, and will make it to be a proverb and a byword among all nations. And this house which is high shall be an astonishment to every one that passeth by it, so that he shall say, 'Why hath the Lord done this unto this land and unto this house?' And it shall be answered, 'Because they forsook the Lord God of their fathers, which brought them forth out of the land of Egypt, and laid hold on other gods, and worshipped them and served them; therefore hath he brought all this evil upon them.'" [Footnote 102 ]

[Footnote 102: 2 Chron. vii. 15, _seq_. ]

That is the canon of church building as ordained by God himself--make the church as grand an offering as you can, but keep the ritual pure--fill the temple with all the emblems of his glory, but remember that it is he only who is to be worshipped. Such is the teaching of revelation; and now we turn to nature, that boundless temple which God has built up to himself with his own hands. Had he been a God of mere utility instead of a God of beauty and glory; had he only considered the bare convenience and accommodation of the human race, a proportionate amount of dry land in one place, and a proportionate amount of water in another, would have sufficed to meet all human wants; there was no practical need for the variegated aspect, of natural scenery, of hill and dale, mountain and valley, of rippling stream and sweet-smelling flowers; but the world of nature was built for something higher than the mere dwelling place of man. It was built as a temple in which he should honor his God, and which was therefore filled with a myriad of beauties to excite his admiration, to please his eye, to fill his soul with gratitude and joy, and to raise his heart to that God who has given him such a beautiful home, furnished not only with the means of supplying his necessities, but embellished with the choicest beauties of creative power. What is nature but a gorgeous temple, laid out and decorated by the hand of God himself, with its broad pavement tesselated with endless varieties of verdure, with mountain altars which Christ himself loved to frequent and hallow with his prayers, its long aisles fretted with luxurious foliage pillared with tall trees, which bend their tops together in the matchless symmetry of nature's arch, all vocal with the deep-toned music of rushing waters, and melodies warbled by the unseen songsters of the air, spanned over with the boundless blue ceiling of heaven itself, lit up by day with the sunshine of his majesty, and at night by the stars placed there with his own hands?

Let us, whilst we endeavor to get at the truth of history, appeal also to revelation and nature.

{680}

From The St. James Magazine.

CITY ASPIRATIONS.

Oh, not in the town to die! With its restless trampling to and fro, And its traffic-hubbub above, below, And the whirling wheels that hurry by. And the chimney forests, blacken'd and high-- Oh, mercy! not in a town to die!

In a town I may live, and strive, and toil, And grow a part of the living turmoil; A cog-wheel in a machine of men. Turning to labor again and again, Doing my work with the multitude, With a spirit wean'd, and a heart subdued, Pausing sometimes, in a moment of ease, To yearn and sigh for a meadow breeze, For the whispering rustle of summer trees, And the dreamy murmur of golden bees, And the field-path margined by many a flower. And the village church with its grey old tower; Yet still, for sake of my babes and thee. Sweet wife, I may work courageously; May bide in a town, and with iron will Go laboring on in the hubbub still. Where the wheels of the man-machine ever spin, Money, and money, and money, to win.

But to _die_ in a town, in turmoil and smoke, 'Mongst houses, and chimneys gaunt and high. When the silken cord of the soul is broke, Methinks the vapors so heavy would lie. It scarce could soar, as it should, to the sky. Oh, live as I may, to brook it I'll try-- But, mercy! not in a town to die!

{681}

From The Month.

THE FACULTY OF PARIS IN THE TIME OF MOLIÈRE.

In a former number we gave a slight sketch of the laws and etiquettes of the old French Medical Faculty. The state of things there described was already on the wane when Molière dealt it a blow, from the effects of which it never recovered. But there is one characteristic of the position of the medical body which is inherent in its very nature, and is likely to be as enduring as the world itself, allowing for the modifications of varying times and changing manners. So long as our poor humanity shall be subject to disease and death, so long will medicine and its scientific administration be esteemed a necessity. Some, indeed, judge both to be well-nigh unmitigated evils; but at any rate, if evils, they are necessary evils; and even the greatest railers at the doctor and his drugs are pretty sure to send for him in the hour of danger, lean on him for hope, and swallow his potions. The medical man thus obtains an exceptional position. He is introduced into the sanctuary of the family, sees us in our unguarded moments, receives our confidence, and often wins our friendship. He never comes as a judge or a censor. We feel at our ease with him. Our esteem for him is personal, and independent of all considerations of rank or fortune. He is a stranger to all the conflicting interests which divide parties from each other, and can visit persons of all shades of opinion and of views the most opposite, whether of religion or politics, without causing the shadow of an offense. From all this it results that the doctor is often admitted to the closest intimacy by men occupying the highest positions. Hence the footing of quasi-equality accorded, often to the obscure son of AEsculapius, raised by his profession to a post of dignity and benevolent authority, which, while it obtains for him consideration and respect, clashes in nothing with the social importance of the patient. It was so, in a certain degree, in the seventeenth century, when classes were divided much more widely than at present, and reverence for birth and rank much stronger; and we have numerous instances of the friendship subsisting between doctors and the highest in the land.

It is true that the medical faculty did actually number amongst its members men who had undoubted claims to nobility; and we find from Larroque's _Traité de la Noblesse_ that doctors, as distinguished from apothecaries and surgeons, were held not to derogate from their rank by the practice of medicine. But further, the medical profession was held to confer a species of nobility; for of nobility there were reckoned to be three sorts--nobility of race, nobility of royal concession, and personal nobility, such as in peculiar cases we find conferred on the whole _bourgeoisie_ of certain towns. This distinction offended no one, as it expired with its recipient, on whom while living it conferred many practical advantages, such as exemption from taxation. In Paris this circumstance was of small moment, because, as members of the university, the doctors enjoyed all manner of immunities. But in the provinces it was different. In the south of France, in particular, these privileges were energetically claimed on the ground of the honor of the profession, and they were traditionally referred to Roman times. Montpellier {682} was full of these reminiscences of the past, and in Dauphiné the nobility of the doctors was even transmitted from father to son. At Lyons it was remembered that Antonius Musa had cured the Emperor Augustus, and had received a gold ring for himself and his successors in the art. "Accipe annulum aureum, in signum nobilitatis ab Augusto et Senatu Romano medicis concessae," were the words used in the aggregation of a doctor by the college of that city.

The misfortune was that there must of necessity be some contrast between this theoretical nobility and the practical life of the physician. He must, if he would gain his living, go from house to house indiscriminately, and receive his pay from all classes, like the butcher or the baker. The doctors endeavored to smooth over this anomaly by affecting considerable state. They might be seen threading the streets of Paris mounted on mules, in large wigs and with ample beards. The mule gave an almost episcopal air. "The beard is more than half the doctor," says Toinette, in the _Malade Imaginaire_, When the fashionable Guénaut took to a horse, it raised quite a scandal, which Boileau has commemorated:

"Guénaut, sur son cheval, en passant m'éclabousse."

Many, not satisfied with this degree of state, paid their visits in the long magisterial robe, with scarlet hose and band, the famous _rabat_, to which Pascal wittily alludes when he says, "Who could place any confidence in a doctor without a _rabat_?" Not only were the doctors careful to uphold their dignity by these forms, but the Paris Faculty was extremely jealous in maintaining its exclusive position. Its members not merely refused, as was natural, to meet in consultation any of the host of quacks with which the capital swarmed, and who found frequent access to the houses of the great lords and ladies, often as sceptical in regard to orthodox practitioners as they were credulous in the extreme of the pretensions of these heretical interlopers, but they likewise stood aloof from men as respectable as themselves--the honorable doctors of Montpellier, of whom perhaps a few words anon. In the meantime we will take a hasty glance at the members of the Paris Faculty apart from their official life; for they were men after all, and did not always figure in wig and gown. They must have had their private as well as public existence; but it is a more difficult task to obtain a sight of them _en déshabille_.

In history, of course, it were vain to seek anything beyond the record of public events; and even the contemporary memoirs of the age of the Grand Monarque tell us more about the court and its festivities, the _réunions_ of the wits of the day, and the current gossip and scandal of the hour, than about the ordinary domestic life of any class, particularly of such as ranged below the aristocratic level. We are too apt to believe, from the revelations that are made in the light literature of the time, that the brilliant surface of the Augustan age of France concealed a general mass of corruption in the higher classes, and of misery in the lower. But this would be a false conclusion. The _bourgeoisie_, as a body, were complete strangers to the ferment of ambition and intrigue so rife in the upper strata of society. They had their own interests, their own pursuits, and were in the main an industrious and worthy class, sufficiently independent to be able often to regard those above them with a secret, and not always undeserved, contempt. To confine ourselves, however, to the doctors. Two courses were open to them. They might shut themselves up within the round of their own immediate occupations and studies, and limit themselves to the social circle of their colleagues and compeers. The faculty, as we have seen, was a little community in itself, with its own traditions, laws, distinctions, glories. Here, satisfied with their moderate gains, the doctors might preserve their independence {683} and live in all security and honor; or, on the other hand, they might try their fortune in the world and seek the favor of the great. The enterprise involved a certain loss of liberty and a corresponding detriment to that nice delicacy of feeling which is the guardian of severe probity. There were doctors of both kinds; those of the first class were by far the most numerous. The others were the richest; but the esteem in which they were held by their brethren was in the inverse ratio to the wealth acquired by this compromise of dignified independence.

The illustrious dean, Guy Patin, who enjoyed an immense reputation in his day, furnishes an example of the life of voluntary isolation and of practical activity systematically confined to professional or scientific subjects. He is now remembered chiefly for that on which he probably least valued himself--his epistolary correspondence, never designed for publication, but which is extremely interesting, not only as a record of events great and small, the memory of which has long passed away, but for the freshness both of ideas and style for which it is remarkable. These letters exhibit Guy Patin as an apparent compendium of contradictions--a believer in medicine, a sceptic in almost all else; obstinately tenacious of the privileges of the faculty, but full of liberal, and even republican, aspirations; confident in the steady advance of science, but always railing at modern times and extolling the past. Yet there is a clue to many of these seeming contradictions; Guy Patin was a dean. Before he was dean, you felt that he would be dean; later, he has been dean. He has studied minutely all the details of the organized institution to which he is indebted for all that he is--he has made its spirit and doctrine his own; for the faculty _has_ a doctrine. The experimental method is newer in medicine than in the other sciences. In the seventeenth century we find in its place simple observation guided by theory; which theory was no other than that of the father of medicine, Hippocrates--viz., that nature tends to a cure, and that disease is but an outward manifestation of a salutary effort of the vital organization to counteract the destructive causes at work. The physician's part was to aid this process rather than to interfere with it. This view, we may observe, is finding favor anew in certain quarters in our own day; and we may perhaps be allowed humbly to express an instinctive leaning toward any theory of which the practical result might be a system of comparative non-intervention. But this by the way. Certainly Hippocrates's fundamental principle did not deter medical practitioners of the olden time from much painful interference with the workings of nature under the plea of assistance; a course to which their elaborate doctrine concerning the humors of the body--which, however, they did _not_ derive from Hippocrates, but of which the germ exists in the other great authority, Galen--much contributed.

The period we are considering was one of transition. Men felt the need of progress; and this feeling evoked a number of medical adventurers--the revolutionists, as we may call them, of medicine. Placed between two opposite systems--the one resting on tradition and on principles, at any rate, in great measure sound; the other calling itself progress, but having nothing to allege save a number of vague aspirations and anticipations, some genuine discoveries mingled with much baser metal, and half-truths obscured by palpable error--can we wonder that the faculty should be tempted to confound all novelties in one sweeping act of reprobation, and intrench itself in a state of obstinate opposition? Guy Patin shared this feeling, though not to excess. He was no enemy, as we have said, to a wise and safe progress; but he had the shallowness and narrowness which belongs to a certain range of cleverness. He was not the man to accept anything new which it required {684} breadth, elevation, and comprehensiveness of mind to discern. He had also his favorite theory of simplicity; and this made him suspicious of aught which seemed at variance therewith. He looked askance, for instance, at Harvey and the circulation of the blood. We have said that Guy Patin was a sceptic, yet he was not an unbeliever. His language certainly is often extremely irreverent; but just as he sometimes speaks in terms bordering on modern liberalism, while all the time, by his attachment to medical traditions, to the faculty, and to monarchy, he is securely anchored in respect for antiquity and authority, so is it as regards religion, and we must not conclude from his free expressions that he is a decided freethinker. Nevertheless it must be confessed that he betrays a very uncatholic mind and temper; and as we cannot believe that he stood alone in this respect, it may serve as an indication of the spirit of many of his order, and of the prevalence of opinions which were later to bear such bitter fruit.

Guy Patin was content with his sphere; he had no desire to overstep it. His friends and intimates were from amongst his own medical brethren, or they were members of the legal and magisterial body. By marriage he was connected with the latter class; and moreover there was always a close analogy of manners and sentiments betwixt the medical body and the _noblesse de robe_. To his friendship with the President de Thou, brother to Cinq Mars' unfortunate accomplice, we may attribute much of his animosity to the minister Richelieu. Guy Patin is, in short, a systematic grumbler, a regular _frondeur_; but it is chiefly in talk and speculation. He is in reality no revolutionist. Speaking of his frequent social meetings with two lawyer friends, he observes: "Our conversation is always gay. If we talk of religion or of state affairs, it is always historically, without dreaming of either reformation or sedition. We converse chiefly on literary subjects. With a mind thus recreated, I return home, where, after some little converse with my books, or with the record of some past consultation, I retire to rest."

Such was the honorable position of an independent member of the faculty. But what was the condition and social estimate of those who sought the favor of the nobility? Undoubtedly their standing was much inferior to that which they came to occupy a hundred years later--thanks to the spread of the utilitarian spirit, which raised all the positive sciences into high esteem. In the eighteenth century fine ladies had their pet physician, as they had their philosophic or poetic _protégé_; but in the seventeenth a great personage thought he conferred much honor on a doctor by seeking a cure at his hands. The nobles were glad, it is true, to have their familiar physician; though the physician, if he had any self-respect, must have felt that he paid rather dear for admission to this familiarity, not to speak of the actual large sums by which, in the case at least of princes of the blood-royal, they had to buy their offices. But we are here chiefly speaking of a less aspiring class, who angled for the casual good graces of the aristocratic order. See how Madame de Sevigné speaks of the doctors, whom she is always consulting and always unmercifully quizzing. See her malicious pleasure when she can get four or five together to discuss her bile, her spleen, her humors, when she would ply them with questions and contrive to make them contradict each other. She talks of the profession as a humbug, yet she never passes through a town without consulting what she calls "the chief ignoramuses of the place." She consults them, and then turns them into ridicule. They know this, and take their legitimate revenge in high charges. But strange to say, although so contemptuous toward the privileged doctors, Madame de Sevigné has quite a weakness for all quacks or unlicensed dabblers in the {685} art, and is even credulous in their regard. However, it would seem that science with this lively lady is not the sole requirement. "My dear," she says, speaking of a certain elegant Signor Antonio, an Italian son of AEsculapius, "he is twenty-eight years old, with the most beautiful and charming face I ever saw. He has Madame de Mazarin's eyes, and his teeth are perfection. The rest of his face is what you might conceive Rinaldo's to have been, with large black curls, altogether making the prettiest head in the world. He is dressed like a prince, and is a thorough _bon garçon_." We are a long way off the wigs and _rabats_, it will be seen; but we have got a clue to the secret. It is the _médecin bon garçon_ Madame de Sevigné is in search of. She finds him at the baths--_les eaux_. He has none of the pedantry, possibly little of the science, of his Paris brethren of the faculty. He is a man of the world, and can sacrifice to the graces. Medically, his part seems restricted to drenching and dosing his patients with hot water. Tired of court amusements, they fly to the _douche_ and the vapor-bath to expel those inward vapors of which Frenchwomen, and indeed our own great-grandmothers, complained so much. Madame de Sevigné goes through this ordeal perseveringly; but she has her alleviations. "My doctor"--this is another pet _bon garçon_--"is very good. Instead of resigning myself to two hours' _ennui_, inseparable from _la suerie_(the sweating process) I make him read to me. He knows what life is; he has no trickery about him; he deals with medicine like a gentleman (_en galant homme_); in short, he amuses me."

At court the doctors had more serious trials. Beside the task of pleasing this or that capricious and exacting patron, they had to beware of displeasing twenty others. The princes of the blood shared with the sovereign the right to choose their own physician from any quarter they pleased, who became forthwith invested _ipso facto_ with all the privileges of the Paris faculty. Possibly, to make a little display of authority, they would often decline selecting him from the honored precincts of the Rue de la Bûcherie, and perhaps take a doctor of Montpellier. Hence interminable jealousies. Then the doctors would sometimes be drawn into mixing themselves with party politics, and get into the Bastille; but this was their own fault. To escape the shaft of ridicule was more difficult. It appears certain that in _L'Amour Médecin_ Molière ventured upon satirizing four of the court physicians under assumed names; and this in the presence of the king himself, before whom the piece was played. Possibly Louis, whose docility to his physicians stands in remarkable contrast with his lofty distance toward others, might not be sorry to indulge occasionally in a laugh at his masters, or have a brief fling of independence, like a truant schoolboy. Of his habitual bondage to their authority we have the record in a journal of the royal health, magnificently bound in folio and besprinkled _fleurs-de-lis_, which has been preserved. It was begun in 1652 at the desire of the boy-sovereign himself--who thus gave early tokens of his methodical tastes--and it was kept up till four years previous to his death, when it suddenly ceases, possibly because even the pen of flattery became unable to disguise the approaches of inevitable death. The whole is in the handwriting of Louis' three successive physicians, Valot, Daquin, and Fagon. No man, it is said, is a hero to his _valet de chambre_; still less, we may imagine, to his apothecary. That the king should have to submit to all those medical appliances which in Molière's pages are recorded in such plain terms was perhaps a necessity--judged at least to be so; but that etiquette should require that the whole court should be regularly apprised of all these details, is a little surprising. {686} The diary is, however, interlarded with no small amount of flattery. Valot inaugurates his office, for instance, by a memoir on the king's temperament, which was that of which "heroes are made;" and all is in the same adulatory and stilted style. But the writer is by no means unsparing of self-laudation. It is with much evident self-complacency that he registers for the benefit of posterity the different remedies with which "heaven inspired him" to prescribe for the preservation of a health so precious. "Plaster for the king," "potion for the king," and so on, figure in large characters. He can also play the prophet, and announce coming measles, dysenteries, etc., _from which the king is to be exempt_. There are temporary interruptions to Valot's absolute rule; these were the seasons when Louis was campaigning; the monarch on these occasions despised the care of his health, and threw physic to the dogs. The doctor groaned and remonstrated, but was fain to await the close of the campaign to resume his authority and make up for lost time. He died in his office. His nephew and successor, Daquin, was a Montpellier doctor and a converted Jew. He was a clever man of moderate science. But he entered on his charge in difficult days. A gouty prince, subject to melancholy, and desirous to abate nothing of his customary attention either to business or amusement, is not an easy patient to manage. Beside, the royal valetudinarian met with sundry accidents while under this physician's care. Daquin was an accomplished courtier, and even improved upon Valot in the art of flattery. From him we learn the remarkable fact that "the king is subject, like other men, to catch cold." With all his tact, Daquin did not escape disgrace. Perhaps he made too undisguised a display of his acquisitive disposition; indeed, he was a notorious beggar. It is related that one day Louis, being informed of the death of an old officer, expressed regret, saying that the man had been to him a faithful servant, with the merit, rare in a courtier, of never having asked for anything. While making this observation, he fixed his eyes pointedly on Daquin. The physician, no way disconcerted, naively said, "May one venture to inquire, sire, what your majesty gave him?" The king was silenced, for the bashful courtier in question had never received any royal favor whatsoever. Daquin was dismissed in 1693. He had asked for the archbishopric of Tours for his son. He had so often offended, if offence it were considered, in making bold requests, that it is hardly likely that this application was the real cause of his disgrace. It was probably rather the consequence of the king's rupture with Mme. de Montespen, to whom Daquin owed his elevation. It appears that ever since the king's marriage he had found some difficulty in maintaining his position, from which it is natural to infer that adverse influences were at work; indeed, it was a _protégé_, or rather a friend, of Mme. de Maintenon who was promoted to fill his place--a circumstance corroborative of this supposition. Fagon appears to have been a very estimable man, and the attachment and mutual esteem subsisting between him and his patroness, with whom he had first become acquainted in his capacity of physician to the Duc de Maine, never abated. [Footnote 103] He won the confidence also of Louis, and the favor he enjoyed while still in his position of secondary physician was much increased at the period of the king's great illness by a trifling circumstance which made a strong impression on the monarch's mind. One night all the surgeons and doctors, {687} Daquin included, had ventured to go to bed. The king had taken a _bouillon_, and the fever seemed to be subdued. But Fagon, unobserved by the rest, slipped back and took his post in an arm-chair in the ante-room. He was thus at hand to comfort and administer a _tisane_ to the sick monarch, whose fever shortly returned, and who, albeit with the fear of Daquin greatly before his eyes, ventured to accept the services of the attentive subaltern. The _tisane_ sent Louis to sleep, and made Fagon's fortune. Three months afterward he was first in command. He deserved his elevation to an office which was a post of no slight honor and profit. [Footnote 104] He bore his honors meekly, and was remarkable for a spirit of disinterestedness as rare as it was creditable to him. Fagon closes the list of the court physicians of the seventeenth century, and indeed carries us on into the eighteenth. All reserve being made in his favor, it must be confessed that the great dramatist's satire was richly deserved by those doctors of royalty, whose ambitious manoeuvres, intrigues, and paltry rivalries were enough to excite the indignation of any honest man.

[Footnote 103: Fagon was the nephew of Guy de la Brosse, the founder of the _Jardin du Roi_, now developed into the magnificent Museum of Natural Science and himself also an eminent botanist. He was named professor of botany at this establishment by Valot, who, as first physician to the king, was its superintendent.]

[Footnote 104: The king's physician ranked with the great officers of the crown, and received orders from the sovereign alone, to whom he took an oath of fidelity; and he became a count in virtue of his office, and transmitted his nobility to his children. He was entitled to the same honors and privileges as the high chamberlain. He was a councillor of state, and received the usual emoluments. When he visited the faculty, he was met at the door by the dean, bachelors, and beadles, although he himself might not be a Paris doctor. He had, beside, very extensive authority, enjoying a species of medical jurisdiction throughout the kingdom.]

We have seen that the independent physician, who stood aloof from courting the great, could lead an honorable and tranquil life; but it would be a mistake to conclude that profound peace reigned within the medical corporation itself. On the contrary, it was the scene of a bitter internecine war between the men of the new ideas, the men of progress, and the adherents to tradition and the received system. But to excite men's passions ideas must assume a concrete form, which then becomes at once a rallying-point and a watchword. Such in the seventeenth century were the circulation of the blood and antimony. Ever since the days of Galen the liver had been held to be the origin of the veins, and of those organs by which blood is transmitted to the whole body. Harvey's announcement accordingly raised a universal commotion in the medical world: perhaps his doctrine would have met with less opposition but for the discovery of the lacteal veins by an Italian anatomist, Gasparo Aselli, in the year 1622. These veins, as most of our readers probably know, originating in the intestines, receive and convey thence the products of digestion--the chyle. Imbued with the doctrine of Galen, and deceived by appearances, Aselli, it is true, believed the liver to be their ultimate destination. Immediately there was one general outcry against these intrusive vessels: their non-necessity was put forward as a conclusive objection--a very common argument, it may be noted, with the old doctors. Really it was not worth upsetting received notions on their account--the lacteal vessels were superfluous. Even Harvey, who was among Aselli's opponents, joined in insisting on this unsatisfactory reason. "It is not _necessary_," he says, "to seek a fresh channel for the transport of the chyle in the lacteal veins." It was evident, he said, that the chyle was carried from the intestines by the mesenteric veins.

But in 1649 Pecquet, a Frenchman, completed the demonstration, by showing that the lacteal veins do not terminate in the liver, but in a reservoir, to which his name was given. Now indeed the liver, and Galen, and the whole edifice of medicine, were threatened; nothing could be deemed sacred any longer. The liver was not the origin of the veins, if the blood careered in a circle, having neither beginning nor end; and the chyle did not go to the liver. {688} "_Quid de nostra fiet medicina?_" was the sorrowful exclamation of one of the doctors of the Montpellier faculty when Pecquet had triumphantly expounded his discovery before them. Ah, there was the difficulty! _Quid de nostra fiet medicina?_ We are condemning our past--an argument which weighs powerfully against all conversions. Nothing can afford stronger evidence of the deep conviction entertained that the whole existing system was at stake, than the opposition of a physician of so much eminence, intellectual and scientific, as Riolan, whom alone of all his adversaries Harvey judged worthy of a rejoinder. It is astonishing, indeed, to see a man of his stamp reduced to throw himself on such arguments as the uselessness and degradation of the liver if the new hypothesis be admitted; to find him urging the impropriety of allowing impure unelaborated chyle to go straight to the heart, which under these circumstances it must do--thus converting that noble seat of vital heat into an ignoble kitchen. And then, once there, how was the chyle to be got rid of? An absurd list of suppositions follows, intended to prove, by an exhaustive process, the sheer impossibility of disposing of the chyle after having arrived at such an _impasso_. _Ergo_, the chyle _must_ go to the liver. In fact, it cannot go anywhere else with either reason or propriety. Such are the contemptible arguments to which even superior minds will stoop when they battle against evidence. Harvey, however, found many partisans amongst the Paris faculty. Guy Patin, as we have said, was not of the number: he was not a deep thinker, and trusted his friend Riolan. Harvey's followers were called "circulators." Now "circulator" in Latin means a charlatan--that is enough for Guy Patin. The debate ceased with Riolan's death: the doctrine had been gradually gaining ground. In 1678 its victory had been achieved when Louis instituted at the Jardin des Plantes a special chair of anatomy for propagating the new discoveries.

The battle about antimony raged still more fiercely, inasmuch as the question admitted of less tangible proof. There is a legend that this mineral was first exhibited in a pure state and applied to medical purposes by Basil Valentine, a Benedictine monk of Erfurt, in the beginning of the sixteenth century; he gave it to his hogs, who throve marvellously. This is to be attributed to the arsenic contained in the drug, which fattens when taken in small quantities--a fact well known to the peasants of Styria and Lower Austria. Basil next gave it to his monks, who fell sick; from which he drew the following conclusion: "This metal suits hogs; it does not suit monks." Hence its name of antimony. Thirty years later Paracelsus took up the study of antimony, and endeavored to introduce its use, with that of other minerals, in medicine. This would have been to break completely with tradition; but Paracelsus was half-cracked, and not very intelligible. The sixteenth century was the age of alchemy, especially in Germany, where it was ardently pursued, in connection with the occult sciences, by men who rivalled Paracelsus in obscurity. In France transcendental chemistry found less favor, and there was early a split between the pseudo-mystics and the chemists. The former cultivated astrology; but astrology, as an aid to medicine, had quite fallen into disrepute in the seventeenth century, being abandoned to low vagabond quacks. Chemistry, however, was making gradual progress and striving to establish its place in medicine. The sympathy manifested for this science at Montpellier was quite enough to indispose toward it the faculty of Paris. The absurd blunders into which its association with alchemy had betrayed it in times past weighed also on its reputation; but, above all, the contempt for antiquity manifested by its adepts was calculated to condemn it in the eyes {689} of the majority of the physicians, brought up as they were in reverence for all that chemistry pretended to reform or destroy.

There were not wanting, however, conciliatory spirits, who strove to effect a compromise between the past and the present, and make room for the new chemical theories in the received system. It has already been observed how Galen's theory of the humors of the body had been elaborated: all medical language was grounded upon it. [Footnote 105] Disease was the result of the vitiation of these humors, each humor having its special morbid product. To expel this vitiated humor was the task of the doctor; but why might not minerals be added to his pharmacopoeia, without interfering with his principles? This seemed reasonable; and as a matter of theory the faculty were not unwilling to let it pass. The difference arose on the practical question. All were agreed that the peccant humor was to be expelled; but the faithful followers of Hippocrates attached great importance to awaiting what was called the _coction_ of the humors. This was the work of nature, which was employed in making an effort which the physician was called only to second,--an effort of which fever was but the symptom. It was esteemed a very nice point to hit off the proper moment, and not prevent or disturb the crisis which was thus preparing: hence the need of mild measures. Whoever will refer to the apothecary's bill in the first scene of Molière's _Malade Imaginaire_ will see that lenifying, softening, tempering, and refreshing, were the avowed objects of the drugs administered. Such was Hippocratic medicine; mild, at least, in theory. We must make one exception as respects bleeding: these enemies of violent measures bled with a vengeance; they shed torrents of blood. They bled old men of eighty, and babies two months, nay, even two days old; and this "without inconvenience,"--so they said. We presume some of the sufferers survived,--thanks to a strong constitution. Riolan says that there are twenty-four pounds of blood in the human body, and that twenty can be lost without causing death; _ergo_, it is keeping within very reasonable bounds to deprive a man of only the half of his blood. [Footnote 106]

[Footnote 105: M. Raynaud, to whose amusing work we are again largely indebted, notices that much of this language still survives in the diction of the common people. Many of their ideas and forms of expression still reflect the old doctrine of humorism; just as they have retained many words and idioms now become obsolete in the upper and more shifting strata of society.]

[Footnote 106: The famous Guy de la Brosse refused to be bled. He called bleeding the remedy of sanguinary pedants, and said he would rather die then submit to the operation. "And he did die," says M. Basalis, a brother doctor; adding, "The devil will bleed him in the next world, has such a rascal and unbeliever deserves." Such are the imprecations hurled at the man who ventured on refusing to die _in proper form_. Could Molière have written anything more sublimely comic?]

The object of bleeding, of course, was the expulsion of the vitiated humors supposed to be contained in it; but it is hardly reconcilable with the doctrine of waiting for their _coction_ to commence operations by attacking a disease at once with a lancet. But this is one of Guy Patin's primary convictions, as well as of numbers of his brethren, and they conscientiously acted on the same. It was otherwise as respected emetics. Antimony administered in the potent quantities then used was a most frightful emetic. No one in those days thought of giving infinitesimal doses, or suspected that what was poisonous in large, might be salutary in fractional, proportions. It was reserved for Rasoni to discover that antimony could be thus beneficially administered. And so the whole question lay between those who held as a principle that the peccant humor was not to be expelled till after _coction_, and those who maintained that the sooner the morbific matter was ejected from the system the better.

It is true that the horrible prostration of strength consequent on this summary process was sufficient to alarm men's minds, and furnish a reasonable topic to the opponents of {690} antimony. The quarrel occupied a whole century; of course we cannot attempt to go into even its most elementary details. In 1566, the parliament prohibited the use of this drug. The year 1666 saw it rehabilitated by the same body. The motive of the first decree was the report of the faculty that antimony was an incorrigible poison. The idea, as we just now observed, that diminution of quantity might effect what was unattainable by correctives, did not occur to the medical mind of that day. In 1615 there was a fresh unanimous decree against antimony, also indorsed by parliament; but the scientific world was still on the search for a _corrective_, and converts, or perverts, were being secretly made within the very sanctuary of the faculty. In 1638, the dean, Hardoun de Saint-Jacques, suddenly published an incomplete pharmaceutic codex, which had been in course of preparation for twelve years. In this dictionary antimonial wine actually figured in its alphabetical place. How had the enemy contrived to creep into the citadel? No one could say. This incident was the occasion of a deluge of pamphlets, of which the very form and language are, for the most part, like a dead letter to us. Hippocrates, Holy Scripture, history, and the fathers, are all called into court. Even the definition of antimony gives rise to much discussion; and it is gravely argued whether Adam, when conferring names in Paradise, named this drug, and if so, what he called it. Even the troubles of the Fronde did not check this medical civil war. Antimony had quite a literature of its own. Guy Patin, of course, was inimical, but a little cautious while the question of his deanship was impending. Afterward he launches out; he hates chemistry, he hates antimony, he hates Guénaut, who is its warm advocate, and is beside Cardinal Mazarin's physician (Guy Patin is always in political opposition). Guénaut, he says, has poisoned his wife, daughter, and two sons-in-law with this drug; at last he poisons himself, and dies a martyr to his infatuation. And then the faculty have twice condemned antimony. That is more than enough for Guy Patin. However, a great event turned the balance in his favor. During the campaign of 1658, the king, then twenty years of age, was attacked by typhus. Valot had been absent a few days, sent by Louis, as the journal tells us, to settle a quarrel between the physicians and surgeons who were treating the Maréchal de Castelnau for a mortal wound--poor marshal! He hastened back to his master, and fell to work vigorously, sparing neither bleeding nor dosing; but the king got worse, and Guénaut was sent for. The court-physicians--Valot, Esprit, Daquin, Yvelin, beside a local doctor--were all there disputing over the monarch's sinking body. A great consultation is now held, presided over by the cardinal; and he votes for antimony. It was given. The king took an ounce, and marvellous are the recorded effects. However, whether in consequence or in spite of the dose, he recovered. Louis was at that time his people's darling and idol; they adored their young monarch, and he had been saved by Guénaut and antimony! Guy Patin's embarrassment at this crisis is a little ludicrous. The dose, he urges in extenuation, was small; but he concludes that, after all, what saved the king "was his innocence, his youth and strength, nine good bleedings, and the prayers of good people like himself and others." Defections now became numerous, and the faculty was in a false position. In fact, most of the doctors gave antimony in spite of the two decrees, the last of which interdicted the mention of it. In 1666 the embargo was finally removed, after a tedious and ponderous process, as were all processes in those days, before the parliament; and the doctors were henceforth permitted "to give the said emetic wine for the cure of maladies, to write and dispute about it,"' etc., but it was not lawful for persons to take it {691} without their advice. The question had been decided in the faculty by ninety-two doctors against ten. The decree came to sadden the last days of Guy Patin, and of a few more respectable old stagers, who were unable to advance with their age.

But this internal conflict was not the only one which the faculty had to sustain. There was the perennial dispute with the surgeons. Surgery and medicine are twin sciences, if they be not rather branches of one and the same. Hippocrates, Galen, Celsus, made no practical distinction between them; nevertheless, they came to be entirely separated in mediaeval practice. Two causes may be assigned for this: the first was the quasi-ecclesiastical character of the medical profession in early days, which rendered the shedding of blood and other operations incompatible with the position of men who were either clerics or bound by clerical rules. Still, though they could not themselves draw blood, they could prescribe blood-letting and other sanguinary operations; and this led, of course, to the existence of another class, paid to carry out their orders. But a second and far more enduring cause was the strong prejudice existing in feudal times against manual labor as degrading. In vain might the surgeons urge that it was absurd to regard as merely mechanical an occupation which necessitated much scientific knowledge. The university shared the feelings of the faculty on this point; and while admitting the doctors into its fellowship, rejected the surgeons. Excluded from this fraternity of liberal science, the surgeons gave themselves diligently to professional study. As early as the fourteenth century we meet with their celebrated confraternity, placed under the patronage of Sts. Cosmas and Damian, which boasted of its foundation by St. Louis, and which maintained its existence for five centuries. The quarrel with the doctors began in the middle of the fifteenth century, and terminated only on the eve of the Revolution, when St. Cosmas's College and the faculty were both alike to share the universal shipwreck of all the ancient institutions.

The surgeons had long been in the habit of availing themselves of the aid of the barbers in certain ordinary operations, and bleeding was at last entirely abandoned to their hands. Just, however, as the faculty wished to depress the surgeons, and the latter were desirous to raise themselves to an equality with the faculty, so also the surgeons were resolved to keep down their servants the barbers, who, on their part, aspired to rise in the professional scale. The policy of the faculty was to foster their rivalry, and thus keep a check upon both; but as the nearest enemy is always the most dreaded, the time came when it was judged prudent to elevate the barbers, whose very inferiority rendered them less obnoxious, in order the better to make head against the surgeons; and so the faculty adopted the barbers, in whom it hoped to find docile clients, in order to mortify its unsubmissive children. It magnificently compared this measure to the call of the Gentiles and rejection of ungrateful Israel. But the barbers held their heads up now, and requested to study anatomy. Here was a difficulty. University regulations strictly enjoined that all public lessons should be in Latin; but what was the use of talking Latin to barbers? So the lecture was to be in Latin, and the explanation in French. Apparently to facilitate the comprehension of the classic tongue by the unlearned, the use of that whimsical Latin which Molière has so happily caricatured then first began. A clever compromise was now supposed to have been effected. A doctor was to teach in the amphitheatre of the faculty without touching the body; a surgeon was to dissect; the barbers were to be present, and try to understand. This was in 1498.

Further concessions followed; and in 1505 the faculty allowed the barbers to be inscribed on the dean's {692} register, and, after passing through an examination, to be formally received as scholars. They paid, however, for their lessons, and took an oath never to prescribe an internal remedy, but to have recourse to the doctors for the medical treatment of their patients. On these conditions the proudest of scientific corporations extended its protection to, and even took into a certain fellowship, a profession not only humble, but so much despised, that in Germany at that period barbers were not admitted into any trade corporation. The credit of the king's barber--an important personage, who enjoyed familiar opportunities for asking favors--had something perhaps to say to the prosperity of this trade in France. And the barbers continued to prosper; it was their interest, indeed, to keep well with the faculty, whose protecting hand once withdrawn, they would helplessly fall back under the cruel bondage of their old masters. But as time went on, they grew confident. The troubles of the League unhinged society, and for some years we find them neglecting to take the oath of fidelity. Meanwhile surgery had attained a proud position, and at the end of the sixteenth century was much in advance of the other sciences, both in its spirit of independent inquiry and in experimental practice.

Many eminent names illustrate its annals at this period. At the head of the corporation was Ambroise Paré, the restorer--we might almost say the creator--of modern surgery. He had been a barber's boy in his youth, and still treated his old associates with much consideration. Perhaps this honorable notice helped to turn their heads a little, for they actually began to set up school for themselves, and to maintain theses. This got them a snub from the faculty, and a prohibition from parliament, which recalled to their recollection the ancient statute which permitted their intervention only "_pro furunculis, bocchiis, et apostumatibus_." But the time was past for enforcing such laws; every day the barbers more and more emancipated themselves from thraldom; and in 1629 they obtained the right of having their receptions presided over by the king's barber or by his lieutenant.

The surgeons meanwhile had left no stone unturned to get admission into the university, to have a recognized right to lecture publicly, and to receive the chancellor's benediction. They were several times granted the king's license to this effect; but the university disregarded the royal injunction, and even set at naught a Papal bull which, in 1579, recognized the surgeon's title to the chancellor's benediction. There was a consequent _appel comme d'abus_ from that Gallican body to the parliament. Nevertheless, more than one chancellor was found to comply with the Pope's rescript.

Such, then, was the situation of parties in the beginning of Louie XIV.'s reign. Three rival corporations existed; in principle united, but mutually independent. There was the faculty, petrified as it were, in its immobility, demanding from the others a submission it could not obtain; there was the corporation of surgeons, intermediary between the learned bodies and the trading _bourgeoisie_, wearing the gown on days of ceremony, holding examinations, conferring degrees, but keeping shop; [Footnote 107] and there were the barbers, with neither gown nor school, but living at the expense of the two former classes, and, by long prescription, freely practising surgery, and even medicine to a certain extent. The reasons for old distinctions had passed away--nothing remained but inveterate rivalries. Anatomy was the perpetual theatre for dissension. The surgeons never had resigned themselves to the secondary part allotted to them. They claimed {693} to teach what they understood at least as well as their superiors. But how to get bodies? The dean of the faculty had an exclusive claim to those of all executed criminals, and none other were procurable. Accordingly, whenever an execution occurred there was a regular scramble for the poor wretch's body. The students of surgery and the barber-apprentices assembled on the Place de Grève, where they had no difficulty in finding recruits amongst the rabble. Scarcely had the executioner done his work, when these bands, armed with swords and sticks, rushed on the yet warm corpse, which was carried off by the victors to some shop, in which they barricaded themselves against the _maréchaussée_. Many of these disgraceful acts went unpunished. Sometimes the faculty would despatch an official to claim the body; he was always sent about his business; and then recourse was had to law. The report of an unfortunate _huissier_, who was actor and victim in one of these scenes, may be seen in a _procès-verbal_ of the time. He was sent to seize a body which had been taken to St. Cosmas's. There he found three professors (in cap and gown!) giving an anatomical demonstration to a large audience. He was received with yells, and cruelly beaten. A force coming to his rescue, the students cut up the corpse into bits rather than let the faculty get it.

[Footnote 107: They hang up at their windows as a sign three emblematic boxes, surmounted with a banner bearing the figures of Sts. Cosmas and Damian.]

A common interest and a common hatred of their domineering antagonist ended by drawing together the two inferior orders, and finally led to their reunion. The increasing number of the barbers, unrestrained by any rule, and unrestrainable by any law, threatened to swamp surgery altogether; and so the men of letters made up their minds to extend the hand of fellowship to the artisans, and receive them back, not as slaves any longer, but as brethren. In 1655 the surgeons swallowed this bitter pill; they took upon themselves the shame of uniting with the barbers, and the barbers entered on the privileges of the surgeons. Parliament ratified the contract, and the faculty was scarcely named in the affair. It was left stranded. Its servants, whom it had raised from the dust to do its work and fight its battles, had betrayed it and gone off with arms and baggage to the enemy's camp. But it was not long without perceiving that it might draw profit from what seemed a discomfiture. The surgeons had conferred their privileges on the barbers; in return they had, of course, accepted the liabilities of their new associates. Now the barbers were bound by contract to an oath of fidelity, and other obligations of a pecuniary nature, to the faculty. This body accordingly claimed either that the union effected should be dissolved, or that both companies should be subject to the engagements by which the barbers had bound themselves. It renewed at the same time all its former claims of supremacy, and its old prohibitions against teaching and conferring degrees, but, above all, against the assumption of the _cap and gown_.

Three years did this process last, which occupies a voluminous place in the parliamentary registers. The surgeons eventually lost their cause; and that which did not a little contribute thereto was the manifestation of their own miserable internal dissensions. "St. Luke has been stronger than St. Cosmas!" exclaimed the triumphant Guy Patin at the news of this great victory. Seventy-two doctors went in procession, in grand costume, to thank the president, Lamoignon, and the avocat-général, Talon; and in order to testify their special gratitude to the latter, it was decreed that, having well merited of the faculty, he and his family should be attended gratis in perpetuity. A magnificent edition of Hippocrates in five folio volumes was presented along with this decree, inclosed in a silver box. For several days not one of the crest-fallen {694} surgeons was to be seen in the streets, and six of their number, it is said, fell sick. Gladly would they now have dissolved the unhappy _mésalliance_ they had contracted, but it was too late. Both barbers and surgeons, indeed, alike felt that the defeat was final; but on the latter it must have fallen with the most crushing severity. Before the close of the year the chair in which Ambroise Paré had sat--the symbol of departed greatness--was removed. They had to pay the impost, take the oath of fidelity--no humiliation was spared them. Thus forced into a preposterous alliance, which was made the pretext for its degradation, the surgical profession languished for many years. The faculty on this occasion certainly committed its worst fault. For paltry questions of precedence it retarded for a century the progress of surgery, which did not emerge from the inferior position to which the decree of 1660 had reduced it until time and necessity led to a reconstitution of surgery and shaving as two distinct professions. It was then that Louis XV., at the instance of La Peyronie, created the Royal Academy of Surgery, which furnished so many illustrious names to science in the eighteenth century, and which would doubtless have extinguished the old faculty if the Revolution had not saved it the trouble by destroying them both.

Our space forbids us to notice the other great battle of the faculty during the period which has immediately fallen under our consideration--that which it waged and won against the Montpellier doctors. But the Montpellier school would deserve a notice by itself; and the interest which gathers round it has been heightened by the important questions, physiological and philosophical, connected with its name in the present day.

A word or two more, and we have done. When Molière was about to deal the faculty its most grievous wound, it was triumphant on all sides. Yet, as a system, it was already doomed to that destruction which had fallen on the whole scholastic method in science prevailing in the middle ages. Hippocrates, it is true, furnished the text-book of medicine, but it was Hippocrates virtually commented by Aristotle, as all the old medical phraseology and medical argumentations abundantly prove. Much of the ridicule attached to that venerable body against which Molière has raised an inextinguishable laugh had its origin in the retention of this language, with all the quiddities of the schools, and of those curious dialectic exercises which formed the approved method of mental gymnastics in the middle ages long after they had been discarded everywhere else. The rest of the ridicule which falls to the due share of the faculty must be laid to the account of the selfishness, pride, and egotism inherent in human nature, but which always strike us more forcibly when exhibited in a state of things foreign to current ideas and manners.

In conclusion, we would point out what we conceive may be esteemed as a sound point in the system of that day--its treatment of man as a whole. There is no divorce with these old doctors between body and soul. Modern medical science has affected to treat the body apart from any regard to the spiritual portion of man's nature. While allowing the immense progress made in medicine and surgery in modern times, we cannot but feel that a serious error was committed in dividing what our fathers deemed inseparable. The materialistic errors of the eighteenth century, and, in particular, the materialism so prevalent in the learned medical body, are a standing comment on the systems which made clear decks of those fundamental principles which had come down to us from the earliest antiquity, and which had received the sanction of the Christian schools, in whose teaching physiology and psychology were always closely united; the study of the soul crowning {695} that of physiology. We witness with satisfaction a strong reaction amongst many members of the French medical body toward views which harmonize thoroughly with the old doctrine of the Angel of the School, laid down long before those modern discoveries which are beginning slowly to lead men back, not to the pedantry of the olden time, but to those ancient paths from which our fathers would have deemed it heresy to wander.

From The Sixpenny Magazine.

HANDWRITING.

Men, like trees, have a curved line which, touching at the extremities, forms a figure which is the general estimate of their characters. Individual traits are lost in the harmony of them all. The hand may be delicate; the face coarse; there may be contradiction between the eye and the brow, between the motive power and the object desired; but still the man is a unity unlike any other man, and yet similar in original traits.

To tell character by confining one's self to one exhibition of a faculty, would be like trying to tell the climate of a place by staying there one day. But in the other extreme, the collecting of facts proves nothing unless there have been opportunities for the display of other qualities than the ones in which the person is not interested. I, for instance, always dislike making new acquaintances; I get sulky whenever it is forced upon me; that does not prove that I may not be pleasant enough when allowed to act as I please.

One man, with no taste for a certain pursuit, is forced into it, kept at it, and, as he gives evidence of dislike, is accused of being almost a fool. Wonderful that in something else he should be a proficient at the first attempt. Yet it is not the doing a thing, but the getting pay for it, that is difficult; not the reading of character, but the applying it. What value is the being able to understand why men's handwritings vary, save as interesting?

Yet, perhaps, many a reader will glance over this and be inclined to acquire the skill.

First, does the man write often moderately, or very nicely? Did he write in a hurry, or not? Lastly, is his temperament nervous or inclined to be heavy?

Bad writing may arise from haste, nervousness, and want of practice; but the handwriting of the illiterate is intrinsically different from that of a nervous scholar. A man who writes badly when in haste must be a nervous man; so scrawly writing may be reduced to want of self-command. The man of business asks of the scholar, "Why can't you sell your labor and become rich?" The scholar may ask, "Why don't you give your money and write a book?" It is as impossible for one to change as the other. Poverty of brains can be no more overcome than poverty of purse. The right plan is for the two to divide. Money for talent. Ridiculous for money to wait for brains, or brains to be contemptuous of money. There must be help. Look at the writing! That nervous sweep of the pen is not the characteristic of a man to sway material matters; he is not thick-headed enough; the blows crush him.

On the other hand, that round, manly, firm chirography, regular as a troop of horses, indicates outward show, but there is no brain, sentiment, intense sensibility behind. {696} A bird is in a quiver of excitement at the least noise, but a cow stands looking on without the least alarm. Women write small. Indolence, affectation, and weakness are indicated, and indolence is nature's guard for nervous persons.

Take particular instances. A is a man of medium size, high forehead, hair of the Yankee brownish hue, eyes deep-set and rather small, nose small, mouth firm, chin rather weak. Physically, he is inclined to be of a nervous, sanguine temperament; hope large, caution large; animal propensities strong. He is a man of business, writes considerably, generally about business. His habit of mind exact. Now, what will be his characteristic handwriting? Ask half a dozen different men who are interested in judging of character, and compare their answers. His habits of business will have made his writing to a certain extent formal. He will have tried to make it a plain hand. His long practice in keeping books will have taught him to be able to write large or small; his nervousness will have taught him to use abbreviations; his solidity and preference for mercantile pursuits will have made him always more or less subject to self-command. He writes, then, not like the man of mere intellect, to get his thoughts upon paper for preservation, but for others to read. He thinks constantly how he will affect others; how they will understand him. He employs formal expressions because they are better understood. He says, "Rec'd three bales goods," instead of telling in many words the same fact, but writes not obscurely, but with particular care that they shall be read.

A lawyer will fill out a writ, and, save an undulating line, no one but the initiated would understand that a legal phrase was implied. The man of business deals with facts. The facts may be expressed briefly, in a formal way, hurriedly, but always with the intention of being read. That some business men do write badly is nothing to this purpose. I am speaking of the desire in you to write plainly.

Now my man, described, sits down to tell his correspondent that a certain lot of goods has arrived, all save one package. He writes rapidly, exactly, and with the wish that the others shall read what he says at once and without mistake. His nervous power would urge him to haste and carelessness, but his business education will restrain him. How will his writing show it? His mind is not particularly active. He is not thinking what to say, but to explain an understood fact. I think, all these circumstances taken into consideration, his letters will be open, frank regular, round, and well-looking, but at the ends of the longest wider, and at the tops and bottoms of long letters will be a perceptible twitch as if he grew there first a little impatient at the delay.

Boldness and delicacy of handwriting may not indicate more than straight-forwardness or caution. A prudent, secretive man generally writes fine, generally also boldly. A passionate nature is confined, and, unless great ability of pencraft is acquired, will rather betray his interest by weakness and indecision in his letters than by excess of power. A fine writer is either one who holds himself in control or a thick-headed nobody, a calm, passionless man, or a mere copyist, for to pay attention to the mere form, augurs that the man's mind is not very much excited by his theme.

Writing full of unnecessary thrusts and turns betokens a man undecided and wavering. A direct up and down style is his who cares nothing for ornament--prefers comfort with regularity to luxury without. A slovenly man scrawls his own nature. A timid man writes commandingly, with unequal heaviness of line. Indolent men avoid trouble and write small. A bold, careless, obstinate man writes variably, at one time well, at another ill. Nothing can charm a man, especially if careless himself, like neatness in the letters of a lady.

{697}

From The Lamp.

ALL-HALLOW EVE; OR, THE TEST OF FUTURITY.

BY ROBERT CURTIS.