Library Notes Part 2

A writer upon Holland--its Martyrs and Heroes, gives an account of Richard Willemson, a worthy burgess of Aspern, and an Anabaptist, who was chased by an officer of justice. It was a winter day, and he fled across the ice. The frozen surface, however, was so thin that the fugitive had the utmost difficulty in crossing, and his pursuer fell through. Perceiving his danger, Willemson returned and at the risk of his own life saved his enemy. Touched with such generosity, the officer would gladly have let his prisoner go; but the burgomaster, who witnessed the occurrence, called out, "Fulfil your oath," and the good Christian was led away to a fiery martyrdom.

Dr. Livingstone, when he first went into Africa, as a missionary, attached himself to the tribe of Bakwains. Their chief, Sechele, embraced Christianity, and became an a.s.siduous reader of the Bible, the eloquence of Isaiah being peculiarly acceptable to him, and he was wont to say, "He was a fine man, that Isaiah: he knew how to speak." But his people were not so ready for conversion, although he calmly proposed to have them flogged into faith: "Do you imagine," he said, "these people will ever believe by your merely talking to them? I can make them do nothing except by thras.h.i.+ng them; and if you like I shall call my head men, and with our litupa (whips of rhinoceros hide) we will soon make them believe altogether." It has been stated upon authority that when a fugitive from one of the early missions in New California was captured, he was brought back again to the mission, where he was bastinadoed, and an iron rod of a foot or a foot and a half long, and an inch in diameter, was fastened to one of his feet, which had the double use of preventing him from repeating the attempt, and of frightening others from imitating him. Southey says that one of the missionaries whom Virgilius, the bishop of Salzburg, sent among the Slavonic people, made the converted serfs sit with him at table, where wine was served to them in gilt beakers, while he ordered their unbaptized lords to sit on the ground, out of doors, where the food and wine was thrown before them, and they were left to serve themselves. Among our Norse forefathers, King Olaf's mode of converting Eyvind to Christianity was to put a pan of glowing coals on his belly, which burst asunder. "Wilt thou not, Eyvind, believe in Christ?" asks Olaf, in excellent faith. Another argument was an adder put into the mouth of the reluctant disciple Rand, who refused to believe.

"Seeing a large building," relates an English gentleman, "I asked a man who looked like a journeyman weaver what it was. He told me a grammar-school. 'But, sir,' he added, 'I think it would become you better on the Lord's day morning to be reading your Bible at home, than asking about public buildings.' I very quickly answered: 'My friend, you have given me a piece of very good advice; let me give you one, and we may both profit by our meeting. Beware of spiritual pride.'" "In one of the debates on the Catholic question," said Lord Byron, "when we were either equal or within one (I forget which), I had been sent for in great haste to a ball, which I quitted, I confess, somewhat reluctantly, to emanc.i.p.ate five millions of people." Some ladies bantering Selwyn on his want of feeling, in attending to see Lord Lovat's head cut off, "Why," he said, "I made amends by going to the undertaker's to see it sewn on again." "I have," says Heine, "the most peaceable disposition.

My desires are a modest cottage with thatched roof--but a good bed, good fare, fresh milk and b.u.t.ter, flowers by my window, and a few fine trees before the door. And if the Lord wished to fill my cup of happiness, He would grant me the pleasure of seeing some six or seven of my enemies hanged on those trees. With a heart moved to pity, I would, before their death, forgive the injury they had done me during their lives. Yes, we ought to forgive our enemies--but not until they are hanged." Some would pursue them after they are hanged. "Our measure of rewards and punishments," says Thackeray, "is most partial and incomplete, absurdly inadequate, utterly worldly, and we wish to continue it into the next world. Into that next and awful world we strive to pursue men, and send after them our impotent party verdicts, of condemnation or acquittal. We set up our paltry little rods to measure Heaven immeasurable, as if, in comparison to that, Newton's mind, or Pascal's, or Shakespeare's, was any loftier than mine; as if the ray which travels from the sun would reach me sooner than the man who blacks my boots. Measured by that alt.i.tude, the tallest and the smallest among us are so alike diminutive and pitifully base that I say we should take no count of the calculation, and it is a meanness to reckon the difference."

Tertullian, according to Lecky, had written a treatise dissuading the Christians of his day from frequenting the public spectacles. He had collected on the subject many arguments, some of them very powerful, and others extremely grotesque; but he perceived that to make his exhortations forcible to the majority of his readers, he must point them to some counter-attraction. He accordingly proceeded--and his style a.s.sumed a richer glow and a more impetuous eloquence as he rose to the congenial theme--to tell them that a spectacle was reserved for them, so fascinating and so attractive that the most joyous festivals of earth faded in insignificance by the comparison. That spectacle was the agonies of their fellow-countrymen as they writhe amid the torments of h.e.l.l. "What!" he exclaimed, "shall be the magnitude of that scene! How shall I wonder! How shall I laugh! How shall I rejoice! How shall I triumph, when I behold so many and such ill.u.s.trious kings, who were said to have mounted into heaven, groaning with Jupiter their G.o.d in the lowest darkness of h.e.l.l! Then shall the soldiers who had persecuted the name of Christ burn in more cruel fire than any they had kindled for the saints. Then shall the tragedians pour forth in their own misfortune more piteous cries than those with which they had made the theatre to resound, while the comedian's powers shall be better seen as he becomes more flexible by the heat. Then shall the driver of the circus stand forth to view, all blus.h.i.+ng in his flaming chariot, and the gladiators pierced, not by spears, but by darts of fire. Compared with such spectacles, with such subjects of triumph as these, what can praetor or consul, quaestor or pontiff, afford? And even now faith can bring them near, imagination can depict them as present!"

Crabb Robinson says some one at a party at which he was present, abusing Mahometanism in a commonplace way, said: "Its heaven is quite material."

He was met with the quiet remark, "So is the Christian's h.e.l.l;" to which there was no reply. In the time of Tertullian, the angel in the Last Judgment was constantly represented weighing the souls in a literal balance, while devils clinging to the scales endeavored to disturb the equilibrium. The redbreast, according to one popular legend, was commissioned by the Deity to carry a drop of water to the souls of unbaptized infants in h.e.l.l, and its breast was singed in piercing the flames. In Wales, the robin is said to bear in its bill one drop of water daily to the place of torment, in order to extinguish the flames.

A Calvinistic divine, of the name of Pet.i.t Pierre, was ejected from his church at Neufchatel for preaching and publis.h.i.+ng the doctrine that the d.a.m.ned would at some future period be pardoned. A member said to him, "My good friend, I no more believe in the eternity of h.e.l.l than yourself; but recollect that it may be no bad thing, perhaps, for your servant, your tailor, and your lawyer, to believe in it." Whitefield was once preaching in Haworth, and made use of some such expression, as that he "hoped there was no need to say much to this congregation, as they had sat under so pious and G.o.dly a minister for so many years;"

whereupon Mr. Grimshaw, the curate, stood up in his place, and said with a loud voice, "Oh, sir! for G.o.d's sake do not speak so. I pray you do not flatter them. I fear the greater part of them are going to h.e.l.l with their eyes open." Cowper's friend, Newton, says this in one of his letters: "A friend of mine was desired to visit a woman in prison; he was informed of her evil habits of life, and therefore spoke strongly of the terrors of the Lord, and the curses of the law: she heard him a while, and then laughed in his face; upon this he changed his note, and spoke of the Saviour, and what he had done and suffered for sinners. He had not talked long in this strain before he saw a tear or two in her eyes: at length she interrupted him by saying: 'Why, sir, do you think there can be any hope of mercy for me?' He answered, 'Yes, if you feel your need of it, and are willing to seek it in G.o.d's appointed way. I am sure it is as free for you as for myself.' She replied, 'Ah, if I had thought so, I should not have been in this prison. I long since settled it in my mind that I was utterly lost; that I had sinned beyond all possibility of forgiveness, and that made me desperate.'" Monod relates that the Moravian missionaries who carried the gospel to the Greenlanders thought it best to prepare the minds of the savages to receive it, by declaring to them at first only the general truths of religion; the existence of G.o.d, the obedience due to his laws, and a future retribution. Thus pa.s.sed away several years, during which they saw no fruit of their labors. At last they ventured one day to speak to them of the Saviour, and read to them the history of his pa.s.sion. They had no sooner done so, than one of the hearers, named Kajarnak, approached the table where the missionary Beck was sitting, and said to him in an earnest, affecting tone: "What is that you tell us? Repeat that once more. I too will be saved!" ("The most awfully tremendous of all metaphysical divines," wrote an eminent Englishman, "is the American ultra Calvinist, Jonathan Edwards, whose book on Original Sin I unhappily read when a very young man. It did me an irreparable mischief.")

"Soon after the accession of James I. to the throne of England," writes Lecky, in his History of Rationalism in Europe, "a law was enacted which subjected witches to death on the first conviction, even though they should have inflicted no injury upon their neighbors. This law was pa.s.sed when c.o.ke was attorney general, and Bacon a member of Parliament; and twelve bishops sat upon the commission to which it was referred. The prosecutions were rapidly multiplied throughout the country, but especially in Lancas.h.i.+re, and at the same time the general tone of literature was strongly tinged with the superst.i.tion. Sir Thomas Browne declared that those who denied the existence of witchcraft were not only 'infidels, but also, by implication, atheists.' In Cromwell's time there was still greater persecution. The county of Suffolk was especially agitated, and the famous witch-finder, Matthew Hopkins, p.r.o.nounced it to be infested with witches. A commission was accordingly issued, and two distinguished Presbyterian divines were selected by the Parliament to accompany it. It would have been impossible to take any measure more calculated to stimulate the prosecutions, and we accordingly find that in Suffolk sixty persons were hung for witchcraft in a single year. In 1664 two women were hung in Suffolk, under a sentence of Sir Matthew Hale, who took the opportunity of declaring that the reality of witchcraft was unquestionable; 'for, first, the Scriptures had affirmed so much; and, secondly, the wisdom of all nations had provided laws against such persons, which is an argument of their confidence of such a crime.' Sir Thomas Browne, who was a great physician, as well as a great writer, was called as a witness, and swore 'that he was clearly of opinion that the persons were bewitched.'"

Here is a terrible story, perfectly well authenticated, taken from the official report of the proceedings by an English historian: "Toward the end of 1593 there was trouble in the family of the Earl of Orkney. His brother laid a plot to murder him, and was said to have sought the help of a notorious witch called Alison Balfour. When Alison Balfour's life was looked into, no evidence could be found connecting her either with the particular offense or with witchcraft in general; but it was enough in these matters to be accused. She swore she was innocent; but her guilt was only held to be aggravated by perjury. She was tortured again and again. Her legs were put in the caschilaws,--an iron frame which was gradually heated till it burned into the flesh,--but no confession could be wrung from her. The caschilaws failed utterly, and something else had to be tried. She had a husband, a son, and a daughter, a child seven years old. As her own sufferings did not work upon her, she might be touched, perhaps, by the suffering of those who were dear to her. They were brought into court, and placed at her side, and the husband first placed in the 'long irons'--some accursed instrument, I know not what.

Still the devil did not yield. She bore this; and her son was next operated on. The boy's legs were set in 'the boot,'--the iron boot you may have heard of. The wedges were driven in, which, when forced home, crushed the very bone and marrow. Fifty-seven mallet strokes were delivered upon the wedges. Yet this, too, failed. There was no confession yet. So, last of all, the little daughter was taken. There was a machine called the piniwinkies--a kind of thumb-screw, which brought blood from under the finger-nails, with a pain successfully terrible. These things were applied to the poor child's hands, and the mother's constancy broke down, and she said she would admit anything they wished. She confessed her witchcraft,--so tried, she would have confessed to the seven deadly sins,--and then she was burned, recalling her confession, and with her last breath protested her innocence."

"There was one Mary Johnson try'd at Hartford in this countrey," says Cotton Mather, in his Magnalia Christi Americana, "upon an indictment of 'familiarity with the devil,' and was found guilty thereof, chiefly upon her own confession.... In the time of her imprisonment, the famous Mr.

Stone was at great pains to promote her conversion from the devil to G.o.d; and she was by the best observers judged very penitent, both before her execution and at it; and she went out of the world with comfortable hopes of mercy from G.o.d through the merit of our Saviour. Being asked what she built her hopes upon, she answered, Upon these words: 'Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest;' and these: 'There is a fountain set open for sin and uncleanness.' And she dy'd in a frame extreamly to the satisfaction of them that were spectators of it."

In 1768 John Wesley prefaced an account of an apparition that had been related by a girl named Elizabeth Hobson, by some extremely remarkable sentences on the subject. "It is true, likewise," he wrote, "that the English in general, and, indeed, most of the men of learning in Europe, have given up all account of witches and apparitions as mere old wives'

fables. I am sorry for it, and I willingly take this opportunity of entering my solemn protest against this violent compliment which so many that believe the Bible pay to those that do not believe it. I owe them no such service. I take knowledge that these are at the bottom of the outcry which has been raised, and with such insolence spread through the land, in direct opposition, not only to the Bible, but to the suffrage of the wisest and best men in all ages and nations. They well know (whether Christians know it or not) that the giving up of witchcraft is in effect giving up the Bible."

"In the first year of this persecution, Cotton Mather wrote a history of the earliest of the trials. This history was introduced to the English public by Richard Baxter, who declared in his preface that 'that man must be a very obdurate Sadducee who would not believe it.' Not content with having thus given the weight of his great name to the superst.i.tion, Baxter in the following year published his treatise on The Certainty of the World of Spirits; in which he collected, with great industry, an immense number of witch cases; reverted in extremely laudatory terms to Cotton Mather and his crusade; and denounced, in unmeasured language, all who were skeptical upon the subject. This work appeared in 1691, when the panic in America had not yet reached its height; and being widely circulated there, is said to have contributed much to stimulate the persecutions. The Pilgrim Fathers had brought to America the seeds of the persecution; and at the same time when it was rapidly fading in England, it flourished with fearful vigor in Ma.s.sachusetts. Cotton Mather and Parris proclaimed the frequency of the crime; and, being warmly supported by their brother divines, they succeeded in creating a panic through the whole country. A commission was issued. A judge named Stoughton, who appears to have been a perfect creature of the clergy, conducted the trials. Scourgings and tortures were added to the terrorism of the pulpit, and many confessions were obtained. The few who ventured to oppose the prosecutions were denounced as Sadducees and infidels. Mult.i.tudes were thrown into prison, others fled from the country, abandoning their property, and twenty-seven persons were executed. An old man of eighty was pressed to death--a horrible sentence, which was never afterward executed in America. [Giles Corey was the name of the poor victim. He refused to plead, to save his property from confiscation. He urged the executioners, it is stated by Upham, in his History of Witchcraft, to increase the weight which was crus.h.i.+ng him; he told them that it was no use to expect him to yield; that there could be but one way of ending the matter, and that they might as well pile on the stones. Calef says, that as his body yielded to the pressure, his tongue protruded from his mouth, and an official forced it back with his cane.] The ministers of Boston and Charlestown drew up an address, warmly thanking the commissioners for their zeal, and expressing their hope that it would never be relaxed."

There is no more painful reading than this except the trials of the witches themselves. "These," says Lowell, "awaken, by turns, pity, indignation, disgust, and dread,--dread, at the thought of what the human mind may be brought to believe not only probable, but proven. But it is well to be put upon our guard by lessons of this kind, for the wisest man is in some respects little better than a madman in a straight-waistcoat of habit, public opinion, prudence, or the like.

Skepticism began at length to make itself felt, but it spread slowly, and was shy of proclaiming itself. The orthodox party was not backward to charge with sorcery whoever doubted their facts or pitied their victims. The mob, as it always is, was orthodox. It was dangerous to doubt, it might be fatal to deny."

"The spirit of party," quaintly says Bayle, in his Critical Dictionary, discoursing of Margaret, Queen of Navarre, "the attachment to a sect, and even zeal for orthodoxy, produce a kind of ferment in the humors of our body; and hence the medium through which reason ought to behold these primitive ideas is clouded and obscured. These are infirmities which will attend our reason, as long as it shall depend upon the ministry of organs. It is the same thing to it, as the low and middle region of the air, the seat of vapors and meteors. There are but very few persons who can elevate themselves above these clouds, and place themselves in a true serenity. If any one could do it, we must say of him what Virgil did of Daphnis:--

'Daphnis, the guest of Heaven, with wondering eyes, Views in the milky-way the starry skies; And far beneath him, from the s.h.i.+ning sphere, Beholds the moving clouds and rolling year.'

And he would not have so much the appearance of a man, as of an immortal Being, placed upon a mountain above the region of wind and clouds. There is almost as much necessity for being above the pa.s.sions to come to a knowledge of some kind of truths, as to act virtuously." "How limited is human reason," exclaims Disraeli, the younger, "the profoundest inquirers are most conscious. We are not indebted to the reason of man for any of the great achievements which are the landmarks of human action and human progress. It was not reason that besieged Troy; it was not reason that sent forth the Saracen from the desert to conquer the world; that inspired the crusades; that inst.i.tuted the monastic orders; it was not reason that produced the Jesuits; above all, it was not reason that enacted the French Revolution. Man is only truly great when he acts from the pa.s.sions; never irresistible but when he appeals to the imagination. Even Mormon counts more votaries than Bentham." "Let us not dream," said Goethe, "that reason can ever be popular. Pa.s.sions, emotions, may be made popular; but reason remains ever the property of an elect few." "It is not from reason and prudence that people marry,"

said Dr. Johnson, "but from inclination. A man is poor; he thinks it cannot be worse, and so I'll e'en marry Peggy." "If people," said Thackeray, "only made prudent marriages, what a stop to population there would be!"

III.

DISGUISES.

Man, poor fellow, would be a curious object for microscopic study. If it were possible to view him through powerful gla.s.ses, what humiliating resemblances and infirmities would be discovered. He would be found to have innumerable tentacula and appendages, for protection and warning, and especially to possess unconceived of apparatus for making his way in the dark,--necessities to him, it would appear, when further inspection of the creature had shown him to be--blind. At last, he finds himself obliged to rely upon such qualities and faculties as take the place of powers and eyes. Cowardly, he is gregarious, and will not live alone; weak, he consorts with weakness, to acquire strength; ignorant, he contributes the least bit to the common stock of intelligence, and escapes responsibility. One of many, he has the protection of the mob; embodying others' weaknesses, he is strong in the bundle of sticks; joining his voice with the million, it is lost in the confusion of tongues. Attacked, he is fortified by his society; down, he will rise again with his fellows; stupid with the rest, his shame is unfelt by being diffused. In any extremity, there is safety in counsel; in the ranks, he cannot run; in the crowd, it were vain to think. Weary of stagnation or tired by the eddies, he goes with the current; unable to stand an individual, he joins with a party; a poor creature of G.o.d, he is afraid to trust Him on his Word, and flies to a sect with a creed for protection. In the wake of thought, he may be thoughtless; voting the ticket, he is a patriot; a stiff bigot, there can be no doubt about his religion. He submits to be thought for as a child; to be cared for as an invalid; to be subordinated as an idiot. Unequal to a scheme of his own, he falls into one already devised for him; without independent views, he relies upon his newspaper; without implicit trust in G.o.d, he leans upon a broken reed in preference. Thus his business, his politics, his religion, are defined for him, and are of easy reference; indeed it may be said he knows them by heart, so little there is of them. Of the laws of trade, political economy, essential Christianity, he may be as ignorant as a barbarian, at the same time be complacent and respectable in his ignorance. Acting for himself, he would be set down as eccentric by his banker; thinking for himself, he would be thought to be too uncertain to be trustworthy; living virtuously, walking humbly, and trusting his Creator to take care of his creature, he would be an object of suspicion, even if he escaped being called an infidel. His tailor determines the cut of his coat; the street defines his manners and morals; custom becomes his law, and compliance his gospel.

Addison, in The Spectator, gives an account of a gentleman who determined to live and dress according to the rules of common sense, and was shut up in a lunatic asylum in consequence. "Custom," says Carlyle, "doth make dotards of us all. Philosophy complains that custom has hoodwinked us from the first; that we do everything by custom, even believe by it; that our very axioms, let us boast of free-thinking as we may, are oftenest simply such beliefs as we have never heard questioned." "In this great society wide lying around us," says Emerson, "a critical a.n.a.lysis would find very few spontaneous actions. It is almost all custom and gross sense." We play our parts so faithfully, not to say conscientiously, that often we have difficulty in placing ourselves, whether with the a.s.sumed or the natural. The little arts and artifices we thrive by, become essentially a part of us; and in the jostle and conflict--the greater to devour the lesser and the lesser the least--we seem impelled to pursue the objects and ends which long habit has somehow convinced us nature particularly suited us to pursue. When an event occurs to attract attention to our follies or baseness, it has not the effect to prompt repentance, but to excite our cunning, and set us to work to find excuses, or to imagine some other course of conduct which would have been more foolish or mischievous. "We keep on deceiving ourselves in regard to our faults, until we, at last, come to look upon them as virtues." Like Selwyn, the accomplished courtier and wit in the time of George III., we get to think even our vices necessities. After a night of elegant rioting and debauch, he tumbled out of his bed at noon the next day, and reeling with both hands upon his head to a mirror in his apartment, gazed at himself and soliloquized: "I look and feel most villainously mean; but it's life--hang it, it's life!"

Lord Bacon, discoursing upon the "politic knowledge of ourselves," and the "wisdom of business," in the Second Book of the Proficience and Advancement of Learning, says: "The covering of defects is of no less importance than the valuing of good parts; which may be done in three manners, by caution, by color, and by confidence. Caution is when men do ingeniously and discreetly avoid to be put into those things for which they are not proper: whereas, contrariwise, bold and unquiet spirits will thrust themselves into matters without difference, and so publish and proclaim all their wants. Color is, when men make a way for themselves, to have a construction made of their faults and wants, as proceeding from a better cause, or intended for some other purpose: for of the one it is well said, 'Vice often lurks in the likeness of virtue,' and therefore whatsoever want a man hath, he must see that he pretend the virtue that shadoweth it; as if he be dull, he must affect gravity; if a coward, mildness; and so the rest: for the second, a man must frame some probable cause why he should not do his best, and why he should dissemble his abilities; and for that purpose must use to dissemble those abilities which are notorious in him, to give color that his true wants are but industries and dissimulations. For confidence, it is the last but surest remedy; namely, to depress and seem to despise whatsoever a man cannot attain; observing the good principle of the merchants, who endeavor to raise the price of their own commodities, and to beat down the price of others. But there is a confidence that pa.s.seth this other; which is to face out a man's own defects, in seeming to conceive that he is best in those things wherein he is failing; and, to help that again, to seem on the other side that he hath least opinion of himself in those things wherein he is best; like as we shall see it commonly in poets; that if they show their verses, and you except to any, they will say, that that line cost them more labor than any of the rest; and presently will seem to disable and suspect rather some other line, which they know well enough to be the best in the number."

"Few persons who talk of any virtue or quality," says Pascal, "are inwardly acquainted or affected with it. We are all full of duplicity, deceit, and contradiction. We love to wear a disguise, even within, and are afraid of being detected by ourselves."

Infirmities and calamities have been made to serve important uses in the designs of men. "It was necessary," says a writer upon Mahomet, "that the religion he proposed to establish should have a divine sanction; and for this purpose he turned a calamity with which he was afflicted to his advantage. He was often subject to fits of epilepsy, a disease which those whom it afflicts are desirous to conceal. Mahomet gave out, therefore, that these fits were trances, into which he was miraculously thrown by G.o.d Almighty, during which he was instructed in his will, which he was commanded to publish to the world. By this strange story, and by leading a retired, abstemious, and austere life, he easily acquired a character for superior sanct.i.ty among his acquaintances and neighbors. When he thought himself sufficiently fortified by the numbers and enthusiasm of his followers, he boldly declared himself a prophet, sent by G.o.d into the world, not only to teach his will, but to compel mankind to obey it."

The world not only seems to be easily deceived, but seems to delight in deception. "If you wish to be powerful," said Horne Tooke, "pretend to be powerful." If you wish to be considered wise, systematically pretend to be, and you will generally be acknowledged to be. We all know, for instance, the influence of manner, as sometimes displayed by persons of great a.s.sumed personal dignity. Every neighborhood is afflicted with such pretenders. "Among those terms," says Whipple, indignantly, "which have long ceased to have any vital meaning, the word dignity deserves a disgraceful prominence. No word has fallen so readily into the designs of cant, imposture, and pretense; none has played so well the part of verbal scarecrow, to frighten children of all ages and both s.e.xes. It is at once the thinnest and most effective of all the coverings under which duncedom sneaks and skulks. Most of the men of dignity, who awe or bore their more genial brethren, are simply men who possess the art of pa.s.sing off their insensibility for wisdom, their dullness for depth, and of concealing imbecility of intellect under haughtiness of manner.

Their success in this small game is one of the stereotyped satires upon mankind. Once strip from these pretenders their stolen garments--once disconnect their show of dignity from their real meanness--and they would stand s.h.i.+vering and defenseless,--objects of the tears of pity, or targets for the arrows of scorn.... Manner triumphs over matter; and throughout society, politics, letters, and science, we are doomed to meet a swarm of dunces and wind-bags, disguised as gentlemen, statesmen, and scholars." When they open their mouths, it is to expand themselves with a new inhalation of emptiness, or to depreciate or belittle what they pretend is insignificant, when it only exceeds their capacity. They put up their heads and expectorate with a smirky haughtiness, as if everything worth knowing were known to them, when a single sensation of modesty would envelop their moony faces with blushes. Every one has seen such a character,--"an embodied tediousness, which society is apt not only to tolerate, but to wors.h.i.+p; a person who announces the stale commonplaces of conversation with the awful precision of one bringing down to the valleys of thought bright truths plucked on its summits; who is so profoundly deep and painfully solid, on the weather, or some nothing of the day; who is inexpressibly shocked if your eternal grat.i.tude does not repay him for the trite information he consumed your hour in imparting; and who, if you insinuate that this calm, contented, imperturbable stupidity is preying upon your patience, instantly stands upon his dignity, and puts on a face." "A certain n.o.bleman, some years ago," says Bulwer, in one of his essays, "was conspicuous for his success in the world. He had been employed in the highest situations, at home and abroad, without one discoverable reason for his selection, and without justifying the selection by one proof of administrative ability.

Yet at each appointment the public said, 'A great gain to the government! Superior man!' And when from each office he pa.s.sed away, or rather pa.s.sed imperceptibly onward toward offices still more exalted, the public said, 'A great loss to the government! Superior man!' He was the most silent person I ever met. But when the first reasoners of the age would argue some knotty point in his presence, he would, from time to time, slightly elevate his eyebrows, gently shake his head, or, by a dexterous smile of significant complacency, impress on you the notion how easily he could set those babblers right if he would but condescend to give voice to the wisdom within him. I was very young when I first met this superior man; and chancing on the next day to call on the late Lord Durham, I said, in the presumption of early years, 'I pa.s.sed six mortal hours last evening in company with Lord ----. I don't think there is much in him,' 'Good heavens!' cried Lord Durham, 'how did you find that out? Is it possible that he could have--talked?'" Coleridge speaks of a dignified man he once saw at a dinner-table. "He listened to me,"

says the poet, "and said nothing for a long time; but he nodded his head, and I thought him intelligent. At length, toward the end of the dinner, some apple dumplings were placed on the table, and my man had no sooner seen them, than he burst forth with,--'Them's the jockies for me!' I wish Spurzheim could have examined the fellow's head." The Duke of Somerset is described as one of these dignified gentlemen. His second wife was one of the most beautiful women in England. She once suddenly threw her arms around his neck, and gave him a kiss which might have gladdened the heart of an emperor. The duke, lifting his shoulders with an aristocratic square, slowly said, "Madam, my first wife was a Howard, and she never would have taken such a liberty!" If it were practicable to expose the artifice and emptiness of such characters, the exhibition would be as amusing as the scene once presented on the stage of a theatre. The comedian was enveloped in a great India-rubber suit, expanded by air to give it the proper proportions to represent Falstaff: when just in the middle of one of the inimitable speeches of that inimitable character, some wag of the stock insinuated a sharp-pointed instrument into the immense windful garment: immediately the great proportions of Falstaff began to diminish, attended by an audible hissing noise; and before the discomposed actor, overwhelmed with the laughter of the uproarious audience, could retire from the stage, he had shrunk to an insignificant one hundred and fifty pounds avoirdupois, with his deceptive covering hanging about his gaunt limbs in voluminous folds! Such persons will generally be found in possession of good moral habits--props they instinctively set up to sustain their pretenses. They know by intuition that an affectation of wisdom and greatness would be intolerable if attended by vicious propensities and practices; so they cultivate with systematic carefulness all the forms of morality and virtue. They know that their good habits will always insure the respect of even those who detect and despise their emptiness. But they are never heard to claim anything on the score of superior virtue; they demand to be known as Solons--as abridgments of all that is profound and wonderful known among men. Like the owl--that wise bird, sacred of old to Minerva--they make their pretensions respected by the most commendable propriety.

"Yorick had an invincible dislike and opposition in his nature to gravity;--not to gravity as such;--for where gravity was wanted, he would be the most grave or serious of mortal men for days and weeks together; but he was an enemy to the affectation of it, and declared open war against it, only as it appeared a cloak for ignorance, or folly: and then, whenever it fell in his way, however sheltered and protected, he seldom gave it any quarter. Sometimes, in his wild way of talking, he would say, that gravity was an errant scoundrel, and, he would add,--of the most dangerous kind too,--because a sly one; and that he verily believed, more honest, well-meaning people were bubbled out of their goods and money by it in one twelvemonth, than by pocket-picking, and shoplifting in seven. In the naked temper which a merry heart discovered, he would say there was no danger,--but to itself:--whereas the very essence of gravity was design, and consequently deceit;--'twas a taught trick, to gain credit of the world for more sense and knowledge than a man was worth; and that, with all his pretensions,--it was no better, but often worse, than what a French wit had long ago defined it, viz.: A mysterious carriage of the body, to cover the defects of the mind:--which definition of gravity, Yorick, with great imprudence, would say, deserved to be wrote in letters of gold."

"Men in general," says Machiavelli, in his Prince, "judge more from appearances than from reality. All men have eyes, but few have the gift of penetration. Every one sees your exterior, but few can discern what you have in your heart; and those few dare not oppose the voice of the mult.i.tude."

A pretension to devoutness and asceticism was one of the fas.h.i.+ons in Moliere's time. In his play of Le Festin de Pierre, he makes Don Juan to say: "The profession of hypocrite has marvelous advantages. It is an act of which the imposture is always respected; and though it may be discovered, no one dares do anything against it. All the other vices of man are liable to censure, and every one has the liberty of boldly attacking them; but hypocrisy is a privileged vice, which with its hand closes everybody's mouth, and enjoys its repose with sovereign impunity."

The absorbing desire for wealth--"that bad thing, gold," that "buys all things good"--like ambition, "often puts men upon doing the meanest offices: so climbing is performed in the same posture with creeping."

Almost every act may be a lie against the thought or motive which prompted it. The great aim of the mere money-getter--to get and get forever--involves him in false pretense and practical falsehood. He advises to inveigle; he condoles and sympathizes to ruin. He talks of liberalty, and never gives. He depreciates money and the love of it, at the same time glows and dimples with the consciousness of his possessions. He calls life a humbug or muck, and proves it by a hypocritical exhibit of his gains. He puts a penny in the urn of poverty, and sees clearly how he will get a s.h.i.+lling out. He whines for wretchedness, forgetting the number he has made wretched. He gives to religion, and plunders her devotees. He hires an expensive pew near the pulpit, and cheats his woodsawyer and washerwoman. He builds costly churches with tall steeples, and, writing the Almighty in his list of debtors, formally bargains admission to heaven. "He falls down and wors.h.i.+ps the G.o.d of this world, but will have neither its pomps, its vanities, nor its pleasures, for his trouble. He begins to acc.u.mulate treasure as a mean to happiness, and by a common but morbid a.s.sociation he continues to acc.u.mulate it as an end. He lives poor to die rich, and is the mere jailer of his house, and the turnkey of his wealth.

Impoverished by his gold, he slaves harder to imprison it in his chest than his brother-slave to liberate it from the mine." "Some men," says Chrysippus, in Athenaeus, "apply themselves with such eagerness to the pursuit of money, that it is even related, that a man once, when near his end, swallowed a number of pieces of gold, and so died. Another person sewed a quant.i.ty of money into a tunic, and put it on, and then ordered his servants to bury him in that dress, neither burning his body, nor stripping it and laying it out." Foote, in endeavoring to express the microscopic n.i.g.g.ardliness of a miser of his acquaintance, expressed a belief that he would be willing to take the beam out of his own eye if he knew he could sell the timber. Doubtless, one source of the miser's insane covetousness and parsimony is the tormenting fear of dying a beggar--that "fine horror of poverty," according to Lamb, "by which he is not content to keep want from the door, or at arm's-length, but he places it, by heaping wealth upon wealth, at a sublime distance."

("All the arguments which are brought to represent poverty as no evil,"

impatiently exclaimed Dr. Johnson, "show it to be evidently a great evil. You never find people laboring to convince you that you may live very happily upon a plentiful fortune. So you hear people talking how miserable a king must be; and yet they all wish to be in his place."

"One asks," says La Bruyere, "if, in comparing the different conditions of men together, their sufferings and advantages, we cannot observe an equal mixture, and a like a.s.sortment of good and evil, which settles them on an equality, or at least makes one as desirable as the other: the rich and powerful man, who wants nothing, may put the question, but a poor man must answer it.") The h.o.a.rding habits of the miser remind one of a device of American boatmen, at an early day, before the steamboat was invented, and when the forest was infested with savages and robbers.

Receiving specie at New Orleans for their produce, they deposited it in a wet buckskin belt, of sufficient length to surround the body, which, as it dried, contracted and shrunk round the coin, till no amount of shaking would cause it to jingle. So may the heart and soul of the avaricious man shrink round his little heap of gold, until all healthy circulation ceases, and his heart never jingles with a genuine, generous, manly impulse.

Disraeli, in his Curiosities, gives an interesting philosophical sketch of Audley,--the great Audley, as he was called in his time,--who concentrated all the powers of a vigorous intellect in the acc.u.mulation of wealth. He lived in England in the beginning of the seventeenth century, through the reigns of James I. and Charles I., and, beginning life with almost nothing, died worth four hundred thousand pounds sterling. He "lived to view his mortgages, his statutes, and his judgments so numerous, that it was observed, his papers would have made a good map of England. This philosophical usurer never pressed hard for his debts; like the fowler, he never shook his nets lest he might startle, satisfied to have them, without appearing to hold them. With great fondness he compared his 'bonds to infants, which battle best by sleeping.' To battle is to be nourished, a term still retained at the University of Oxford. His familiar companions were all subordinate actors in the great piece he was performing; he too had his part in the scene. When not taken by surprise, on his table usually laid open a great Bible, with Bishop Andrews' folio Sermons, which often gave him an opportunity of railing at the covetousness of the clergy! declaring their religion was a 'mere preach,' and that 'the time would never be well till we had Queen Elizabeth's Protestants again in fas.h.i.+on.' He was aware of all the evils arising out of a population beyond the means of subsistence, and dreaded an inundation of man, spreading like the sp.a.w.n of a cod. Hence he considered marriage, with a modern political economist, as very dangerous; bitterly censuring the clergy, whose children, he said, never thrived, and whose widows were left dest.i.tute.

An apostolic life, according to Audley, required only books, meat, and drink, to be had for fifty pounds a year! Celibacy, voluntary poverty, and all the mortifications of a primitive Christian, were the virtues practiced by this Puritan among his money bags. Audley's was that worldly wisdom which derives all its strength from the weaknesses of mankind. Everything was to be obtained by stratagem, and it was his maxim, that to grasp our object the faster, we must go a little round about it. His life is said to have been one of intricacies and mysteries, using indirect means in all things; but if he walked in a labyrinth, it was to bewilder others; for the clew was still in his own hand; all he sought was that his designs should not be discovered in his actions. His word, we are told, was his bond; his hour was punctual; and his opinions were compressed and weighty; but if he was true to his bond-word, it was only a part of the system to give facility to the carrying on of his trade, for he was not strict to his honor; the pride of victory, as well as the pa.s.sion for acquisition, combined in the character of Audley, as in more tremendous conquerors. In the course of time he purchased a position in the 'court of wards,' which enabled him to plunder the estates of deceased persons and minors. When asked the value of this new office, he replied that 'it might be worth some thousands of pounds to him who after his death would go instantly to heaven; twice as much to him who would go to purgatory, and n.o.body knows what to him who would adventure to go to h.e.l.l.'" What he thought of a venture to the latter place, his four hundred thousand pounds must speak.

Many and interesting as are the disguises of avarice, it is only in rank and ancestry that you find perfect complacency and a.s.surance. "We have all heard," says Thackeray, "of the dying French d.u.c.h.ess who viewed her coming dissolution and subsequent fate so easily, because she said she was sure that Heaven must deal politely with a person of her quality."

You recollect that other d.u.c.h.ess, in Saint-Simon, who, on the death of a sinner of ill.u.s.trious race, said, "They may say what they like, but no one shall persuade me that G.o.d does not think of it twice before he d.a.m.ns a man of his birth." An old lady once said to De Tocqueville, "I have been reading with great satisfaction the genealogies which prove that Jesus Christ descended from David. It shows that our Lord was a gentleman." "We are somewhat ashamed in general," said Senior to De Tocqueville, "of Jewish blood; yet the Levis boast of their descent from the Hebrew Levi." "They are proud of it," answered De Tocqueville; "because they make themselves out to be cousins of the blessed Virgin.

They have a picture in which a Duke de Levi stands bareheaded before the Virgin. 'Pray put your hat on, cousin,' she says. 'I had rather keep it off,' he answered."

"Do we not every day meet with people," says Xavier de Maistre, "who fancy they are ill because they are unshaven, or because some one has thought they have looked poorly, and told them so? Dress has such influence upon men's minds that there are valetudinarians who think themselves in better health than usual when they have on a new coat and well powdered wig. They deceive the public and themselves by their nicety about dress, until one finds some fine morning they have died in full fig, and their death startles everybody."

Lord Eldon was fond of relating amusing anecdotes of the famous state trials of Hardy, Horne Tooke, and Thelwall, which occurred while he was attorney general. "Every evening," he said, "upon my leaving the court, a signal was given that I was coming out, for a general hissing and hooting of the attorney general. This went through the street in which the court sat, from one end of it to the other, and was continued all the way down to Ludgate Hill and by Fleet Market. One evening, at the rising of the court, I was preparing to retire, when Mr. Garrow said, 'Do not, Mr. Attorney, pa.s.s that tall man at the end of the table.' 'And why not?' said Mr. Law, who stood next. 'He has been here,' answered Mr.

Garrow, 'during the whole trial, with his eyes constantly fixed on the attorney general.' 'I will pa.s.s him,' said Mr. Law. 'And so will I,' was my rejoinder. As we pa.s.sed, the man drew back. When I entered my carriage, the mob rushed forward, crying, 'That's he, drag him out!' Mr.

Erskine, from whose carriage the mob had taken off the horses to draw him home in triumph, stopped the people, saying, 'I will not go without the attorney general!' I instantly addressed them: 'So you imagine, that if you kill me, you will be without an attorney general! Before ten o'clock to-morrow there will be a new attorney general, by no means so favorably disposed to you as I am.' I heard a friend in the crowd exclaim, 'Let him alone! let him alone!' They separated, and I proceeded. When I reached my home in Gower Street, I saw, close to my door, the tall man who stood near me in court. I had no alternative; I instantly went up to him: 'What do you want?' I said. 'Do not be alarmed,' he answered; 'I have attended in court during the whole of the trial--I know my own strength, and am resolved to stand by you. You once did an act of great kindness to my father. Thank G.o.d, you are safe at home. May He bless and protect you!' He instantly disappeared."

Rulhiere told De Tocqueville a very different story, characteristic of a Russian. He was a man of high rank, who had been sent to the French head-quarters on a mission, and lived for some time on intimate terms with the staff, particularly with Rulhiere. At the battle of Eylau Rulhiere was taken prisoner. He caught the eye of his Russian friend, who came to offer his services. "You can do me," said Rulhiere, "an important service. One of your Cossacks yonder has just seized my horse and cloak. I am dying of fatigue and cold. If you can get them for me, you may save my life." The Russian went to the Cossack, talked to him rather sharply, probably on the wickedness of robbing a prisoner; got possession of the horse and cloak; put on the one, and mounted the other, and Rulhiere never saw him again.

Incledon, the singer, related to Crabb Robinson, in a stage-coach, anecdotes of Garrick and Foote, which show how completely they both lost themselves in their acting. Garrick had a brother living in the country, who was an idolatrous admirer of his genius. A rich neighbor, a grocer, being about to visit London, this brother insisted on his taking a letter of introduction to the actor. Not being able to make up his mind to visit the great man the first day, the grocer went to the play in the evening, and saw Garrick in Abel Drugger. On his return to the country, the brother eagerly inquired respecting the visit he had been so anxious to bring about. "Why, Mr. Garrick," said the good man, "I am sorry to hurt your feelings, but there's your letter. I did not choose to deliver it." "Not deliver it!" exclaimed the other, in astonishment. "I happened to see him when he did not know me, and I saw that he was such a dirty, low-lived fellow, that I did not like to have anything to do with him."

Foote went to Ireland, and took off a celebrated Dublin printer. The printer stood the jest for some time, but found at last that Foote's imitations became so popular, and drew such attention to himself, that he could not walk the streets without being pointed at. He bethought himself of a remedy. Collecting a number of boys, he gave them a hearty meal and a s.h.i.+lling each for a place in the gallery, and promised them another meal on the morrow if they would hiss off the scoundrel who turned him into ridicule. The injured man learned from his friends that Foote was received that night better than ever. Nevertheless, in the morning, the ragged troop of boys appeared to demand their recompense, and when the printer reproached them for their treachery, their spokesman said: "Plase yer honor, we did all we could, for the actor-man had heard of us, and did not come at all at all. And so we had n.o.body to hiss. But when we saw yer honor's own dear self come on, we did clap, indeed we did, and showed you all the respect and honor in our power.

And so yer honor won't forget us because yer honor's enemy was afraid to come, and left yer honor to yer own dear self."

Immortal sermons are disguised in legends; the most familiar objects are perpetually preaching to us. Ages ago, the Germans have it, there went, one Sunday morning, an old man into the forest to cut wood. When he had made a bundle, he slung it on his staff, cast it over his shoulder, and started for home. On his way he met a minister, all in his bands and robes, who asked him, "Don't you know, my friend, that it is Sunday on earth, when all must rest from their labors?" "Sunday on earth, Monday in heaven, it is all one to me," laughed the woodman.

"Then bear your burden forever," said the priest; "and as you value not Sunday on earth, you shall have Monday in heaven till the great day."

Thereupon the speaker vanished, and the man was caught up, with cane and f.a.gots, into the moon, where you can see him any clear night. The Norwegians think they see both a man and woman; and the legend is, that the former threw branches at people going to church, and the latter made b.u.t.ter on Sunday. In the clear, cold nights of winter they will point out the man carrying his bundle of thorns, and the woman her b.u.t.ter-tub.

In Norway, the red-crested, black woodp.e.c.k.e.r is known under the name of Gertrud's bird. Its origin, according to Thorpe, is as follows: When our Lord, accompanied by St. Peter, was wandering on earth, they came to a woman who was occupied in baking: her name was Gertrud, and on her head she wore a red hood. Weary and hungry from their long journeying, our Lord begged for a cake. She took a little dough and set it on to bake, and it grew so large that it filled the whole pan. Thinking it too much for alms, she took a smaller quant.i.ty of dough, and again began to bake, but this cake also swelled up to the same size as the first; she then took still less dough, and when the cake had become as large as the preceding ones, Gertrud said: "You must go without alms; for all my bakings are too large for you." Then was our Lord wroth, and said, "Because thou gavest me nothing, thou shalt for punishment become a little bird, shalt seek thy dry food between the wood and the bark, and drink only when it rains." Hardly were these words spoken when the woman was transformed to the Gertrud bird, and flew away through the kitchen chimney; and at this day she is seen with a red hood and black body, because she was blackened by the soot of the chimney. She constantly pecks the bark of trees for sustenance, and whistles against rain; for she always thirsts and hopes to drink. According to the legend, the Wandering Jew is a poor shoemaker of Jerusalem. When Christ, bearing his cross, pa.s.sed before his house, and asked his leave to repose for a moment on the stone bench at his door, the Jew replied harshly, "Go on--go on!" and refused him. "It is thou who shalt go on till the end of time!" was Christ's reply, in a sad but severe tone.

Lord c.o.c.kburn, in his Memorials, relates an anecdote of Dr. Henry, the historian, as told to him by Sir Harry Moncreiff, who was the doctor's favorite younger friend. The doctor was living at a place of his own in his native county of Stirling. He was about seventy-two, and had been for some time very feeble. He wrote to Sir Harry that he was dying, and thus invited him for the last time--"Come out here directly. I have got something to do this week, I have got to die." Sir Harry went; and found his friend plainly sinking, but resigned and cheerful. He had no children, and there was n.o.body with him except his wife. She and Sir Harry remained alone with him for about three days, being his last three; during a great part of which the reverend historian sat in his easy chair, and conversed, and listened to reading, and dozed. While engaged in this way, the hoofs of a horse were heard clattering in the court below. Mrs. Henry looked out and exclaimed that it was "that wearisome body," naming a neighboring minister, who was famous for never leaving a house after he had once got into it. "Keep him out," cried the doctor, "don't let the crater in here." But before they could secure his exclusion, the crater's steps were heard on the stair, and he was at the door. The doctor instantly winked significantly, and signed to them to sit down and be quiet, and he would pretend to be sleeping. The hint was taken; and when the intruder entered he found the patient asleep in his cus.h.i.+oned chair. Sir Harry and Mrs. Henry put their fingers to their lips, and pointing to the supposed slumberer as one not to be disturbed, shook their heads. The man sat down near the door, like one inclined to wait till the nap was over. Once or twice he tried to speak; but was instantly repressed by another finger on the lip, and another shake of the head. So he sat on, all in perfect silence for about a quarter of an hour; during which Sir Harry occasionally detected the dying man peeping cautiously through the fringes of his eyelids, to see how his visitor was coming on. At last Sir Harry tired, and he and Mrs. Henry, pointing to the poor doctor, fairly waved the visitor out of the room; on which the doctor opened his eyes wide, and had a tolerably hearty laugh; which was renewed when the sound of the horse's feet made them certain that their friend was actually off the premises. Dr. Henry died that night.