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Title: The doctor, &c., vol. 1 (of 7)

Author: Robert Southey

Release date: November 1, 2022 [eBook #69282]

Most recently updated: October 19, 2024

Language: English

Original publication: United Kingdom: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, Green and Longman, 1834

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/69282

Credits: Ron Swanson

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE DOCTOR, &C., VOL. 1 (OF 7) ***

THE DOCTOR,

&c.

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

BUTLER'S REMAINS.

THE DOCTOR,

&c.

VOL. I.

LONDON:

LONGMAN, REES, ORME, BROWN, GREEN AND LONGMAN.

1834.

LONDON:

PRINTED BY W. NICOL, CLEVELAND-ROW, ST. JAMES'S.

PRELUDE OF MOTTOES.

Now they that like it may: the rest may chuse.

G. WITHER.

Je veux à face descouverte qu'on sçache que je fay le fol. Et pourquoy ne me le sera-t-il permis, si le grand Solon dans Athenes, ne douta de le faire pour apporter un grand bien à sa Republique? La Republique dont j'ay charge, est ce petit monde que Dieu a estably en moy; pour la conservation duquel je ne scay meilleur moyen que de tromper mes afflictions par quelques honnestes jeux d'esprit; appellez-les bouffonneries si ainsi le voulez.

PASQUIER.

If you are so bold as to venture a blowing-up, look closely to it! for the plot lies deadly deep, and 'twill be between your legs before you be aware of it.—But of all things have a care of putting it in your pocket, for fear it takes fire, or runs away with your breeches. And if you can shun it, read it not when you are alone; or at least not late in the evening; for the venom is strongest about midnight, and seizes most violently upon the head when the party is by himself. I shall not tell you one line of what is in it; and therefore consider well what you do, and look to yourself. But if you be resolved to meddle, be sure have a care of catching cold, and keep to a moderate diet; for there is danger and jeopardy in it besides.

DR. EACHARD.

—For those faults of barbarism, Doric dialect, extemporanean stile, tautologies, apish imitation, a rhapsody of rags gathered together from several dung-hills, excrements of authors, toyes and fopperies, confusedly tumbled out, without art, invention, judgement, wit, learning, harsh, raw, rude, phantasticall, absurd, insolent, indiscreet, ill-composed, indigested, vain, scurrile, idle, dull, and dry:—I confess all; ('tis partly affected;) thou canst not think worse of me than I do of myself. 'Tis not worth the reading! I yield it. I desire thee not to lose time in perusing so vain a subject. I should be peradventure loth myself to read him or thee so writing; 'tis not operæ pretium. All I say is this, that I have precedents for it.

BURTON.

A foolish extravagant spirit, full of forms, figures, shapes, objects, ideas, apprehensions, motions, revolutions; these are begot in the ventricle of memory, nourished in the womb of pia mater, and delivered upon the mellowing of the occasion. But the gift is good in those in whom it is acute, and I am thankful for it.

LOVE'S LABOUR'S LOST.

If the world like it not, so much the worse for them.

COWPER.

—un boschetto,

Donne per quello givan fior cogliendo,

Con diletto, co' quel, co' quel dicendo;

Eccolo, eccol! . . che à?—è fiordaliso!

Va là per le viole;

Più colà per le rose, cole, cole,

Vaghe amorose.

O me, che' l prun mi punge!

Quell' altra me v' aggiunge.

U', ù, o, ch' è quel che salta?

Un grillo! un grillo!

Venite qua, correte,

Ramponzoli cogliete;

E' non con essi!

Si, son!—colei o colei

Vien qua, vien qua per funghi, un micolino

Piu colà, più cola per sermollino.

UGOLINO UBALDINI or

FRANCO SACCHETTI.

If the particulars seem too large or to be over tediously insisted upon, consider in how many impertinent and trifling discourses and actions the best of us do consume far more hours than the perusal of this requires minutes, and yet think it no tediousness: and let them call to mind how many volumes this age imprints and reads which are foolish if not wicked. Let them be persuaded likewise, that I have not written this for those who have no need thereof, or to shew my own wit or compendiousness but to instruct the ignorant; to whom I should more often speak in vain, if I did not otherwhile by repetitions and circumlocutions, stir up their affections, and beat into their understandings the knowledge and feeling of those things which I deliver. Yea, let them know that I know those expressions will be both pleasing and profitable to some which they imagine to be needless and superabundant; and that I had rather twenty nice critics should censure me for a word here and there superfluous than that one of those other should want that which might explain my meanings to their capacities, and so make frustrate all my labour to those who have most need of it, and for whom it was chiefly intended.

G. WITHER.

Tempus ad hoc mecum latuit, portuque resedit,

Nec fuit audaces impetus ire vias.

Nunc animi venere; juvat nunc denique funem

Solvere:——

Ancora sublata est; terræ, portusque valete!

Imus; habet ventos nostra carina suos.

WALLIUS.

POSTSCRIPT.

There was a certain Pisander whose name has been preserved in one of the proverbial sayings of the Greeks, because he lived in continual fear of seeing his own ghost. How often have I seen mine while arranging these volumes for publication, and carrying them through the press!

Twenty years have elapsed since the intention of composing them was conceived, and the composition commenced, in what manner and in what mood the reader will presently be made acquainted. The vicissitudes which in the course of those years have befallen every country in Europe are known to every one; and the changes, which, during such an interval, must have occurred in a private family, there are few who may not, from their own sad experience, readily apprehend.

Circumstances which when they were touched upon in these volumes were of present importance, and excited a lively interest, belong now to the history of the past. They who were then the great performers upon the theatre of public life have fretted their hour and disappeared from the stage. Many who were living and flourishing when their names were here sportively or severely introduced, are gone to their account. The domestic circle which the introduction describes has in the ordinary course of things been broken up; some of its members are widely separated from others, and some have been laid to rest. The reader may well believe that certain passages which were written with most joyousness of heart, have been rendered purely painful to the writer by time and change: and that some of his sweetest thoughts come to him in chewing the cud, like wormwood and gall.—But it is a wholesome bitterness.

He has neither expunged nor altered any thing on any of these accounts. It would be weakness to do this on the score of his own remembrances, and in the case of allusions to public affairs and to public men it would be folly. The Almanack of the current year will be an old one as soon as next year begins.

It is the writer's determination to remain unknown; and they who may suppose that

By certain signs here set in sundry place,

they have discovered him, will deceive themselves. A Welsh Triad says that the three unconcealable traits of a person by which he shall be known, are the glance of his eye, the pronunciation of his speech, and the mode of his self-motion;—in briefer English, his look, his voice, and his gait. There are no such characteristics by which an author can be identified. He must be a desperate mannerist who can be detected by his style, and a poor proficient in his art if he cannot at any time so vary it, as to put the critic upon a false scent. Indeed every day's experience shews that they who assume credit to themselves, and demand it from others for their discrimination in such things, are continually and ridiculously mistaken.

On that side the author is safe; he has a sure reliance upon the honour as well as the discretion of the very few to whom he is naturally or necessarily known; and if the various authors to whom the Book will be ascribed by report, should derive any gratification from the perusal, he requests of them in return that they will favour his purpose by allowing such reports to pass uncontradicted.

CONTENTS.

PRELUDE OF MOTTOES.

POSTSCRIPT.

CHAPTER VII. A. I.

A FAMILY PARTY AT A NEXT DOOR NEIGHBOUR'S.

Good Sir, reject it not, although it bring

Appearances of some fantastic thing

At first unfolding!

GEORGE WITHER TO THE KING.

CHAPTER VI. A. I.

SHEWING THAT AN AUTHOR MAY MORE EASILY BE KEPT AWAKE BY HIS OWN IMAGINATIONS THAN PUT TO SLEEP BY THEM HIMSELF, WHATEVER MAY BE THEIR EFFECT UPON HIS READERS.

Thou sleepest worse than if a mouse should be forced to take up her lodging in a cat's ear: a little infant that breeds its teeth, should it lie with thee, would cry out as if thou wert the more unquiet bedfellow.

WEBSTER.

CHAPTER V. A. I.

SOMETHING CONCERNING THE PHILOSOPHY OF DREAMS, AND THE AUTHOR'S EXPERIENCE IN AERIAL HORSEMANSHIP.

If a dream should come in now to make you afear'd,

With a windmill on his head and bells at his beard,

Would you straight wear your spectacles here at your toes,

And your boots on your brows and your spurs on your nose?

BEN JONSON.

CHAPTER IV. A. I.

A CONVERSATION AT THE BREAKFAST TABLE.

Tel condamne mon coq-à-l'âne qui un jour en justifiera le bon sens.

LA PRETIEUSE.

CHAPTER III. A. I.

THE UTILITY OF POCKETS. A COMPLIMENT PROPERLY RECEIVED.

La tasca è propria cosa da Christiani.

BENEDETTO VARCHI.

CHAPTER II. A. I.

CONCERNING DEDICATIONS, PRINTERS TYPES, AND IMPERIAL INK.

Il y aura des clefs, et des ouvertures de mes secrets.

LA PRETIEUSE.

DEDICATION.

CHAPTER I. A. I.

NO BOOK CAN BE COMPLETE WITHOUT A PREFACE.

I see no cause but men may pick their teeth,

Though Brutus with a sword did kill himself.

TAYLOR, THE WATER POET.

ANTE-PREFACE.

I here present thee with a hive of bees, laden some with wax, and some with honey. Fear not to approach! There are no Wasps, there are no Hornets here. If some wanton Bee should chance to buzz about thine ears, stand thy ground and hold thy hands: there's none will sting thee if thou strike not first. If any do, she hath honey in her bag will cure thee too.

QUARLES.

PREFACE.

Oh for a quill plucked from a Seraph's wing!

YOUNG.

INITIAL CHAPTER.

᾿Εξ οὗ δὴ τὰ πρῶτα.

HOMER.

THE DOCTOR,

&c.

Eccoti il libro; mettivi ben cura

Iddio t' ajuti e dia buona ventura.

ORL. INNAM.

CHAPTER I. P. I.

THE SUBJECT OF THIS HISTORY AT HOME AND AT TEA.

If thou be a severe sour complexioned man then I here disallow thee to be a competent judge.

IZAAK WALTON.

CHAPTER II. P. I.

WHEREIN CERTAIN QUESTIONS ARE PROPOSED CONCERNING TIME, PLACE AND PERSONS.

Quis? quid? ubi? quibus auxiliis? cur? quomodo? quando?

TECHNICAL VERSE.

CHAPTER III. P. I.

WHOLESOME OBSERVATIONS UPON THE VANITY OF FAME.

Whosoever shall address himself to write of matters of instruction, or of any other argument of importance, it behoveth that before he enter thereinto, he should resolutely determine with himself in what order he will handle the same; so shall he best accomplish that he hath undertaken, and inform the understanding, and help the memory of the Reader.

GWILLIM'S DISPLAY OF HERALDRY.

CHAPTER IV. P. I.

BIRTH AND PARENTAGE OF DR. DOVE, WITH THE DESCRIPTION OF A YEOMAN'S HOUSE IN THE WEST RIDING OF YORKSHIRE A HUNDRED YEARS AGO.

Non possidentem multa vocaveris

Recte beatum; rectius occupat

Nomen beati, qui Deorum

Muneribus sapienter uti,

Duramque callet pauperiem pati,

Pejusque letho flagitium timet.

HORACE, L. 4, Od. 9.

CHAPTER V. P. I.

EXTENSION OF THE SCIENCE OF PHYSIOGNOMY, WITH SOME REMARKS UPON THE PRACTICAL USES OF CRANIOLOGY.

Hanc ergo scientiam blande excipiamus, hilariterque amplectamur, ut vere nostram et de nobismet ipsis tractantem; quam qui non amat, quam qui non amplectitur, nec philosophiam amat, neque suæ vitæ discrimina curat.

BAPTISTA PORTA.

CHAPTER VI. P. I.

A COLLECTION OF BOOKS NONE OF WHICH ARE INCLUDED AMONGST THE PUBLICATIONS OF ANY SOCIETY FOR THE PROMOTION OF KNOWLEDGE RELIGIOUS OR PROFANE.—HAPPINESS IN HUMBLE LIFE.

Felix ille animi, divisque simillimus ipsis,

Quem non mordaci resplendens gloria fuco

Solicitat, non fastosi mala gaudia luxus,

Sed tacitos sinit ire dies, et paupere cultu

Exigit innocuæ tranquilla silentia vitæ.

POLITIAN.

CHAPTER VII. P. I.

RUSTIC PHILOSOPHY. AN EXPERIMENT UPON MOONSHINE.

Quien comienza en juventud

A bien obrar,

Señal es de no errar

En senetud.

PROVERBIOS DEL MARQUES DE SANTILLANA.

CHAPTER VIII. P. I.

A KIND SCHOOLMASTER AND A HAPPY SCHOOL BOY.

Though happily thou wilt say that wands be to be wrought when they are green, lest they rather break than bend when they be dry, yet know also that he that bendeth a twig because he would see if it would bow by strength may chance to have a crooked tree when he would have a straight.

EUPHUES.

INTERCHAPTER I.

REMARKS IN THE PRINTING OFFICE. THE AUTHOR CONFESSES A DISPOSITION TO GARRULITY. PROPRIETY OF PROVIDING CERTAIN CHAPTERS FOR THE RECEPTION OF HIS EXTRANEOUS DISCOURSE. CHOICE OF AN APPELLATION FOR SUCH CHAPTERS.

Perque vices aliquid, quod tempora longa videri

Non sinat, in medium vacuas referamus ad aures.

OVID.

CHAPTER IX. P. I.

EXCEPTIONS TO ONE OF KING SOLOMON'S RULES—A WINTER'S EVENING AT DANIEL'S FIRESIDE.

These are my thoughts; I might have spun them out into a greater length, but I think a little plot of ground, thick sown, is better than a great field which, for the most part of it, lies fallow.

NORRIS.

CHAPTER X. P. I.

ONE WHO WAS NOT SO WISE AS HIS FRIENDS COULD HAVE WISHED, AND YET QUITE AS HAPPY AS IF HE HAD BEEN WISER. NEPOTISM NOT CONFINED TO POPES.

There are of madmen as there are of tame,

All humoured not alike.———Some

Apish and fantastic;

And though 'twould grieve a soul to see God's image

So blemished and defaced, yet do they act

Such antic and such pretty lunacies,

That spite of sorrow, they will make you smile.

DEKKER.

CHAPTER XI. P. I.

A WORD TO THE READER, SHEWING WHERE WE ARE, AND HOW WE CAME HERE, AND WHEREFORE; AND WHITHER WE ARE GOING.

'Tis my venture

On your retentive wisdom.

BEN JONSON.

CHAPTER XII. P. I.

A HISTORY NOTICED WHICH IS WRITTEN BACKWARD. THE CONFUSION OF TONGUES AN ESPECIAL EVIL FOR SCHOOLBOYS.

For never in the long and tedious tract

Of slavish grammar was I made to plod;

No tyranny of Rules my patience rackt;

I served no prenticehood to any Rod;

But in the freedom of the Practic way

Learnt to go right, even when I went astray.

DR. BEAUMONT.

CHAPTER XIII. P. I.

A DOUBT CONCERNING SCHOOL BOOKS, WHICH WILL BE DEEMED HERETICAL: AND SOME ACCOUNT OF AN EXTRAORDINARY SUBSTITUTE FOR OVID OR VIRGIL.

They say it is an ill mason that refuseth any stone; and there is no knowledge but in a skilful hand serves, either positively as it is, or else to illustrate some other knowledge.

HERBERT'S REMAINS.

CHAPTER XIV. P. I.

AN OBJECTION ANSWERED.

Is this then your wonder?

Nay then you shall under-

stand more of my skill.

BEN JONSON.

CHAPTER XV. P. I.

THE AUTHOR VENTURES AN OPINION AGAINST THE PREVAILING WISDOM OF MAKING CHILDREN PREMATURELY WISE.

Pray you, use your freedom;

And so far, if you please allow me mine,

To hear you only; not to be compelled

To take your moral potions.

MASSINGER.

CHAPTER XVI. P. I.

USE AND ABUSE OF STORIES IN REASONING, WITH A WORD IN BEHALF OF CHIMNEY-SWEEPERS AND IN REPROOF OF THE EARL OF LAUDERDALE.

My particular inclination moves me in controversy especially to approve his choice that said, fortia mallem quam formosa.

DR. JACKSON.

INTERCHAPTER II.

ABALLIBOOZOBANGANORRIBO.

Io'l dico dunque, e dicol che ognun m'ode.

BENEDETTO VARCHI.

CHAPTER XVII. P. I.

THE HAPPINESS OF HAVING A CATHOLIC TASTE.

There's no want of meat, Sir;

Portly and curious viands are prepared

To please all kinds of appetites.

MASSINGER.

CHAPTER XVIII. P. I.

ALL'S WELL THAT ENDS WELL.

Τὰ δ᾿ἄν ἐπιμνησϑῶ,--ὑπὸ τοῦ λόγου ἐξαναγκαζὀμενος ἐπιμνησϑῄσομαι.

HERODOTUS.

CHAPTER XIX. P. I.

A CONVERSATION WITH MISS GRAVEAIRS.

Operi suscepto inserviendum fuit; so Jacobus Mycillus pleadeth for himself in his translation of Lucian's Dialogues, and so do I; I must and will perform my task.

BURTON.

CHAPTER XX. P. I.

HOW TO MAKE GOLD.

L' Alchimista non travaglia a voto;

Ei cerca l' oro, ei cerca l' oro, io dico

Ch' ei cerca l' oro; e s' ei giungesse in porto

Fora ben per se stesso e per altrui.

L' oro e somma posanza infra mortali;

Chiedine a Cavalier, chiedine a Dame,

Chiedine a tutto il Mondo.

CHIABRERA.

CHAPTER XXI. P. I.

A DOUBT CONCERNING THE USES OF PHILOSOPHY.

El comienzo de salud

es el saber,

distinguir y conocer

qual es virtud.

PROVERBIOS DEL MARQUES DE SANTILLANA.

CHAPTER XXII. P. I.

Τὸν δ᾿ ἀπαμειβόμενος.

O felice colui, che intender puote

Le cagion de le cose di natura,

Che al piu di que' che vivon sono ignote;

E sotto il piè si mette ogni paura

De fati, e de la morte, ch'è si trista,

Ne di vulgo gli cal, nè d'altro ha cura.

TANSILLO.

CHAPTER XXIII. P. I.

ROWLAND DIXON AND HIS COMPANY OF PUPPETS.

Alli se ve tan eficaz el llanto,

las fabulas y historias retratadas,

que parece verdad, y es dulce encanto.

*              *              *              *              *

Y para el vulgo rudo, que ignorante

aborrece el manjar costoso, guisa

el plato del gracioso extravagante;

Con que les hartas de contento y risa,

gustando de mirar sayal grossero,

mas que sutil y candida camisa.

JOSEPH ORTIZ DE VILLENA.

CHAPTER XXIV. P. I.

QUACK AND NO QUACK, BEING AN ACCOUNT OF DR. GREEN AND HIS MAN KEMP. POPULAR MEDICINE, HERBARY, THEORY OF SIGNATURES, WILLIAM DOVE, JOHN WESLEY, AND BAXTER.

Hold thy hand! health's dear maintainer;

Life perchance may burn the stronger:

Having substance to maintain her

She untouched may last the longer.

When the Artist goes about

To redress her flame, I doubt

Oftentimes he snuffs it out.

QUARLES.

CHAPTER XXV. P. I.

Hiatus valde lacrymabilis.

Time flies away fast,

The while we never remember

How soon our life here

Grows old with the year

That dies with the next December!

HERRICK.

CHAPTER XXVI. P. I.

DANIEL AT DONCASTER; THE REASON WHY HE WAS DESTINED FOR THE MEDICAL PROFESSION, RATHER THAN HOLY ORDERS; AND SOME REMARKS UPON SERMONS.

Je ne veux dissimuler, amy Lecteur, que je n'aye bien préveu, et me tiens pour deüement adverty, que ne puis eviter la reprehension d'aucuns, et les calomnies de plusieurs, ausquels c'est éscrit désplaira du tout.

CHRISTOFLE DE HERICOURT.

CHAPTER XXVII. P. I.

A PASSAGE IN PROCOPIUS IMPROVED. A STORY CONCERNING URIM AND THUMMIM; AND THE ELDER DANIEL'S OPINION OF THE PROFESSION OF THE LAW.

Here is Domine Picklock

My man of Law, sollicits all my causes,

Follows my business, makes and compounds my quarrels

Between my tenants and me; sows all my strifes

And reaps them too, troubles the country for me,

And vexes any neighbour that I please.

BEN JONSON.

CHAPTER XXVIII. P. I.

PETER HOPKINS. EFFECTS OF TIME AND CHANGE. DESCRIPTION OF HIS DWELLING-HOUSE.

Combien de changemens depuis que suis au monde,

Qui n'est qu' un point du tems!

PASQUIER.

CHAPTER XXIX. P. I.

A HINT OF REMINISCENCE TO THE READER. THE CLOCK OF ST. GEORGE'S. A WORD IN HONOR OF ARCHDEACON MARKHAM.

There is a ripe season for every thing, and if you slip that or anticipate it, you dim the grace of the matter be it never so good. As we say by way of Proverb that an hasty birth brings forth blind whelps, so a good tale tumbled out before the time is ripe for it, is ungrateful to the hearer.

BISHOP HACKETT.

CHAPTER XXX. P. I.

THE OLD BELLS RUNG TO A NEW TUNE.

If the bell have any sides the clapper will find 'em.

BEN JONSON.

CHAPTER XXXI. P. I.

MORE CONCERNING BELLS.

Lord, ringing changes all our bells hath marr'd;

Jangled they have and jarr'd

So long, they're out of tune, and out of frame;

They seem not now the same.

Put them in frame anew, and once begin

To tune them so, that they may chime all in.

HERBERT.

CHAPTER XXXII. P. I.

AN INTRODUCTION TO CERTAIN PRELIMINARIES ESSENTIAL TO THE PROGRESS OF THIS WORK.

Mas demos ya el assiento en lo importante,

Que el tiempo huye del mundo por la posta.

BALBUENA.

THE DOCTOR,

&c.

CHAPTER VII. A. I.

A FAMILY PARTY AT A NEXT DOOR NEIGHBOUR'S.

Good Sir, reject it not, although it bring

Appearances of some fantastic thing

At first unfolding!

GEORGE WITHER TO THE KING.

I was in the fourth night of the story of the Doctor and his horse, and had broken it off, not like Scheherezade because it was time to get up, but because it was time to go to bed. It was at thirty-five minutes after ten o'clock, on the 20th of July in the year of our Lord 1813. I finished my glass of punch, tinkled the spoon against its side, as if making music to my meditations, and having my eyes fixed upon the Bhow Begum, who was sitting opposite to me at the head of her own table, I said, “It ought to be written in a Book!”

There had been a heavy thunder-storm in the afternoon; and though the thermometer had fallen from 78 to 70, still the atmosphere was charged. If that mysterious power by which the nerves convey sensation and make their impulses obeyed, be (as experiments seem to indicate) identical with the galvanic fluid; and if the galvanic and electric fluids be the same (as philosophers have more than surmised;) and if the lungs (according to a happy hypothesis) elaborate for us from the light of heaven this pabulum of the brain, and material essence, or essential matter of genius,—it may be that the ethereal fire which I had inhaled so largely during the day produced the bright conception, or at least impregnated and quickened the latent seed. The punch, reader, had no share in it.

I had spoken as it were abstractedly, and the look which accompanied the words was rather cogitative than regardant. The Bhow Begum laid down her snuff-box and replied, entering into the feeling, as well as echoing the words, “It ought to be written in a book,—certainly it ought.”

They may talk as they will of the dead languages. Our auxiliary verbs give us a power which the ancients, with all their varieties of mood, and inflections of tense, never could attain. “It must be written in a book,” said I, encouraged by her manner. The mood was the same, the tense was the same; but the gradation of meaning was marked in a way which a Greek or Latin grammarian might have envied as well as admired.

“Pshaw! nonsense! stuff!” said my wife's eldest sister, who was sitting at the right hand of the Bhow Begum; “I say write it in a book indeed!” My wife's youngest sister was sitting diagonally opposite to the last speaker: she lifted up her eyes and smiled. It was a smile which expressed the same opinion as the late vituperative tones; there was as much of incredulity in it; but more of wonder and less of vehemence.

My wife was at my left hand, making a cap for her youngest daughter, and with her tortoiseshell-paper work-box before her. I turned towards her and repeated the words, “It must be written in a book!” But I smiled while I was speaking, and was conscious of that sort of meaning in my eyes, which calls out contradiction for the pleasure of sporting with it.

“Write it in a book?” she replied, “I am sure you wo'nt!” and she looked at me with a frown. Poets have written much upon their ladies' frowns, but I do not remember that they have ever described the thing with much accuracy. When my wife frowns two perpendicular wrinkles, each three quarters of an inch in length, are formed in the forehead, the base of each resting upon the top of the nose, and equi-distant from each other. The poets have also attributed dreadful effects to the frown of those whom they love. I cannot say that I ever experienced any thing very formidable in my wife's. At present she knew her eyes would give the lie to it if they looked at me steadily for a moment; so they wheeled to the left about quick, off at a tangent, in a direction to the Bhow Begum, and then she smiled. She could not prevent the smile; but she tried to make it scornful.

My wife's nephew was sitting diagonally with her, and opposite his mother, on the left hand of the Bhow Begum. “Oh!” he exclaimed, “it ought to be written in a book! it will be a glorious book! write it, uncle, I beseech you!” My wife's nephew is a sensible lad. He reads my writings, likes my stories, admires my singing, and thinks as I do in politics:—a youth of parts and considerable promise.

“He will write it!” said the Bhow Begum, taking up her snuff-box, and accompanying the words with a nod of satisfaction and encouragement. “He will never be so foolish!” said my wife. My wife's eldest sister rejoined, “he is foolish enough for any thing.”

CHAPTER VI. A. I.

SHEWING THAT AN AUTHOR MAY MORE EASILY BE KEPT AWAKE BY HIS OWN IMAGINATIONS THAN PUT TO SLEEP BY THEM HIMSELF, WHATEVER MAY BE THEIR EFFECT UPON HIS READERS.

Thou sleepest worse than if a mouse should be forced to take up her lodging in a cat's ear: a little infant that breeds its teeth, should it lie with thee, would cry out as if thou wert the more unquiet bedfellow.

WEBSTER.

When I ought to have been asleep the “unborn pages crowded on my soul.” The Chapters ante-initial and post-initial appeared in delightful prospect “long drawn out:” the beginning, the middle and the end were evolved before me: the whole spread itself forth, and then the parts unravelled themselves and danced the hays. The very types rose in judgment against me, as if to persecute me for the tasks which during so many years I had imposed upon them. Capitals and small letters, pica and long-primer, brevier and bourgeois, english and nonpareil, minion and pearl, Romans and Italics, black-letter and red, past over my inward sight. The notes of admiration!!! stood straight up in view as I lay on the one side; and when I turned on the other to avoid them, the notes of interrogation cocked up their hump-backs??? Then came to recollection the various incidents of the eventful tale. “Visions of glory spare my aching sight!” The various personages, like spectral faces in a fit of the vapours, stared at me through my eyelids. The Doctor oppressed me like an incubus; and for the Horse,—he became a perfect night-mare. “Leave me, leave me to repose!”

Twelve by the kitchen clock!—still restless!—One! O Doctor, for one of thy comfortable composing draughts!—Two! here's a case of insomnolence! I, who in summer close my lids as instinctively as the daisy when the sun goes down; and who in winter could hybernate as well as Bruin, were I but provided with as much fat to support me during the season, and keep the wick of existence burning:—I, who, if my pedigree were properly made out, should be found to have descended from one of the Seven Sleepers, and from the Sleeping Beauty in the Wood!

I put my arms out of bed. I turned the pillow for the sake of applying a cold surface to my cheek. I stretched my feet into the cold corner. I listened to the river, and to the ticking of my watch. I thought of all sleepy sounds and all soporific things: the flow of water, the humming of bees, the motion of a boat, the waving of a field of corn, the nodding of a mandarine's head on the chimney-piece, a horse in a mill, the opera, Mr. Humdrum's conversation, Mr. Proser's poems, Mr. Laxative's speeches, Mr. Lengthy's sermons. I tried the device of my own childhood, and fancied that the bed revolved with me round and round. Still the Doctor visited me as perseveringly as if I had been his best patient; and, call up what thoughts I would to keep him off, the Horse charged through them all.

At last Morpheus reminded me of Dr. Torpedo's divinity lectures, where the voice, the manner, the matter, even the very atmosphere, and the streamy candle-light were all alike somnific;—where he who by strong effort lifted up his head, and forced open the reluctant eyes, never failed to see all around him fast asleep. Lettuces, cowslip-wine, poppy-syrup, mandragora, hop-pillows, spiders'-web pills, and the whole tribe of narcotics, up to bang and the black drop, would have failed: but this was irresistible; and thus twenty years after date I found benefit from having attended the course.

CHAPTER V. A. I.

SOMETHING CONCERNING THE PHILOSOPHY OF DREAMS, AND THE AUTHOR'S EXPERIENCE IN AERIAL HORSEMANSHIP.

If a dream should come in now to make you afear'd,

With a windmill on his head and bells at his beard,

Would you straight wear your spectacles here at your toes,

And your boots on your brows and your spurs on your nose?

BEN JONSON.

The wise ancients held that dreams are from Jove. Virgil hath told us from what gate of the infernal regions they go out, but at which of the five entrances of the town of Mansoul they get in John Bunyan hath not explained. Some have conceited that unembodied spirits have access to us during sleep, and impress upon the passive faculty, by divine permission, presentiments of those things whereof it is fitting that we should be thus dimly forewarned. This opinion is held by Baxter, and to this also doth Bishop Newton incline. The old atomists supposed that the likenesses or spectres of corporeal things, (exuviæ scilicet rerum, vel effluvia, as they are called by Vaninus, when he takes advantage of them to explain the Fata Morgana) the atomists I say, supposed that these spectral forms which are constantly emitted from all bodies,

Omne genus quoniam passim simulacra feruntur^1

assail the soul when she ought to be at rest; according to which theory all the lathered faces that are created every morning in the looking-glass, and all the smiling ones that my Lord Simper and Mr. Smallwit contemplate there with so much satisfaction during the day, must at this moment be floating up and down the world. Others again opine, as if in contradiction to those who pretend life to be a dream, that dreams are realities, and that sleep sets the soul free like a bird from a cage. John Henderson saw the spirit of a slumbering cat pass from her in pursuit of a visionary mouse;—(I know not whether he would have admitted the fact as an argument for materialism); and the soul of Hans Engelbrecht not only went to hell, but brought back from it a stench which proved to all the bystanders that it had been there.—Faugh!

1 Lucretius.

Whether then my spirit that night found its way out at the nose, (for I sleep with my mouth shut) and actually sallied out seeking adventures; or whether the spectrum of the Horse floated into my chamber; or some benevolent genius or dæmon assumed the well-known and welcome form; or whether the dream were merely a dream,—

si fuè en espiritu, ò fuè

en cuerpo, no sè; que yo

solo sè, que no lo sè;2

so however it was that in the visions of the night I mounted Nobs. Tell me not of Astolfo's hippogriff, or Pacolet's wooden steed; nor

Of that wonderous horse of brass

Whereon the Tartar King did pass;

nor of Alborak, who was the best beast for a night-journey that ever man bestrode. Tell me not even of Pegasus! I have ridden him many a time; by day and by night have I ridden him; high and low, far and wide, round the earth, and about it, and over it, and under it. I know all his earth-paces, and his sky-paces. I have tried him at a walk, at an amble, at a trot, at a canter, at a hand-gallop, at full gallop and at full speed. I have proved him in the manége with single turns and the manége with double turns, his bounds, his curvets, his pirouettes, and his pistes, his croupade and his balotade, his gallop-galliard and his capriole. I have been on him when he has glided through the sky with wings outstretched and motionless, like a kite or a summer cloud; I have bestrode him when he went up like a bittern with a strong spiral flight, round, round and round, and upward, upward, upward, circling and rising still; and again when he has gone full sail, or full fly, with his tail as straight as a comet's behind him. But for a hobby or a night horse, Pegasus is nothing to Nobs.

2 Calderon.

Where did we go on that memorable night? What did we see?—What did we do?—Or rather what did we not see! and what did we not perform!

CHAPTER IV. A. I.

A CONVERSATION AT THE BREAKFAST TABLE.

Tel condamne mon coq-à-l'âne qui un jour en justifiera le bon sens.

LA PRETIEUSE.

I went down to breakfast as usual overflowing with joyous thoughts. For mirth and for music the skylark is but a type of me. I warbled a few wood notes wild, and then full of the unborn work, addressed myself to my wife's eldest sister, and asked if she would permit me to dedicate the Book to her. “What book?” she replied. “The History,” said I, “of Dr. Daniel Dove of Doncaster, and his Horse Nobs.” She answered, “No indeed! I will have no such nonsense dedicated to me!”—and with that she drew up her upper lip, and the lower region of the nose. I turned to my wife's youngest sister: “Shall I have the pleasure of dedicating it to you?” She raised her eyes, inclined her head forwards with a smile of negation, and begged leave to decline the honour. “Commandante,” said I, to my wife and Commandress, “shall I dedicate it then to you?” My Commandante made answer, “not unless you have something better to dedicate.”

“So Ladies!” said I; “the stone which the builders rejected,”—and then looking at my wife's youngest sister—“Oh, it will be such a book!” The manner and the tone were so much in earnest that they arrested the bread and butter on the way to her mouth; and she exclaimed, with her eyes full of wonder and incredulity at the same time, “Why you never can be serious?” “Not serious?” said I; “why I have done nothing but think of it and dream of it the whole night.” “He told me so,” rejoined my Commandante, “the first thing in the morning.” “Ah Stupey!” cried my wife's eldest sister, accompanying the compliment with a protrusion of the head, and an extension of the lips, which disclosed not only the whole remaining row of teeth, but the chasms that had been made in it by the tooth drawer; hiatus valde lacrymabiles.

“Two volumes,” said I, “and this in the title-page!” So taking out my pencil, I drew upon the back of a letter the mysterious monogram, erudite in its appearance as the digamma of Mr. A. F. Valpy.

It past from hand to hand. “Why he is not in earnest?” said my wife's youngest sister. “He never can be,” replied my wife. And yet beginning to think that peradventure I was, she looked at me with a quick turn of the eye,—“a pretty subject indeed for you to employ your time upon! You,—vema whehaha yohu almad otenba twandri athancod!” I have thought proper to translate this part of my Commandante's speech into the Garamna tongue.

CHAPTER III. A. I.

THE UTILITY OF POCKETS. A COMPLIMENT PROPERLY RECEIVED.

La tasca è propria cosa da Christiani.

BENEDETTO VARCHI.

My eldest daughter had finished her Latin lessons, and my son had finished his Greek; and I was sitting at my desk, pen in hand, and in mouth at the same time, (a substitute for biting the nails which I recommend to all onygophagists;) when the Bhow Begum came in with her black velvet reticule, suspended as usual from her arm by its silver chain.

Now of all the inventions of the Tailor (who is of all artists the most inventive) I hold the pocket to be the most commodious, and saving the fig leaf, the most indispensible. Birds have their craw; ruminating beasts their first or ante-stomach; the monkey has his cheek, the opossum her pouch; and, so necessary is some convenience of this kind for the human animal, that the savage who cares not for clothing makes for himself a pocket if he can. The Hindoo carries his snuff-box in his turban. Some of the inhabitants of Congo make a secret fob in their wooly toupet, of which as P. Labat says, the worst use they make is—to carry poison in it. The Matolas, a long haired race who border upon the Caffres, form their locks into a sort of hollow cylinder in which they bear about their little implements; certes a more sensible bag than such as is worn at court. The New Zealander is less ingenious; he makes a large opening in his ear, and carries his knife in it. The Ogres, who are worse than savages, and whose ignorance and brutality is in proportion to their bulk, are said, upon the authority of tradition, when they have picked up a stray traveller or two more than they require for their supper, to lodge them in a hollow tooth as a place of security till breakfast; whence it may be inferred that they are not liable to tooth ache, and that they make no use of tooth-picks. Ogres, Savages, Beasts and Birds all require something to serve the purpose of a pocket. Thus much for the necessity of the thing. Touching its antiquity much might be said; for it would not be difficult to show, with that little assistance from the auxiliaries must and have and been which enabled Whitaker of Manchester to write whole quartos of hypothetical history in the potential mood, that pockets are coeval with clothing: and, as erudite men have maintained that language and even letters are of divine origin, there might with like reason be a conclusion drawn from the twenty-first verse of the third chapter of the book of Genesis, which it would not be easy to impugn. Moreover Nature herself shows us the utility, the importance, nay the indispensability, or, to take a hint from the pure language of our diplomatists, the sinequanonniness of pockets. There is but one organ which is common to all animals whatsoever: some are without eyes, many without noses; some have no heads, others no tails; some neither one nor the other; some there are who have no brains, others very pappy ones; some no hearts, others very bad ones; but all have a stomach,—and what is the stomach but a live inside pocket? Hath not Van Helmont said of it, “saccus vel pera est, ut ciborum olla?”

Dr. Towers used to have his coat pockets made of capacity to hold a quarto volume—a wise custom; but requiring stout cloth, good buckram, and strong thread well waxed. I do not so greatly commend the humour of Dr. Ingenhouz, whose coat was lined with pockets of all sizes, wherein, in his latter years, when science had become to him as a plaything, he carried about various materials for chemical experiments: among the rest so many compositions for fulminating powders in glass tubes, separated only by a cork in the middle of the tube, that, if any person had unhappily given him a blow with a stick, he might have blown up himself and the Doctor too. For myself, four coat pockets of the ordinary dimensions content me; in these a sufficiency of conveniences may be carried, and that sufficiency methodically arranged. For mark me, gentle or ungentle Reader! there is nothing like method in pockets, as well as in composition: and what orderly and methodical man would have his pocket-handkerchief, and his pocket-book, and the key of his door (if he be a batchelor living in chambers) and his knife, and his loose pence and half-pence, and the letters which peradventure he might just have received, or peradventure he may intend to drop in the post-office, two-penny or general, as he passes by, and his snuff, if he be accustomed so to regale his olfactory conduits, or his tobacco-box, if he prefer the masticable to the pulverized weed; or his box of lozenges if he should be troubled with a tickling cough; and the sugar-plumbs and the gingerbread nuts which he may be carrying home to his own children, or to any other small men and women upon whose hearts he may have a design;—who I say would like to have all this in chaos and confusion, one lying upon the other, and the thing which is wanted first fated alway to be undermost!—(Mr. Wilberforce knows the inconvenience;—) the snuff working its way out to the gingerbread, the sugar-plumbs insinuating themselves into the folds of the pocket-handkerchief, the pence grinding the lozenges to dust for the benefit of the pocket-book, and the door key busily employed in unlocking the letters?

Now, forasmuch as the commutation of female pockets for the reticule leadeth to inconveniences like this, (not to mention that the very name of commutation ought to be held in abhorrence by all who hold day-light and fresh air essential to the comfort and salubrity of dwelling-houses,) I abominate that bag of the Bhow Begum, notwithstanding the beauty of the silver chain upon the black velvet. And perceiving at this time that the clasp of its silver setting was broken, so that the mouth of the bag was gaping pitiably, like a sick or defunct oyster, I congratulated her as she came in upon this farther proof of the commodiousness of the invention; for here, in the country, there is no workman who can mend that clasp, and the bag must therefore either be laid aside, or used in that deplorable state.

When the Bhow Begum had seated herself I told her how my proffered dedication had been thrice rejected with scorn, and repeating the offer I looked for a more gracious reply. But, as if scorn had been the influenza of the female mind that morning, she answered, “No; indeed she would not have it after it had been refused by every body else.” “Nay, nay,” said I; “it is as much in your character to accept, as it was in their's to refuse.” While I was speaking she took a pinch of snuff; the nasal titillation co-operated with my speech, for when any one of the senses is pleased, the rest are not likely to continue out of humour. “Well,” she replied, “I will have it dedicated to me, because I shall delight in the book.” And she powdered the carpet with tobacco dust as she spake.

CHAPTER II. A. I.

CONCERNING DEDICATIONS, PRINTERS TYPES AND IMPERIAL INK.

Il y aura des clefs, et des ouvertures de mes secrets.

LA PRETIEUSE.

Monsieur Dellon, having been in the Inquisition at Goa, dedicated an account of that tribunal, and of his own sufferings to Mademoiselle Du Cambout de Coislin, in these words:

Mademoiselle

J'aurois tort de me plaindre des rigueurs de l'Inquisition, et des mauvais traitemens que j'ay éprouvez de la part de ses ministres, puisqu'en me fournissant la matiére de cet ouvrage, ils m'ont procuré l'avantage de vous le dedier.

This is the book which that good man Claudius Buchanan with so much propriety put into the hands of the Grand Inquisitor of India, when he paid him a visit at the Inquisition, and asked him his opinion of the accuracy of the relation upon the spot!

The Frenchman's compliment may truly be said to have been far-fetched and dearly bought. Heaven forefend that I should either go so far for one, or purchase it at such a price!

A dedication has oftentimes cost the unhappy author a greater consumption of thumb and finger-nail than the whole book besides, and all varieties of matter and manner have been resorted to. Mine must be so far in character with the delectable history which it introduces that it shall be unlike all which have ever gone before it. I knew a man, (one he was who would have been an ornament to his country if methodism and madness had not combined to overthrow a bright and creative intellect) who, in one of his insaner moods, printed a sheet and a half of muddy rhapsodies with the title of the “Standard of God Displayed:” and he prefaced it by saying that the price of a perfect book, upon a perfect subject, ought to be a perfect sum in a perfect coin; that is to say one guinea. Now as Dr. Daniel Dove was a perfect Doctor, and his horse Nobs was a perfect horse, and as I humbly hope their history will be a perfect history, so ought the Dedication thereunto to be perfect in its kind. Perfect therefore it shall be, as far as kalotypography can make it. For though it would be hopeless to exceed all former Dedications in the turn of a compliment or of a sentence, in the turn of the letters it is possible to exceed them all. It was once my fortune to employ a printer who had a love for his art; and having a taste that way myself, we discussed the merits of a new font one day when I happened to call in upon him. I objected to the angular inclination of a capital italic A which stood upon its pins as if it were starting aghast from the next letter on the left, and was about to tumble upon that to the right; in which case down would go the rest of the word, like a row of soldiers which children make with cards. My printer was too deeply enamoured with the beauties of his font, to have either ear or eye for its defects; and hastily waiving that point he called my attention to a capital R in the same line, which cocked up its tail just as if it had been nicked; that cock of the tail had fascinated him. “Look Sir,” said he, while his eyes glistened with all the ardour of an amateur; “look at that turn!—that's sweet, Sir!” and drawing off the hand with the forefinger of which he had indicated it, he described in the air the turn that had delighted him, in a sort of heroic flourish, his head with a diminished axis, like the inner stile of a Pentegraph, following the movement. I have never seen that R since without remembering him. ** *** ** **** ** *** ******** ** *** ***** ******* ** *******, *** ********* *****, ***, *** ** *** ******* ***** ** **********, *** *** *******. He who can read the stars, may read in them the secret which he seeketh.

But the turns of my Dedication to the Bhow Begum shall not be trusted to the letter founders, a set of men remarkable for involving their craft in such mystery that no one ever taught it to another, every one who has practised it having been obliged either surreptitiously to obtain the secret, or to invent a method for himself. It shall be in the old English letter, not only because that alphabet hath in its curves and angles, its frettings and redundant lines, a sort of picturesque similitude with Gothic architecture, but also because in its breadth and beauty it will display the colour of the ink to most advantage. For the Dedication shall not be printed in black after the ordinary fashion, nor in white like the Sermon upon the Excise Laws, nor in red after the mode of Mr. Dibdin's half titles, but in the colour of that imperial encaustic ink, which by the laws of the Roman Empire it was death for any but the Roman Emperor himself to use. We Britons live in a free country, wherein every man may use what coloured ink seemeth good to him, and put as much gall in it as he pleases, or any other ingredient whatsoever. Moreover this is an imperial age, in which to say nothing of M. Ingelby the Emperor of the Conjurors, we have seen no fewer than four new Emperors. He of Russia who did not think the old title of Peter the Great good enough for him: he of France, for whom any name but that of Tyrant or Murderer is too good; he of Austria who took up one imperial appellation to cover over the humiliating manner in which he laid another down; and he of Hayti, who if he be wise will order all public business to be carried on in the talkee-talkee tongue, and make it high treason for any person to speak or write French in his dominions. We also must dub our old Parliament imperial forsooth! that we may not be behindhand with the age. Then we have Imperial Dining Tables! Imperial Oil for nourishing the hair! Imperial Liquid for Boot Tops! Yea, and, by all the Cæsars deified and damnified, Imperial Blacking! For my part I love to go with the stream, so I will have an Imperial Dedication.

Behold it Reader. Therein is mystery.

CHAPTER I. A. I.

NO BOOK CAN BE COMPLETE WITHOUT A PREFACE.

I see no cause but men may pick their teeth,

Though Brutus with a sword did kill himself.

TAYLOR, THE WATER POET.

Who was the Inventor of Prefaces? I shall be obliged to the immortal Mr. Urban, (immortal, because like the king in law he never dies) if he will propound this question for me in his Magazine, that great lumber-room wherein small ware of all kinds has been laid up higgledy-piggledy by half-penny-worths or farthing-worths at a time for fourscore years, till like broken glass, rags, or rubbish it has acquired value by mere accumulation. To send a book like this into the world without a Preface would be as impossible as it is to appear at Court without a bag at the head and a sword at the tail, for as the perfection of dress must be shown at Court, so in this history should the perfection of histories be exhibited. The book must be omni genere absolutum; it must prove and exemplify the perfectibility of books: yea with all imaginable respect for the “Delicate Investigation,” which I leave in undisputed possession of an appellation so exquisitely appropriate, I conceive that the title of THE BOOK, as a popular designation κατ᾿ εξοχην, should be transferred from the edifying report of that Inquiry, to the present unique, unrivalled and unrivalable production;—a production the like whereof hath not been, is not, and will not be. Here however let me warn my Greek and Arabian translators how they render the word, that if they offend the Mufti or the Patriarch, the offence as well as the danger may be theirs: I wash my hands of both. I write in plain English, innocently and in the simplicity of my heart: what may be made of it in heathen languages concerns not me.

ANTE-PREFACE.

I here present thee with a hive of bees, laden some with wax, and some with honey. Fear not to approach! There are no Wasps, there are no Hornets here. If some wanton Bee should chance to buzz about thine ears, stand thy ground and hold thy hands: there's none will sting thee if thou strike not first. If any do, she hath honey in her bag will cure thee too.

QUARLES.

Prefaces, said Charles Blount, Gent., who committed suicide because the law would not allow him to marry his brother's widow,—(a law, be it remarked in passing, which is not sanctioned by reason, and which instead of being in conformity with scripture, is in direct opposition to it, being in fact the mere device of a corrupt and greedy church)—“Prefaces,” said this flippant, ill-opinioned and unhappy man, “ever were, and still are but of two sorts, let other modes and fashions vary as they please. Let the profane long peruke succeed the godly cropt hair; the cravat, the ruff; presbytery, popery; and popery presbytery again, yet still the author keeps to his old and wonted method of prefacing; when at the beginning of his book he enters, either with a halter about his neck, submitting himself to his reader's mercy whether he shall be hanged, or no; or else in a huffing manner he appears with the halter in his hand, and threatens to hang his reader, if he gives him not his good word. This with the excitement of some friends to his undertaking, and some few apologies for want of time, books, and the like, are the constant and usual shams of all scribblers as well ancient as modern.”—This was not true then, nor is it now; but when he proceeds to say, “for my part I enter the lists upon another score,”—so say I with him; and my Preface shall say the rest.

PREFACE.

Oh for a quill plucked from a Seraph's wing!

YOUNG.

So the Poet exclaimed; and his exclamation may be quoted as one example more of the vanity of human wishes; for in order to get a Seraph's quill it would be necessary, according to Mrs. Glasse's excellent item in her directions for roasting a hare, to begin by catching a Seraph. A quill from a Seraph's wing is, I confess, above my ambition; but one from a Peacock's tail was within my reach; and be it known unto all people, nations and languages, that with a Peacock's quill this Preface hath been penned—literally—truly, and bona-fidely speaking. And this is to write, as the learned old Pasquier says, pavonesquement, which in latin minted for the nonce may be rendered pavonicè and in English peacockically or peacockishly, whichever the reader may like best. That such a pen has verily and indeed been used upon this occasion I affirm. I affirm it upon the word of a true man; and here is a Captain of his Majesty's Navy at my elbow, who himself made the pen, and who, if evidence were required to the fact, would attest it by as round an oath as ever rolled over a right English tongue. Nor will the time easily escape his remembrance, the bells being at this moment ringing, June 4, 1814, to celebrate the King's birthday, and the public notification that peace has been concluded with France.

I have oftentimes had the happiness of seeing due commendation bestowed by gentle critics, unknown admirers and partial friends upon my pen, which has been married to all amiable epithets:—classical, fine, powerful, tender, touching, pathetic, strong, fanciful, daring, elegant, sublime, beautiful. I have read these epithets with that proper satisfaction which when thus applied they could not fail to impart, and sometimes qualified the pride which they inspired by looking at the faithful old tool of the Muses beside me, worn to the stump in their service: the one end mended up to the quick in that spirit of œconomy which becomes a son of the Lackland family, and shortened at the other by the gradual and alternate processes of burning and biting, till a scant inch only is left above the finger place. Philemon Holland was but a type of me in this respect. Indeed I may be allowed to say that I have improved upon his practice, or at least that I get more out of a pen than he did, for in the engraved title-page to his Cyrupædia, where there appears the Portrait of the Interpres marked by a great D inclosing the Greek letter Φ (which I presume designates Doctor Philemon) ætatis suæ 80. A°. 1632, it may be plainly seen that he used his pen only at one end. Peradventure he delighted not, as I do, in the mitigated ammoniac odour.

But thou, O gentle reader, who in the exercise of thy sound judgment and natural benignity wilt praise this Preface, thou mayest with perfect propriety bestow the richest epithets upon the pen wherewith its immortal words were first clothed in material forms. Beautiful, elegant, fine, splendid, fanciful, will be to the very letter of truth: versatile it is as the wildest wit; flexible as the most monkey-like talent; and shouldst thou call it tender, I will whisper in thine ear—that it is only too soft. Yet softness may be suitable; for of my numerous readers one half will probably be soft by sex, and of the other half a very considerable proportion soft by nature. Soft therefore be the Pen and soft the strain.

I have drawn up the window-blinds (though sunshine at this time acts like snuff upon the mucous membrane of my nose) in order that the light may fall upon this excellent Poet's wand as I wave it to and fro, making cuts five and six of the broad-sword exercise. Every feather of its fringe is now lit up by the sun; the hues of green and gold and amethyst are all brought forth; and that predominant lustre which can only be likened to some rich metallic oxyd; and that spot of deepest purple, the pupil of an eye for whose glorious hue neither metals nor flowers nor precious stones afford a resemblance: its likeness is only to be found in animated life, in birds and insects whom nature seems to have formed when she was most prodigal of beauty: I have seen it indeed upon the sea, but it has been in some quiet bay when the reflection of the land combined with the sky and the ocean to produce it.

And what can be more emblematic of the work which I am beginning than the splendid instrument wherewith the Preface is traced? What could more happily typify the combination of parts each perfect in itself when separately considered, yet all connected into one harmonious whole; the story running through like the stem or back-bone, which the episodes and digressions fringe like so many featherlets, leading up to that catastrophe, the gem or eye-star, for which the whole was formed, and in which all terminate.

They who are versed in the doctrine of sympathies and the arcana of correspondences as revealed to the Swedish Emanuel, will doubtless admire the instinct or inspiration which directed my choice to the pavonian Pen. The example should be followed by all consumers of ink and quill. Then would the lover borrow a feather from the turtle dove. The lawyer would have a large assortment of kite, hawk, buzzard and vulture: his clients may use pigeon or gull. Poets according to their varieties. Mr. —— the Tom Tit. Mr. —— the Water-wagtail. Mr. —— the Crow. Mr. —— the Mocking-bird. Mr. —— the Magpie. Mr. —— the Sky-lark. Mr. —— the Eagle. Mr. —— the Swan. Lord —— the Black Swan. Critics some the Owl, others the Butcher Bird. Your challenger must indite with one from the wing of a game cock: he who takes advantage of a privileged situation to offer the wrong and shrink from the atonement will find a white feather. Your dealers in public and private scandal, whether Jacobins or Anti-Jacobins, the pimps and pandars of a profligate press should use none but duck feathers, and those of the dirtiest that can be found in the purlieus of Pimlico or St. George's Fields. But for the Editor of the Edinburgh Review, whether he dictates in morals or in taste, or displays his peculiar talent in political prophecy, he must continue to use goose quills. Stick to the goose Mr. Jeffrey, while you live stick to the Goose!

INITIAL CHAPTER.

᾿Εξ οὗ δὴ τὰ πρῶτα.

HOMER.

They who remember the year 1800 will remember also the great controversy whether it was the beginning of a century, or the end of one; a controversy in which all Magazines, all Newspapers, and all persons took part. Now as it has been deemed expedient to divide this work, or to speak more emphatically this Opus, or more emphatically still this Ergon, into Chapters Ante-Initial and Post-Initial, a dispute of the same nature might arise among the commentators in after ages, if especial care were not now taken to mark distinctly the beginning. This therefore is the Initial Chapter, neither Ante nor Post, but standing between both; the point of initiation, the goal of the Antes, the starting place of the Posts; the mark at which the former end their career, and from whence the latter take their departure.

THE DOCTOR,

&c.

Eccoti il libro; mettivi ben cura

Iddio t' ajuti e dia buona ventura.

ORL. INNAM.

CHAPTER I. P. I.

THE SUBJECT OF THIS HISTORY AT HOME AND AT TEA.

If thou be a severe sour complexioned man then I here disallow thee to be a competent judge.

IZAAK WALTON.

The clock of St. George's had struck five. Mrs. Dove had just poured out the Doctor's seventh cup of tea. The Doctor was sitting in his arm-chair. Sir Thomas was purring upon his knees; and Pompey stood looking up to his mistress, wagging his tail, sometimes whining with a short note of impatience, and sometimes gently putting his paw against her apron to remind her that he wished for another bit of bread and butter. Barnaby was gone to the farm: and Nobs was in the stable.

CHAPTER II. P. I.

WHEREIN CERTAIN QUESTIONS ARE PROPOSED CONCERNING TIME, PLACE AND PERSONS.

Quis? quid? ubi? quibus auxiliis? cur? quomodo? quando?

TECHNICAL VERSE.

Thus have I begun according to the most approved forms; not like those who begin the Trojan War from Leda's egg, or the History of Great Britain from Adam, or the Life of General Washington from the Discovery of the New World; but in conformity to the Horatian precept, rushing into the middle of things. Yet the Giant Moulineau's appeal to his friend the story-telling Ram may well be remembered here; Belier mon ami, si tu voulois commencer par le commencement tu me ferois grand plaisir. For in the few lines of the preceding chapter how much is there that requires explanation?—Who was Nobs?—Who was Barnaby?—Who was the Doctor?—Who was Mrs. Dove?—The place, where?—The time, when?—The persons, who?—

I maie not tell you all at once;

But as I maie and can, I shall

By order tellen you it all.

So saith Chaucer; and in the same mind, facilius discimus quæ congruo dicuntur ordine quam quæ sparsim et confusim, saith Erasmus. Think a moment I beseech thee, Reader, what order is! Not the mere word which is so often vociferated in the House of Commons or uttered by the Speaker ore rotundo, when it is necessary for him to assume the tone of Ζεὺς ὑψιβρεμέτης; but order in its essence and truth, in itself and in its derivatives.

Waiving the Orders in Council, and the Order of the Day, a phrase so familiar in the disorderly days of the French National Convention, think gentle Reader of the order of Knighthood, of holy orders, of the orders of architecture, the Linnæan orders, the orderly Serjeant, the ordinal numbers, the Ordinary of Newgate, the Ordinary on Sundays at 2 o'clock in the environs of the Metropolis, the ordinary faces of those who partake of what is ordinarily provided for them there; and under the auspices of Government itself, and par excellence the Extraordinary Gazette. And as the value of health is never truly and feelingly understood except in sickness, contemplate for a moment what the want of order is. Think of disorder in things remote, and then as it approaches thee. In the country wherein thou livest, bad; in the town whereof thou art an inhabitant, worse; in thine own street, worser; in thine own house, worst of all. Think of it in thy family, in thy fortune, in thine intestines. In thy affairs, distressing; in thy members, painful; in thy conduct, ruinous. Order is the sanity of the mind, the health of the body, the peace of the city, the security of the state. As the beams to a house, as the bones to the microcosm of man, so is order to all things. Abstract it from a Dictionary, and thou mayest imagine the inextricable confusion which would ensue. Reject it from the Alphabet, and Zerah Colburne himself could not go through the chriscross row. How then should I do without it in this history?

A Quaker by name Benjamin Lay (who was a little cracked in the head though sound at heart) took one of his compositions once to Benjamin Franklin that it might be printed and published. Franklin having looked over the manuscript observed that it was deficient in arrangement; it is no matter, replied the author, print any part thou pleasest first. Many are the speeches and the sermons and the treatises and the poems and the volumes which are like Benjamin Lay's book; the head might serve for the tail, and the tail for the body, and the body for the head,—either end for the middle, and the middle for either end;—nay if you could turn them inside out like a polypus, or a glove, they would be no worse for the operation.

When the excellent Hooker was on his death-bed, he expressed his joy at the prospect of entering a World of Order.

CHAPTER III. P. I.

WHOLESOME OBSERVATIONS UPON THE VANITY OF FAME.

Whosoever shall address himself to write of matters of instruction, or of any other argument of importance, it behoveth that before he enter thereinto, he should resolutely determine with himself in what order he will handle the same; so shall he best accomplish that he hath undertaken, and inform the understanding, and help the memory of the Reader.

GWILLIM'S DISPLAY OF HERALDRY.

Who was the Doctor?

We will begin with the persons for sundry reasons, general and specific. Doth not the Latin grammar teach us so to do, wherein the personal verbs come before the impersonal, and the Propria quæ maribus precede all other nouns? Moreover by replying to this question all needful explanation as to time and place will naturally and of necessity follow in due sequence.

Truly I will deliver and discourse

The sum of all.1

1 G. PEELE.

Who was the Doctor?

Can it then be necessary to ask?—Alas the vanity of human fame! Vanity of vanities, all is Vanity! “How few,” says Bishop Jeremy Taylor, “have heard of the name of Veneatapadino Ragium! He imagined that there was no man in the world that knew him not: how many men can tell me, that he was the King of Narsinga?” When I mention Arba, who but the practised textualist can call to mind that he was “a great man among the Anakim,” that he was the father of Anak, and that from him Kirjath-Arba took its name? A great man among the Giants of the earth, the founder of a city, the father of Anak!—and now there remaineth nothing more of him or his race than the bare mention of them in one of the verses of one of the chapters of the Book of Joshua: except for that only record it would not now be known that Arba had ever lived, or that Hebron was originally called after his name. Vanitas Vanitatum! Omnia Vanitas . An old woman in a village in the West of England was told one day that the King of Prussia was dead, such a report having arrived when the great Frederic was in the noon-day of his glory. Old Mary lifted up her great slow eyes at the news, and fixing them in the fullness of vacancy upon her informant, replied, “is a! is a!—The Lord ha' marcy!—Well, well! The King of Prussia! And who's he?”—The “Who's he” of this old woman might serve as text for a notable sermon upon ambition. “Who's he” may now be asked of men greater as soldiers in their day than Frederic, or Wellington; greater as discoverers than Sir Isaac, or Sir Humphrey. Who built the Pyramids? Who ate the first Oyster? Vanitas Vanitatum! Omnia Vanitas.

Why then doth flesh, a bubble-glass of breath,

Hunt after honour and advancement vain,

And rear a trophy for devouring Death,

With so great labour and long-lasting pain,

As if his days for ever should remain?

Sith all that in this world is great or gay,

Doth as a vapour vanish and decay.

Look back who list unto the former ages,

And call to count what is of them become;

Where be those learned wits and antique sages

Which of all wisdom knew the perfect sum?

Where those great warriors which did overcome

The world with conquest of their might and main,

And made one mear of the earth and of their reign?2

2 SPENSER.

Who was the Doctor?

Oh that thou hadst known him, Reader! Then should I have answered the question—if orally, by an emphasis upon the article,—the Doctor; or if in written words, THE DOCTOR—thus giving the word that capital designation to which, as the head of his profession within his own orbit, he was so justly entitled. But I am not writing to those only who knew him, nor merely to the inhabitants of the West Riding, nor to the present generation alone;—No! to all Yorkshire,—all England; all the British Empire; all the countries wherein the English tongue is, or shall be, spoken or understood; Yea to all places, and all times to come. Para todos, as saith the famous Doctor Juan Perez de Montalvan Natural de Madrid, which is, being interpreted, a Spanish Cockney—para todos; porque es un aparato de varias materias, donde el Filosofo, el Cortesano, el Humanista, el Poeta, el Predicador, el Teologo, el Soldado, el Devoto, el Jurisconsulto, el Matematico, el Medico, el Soltero, el Casado, el Religioso, el Ministro, el Plebeyo, el Señor, el Oficial, y el Entretenido, hallaran juntamente utilidad y gusto, erudicion y divertimiento, doctrina y desahogo, recreo y enseñanza, moralidad y alivio, ciencia y descanso, provecho y passatiempo, alabanzas y reprehensiones, y ultimamente exemplos y donaires, que sin ofender las costumbres delecten el animo, y sazonen el entendimiento.

Who was the Doctor?

The Doctor was Doctor Daniel Dove.

CHAPTER IV. P. I.

BIRTH AND PARENTAGE OF DR. DOVE, WITH THE DESCRIPTION OF A YEOMAN'S HOUSE IN THE WEST RIDING OF YORKSHIRE A HUNDRED YEARS AGO.

Non possidentem multa vocaveris

Recte beatum; rectius occupat

Nomen beati, qui Deorum

Muneribus sapienter uti,

Duramque callet pauperiem pati,

Pejusque letho flagitium timet.

HORACE, L. 4, Od. 9.

Daniel, the son of Daniel Dove and of Dinah his wife, was born near Ingleton in the West Riding of Yorkshire, on Monday the twenty second of April, old style, 1723, nine minutes and three seconds after three in the afternoon; on which day Marriage came in and Mercury was with the Moon; and the aspects were □ ♄ ♀: a week earlier, it would have been a most glorious Trine of the Sun and Jupiter;—circumstances which were all duly noted in the blank leaf of the family Bible.

Daniel the father was one of a race of men who unhappily are now almost extinct. He lived upon an estate of six and twenty acres which his fathers had possessed before him, all Doves and Daniels, in uninterrupted succession from time immemorial, farther than registers or title deeds could ascend. The little church called Chapel le Dale, stands about a bow shot from the family house. There they had all been carried to the font; there they had each led his bride to the altar; and thither they had, each in his turn, been borne upon the shoulders of their friends and neighbours. Earth to earth they had been consigned there for so many generations, that half of the soil of the churchyard consisted of their remains. A hermit who might wish his grave to be as quiet as his cell, could imagine no fitter resting place. On three sides there was an irregular low stone wall, rather to mark the limits of the sacred ground, than to inclose it; on the fourth it was bounded by the brook whose waters proceed by a subterraneous channel from Wethercote cave. Two or three alders and rowan trees hung over the brook, and shed their leaves and seeds into the stream. Some bushy hazels grew at intervals along the lines of the wall; and a few ash trees, as the winds had sown them. To the East and West some fields adjoined it, in that state of half cultivation which gives a human character to solitude: to the South, on the other side the brook, the common with its limestone rocks peering every where above ground, extended to the foot of Ingleborough. A craggy hill, feathered with birch, sheltered it from the North.

The turf was as soft and fine as that of the adjoining hills; it was seldom broken, so scanty was the population to which it was appropriated; scarcely a thistle or a nettle deformed it, and the few tomb-stones which had been placed there were now themselves half buried. The sheep came over the wall when they listed, and sometimes took shelter in the porch from the storm. Their voices, and the cry of the kite wheeling above, were the only sounds which were heard there, except when the single bell which hung in its niche over the entrance tinkled for service on the Sabbath day, or with a slower tongue gave notice that one of the children of the soil was returning to the earth from which he sprung.

The house of the Doves was to the East of the Church, under the same hill, and with the same brook in front; and the intervening fields belonged to the family. It was a low house, having before it a little garden of that size and character which shewed that the inhabitants could afford to bestow a thought upon something more than mere bodily wants. You entered between two yew trees clipt to the fashion of two pawns. There were hollyhocks and sunflowers displaying themselves above the wall; roses and sweet peas under the windows, and the everlasting pea climbing the porch. Over the door was a stone with these letters.

D

D + M

A.D

1608.

The A. was in the Saxon character. The rest of the garden lay behind the house, partly on the slope of the hill. It had a hedge of gooseberry-bushes, a few apple-trees, pot-herbs in abundance, onions, cabbages, turnips and carrots; potatoes had hardly yet found their way into these remote parts: and in a sheltered spot under the crag, open to the south, were six bee-hives which made the family perfectly independent of West India produce. Tea was in those days as little known as potatoes, and for all other things honey supplied the place of sugar.

The house consisted of seven rooms, the dairy and cellar included which were both upon the ground floor. As you entered the kitchen there was on the right one of those open chimneys which afford more comfort in a winter's evening than the finest register stove; in front of the chimney stood a wooden bee-hive chair, and on each side was a long oak seat with a back to it, the seats serving as chests in which the oaten bread was kept. They were of the darkest brown, and well polished by constant use. On the back of each were the same initials as those over the door, with the date 1610. The great oak table, and the chest in the best kitchen which held the house-linen, bore the same date. The chimney was well hung with bacon, the rack which covered half the ceiling bore equal marks of plenty; mutton hams were suspended from other parts of the ceiling; and there was an odour of cheese from the adjoining dairy, which the turf fire, tho' perpetual as that of the Magi, or of the Vestal Virgins, did not overpower. A few pewter dishes were ranged above the trenchers, opposite the door on a conspicuous shelf. The other treasures of the family were in an open triangular cupboard, fixed in one of the corners of the best kitchen, half way from the floor, and touching the ceiling. They consisted of a silver saucepan, a silver goblet, and four apostle spoons. Here also King Charles's Golden Rules were pasted against the wall, and a large print of Daniel in the Lion's Den. The Lions were bedaubed with yellow, and the Prophet was bedaubed with blue, with a red patch upon each of his cheeks: if he had been like his picture he might have frightened the Lions; but happily there were no “judges” in the family, and it had been bought for its name's sake. The other print which ornamented the room had been purchased from a like feeling, though the cause was not so immediately apparent. It represented a Ship in full sail, with Joseph and the Virgin Mary, and the Infant on board, and a Dove flying behind as if to fill the sails with the motion of its wings. Six black chairs were ranged along the wall, where they were seldom disturbed from their array. They had been purchased by Daniel the grandfather upon his marriage, and were the most costly purchase that had ever been made in the family; for the goblet was a legacy. The backs were higher than the head of the tallest man when seated; the seats flat and shallow, set in a round frame, unaccommodating in their material, more unaccommodating in shape; the backs also were of wood rising straight up, and ornamented with balls and lozenges and embossments; and the legs and cross bars were adorned in the same taste. Over the chimney were two Peacocks' feathers, some of the dry silky pods of the honesty flower, and one of those large “sinuous shells” so finely thus described by Landor;

Of pearly hue

Within, and they that lustre have imbibed

In the sun's palace porch; where, when unyoked,

His chariot wheel stands midway in the wave,

Shake one, and it awakens; then apply

Its polished lips to your attentive ear,

And it remembers its august abodes,

And murmurs as the ocean murmurs there.

There was also a head of Indian corn there, and a back scratcher, of which the hand was ivory and the handle black. This had been a present of Daniel the grandfather to his wife. The three apartments above served equally for store-rooms and bed-chambers. William Dove the brother slept in one, and Agatha the maid, or Haggy as she was called, in another.

CHAPTER V. P. I.

EXTENSION OF THE SCIENCE OF PHYSIOGNOMY, WITH SOME REMARKS UPON THE PRACTICAL USES OF CRANIOLOGY.

Hanc ergo scientiam blande excipiamus, hilariterque amplectamur, ut vere nostram et de nobismet ipsis tractantem; quam qui non amat, quam qui non amplectitur, nec philosophiam amat, neque suæ vitæ discrimina curat.

BAPTISTA PORTA.

They who know that the word physiognomy is not derived from phiz, and infer from that knowledge that the science is not confined to the visage alone, have extended it to handwritings also, and hence it has become fashionable in this age of collectors to collect the autographs of remarkable persons. But now that Mr. Rapier has arisen, “the Reformer of illegible hands,” he and his rival Mr. Carstairs teach all their pupils to write alike. The countenance however has fairer play in our days than it had in old times, for the long heads of the sixteenth century were made by the nurses, not by nature. Elongating the nose, flattening the temples, and raising the forehead are no longer performed by manual force, and the face undergoes now no other artificial modelling than such as may be impressed upon it by the aid of the looking-glass. So far physiognomy becomes less difficult, the data upon which it has to proceed, not having been falsified ab initio; but there arises a question in what state ought they to be examined? Dr. Gall is for shaving the head, and overhauling it as a Turk does a Circassian upon sale, that he may discover upon the outside of the skull the organs of fighting, murder, cunning, and thieving (near neighbours in his mappa cerebri,) of comparing colours, of music, of sexual instinct, of philosophical judgement &c. &c. all which, with all other qualities, have their latitudes and longitudes in the brain, and are conspicuous upon the outward skull, according to the degree in which they influence the character of the individual.

It must be admitted that if this learned German's theory of craniology be well founded, the Gods have devised a much surer, safer and more convenient means for discovering the real characters of the Lords and Ladies of the creation, than what Momus proposed, when he advised that a window should be placed in the breast. For if his advice had been followed, and there had actually been a window in the sternum,—it is I think beyond all doubt that a window-shutter would soon have been found indispensably necessary in cold climates, more especially in England where pulmonary complaints are so frequent; and, secondly, the wind would not be more injurious to the lungs in high latitudes, than the sun would be to the liver in torrid regions; indeed every where during summer it would be impossible to exist without a green curtain, or Venetian blinds to the window; and after all, take what precautions we might, the world would be ten times more bilious than it is. Another great physical inconvenience would also have arisen; for if men could peep into their insides at any time, and see the motions and the fermentations which are continually going on, and the rise and progress of every malady distinctly marked in the changes it produced, so many nervous diseases would be brought on by frequent inspection, and so many derangements from attempting to regulate the machine, that the only way to prevent it from making a full stop would be to put a lock upon the shutter, and deliver the key to the Physician.

But upon Dr. Gall's theory how many and what obvious advantages result! Nor are they merely confined to the purposes of speculative physiognomy; the uses of his theory as applied to practice offer to us hopes scarcely less delightful than those which seemed to dawn upon mankind with the discovery of the gasses, and with the commencement of the French Revolution, and in these later days with the progress of the Bible Society. In courts of Justice for instance how beautifully would this new science supply any little deficiency of evidence upon trial! If a man were arraigned for murder, and the case were doubtful, but he were found to have a decided organ for the crime, it would be of little matter whether he had committed the specific fact in the indictment, or not; for hanging if not applicable as punishment, would be proper for prevention. Think also in State Trials what infinite advantages an Attorney General might derive from the opinion of a Regius Professor of Craniology! Even these are but partial benefits. Our Generals, Ministers, and Diplomatists would then unerringly be chosen by the outside of the head, though a criterion might still be wanted to ascertain when it was too thick and when too thin. But the greatest advantages are those which this new system would afford to education; for by the joint efforts of Dr. Gall and Mr. Edgeworth we should be able to breed up men according to any pattern which Parents or Guardians might think proper to bespeak. The Doctor would design the mould, and Mr. Edgeworth by his skill in mechanics devise with characteristic ingenuity the best means of making and applying it. As soon as the child was born the professional cap, medical, military, theological, commercial or legal, would be put on, and thus he would be perfectly prepared for Mr. Edgeworth's admirable system of professional education. I will pursue this subject no farther than just to hint that the materials of the mould may operate sympathetically, and therefore that for a lawyer in rus the cap should be made of brass, for a divine of lead, for a politician of base-metal, for a soldier of steel, and for a sailor of heart of English oak.

Dr. Gall would doubtless require the naked head to be submitted to him for judgement. Contrariwise I opine,—and all the Ladies will agree with me in this opinion,—that the head ought neither to be stript, nor even examined in undress, but that it should be taken with all its accompaniments, when the owner has made the best of it, the accompaniments being not unfrequently more indicative than the features themselves. Long ago the question whether a man is most like himself drest or undrest, was propounded to the British Apollo; and it was answered by the Oracle that a man of God Almighty's making is most like himself when undrest; but a man of a tailor's, periwig-maker's, and sempstress's making, when drest. The Oracle answered rightly; for no man can select his own eyes, nose, or mouth,—but his wig and his whiskers are of his own chusing. And to use an illustrious instance, how much of character is there in that awful wig which alway in its box accompanies Dr. Parr upon his visits of ceremony, that it may be put on in the hall, with all its feathery honours thick upon it, not a curl deranged, a hair flattened, or a particle of powder wasted on the way!

But if we would form a judgement of the interior of that portentous head which is thus formidably obumbrated, how could it be done so well as by beholding the Doctor among his books, and there seeing the food upon which his terrific intellect is fed. There we should see the accents, quantities, dialects, digammas, and other such small gear as in these days constitute the complete armour of a perfect scholar; and by thus discovering what goes into the head we might form a fair estimate of what was likely to come out of it. This is a truth which, with many others of equal importance, will be beautifully elucidated in this nonpareil history. For Daniel Dove the Father had a collection of books; they were not so numerous as those of his contemporary Harley, famous for his library, and infamous for the Peace of Utrecht; but he was perfectly conversant with all their contents, which is more than could be said of the Earl of Oxford.

Reader whether thou art man, woman or child, thou art doubtless acquainted with the doctrine of association as inculcated by the great Mr. Locke and his disciples. But never hast thou seen that doctrine so richly and so entirely exemplified as in this great history, the association of ideas being, in oriental phrase, the silken thread upon which its pearls are strung. And never wilt thou see it so clearly and delightfully illustrated, not even if the ingenious Mr. John Jones should one day give to the world the whole twelve volumes in which he has proved the authenticity of the Gospel History, by bringing the narratives of the Four Evangelists to the test of Mr. Locke's metaphysics.

“Desultoriness,” says Mr. Danby, “may often be the mark of a full head; connection must proceed from a thoughtful one.”

CHAPTER VI. P. I.

A COLLECTION OF BOOKS NONE OF WHICH ARE INCLUDED AMONGST THE PUBLICATIONS OF ANY SOCIETY FOR THE PROMOTION OF KNOWLEDGE RELIGIOUS OR PROFANE.—HAPPINESS IN HUMBLE LIFE.

Felix ille animi, divisque simillimus ipsis,

Quem non mordaci resplendens gloria fuco

Solicitat, non fastosi mala gaudia luxus,

Sed tacitos sinit ire dies, et paupere cultu

Exigit innocuæ tranquilla silentia vitæ.

POLITIAN.

Happily for Daniel, he lived before the age of Magazines, Reviews, Cyclopædias, Elegant Extracts and Literary Newspapers, so that he gathered the fruit of knowledge for himself, instead of receiving it from the dirty fingers of a retail vender. His books were few in number, but they were all weighty either in matter or in size. They consisted of the Morte d'Arthur in the fine black-letter edition of Copland; Plutarch's Morals and Pliny's Natural History, two goodly folios, full as an egg of meat, and both translated by that old worthy Philemon, who for the service which he rendered to his contemporaries and to his countrymen deserves to be called the best of the Hollands, without disparaging either the Lord or the Doctor of that appellation. The whole works of Joshua Sylvester (whose name, let me tell thee reader in passing, was accented upon the first syllable by his contemporaries, not as now upon the second);—Jean Petit's History of the Netherlands, translated and continued by Edward Grimeston, another worthy of the Philemon order; Sir Kenelm Digby's Discourses; Stowe's Chronicle; Joshua Barnes's Life of Edward III.; “Ripley Revived by Eirenæus Philalethes, an Englishman styling himself Citizen of the World,” with its mysterious frontispiece representing the Domus Naturæ, to which, Nil deest, nisi clavis: the Pilgrim's Progress: two volumes of Ozell's translation of Rabelais; Latimer's Sermons; and the last volume of Fox's Martyrs, which latter book had been brought him by his wife. The Pilgrim's Progress was a godmother's present to his son: the odd volumes of Rabelais he had picked up at Kendal, at a sale, in a lot with Ripley Revived and Plutarch's Morals: the others he had inherited.

Daniel had looked into all these books, read most of them, and believed all that he read, except Rabelais, which he could not tell what to make of. He was not however one of those persons who complacently suppose every thing to be nonsense, which they do not perfectly comprehend, or flatter themselves that they do. His simple heart judged of books by what they ought to be, little knowing what they are. It never occurred to him that any thing would be printed which was not worth printing, any thing which did not convey either reasonable delight or useful instruction: and he was no more disposed to doubt the truth of what he read, than to question the veracity of his neighbour, or any one who had no interest in deceiving him. A book carried with it to him authority in its very aspect. The Morte d'Arthur therefore he received for authentic history, just as he did the painful chronicle of honest John Stowe, and the Barnesian labours of Joshua the self-satisfied: there was nothing in it indeed which stirred his English blood like the battles of Cressy and Poictiers and Najara; yet on the whole he preferred it to Barnes's story, believed in Sir Tor, Sir Tristram, Sir Lancelot and Sir Lamorack as entirely as in Sir John Chandos, the Captal de Buche and the Black Prince, and liked them better.

Latimer and Du Bartas he used sometimes to read aloud on Sundays; and if the departed take cognizance of what passes on earth, and poets derive any satisfaction from that posthumous applause which is generally the only reward of those who deserve it, Sylvester might have found some compensation for the undeserved neglect into which his works had sunk, by the full and devout delight which his rattling rhymes and quaint collocations afforded to this reader. The silver-tongued Sylvester however was reserved for a Sabbath book; as a week-day author Daniel preferred Pliny, for the same reason that bread and cheese, or a rasher of hung mutton contented his palate better than a syllabub. He frequently regretted that so knowing a writer had never seen or heard of Wethercote and Yordas caves; the ebbing and flowing spring at Giggleswick, Malham Cove, and Gordale Scar, that he might have described them among the wonders of the world. Omne ignotum pro magnifico is a maxim which will not in all cases hold good. There are things which we do not undervalue because we are familiar with them, but which are admired the more the more thoroughly they are known and understood; it is thus with the grand objects of nature and the finest works of art,—with whatsoever is truly great and excellent. Daniel was not deficient in imagination; but no description of places which he had never seen, however exaggerated (as such things always are) impressed him so strongly as these objects in his own neighbourhood, which he had known from childhood. Three or four times in his life it had happened that strangers with a curiosity as uncommon in that age as it is general in this, came from afar to visit these wonders of the West Riding, and Daniel accompanied them with a delight such as he never experienced on any other occasion.

But the Author in whom he delighted most was Plutarch, of whose works he was lucky enough to possess the worthier half: if the other had perished Plutarch would not have been a popular writer, but he would have held a higher place in the estimation of the judicious. Daniel could have posed a candidate for university honors, and perhaps the examiner too, with some of the odd learning which he had stored up in his memory from these great repositories of ancient knowledge. Refusing all reward for such services, the strangers to whom he officiated as a guide, though they perceived that he was an extraordinary person, were little aware how much information he had acquired, and of how strange a kind. His talk with them did not go beyond the subjects which the scenes they came to visit naturally suggested, and they wondered more at the questions he asked, than at any thing which he advanced himself. For his disposition was naturally shy, and that which had been bashfulness in youth assumed the appearance of reserve as he advanced in life; for having none to communicate with upon his favorite studies he lived in an intellectual world of his own, a mental solitude as complete as that of Alexander Selkirk or Robinson Crusoe. Even to the Curate his conversation, if he had touched upon his books, would have been heathen Greek; and to speak the truth plainly, without knowing a letter of that language, he knew more about the Greeks, than nine-tenths of the clergy at that time, including all the dissenters, and than nine-tenths of the schoolmasters also.

Our good Daniel had none of that confidence which so usually and so unpleasantly characterizes self-taught men. In fact he was by no means aware of the extent of his acquirements, all that he knew in this kind having been acquired for amusement not for use. He had never attempted to teach himself any thing. These books had lain in his way in boyhood, or fallen in it afterwards, and the perusal of them intently as it was followed, was always accounted by him to be nothing more than recreation. None of his daily business had ever been neglected for it; he cultivated his fields and his garden, repaired his walls, looked to the stable, tended his cows and salved his sheep, as diligently and as contentedly as if he had possessed neither capacity nor inclination for any higher employments. Yet Daniel was one of those men, who, if disposition and aptitude were not overruled by circumstances, would have grown pale with study, instead of being bronzed and hardened by sun and wind and rain. There were in him undeveloped talents which might have raised him to distinction as an antiquary, a virtuoso of the Royal Society, a poet, or a theologian, to which ever course the bias in his ball of fortune had inclined. But he had not a particle of envy in his composition. He thought indeed that if he had had grammar learning in his youth like the curate, he would have made more use of it; but there was nothing either of the sourness or bitterness (call it which you please) of repining in this natural reflection.

Never indeed was any man more contented with doing his duty in that state of life to which it had pleased God to call him. And well he might be so, for no man ever passed through the world with less to disquiet or to sour him. Bred up in habits which secured the continuance of that humble but sure independance to which he was born, he had never known what it was to be anxious for the future. At the age of twenty-five he had brought home a wife, the daughter of a little landholder like himself, with fifteen pounds for her portion: and the true-love of his youth proved to him a faithful helpmate in those years when the dream of life is over, and we live in its realities. If at any time there had been some alloy in his happiness it was when there appeared reason to suppose that in him his family would be extinct; for though no man knows what parental feelings are till he has experienced them, and Daniel therefore knew not the whole value of that which he had never enjoyed, the desire of progeny is natural to the heart of man; and though Daniel had neither large estates, nor an illustrious name to transmit, it was an unwelcome thought that the little portion of the earth which had belonged to his fathers time out of mind, should pass into the possession of some stranger, who would tread on their graves and his own without any regard to the dust that lay beneath. That uneasy apprehension was removed after he had been married fifteen years, when to the great joy of both parents, because they had long ceased to entertain any hope of such an event, their wishes were fulfilled in the birth of a son. This their only child was healthy, apt and docile, to all appearance as happily disposed in mind and body as a father's heart could wish. If they had fine weather for winning their hay or shearing their corn, they thanked God for it; if the season proved unfavourable, the labour was only a little the more and the crop a little the worse. Their stations secured them from want, and they had no wish beyond it. What more had Daniel to desire?

The following passage in the divine Du Bartas he used to read with peculiar satisfaction, applying it to himself:—

O thrice, thrice happy he, who shuns the cares

Of city troubles, and of state-affairs;

And, serving Ceres, tills with his own team,

His own free land, left by his friends to him!

Never pale Envy's poisony heads do hiss

To gnaw his heart: nor Vulture Avarice:

His fields' bounds, bound his thoughts: he never sups,

For nectar, poison mixed in silver cups;

Neither in golden platters doth he lick

For sweet ambrosia deadly arsenic:

His hand's his bowl (better than plate or glass)

The silver brook his sweetest hippocrass:

Milk cheese and fruit, (fruits of his own endeavour)

Drest without dressing, hath he ready ever.

False counsellors (concealers of the law)

Turncoat attorneys that with both hands draw;

Sly pettifoggers, wranglers at the bar,

Proud purse-leeches, harpies of Westminster,

With feigned-chiding, and foul jarring noise,

Break not his brain, nor interrupt his joys;

But cheerful birds chirping him sweet good-morrows

With nature's music do beguile his sorrows;

Teaching the fragrant forests day by day

The diapason of their heavenly lay.

His wandering vessel, reeling to and fro

On th' ireful ocean (as the winds do blow)

With sudden tempest is not overwhurled,

To seek his sad death in another world:

But leading all his life at home in peace,

Always in sight of his own smoke, no seas

No other seas he knows, no other torrent,

Than that which waters with its silver current

His native meadows: and that very earth

Shall give him burial which first gave him birth.

To summon timely sleep, he doth not need

Æthiop's cold rush, nor drowsy poppy-seed;

Nor keep in consort (as Mecænas did)

Luxurious Villains—(Viols I should have said);

But on green carpets thrum'd with mossy bever,

Fringing the round skirts of his winding river,

The streams mild murmur, as it gently gushes,

His healthy limbs in quiet slumber hushes.

Drum fife and trumpet, with their loud alarms,

Make him not start out of his sleep, to arms;

Nor dear respect of some great General,

Him from his bed unto the block doth call.

The crested cock sings “Hunt-is-up” to him,

Limits his rest, and makes him stir betime,

To walk the mountains and the flow'ry meads

Impearl'd with tears which great Aurora sheds.

Never gross air poisoned in stinking streets,

To choke his spirit, his tender nostril meets;

But th'open sky where at full breath he lives,

Still keeps him sound, and still new stomach gives.

And Death, dread Serjeant of the Eternal Judge,

Comes very late to his sole-seated lodge.

CHAPTER VII. P. I.

RUSTIC PHILOSOPHY. AN EXPERIMENT UPON MOONSHINE.

Quien comienza en juventud

A bien obrar,

Señal es de no errar

En senetud.

PROVERBIOS DEL MARQUES DE SANTILLANA.

It is not however for man to rest in absolute contentment. He is born to hopes and aspirations as the sparks fly upward, unless he has brutified his nature and quenched the spirit of immortality which is his portion. Having nothing to desire for himself, Daniel's ambition had taken a natural direction and fixed upon his son. He was resolved that the boy should be made a scholar; not with the prospect of advancing him in the world, but in the hope that he might become a philosopher, and take as much delight in the books which he would inherit as his father had done before him. Riches and rank and power appeared in his judgement to be nothing when compared to philosophy; and herein he was as true a philosopher as if he had studied in the Porch, or walked the groves of Academus.

It was not however for this,—for he was as little given to talk of his opinions as to display his reading,—but for his retired habits, and general character, and some odd practices into which his books had led him, that he was commonly called Flossofer Daniel by his neighbours. The appellation was not affixed in derision, but respectfully and as his due; for he bore his faculties too meekly ever to excite an envious or an ill-natured feeling in any one. Rural Flossofers were not uncommon in those days, though in the progress of society they have disappeared like Crokers, Bowyers, Lorimers, Armourers, Running Footmen and other descriptions of men whose occupations are gone by. But they were of a different order from our Daniel. They were usually Philomaths, Students in Astrology, or the Cœlestial Science, and not unfrequently Empirics or downright Quacks. Between twenty and thirty almanacs used to be published every year by men of this description, some of them versed enough in mathematics to have done honor to Cambridge, had the fates allowed; and others such proficients in roguery, that they would have done equal honor to the whipping-post.

A man of a different stamp from either came in declining life to settle at Ingleton in the humble capacity of schoolmaster, a little before young Daniel was capable of more instruction than could be given him at home. Richard Guy was his name; he is the person to whom the lovers of old rhyme are indebted for the preservation of the old poem of Flodden Field, which he transcribed from an ancient manuscript, and which was printed from his transcript by Thomas Gent of York. In his way through the world, which had not been along the King's high Dunstable road, Guy had picked up a competent share of Latin, a little Greek, some practical knowledge of physic, and more of its theory; astrology enough to cast a nativity, and more acquaintance with alchemy than has often been possessed by one who never burnt his fingers in its processes. These acquirements were grafted on a disposition as obliging as it was easy; and he was beholden to nature for an understanding so clear and quick that it might have raised him to some distinction in the world if he had not been under the influence of an imagination at once lively and credulous. Five and fifty years had taught him none of the world's wisdom; they had sobered his mind without maturing it; but he had a wise heart, and the wisdom of the heart is worth all other wisdom.

Daniel was too far advanced in life to fall in friendship; he felt a certain degree of attractiveness in this person's company; there was however so much of what may better be called reticence than reserve in his own quiet habitual manners, that it would have been long before their acquaintance ripened into any thing like intimacy, if an accidental circumstance had not brought out the latent sympathy which on both sides had till then rather been apprehended than understood. They were walking together one day when young Daniel, who was then in his sixth year, looking up in his father's face proposed this question: “will it be any harm, Father, if I steal five beans when next I go into Jonathan Dowthwaites, if I can do it without any one's seeing me?”

“And what wouldst thou steal beans for?” was the reply, “when any body would give them to thee, and when thou knowest there are plenty at home?”

“But it wo'nt do to have them given, Father,” the boy replied. “They are to charm away my warts. Uncle William says I must steal five beans, a bean for every wart, and tie them carefully up in paper, and carry them to a place where two roads cross, and then drop them, and walk away without ever once looking behind me. And then the warts will go away from me, and come upon the hands of the person that picks up the beans.”

“Nay boy,” the Father made answer; “that charm was never taught by a white witch! If thy warts are a trouble to thee, they would be a trouble to any one else; and to get rid of an evil from ourselves Daniel, by bringing it upon another, is against our duty to our neighbour. Have nothing to do with a charm like that!”

“May I steal a piece of raw beef then,” rejoined the boy, “and rub the warts with it and bury it? For Uncle says that will do, and as the beef rots, so the warts will waste away.”

“Daniel,” said the Father, “those can be no lawful charms that begin with stealing; I could tell thee how to cure thy warts in a better manner. There is an infallible way, which is by washing the hands in moonshine, but then the moonshine must be caught in a bright silver basin. You wash and wash in the basin, and a cold moisture will be felt upon the hands, proceeding from the cold and moist rays of the moon.”

“But what shall we do for a silver basin,” said little Daniel?

The Father answered, “a pewter dish might be tried if it were made very bright; but it is not deep enough. The brass kettle perhaps might do better.”

“Nay,” said Guy, who had now begun to attend with some interest, “the shape of a kettle is not suitable. It should be a concave vessel, so as to concentrate the rays. Joshua Wilson I dare say would lend his brass basin, which he can very well spare at the hour you want it, because nobody comes to be shaved by moonlight. The moon rises early enough to serve at this time. If you come in this evening at six o'clock I will speak to Joshua in the mean time, and have the basin as bright and shining as a good scouring can make it. The experiment is curious and I should like to see it tried. Where Daniel didst thou learn it?” “I read it,” replied Daniel, “in Sir Kenelm Digby's Discourses, and he says it never fails.”

Accordingly the parties met at the appointed hour. Mambrino's helmet when new from the armourers, or when furbished for a tournament, was not brighter than Guy had rendered the inside of the barber's basin. Schoolmaster, Father and son retired to a place out of observation, by the side of the river, a wild stream tumbling among the huge stones which it had brought down from the hills. On one of these stones sate Daniel the elder, holding the basin in such an inclination toward the moon that there should be no shadow in it; Guy directed the boy where to place himself so as not to intercept the light, and stood looking complacently on, while young Daniel revolved his hands one in another within the empty basin, as if washing them. “I feel them cold and clammy Father!” said the boy. (It was the beginning of November) “Aye,” replied the father, “that's the cold moisture of the moon!” “Aye!” echoed the schoolmaster, and nodded his head in confirmation.

The operation was repeated on the two following nights; and Daniel would have kept up his son two hours later than his regular time of rest to continue it on the third if the evening had not set in with clouds and rain. In spite of the patient's belief that the warts would waste away and were wasting, (for Prince Hohenlohe could not require more entire faith than was given on this occasion) no alteration could be perceived in them at a fortnight's end. Daniel thought the experiment had failed because it had not been repeated sufficiently often, nor perhaps continued long enough. But the Schoolmaster was of opinion that the cause of failure was in the basin: for that silver being the lunar metal would by affinity assist the influential virtues of the moonlight, which finding no such affinity in a mixed metal of baser compounds, might contrariwise have its potential qualities weakened, or even destroyed when received in a brasen vessel, and reflected from it. Flossofer Daniel assented to this theory. Nevertheless as the child got rid of his troublesome excrescences in the course of three or four months, all parties disregarding the lapse of time at first, and afterwards fairly forgetting it, agreed that the remedy had been effectual, and Sir Kenelm if he had been living, might have procured the solemn attestation of men more veracious than himself that moonshine was an infallible cure for warts.

CHAPTER VIII. P. I.

A KIND SCHOOLMASTER AND A HAPPY SCHOOL BOY.

Though happily thou wilt say that wands be to be wrought when they are green, lest they rather break than bend when they be dry, yet know also that he that bendeth a twig because he would see if it would bow by strength may chance to have a crooked tree when he would have a straight.

EUPHUES.

From this time the two Flossofers were friends. Daniel seldom went to Ingleton without looking in upon Guy, if it were between school hours. Guy on his part would walk as far with him on the way back, as the tether of his own time allowed, and frequently on Saturdays and Sundays he strolled out and took a seat by Daniel's fire side. Even the wearying occupation of hearing one generation of urchins after another repeat a-b-ab, hammering the first rules of arithmetic into leaden heads, and pacing like a horse in a mill the same dull dragging round day after day, had neither diminished Guy's good-nature, nor lessened his love for children. He had from the first conceived a liking for young Daniel, both because of the right principle which was evinced by the manner in which he proposed the question concerning stealing the beans, and of the profound gravity (worthy of a Flossofer's son) with which he behaved in the affair of the moonshine. All that he saw and heard of him tended to confirm this favourable prepossession; and the boy, who had been taught to read in the Bible and in Stowe's Chronicle, was committed to his tuition at seven years of age.

Five days in the week (for in the North of England Saturday as well as Sunday is a Sabbath to the Schoolmaster) did young Daniel after supping his porringer of oat-meal pottage, set off to school, with a little basket containing his dinner in his hand. This provision usually consisted of oat-cake and cheese, the latter in goodly proportion, but of the most frugal quality, whatever cream the milk afforded having been consigned to the butter tub. Sometimes it was a piece of cold bacon or of cold pork; and in winter there was the luxury of a shred pie, which is a coarse north country edition of the pie abhorred by puritans. The distance was in those days called two miles; but miles of such long measure that they were for him a good hour's walk at a cheerful pace. He never loitered on the way, being at all times brisk in his movements, and going to school with a spirit as light as when he returned from it, like one whose blessed lot it was never to have experienced, and therefore never to stand in fear of severity or unkindness. For he was not more a favorite with Guy for his docility, and regularity and diligence, than he was with his schoolfellows for his thorough good nature and a certain original oddity of humour.

There are some boys who take as much pleasure in exercising their intellectual faculties, as others do when putting forth the power of arms and legs in boisterous exertion. Young Daniel was from his childhood fond of books. William Dove used to say he was a chip of the old block; and this hereditary disposition was regarded with much satisfaction by both parents, Dinah having no higher ambition nor better wish for her son, than that he might prove like his father in all things. This being the bent of his nature, the boy having a kind master as well as a happy home, never tasted of what old Lily calls (and well might call) the wearisome bitterness of the scholar's learning. He was never subject to the brutal discipline of the Udals and Busbys and Bowyers, and Parrs and other less notorious tyrants who have trodden in their steps; nor was any of that inhuman injustice ever exercised upon him to break his spirit, for which it is to be hoped Dean Colet has paid in Purgatory;—to be hoped, I say, because if there be no Purgatory, the Dean may have gone farther and fared worse. Being the only Latiner in the school his lessons were heard with more interest and less formality. Guy observed his progress with almost as much delight and as much hope as Daniel himself. A schoolmaster who likes his vocation feels toward the boys who deserve his favour something like a thrifty and thriving father toward the children for whom he is scraping together wealth; he is contented that his humble and patient industry should produce fruit not for himself, but for them, and looks with pride to a result in which it is impossible for him to partake, and which in all likelihood he may never live to see. Even some of the old Phlebotomists have had this feeling to redeem them.

“Sir,” says the Compositor to the Corrector of the Press, “there is no heading in the Copy for this Chapter. What must I do?”

“Leave a space for it,” the Corrector replies. “It is a strange sort of book; but I dare say the Author has a reason for every thing that he says or does, and most likely you will find out his meaning as you set up.”

Right Mr. Corrector! you are a judicious person, free from the common vice of finding fault with what you do not understand. My meaning will be explained presently. And having thus prologized, we will draw a line if you please, and begin.

Ten measures of garrulity, says the Talmud, were sent down upon the earth, and the women took nine.

I have known in my time eight terrific talkers; and five of them were of the masculine gender.

But supposing that the Rabbis were right in allotting to the women a ninefold proportion of talkativeness, I confess that I have inherited my mother's share.

I am liberal of my inheritance, and the Public shall have the full benefit of it.

And here if my gentle Public will consider to what profitable uses this gift might have been applied, the disinterestedness of my disposition in having thus benevolently dedicated it to their service, will doubtless be appreciated as it deserves by their discrimination and generosity. Had I carried it to the pulpit, think now how I might have filled the seats, and raised the prices of a private chapel! Had I taken it to the bar, think how I could have mystified a judge, and bamboozled a jury! Had I displayed it in the senate, think how I could have talked against time, for the purpose of delaying a division, till the expected numbers could be brought together; or how efficient a part I could have borne in the patriotic design of impeding the business of a session, prolonging and multiplying the debates, and worrying a minister out of his senses and his life.

Diis aliter visum.—I am what I was to be,—what it is best for myself that I should be,—and for you, my Public, also. The rough-hewn plans of my destination have been better shaped for me by Providence than I could have shaped them for myself.

But to the purpose of this chapter, which is as headless as the Whigs—Observe my Public, I have not said as brainless...If it were, the book would be worth no more than a new Tragedy of Lord Byron's; or an old number of Mr. Jeffrey's Review, when its prophecies have proved false, its blunders have been exposed, and its slander stinks.

Every thing here shall be in order. The digressions into which this gift of discourse may lead me must not interrupt the arrangement of our History. Never shall it be said of the Unknown that “he draweth out the thread of his verbosity finer than the staple of his argument.” We have a journey to perform from Dan to Beersheba, and we must halt occasionally by the way. Matter will arise contingent to the story, correlative to it, or excrescent from it; not necessary to its progress, and yet indispensable for your delight, my gentle Public, and for mine own ease. My Public would not have me stifle the afflatus when I am labouring with it, and in the condition of Elihu as described by himself in the 18th and 19th verses of the xxxii. chapter of the book of Job.

Quemadmodum cælator oculos diu intentos ac fatigatos remittit atque avocat, et, ut dici solet, pascit; sic nos animum aliquando debemus relaxare et quibusdam oblectamentis reficere. Sed ipsa oblectamenta opera sint; ex his quoque si observaveris, sumes quod possit fieri salutare.1

1 SENECA, Epist. 58.

But that the beautiful structure of this history may in no wise be deranged, such matter shall be distributed into distinct chapters in the way of intercalation; a device of which as it respects the year, Adam is believed to have been the inventor; but according to the Author of the book of Jalkut, it was only transmitted by him to his descendants, being one of the things which he received by revelation.

How then shall these Chapters be annominated? Intercalary they shall not. That word will send some of my readers to Johnson's Dictionary for its meaning; and others to Sheridan, or Walker for its pronunciation. Besides, I have a dislike to all mongrel words, and an especial dislike for strange compounds into which a preposition enters. I owe them a grudge. They make one of the main difficulties in Greek and German.

From our own Calenders we cannot borrow an appellation. In the Republican one of our neighbours, when the revolutionary fever was at its height, the supplemental days were called Sansculottedes. The Spaniards would call them Dias Descamisados. The holders of liberal opinions in England would term them Radical Days. A hint might be taken hence, and we might name them radical chapters, as having the root of the matter in them;—Or ramal, if there were such a word, upon the analogy of the Branch Bible societies. Or ramage as the king of Cockayne hath his Foliage. But they would not be truly and philosophically designated by these names. They are not branches from the tree of this history, neither are they its leaves; but rather choice garlands suspended there to adorn it on festival days. They may be likened to the waste weirs of a canal, or the safety valves of a steam engine; (my gentle Public would not have me stifle the afflatus!)—interludes;—symphonies between the acts;—voluntaries during the service;—resting places on the ascent of a church tower; angular recesses of an old bridge, into which foot passengers may retire from carriages or horsemen;—houses-of-call upon the road; seats by the way side, such as those which were provided by the Man of Ross, or the not less meritorious Woman of Chippenham, Maud Heath of Langley Burrel,—Hospices on the passages of the Alps,—Capes of Good Hope, or Isles of St. Helena,—yea Islands of Tinian or Juan Fernandez, upon the long voyage whereon we are bound.

Leap-chapters they cannot properly be called; and if we were to call them Ha Has! as being chapters which the Reader may leap if he likes, the name would appear rather strained than significant, and might be justly censured as more remarkable for affectation than for aptness. For the same reason I reject the designation of Intermeans, though it hath the sanction of great Ben's authority.

Among the requisites for an accomplished writer Steele enumerates the skill whereby common words are started into new significations. I will not presume so far upon that talent (—modesty forbids me—) as to call these intervening chapters either Interpellations or Interpositions, or Interlocations, or Intervals. Take this Reader for a general rule, that the readiest and plainest style is the most forcible (if the head be but properly stored;) and that in all ordinary cases the word which first presents itself is the best; even as in all matters of right and wrong, the first feeling is that which the heart owns and the conscience ratifies.

But for a new occasion, a new word or a new composite must be formed. Therefore I will strike one in the mint of analogy, in which alone the king's English must be coined, and call them Interchapters—and thus endeth

INTERCHAPTER I.

REMARKS IN THE PRINTING OFFICE. THE AUTHOR CONFESSES A DISPOSITION TO GARRULITY. PROPRIETY OF PROVIDING CERTAIN CHAPTERS FOR THE RECEPTION OF HIS EXTRANEOUS DISCOURSE. CHOICE OF AN APPELLATION FOR SUCH CHAPTERS.

Perque vices aliquid, quod tempora longa videri

Non sinat, in medium vacuas referamus ad aures.

OVID.

CHAPTER IX. P. I.

EXCEPTIONS TO ONE OF KING SOLOMON'S RULES—A WINTER'S EVENING AT DANIEL'S FIRE-SIDE.

These are my thoughts; I might have spun them out into a greater length, but I think a little plot of ground, thick sown, is better than a great field which, for the most part of it, lies fallow.

NORRIS.

“Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old his feet will not depart from it.” Generally speaking it will be found so; but is there any other rule to which there are so many exceptions?

Ask the serious Christian as he calls himself, or the Professor (another and more fitting appellative which the Christian Pharisees have chosen for themselves)—ask him whether he has found it hold good? Whether his sons when they attained to years of discretion (which are the most indiscreet years in the course of human life) have profited as he expected by the long extemporaneous prayers to which they listened night and morning, the sad sabbaths which they were compelled to observe, and the soporific sermons which closed the domestic religiosities of those melancholy days? Ask him if this discipline has prevented them from running headlong into the follies and vices of the age? from being birdlimed by dissipation? or caught in the spider's web of sophistry and unbelief? “It is no doubt a true observation,” says Bishop Patrick, “that the ready way to make the minds of youth grow awry, is to lace them too hard, by denying them their just freedom.”

Ask the old faithful servant of Mammon, whom Mammon has rewarded to his heart's desire, and in whom the acquisition of riches has only encreased his eagerness for acquiring more—ask him whether he has succeeded in training up his heir to the same service? He will tell you that the young man is to be found upon race-grounds, and in gaming-houses, that he is taking his swing of extravagance and excess, and is on the high road to ruin.

Ask the wealthy Quaker, the pillar of the meeting—most orthodox in heterodoxy,—who never wore a garment of forbidden cut or colour, never bent his body in salutation, or his knees in prayer,—never uttered the heathen name of a day or month, nor ever addrest himself to any person without religiously speaking illegitimate English,—ask him how it has happened that the tailor has converted his sons? He will fold his hands, and twirl his thumbs mournfully in silence. It has not been for want of training them in the way wherein it was his wish that they should go.

You are about, Sir, to send your son to a public school; Eton or Westminster; Winchester or Harrow; Rugby or the Charter House, no matter which. He may come from either an accomplished scholar to the utmost extent that school education can make him so; he may be the better both for its discipline and its want of discipline; it may serve him excellently well as a preparatory school for the world into which he is about to enter. But also he may come away an empty coxcomb or a hardened brute—a spendthrift—a profligate—a blackguard or a sot.

To put a boy in the way he should go, is like sending out a ship well found, well manned and stored, and with a careful captain; but there are rocks and shallows in her course, winds and currents to be encountered, and all the contingencies and perils of the sea.

How often has it been seen that sons, not otherwise deficient in duty toward their parents, have, in the most momentous concerns of life, taken the course most opposite to that in which they were trained to go, going wrong where the father would have directed them aright, or taking the right path in spite of all inducements and endeavours for leading them wrong! The son of Charles Wesley, born and bred in methodism and bound to it by all the strongest ties of pride and prejudice, became a papist. This indeed was but passing from one erroneous persuasion to another, and a more inviting one. But Isaac Casaubon also had the grief of seeing a son seduced into the Romish superstition, and on the part of that great and excellent man, there had been no want of discretion in training him, nor of sound learning and sound wisdom. Archbishop Leighton, an honor to his church, his country, and his kind, was the child of one of those firebrands who kindled the Great Rebellion. And Franklin had a son, who notwithstanding the example of his father (and such a father!) continued stedfast in his duty as a soldier and a subject; he took the unsuccessful side—but

nunquam successu crescat honestum.1

1 LUCAN.

No such disappointment was destined to befal our Daniel. The way in which he trained up his son was that into which the bent of the boy's own nature would have led him; and all circumstances combined to favour the tendency of his education. The country abounding in natural objects of sublimity and beauty (some of these singular in their kind) might have impressed a duller imagination than had fallen to his lot; and that imagination had time enough for its workings during his solitary walks to and from school morning and evening. His home was in a lonely spot; and having neither brother nor sister, nor neighbours near enough in any degree to supply their place as playmates, he became his father's companion imperceptibly as he ceased to be his fondling. And the effect was hardly less apparent in Daniel than in the boy. He was no longer the same taciturn person as of yore; it seemed as if his tongue had been loosened, and when the reservoirs of his knowledge were opened they flowed freely.

Their chimney corner on a winter's evening presented a group not unworthy of Sir Joshua's pencil. There sate Daniel, richer in marvellous stories than ever traveller who in the days of mendacity returned from the East; the peat fire shining upon a countenance which weather-hardened as it was, might have given the painter a model for a Patriarch, so rare was the union which it exhibited of intelligence, benevolence and simplicity. There sate the boy with open eyes and ears, raised head, and fallen lip, in all the happiness of wonder and implicit belief. There sate Dinah, not less proud of her husband's learning than of the towardly disposition and promising talents of her son,—twirling the thread at her spinning wheel, but attending to all that past; and when there was a pause in the discourse, fetching a deep sigh, and exclaiming “Lord bless us! what wonderful things there are in the world!” There also sate Haggy, knitting stockings, and sharing in the comforts and enjoyments of the family when the day's work was done. And there sate William Dove;—but William must have a chapter to himself.

CHAPTER X. P. I.

ONE WHO WAS NOT SO WISE AS HIS FRIENDS COULD HAVE WISHED, AND YET QUITE AS HAPPY AS IF HE HAD BEEN WISER. NEPOTISM NOT CONFINED TO POPES.

There are of madmen as there are of tame,

All humoured not alike.———Some

Apish and fantastic;

And though 'twould grieve a soul to see God's image

So blemished and defaced, yet do they act

Such antic and such pretty lunacies,

That spite of sorrow, they will make you smile.

DEKKER.

William Dove was Daniel's only surviving brother, seven years his junior. He was born with one of those heads in which the thin partition that divides great wits from folly is wanting. Had he come into the world a century sooner, he would have been taken nolens volens into some Baron's household, to wear motley, make sport for the guests and domestics, and live in fear of the rod. But it was his better fortune to live in an age when this calamity rendered him liable to no such oppression, and to be precisely in that station which secured for him all the enjoyments of which he was capable, and all the care he needed. In higher life, he would probably have been consigned to the keeping of strangers who would have taken charge of him for pay; in a humbler degree he must have depended upon the parish for support; or have been made an inmate of one of those moral lazar-houses in which age and infancy, the harlot and the idiot, the profligate and the unfortunate are herded together.

William Dove escaped these aggravations of calamity. He escaped also that persecution to which he would have been exposed in populous places where boys run loose in packs, and harden one another in impudence, mischief and cruelty. Natural feeling, when natural feeling is not corrupted, leads men to regard persons in his condition with a compassion not unmixed with awe. It is common with the country people when they speak of such persons to point significantly at the head and say 'tis not all there;—words denoting a sense of the mysteriousness of our nature which perhaps they feel more deeply on this than on any other occasion. No outward and visible deformity can make them so truly apprehend how fearfully and wonderfully we are made.

William Dove's was not a case of fatuity. Though all was not there, there was a great deal. He was what is called half-saved. Some of his faculties were more than ordinarily acute, but the power of self conduct was entirely wanting in him. Fortunately it was supplied by a sense of entire dependence which produced entire docility. A dog does not obey his master more dutifully than William obeyed his brother; and in this obedience there was nothing of fear; with all the strength and simplicity of a child's love, it had also the character and merit of a moral attachment.

The professed and privileged Fool was generally characterized by a spice of knavery, and not unfrequently of maliciousness: the unnatural situation in which he was placed, tended to excite such propensities and even to produce them. William had shrewdness enough for the character, but nothing of this appeared in his disposition; ill-usage might perhaps have awakened it, and to a fearful degree, if he had proved as sensible to injury as he was to kindness. But he had never felt an injury. He could not have been treated with more tenderness in Turkey (where a degree of holiness is imputed to persons in his condition) than was uniformly shewn him within the little sphere of his perambulations. It was surprizing how much he had picked up within that little sphere. Whatever event occurred, whatever tale was current, whatever traditions were preserved, whatever superstitions were believed, William knew them all; and all that his insatiable ear took in, his memory hoarded. Half the proverbial sayings in Ray's volume were in his head, and as many more with which Ray was unacquainted. He knew many of the stories which our children are now receiving as novelties in the selections from Grimm's Kinder- und Haus-Marchen, and as many of those which are collected in the Danish Folk-Sagn. And if some zealous lover of legendary lore, (like poor John Leyden, or Sir Walter Scott) had fallen in with him, the Shakesperian commentators might perhaps have had the whole story of St. Withold; the Wolf of the World's End might have been identified with Fenris and found to be a relic of the Scalds: and Rauf Collyer and John the Reeve might still have been as well known as Adam Bell, and Clym of the Clough and William of Cloudeslie.

William had a great fondness for his nephew. Let not Protestants suppose that Nepotism is an affection confined to the dignitaries of the Roman Catholic Church. In its excess indeed it is peculiarly a Papal vice,—which is a degree higher than a Cardinal one; but like many other sins it grows out of the corruption of a good feeling. It may be questioned whether fond uncles are not as numerous as unkind ones, notwithstanding our recollections of King Richard and the Children in the Wood. We may use the epithet nepotious for those who carry this fondness to the extent of doting, and as expressing that degree of fondness it may be applied to William Dove: he was a nepotious uncle. The father regarded young Daniel with a deeper and more thoughtful, but not with a fonder affection, not with such a doting attachment. Dinah herself, though a fond as well as careful mother did not more thoroughly

———delight to hear

Her early child mis-speak half-uttered words;1

and perhaps the boy so long as he was incapable of distinguishing between their moral qualities, and their relative claims to his respect and love and duty, loved his uncle most of the three. The father had no idle hours; in the intervals when he was not otherwise employed, one of his dear books usually lay open before him, and if he was not feeding upon the page, he was ruminating the food it had afforded him. But William Dove from the time that his nephew became capable of noticing and returning caresses seemed to have concentered upon him all his affections. With children affection seldom fails of finding its due return; and if he had not thus won the boy's heart in infancy, he would have secured it in childhood by winning his ear with these marvellous stories. But he possessed another talent which would alone have made him a favourite with children,—the power of imitating animal sounds with singular perfection. A London manager would have paid him well for performing the cock in Hamlet. He could bray in octaves to a nicety, set the geese gabbling by addressing them in their own tongue, and make the turkey-cock spread his fan, brush his wing against the ground, and angrily gob-gobble in answer to a gobble of defiance. But he prided himself more upon his success with the owls, as an accomplishment of more difficult attainment. In this Mr. Wordsworth's boy of Winander was not more perfect. Both hands were used as an instrument in producing the notes; and if Pope could have heard the responses which came from barn and doddered oak and ivied crag, he would rather, (satirist as he was,) have left Ralph unsatirized, than have vilified one of the wildest and sweetest of nocturnal sounds.

1 DONNE.

He was not less expert to a human ear in hitting off the wood-pigeon's note, though he could not in this instance provoke a reply. This sound he used to say ought to be natural to him, and it was wrong in the bird not to acknowledge his relation. Once when he had made too free with a lasses lips, he disarmed his brother of a reprehensive look, by pleading that as his name was William Dove it behoved him both to bill and to coo.

CHAPTER XI. P. I.

A WORD TO THE READER, SHEWING WHERE WE ARE, AND HOW WE CAME HERE, AND WHEREFORE; AND WHITHER WE ARE GOING.

'Tis my venture

On your retentive wisdom.

BEN JONSON.

Reader, you have not forgotten where we are at this time: you remember I trust, that we are neither at Dan nor Beersheba; nor any where between those two celebrated places; nor on the way to either of them: but that we are in the Doctor's parlour, that Mrs. Dove has just poured out his seventh cup of tea, and that the clock of St. George's has struck five. In what street, parade, place, square, row, terrace or lane, and in what town, and in what county; and on what day, and in what month, and in what year, will be explained in due time. You cannot but remember what was said in the second chapter post-initium concerning the importance and the necessity of order in an undertaking like this. “All things,” says Sir Thomas Brown, “began in order; so shall they end, and so shall they begin again; according to the ordainer of order, and mystical mathematics of the City of Heaven:” This awful sentence was uttered by the Philosopher of Norwich upon occasion of a subject less momentous than that whereon we have entered, for what are the mysteries of the Quincunx compared to the delineation of a human mind? Be pleased only at present to bear in mind where we are. Place but as much confidence in me as you do in your review, your newspaper, and your apothecary; give me but as much credit as you expect from your tailor; and if your apothecary deserves that confidence as well, it will be well for you, and if your credit is as punctually redeemed it will be well for your tailor. It is not without cause that I have gone back to the Doctor's childhood and his birth place. Be thou assured, O Reader! that he never could have been seated thus comfortably in that comfortable parlour where we are now regarding him—never by possibility could have been at that time in that spot, and in those circumstances;—never could have been the Doctor that he was,—nay according to all reasonable induction, all tangible or imaginable probabilities,—never would have been a Doctor at all,—consequently thou never couldst have had the happiness of reading this delectable history, nor I the happiness of writing it for thy benefit and information and delight,—had it not been for his father's character, his father's books, his schoolmaster Guy, and his Uncle William, with all whom and which, it was therefore indispensable that thou shouldst be made acquainted.

A metaphysician, or as some of my contemporaries would affect to say a psychologist, if he were at all a master of his art bablative (for it is as much an ars bablativa as the Law, which was defined to be so by that old traitor and time-server Serjeant Maynard)—a metaphysician I say, would not require more than three such octavo volumes as those of Mr. Malthus's Essay on Population, to prove that no existing circumstance could at this time be what it is, unless all preceding circumstances had from the beginning of time been precisely what they were. But, my good Reader, I have too much respect for you, and too much regard for your precious time, and too much employment, or amusement (which is a very rational kind of employment) for my own, to waste it in demonstrating a truism. No man knows the value of time more feelingly, than I do!

Man's life, Sir, being

So short, and then the way that leads unto

The knowledge of ourselves, so long and tedious,

Each minute should be precious.1

1 BEAUMONT and FLETCHER.

It is my wish and intention to make you acquainted with a person most worthy to be known, for such the subject of this history will be admitted to be: one whom when you once know him it will be impossible that you should ever forget: one for whom I have the highest possible veneration and regard; (and though it is not possible that your feelings towards him should be what mine are) one who, the more he is known, will and must be more and more admired. I wish to introduce this person to you. Now, Sir, I appeal to your good sense, and to your own standard of propriety, should I act with sufficient respect either to yourself or him, if, without giving you any previous intimation, any information, concerning his character and situation in life; or in any way apprizing you who and what he was, I were to knock at your door and simply present him to you as Doctor Dove? No, my dear Sir! it is indispensable that you should be properly informed who it is whom I thus introduce to your acquaintance; and if you are the judicious person that I suppose you to be, you will be obliged to me as long as you live. “For why,” as old Higgins hath it,—

For why, who writes such histories as these

Doth often bring the Reader's heart such ease

As when they sit and see what he doth note,

Well fare his heart, say they, this book that wrote!

Ill fare that reader's heart who of this book says otherwise! “Tam suavia dicam facinora, ut malè sit ei qui talibus non delectetur!” said a very different person from old Higgins, writing in a different vein, I have not read his book, but so far as my own is concerned, I heartily adopt his malediction.

Had I been disposed, as the Persians say, to let the steed of the pen expatiate in the plains of prolixity, I should have carried thee farther back in the generations of the Doves. But the good garrulous son of Garcilasso my Lord (Heaven rest the soul of the Princess who bore him,—for Peru has never produced any thing else half so precious as his delightful books,)—the Inca-blooded historian himself, I say, was not more anxious to avoid that failing than I am. Forgive me, Reader, if I should have fallen into an opposite error; forgive me if in the fear of saying too much I should have said too little. I have my misgivings:—I may have run upon Scylla while striving to avoid Charybdis. Much interesting matter have I omitted; much have I past by on which I “cast a longing lingering look behind;”—much which might worthily find a place in the History of Yorkshire;—or of the West Riding (if that history were tripartitively distributed;)—or in the Gentleman's Magazine;—or in John Nichols's Illustrations of the Literary History of the Eighteenth Century: (I honor John Nichols, I honor Mr. Urban!) much more might it have had place,—much more might it be looked for here.

I might have told thee, Reader, of Daniel the Grandfather, and of Abigail his second wife, who once tasted tea in the housekeeper's apartments at Skipton Castle; and of the Great Grandfather who at the age of twenty-eight died of the small pox, and was the last of the family that wore a leathern jerkin; and of his father Daniel the atavus, who was the first of the family that shaved, and who went with his own horse and arms to serve in that brave troop, which during the wreck of the King's party the heir of Lowther raised for the loyal cause: and of that Daniel's Grandfather (the tritavus) who going to Kentmere to bring home a wife was converted from the popish superstition by falling in with Bernard Gilpin on the way. That apostolic man was so well pleased with his convert, that he gave him his own copy of Latimer's sermons,—that copy which was one of our Daniel's Sunday books, and which was religiously preserved in reverence for this ancestor, and for the Apostle of the North (as Bernard Gilpin was called) whose autograph it contained.

The history of any private family, however humble, could it be fully related for five or six generations, would illustrate the state and progress of society better than could be done by the most elaborate dissertation. And the History of the Doves might be rendered as interesting and as instructive as that of the Seymours or the Howards. Frown not, My Lord of Norfolk, frown not, your Grace of Somerset, when I add, that it would contain less for their descendants to regret.

CHAPTER XII. P. I.

A HISTORY NOTICED WHICH IS WRITTEN BACKWARD. THE CONFUSION OF TONGUES AN ESPECIAL EVIL FOR SCHOOLBOYS.

For never in the long and tedious tract

Of slavish grammar was I made to plod;

No tyranny of Rules my patience rackt;

I served no prenticehood to any Rod;

But in the freedom of the Practic way

Learnt to go right, even when I went astray.

DR. BEAUMONT.

It has been the general practice of historians, from the time of Moses, to begin at the beginning of their subject: but as a river may be traced either from its sources or its mouth, so it appears that a history may be composed in the reversed order of its chronology; and a French author of very considerable ability and great learning has actually written a history of the Christian religion from his own times upwards. It forms part of an elaborate and extensive work entitled Parallele des Religions, which must have been better known than it appears to be at present if it had not happened to be published in Paris during the most turbulent year of the Revolution. Perhaps if I had carried back the memoirs of the Dove family, I might have followed his example in chusing the up-hill way, and have proceeded from son to father in the ascending line. But having resolved (whether judiciously or not) not to go farther back in these family records than the year of our Lord 1723, being the year of the Doctor's birth, I shall continue in the usual course, and pursue his history ab incunabulis down to that important evening on which we find him now reaching out his hand to take that cup of tea which Mrs. Dove has just creamed and sugared for him. After all the beaten way is usually the best, and always the safest. “He ought to be well mounted,” says Aaron Hill, “who is for leaping the hedges of custom.” For myself I am not so adventurous a horseman as to take the hazards of a steeple chace.

Proceeding therefore after the model of a Tyburn biography, which being an ancient as well as popular form is likely to be the best,—we come after birth and parentage to education. “That the world from Babel was scattered into divers tongues, we need not other proof,” says a grave and good author, “than as Diogenes proved that there is motion,—by walking;—so we may see the confusion of languages by our confused speaking. Once all the earth was of one tongue, one speech and one consent; for they all spake in the holy tongue wherein the world was created in the beginning. But pro peccato dissentionis humanæ (as saith St. Austin,)—for the sin of men disagreeing,—not only different dispositions but also different languages came into the world.—They came to Babel with a disagreeing agreement; and they came away punished with a speechless speech. They disagree among themselves, while every one strives for dominion. They agree against God in their Nagnavad lan Liguda,—we will make ourselves a rendezvous for idolatry. But they come away speaking to each other, but not understood of each other; and so speak to no more purpose than if they spake not at all. This punishment of theirs at Babel is like Adam's corruption, hereditary to us; for we never come under the rod at the Grammar School, but we smart for our ancestor's rebellion at Babel.”

Light lie the earth upon the bones of Richard Guy, the Schoolmaster of Ingleton! He never consumed birch enough in his vocation to have made a besom; and his ferule was never applied unless when some moral offence called for a chastisement that would be felt. There is a closer connection between good-nature and good sense than is commonly supposed. A sour ill-tempered pedagogue would have driven Daniel through the briars and brambles of the Grammar and foundered him in its sloughs; Guy led him gently along the green-sward. He felt that childhood should not be made altogether a season of painful acquisition, and that the fruits of the sacrifices then made are uncertain as to the account to which they may be turned, and are also liable to the contingencies of life at least, if not otherwise jeopardized. “Puisque le jour peut lui manquer, laissons le un peu jouir de l'Aurore!” The precepts which warmth of imagination inspired in Jean Jacques was impressed upon Guy's practice by gentleness of heart. He never crammed the memory of his pupil with such horrific terms as Prothesis, Aphæresis, Epenthesis, Syncope, Paragoge, and Apocope; never questioned him concerning Appositio, Evocatio, Syllepsis, Prolepsis, Zeugma, Synthesis, Antiptosis, and Synecdoche; never attempted to deter him (as Lily says boys are above all things to be deterred) from those faults which Lily also says, seem almost natural to the English,—the heinous faults of Iotacism, Lambdacism, (which Alcibiades affected,)—Ischnotesism, Trauli'sm and Plateasm. But having grounded him well in the nouns and verbs, and made him understand the concords, he then followed in part the excellent advice of Lily thus given in his address to the Reader:

“When these concords be well known unto them (an easy and pleasant pain, if the foregrounds be well and thoroughly beaten in) let them not continue in learning of the rules orderly, as they lie in their Syntax, but rather learn some pretty book wherein is contained not only the eloquence of the tongue, but also a good plain lesson of honesty and godliness; and thereof take some little sentence as it lieth, and learn to make the same first out of English into Latin, not seeing the book, or construing it thereupon. And if there fall any necessary rule of the Syntax to be known, then to learn it, as the occasion of the sentence giveth cause that day; which sentence once made well, and as nigh as may be with the words of the book, then to take the book and construe it; and so shall he be less troubled with the parsing of it, and easiliest carry his lesson in mind.”

Guy followed this advice in part; and in part he deviated from it, upon Lily's own authority, as “judging that the most sufficient way which he saw to be the readiest mean;” while therefore he exercised his pupil in writing Latin pursuant to this plan, he carried him on faster in construing, and promoted the boy's progress by gratifying his desire of getting forward. When he had done with Cordery, Erasmus was taken up,—for some of Erasmus's colloquies were in those days used as a school book, and the most attractive one that could be put into a boy's hands. After he had got through this, the aid of an English version was laid aside. And here Guy departed from the ordinary course, not upon any notion that he could improve upon it, but merely because he happened to possess an old book composed for the use of Schools, which was easy enough to suit young Daniel's progress in the language, and might therefore save the cost of purchasing Justin or Phædrus or Cornelius Nepos, or Eutropius,—to one or other of which he would otherwise have been introduced.

CHAPTER XIII. P. I.

A DOUBT CONCERNING SCHOOL BOOKS, WHICH WILL BE DEEMED HERETICAL: AND SOME ACCOUNT OF AN EXTRAORDINARY SUBSTITUTE FOR OVID OR VIRGIL.

They say it is an ill mason that refuseth any stone; and there is no knowledge but in a skilful hand serves, either positively as it is, or else to illustrate some other knowledge.

HERBERT'S REMAINS.

I am sometimes inclined to think that pigs are brought up upon a wiser system, than boys at a grammar school. The Pig is allowed to feed upon any kind of offal, however coarse, on which he can thrive, till the time approaches when pig is to commence pork, or take a degree as bacon; and then he is fed daintily. Now it has sometimes appeared to me that in like manner, boys might acquire their first knowledge of Latin from authors very inferior to those which are now used in all schools; provided the matter was unexceptionable and the Latinity good; and that they should not be introduced to the standard works of antiquity till they are of an age in some degree to appreciate what they read.

Understand me, Reader, as speaking doubtfully,—and that too upon a matter of little moment; for the scholar will return in riper years to those authors which are worthy of being studied, and as for the blockhead—it signifies nothing whether the book which he consumes by thumbing it in the middle and dog-earing it at the corners be worthy or not of a better use. Yet if the dead have any cognizance of posthumous fame, one would think it must abate somewhat of the pleasure with which Virgil and Ovid regard their earthly immortality, when they see to what base purposes their productions are applied. That their verses should be administered to boys in regular doses, as lessons or impositions, and some dim conception of their meaning whipt into the tail when it has failed to penetrate the head, cannot be just the sort of homage to their genius which they anticipated or desired.

Not from any reasonings or refinements of this kind, but from the mere accident of possessing the book, Guy put into his pupil's hands the Dialogues of Johannes Ravisius Textor. Jean Tixier, Seigneur de Ravisy, in the Nivernois, who thus latinized his name, is a person whose works, according to Baillet's severe censure, were buried in the dust of a few petty colleges and unfrequented shops, more than a century ago. He was however in his day a person of no mean station in the world of letters, having been Rector of the University of Paris, at the commencement of the 16th century; and few indeed are the writers whose books have been so much used; for perhaps no other author ever contributed so largely to the manufacture of exercises whether in prose or verse, and of sermons also. Textor may be considered as the first compiler of the Gradus ad Parnassum; and that collection of Apopthegms was originally formed by him, which Conrade Lycosthenes enlarged and re-arranged; which the Jesuits adopted after expurgating it; and which during many generations served as one of the standard common-place books for common-place divines in this country as well as on the continent.

But though Textor was continually working in classical literature with a patience and perseverance which nothing but the delight he experienced in such occupations could have sustained, he was without a particle of classical taste. His taste was that of the age wherein he flourished, and these his Dialogues are Moralities in Latin verse. The designs and thoughts which would have accorded with their language had they been written either in old French or old English, appear when presented in Latinity, which is always that of a scholar, and largely interwoven with scraps from familiar classics, as strange as Harlequin and Pantaloon would do in heroic costume.

Earth opens the first of these curious compositions with a bitter complaint for the misfortunes which it is her lot to witness. Age (Ætas) overhears the lamentation and enquires the cause; and after a dialogue in which the author makes the most liberal use of his own common-places, it appears that the perishable nature of all sublunary things is the cause of this mourning. Ætas endeavours to persuade Terra that her grief is altogether unreasonable by such brief and cogent observations as Fata jubent, Fata volunt, Ita Diis placitum. Earth asks the name of her philosophic consoler, but upon discovering it, calls her falsa virago, and meretrix, and abuses her as being the very author of all the evils that distress her. However Ætas succeeds in talking Terra into better humour, advises her to exhort man that he should not set his heart upon perishable things, and takes her leave as Homo enters. After a recognition between mother and son, Terra proceeds to warn Homo against all the ordinary pursuits of this world. To convince him of the vanity of glory she calls up in succession the ghosts of Hector, Achilles, Alexander and Samson, who tell their tales and admonish him that valor and renown afford no protection against Death. To exemplify the vanity of beauty Helen, Lais, Thisbe and Lucretia are summoned, relate in like manner their respective fortunes, and remind him that pulvis et umbra sumus. Virgil preaches to him upon the emptiness of literary fame. Xerxes tells him that there is no avail in power, Nero that there is none in tyranny, Sardanapalus that there is none in voluptuousness. But the application which Homo makes of all this, is the very reverse to what his mother intended: he infers that seeing he must die at last, live how he will, the best thing he can do is to make a merry life of it, so away he goes to dance and revel and enjoy himself: and Terra concludes with the mournful observation that men will still pursue their bane, unmindful of their latter end.

Another of these Moralities begins with three Worldlings (Tres Mundani) ringing changes upon the pleasures of profligacy, in Textor's peculiar manner, each in regular succession saying something to the same purport in different words. As thus

PRIMUS MUNDANUS.

Si breve tempus abit,

SECUNDUS MUNDANUS.

Si vita caduca recedit;

TERTIUS MUNDANUS.

Si cadit hora.

PRIMUS MUNDANUS.

Dies abeunt,

SECUNDUS MUNDANUS.

Perit Omne,

TERTIUS MUNDANUS.

Venit Mors,

PRIMUS MUNDANUS.

Quidnam prodesset fati meminisse futuri?

SECUNDUS MUNDANUS.

Quidnam prodesset lachrymis consumere vitam?

TERTIUS MUNDANUS.

Quidnam prodesset tantis incumbere curis?

Upon which an unpleasant personage who has just appeared to interrupt their trialogue observes,

Si breve tempus abit, si vita caduca recedit,

Si cadit hora, dies abeunt, perit omne, venit Mors,

Quidnam lethiferæ Mortis meminisse nocebit?

It is Mors herself who asks the question. The three Worldlings however behave as resolutely as Don Juan in the old drama; they tell Death that they are young and rich and active and vigorous, and set all admonition at defiance. Death or rather Mrs. Death, (for Mors being feminine is called læna, and meretrix, and virago,) takes all this patiently, and letting them go off in a dance, calls up Human Nature who has been asleep meantime, and asks her how she can sleep in peace while her sons are leading a life of dissipation and debauchery? Nature very coolly replies by demanding why they should not? and Death answers, because they must go to the infernal regions for so doing. Upon this Nature, who appears to be liberally inclined, asks if it is credible that any should be obliged to go there? and Death to convince her calls up a soul from bale to give an account of his own sufferings. A dreadful account this Damnatus gives; and when Nature, shocked at what she hears, enquires if he is the only one who is tormented in Orcus, Damnatus assures her that hardly one in a thousand goes to Heaven, but that his fellow-sufferers are in number numberless; and he specifies among them Kings and Popes, and Senators and severe Schoolmasters,—a class of men whom Textor seems to have held in great and proper abhorrence—as if like poor Thomas Tusser he had suffered under their inhuman discipline.

Horrified at this, Nature asks advice of Mors, and Mors advises her to send a Son of Thunder round the world, who should reprove the nations for their sins, and sow the seeds of virtue by his preaching. Peregrinus goes upon this mission and returns to give an account of it. Nothing can be worse than the report. As for the Kings of the Earth, it would be dangerous, he says, to say what they were doing. The Popes suffered the ship of Peter to go wherever the winds carried it. Senators were won by intercession or corrupted by gold. Doctors spread their nets in the temples for prey, and Lawyers were dumb unless their tongues were loosened by money.—Had he seen the Italians?—Italy was full of dissentions, ripe for war, and defiled by its own infamous vice. The Spaniards?—They were suckled by Pride. The English?—

Gens tacitis prægnans arcanis, ardua tentans,

Edita tartareis mihi creditur esse tenebris.

In short the Missionary concludes that he has found every where an abundant crop of vices, and that all his endeavours to produce amendment have been like ploughing the sea shore. Again afflicted Nature asks advice of Mors, and Mors recommends that she should call up Justice and send her abroad with her scourge to repress the wicked. But Justice is found to be so fast asleep that no calling can awaken her. Mors then advises her to summon Veritas; alas! unhappy Veritas enters complaining of pains from head to foot and in all the intermediate parts, within and without; she is dying and entreats that Nature will call some one to confess her. But who shall be applied to?—Kings? They will not come.—Nobles? Veritas is a hateful personage to them.—Bishops, or mitred Abbots? They have no regard for Truth.—Some Saint from the desert? Nature knows not where to find one! Poor Veritas therefore dies “unhouseled, disappointed, unanealed;” and forthwith three Demons enter rejoicing that Human Nature is left with none to help her, and that they are Kings of this world. They call in their Ministers, Caro and Voluptas and Vitium, and send them to do their work among mankind. These successful missionaries return, and relate how well they have sped every where; and the Demons being by this time hungry, after washing in due form, and many ceremonious compliments among themselves, sit down to a repast which their ministers have provided. The bill of fare was one which Beelzebub's Court of Aldermen might have approved. There were the brains of a fat monk,—a roasted Doctor of Divinity who afforded great satisfaction,—a King's sirloin,—some broiled Pope's flesh, and part of a Schoolmaster; the joint is not specified, but I suppose it to have been the rump. Then came a Senator's lights and a Lawyer's tongue.

When they have eaten of these dainties till the distended stomach can hold no more, Virtus comes in and seeing them send off the fragments to their Tartarean den, calls upon mankind to bestow some sustenance upon her, for she is tormented with hunger. The Demons and their ministers insult her and drive her into banishment; they tell Nature that to-morrow the great King of Orcus will come and carry her away in chains; off they go in a dance, and Nature concludes the piece by saying that what they have threatened must happen, unless Justice shall be awakened, Virtue fed, and Veritas restored to life by the sacred book.

There are several other Dialogues in a similar strain of fiction. The rudest and perhaps oldest specimen of this style is to be found in Pierce Ploughman, the most polished in Calderon, the most popular in John Bunyan's Holy War, and above all in his Pilgrim's Progress. It appears from the Dialogues that they were not composed for the use of youth alone as a school book, but were represented at College; and poor as they are in point of composition, the oddity of their combinations, and the wholesome honesty of their satire, were well adapted to strike young imaginations and make an impression there which better and wiser works might have failed to leave.

A schoolmaster who had been regularly bred would have regarded such a book with scorn, and discerning at once its obvious faults, would have been incapable of perceiving any thing which might compensate for them. But Guy was not educated well enough to despise a writer like old Textor. What he knew himself, he had picked up where and how he could, in bye ways and corners. The book was neither in any respect above his comprehension, nor below his taste; and Joseph Warton, never rolled off the hexameters of Virgil or Homer, ore rotundo, with more delight, when expatiating with all the feelings of a scholar and a poet upon their beauties, to such pupils as Headley and Russell and Bowles, than Guy paraphrased these rude but striking allegories to his delighted Daniel.

CHAPTER XIV. P. I.

AN OBJECTION ANSWERED.

Is this then your wonder?

Nay then you shall under-

stand more of my skill.

BEN JONSON.

“This account of Textor's Dialogues,” says a critical Reader, “might have done very well for the Retrospective Review, or one of the Magazines, or D'Israeli's Curiosities of Literature. But no one would have looked for it here, where it is completely out of place.”

“My good Sir, there is quite enough left untouched in Textor to form a very amusing paper for the journal which you have mentioned, and the Editor may thank you for the hint. But you are mistaken in thinking that what has been said of those Dialogues is out of place here. May I ask what you expected in these volumes?”

“What the Title authorized me to look for.”

“Do you know, Sir, what mutton broth means at a city breakfast on the Lord Mayor's Day, mutton broth being the appointed breakfast for that festival? It means according to established usage—by liberal interpretation—mutton broth and every thing else that can be wished for at a breakfast. So, Sir, you have here not only what the title seems to specify, but every thing else that can be wished for in a book. In treating of the Doctor, it treats de omnibus rebus et quibusdam aliis. It is the Doctor &c., and that &c., like one of Lyttleton's, implies every thing that can be deduced from the words preceding.

“But I maintain that the little which has been said of comical old Textor (for it is little compared to what his Dialogues contain) strictly relates to the main thread of this most orderly and well compacted work. You will remember that I am now replying to the question proposed in the third chapter P. I. ‘Who was the Doctor?’ And as he who should undertake to edite the works of Chaucer, or Spenser, or Shakespear would not be qualified for the task, unless he had made himself conversant with the writings of those earlier authors, from whose storehouses (as far as they drew from books) their minds were fed; so it behoved me (as far as my information and poor ability extend) to explain in what manner so rare a character as Dr. Dove's was formed.

“Quo semel est imbuta recens,—you know the rest of the quotation, Sir. And perhaps you may have tasted water out of a beery glass,—which it is not one or two rinsings that can purify.

“You have seen yew trees cut into the forms of pyramids, chess-kings, and peacocks:—nothing can be more unlike their proper growth—and yet no tree except the yew could take the artificial figures so well. The garden passes into the possession of some new owner who has no taste for such ornaments: the yews are left to grow at their own will; they lose the preposterous shape which had been forced upon them, without recovering that of their natural growth, and what was formal becomes grotesque—a word which may be understood as expressing the incongruous combination of formality with extravagance or wildness.”

The intellectual education which young Daniel received at home was as much out of the ordinary course as the book in which he studied at school. Robinson Crusoe had not yet reached Ingleton. Sandford and Merton had not been written, nor that history of Pecksey and Flapsey and the Robin's Nest, which is the prettiest fiction that ever was composed for children, and for which its excellent authoress will one day rank high among women of genius when time shall have set its seal upon desert. The only book within his reach, of all those which now come into the hands of youth, was the Pilgrim's Progress, and this he read at first without a suspicion of its allegorical import. What he did not understand was as little remembered as the sounds of the wind, or the motions of the passing clouds; but the imagery and the incidents took possession of his memory and his heart. After a while Textor became an interpreter of the immortal Tinker, and the boy acquired as much of the meaning by glimpses as was desirable, enough to render some of the personages more awful by spiritualizing them, while the tale itself remained as a reality. Oh! what blockheads are those wise persons who think it necessary that a child should comprehend every thing it reads!

CHAPTER XV. P. I.

THE AUTHOR VENTURES AN OPINION AGAINST THE PREVAILING WISDOM OF MAKING CHILDREN PREMATURELY WISE.

Pray you, use your freedom;

And so far, if you please allow me mine,

To hear you only; not to be compelled

To take your moral potions.

MASSINGER.

“What, Sir,” exclaims a Lady, who is bluer than ever one of her naked and woad-stained ancestors appeared at a public festival in full dye,—“what, Sir, do you tell us that children are not to be made to understand what they are taught?” And she casts her eyes complacently toward an assortment of those books which so many writers, male and female, some of the infidel, some of the semi-fidel, and some of the super-fidel schools have composed for the laudable purpose of enabling children to understand every thing.—“What, Sir,” she repeats, “are we to make our children learn things by rote like parrots, and fill their heads with words to which they cannot attach any signification?”

“Yes, Madam, in very many cases.”

“I should like, Sir, to be instructed why?”

She says this in a tone, and with an expression both of eyes and lips which plainly show, in direct opposition to the words, that the Lady thinks herself much fitter to instruct, than to be instructed. It is not her fault. She is a good woman, and naturally a sensible one, but she has been trained up in the way women should not go. She has been carried from lecture to lecture, like a student who is being crammed at a Scotch University. She has attended lectures on chemistry, lectures on poetry, lectures on phrenology, lectures on mnemonics; she has read the latest and most applauded essays on Taste: she has studied the newest and most approved treatises practical and theoretical upon Education: she has paid sufficient attention to metaphysics to know as much as a professed philosopher about matter and spirit; she is a proficient in political economy, and can discourse upon the new science of population. Poor Lady, it would require large draughts of Lethe to clear out all this undigested and undigestible trash, and fit her for becoming what she might have been! Upon this point however it may be practicable to set her right.

“You are a mother, Madam, and a good one. In caressing your infants you may perhaps think it unphilosophical to use what I should call the proper and natural language of the nursery. But doubtless you talk to them; you give some utterance to your feelings; and whether that utterance be in legitimate and wise words, or in good extemporaneous nonsense it is alike to the child. The conventional words convey no more meaning to him than the mere sound; but he understands from either all that is meant, all that you wish him to understand, all that is to be understood. He knows that it is an expression of your love and tenderness, and that he is the object of it.

“So too it continues after he is advanced from infancy into childhood. When children are beginning to speak they do not and cannot affix any meaning to half the words which they hear; yet they learn their mother tongue. What I say is, do not attempt to force their intellectual growth. Do not feed them with meat till they have teeth to masticate it.

“There is a great deal which they ought to learn, can learn, and must learn, before they can or ought to understand it. How many questions must you have heard from them which you have felt to be best answered, when they were with most dexterity put aside! Let me tell you a story which the Jesuit Manuel de Vergara used to tell of himself. When he was a little boy he asked a Dominican Friar what was the meaning of the seventh commandment, for he said he could not tell what committing adultery was. The Friar not knowing how to answer, cast a perplexed look round the room, and thinking he had found a safe reply pointed to a kettle on the fire, and said the Commandment meant that he must never put his hand in the pot while it was boiling. The very next day, a loud scream alarmed the family, and behold there was little Manuel running about the room holding up his scalded finger, and exclaiming ‘Oh dear, oh dear, I've committed adultery! I've committed adultery! I've committed adultery!’”

CHAPTER XVI. P. I.

USE AND ABUSE OF STORIES IN REASONING, WITH A WORD IN BEHALF OF CHIMNEY-SWEEPERS AND IN REPROOF OF THE EARL OF LAUDERDALE.

My particular inclination moves me in controversy especially to approve his choice that said, fortia mallem quam formosa.

DR. JACKSON.

I ended that last chapter with a story, and though “I say it who should not say it,” it is a good story well applied. Of what use a story may be even in the most serious debates may be seen from the circulation of old Joes in Parliament, which are as current there as their sterling namesakes used to be in the city some threescore years ago. A jest though it should be as stale as last weeks newspaper, and as flat as Lord Flounder's face, is sure to be received with laughter by the Collective Wisdom of the Nation: nay it is sometimes thrown out like a tub to the whale, or like a trail of carrion to draw off hounds from the scent.

The Bill which should have put an end to the inhuman practice of employing children to sweep chimneys, was thrown out on the third reading in the House of Lords (having passed the Commons without a dissentient voice) by a speech from Lord Lauderdale, the force of which consisted in, literally, a Joe Millar jest. He related that an Irishman used to sweep his chimney by letting a rope down, which was fastened round the legs of a goose, and then pulling the goose after it. A neighbour to whom he recommended this as a convenient mode objected to it upon the score of cruelty to the goose: upon which he replied, that a couple of ducks might do as well. Now if the Bill before the house had been to enact that men should no longer sweep chimneys but that boys should be used instead, the story would have been applicable. It was no otherwise applicable than as it related to chimney-sweeping: but it was a joke, and that sufficed. The Lords laughed; his Lordship had the satisfaction of throwing out the Bill, and the home Negro trade has continued from that time, now seven years, till this day, and still continues. His Lordship had his jest, and it is speaking within compass to say that in the course of those seven years two thousand children have been sacrificed in consequence.

The worst actions of Lord Lauderdale's worst ancestor admit of a better defence before God and Man.

Had his Lordship perused the evidence which had been laid before the House of Commons when the Bill was brought in, upon which evidence the Bill was founded? Was he aware of the shocking barbarities connected with the trade, and inseparable from it? Did he know that children inevitably lacerate themselves in learning this dreadful occupation? that they are frequently crippled by it? frequently lose their lives in it by suffocation, or by slow fire? that it induces a peculiar and dreadful disease? that they who survive the accumulated hardships of a childhood during which they are exposed to every kind of misery, and destitute of every kind of comfort, have at the age of seventeen or eighteen to seek their living how they can in some other employment,—for it is only by children that this can be carried on? Did his Lordship know that girls as well as boys are thus abused? that their sufferings begin at the age of six, sometimes a year earlier? finally that they are sold to this worst and most inhuman of all slaveries, and sometimes stolen for the purpose of being sold to it?

I bear no ill-will towards Lord Lauderdale, either personally or politically: far from it. His manly and honorable conduct on the Queen's trial, when there was such an utter destitution of honor in many quarters where it was believed to exist, and so fearful a want of manliness where it ought to have been found, entitles him to the respect and gratitude of every true Briton. But I will tell his Lordship that rather than have spoken as he did against an act which would have lessened the sum of wickedness and suffering in this country,—rather than have treated a question of pure humanity with contempt and ridicule,—rather than have employed my tongue for such a purpose and with such success, I would———But no: I will not tell him how I had concluded. I will not tell him what I had added in the sincerity of a free tongue and an honest heart. I leave the sentence imperfect rather than that any irritation which the strength of my language might excite should lessen the salutary effects of self-condemnation.

James Montgomery! these remarks are too late for a place in thy Chimney Sweepers' Friend: but insert them I pray thee in thy newspaper, at the request of one who admires and loves thee as a Poet, honors and respects thee as a man, and reaches out in spirit at this moment a long arm to shake hands with thee in cordial good will.

My compliments to you Mr. Bowring! your little poem in Montgomery's benevolent album is in a strain of true poetry and right feeling. None but a man of genius could have struck off such stanzas upon such a theme. But when you wrote upon Humanity at Home, the useful reflection might have occurred that Patriotism has no business abroad. Whatever cause there may be to wish for amendment in the government and institutions of other countries, keep aloof from all revolutionary schemes for amending them, lest you should experience a far more painful disappointment in their success than in their failure. No spirit of prophecy is required for telling you that this must be the result. Lay not up that cause of remorse for yourself, and time will ripen in you what is crude, confirm what is right, and gently rectify all that is erroneous; it will abate your political hopes, and enlarge your religious faith, and stablish both upon a sure foundation. My good wishes and sincere respects to you Mr. Bowring!

INTERCHAPTER II.

ABALLIBOOZOBANGANORRIBO.

Io'l dico dunque, e dicol che ognun m'ode.

BENEDETTO VARCHI.

Whether the secret of the Freemasons be comprized in the mystic word above is more than I think proper to reveal at present. But I have broken no vow in uttering it.

And I am the better for having uttered it.

Mahomet begins some of the chapters of the Koran with certain letters of unknown signification, and the commentators say that the meaning of these initials ought not to be enquired. So Gelaleddin says, so sayeth Taleb. And they say truly. Some begin with A. L. M. Some with K. H. I. A. S.: some with T. H.;—T. S. M.;—T. S. or I. S. others with K. M.;—H. M. A. S. K.;—N. M.;—a single Kaf, a single Nun or a single Sad, and sad work would it be either for Kaffer or Mussulman to search for meaning where none is. Gelaleddin piously remarks that there is only One who knoweth the import of these letters—I reverence the name which he uses too much to employ it upon this occasion. Mahomet himself tells us that they are the signs of the Book which teacheth the true doctrine,—the Book of the Wise,—the Book of Evidence, the Book of Instruction. When he speaketh thus of the Koran he lieth like an impostor as he is: but what he has said falsely of that false book may be applied truly to this. It is the Book of Instruction inasmuch as every individual reader among the thousands and tens of thousands who peruse it will find something in it which he did not know before. It is the Book of Evidence because of its internal truth. It is the Book of the Wise, because the wiser a man is the more he will delight therein; yea, the delight which he shall take in it will be the measure of his intellectual capacity. And that it teacheth the true doctrine is plain from this circumstance, that I defy the British Critic, the Antijacobin, the Quarterly and the Eclectic Reviews,—aye, and the Evangelical, the Methodist, the Baptist and the Orthodox Churchman's Magazine, with the Christian Observer to boot, to detect any one heresy in it. Therefore I say again

Aballiboozobanganorribo,

and like Mahomet I say that it is the Sign of the Book; and therefore it is that I have said it;

Nondimen nè la lingua degli Hebrei

Nè la Latina, nè la Greca antica,

Nè quella forse ancor degli Aramei.1

1 MOLZA.

Happen it may,—for things not less strange have happened, and what has been may be again;—for may be and has been are only tenses of the same verb, and that verb is eternally being declined:——Happen I say it may; and peradventure if it may it must; and certainly if it must it will:—but what with indicatives and subjunctives, presents, præterperfects and paulo-post-futura, the parenthesis is becoming too long for the sentence, and I must begin it again. A prudent author should never exact too much from the breath or the attention of his reader,—to say nothing of the brains.

Happen then it may that this Book may outlive Lord Castlereagh's Peace, Mr. Pitt's reputation (we will throw Mr. Fox's into the bargain); Mr. Locke's Metaphysics, and the Regent's Bridge in St. James's Park. It may outlive the eloquence of Burke, the discoveries of Davy, the poems of Wordsworth, and the victories of Wellington. It may outlive the language in which it is written; and in heaven knows what year of heaven knows what era, be discovered by some learned inhabitant of that continent which the insects who make coral and madrepore are now, and from the beginning of the world have been, fabricating in the Pacific Ocean. It may be dug up among the ruins of London, and considered as one of the Sacred Books of the Sacred Island of the West,—for I cannot but hope that some reverence will always be attached to this most glorious and most happy island when its power and happiness and glory like those of Greece shall have passed away. It may be decyphered and interpreted, and give occasion to a new religion called Dovery or Danielism, which may have its Chapels, Churches, Cathedrals, Abbeys, Priories, Monasteries, Nunneries, Seminaries, Colleges and Universities;—its Synods, Consistories, Convocations and Councils;—its Acolytes, Sacristans, Deacons, Priests, Archdeacons, Rural Deans, Chancellors, Prebends, Canons, Deans, Bishops, Archbishops, Prince Bishops, Primates, Patriarchs, Cardinals and Popes;—its most Catholic Kings, and its Kings most Dovish or most Danielish. It may have Commentators and Expounders—(who can doubt that it will have them?) who will leave unenlightened that which is dark, and darken that which is clear. Various interpretations will be given, and be followed by as many sects. Schisms must ensue; and the tragedies, comedies and farces, with all the varieties of tragi-comedy and tragi-farce or farcico-tragedy which have been represented in this old world, be enacted in that younger one. Attack on the one side, defence on the other; high Dovers and low Dovers; Danielites of a thousand unimagined and unimaginable denominations; schisms, heresies, seditions, persecutions, wars,—the dismal game of Puss-catch-corner played by a nation instead of a family of children, and in dreadful earnest, when power, property and life are to be won and lost!

But without looking so far into the future history of Dovery, let me exhort the learned Australian to whom the honour is reserved of imparting this treasure to his countrymen, that he abstain from all attempts at discovering the mysteries of Aballiboozobanganorribo! The unapocalyptical arcana of that stupendous vocable are beyond his reach;—so let him rest assured. Let him not plunge into the fathomless depths of that great word, let him not attempt to soar to its unapproachable heights. Perhaps,—and surely no man of judgement will suppose that I utter any thing lightly,—perhaps if the object were attainable, he might have cause to repent its attainment. If too “little learning be a dangerous thing,” too much is more so;

Il saper troppo qualche volta nuoce.2

2 MOLZA.

“Curiosity,” says Fuller, “is a kernel of the Forbidden Fruit, which still sticketh in the throat of a natural man, sometimes to the danger of his choaking.”

There is a knowledge which is forbidden because it is dangerous. Remember the Apple! Remember the beautiful tale of Cupid and Psyche! Remember Cornelius Agrippa's library; the youth who opened in unhappy hour his magical volume; and the choice moral which Southey, who always writes so morally, hath educed from that profitable story! Remember Bluebeard! But I am looking far into futurity. Bluebeard may be forgotten; Southey may be forgotten; Cornelius Agrippa may be no more remembered; Cupid and Psyche may be mere names which shall have outlived all tales belonging to them;—Adam and Eve—Enough.

Eat beans, if thou wilt, in spite of Pythagoras. Eat bacon with them, for the Levitical law hath been abrogated: and indulge in black-puddings, if thou likest such food, though there be Methodists who prohibit them as sinful. But abstain from Aballiboozobanganorribo.

CHAPTER XVII. P. I.

THE HAPPINESS OF HAVING A CATHOLIC TASTE.

There's no want of meat, Sir;

Portly and curious viands are prepared

To please all kinds of appetites.

MASSINGER.

A fastidious taste is like a squeamish appetite; the one has its origin in some disease of mind, as the other has in some ailment of the stomach. Your true lover of literature is never fastidious. I do not mean the helluo librorum, the swinish feeder, who thinks that every name which is to be found in a title-page, or on a tomb-stone, ought to be rescued from oblivion; nor those first cousins of the moth, who labour under a bulimy for black-letter, and believe every thing to be excellent which was written in the reign of Elizabeth. I mean the man of robust and healthy intellect, who gathers the harvest of literature into his barns, threshes the straw, winnows the grain, grinds it at his own mill, bakes it in his own oven, and then eats the true bread of knowledge. If he bake his loaf upon a cabbage leaf, and eat onions with his bread and cheese, let who will find fault with him for his taste,—not I!

The Doves, father as well as son, were blest with a hearty intellectual appetite, and a strong digestion: but the son had the more catholic taste. He would have relished caviare; would have ventured upon laver undeterred by its appearance—and would have liked it.

What an excellent thing did God bestow on man

When he did give him a good stomach!1

1 BEAUMONT and FLETCHER.

He would have eaten sausages for breakfast at Norwich, Sally Luns at Bath, Sweet Butter in Cumberland, Orange Marmalade at Edinburgh, Findon Haddocks at Aberdeen, and drunk punch with Beef steaks to oblige the French if they insisted upon obliging him with a dejeûner a l'Angloise.

A good digestion turneth all to health.2

2 HERBERT.

He would have eaten squab-pye in Devonshire, and the pye which is squabber than squab in Cornwall; sheep's head with the hair on in Scotland, and potatoes roasted on the hearth in Ireland; frogs with the French, pickled herrings with the Dutch, sour-krout with the Germans, maccaroni with the Italians, aniseed with the Spaniards, garlic with any body; horse-flesh with the Tartars; ass-flesh with the Persians; dogs with the North Western American Indians, curry with the Asiatic East Indians, birds' nests with the Chinese, mutton roasted with honey with the Turks, pismire cakes on the Orinoco, and turtle and venison with the Lord Mayor; and the turtle and venison he would have preferred to all the other dishes, because his taste, though catholic, was not indiscriminating. He would have tried all, tasted all, thriven upon all, and lived contentedly and cheerfully upon either, but he would have liked best that which was best. And his intellectual appetite had the same happy catholicism.

He would not have said with Euphues, “if I be in Crete, I can lie; if in Greece, I can shift; if in Italy, I can court it:” but he might have said with him, “I can carouse with Alexander; abstain with Romulus; eat with the Epicure; fast with the Stoic; sleep with Endymion; watch with Chrysippus.”

The Reader will not have forgotten I trust, (but if he should I now remind him of it,) that in the brief inventory of Daniel's library there appeared some odd volumes of that “book full of Pantagruelism,” the inestimable life of the Great Gargantua. The elder Daniel could make nothing of this book; and the younger, who was about ten years old when he began to read it, less than he could of the Pilgrim's Progress. But he made out something.

Young Daniel was free from all the isms in Lily, and from rhotacism to boot; he was clear too of schism, and all the worse isms which have arisen from it: having by the blessing of Providence been bred up not in any denomination ending in ist or inian, or erian or arian, but as a dutiful and contented son of the church of England. In humour however he was by nature a Pantagruelist. And indeed in his mature years he always declared that one of the reasons which had led him to reject the old humoral pathology was that it did not include Pantagruelism, which he insisted depended neither upon heat or cold, moisture or dryness, nor upon any combination of those qualities; but was itself a peculiar and elementary humour; a truth he said, of which he was feelingly and experimentally convinced, and lauded the Gods therefore.

Mr. Wordsworth in that Poem which Mr. Jeffrey has said won't do—(Mr. Jeffrey is always lucky in his predictions whether as a politician or a critic,—bear witness Wellington! bear witness Wordsworth and Southey! bear witness Elia and Lord Byron!) Mr. Wordsworth in that Poem which

The high and tender Muses shall accept

With gracious smile deliberately pleased,

And listening Time reward with sacred praise:

Mr. Wordsworth in that noble Poem observes,

Oh many are the Poets that are sown

By nature!

Among the Emblems of Daniel Heinsius (look at his head, Reader, if thou hast a collection of portraits to refer to, and thou wilt marvel how so queer a conceit should have entered it, for seldom has there been a face more gnarled and knotted with crabbed cogitation than that of this man, who was one of the last of the Giants;)—among his emblems, I say, is one which represents Cupid sowing a field, and little heads springing out of the ground on all sides, some up to the neck, others to the shoulders, and some with the arms out. If the crop were examined I agree with Mr. Wordsworth that Poets would be found there as thick as darnel in the corn;—and grave counsellors would not be wanting whose advice would be that they should be weeded out.

The Pantagruelists are scarcer. Greece produced three great tragic Poets, and only one Aristophanes. The French had but one Rabelais when the seven Pleiades shone in their poetical hemisphere. We have seen a succession of great Tragedians from Betterton to the present time; and in all that time there has been but one Grimaldi in whom the Pantagruelism of Pantomime has found its perfect representative.

And yet the Reader must not hastily conclude that I think Pantagruelism a better thing than Poetry, because it is rarer; that were imputing to me the common error of estimating things by their rarity rather than their worth, an error more vulgar than any which Sir Thomas Brown has refuted. But I do hold this, that all the greatest Poets have had a spice of Pantagruelism in their composition, which I verily believe was essential to their greatness. What the world lost in losing the Margites of Homer we know not, we only know that Homer had there proved himself a Pantagruelist. Shakespear was a Pantagruelist; so was Cervantes; and till the world shall have produced two other men in whom that humour has been wanting equal to these, I hold my point established.

Some one objects Milton. I thank him for the exception; it is just such an exception as proves the rule; for look only at Milton's Limbo and you will see what a glorious Pantagruelist he might have been,—if the Puritans had not spoilt him for Pantagruelism.

CHAPTER XVIII. P. I.

ALL'S WELL THAN ENDS WELL.

Τὰ δ᾿ἄν ἐπιμνησϑῶ,--ὑπὸ τοῦ λόγου ἐξαναγκαζὀμενος ἐπιμνησϑῄσομαι.

HERODOTUS.

If William Dove had been installed in office with cap and bells and bauble, he would have been a Professor of Pantagruelism, and might have figured in Flógel's History of such Professors with Tyll Eulenspiegel, Piovano Arlotto, and Peter the Lion; and in Douce's Illustrations of Shakespear with Muckle John, Rees Pengelding and Robin Rush. The humour lay latent till the boy his nephew hit the spring by reading to him some of those chapters in Rabelais which in their literal grotesqueness were level to the capacity of both. These readings led to a piece of practical Pantagruelism, for which William would have been whipt if he had worn a Fool's coat.

One unlucky day, Dan was reading to him that chapter wherein young Gargantua relates the course of experiments which he had made with a velvet mask, a leaf of vervain, his mother's glove, a lappet worked with gold thread, a bunch of nettles, and other things more or less unfit for the purpose to which they were applied. To those who are acquainted with the history of Grandgousier's royal family, I need not explain what that purpose was; nor must I to those who are not, (for reasons that require no explanation) farther than to say, it was the same purpose for which that wild enigma (the semi-composition of the Sphinx's Ghost) was designed,—that enigma of all enigmas the wildest,

“On which was written Ρῆγμάρωλ.”

William had frequently interrupted him with bursts of laughter; but when they came to that crowning experiment in which Gargantua thought he had found the beau ideal of what he was seeking, William clapt his hands, and with an expression of glee in his countenance worthy of Eulenspiegel himself exclaimed, “thou shalt try the Goose, Dan! thou shalt try the Goose!”

So with William's assistance the Goose was tried. They began with due prudence, according to rule, by catching a Goose. In this matter a couple of Ducks Lord Lauderdale knows would not have answered as well. The boy then having gone through the ceremony which the devotees of Baal are said to have performed at the foot of his Image, as the highest act of devotion, (an act of super-reverence it was;) and for which the Jews are said to have called him in mockery Baalzebul, instead of Baalzebub;—cried out that he was ready. He was at that moment in the third of those eight attitudes which form a Rik'ath. My Readers who are versed in the fashionable Poets of the day (this day I mean—their fashion not being insured for tomorrow)—such Readers, I say, know that a rose is called a ghul, and a nightingale a bulbul, and that this is one way of dressing up English Poetry in Turkish Costume. But if they desire to learn a little more of what Mahometan customs are, they may consult D'Ohsson's Tableau of the Ottoman Empire, and there they may not only find the eight attitudes described, but see them represented. Of the third attitude or Rukeou as it is denominated, I shall only say that the Ancients represented one of their Deities in it, and that it is the very attitude in which As in præsenti committed that notorious act for which he is celebrated in scholastic and immortal rhyme, and for which poor Syntax bore the blame. Verbum sit sat sapienti. During the reign of Liberty and Equality, a Frenchman was guillotined for exemplifying it under Marat's Monument in the Place du Carousal.

The bird was brought, but young Daniel had not the strength of young Gargantua; the goose, being prevented by William from drawing back, prest forward; they were by the side of the brook and the boy by this violent and unexpected movement was, as the French would say in the politest and most delicate of all languages, culbuté, or in sailors' English capsized into the water. The misfortune did not end there; for falling with his forehead against a stone, he received a cut upon the brow which left a scar as long as he lived.

It was not necessary to prohibit a repetition of what William called the speriment. Both had been sufficiently frightened; and William never felt more pain of mind than on this occasion, when the Father with a shake of the head, a look of displeasure and a low voice told him he ought to have known better than to have put the lad upon such pranks!

The mishap however was not without its use. For in after life when Daniel felt an inclination to do any thing which might better be left undone, the recollection that he had tried the goose served as a salutary memento, and saved him perhaps sometimes from worse consequences.

CHAPTER XIX. P. I.

A CONVERSATION WITH MISS GRAVEAIRS.

Operi suscepto inserviendum fuit; so Jacobus Mycillus pleadeth for himself in his translation of Lucian's Dialogues, and so do I; I must and will perform my task.

BURTON.

“It does not signify, Miss Graveairs! you may flirt your fan, and overcloud that white forehead with a frown; but I assure you the last chapter could not be dispensed with. The Doctor used to relate the story himself to his friends; and often alluded to it as the most wholesome lesson he had ever received. My dear Miss Graveairs, let not those intelligent eyes shoot forth in anger arrows which ought to be reserved for other execution. You ought not to be displeased; ought not, must not, can not, shall not!”

“But you ought not to write such things, Mr. Author; really you ought not. What can be more unpleasant than to be reading aloud, and come unexpectedly upon something so strange that you know not whether to proceed or make a full stop, nor where to look, nor what to do? It is too bad of you, Sir, let me tell you! and if I come to any thing more of the kind, I must discard the book. It is provoking enough to meet with so much that one does not understand; but to meet with any thing that one ought not to understand is worse. Sir, it is not to be forgiven; and I tell you again that if I meet with any thing more of the same kind I must discard the book.”

“Nay, dear Miss Graveairs!”

“I must Mr. Author; positively I must.”

“Nay, dear Miss Graveairs! Banish Tristram Shandy! banish Smollett, banish Fielding, banish Richardson! But for the Doctor,—sweet Doctor Dove, kind Doctor Dove, true Doctor Dove, banish not him! Banish Doctor Dove, and banish all the world!—Come, come, good sense is getting the better of preciseness. That stitch in the forehead will not long keep the brows in their constrained position; and the incipient smile which already brings out that dimple, is the natural and proper feeling.”

“Well, you are a strange man!”

“Call me a rare one, and I shall be satisfied. ‘O rare Ben Jonson’ you know was epitaph enough for one of our greatest men.”

“But seriously why should you put any thing in your book, which if not actually exceptionable exposes it at least to that sort of censure, which is most injurious?”

“That question, dear Madam, is so sensibly proposed that I will answer it with all serious sincerity. There is nothing exceptionable in these volumes; ‘Certes,’ as Euphues Lily has said, ‘I think there be more speeches here which for gravity will mislike the foolish, than unseemly terms which for vanity, may offend the wise.’ There is nothing in them that I might not have read to Queen Elizabeth if it had been my fortune to have lived in her golden days; nothing that can by possibility taint the imagination, or strengthen one evil propensity, or weaken one virtuous principle. But they are not composed like a forgotten novel of Dr. Towers's to be read aloud in dissenting families instead of a moral essay, or a sermon; nor like Mr. Kett's Emily to complete the education of young ladies by supplying them with an abstract of universal knowledge. Neither have they any pretensions to be placed on the same shelf with Cœlebs. But the book is a moral book; its tendency is good, and the morality is both the wholesomer and pleasanter because it is not administered as physic, but given as food. I don't like morality in doses.”

“But why, my good Mr. Author, why lay yourself open to censure?”

“Miss Graveairs, nothing excellent was ever produced by any author who had the fear of censure before his eyes. He who would please posterity must please himself by chusing his own course. There are only two classes of writers who dare do this, the best and the worst,—for this is one of the many cases in which extremes meet. The mediocres in every grade aim at pleasing the public, and conform themselves to the fashion of their age whatever it may be.”

My Doctor, like the Matthew Henderson of Burns, was a queer man, and in that respect I his friend and biographer, humbly resemble him. The resemblance may be natural, or I may have caught it,—this I pretend not to decide, but so it is. Perhaps it might have been well if I had resolved upon a farther designation of Chapters, and distributed them into Masculine and Feminine; or into the threefold arrangement of virile, feminile and puerile; considering the book as a family breakfast, where there should be meat for men, muffins for women, and milk for children. Or I might have adopted the device of the Porteusian Society, and marked my Chapters as they (very usefully) have done the Bible, pointing out what should be read by all persons for edification, and what may be passed over by the many, as instructive or intelligible only to the learned.

Here however the book is,—

An orchard bearing several trees,

And fruits of several taste.1

Ladies and Gentlemen, my gentle Readers, one of our liveliest and most popular old Dramatists knew so well the capricious humour of an audience that he made his Prologue say

He'd rather dress upon a Triumph-Day

My Lord Mayor's Feast, and make them sauces too,

Sauce for each several Mouth; nay further go,

He'd rather build up those invincible Pies

And Castle-Custards that affright all eyes,—

Nay, eat them all and their artillery,—

Than dress for such a curious company,

One single dish.

But I, gentle Readers, have set before you a table liberally spread. It is not expected or desired that every dish should suit the palate of all the guests, but every guest will find something that he likes. You, Madam, may prefer those boiled chicken, with stewed celery,—or a little of that fricandeau;—the Lady opposite will send her plate for some pigeon pye. The Doctor has an eye upon the venison—and so I see has the Captain.—Sir, I have not forgotten that this is one of your fast days—I am glad therefore that the turbot proves so good,—and that dish has been prepared for you. Sir John, there is garlic in the fricassee. The Hungarian wine has a bitterness which every body may not like; the Ladies will probably prefer Malmsey. The Captain sticks to his Port, and the Doctor to his Madeira.—Sir John I shall be happy to take Sauterne with you.—There is a splendid trifle for the young folks, which some of the elders also will not despise:—and I only wish my garden could have furnished a better dessert; but considering our climate, it is not amiss.—Is not this entertainment better than if I had set you all down to a round of beef and turnips?

If any thing be set to a wrong taste

'Tis not the meat there, but the mouth's displaced;

Remove but that sick palate all is well.2

1 MIDDLETON and ROWLEY'S Spanish Gipsey.

2 BEN JONSON.

Like such a dinner I would have my book,—something for every body's taste and all good of its kind.

It ought also to resemble the personage of whom it treats; and

If ony whiggish whingin sot

To blame the Doctor dare, man;

May dool and sorrow be his lot

For the Doctor was a rare man!3

3 BURNS.

Some whiggish sots I dare say will blame him, and whiggish sots they will be who do!

“En un mot; mes amis, je n'ai entrepris de vous contenter tous en general, ainsi uns et autres en particulier; et par special, moymême.”4

4 PASQUIER.

CHAPTER XX. P. I.

HOW TO MAKE GOLD.

L' Alchimista non travaglia a voto;

Ei cerca l' oro, ei cerca l' oro, io dico

Ch' ei cerca l' oro; e s' ei giungesse in porto

Fora ben per se stesso e per altrui.

L' oro e somma posanza infra mortali;

Chiedine a Cavalier, chiedine a Dame,

Chiedine a tutto il Mondo.

CHIABRERA.

William had heard so much about experiments that it is not surprising he should have been for making some himself. It was well indeed for his family that the speculative mind, which lay covered rather than concealed under the elder Daniel's ruminating manners, and quiet contented course of life, was not quickened by his acquaintance with the schoolmaster into an experimental and dangerous activity, instead of being satisfied with theoretical dreams. For Guy had found a book in that little collection which might have produced more serious consequences to the father than the imitation of Gargantua had done to the son.

This book was the Exposition of Eirenæus Philalethes upon Sir George Ripley's Hermetico-Poetical works. Daniel had formerly set as little value upon it as upon Rabelais. He knew indeed what its purport was, thus much he had gathered from it: but although it professed to contain “the plainest and most excellent discoveries of the most hidden secrets of the Ancient Philosophers that were ever yet published,” it was to him as unintelligible as the mysteries of Pantagruelism. He could make nothing of the work that was to ascend in Bus and Nubi from the Moon up to the Sun, though the Expositor had expounded that this was in Nubibus; nor of the Lake which was to be boiled with the ashes of Hermes's Tree, night and day without ceasing, till the Heavenly Nature should ascend and the Earthly descend: nor of the Crow's bill, the White Dove, the Sparkling Cherubim, and the Soul of the Green Lion. But he took those cautions simply and honestly as cautions, which were in fact the lures whereby so many infatuated persons had been drawn on to their own undoing. The author had said that his work was not written for the information of the illiterate, and illiterate Daniel knew himself to be. “Our writings,” says the dark Expositor, “shall prove as a curious edged knife; to some they shall carve out dainties, and to others it shall serve only to cut their fingers. Yet we are not to be blamed; for we do seriously profess to any that shall attempt the work, that he attempts the highest piece of Philosophy that is in Nature; and though we write in English, yet our matter will be as hard as Greek to some, who will think they understand us well, when they misconstrue our meaning most perversely; for is it imaginable that they who are fools in Nature should be wise in our Books, which are testimonies unto Nature?” And again, “make sure of thy true matter, which is no small thing to know; and though we have named it yet we have done it so cunningly, that thou mayest sooner stumble at our Books than at any thou ever didst read in thy life.—Be not deceived either with receipt or discourse; for we verily do not intend to deceive you; but if you will be deceived, be deceived!—Our way which is an easy way, and in which no man may err,—our broad way, our linear way, we have vowed never to reveal it but in metaphor. I, being moved with pity, will hint it to you. Take that which is not yet perfect, nor yet wholly imperfect, but in a way to perfection, and out of it make what is most noble and most perfect. This you may conceive to be an easier receipt than to take that which is already perfect and extract out of it what is imperfect and make it perfect, and after out of that perfection to draw a plusquam perfection; and yet this is true, and we have wrought it. But this last discovery which I hinted in few words is it which no man ever did so plainly lay open; nor may any make it more plain upon pain of an anathema.”

All this was heathen Greek to Daniel, except the admonition which it contained. But Guy had meddled with this perilous pseudo-science, and used to talk with him concerning its theory, which Daniel soon comprehended, and which like many other theories wanted nothing but a foundation to rest upon. That every thing had its own seed as well as its own form seemed a reasonable position; and that the fermental virtue, “which is the wonder of the world, and by which water becomes herbs, trees and plants, fruits, flesh, blood, stones, minerals and every thing, works only in kind. Was it not then absurd to allow that the fermentive and multiplicative power existed in almost all other things, and yet deny it to Gold, the most perfect of all sublunary things?”—The secret lay in extracting from Gold its hidden seed.

Ben Jonson has with his wonted ability presented the theory of this delusive art. His knavish Alchemist asks of an unbeliever

Why, what have you observed Sir, in our art

Seems so impossible?

Surly. But your whole work, no more!

That you should hatch gold in a furnace, Sir,

As they do eggs in Egypt.

Subtle. Sir, do you

Believe that eggs are hatch'd so?

Surly. If I should?

Subtle. Why I think that the greater miracle.

No egg but differs from a chicken more

Than metals in themselves.

Surly. That cannot be.

The egg's ordained by nature to that end,

And is a chicken in potentiâ.

Subtle. The same we say of lead and other metals,

Which would be gold if they had time.

Mammon. And that

Our art doth further.

Subtle. Aye, for 'twere absurd

To think that nature in the earth bred gold

Perfect in the instant: something went before.

There must be remote matter.

Surly. Ay, what is that?

Subtle. Marry we say—

Mammon. Ay, now it heats; stand father;

Pound him to dust.

Subtle. It is, of the one part,

A humid exhalation, which we call

Materia liquida, or the unctuous water;

On the other part a certain crass and viscous

Portion of earth; both which concorporate

Do make the elementary matter of gold;

Which is not yet propria materia,

But common to all metals and all stones;

For where it is forsaken of that moisture,

And hath more dryness, it becomes a stone;

Where it retains more of the humid fatness,

It turns to sulphur, or to quicksilver,

Who are the parents of all other metals.

Nor can this remote matter suddenly

Progress so from extreme unto extreme,

As to grow gold, and leap o'er all the means.

Nature doth first beget the imperfect, then

Proceeds she to the perfect. Of that airy

And oily water, mercury is engendered;

Sulphur of the fat and earthy part; the one,

Which is the last, supplying the place of male,

The other of the female in all metals.

Some so believe hermaphrodeity,

That both do act and suffer. But these too

Make the rest ductile, malleable, extensive.

And even in gold they are; for we do find

Seeds of them, by our fire, and gold in them;

And can produce the species of each metal

More perfect thence than nature doth in earth.

I have no cause to say here with Sheik Mohammed Ali Hazin that “taste for poetical and elegant composition has turned the reins of my ink-dropping pen away from the road which lay before it:” For this passage of learned Ben lay directly in the way; and no where, Reader, couldst thou find the theory of the Alchemists more ably epitomized.

“Father,” said the boy Daniel one day, after listening to a conversation upon this subject, “I should like to learn to make gold.”

“And what wouldst thou do, Daniel, if thou couldst make it?” was the reply.

“Why I would build a great house, and fill it with books; and have as much money as the King, and be as great a man as the Squire.”

“Mayhap, Daniel, in that case thou wouldst care for books as little as the Squire, and have as little time for them as the King. Learning is better than house or land. As for money, enough is enough; no man can enjoy more; and the less he can be contented with the wiser and better he is likely to be. What, Daniel, does our good poet tell us in the great verse-book?

Nature's with little pleased; enough's a feast:

A sober life but a small charge requires:

But man, the author of his own unrest,

The more he hath, the more he still desires.

No, boy, thou canst never be as rich as the King, nor as great as the Squire; but thou mayest be a Philosopher, and that is being as happy as either.”

“A great deal happier,” said Guy. “The Squire is as far from being the happiest man in the neighbourhood, as he is from being the wisest or the best. And the King, God bless him! has care enough upon his head to bring on early grey hairs.

Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.”

“But what does a Philosopher do?” rejoined the boy. “The Squire hunts and shoots and smokes, and drinks punch and goes to Justice-Meetings. And the King goes to fight for us against the French, and governs the Parliament, and makes laws. But I cannot tell what a Philosopher's business is. Do they do any thing else besides making Almanacks and gold?”

“Yes,” said William, “they read the stars.”

“And what do they read there?”

“What neither thou nor I can understand, Daniel,” replied the father, “however nearly it may concern us!”

CHAPTER XXI. P. I.

A DOUBT CONCERNING THE USES OF PHILOSOPHY.

El comienzo de salud

es el saber,

distinguir y conocer

qual es virtud.

PROVERBIOS DEL MARQUES DE SANTILLANA.

That grave reply produced a short pause. It was broken by the boy, who said returning to the subject, “I have been thinking, Father, that it is not a good thing to be a Philosopher.”

“And what, my Son, has led thee to that thought?”

“What I have read at the end of the Dictionary, Father. There was one Philosopher that was pounded in a mortar.”

“That Daniel,” said the Father, “could neither have been the Philosopher's fault nor his choice.”

“But it was because he was a Philosopher, my lad,” said Guy, “that he bore it so bravely, and said, beat on, you can only bruise the shell of Anaxarchus! If he had not been a Philosopher they might have pounded him just the same, but they would never have put him in the Dictionary. Epictetus in like manner bore the torments which his wicked master inflicted upon him, without a groan, only saying, ‘take care, or you will break my leg;’ and when the leg was broken, he looked the wretch in the face and said, ‘I told you you would break it.’”

“But,” said the youngster, “there was one Philosopher who chose to live in a tub; and another who that he might never again see any thing to withdraw his mind from meditation, put out his eyes by looking upon a bright brass basin, such as I cured my warts in.”

“He might have been a wise man,” said William Dove, “but not wondrous wise: for if he had, he would not have used the basin to put his eyes out. He would have jumped into a quickset hedge, and scratched them out, like the Man of our Town; because when he saw his eyes were out, he might then have jumped into another hedge and scratched them in again. The Man of our Town was the greatest philosopher of the two.”

“And there was one,” continued the boy, “who had better have blinded himself at once, for he did nothing else but cry at every thing he saw. Was not this being very foolish?”

“I am sure,” says William, “it was not being merry and wise.”

“There was another who said that hunger was his daily food.”

“He must have kept such a table as Duke Humphrey,” quoth William; “I should not have liked to dine with him.”

“Then there was Crates,” said the persevering boy; “he had a good estate and sold it and threw the money into the sea, saying, ‘away ye paltry cares! I will drown you, that you may not drown me.’”

“I should like to know,” quoth William, “what the overseers said to that chap, when he applied to the parish for support.”

“They sent him off to Bedlam, I suppose,” said the Mother, “it was the fit place for him, poor creature.”

“And when Aristippus set out upon a journey he bade his servants throw away all their money, that they might travel the better. Why they must have begged their way, and it cannot be right to beg if people are not brought to it by misfortune. And there were some who thought there was no God. I am sure they were fools, for the Bible says so.”

“Well Daniel,” said Guy, “thou hast studied the end of the Dictionary to some purpose!”

“And the Bible too, Master Guy!” said Dinah,—her countenance brightening with joy at her son's concluding remark.

“It's the best part of the book,” said the boy, replying to his schoolmaster; “there are more entertaining and surprizing things there than I ever read in any other place, except in my Father's book about Pantagruel.”

CHAPTER XXII. P. I.

Τὸν δ᾿ ἀπαμειβόμενος.

O felice colui, che intender puote

Le cagion de le cose di natura,

Che al piu di que' che vivon sono ignote;

E sotto il piè si mette ogni paura

De fati, e de la morte, ch'è si trista,

Ne di vulgo gli cal, nè d'altro ha cura.

TANSILLO.

The elder Daniel had listened to this dialogue in his usual quiet way, smiling sometimes at his brother William's observations. He now stroked his forehead, and looking mildly but seriously at the boy addressed him thus.

“My son, many things appear strange or silly in themselves if they are presented to us simply, without any notice when and where they were done, and upon what occasion. If any strangers for example had seen thee washing thy hands in an empty basin, without knowing the philosophy of the matter, they would have taken thee for an innocent, and thy master and me for little better; or they might have supposed some conjuring was going on. The things which the old Philosophers said and did, would appear, I dare say, as wise to us as they did to the people of their own times, if we knew why and in what circumstances they were done and said.

“Daniel, there are two sorts of men in all ranks and ways of life, the wise and the foolish; and there are a great many degrees between them. That some foolish people have called themselves Philosophers, and some wicked ones, and some who were out of their wits, is just as certain as that persons of all these descriptions are to be found among all conditions of men.

“Philosophy, Daniel, is of two kinds: that which relates to conduct, and that which relates to knowledge. The first teaches us to value all things at their real worth, to be contented with little, modest in prosperity, patient in trouble, equal-minded at all times. It teaches us our duty to our neighbour and ourselves. It is that wisdom of which King Solomon speaks in our rhyme-book. Reach me the volume!” Then turning to the passage in his favourite Du Bartas he read these lines:

“She's God's own mirror; she's a light whose glance

Springs from the lightening of his countenance.

She's mildest heaven's most sacred influence;

Never decays her beauties' excellence,

Aye like herself; and she doth always trace

Not only the same path but the same pace.

Without her honor, health and wealth would prove

Three poisons to me. Wisdom from above

Is the only moderatrix, spring and guide

Organ and honor of all gifts beside.”

“But let us look in the Bible:—aye this is the place.

“For in her is an understanding spirit, holy, one only, manifold, subtil, lively, clear, undefiled, plain, not subject to hurt, loving the thing that is good, quick, which cannot be letted, ready to do good;

“Kind to man, steadfast, sure, free from care, having all power, overseeing all things, and going through all understanding, pure and most subtil spirits.

“For wisdom is more moving than any motion: she passeth and goeth through all things by reason of her pureness.

“For she is the breath of the power of God, and a pure influence, flowing from the glory of the Almighty; therefore can no defiled thing fall into her.

“For she is the brightness of the everlasting light, the unspotted mirror of the power of God, and the image of his goodness.

“And being but one she can do all things; and remaining in herself she maketh all things new: and in all ages entering into holy souls she maketh them friends of God, and prophets.

“For God loveth none but him that dwelleth with wisdom.

“For she is more beautiful than the Sun, and above all the order of Stars: being compared with the light she is found before it.

“For after this cometh night: but vice shall not prevail against wisdom.”

He read this with a solemnity that gave weight to every word. Then closing the book, after a short pause, he proceeded in a lower tone.

“The Philosophers of whom you have read in the Dictionary possessed this wisdom only in part, because they were heathens, and therefore could see no farther than the light of mere reason sufficed to shew the way. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and they had not that to begin with. So the thoughts which ought to have made them humble produced pride, and so far their wisdom proved but folly. The humblest Christian who learns his duty, and performs it as well as he can, is wiser than they. He does nothing to be seen of men; and that was their motive for most of their actions.

“Now for the philosophy which relates to knowledge. Knowledge is a brave thing. I am a plain, ignorant, untaught man, and know my ignorance. But it is a brave thing when we look around us in this wonderful world to understand something of what we see: to know something of the earth on which we move, the air which we breathe, and the elements whereof we are made: to comprehend the motions of the moon and stars, and measure the distances between them, and compute times and seasons: to observe the laws which sustain the universe by keeping all things in their courses: to search into the mysteries of nature, and discover the hidden virtue of plants and stones, and read the signs and tokens which are shown us, and make out the meaning of hidden things, and apply all this to the benefit of our fellow creatures.

“Wisdom and knowledge, Daniel, make the difference between man and man, and that between man and beast is hardly greater.

“These things do not always go together. There may be wisdom without knowledge, and there may be knowledge without wisdom. A man without knowledge, if he walk humbly with his God, and live in charity with his neighbours, may be wise unto salvation. A man without wisdom may not find his knowledge avail him quite so well. But it is he who possesses both that is the true Philosopher. The more he knows, the more he is desirous of knowing; and yet the farther he advances in knowledge the better he understands how little he can attain, and the more deeply he feels that God alone can satisfy the infinite desires of an immortal soul. To understand this is the height and perfection of philosophy.”

Then opening the Bible which lay before him, he read these verses from the Proverbs.

“My son, if thou wilt receive my words,—

“So that thou incline thine ear unto wisdom and apply thine heart to understanding;

“Yea, if thou criest after knowledge, and liftest up thy voice for understanding;

“If thou seekest after her as silver, and searchest for her as for hid treasures;

“Then shalt thou understand the fear of the Lord and find the knowledge of God.

“For the Lord giveth wisdom; out of His mouth cometh knowledge and understanding.

“He layeth up sound wisdom for the righteous; He is a buckler to them that walk uprightly.

“He keepeth the paths of judgement and preserveth the way of his Saints.

“Then shalt thou understand righteousness and judgement and equity; yea, every good path.

“When wisdom entereth into thine heart, and knowledge is pleasant unto thy soul;

“Discretion shall preserve thee, understanding shall keep thee,

“To deliver thee from the way of the evil.

“Daniel, my son,” after a pause he pursued, “thou art a diligent good lad. God hath given thee a tender and a dutiful heart; keep it so, and it will be a wise one, for thou hast the beginning of wisdom. I wish thee to pursue knowledge, because in pursuing it happiness will be found by the way. If I have said any thing now which is above thy years, it will come to mind in after time, when I am gone perhaps, but when thou mayest profit by it. God bless thee, my child!”

He stretched out his right hand at these words, and laid it gently upon the boy's head. What he said was not forgotten, and throughout life the son never thought of that blessing without feeling that it had taken effect.

CHAPTER XXIII. P. I.

ROWLAND DIXON AND HIS COMPANY OF PUPPETS.

Alli se ve tan eficaz el llanto,

las fabulas y historias retratadas,

que parece verdad, y es dulce encanto.

*              *              *              *              *

Y para el vulgo rudo, que ignorante

aborrece el manjar costoso, guisa

el plato del gracioso extravagante;

Con que les hartas de contento y risa,

gustando de mirar sayal grossero,

mas que sutil y candida camisa.

JOSEPH ORTIZ DE VILLENA.

Were it not for that happy facility with which the mind in such cases commonly satisfies itself, my readers would find it not more easy to place themselves in imagination at Ingleton a hundred years ago, than at Thebes or Athens, so strange must it appear to them that a family should have existed in humble but easy circumstances, among whose articles of consumption neither tea nor sugar had a place, who never raised potatoes in their garden nor saw them at their table, and who never wore a cotton garment of any kind.

Equally unlike any thing to which my contemporaries have been accustomed, must it be for them to hear of an Englishman whose talk was of philosophy moral or speculative not of politics; who read books in folio and had never seen a newspaper; nor ever heard of a magazine, review, or literary journal of any kind. Not less strange must it seem to them who if they please may travel by steam at the rate of thirty miles an hour upon the Liverpool and Manchester rail-way, or at ten miles an hour by stage upon any of the more frequented roads, to consider the little intercourse which in those days was carried on between one part of the kingdom and another. During young Daniel's boyhood, and for many years after he had reached the age of manhood, the whole carriage of the northern counties, and indeed of all the remoter parts was performed by pack-horses, the very name of which would long since have been as obsolete as their use, if it had not been preserved by the sign or appellation of some of those inns at which they were accustomed to put up. Rarely indeed were the roads about Ingleton marked by any other wheels than those of its indigenous carts.

That little town however obtained considerable celebrity in those days as being the home and head quarters of Rowland Dixon, the Gesticulator Maximus, or Puppet-show-master-general, of the North; a person not less eminent in his line than Powel whom the Spectator has immortalized.

My readers must not form their notion of Rowland Dixon's company from the ambulatory puppet shows which of late years have added new sights and sounds to the spectacles and cries of London. Far be it from me to depreciate those peripatetic street exhibitions, which you may have before your window at a call, and by which the hearts of so many children are continually delighted: Nay I confess that few things in that great city carry so much comfort to the cockles of my own, as the well-known voice of Punch.

——the same which in my school-boy days

I listened to,——

as Wordsworth says of the Cuckoo,

And I can listen to it yet—

And listen till I do beget

That golden time again.

It is a voice that seems to be as much in accord with the noise of towns, and the riotry of fairs, as the note of the Cuckoo, with the joyousness of spring fields and the fresh verdure of the vernal woods.

But Rowland Dixon's company of puppets would be pitifully disparaged, if their size, uses or importance were to be estimated by the street performances of the present day.

The Dramatis Personæ of these modern exhibitions never I believe comprehends more than four characters, and these four are generally the same, to wit, Punch, Judy as she who used to be called Joan is now denominated, the Devil and the Doctor, or sometimes the Constable in the Doctor's stead. There is therefore as little variety in the action as in the personages. And their dimensions are such that the whole company and the theatre in which they are exhibited are carried along the streets at quick time and with a light step by the two persons who manage the concern.

But the Rowlandian, Dixonian, or Ingletonian puppets were large as life; and required for their removal a caravan (in the use to which that word is now appropriated),—a vehicle of such magnitude and questionable shape, that if Don Quixote had encountered its like upon the highway, he would have regarded it as the most formidable adventure which had ever been presented to his valour. And they went as far beyond our street-puppets in the sphere of their subjects as they exceeded them in size; for in that sphere quicquid agunt homines was included,—and a great deal more.

In no country and in no stage of society has the drama ever existed in a ruder state than that in which this company presented it. The Drolls of Bartholomew Fair were hardly so far below the legitimate drama, as they were above that of Rowland Dixon; for the Drolls were written compositions: much ribaldry might be, and no doubt was, interpolated as opportunity allowed or invited; but the main dialogue was prepared. Here on the contrary, there was no other preparation than that of frequent practice. The stock pieces were founded upon popular stories or ballads, such as Fair Rosamond, Jane Shore, and Bateman who hanged himself for love; with scriptural subjects for Easter and Whitsun-week, such as the Creation, the Deluge, Susannah and the Elders, and Nebuchadnezzar or the Fall of Pride. These had been handed down from the time of the old mysteries and miracle-plays, having, in the progress of time and change, descended from the monks and clergy to become the property of such managers as Powel and Rowland Dixon. In what manner they were represented when thus

Fallen, fallen, fallen, fallen,

Fallen from their high estate,

may be imagined from a play-bill of Queen Anne's reign, in which one of them is thus advertised:

“At Crawley's Booth, over against the Crown Tavern in Smithfield, during the time of Bartholomew Fair, will be presented a little Opera, called the Old Creation of the World, yet newly revived; with the addition of Noah's flood. Also several fountains playing water during the time of the play. The last scene does present Noah and his family coming out of the Ark, with all the beasts two and two, and all the fowls of the air seen in a prospect sitting upon trees. Likewise over the Ark is seen the Sun rising in a most glorious manner. Moreover a multitude of Angels will be seen in a double rank, which presents a double prospect, one for the Sun, the other for a palace, where will be seen six Angels, ringing of bells. Likewise machines descend from above double and treble, with Dives rising out of Hell, and Lazarus seen in Abraham's bosom; besides several figures dancing jigs, sarabands and country dances, to the admiration of the spectators; with the merry conceits of Squire Punch, and Sir John Spendall.”

I have not found it any where stated at what time these irreverent representations were discontinued in England, nor whether (which is not unlikely) they were put an end to by the interference of the magistrates. The Autos Sacramentales, which form the most characteristic department of the Spanish drama, were prohibited at Madrid in 1763, at the instance of the Conde de Teba, then Archbishop of Toledo, chiefly because of the profaneness of the actors, and the indecency of the places in which they were represented: it seems therefore that if they had been performed by clerks, and within consecrated precincts, he would not have objected to them. The religious dramas, though they are not less extraordinary and far more reprehensible, because in many instances nothing can be more pernicious than their direct tendency, were not included in the same prohibition; the same marks of external reverence not being required for Saints and Images as for the great object of Romish Idolatry. These probably will long continue to delight the Spanish people. But facts of the same kind may be met with nearer home. So recently as the year 1816, the Sacrifice of Isaac was represented on the stage at Paris: Samson was the subject of the ballet; the unshorn son of Manoah delighted the spectators by dancing a solo with the gates of Gaza on his back; Dalilah clipt him during the intervals of a jig; and the Philistines surrounded and captured him in a country dance!

That Punch made his appearance in the puppet-show of the Deluge, most persons know; his exclamation of “hazy weather, master Noah,” having been preserved by tradition. In all of these wooden dramas whether sacred or profane, Punch indeed bore a part, and that part is well described in the verses entitled Pupæ gesticulantes, which may be found among the Selecta Poemata Anglorum Latina, edited by Mr. Popham.

Ecce tamen subitò, et medio discrimine rerum,

Ridiculus vultu procedit Homuncio, tergum

Cui riget in gibbum, immensusque protruditur alvus:

PUNCHIUS huic nomen, nec erat petulantior unquam

Ullus; quinetiam media inter seria semper

Importunus adest, lepidusque et garrulus usque

Perstat, permiscetque jocos, atque omnia turbat.

Sæpe puellarum densa ad subsellia sese

Convertens,—sedet en! pulchras mea, dixit, amica

Illic inter eas! Oculo simul improbus uno

Connivens, aliquam illarum quasi noverat, ipsam

Quæque pudens se signari pudefacta rubescit;

Totaque subridet juvenumque virumque corona.

Cum vero ambiguis obscœnas turpia dictis

Innuit, effuso testantur gaudia risu.

In one particular only this description is unlike the Punch of the Ingleton Company. He was not an homuncio, but a full grown personage, who had succeeded with little alteration either of attributes or appearance to the Vice of the old Mysteries, and served like the Clown of our own early stage, and the Gracioso of the Spaniards, to scatter mirth over the serious part of the performance, or turn it into ridicule. The wife was an appendage of later times, when it was not thought good for Punch to be alone; and when as these performances had fallen into lower hands, the quarrels between such a pair afforded a standing subject equally adapted to the capacity of the interlocutor and of his audience.

A tragic part was assigned to Punch in one of Rowland Dixon's pieces, and that one of the most popular, being the celebrated tragedy of Jane Shore. The Beadle in this piece, after proclaiming in obvious and opprobrious rhyme the offence which had drawn upon Mistress Shore this public punishment, prohibited all persons from relieving her on pain of death, and turned her out, according to the common story, to die of hunger in the streets. The only person who ventured to disobey this prohibition was Punch the Baker; and the reader may judge of the dialogue of these pieces by this Baker's words, when he stole behind her, and nudging her furtively while he spake, offered her a loaf, saying, “tak it Jenny, tak it!” for which act so little consonant with his general character, Punch died a martyr to humanity by the hangman's hands.

Dr. Dove used to say he doubted whether Garrick and Mrs. Cibber could have affected him more in middle life, than he had been moved by Punch the Baker and this wooden Jane Shore in his boyhood. For rude as were these performances, (and nothing could possibly be ruder,) the effect on infant minds was prodigious, from the accompanying sense of wonder, an emotion which of all others is at that time of life the most delightful. Here was miracle in any quantity to be seen for two-pence, and be believed in for nothing. No matter how confined the theatre, how coarse and inartificial the scenery, or how miserable the properties; the mind supplied all that was wanting.

“Mr. Guy,” said young Daniel to the schoolmaster, after one of these performances, “I wish Rowland Dixon could perform one of our Latin dialogues!”

“Aye Daniel,” replied the schoolmaster, entering into the boy's feelings; “it would be a grand thing to have the Three Fatal Sisters introduced, and to have them send for Death; and then for Death to summon the Pope and jugulate him; and invite the Emperor and the King to dance; and disarm the soldier, and pass sentence upon the Judge; and stop the Lawyer's tongue; and feel the Physician's pulse; and make the Cook come to be killed; and send the Poet to the shades; and give the Drunkard his last draught. And then to have Rhadamanthus come in and try them all! Methinks Daniel that would beat Jane Shore and Fair Rosamond all to nothing, and would be as good as a sermon to boot.”

“I believe it would indeed!” said the Boy: “and then to see MORS and NATURA; and have DAMNATUS called up; and the Three Cacodæmons at supper upon the sirloin of a King, and the roasted Doctor of Divinity, and the cruel Schoolmaster's rump! Would not it be nice Mr. Guy?”

“The pity is, Daniel,” replied Guy, “that Rowland Dixon is no Latiner, any more than those who go to see his performances.”

“But could not you put it into English for him, Mr. Guy?”

“I am afraid Daniel, Rowland Dixon would not thank me for my pains. Besides I could never make it sound half so noble in English as in those grand Latin verses, which fill the mouth and the ears, and the mind,—aye and the heart and soul too. No, boy! schools are the proper places for representing such pieces, and if I had but Latiners enough we would have them ourselves. But there are not many houses, my good Daniel, in which learning is held in such esteem as it is at thy father's; if there were, I should have more Latin scholars;—and what is of far more consequence, the world would be wiser and better than it is!”

CHAPTER XXIV. P. I.

QUACK AND NO QUACK, BEING AN ACCOUNT OF DR. GREEN AND HIS MAN KEMP. POPULAR MEDICINE, HERBARY, THEORY OF SIGNATURES, WILLIAM DOVE, JOHN WESLEY, AND BAXTER.

Hold thy hand! health's dear maintainer;

Life perchance may burn the stronger:

Having substance to maintain her

She untouched may last the longer.

When the Artist goes about

To redress her flame, I doubt

Oftentimes he snuffs it out.

QUARLES.

It was not often that Rowland Dixon exhibited at Ingleton. He took his regular circuits to the fairs in all the surrounding country far and wide; but in the intervals of his vocation, he, who when abroad was the servant of the public, became his own master at home. His puppets were laid up in ordinary, the voice of Punch ceased, and the master of the motions enjoyed otium cum dignitate. When he favoured his friends and neighbours with an exhibition, it was speciali gratiâ, and in a way that rather enhanced that dignity than derogated from it.

A performer of a very different kind used in those days to visit Ingleton in his rounds, where his arrival was always expected by some of the community with great anxiety. This was a certain Dr. Green, who having been regularly educated for the profession of medicine, and regularly graduated in it, chose to practice as an itinerant, and take the field with a Merry Andrew for his aid-de-camp. He was of a respectable and wealthy family in the neighbourhood of Doncaster, which neighbourhood on their account he never approached in his professional circuits, though for himself he was far from being ashamed of the character that he had assumed. The course which he had taken had been deliberately chosen, with the twofold object of gratifying his own humour, and making a fortune; and in the remoter as well as in the immediate purpose, he succeeded to his heart's content.

It is not often that so much worldly prudence is found connected with so much eccentricity of character. A French poetess, Madame de Villedieu, taking as a text for some verses the liberal maxim que la vertu dépend autant du temperament que des loix, says,

Presque toujours chacun suit son caprice;

Heureux est le mortel que les destins amis

Ont partagé d'un caprice permis.

He is indeed a fortunate man who if he must have a hobby-horse, which is the same as saying if he will have one, keeps it not merely for pleasure, but for use, breaks it in well, has it entirely under command, and gets as much work out of it as he could have done out of a common roadster. Dr. Green did this; he had not taken to this strange course because he was impatient of the restraints of society, but because he fancied that his constitution both of body and of mind required an erratic life; and that, within certain bounds which he prescribed for himself, he might indulge in it, both to his own advantage, and that of the community,—that part of the community at least among whom it would be his lot to labour. Our laws had provided itinerant Courts of Justice for the people. Our church had formerly provided itinerant preachers; and after the Reformation when the Mendicant Orders were abolished by whom this service used to be performed, such preachers have never failed to appear during the prevalence of any religious influenza. Dr. Green thought that itinerant physicians were wanted; and that if practitioners regularly educated and well qualified would condescend to such a course, the poor ignorant people would no longer be cheated by travelling quacks, and sometimes poisoned by them!

One of the most reprehensible arts to which the Reformers resorted in their hatred of popery, was that of adapting vulgar verses to church tunes, and thus associating with ludicrous images, or with something worse, melodies which had formerly been held sacred. It is related of Whitefield that he, making a better use of the same device, fitted hymns to certain popular airs, because, he said, “there was no reason why the Devil should keep all the good tunes to himself.” Green acted upon a similar principle when he took the field as a Physician Errant, with his man Kemp, like another Sancho for his Squire. But the Doctor was no Quixote; and his Merry Andrew had all Sancho's shrewdness, without any alloy of his simpleness.

In those times medical knowledge among the lower practitioners was at the lowest point. Except in large towns the people usually trusted to domestic medicine, which some Lady Bountiful administered from her family receipt book; or to a Village Doctress whose prescriptions were as likely sometimes to be dangerously active, as at others to be ridiculous and inert. But while they held to their garden physic it was seldom that any injury was done either by exhibiting wrong medicines or violent ones.

Herbs, Woods and Springs, the power that in you lies

If mortal man could know your properties!1

There was at one time abundant faith in those properties. The holy Shepherdess in Fletcher's fine pastoral drama, which so infinitely surpasses all foreign compositions of that class, thus apostrophises the herbs which she goes out to cull:

O you best sons of earth,

You only brood unto whose happy birth

Virtue was given, holding more of Nature

Than man, her first-born and most perfect creature,—

Let me adore you, you that only can

Help or kill Nature, drawing out that span

Of life and breath even to the end of time!

So abundantly was the English garden stocked in the age of the Tudors, that Tusser, after enumerating in an Appendix to one of his Chapters two and forty herbs for the kitchen, fourteen others for sallads or sauces, eleven to boil or butter, seventeen as strewing herbs, and forty “herbs branches and flowers for windows and pots,” adds a list of seventeen herbs “to still in summer,” and of five and twenty “necessary herbs to grow in the garden for physic, not rehearsed before;” and after all advises his readers to seek more in the fields. He says,

The nature of Flowers dame Physic doth shew;

She teacheth them all to be known to a few.

Elsewhere he observes that

The knowledge of stilling is one pretty feat,

The waters be wholesome, the charges not great.

1 FLETCHER.

In a comedy of Lord Digby's, written more than a hundred years after Tusser's didactics, one of the scenes is laid in a lady's laboratory, “with a fountain in it, some stills, and many shelves, with pots of porcelain and glasses;” and when the lady wishes to keep her attendant out of the way, she sends her there, saying

I have a task to give you,——carefully

To shift the oils in the perfuming room,

As in the several ranges you shall see

The old begin to wither. To do it well

Will take you up some hours, but 'tis a work

I oft perform myself.

And Tusser among “the Points of Housewifery united to the Comfort of Husbandry,” includes good housewifely physic, as inculcated in these rhymes;

Good houswife provides ere an sickness do come,

Of sundry good things in her house to have some;

Good aqua composita, and vinegar tart,

Rose water, and treacle to comfort the heart;

Cold herbs in her garden for agues that burn,

That over-strong heat to good temper may turn;

White endive, and succory, with spinage enow,

All such with good pot-herbs should follow the plough.

Get water of fumitory liver to cool,

And others the like, or else go like a fool;

Conserves of barberry, quinces and such,

With syrups that easeth the sickly so much.

Old Gervase Markham in his “Approved Book called the English Housewife, containing the inward and outward virtues which ought to be in a complete woman,” places her skill in physic as one of the most principal; “you shall understand,” he says, “that sith the preservation and care of the family touching their health and soundness of body consisteth most in her diligence, it is meet that she have a physical kind of knowledge, how to administer any wholesome receipts or medicines for the good of their healths, as well to prevent the first occasion of sickness, as to take away the effects and evil of the same, when it hath made seizure upon the body.” And “as it must be confessed that the depths and secrets of this most excellent art of physic, are far beyond the capacity of the most skilful woman,” he relates for the Housewife's use some “approved medecines and old doctrines, gathered together by two excellent and famous physicians, and in a manuscript given to a great worthy Countess of this land.”

The receipts collected in this and other books for domestic practice are some of them so hyper-composite that even Tusser's garden could hardly supply all the indigenous ingredients; others are of the most fantastic kind, and for the most part they were as troublesome in preparation, and many of them as disgusting, as they were futile. That “Sovereign Water” which was invented by Dr. Stephens was composed of almost all known spices, and all savoury and odorous herbs, distilled in claret. With this Dr. Stephens “preserved his own life until such extreme old age that he could neither go nor ride; and he did continue his life, being bed-rid five years, when other physicians did judge he could not live one year; and he confessed a little before his death, that if he were sick at any time, he never used any thing but this water only. And also the Archbishop of Canterbury used it, and found such goodness in it that he lived till he was not able to drink out of a cup, but sucked his drink through a hollow pipe of silver.”

Twenty-nine plants were used in the composition of Dr. Adrian Gilbert's most sovereign Cordial Water, besides hartshorn, figs, raisins, gillyflowers, cowslips, marygolds, blue violets, red rose-buds, ambergris, bezoar-stone, sugar, aniseed, liquorice, and to crown all, “what else you please.” But then it was sovereign against all fevers; and one who in time of plague should take two spoonsfull of it in good beer, or white wine, “he might walk safely from danger, by the leave of God.”—The Water of Life was distilled from nearly as many ingredients, to which were added a fleshy running capon, the loins and legs of an old coney, the red flesh of the sinews of a leg of mutton, four young chickens, twelve larks, the yolks of twelve eggs, and a loaf of white bread, all to be distilled in white wine.

For consumption, there were pills in which powder of pearls, of white amber and of coral, were the potential ingredients; there was cockwater, the cock being to be chased and beaten before he was killed, or else plucked alive! and there was a special water procured by distillation, from a peck of garden shell-snails and a quart of earth worms, besides other things; this was prescribed not for consumption alone, but for dropsy and all obstructions. For all faintness, hot agues, heavy fantasies and imaginations, a cordial was prepared in tabulates, which were called Manus Christi: the true receipt required one ounce of prepared pearls to twelve of fine sugar, boiled with rose water, violet water, cinnamon water, “or howsoever one would have them.” But apothecaries seldom used more than a drachm of pearls to a pound of sugar, because men would not go to the cost thereof; and the Manus Christi simplex was made without any pearl at all. For broken bones, bones out of joint, or any grief in the bones or sinews, oil of swallows was pronounced exceeding sovereign, and this was to be procured by pounding twenty live swallows in a mortar with about as many different herbs! A mole, male or female according to the sex of the patient, was to be dried in an oven whole as taken out of the earth, and administered in powder for the falling evil. A grey eel with a white belly was to be closed in an earthen pot, and buried alive in a dunghill, and at the end of a fortnight its oil might be collected to “help hearing.” A mixture of rose leaves and pigeon's dung quilted in a bag, and laid hot upon the parts affected, was thought to help a stitch in the side; and for a quinsey, “give the party to drink,” says Markham, “the herb mouse-ear, steept in ale or beer; and look when you see a swine rub himself, and there upon the same place rub a slick-stone, and then with it slick all the swelling, and it will cure it.”

To make hair grow on a bald part of the head, garden snails were to be plucked out of their houses, and pounded with horse-leaches, bees, wasps and salt, an equal quantity of each; and the baldness was to be anointed with the moisture from this mixture after it had been buried eight days in a hot bed. For the removal and extirpation of superfluous hairs, a depilatory was to be made by drowning in a pint of wine as many green frogs as it would cover, (about twenty was the number,) setting the pot forty days in the sun, and then straining it for use.

A water specially good against gravel or dropsy might be distilled from the dried and pulverized blood of a black buck or he-goat, three or four years old. The animal was to be kept by himself, in the summer time when the sun was in Leo, and dieted for three weeks upon certain herbs given in prescribed order, and to drink nothing but red wine, if you would have the best preparation, though some persons allowed him his fill of water every third day. But there was a water of mans blood which in Queen Elizabeth's days was a new invention, “whereof some princes had very great estimation, and used it for to remain thereby in their force, and, as they thought, to live long.” A strong man was to be chosen, in his flourishing youth, and of twenty-five years, and somewhat choleric by nature. He was to be well dieted for one month with light and healthy meats, and with all kinds of spices, and with good strong wine, and moreover to be kept with mirth; at the month's end veins in both arms were to be opened, and as much blood to be let out as he could “tolerate and abide.” One handful of salt was to be added to six pounds of this blood, and this was to be seven times distilled, pouring the water upon the residuum after every distillation, till the last. This was to be taken three or four times a year, an ounce at a time. One has sight of a theory here; the life was thought to be in the blood, and to be made transferable when thus extracted.

Richard Brathwait, more famous since Mr. Haslewood has identified him with Drunken Barnaby, than as author of “the English Gentleman and the English Gentlewoman, presented to present times for ornaments, and commended to posterity for precedents,” says of this Gentlewoman, “herbals she peruseth, which she seconds with conference; and by degrees so improves her knowledge, as her cautelous care perfits many a dangerous cure.” But herbals were not better guides than the medical books of which specimens have just been set before the reader, except that they did not lead the practitioner so widely and perilously astray. “Had Solomon,” says the author of Adam in Eden, or the Paradise of Plants, “that great proficient in all sublunary experiments, preserved those many volumes that he wrote in this kind, for the instruction of future ages, so great was that spaciousness of mind that God had bestowed on him, that he had immediately under the Deity been the greatest of Doctors for the preservation of mankind: but with the loss of his books so much lamented by the Rabbins and others, the best part of this herbarary art hath since groaned under the defects of many unworthy authors, and still remains under divers clouds and imperfections.” This writer, “the ingeniously learned and excellent Herbarist Mr. William Coles,” professing as near as possible to acquaint all sorts of people with the very pith and marrow of herbarism, arranges his work according to the anatomical application of plants, “appropriating,” says he, “to every part of the body, (from the crown of the head, with which I begin, and proceed till I come to the sole of the foot,) such herbs and plants whose grand uses and virtues do most specifically, and by signature thereunto belong, not only for strengthening the same, but also for curing the evil effects whereunto they are subjected:—the signatures being as it were the books out of which the ancients first learned the virtues of herbs; Nature, or rather the God of Nature, having stamped on divers of them legible characters to discover their uses, though he hath left others without any, that after he had shewed them the way, they, by their labour and industry which renders every thing more acceptable, might find out the rest.” It was an opinion often expressed by a physician of great and deserved celebrity, that in course of time specifics would be discovered for every malady to which the human frame is liable. He never supposed, (though few men have ever been more sanguine in their hopes and expectations,) that life was thus to be indefinitely prolonged, and that it would be man's own fault, or his own choice, if he did not live for ever; but he thought that when we should thus have been taught to subdue those diseases which cut our life short, we should, like the Patriarchs, live out the number of our days, and then fall asleep,—Man being by this physical redemption restored to his original corporeal state.

Then shall like four straight pillars, the four Elements

Support the goodly structure of Mortality:

Then shall the four Complexions, like four heads

Of a clear river, streaming in his body,

Nourish and comfort every vein and sinew:

No sickness of contagion, no grim death,

Or deprivation of health's real blessings,

Shall then affright the creature, built by Heaven,

Reserved for immortality.2

2 FORD.

He had not taken up this notion from any religious feeling; it was connected in him with the pride of philosophy, and he expected that this was one of the blessings which we were to obtain in the progress of knowledge.

Some specific remedies being known to exist, it is indeed reasonable to suppose that others will be found. Old theorists went farther; and in a world which everywhere bears such undeniable evidences of design in every thing, few theories should seem more likely to be favourably received than the one which supposed that every healing plant bears, in some part of its structure, the type or signature of its peculiar virtues: now this could in no other way be so obviously marked, as by a resemblance to that part of the human frame for which its remedial uses were intended. There is a fable indeed which says that he who may be so fortunate as to taste the blood of a certain unknown animal would be enabled thereby to hear the voice of plants and understand their speech; and if he were on a mountain at sunrise, he might hear the herbs which grow there, when freshened with the dews of night they open themselves to the beams of the morning, return thanks to the Creator for the virtues with which he has indued them, each specifying what those virtues were, le quali veramente son tante e tali che beati i pastori che quelle capessero. A botanical writer who flourished a little before the theory of signatures was started complains that herbal medicine had fallen into disuse; he says, “antequam chemia patrum nostrorum memoriâ orbi restitueretur, contenti vivebant ὅι τῶν ἰατρῶν κομψὸι και χαριὲστατοι pharmacis ex vegetabilium regno accersitis parum solliciti de Solis sulphure et oleo, de Lunæ sale et essentiâ, de Saturni saccaro, de Martis tincturâ et croco, de vitriolo Veneris, de Mercurio præcipitato, et Antimonii floribus, de Sulphuris spiritu et Tartari crystallis: nihilominus masculè debellabant morbos, et tutè et jucundè. Nunc sæculi nostri infelicitas est, quod vegetabilibus contemptim habitis, plerique nihil aliud spirant præter metallica ista, et extis parata horribilia secreta.”3 The new theory came in timely aid of the Galenists; it connected their practice with a doctrine hardly less mysterious than those of the Paracelsists, but more plausible because it seemed immediately intelligible, and had a natural religious feeling to strengthen and support it.

3 Petri Laurembergii Rostochiensis Horticultura—Præloquium, p. 10.

The Author of Adam in Eden refers to Oswald Crollius as “the great discoverer of signatures,” and no doubt has drawn from him, most of his remarks upon this theory of physical correspondence. The resemblance is in some cases very obvious; but in many more the Swedenborgian correspondences are not more fantastic; and where the resemblances exist the inference is purely theoretical.

Walnuts are said to have the perfect signature of the head; the outer husks or green covering represents the pericranium, or outward skin of the skull, whereon the hair groweth,—and therefore salt made of those husks is exceeding good for wounds in the head. The inner woody shell hath the signature of the skull, and the little yellow skin or peel, that of the dura and pia mater which are the thin scarfs that envelope the brain. The kernel hath “the very figure of the brain, and therefore it is very profitable for the brain and resists poisons.” So too the Piony, being not yet blown, was thought to have “some signature and proportion with the head of man, having sutures and little veins dispersed up and down, like unto those which environ the brain: when the flowers blow they open an outward little skin representing the skull:” the piony therefore besides its other virtues was very available against the falling sickness. Poppy heads with their crowns somewhat represent the head and brain, and therefore decoctions of them were used with good success in several diseases of the head. And Lillies of the Valley, which in Coles's days grew plentifully upon Hampstead-heath, were known by signature to cure the apoplexy; “for as that disease is caused by the dropping of humours into the principal ventricles of the brain, so the flowers of this lilly hanging on the plants as if they were drops, are of wonderful use herein.”

All capillary herbs were of course sovereign in diseases of the hair; and because the purple and yellow spots and stripes upon the flowers of Eyebright very much resemble the appearance of diseased eyes, it was found out by that signature that this herb was very effectual “for curing of the same.” The small Stone-crop hath the signature of the gums, and is therefore good for scurvy. The exquisite Crollius observed that the woody scales of which the cones of the pine tree are composed, resemble the fore teeth; and therefore pine leaves boiled in vinegar make a gargle which relieves the tooth-ache. The Pomegranate has a like virtue for a like reason. Thistles and Holly leaves signify by their prickles that they are excellent for pleurisy and stiches in the side. Saxifrage manifesteth in its growth its power of breaking the stone. It had been found experimentally that all roots, barks and flowers which were yellow, cured the yellow jaundice; and though Kidney beans as yet were only used for food, yet having so perfect a signature, practitioners in physic were exhorted to take it into consideration and try whether there were not in this plant some excellent faculty to cure nephritic diseases. In pursuing this fantastic system examples might be shown of that mischief, which, though it may long remain latent, never fails at some time or other to manifest itself as inherent in all error and falsehood.

When the mistresses of families grounded their practice of physic upon such systems of herbary, or took it from books which contained prescriptions like those before adduced, (few being either more simple or more rational,) Dr. Green might well argue that when he mounted his hobby and rode out seeking adventures as a Physician-Errant, he went forth for the benefit of his fellow creatures. The guidance of such works, or of their own traditional receipts, the people in fact then generally followed. Burton tells us that Paulus Jovius in his description of Britain, and Levinus Lemnius have observed, of this our island, how there was of old no use of physic amongst us, and but little at this day, except he says “it be for a few nice idle citizens, surfeiting courtiers, and stall-fed gentlemen lubbers. The country people use kitchen physic.” There are two instances among the papers of the Berkeley family, of the little confidence which persons of rank placed upon such medical advice and medicinal preparations as could be obtained in the country, and even in the largest of our provincial cities. In the second year of Elizabeth's reign Henry Lord Berkeley “having extremely heated himself by chasing on foot a tame deer in Yate Park, with the violence thereof fell into an immoderate bleeding of the nose, to stay which, by the ill counsel of some about him, he dipt his whole face into a bason of cold water, whereby,” says the family chronicler, “that flush and fulness of his nose which forthwith arose could never be remedied, though for present help he had Physicians in a few days from London, and for better help came thither himself not long after to have the advice of the whole College, and lodged with his mother at her house in Shoe-lane.”—He never afterwards could sing with truth or satisfaction the old song,

Nose, Nose, jolly red Nose,

And what gave thee that jolly red Nose?

Cinnamon and Ginger, Nutmegs and Cloves,

And they gave me this jolly red Nose.

A few years later, “Langham an Irish footman of this Lord, upon the sickness of the Lady Catherine, this Lord's wife, carried a letter from Callowdon to old Dr. Fryer, a physician dwelling in Little Britain in London; and returned with a glass bottle in his hand compounded by the doctor for the recovery of her health, a journey of an hundred and forty-eight miles performed by him in less than forty-two hours, notwithstanding his stay of one night at the physician's and apothecary's houses, which no one horse could have so well and safely performed.” No doubt it was for the safer conveyance of the bottle, that a footman was sent on this special errand, for which the historian of that noble family adds, “the lady shall after give him a new suit of cloaths.”

In those days, and long after, they who required remedies were likely to fare ill, under their own treatment, or that of their neighbours; and worse under the travelling quack, who was always an ignorant and impudent impostor, but found that human sufferings and human credulity afforded him a never-failing harvest. Dr. Green knew this: he did not say with the Romish priest populus vult decipi, et decipietur! for he had no intention of deceiving them; but he saw that many were to be won by buffoonery, more by what is called palaver, and almost all by pretensions. Condescending therefore to the common arts of quackery, he employed his man Kemp to tickle the multitude with coarse wit; but he stored himself with the best drugs that were to be procured, distributed as general remedies such only as could hardly be misapplied and must generally prove serviceable; and brought to particular cases the sound knowledge which he had acquired in the school of Boerhaave, and the skill which he had derived from experience aided by natural sagacity. When it became convenient for him to have a home, he established himself at Penrith, in the County of Cumberland, having married a lady of that place; but he long continued his favourite course of life and accumulated in it a large fortune. He gained it by one maggot, and reduced it by many: nevertheless there remained a handsome inheritance for his children. His son proved as maggotty as the father, ran through a good fortune, and when confined in the King's Bench prison for debt, wrote a book upon the Art of cheap living in London!

The father's local fame, though it has not reached to the third and fourth generation, survived him far into the second; and for many years after his retirement from practice, and even after his death every travelling mountebank in the northern counties adopted the name of Dr. Green.

At the time to which this chapter refers, Dr. Green was in his meridian career, and enjoyed the highest reputation throughout the sphere of his itinerancy. Ingleton lay in his rounds, and whenever he came there he used to send for the schoolmaster to pass the evening with him. He was always glad if he could find an opportunity also of conversing with the elder Daniel, as the Flossofer of those parts. William Dove could have communicated to him more curious things relating to his own art; but William kept out of the presence of strangers, and had happily no ailments to make him seek the Doctor's advice; his occasional indispositions were but slight, and he treated them in his own way. That way was sometimes merely superstitious, sometimes it was whimsical, and sometimes rough. If his charms failed when he tried them upon himself, it was not for want of faith. When at any time it happened that one of his eyes was blood-shot, he went forthwith in search of some urchin whose mother, either for laziness, or in the belief that it was wholesome to have it in that state, allowed his ragged head to serve as a free warren for certain “small deer.” One of these hexapeds William secured, and “using him as if he loved him,” put it into his eye; when according to William's account the insect fed upon what it found, cleared the eye, and disappearing he knew not where or how, never was seen more.

His remedy for the cholic was a pebble posset; white pebbles were preferred, and of these what was deemed a reasonable quantity was taken in some sort of milk porridge. Upon the same theory he sometimes swallowed a pebble large enough as he said to clear all before it; and for that purpose they have been administered of larger calibre than any bolus that ever came from the hands of the most merciless apothecary, as large indeed sometimes as a common sized walnut. Does the reader hesitate at believing this of an ignorant man, living in a remote part of the country? Well might William Dove be excused, for a generation later than his John Wesley prescribed in his Primitive Physic quicksilver, to be taken ounce by ounce, to the amount of one, two, or three pounds, till the desired effect was produced. And a generation earlier, Richard Baxter of happy memory and unhappy digestion, having read in Dr. Gerhard “the admirable effects of the swallowing of a gold bullet upon his father,” in a case which Baxter supposed to be like his own, got a gold bullet of between twenty and thirty shillings weight, and swallowed it. “Having taken it,” says he, “I knew not how to be delivered of it again. I took clysters and purges for about three weeks, but nothing stirred it; and a gentleman having done the like, the bullet never came from him till he died, and it was cut out. But at last my neighbours set a day apart to fast and pray for me, and I was freed from my danger in the beginning of that day!”

CHAPTER XXV. P. I.

Hiatus valde lacrymabilis.

Time flies away fast,

The while we never remember

How soon our life here

Grows old with the year

That dies with the next December!

HERRICK.

I must pass over fourteen years, for were I to pursue the history of our young Daniel's boyhood and adolescence into all the ramifications which a faithful biography requires, fourteen volumes would not contain it. They would be worth reading, for that costs little; they would be worth writing, though that costs much. They would deserve the best embellishments that the pencil and the graver could produce. The most poetical of artists would be worthily employed in designing the sentimental and melancholy scenes; Cruikshank for the grotesque; Wilkie and Richter for the comic and serio-comic; Turner for the actual scenery; Bewick for the head and tail pieces. They ought to be written; they ought to be read. They should be written—and then they would be read. But time is wanting:

Eheu! fugaces Posthume, Posthume,

Labuntur anni!

and time is a commodity of which the value rises as long as we live. We must be contented with doing not what we wish, but what we can,—our possible as the French call it.

One of our Poets—(which is it?)—speaks of an everlasting now. If such a condition of existence were offered to us in this world, and it were put to the vote whether we should accept the offer and fix all things immutably as they are, who are they whose voices would be given in the affirmative?

Not those who are in pursuit of fortune, or of fame, or of knowledge, or of enjoyment, or of happiness; though with regard to all of these, as far as any of them are attainable, there is more pleasure in the pursuit than in the attainment.

Not those who are at sea, or travelling in a stage coach.

Not the man who is shaving himself.

Not those who have the tooth ache, or who are having a tooth drawn.

The fashionable beauty might; and the fashionable singer, and the fashionable opera dancer, and the actor who is in the height of his power and reputation. So might the alderman at a city feast. So would the heir who is squandering a large fortune faster than it was accumulated for him. And the thief who is not taken, and the convict who is not hanged, and the scoffer at religion whose heart belies his tongue.

Not the wise and the good.

Not those who are in sickness or in sorrow.

Not I.

But were I endowed with the power of suspending the effect of time upon the things around me, methinks there are some of my flowers which should neither fall nor fade: decidedly my kitten should never attain to cathood; and I am afraid my little boy would continue to “mis-speak half-uttered words;” and never, while I live, outgrow that epicene dress of French grey, half European, half Asiatic in its fashion.

CHAPTER XXVI. P. I.

DANIEL AT DONCASTER; THE REASON WHY HE WAS DESTINED FOR THE MEDICAL PROFESSION, RATHER THAN HOLY ORDERS; AND SOME REMARKS UPON SERMONS.

Je ne veux dissimuler, amy Lecteur, que je n'aye bien préveu, et me tiens pour deüement adverty, que ne puis eviter la reprehension d'aucuns, et les calomnies de plusieurs, ausquels c'est éscrit désplaira du tout.

CHRISTOFLE DE HERICOURT.

Fourteen years have elapsed since the scene took place which is related in the twenty-second chapter: and Daniel the younger at the time to which this present chapter refers was residing at Doncaster with Peter Hopkins who practised the medical art in all its branches. He had lived with him eight years, first as a pupil, latterly in the capacity of an assistant, and afterwards as an adopted successor.

How this connection between Daniel and Peter Hopkins was brought about, and the circumstances which prepared the way for it, would have appeared in some of the non-existent fourteen volumes, if it had pleased Fate that they should have been written.

Some of my readers, and especially those who pride themselves upon their knowledge of the world, or their success in it, will think it strange perhaps that the elder Daniel, when he resolved to make a scholar of his son, did not determine upon breeding him either to the Church, or the Law, in either of which professions the way was easier and more inviting. Now though this will not appear strange to those other readers who have perceived that the father had no knowledge of the world, and could have none, it is nevertheless proper to enter into some explanation upon that point.

If George Herbert's Temple, or his Remains, or his life by old Izaak Walton, had all or any of them happened to be among those few but precious books which Daniel prized so highly and used so well, it is likely that the wish of his heart would have been to train up his Son for a Priest to the Temple. But so it was that none of his reading was of a kind to give his thoughts that direction; and he had not conceived any exalted opinion of the Clergy from the specimens which had fallen in his way. A contempt which was but too general had been brought upon the Order by the ignorance or the poverty of a great proportion of its members. The person who served the humble church which Daniel dutifully attended was almost as poor as a Capuchine, and quite as ignorant. This poor man had obtained in evil hour from some easy or careless Bishop a licence to preach. It was reprehensible enough to have ordained one who was destitute of every qualification that the office requires; the fault was still greater in promoting him from the desk to the pulpit.

“A very great Scholar,” is quoted by Dr. Eachard, as saying “that such preaching as is usual is a hindrance of salvation rather than the means to it.” This was said when the fashion of conceited preaching which is satirized in Frey Gerundio, had extended to England, and though that fashion has so long been obsolete, that many persons will be surprized to hear it had ever existed among us, it may still reasonably be questioned whether sermons such as they commonly are, do not quench more devotion than they kindle.

My Lord! put not the book aside in displeasure! (I address myself to whatever Bishop may be reading it.) Unbiassed I will not call myself, for I am a true and orthodox churchman, and have the interests of the Church zealously at heart, because I believe and know them to be essentially and inseparably connected with those of the commonwealth. But I have been an attentive observer, and as such, request a hearing. Receive my remarks as coming from one whose principles are in entire accord with your Lordship's, whose wishes have the same scope and purport, and who while he offers his honest opinion, submits it with proper humility to your judgement.

The founders of the English Church did not intend that the sermon should invariably form a part of the Sunday services. It became so in condescension to the Puritans, of whom it has long been the fashion to speak with respect, instead of holding them up to the contempt and infamy and abhorrence which they have so richly merited. They have been extolled by their descendants and successors as models of patriotism and piety; and the success with which this delusion has been practised is one of the most remarkable examples of what may be effected by dint of effrontery and persevering falsehood.

That sentence I am certain will not be disapproved at Fulham or Lambeth. Dr. Southey, or Dr. Phillpots might have written it.

The general standard of the Clergy has undoubtedly been very much raised since the days when they were not allowed to preach without a licence for that purpose from the Ordinary. Nevertheless it is certain that many persons who are in other, and more material respects well, or even excellently qualified for the ministerial functions, may be wanting in the qualifications for a preacher. A man may possess great learning, sound principles and good sense, and yet be without the talent of arranging and expressing his thoughts well in a written discourse: he may want the power of fixing the attention, or reaching the hearts of his hearers; and in that case the discourse, as some old writer has said in serious jest, which was designed for edification turns to tedification. The evil was less in Addison's days when he who distrusted his own abilities, availed himself of the compositions of some approved Divine, and was not disparaged in the opinion of his congregation, by taking a printed volume into the pulpit. This is no longer practised; but instead of this, which secured wholesome instruction to the people, sermons are manufactured for sale, and sold in manuscript, or printed in a cursive type imitating manuscript. The articles which are prepared for such a market, are for the most part copied from obscure books, with more or less alteration of language, and generally for the worse; and so far as they are drawn from such sources they are not likely to contain any thing exceptionable on the score of doctrine: but the best authors will not be resorted to, for fear of discovery, and therefore when these are used, the congregation lose as much in point of instruction, as he who uses them ought to lose in self-esteem.

But it is more injurious when a more scrupulous man composes his own discourses, if he be deficient either in judgement or learning. He is then more likely to entangle plain texts than to unravel knotty ones; rash positions are sometimes advanced by such preachers, unsound arguments are adduced by them in support of momentous doctrines, and though these things neither offend the ignorant and careless, nor injure the well-minded and well-informed, they carry poison with them when they enter a diseased ear. It cannot be doubted that such sermons act as corroboratives for infidelity.

Nor when they contain nothing that is actually erroneous, but are merely unimproving, are they in that case altogether harmless. They are not harmless if they are felt to be tedious. They are not harmless if they torpify the understanding: a chill that begins there may extend to the vital regions. Bishop Taylor (the great Jeremy) says of devotional books that “they are in a large degree the occasion of so great indevotion as prevails among the generality of nominal Christians, being,” he says, “represented naked in the conclusions of spiritual life, without or art or learning; and made apt for persons who can do nothing but believe and love, not for them that can consider and love.” This applies more forcibly to bad sermons than to common-place books of devotion; the book may be laid aside if it offend the reader's judgement, but the sermon is a positive infliction upon the helpless hearer.

The same Bishop,—and his name ought to carry with it authority among the wise and the good, has delivered an opinion upon this subject, in his admirable Apology for Authorized and Set Forms of Liturgy. “Indeed,” he says, “if I may freely declare my opinion, I think it were not amiss, if the liberty of making sermons were something more restrained than it is; and that such persons only were intrusted with the liberty, for whom the church herself may safely be responsive,—that is men learned and pious; and that the other part, the vulgus cleri, should instruct the people out of the fountains of the church and the public stock, till by so long exercise and discipline in the schools of the Prophets they may also be intrusted to minister of their own unto the people. This I am sure was the practice of the Primitive Church.”

“I am convinced,” said Dr. Johnson, “that I ought to be at Divine Service more frequently than I am; but the provocations given by ignorant and affected preachers too often disturb the mental calm which otherwise would succeed to prayer. I am apt to whisper to myself on such occasions, ‘How can this illiterate fellow dream of fixing attention, after we have been listening to the sublimest truths, conveyed in the most chaste and exalted language, throughout a liturgy which must be regarded as the genuine offspring of piety impregnated by wisdom!’”—“Take notice, however,” he adds, “though I make this confession respecting myself, I do not mean to recommend the fastidiousness that sometimes leads me to exchange congregational for solitary worship.”

The saintly Herbert says,

“Judge not the Preacher, for he is thy Judge;

If thou mislike him thou conceiv'st him not.

God calleth preaching folly. Do not grudge

To pick out treasures from an earthen pot.

The worst speak something good. If all want sense

God takes a text and preacheth patience.

He that gets patience and the blessing which

Preachers conclude with, hath not lost his pains.”

This sort of patience was all that Daniel could have derived from the discourses of the poor curate; and it was a lesson of which his meek and benign temper stood in no need. Nature had endowed him with this virtue, and this Sunday's discipline exercised without strengthening it. While he was, in the phrase of the Religious Public, sitting under the preacher, he obeyed to a certain extent George Herbert's precept,—that is he obeyed it as he did other laws with the existence of which he was unacquainted,—

Let vain or busy thoughts have there no part;

Bring not thy plough, thy plots, thy pleasure thither.

Pleasure made no part of his speculations at any time. Plots he had none. For the Plough,—it was what he never followed in fancy, patiently as he plodded after the furrow in his own vocation. And then for worldly thoughts they were not likely in that place to enter a mind, which never at any time entertained them. But to that sort of thought (if thought it may be called) which cometh as it listeth, and which when the mind is at ease and the body in health, is the forerunner and usher of sleep, he certainly gave way. The curate's voice past over his ear like the sound of the brook with which it blended, and it conveyed to him as little meaning and less feeling. During the sermon therefore he retired into himself, with as much or as little edification, as a Quaker finds at a silent meeting.

It happened also that of the few clergy within the very narrow circle in which Daniel moved, some were in no good repute for their conduct, and none displayed either that zeal in the discharge of their pastoral functions, or that earnestness and ability in performing the service of the Church, which are necessary for commanding the respect and securing the affections of the parishioners. The clerical profession had never presented itself to him in its best, which is really its true light; and for that cause he would never have thought of it for the boy, even if the means of putting him forward in this path had been easier and more obvious than they were. And for the dissenting ministry, Daniel liked not the name of a Nonconformist. The Puritans had left behind them an ill savour in his part of the country, as they had done every where else; and the extravagances of the primitive Quakers, which during his childhood were fresh in remembrance, had not yet been forgotten.

It was well remembered in those parts that the Vicar of Kirkby Lonsdale through the malignity of some of his puritanical parishioners, had been taken out of his bed—from his wife who was then big with child, and hurried away to Lancaster jail, where he was imprisoned three years for no other offence than that of fidelity to his Church and his King. And that the man who was a chief instigator of this persecution, and had enriched himself by the spoil of his neighbour's goods, though he flourished for a while, bought a field and built a fine house, came to poverty at last, and died in prison, having for some time received his daily food there from the table of one of this very Vicar's sons. It was well remembered also that, in a parish of the adjoining county-palatine, the puritanical party had set fire in the night to the Rector's barns, stable, and parsonage; and that he and his wife and children had only as it were by miracle escaped from the flames.

William Dove had also among his traditional stores some stories of a stranger kind concerning the Quakers, these parts of the North having been a great scene of their vagaries in their early days. He used to relate how one of them went into the church at Brough, during the reign of the Puritans, with a white sheet about his body, and a rope about his neck, to prophesy before the people and their Whig Priest (as he called him) that the surplice which was then prohibited should again come into use, and that the Gallows should have its due! And how when their ringleader George Fox was put in prison at Carlisle, the wife of Justice Benson would eat no meat unless she partook it with him at the bars of his dungeon, declaring she was moved to do this; wherefore it was supposed he had bewitched her. And not without reason; for when this old George went, as he often did, into the Church to disturb the people, and they thrust him out, and fell upon him and beat him, sparing neither sticks nor stones if they came to hand, he was presently for all that they had done to him, as sound and as fresh as if nothing had touched him; and when they tried to kill him, they could not take away his life! And how this old George rode a great black horse, upon which he was seen in the course of the same hour at two places threescore miles distant from each other! And how some of the women who followed this old George used to strip off all their clothes, and in that plight go into the church at service time on the Sunday to bear testimony against the pomps and vanities of the world; “and to be sure,” said William, “they must have been witched, or they never would have done this.” “Lord deliver us!” said Dinah, “to be sure they must!”—“To be sure they must, Lord bless us all!” said Haggy.

CHAPTER XXVII. P. I.

A PASSAGE IN PROCOPIUS IMPROVED. A STORY CONCERNING URIM AND THUMMIM; AND THE ELDER DANIEL'S OPINION OF THE PROFESSION OF THE LAW.

Here is Domine Picklock

My man of Law, sollicits all my causes,

Follows my business, makes and compounds my quarrels

Between my tenants and me; sows all my strifes

And reaps them too, troubles the country for me,

And vexes any neighbour that I please.

BEN JONSON.

Among the people who were converted to the Christian faith during the sixth century were two tribes or nations called the Lazi and the Zani. Methinks it had been better if they had been left unconverted; for they have multiplied prodigiously among us, so that between the Lazy Christians and the Zany ones, Christianity has grievously suffered.

It was one of the Zany tribe whom Guy once heard explaining to his congregation what was meant by Urim and Thummim, and in technical phrase improving the text. Urim and Thummim, he said, were two precious stones, or rather stones above all price, the Hebrew names of which have been interpreted to signify Light and Perfection, or Doctrine and Judgement, (which Luther prefers in his Bible, and in which some of the northern versions, have followed him) or the Shining and the Perfect, or Manifestation and Truth, the words in the original being capable of any or all of these significations. They were set in the High Priest's breast-plate of judgement; and when he consulted them upon any special occasion to discover the will of God, they displayed an extraordinary brilliancy if the matter which was referred to this trial were pleasing to the Lord Jehovah, but they gave no lustre if it were disapproved. “My Brethren,” said the Preacher, “this is what learned Expositors, Jewish and Christian, tell me concerning these two precious stones. The stones themselves are lost. But, my Christian Brethren, we need them not, for we have a surer means of consulting and discovering the will of God; and still it is by Urim and Thummim if we alter only a single letter in one of those mysterious words. Take your Bible, my brethren; use him and thumb him—use him and thumb him well, and you will discover the will of God as surely as ever the High Priest did by the stones in his breast plate!”

What Daniel saw of the Lazi, and what he heard of the Zani, prevented him from ever forming a wish to educate his son for a North country cure, which would have been all the preferment that lay within his view. And yet if any person to whose judgement he deferred had reminded him that Bishop Latimer had risen from as humble an origin, it might have awakened in him a feeling of ambition for the boy, not inconsistent with his own philosophy.

But no suggestions could ever have induced Daniel to chuse for him the profession of the Law. The very name of Lawyer was to him a word of evil acceptation. Montaigne has a pleasant story of a little boy who when his mother had lost a lawsuit which he had always heard her speak of as a perpetual cause of trouble, ran up to him in great glee to tell him of the loss as a matter for congratulation and joy; the poor child thought it was like losing a cough, or any other bodily ailment. Daniel entertained the same sort of opinion concerning all legal proceedings. He knew that laws were necessary evils; but he thought they were much greater evils than there was any necessity that they should be; and believing this to be occasioned by those who were engaged in the trade of administering them, he looked upon lawyers as the greatest pests in the country—

Because, their end being merely avarice,

Winds up their wits to such a nimble strain

As helps to blind the Judge, not give him eyes.1

He had once been in the Courts at Lancaster, having been called upon as witness in a civil suit, and the manner in which he was cross examined there by one of those “young spruce Lawyers,” whom Donne has so happily characterized as being

———“all impudence and tongue”

had confirmed him in this prejudice. What he saw of the proceedings that day induced him to agree with Beaumont and Fletcher, that

Justice was a Cheese-monger, a mere cheese-monger,

Weighed nothing to the world but mites and maggots

And a main stink; Law, like a horse-courser,

Her rules and precepts hung with gauds and ribbands,

And pampered up to cozen him that bought her,

When she herself was hackney, lame and founder'd.2

His was too simple and sincere an understanding to admire in any other sense than that of wondering at them

Men of that large profession that can speak

To every cause, and things mere contraries,

Till they are hoarse again, yet all be law!

That with most quick agility can turn

And re-return; can make knots and undo them,

Give forked counsel, take provoking gold

On either hand, and put it up. These men

He knew would thrive;—3

but far was he from wishing that a son of his should thrive by such a perversion of his intellectual powers, and such a corruption of his moral nature.

1 LORD BROOKE.

2 WOMAN PLEASED.

3 BEN JONSON.

On the other hand he felt a degree of respect amounting almost to reverence for the healing art, which is connected with so many mysteries of art and nature. And therefore when an opportunity offered of placing his son with a respectable practitioner, who he had every reason for believing would behave toward him with careful and prudent kindness, his entire approbation was given to the youth's own choice.

CHAPTER XXVIII. P. I.

PETER HOPKINS. EFFECTS OF TIME AND CHANGE. DESCRIPTION OF HIS DWELLING-HOUSE.

Combien de changemens depuis que suis au monde,

Qui n'est qu' un point du tems!

PASQUIER.

Peter Hopkins was a person who might have suffered death by the laws of Solon, if that code had been established in this country; for though he lived in the reigns of George I. and George II. he was neither Whig nor Tory, Hanoverian nor Jacobite. When he drank the King's health with any of his neighbours, he never troubled himself with considering which King was intended, nor to which side of the water their good wishes were directed. Under George or Charles he would have been the same quiet subject, never busying himself with a thought about political matters, and having no other wish concerning them than that they might remain as they were,—so far he was a Hanoverian, and no farther. There was something of the same temper in his religion; he was a sincere Christian, and had he been born to attendance at the Mass or the Meeting House would have been equally sincere in his attachment to either of those extremes. For his whole mind was in his profession. He was learned in its history; fond of its theories; and skilful in its practice, in which he trusted little to theory and much to experience.

Both he and his wife were at this time well stricken in years; they had no children, and no near kindred on either side; and being both kind-hearted people, the liking which they soon entertained toward Daniel for his docility, his simplicity of heart, his obliging temper, his original cast of mind, and his never failing good-humour, ripened into a settled affection.

Hopkins lived next door to the Mansion House, which edifice was begun a few years after Daniel went to live with him. There is a view of the Mansion House in Dr. Miller's History of Doncaster, and in that print the dwelling in question is included. It had undergone no other alteration at the time this view was taken than that of having had its casements replaced by sash windows, an improvement which had been made by our Doctor, when the frame work of the casements had become incapable of repair. The gilt pestle and mortar also had been removed from its place above the door. Internally the change had been greater; for the same business not being continued there after the Doctor's decease, the shop had been converted into a sitting room, and the very odour of medicine had passed away. But I will not allow myself to dwell upon this melancholy subject. The world is full of mutations; and there is hardly any that does not bring with it some regret at the time,—and alas, more in the retrospect! I have lived to see the American Colonies separated from Great Britain, the Kingdom of Poland extinguished, the republic of Venice destroyed, its territory seized by one Usurper, delivered over in exchange to another, and the transfer sanctioned and confirmed by all the Powers of Europe in Congress assembled! I have seen Heaven knows how many little Principalities and States, proud of their independance, and happy in the privileges connected with it, swallowed up by the Austrian or the Prussian Eagle, or thrown to the Belgic Lion, as his share in the division of the spoils. I have seen constitutions spring up like mushrooms and kicked down as easily. I have seen the rise and fall of Napoleon.

I have seen Cedars fall

And in their room a mushroom grow;

I have seen Comets, threatening all,

Vanish themselves;1

wherefore then should I lament over what time and mutability have done to a private dwelling-house in Doncaster?

1 HABINGTON.

It was an old house, which when it was built had been one of the best in Doncaster; and even after the great improvements which have changed the appearance of the town, had an air of antiquated respectability about it. Had it been near the church it would have been taken for the Vicarage; standing where it did, its physiognomy was such that you might have guessed it was the Doctor's house, even if the pestle and mortar had not been there as his insignia. There were eight windows and two doors in front. It consisted of two stories, and was oddly built, the middle part having, something in the Scotch manner, the form of a gable end towards the street. Behind this was a single chimney, tall, and shaped like a pillar. In windy nights the Doctor was so often consulted by Mrs. Dove concerning the stability of that chimney, that he accounted it the plague of his life. But it was one of those evils which could not be removed without bringing on a worse, the alternative being whether there should be a tall chimney, or a smoky house. And after the mansion house was erected, there was one wind which in spite of the chimney's elevation drove the smoke down,—so inconvenient is it sometimes to be fixed near a great neighbour.

This unfortunate chimney, being in the middle of the house, served for four apartments; the Doctor's study and his bedchamber on the upper floor, the kitchen and the best parlour on the lower, that parlour, yes Reader, that very parlour wherein, as thou canst not have forgotten, Mrs. Dove was making tea for the Doctor on that ever memorable afternoon with which our history begins.

CHAPTER XXIX. P. I.

A HINT OF REMINISCENCE TO THE READER. THE CLOCK OF ST. GEORGE'S. A WORD IN HONOR OF ARCHDEACON MARKHAM.

There is a ripe season for every thing, and if you slip that or anticipate it, you dim the grace of the matter be it never so good. As we say by way of Proverb that an hasty birth brings forth blind whelps, so a good tale tumbled out before the time is ripe for it, is ungrateful to the hearer.

BISHOP HACKETT.

The judicious reader will now have perceived that in the progress of this narrative,—which may be truly said to

——bear

A music in the ordered history

It lays before us,——

we have arrived at that point which determines the scene and acquaints him with the local habitation of the Doctor. He will perceive also that in our method of narration nothing has been inartificially anticipated; that there have been no premature disclosures, no precipitation, no hurry, or impatience on my part; and that on the other hand there has been no unnecessary delay, but that we have regularly and naturally come to this developement. The author who undertakes a task like mine,

must nombre al the hole cyrcumstaunce

Of hys matter with brevyacion,

as an old Poet says of the professors of the rhyming art, and must moreover be careful

That he walke not by longe continuance

The perambulate way,

as I have been, O Reader! and as it is my fixed intention still to be. Thou knowest, gentle Reader, that I have never wearied thee with idle and worthless words; thou knowest that the old comic writer spake truly when he said, that the man who speaks little says too much, if he says what is not to the point; but that he who speaks well and wisely will never be accused of speaking at too great length,

Τὸν μὴ λέγοντα τῶν δεόντων μηδὲ ἓν

Μακρὸν νόμιζε, κᾂν δύ᾿ εἴπῃ συλλαβάς.

Τὸν δ᾿ εὗ λέγοντα, μὴ νόμιζ᾿ εἶναι μακρὸν,

Μηδ᾿ ἂν σφόδρ᾿ εἴπῃ πολλὰ, και πολὺν χρόνον.1

1 PHILEMON.

My good Readers will remember that, as was duly noticed in our first chapter P. I. the clock of St. George's had just struck five when Mrs. Dove was pouring out the seventh cup of tea for her husband, and when our history opens. I have some observations to make concerning both the tea and the tea service, which will dear the Doctor from any imputation of intemperance in his use of that most pleasant, salutiferous and domesticizing beverage: but it would disturb the method of my narration were they to be introduced in this place. Here I have something to relate about the Clock. Some forty or fifty years ago a Butcher being one of the Churchwardens of the year, and fancying himself in that capacity invested with full power to alter and improve any thing in or about the Church, thought proper to change the position of the clock, and accordingly had it removed to the highest part of the tower, immediately under the battlements. Much beautiful Gothic work was cut away to make room for the three dials, which he placed on three sides of this fine tower; and when he was asked what had induced him thus doubly to disfigure the edifice, by misplacing the dials, and destroying so much of the ornamental part, the great and greasy killcow answered that by fixing the dials so high, he could now stand at his own shop door and see what it was o'clock! That convenience this arrant churchwarden had the satisfaction of enjoying for several years, there being no authority that could call him to account for the insolent mischief he had done. But Archdeacon Markham (to his praise be it spoken) at the end of the last century prevailed on the then churchwardens to remove two of the dials, and restore the architectural ornaments which had been defaced.

This was the clock which, with few intervals, measured out by hours the life of Daniel Dove from the seventeenth year of his age, when he first set up his rest within its sound.

Perhaps of all the works of man sun-dials and church-clocks are those which have conveyed most feeling to the human heart; the clock more than the sun-dial because it speaks to the ear as well as to the eye, and by night as well as by day. Our forefathers understood this, and therefore they not only gave a Tongue to Time, but provided that he should speak often to us and remind us that the hours are passing. Their quarter-boys and their chimes were designed for this moral purpose as much as the memento which is so commonly seen upon an old clock-face,—and so seldom upon a new one. I never hear chimes that they do not remind me of those which were formerly the first sounds I heard in the morning, which used to quicken my step on my way to school, and which announced my release from it, when the same tune methought had always a merrier import. When I remember their tones, life seems to me like a dream, and a train of recollections arises, which if it were allowed to have its course would end in tears.

CHAPTER XXX. P. I.

THE OLD BELLS RUNG TO A NEW TUNE.

If the bell have any sides the clapper will find 'em.

BEN JONSON.

That same St. George's Church has a peal of eight tunable bells, in the key of E. b. the first bell weighing seven hundred, one quarter and fourteen pounds.

Tra tutte quante le musiche humane,

O Signor mio gentil, tra le più care

Gioje del mondo, è 'l suon delle campane;

Don don don don don don, che ve ne pare?1

1 AGNOLO FIRENZUOLA.

They were not christened, because they were not Roman Catholic bells; for in Roman Catholic countries church bells are christened with the intention of causing them to be held in greater reverence,—

—però ordinò n'un consistoro

Un certo di quei buon papi all' antica,

Che non ci lavoravan di straforo,

Che la campana si, si benedica,

Poi si battezzi, e se le ponga il nome,

Prima che' in campanil l' ufizio dica.

Gli organi, ch' anco lor san sì ben come

Si dica il vespro, e le messe cantate,

Non hanno questo honor sopra le chiome.

Che le lor canne non son battezzate,

Ne' nome ha l' una Pier, l' altra Maria

Come hanno le campane prelibate.2

2 AGNOLO FIRENZUOLA.

The bells of St. George's, Doncaster, I say, were not christened, because they were Protestant bells; for distinction's sake however we will name them as the bells stand in the dirge of that unfortunate Cat whom Johnny Green threw into the well.

But it will be better to exhibit their relative weights in figures, so that they may be seen synoptically. Thus then;—

Cwt.

qr.

lb.

Bim the first

7

1

14

Bim the second

8

0

18

Bim the third

8

2

6

Bim the fourth

10

3

15

Bim the fifth

13

1

0

Bim the sixth

15

2

16

Bom

22

1

0

Bell

29

1

20

I cannot but admit that these appellations not so stately in appearance as those of the peal which the Bishop of Chalons recently baptized, and called a “happy and holy family” in the edifying discourse that he delivered upon the occasion. The first of these was called Marie, to which—or to whom,—the Duke and Duchess of Danderville (so the newspapers give this name) stood sponsors. “It is you Marie,” said the Bishop, “who will have the honor to announce the festivals, and proclaim the glory of the Lord! You appear among us under the most happy auspices, presented by those respectable and illustrious hands to which the practices of piety have been so long familiar. And you Anne,” he pursued, addressing the second bell,—“an object worthy of the zeal and piety of our first magistrate (the Prefect) and of her who so nobly shares his solicitude,—you shall be charged with the same employment. Your voice shall be joined to Marie's upon important occasions. Ah! what touching lessons will you not give in imitation of her whose name you bear, and whom we reverence as the purest of Virgins! You also Deodate, will take part in this concert, you whom an angel, a new-born infant, has conjointly with me consecrated to the Lord! Speak Deodate! and let us hear your marvellous accents.” This Angel and Godmother in whose name the third bell was given was Mademoiselle Deodate Boisset, then in the second month of her age, daughter of Viscount Boisset. “And you Stephanie, crowned with glory,” continued the orator, in learned allusion to the Greek word σεφανος, “you are not less worthy to mingle your accents with the melody of your sisters. And you lastly Seraphine and Pudentienne, you will raise your voices in this touching concert, happy all of you in having been presented to the benedictions of the Church, by these noble and generous souls, so praiseworthy for the liveliness of their faith, and the holiness of their example.” And then the Bishop concluded by calling upon the congregation to join with him in prayer that the Almighty would be pleased to preserve from all accidents this “happy and holy family of the bells.”

We have no such sermons from our Bishops! The whole ceremony must have been as useful to the bells as it was edifying to the people.

Were I called upon to act as sponsor upon such an occasion, I would name my bell Peter Bell in honour of Mr. Wordsworth. There has been a bull so called, and a bull it was of great merit. But if it were the great bell, then it should be called Andrew, in honour of Dr. Bell; and that bell should call the children to school.

There are, I believe, only two bells in England which are known by their Christian names, and they are both called Tom; but Great Tom of Oxford which happens to be much the smaller of the two was christened in the feminine gender, being called Mary, in the spirit of catholic and courtly adulation at the commencement of the bloody Queen's reign. Tresham the Vicechancellor performed the ceremony, and his exclamation when it first summoned him to mass has been recorded:—“O delicate and sweet harmony! O beautiful Mary! how musically she sounds! how strangely she pleaseth my ear!”

In spite of this christening, the object of Dr. Tresham's admiration is as decidedly a Tom-Bell, as the Puss in Boots who appeared at a Masquerade (Theodore Hook remembers when and where) was a Tom Cat. Often as the said Tom-Bell has been mentioned, there is but one other anecdote recorded of him; it occurred on Thursday the thirteenth day of March 1806, and was thus described in a letter written two hours after the event:—“An odd thing happened to-day about half past four, Tom suddenly went mad; he began striking as fast as he could about twenty times. Every body went out doubting whether there was an earthquake, or whether the Dean was dead, or the College on fire. However nothing was the matter but that Tom was taken ill in his bowels: in other words something had happened to the works, but it was not of any serious consequence, for he has struck six as well as ever, and bids fair to toll 101 to-night as well as he did before the attack.”

This was written by a youth of great natural endowments, rare acquirements, playful temper, and affectionate heart. If his days had been prolonged, his happy industry, his inoffensive wit, his sound judgement and his moral worth, favoured as they were by all favourable circumstances, must have raised him to distinction, and the name of Barrè Roberts which is now known only in the little circle of his own and his father's friends, would have had its place with those who have deserved well of their kind and reflected honor upon their country.

But I return to a subject, which would have interested him in his antiquarian pursuits,—for he loved to wander among the Ruins of Time. We will return therefore to that ceremony of christening Church Bells, which with other practices of the Holy Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church, has been revived in France.

Bells, say those Theologians in issimi who have gravely written upon this grave matter, Bells, say they, are not actually baptized with that baptism which is administered for the remission of sins; but they are said to be christened because the same ceremonies which are observed in christening children, are also observed in consecrating them, such as the washing, the anointing and the imposing a name; all which however may more strictly be said to represent the signs and symbols of baptism, than they may be called baptism itself.—

Nothing can be more candid! Bells are not baptized for the remission of sins, because the original sin of a bell would be a flaw in the metal, or a defect in the tone, neither of which the Priest undertakes to remove. There was however a previous ceremony of blessing the furnace when the bells were cast within the precincts of a monastery, as they most frequently were in former times, and this may have been intended for the prevention of such defects. The Brethren stood round the furnace ranged in processional order, sang the 150th Psalm, and then after certain prayers blessed the molten metal, and called upon the Lord to infuse into it his grace and overshadow it with his power, for the honor of the Saint, to whom the bell was to be dedicated and whose name it was to bear.

When the time of christening came, the officiating Priest and his assistant named every bell five times, as a sort of prelude, for some unexplained reason which may perhaps be as significant and mystical as the other parts of the ceremony. He then blessed the water in two vessels which were prepared for the service. Dipping a clean linen cloth in one of these vessels he washed the bell within and without, the bell being suspended over a vessel wider in circumference than the bell's mouth, in order that no drop of the water employed in this washing might fall to the ground; for the water was holy. Certain psalms were said or sung (they were the 96th and the four last in the psalter;) during this part of the ceremony and while the officiating Priest prepared the water in the second vessel: this he did by sprinkling salt in it, and putting holy oil upon it, either with his thumb, or with a stick; if the thumb were used, it was to be cleaned immediately by rubbing it well with salt over the same water. Then he dipt another clean cloth in this oiled and salted water, and again washed the bell, within and without: after the service the cloths were burnt lest they should be profaned by other uses. The bell was then authentically named. Then it was anointed with chrism in the form of a cross four times on the broadest part of the outside, thrice on the smaller part, and four times on the inside, those parts being anointed with most care against which the clapper was to strike. After this the name was again given. Myrrh and frankincense were then brought, the bell was incensed while part of a psalm was recited and the bell was authentically named a third time; after which the priest carefully wiped the chrism from the bell with tow, and the tow was immediately burnt in the censer. Next the Priest struck each bell thrice with its clapper, and named it again at every stroke; every one of the assistants in like manner struck it and named it once. The bells were then carefully covered each with a cloth and immediately hoisted that they might not be contaminated by any irreverent touch. The Priest concluded by explaining to the congregation, if he thought proper, the reason for this ceremony of christening the bells, which was that they might act as preservatives against thunder and lightning, and hail and wind, and storms of every kind, and moreover that they might drive away evil Spirits. To these and their other virtues the Bishop of Chalons alluded in his late truly Gallican and Roman Catholic discourse. “The Bells,” said he, “placed like centinels on the towers, watch over us and turn away from us the temptations of the enemy of our salvation, as well as storms and tempests. They speak and pray for us in our troubles; they inform heaven of the necessities of the earth.”

Now were this edifying part of the Roman Catholic ritual to be re-introduced in the British dominions,—as it very possibly may be now that Lord Peter has appeared in his robes before the King, and been introduced by his title,—the opportunity would no doubt be taken by the Bishop or Jesuit who might direct the proceedings, of complimenting the friends of their cause by naming the first “holy and happy family” after them. And to commemorate the extraordinary union of sentiment which that cause has brought about between persons not otherwise remarkable for any similitude of feelings or opinions, they might unite two or more names in one bell, (as is frequently done in the human subject,) and thus with a peculiar felicity of compliment, shew who and who upon this great and memorable occasion have pulled together. In such a case the names selected for a peal of eight tunable bells might run thus

Bim 1st.

—

Canning O'Connel.

Bim 2d.

—

Plunkett Shiel.

Bim 3d.

—

Augustus Frederick Cobbett.

Bim 4th.

—

Williams Wynn Burdett Waithman.

Bim 5th.

—

Grenville Wood.

Bim 6th.

—

Palmerston Hume.

Bom

—

Lawless Brougham.

Bell

—

Lord King, per se;—

—alone par excellence, as the thickest and thinnest friend of the cause, and moreover because

None but himself can be his parallel;

and last in order because the base note accords best with him; and because for the decorum and dignity with which he has at all times treated the Bishops, the clergy and the subject of religion, he must be allowed to bear the bell not from his compeers alone but from all his contemporaries.

CHAPTER XXXI. P. I.

MORE CONCERNING BELLS.

Lord, ringing changes all our bells hath marr'd;

Jangled they have and jarr'd

So long, they're out of tune, and out of frame;

They seem not now the same.

Put them in frame anew, and once begin

To tune them so, that they may chime all in.

HERBERT.

There are more mysteries in a peal of bells than were touched upon by the Bishop of Chalons in his sermon. There are plain bob-triples, bob-majors, bob-majors reversed, double bob-majors, and grandsire-bob-cators, and there is a Bob-maximus. Who Bob was, and whether he were Bob Major, or Major Bob, that is whether Major were his name or his rank, and if his rank, to what service he belonged, are questions which inexorable Oblivion will not answer, however earnestly adjured. And there is no Witch of Endor who will call up Bob from the grave to answer them himself. But there are facts in the history of bell-ringing which Oblivion has not yet made her own, and one of them is that the greatest performance ever completed by one person in the world, was that of Mr. Samuel Thurston at the New Theatre Public House in the City of Norwich, on Saturday evening, July 1, 1809, when he struck all these intricate short peals, the first four upon a set of eight musical hand bells, the last on a peal of ten.

But a performance upon hand-bells when compared to bell-ringing is even less than a review in comparison with a battle. Strength of arm as well as skill is required for managing a bell-rope. Samuel Thurston's peal of plain bob-triples was “nobly brought round” in two minutes and three quarters, and his grandsire-bob-cators were as nobly finished in five minutes and fourteen seconds. The reader shall now see what real bell-ringing is.

The year 1796 was remarkable for the performance of great exploits in this manly and English art,—for to England the art is said to be peculiar, the cheerful carrillons of the continent being played by keys. In that year, and in the month of August the Westmorland youths rang a complete peal of 5040 grandsire triples, in St. Mary's Church Kendal, being the whole number of changes on seven bells. The peal was divided into ten parts, or courses of 504 each; the bobs were called by the sixth, a lead single was made in the middle of the peal, and another at the conclusion which brought the bells home. Distinct leads and exact divisions were observed throughout the whole, and the performance was completed in three hours and twenty minutes. A like performance took place in the same month at Kidderminster in three hours and fourteen minutes. Stephen Hill composed and called the peal, it was conducted through with one single, which was brought to the 4984th change, viz. 1267453. This was allowed by those who were conversant in the art to exceed any peal ever yet rung in this kingdom by that method.

Paulo majora canamus. The Society of Cambridge youths that same year rang in the Church of St. Mary the Great, a true and complete peal of Bob maximus, in five hours and five minutes. This consisted of 6600 changes, and for regularity of striking and harmony throughout the peal was allowed by competent judges to be a very masterly performance. In point of time the striking was to such a nicety that in each thousand changes the time did not vary one sixteenth of a minute, and the compass of the last thousand was exactly equal to the first.

Eight Birmingham youths (some of them were under twenty years of age) attempted a greater exploit, they ventured upon a complete peal of 15120 bob major. They failed indeed, magnis tamen ausis. For after they had rang upwards of eight hours and a half, they found themselves so much fatigued that they desired the caller would take the first opportunity to bring the bells home. This he soon did by omitting a bob and so brought them round thus making a peal of 14224 changes in eight hours and forty-five minutes, the longest which was ever rung in that part of the country, or perhaps any where else.

In that same year died Mr. Patrick the celebrated composer of church-bell-music, and senior of the Society of Cumberland Youths,—an Hibernian sort of distinction for one in middle or later life. He is the same person whose name was well known in the scientific world as a maker of barometers; and he it was who composed the whole peal of Stedman's triples, 5040 changes, (which his obituarist says had till then been deemed impracticable, and for the discovery of which he received a premium of 50l. offered for that purpose by the Norwich amateurs of the art) “his productions of real double and treble bob royal being a standing monument of his unparalleled and superlative merits.” This Mr. Patrick was interred on the afternoon of Sunday, June 26, in the church-yard of St. Leonard, Shoreditch; the corpse was followed to the grave by all the Ringing Societies in London and its environs, each sounding hand bells with muffled clappers, the church bells at the same time ringing a dead peal;

̔Ως οἵγ̕ ἀμφἰεπον τάφον Πατρἰκος βοϐϐοδάμοιο.

James Ogden was interred with honours of the same kind at Ashton under Line, in the year of this present writing, 1827. His remains were borne to the grave by the ringers of St. Michael's Tower in that town, with whom he had rung the tenor bell for more than fifty years, and with whom he performed “the unprecedented feat” of ringing five thousand on that bell (which weighed 28 cwt.) in his sixty-seventh year. After the funeral his old companions rang a dead peal for him of 828 changes, that being the number of the months of his life. Such in England are the funeral honors of the Βελτιϛοι.

It would take 91 years to ring the changes upon twelve bells, at the rate of two strokes to a second; the changes upon fourteen could not be rung through at the same rate in less than 16575 years; and upon four and twenty they would require more than 117,000 billions of years.

Great then are the mysteries of bell-ringing! And this may be said in its praise, that of all devices which men have sought out for obtaining distinction by making a noise in the world, it is the most harmless.

CHAPTER XXXII. P. I.

AN INTRODUCTION TO CERTAIN PRELIMINARIES ESSENTIAL TO THE PROGRESS OF THIS WORK.

Mas demos ya el assiento en lo importante,

Que el tiempo huye del mundo por la posta.

BALBUENA.

The subject of these memoirs heard the bells of St. George's ring for the battles of Dettingen and Culloden; for Commodore Anson's return and Admiral Hawke's victory; for the conquest of Quebec; for other victories, important in their day, though in the retrospect they may seem to have produced little effect; and for more than one Peace; for the going out of the Old Style, and for the coming in of the New; for the accession, marriage and coronation of George the 3d; for the birth of George the 4th; and that of all his royal brethren and sisters;—and what was to him a subject of nearer and dearer interest than any of these events,—for his own wedding.

What said those bells to him that happy day? for that bells can convey articulate sounds to those who have the gift of interpreting their language, Whittington Lord Mayor of London Town knew by fortunate experience.

So did a certain Father Confessor in the Netherlands whom a buxom widow consulted upon the perilous question whether she should marry a second husband, or continue in widowed blessedness. The prudent Priest deemed it too delicate a point for him to decide; so he directed her to attend to the bells of her church when next they chimed—(they were but three in number)—and bring him word what she thought they said; and he exhorted her to pray in the mean time earnestly for grace to understand them rightly, and in the sense that might be most for her welfare here and hereafter, as he on his part would pray for her.—She listened with mouth and ears, the first time that the bells struck up; and the more she listened, the more plainly they said “Nempt een man, Nempt een man!—Take a Spouse, Take a Spouse!” “Aye Daughter!” said the Confessor, when she returned to him with her report, “If the bells have said so, so say I; and not I alone, but the Apostle also, and the Spirit who through that Apostle hath told us when it is best for us to marry!” Reader thou mayest thank the Leonine poet Gummarus Van Craen for this good story.

What said the Bells of Doncaster to our dear Doctor on that happy morning which made him a whole man by uniting to him the rib that he till then had wanted? They said to him as distinctly as they spoke to Whittington, and to the Flemish Widow,

Daniel Dove brings Deborah home.

Daniel Dove brings Deborah home.

But whither am I hurrying? It was not till the year 1761 that that happy union was effected; and the fourteen years whose course of events I have reluctantly, yet of necessity, pretermitted, bring us only to 1748 in which year the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle was made. Peter Hopkins and Mrs. Hopkins were then both living, and Daniel had not attained to the honors of his diploma. Before we come to the day on which the bells rung that joyful peal, I must enter into some details for the purpose of shewing how he became qualified for his degree, and how he was enabled to take it; and it will be necessary therefore to say something of the opportunities of instruction which he enjoyed under Hopkins, and of the state of society in Doncaster at that time. And preliminary to, as preparatory for all this, some account is to be given of Doncaster itself.

Reader, you may skip this preliminary account if you please, but it will be to your loss if you do! You perhaps may be one of those persons who can travel from Dan to Beersheba, and neither make enquiry concerning, nor take notice of, any thing on the way; but, thank Heaven, I cannot pass through Doncaster in any such mood of mind. If however thou belongest to a better class, then may I promise that in what is here to follow, thou wilt find something to recompense thee for the little time thou wilt employ in reading it, were that time more than it will be, or more valuable than it is. For I shall assuredly either tell thee of something which thou didst not know before; (and let me observe by the bye that I never obtained any information of any kind, which did not on some occasion or other prove available;)—or I shall waken up to pleasurable consciousness thy napping knowledge. Snuff the candles therefore, if it be candle-light, and they require it; (I hope, for thine eyes' sake, thou art not reading by a lamp!)—stir the fire, if it be winter, and it be prudent to refresh it with the poker; and then comfortably begin a new chapter:

Faciam ut hujus loci semper memineris.1

1 TERENCE.

END OF VOL. I.

W. Nicol, Cleveland-row, St. James's.

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Table of Contents

THE DOCTOR,

&c.

THE DOCTOR,

&c.

VOL. I.

PRELUDE OF MOTTOES.

POSTSCRIPT.

CONTENTS.

THE DOCTOR,

&c.

THE DOCTOR,

&c.

CHAPTER VII. A. I.

CHAPTER VI. A. I.

CHAPTER V. A. I.

CHAPTER IV. A. I.

CHAPTER III. A. I.

CHAPTER II. A. I.

CHAPTER I. A. I.

ANTE-PREFACE.

PREFACE.

INITIAL CHAPTER.

THE DOCTOR,

&c.

CHAPTER I. P. I.

CHAPTER II. P. I.

CHAPTER III. P. I.

CHAPTER IV. P. I.

CHAPTER V. P. I.

CHAPTER VI. P. I.

CHAPTER VII. P. I.

CHAPTER VIII. P. I.

INTERCHAPTER I.

CHAPTER IX. P. I.

CHAPTER X. P. I.

CHAPTER XI. P. I.

CHAPTER XII. P. I.

CHAPTER XIII. P. I.

CHAPTER XIV. P. I.

CHAPTER XV. P. I.

CHAPTER XVI. P. I.

INTERCHAPTER II.

CHAPTER XVII. P. I.

CHAPTER XVIII. P. I.

CHAPTER XIX. P. I.

CHAPTER XX. P. I.

CHAPTER XXI. P. I.

CHAPTER XXII. P. I.

CHAPTER XXIII. P. I.

CHAPTER XXIV. P. I.

CHAPTER XXV. P. I.

CHAPTER XXVI. P. I.

CHAPTER XXVII. P. I.

CHAPTER XXVIII. P. I.

CHAPTER XXIX. P. I.

CHAPTER XXX. P. I.

CHAPTER XXXI. P. I.

CHAPTER XXXII. P. I.

THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG™ LICENSE