The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 4, April, 1852 Part 17

_Crom a boo_; I will burn. This Irish proverb, or saying, may serve in many respects as an adverse commentary on the preceding. There are people who are never at rest when they are out of hot water--nor contented when they are in. "I will burn" is the motto of the Duke of Leinster. It would do capitally for Mr. Smith O'Brien. Perhaps, however, it should not be read as a resolution to suffer, but as a threat to inflict a burning. Still, the vagueness of this threat--a dreadful announcement with no definite object--would render it equally applicable.

_Bis dat qui cito dat_; he gives double who gives promptly. The truth of this is well ill.u.s.trated by the converse it suggests; that he who long delays and tantalizes before giving, earns less grat.i.tude than scorn. It requires more generosity and a finer mind to confer a favor in the best way, than to confer double the amount of the favor in itself.

_What I gain afore I lose ahint._ (Scotch.) To be engrossed with a fixed object, is to forget what is going on all around us. I am closely engaged with what is pa.s.sing before my eyes, while I am deceived and injured behind my back. This quaint old proverb has been ludicrously ill.u.s.trated by a characteristic story. A Highlander, in a somewhat scanty kilt, was crossing a desolate moor one winter's night, and being very cold, he hastened to a light he saw at no great distance. It turned out to be a decomposed cod's head, which sent forth phosphoric gleams.

He stooped down to try and warm his hands at it; but finding the bleak winds whistling all round his legs, he made the sage observation above, which has pa.s.sed into a proverb.

_Entfloh'nes Wort, geworf'ner Stein, die kommen nimmermehr herein_; the hasty word, and hasty stone, can never be recalled. How truthful, how home to the mark, does this proverb fly; how excellent is the warning and the self-command it inculcates!

_To-day a fire, to-morrow ashes._ (Arabic.) Violent pa.s.sions are the soonest exhausted; to-day all-powerful, to-morrow nothing, or the consequences.

_Reading the psalms to the dead._ (Arabic.) This is the original of our "Preaching to the dead," to express the fruitlessness of exhortations, applications, or pet.i.tions, to certain insensible people.

_Follow the owl, she will lead thee to ruin._ (Arabic.) A most picturesque proverb, giving its own scenery with it. But it strikes one as curious that this should come from the East which seems so familiar to our apprehensions. Not only are the habits of the owl the same, but the owl is equally regarded as the symbol of a purblind fool. Yet, on the other hand, the owl of cla.s.sic times was a type of wisdom.

_Two of a trade can never agree._ It is curious, and, in most instances, highly gratifying, to see how many of these sayings of our ancestors are becoming falsified by the great advances made, of late years, in social feelings and arrangements. Trades' unions, co-operative societies--in fact, all our great companies prove how well two of a trade can agree; and so do all combinations of masters or of workmen. Yes, it will be said, but they "agree," and co-operate for their mutual interests, and they do not agree with those opposed to them. Of course not; the sensible thing, therefore, is obvious, to enlarge the sphere of good understanding and reciprocal fair dealing in matters of business, and thus to supersede the bad feeling and injury of greedy rivalries and selfish antagonisms.

_There was a wife who always took what she had, and never wanted._ (Scotch.) A good practical advice, showing the importance of using what you possess, instead of h.o.a.rding it, or reserving it, even when most needed, for some possible contingency, which may never occur. It seems to refer chiefly to articles of dress, clothing, domestic utensils, or other household matters.

_Dat Deus immiti cornua curta bovi_; G.o.d curtails the power to do evil in those who desire to do it.

_There is honor among thieves._ This is, no doubt, quite true, though you must be a thief yourself to derive much benefit from it. They stand by their order. The suggestion is--since there is honor towards each other among the most unprincipled cla.s.ses, surely Mr. Sweepstakes, and Mr. Moses Battledore, who are both respectable members of society, and belong to clubs, would not cheat me. But this does not logically follow; for we by no means know how far the respectable individual makes his view of his own interest an excuse to himself for an occasional exception to the code of morality he professes. There's honor among thieves; and there are thieves (here and there) among honorably-connected men, "all honorable men." Life is a "mingled yarn"

of good and evil; and society is a motley aggregate of all sorts of yarns.

_A rose-bud fell to the lot of a monkey._ (Arabic.) The monkey appreciated the rose-bud quite as much as swine appreciate the pearls which are said to be cast before them.

_Of what use to a fool is all the trouble he gives himself?_ (Chinese.) None whatever; but his folly may cause a vast deal of trouble to people of sense. One false move of an utterly incompetent man in office, and the force of the saying becomes very expansive.

_There are no lies so wicked as those which have some foundation._ (Chinese.) A saying which is but too true, and which ought to be universally understood in society, as some protection against slander.

_Many preparations before the sour plum sweetens._ (Chinese.) Great results do not hastily ripen; great and important changes must undergo a gradual process.

_Spare the rod and spoil the child._ This seems to be derived from the old Spanish proverb, which we find in Don Quixote, "He loves thee well who makes thee weep." They are unkindly and dangerous maxims, which tend to inculcate severity, and to justify harsh treatment upon the plea of future advantage. We readily admit that nothing can well be worse than a "spoilt child," nor can a more injurious system exist than that of pampering or spoiling--except the direct opposite, that of frequently causing tears.

_A tea-spoonful of honey is worth a pound of gall._ An indiscriminate use of the sweets of life is a stupidity and an injury; but the judicious use of them is of far more service in the production of good results, than the bitter lessons which are often considered to be of most advantage. It is better to soften the heart than to harden it. "A soft word turneth away wrath."

_What the ant collects in a year, the priest eats up in a night._ (Arabic.) The t.i.the-taxes, and other revenues of the state-clergy, derived from the industry of the working cla.s.ses, are not very tenderly dealt with in this proverb.

_The walls have ears._ (Arabic.) This is one of the many instances of our homeliest proverbs in every-day use, being derived from the East. No doubt the saying, that "Little pitchers have great ears" (in allusion to the sharpness of hearing in children), is also derived from the domestic utensils of foreign countries in ancient times. The British Museum contains many such little pitchers, as well as the Foundling Hospital.

_The ox that ploughs must not be muzzled._ (Arabic.) The laborer ought to be allowed freedom of speech, or at least free breathing. We have a nautical saying akin to this--"A sailor never works well if he does not grumble."

_Three united men will ruin a town._ (Arabic.) The power of combination was never more excellently expressed.

_He begins the quarrel who gives the second blow._ (Spanish.) There are but few who possess the requisite degree of wise and kindly forbearance and magnanimous self-command implied in this saying. To strike again, or rather (as the _blow_ is figurative) to retort an angry word, is natural to most men; to preserve a reproving silence, or administer a dignified rebuke, is in the power only of great characters, and not with them at all times. But it is quite possible, as we live in a very pugnacious world, that such forbearance should not be thrown away upon every one, or the small majority of the magnanimous would soon be beaten out of existence. The above proverb, we believe, is originally Spanish, and, coming from a people so proverbially revengeful, seems very extraordinary, and only to be accounted for as the result of an abstract thought of some lofty-minded hidalgo, speculating on friends.h.i.+p. Don Quixote might have said it.

_A st.i.tch in time saves nine._ One of the most sensible and practical of all proverbs, as every body's experience can avouch. Yet, in defiance of all their own experience, how many people we often see who constantly neglect the st.i.tch in time! They do not forget it, or overlook it; and when they do, if you point it out to them, they still neglect it.

_Chi non sa niente, non dubita di niente_; he who knows nothing, doubts of nothing. The converse is equally true. He who knows much, is careful how he doubts of any thing. This is peculiarly inculcated, at the present time, by the extraordinary discoveries and success of science.

From the Ladies' Companion.

A CHAPTER ON WATCHES.

We have no means of telling how long a period elapsed from that primal time when the "evening and the morning made the first day," ere man's ingenuity devised a means of calculating the pa.s.sing by of those precious moments of which his duration is composed, in order to economize them to the purposes of life. Shadows by day and stars at night appear to have indexed the flight of time for the ancient Hebrews; though it is very evident that long before the sun-dial of Ahaz was made memorable by the Prophet Isaiah, the Chaldeans, accustomed to calculate eclipses, and other astronomical phenomena, must have been in possession of some much more accurate instrument for its computation.

Days, months, and years, are constantly referred to in the books of the Old Testament, but nothing is said of more minute divisions of time, save that of the day into the natural ones of morning, noon, eventide, and night, until Judea became tributary to Rome, when three of the Evangelists, in describing the crucifixion, and the supernatural darkness subsequent to that event, remark that it lasted from the sixth _hour_ to the ninth; and it is on record, that the Clepsydra, or water-clock, (said by Vitrivius to have been invented by one Ctesibius of Alexandria, in the reign of Ptolemy Evergetes), was introduced at Rome by P. Cornelius Scipio Nasica, in the 595th year of the city, and consequently many years before the birth of Christ. This simple time-keeper was so constructed, that the water issued, drop by drop, through a hole in the vessel, and fell into another, in which a light floating body marked the height of the water as it rose, and by this means the time that had elapsed. These instruments, we are told, were set full of water in the courts of judicature, and by them the lawyers pleaded; in order, as Phavorinus tells us, to prevent babbling, and cause those who spoke to be brief in their speeches. Hour, or sand-gla.s.ses, are also said to have originated at Alexandria, and to have been introduced into domestic use amongst the Romans eight years afterwards, or 158 years before the Christian era.

The earliest attempt at measuring time in this country appears to have been on the part of Alfred the Great, by means of waxen tapers. The exact period when those direct ancestors of our subject, clocks, or, as they were primitively called, horologes, came into use, is one of those things over which time has cast so thick a veil, that not even the researches of the encyclopaedists can penetrate it. By some, the invention of clocks with wheels is ascribed to Pacificus, archdeacon of Verona, as early as the ninth century. And though we read that clocks (without water) were set up in churches toward the end of the twelfth, the author of the "Divina Commedia" is the first writer on record, who distinctly applies the term horologium to a clock that struck the hours; and he was born 1265, and died 1321.

In 1288, during the reign of the 1st Edward, the _English Justinian_, as he has been called, it is said that a fine levied on a lord chief justice was applied to the purpose of furnis.h.i.+ng the famous clock-house near Westminster Hall with an horologe, which it is farther stated was the work of an English artist.

Mention is also made of the setting up of a clock in Canterbury Cathedral about the same period, and in that of Wells in 1325. So that those three Dutch horologiers, from Delft, who came over (as Rymer tells us) at the invitation of Edward III. in 1368, were not, as some imagined, the introducers of the art, though they very possibly helped us to improve it. Up to the time when Henry de Wic astonished the Emperor Charles V. with those seemingly living toys with which he was wont to surround himself after dinner, and watch the beating and revolving of their curious machinery, those rude prototypes of our subject, which are said to have resembled small table clocks rather than watches, and yet were true specimens, we imagine, since they continued going in a horizontal position, which is the only mechanical distinction between a watch and clock--up to this period, we were about to say, clocks appear to have endured a very ascetic existence, living in tall houses, built on purpose for them, or shut up in church towers and monastic buildings--

"Fell sickerer[19] was his crowning in his loge, As is a clock, or any _abbey orloge_,"

wrote Chaucer in the fourteenth century. And it is not until nearly the end of the fifteenth that we find them domesticated in houses.

From a description of some, which appear in an inventory of articles in the king's palaces of Westminster and Hampton Court, copied by Strutt, the pendules of the period must have been equally ornate with those in modern drawing-rooms, and much more curious. Thus one, we are told, not only showed the course of the planets, and the days of the year, but was richly gilt, and enamelled, and ornamented with the king's (Henry the Eighth's) coat of arms; it also possessed a chime.

Speaking of this monarch reminds us, that previous to the scattering of the treasures of Strawberry Hill, there was preserved in the library there a little clock, of silver gilt, the gift of Henry, on the morning of his marriage, to the ill-fated Anne Boleyn. It was elaborately chased and engraved, and adorned with fleurs-de-lys, and other heraldic devices, and had on the top a lion supporting the arms of England. The gilded weights represented _true-lovers-knots_, inclosing the initials of Henry and Anne; and one bore the inscription, "The most happye," the other the royal motto. Though more than three hundred years had pa.s.sed since the tragic ending of time with its original possessor, it was still going when the ivory hammer of the famous Robins struck it down to another new and more fortunate owner, About this period watches are said to have been in use; and in the Holbein chamber of the collection just mentioned, a bust of the royal _wife-slayer_, carved in box-wood, represented him with a dial suspended on his breast. The earliest watch known was one in Sir Ashton Lever's Museum, which bore date 1541; but from various imperfections in the workmans.h.i.+p, they were not very generally used till towards the end of Elizabeth's reign.

Shakspeare frequently mentions the clock, and in "Twelfth Night" he makes Malvolio--"While exclaim, in his babblings of fancied greatness I, perchance, _wind up my watch_, or play with some rich jewel," an expression that would lead us to suppose that they were even then regarded rather as toys or ornaments than things of necessary use.

Archbishop Parker, in 1575, left by will to the Bishop of Ely his staff of Indian cane, with a _watch_ in the top of it; a position that savors more of whim than utility. Yet the excellence of some of these ancient timekeepers is remarkable; for Derham, in his "Artificial Clockmaker,"

mentions a watch of Henry VIII., which was in order in 1714, and of which Dr. Demanbray had often heard Sir Isaac Newton and Demoivre speak; and the old wooden-framed clock of Peterborough Cathedral, which, instead of the usual key or winch, is wound up by long handles or spikes--a sufficient proof of its antiquity--still strikes, says Denison, upon a bell of considerable size.

Guy Fawkes carried a watch in a more practical spirit than Malvolio or Archbishop Parker; Stowe tells us, one was found upon him which he and Percy had bought the day before, "to try conclusions for the long and short burning of the touch-wood with which he had prepared to give fire to the train of powder;" a proof that even in the third year of the reign of James I. watches were not commonly worn, or the circ.u.mstance would not have been mentioned.

In the next reign, however, we find the London "Clock-Makers' Company,"

incorporated 1631--a sign of the increased use of these instruments, and the growing importance of their manufacture; and as this charter prohibits the importation of clocks, watches, and alarms, it proves that we had even then artists sufficiently skilful in the various manipulations requisite in the construction of these articles, to render us independent of foreign workmans.h.i.+p.

It is a singular feature in the history of this branch of art, that it has remained until very lately concentrated in the metropolis; besides which, Liverpool and Coventry are said to be the only places in England where a complete watch can be manufactured. At the latter place the business has only been introduced since the commencement of the present century, but the number of persons employed are said to equal the number in London.

But before pa.s.sing from this event in the history of our subject (the incorporation of a company for the protection of their manufacture in the reign of Charles I.), we may as well describe a watch of the period, which a few years before the publication of the "Encyclopaedia Londinensis" (in 1811) had been in the possession of the proprietor. It was dug up but a few years previously, near the site of the ancient castle of Winchester, where it had probably lain from the time of Cromwell, who, it is well known, destroyed that edifice. It was of an octagon form, and had no minute hand; a piece of catgut supplied the place of a chain; it required winding up every twelve hours, had no balance spring, and appeared never to have had one; and it shut like a hunting-watch without any gla.s.s.

But to compensate for this interior rudeness in its construction, the lid and bottom of the case, as well as the dial-plate, were of silver, very neatly engraved, with pieces of Scripture history in the centre, and in the compartments the four Evangelists, and St. Peter, St. Paul, St. James, and St. Jude: it had no date.

The reign of Charles II., who (like his namesake the emperor, in whose time they first appeared) is said to have been very partial to these instruments, was remarkable for the improvements made in them. Spring pocket-watches were invented by Hooke, 1658; and repeaters were introduced, one of the first of which Charles sent as a present to Louis XIV. of France. According to some authorities, _reproduced_ would be the juster phrase here, for it is stated in "Memoirs of Literature," that some of the most ancient watches were strikers, and that such having been stolen both from Charles V. and Louis XI. whilst they were in a crowd, the thief was detected by their striking the hour!

Perhaps the most remarkable repeating watch extant, is that in the Academy of Sciences at St. Petersburg, and which, like the old Nuremberg watches, is about the size of an egg: within is represented the holy sepulchre, with the sentinels, and the stone at the mouth; and while the spectator is admiring this curious piece of mechanism, the stone is suddenly removed, the sentinels drop down, the angels appear, the women enter the tomb, and the same chant is heard which is performed in the Greek Church on Easter Eve.

Germany, by the way, has always been famous for the manufacture of clocks and watches, these latter claiming Nuremberg for their birthplace; and from this circ.u.mstance, and their oval shape, Dopplemayer tells us they were originally known as Nuremberg _animated eggs_.

At present this branch of horometry is chiefly to be found on the other side of the Alps, at or near Geneva, and at Chaux de Fond, in the princ.i.p.ality of Neufchatel, where vast numbers of watches are manufactured. But the wooden clocks, which tick on every cottage wall, and which are erroneously called Dutch, are in fact German, and are nearly all made in the Black Forest, the village of Freyburg being the centre of the manufacture, whence it is said 180,000 wooden clocks on an average are yearly exported.