MARSHAL SOULT, DUKE OF DALMATIA.

On the preceding page is a portrait, and under
the head of Recent Deaths, in another
part of this magazine, is a sketch of the history
of Nicholas Jean-de-Dieu Soult, the
last of the great Marshals created by the Emperor
Napoleon. He was unquestionably possessed
of extraordinary abilities, fitting him
for eminence in many and diverse capacities,
but it cannot be said that he was of the first
rank of illustrious generals, as the world has
been led to suppose, chiefly by the masterly
but partial delineations of his career in the
Peninsula by General Napier. He had a genius
for war which qualified him for every position
in connection with it but that of leader
in the field. The subtle and irreversible
decisions of Napoleon followed his astonishingly
quick apprehensions of facts, as suddenly
as the thunderbolt follows lightning; but
Soult, profoundly familiar with all the arts of
war, and surpassing any of the great commanders
with whom he was associated except
only his chief, in the wisdom of his judgments,
was yet so slow in his intellectual operations,
so destitute of the enthusiasm, passion, and
fire, which in high circumstance give an almost
miraculous activity to the minds of the
first order of men, that he could never have
entitled himself to all the precedences he has
received in history. Napoleon understood
him, and in a few pregnant words addressed
to O’Meara, gave that measure of his character
which will be adopted as the final opinion
of the world. “He is,” said Napoleon,
“an excellent minister at war, or major-general
of an army, one who knows much
better how to manage an army than to command
in chief.”

The course of Soult as a citizen, a legislator,
and a minister, was not one upon which
his best biographers will linger with much
satisfaction. The glory he had achieved as
one of the lieutenants of Napoleon, in that
turbulent and grand career which has no
parallel for interest or importance in human
history, was his only claim to distinction in
politics. His master had an ambition as fair
in its proportions as it was vast in its extent,
and brought to every purpose the same forces
of character and preternatural energy of intelligence;
but Soult had no love for civil
duties, but little capacity for them, and he
accepted place as a gratification of vanity or
a means of success in mercenary aims. We
see in all his private and political life “the
soilure of his revolutionary origin,”—proofs
that he loved money and power far more than
he loved honor, and himself far more than his
country or mankind.

The last of the imperial marshals, the last
of that gigantic race who filled the world with
a red glory like the gloom which will precede
the judgment, closed his stormy life peacefully
in the place where he was born, and
thence was borne to the Invalides, to “sleep
well” with his old companions.“

THE HOMES OF COWLEY AND FOX.

We have in the last Art Journal another of
the pleasant gossipping Pilgrimages to
English Shrines, by Mrs. S. C. Hall, and the
following abridgement of it will please all who
have perused the previous papers of the series.
In Chertsey and its neighborhood are memorials
of some of the noblest men of England.

ABRAHAM COWLEY.

CHERTSEY AND ITS FAMOUS CHARACTERS.

The county of Surrey is rich to overflowing
in memories, both of persons and events, and
the little quaint and quiet town of Chertsey
could tell of the gorgeous and gloomy past as
much as many of its ancient neighbors within a
day’s drive of the city. Had its old abbey stones
but tongues, how they could discourse of years
when a visit to Chertsey was an undertaking;
though now the distance is but half an hour.

Nowhere within twenty miles of London
does the Thames appear more queenly, or
sweep with greater grace through its fertile
dominions, than it does at Chertsey. It is,
indeed, delightful to stand on the bridge in
the glowing sunset of a summer evening, and
turning from the refreshing green of the
Shepperton Range, look into the deep clear
blue of the flowing river, while the murmur
of the waters rushing through Laleham Lock
give a sort of spirit music to the scene. On
the right, as you leave Chertsey, the river
bends gracefully towards the double bridge of
Walton, and to the left, it undulates smoothly
along, having passed Runnymede and Staines,
while the almost conical hill of St. Anne’s attracts
attention by its abrupt and singular form
when viewed from the vale of the Thames.

About a mile, on the Walton side, from our
favorite bridge (Old Camden tells us so), is the
spot where Cæsar crossed the Thames. Were
the peasantry as imaginative as their brethren
of Killarney, what legends would have grown
out of this tradition; how often would the
“noblest Roman of them all” have been seen
by the pale moonlight leading his steed over
the waters of the rapid river—how many
would have heard Cassivelaunus himself during[pg 147]
the stillness of some particular Midsummer
night working at the rude defence which can
still be traced beneath the blue waters of the
Thames. What hosts of pale and ghastly
spectres would have risen from those tranquil
banks, and from the deepest hollows of
the rushing current, and—like the Huns, who
almost live on the inspired canvas of Kaulbach,—fought
their last earthly battle, again
and again, in the spirit world, amid the stars!
But ours is no region of romance; even remnants
of history, which go beyond the commonest
capacity, are rejected as dreams, or
put aside as legends. But history has enough
to tell to interest us all; and we may be satisfied
with the abundant enjoyment we have
in delicious rambles through the lanes and
up the hills, along the fair river’s banks, and
among the many traditional ruins of ancient
and beautiful Surrey.

Never was desolation more complete than
in the ruin of the Mitred Abbey of Chertsey;
hardly one stone remains above another to
tell where this stately edifice—since the far-away
year 664—grew and flourished, lording
it with imperial sway over, not only the surrounding
villages, but extending its paternal
wings into Middlesex and even as far as London.
The abbey was of the Benedictine order, and
founded, almost as soon as the Saxons were
converted from Paganism; but it was finished
and chiefly endowed by Frithwald, Earl of
Surrey. The endowment prospered rarely;
the establishment increased in the reputation
of wealth and sanctity; that it was “thickly
populated” is certain, for when the abbey was
sacked and burnt by the Danes, in the ninth
century, the abbot, and ninety monks, were
barbarously murdered by the invaders.

Standing upon the site of their now obliterated
cloisters and towers, their aisles and
dormitories, cells and confessionals, seeing
nothing but the dank, damp grass, and the
tracings of the fish-ponds—stagnant pools in
our day—it is almost impossible to realize the
onslaught of these wild barbarians panting
for plunder, the earnest defence of men who
fought (the monks of old could wield either
sword or crosier) for life or death, the terrible
destruction, the treasures and relics, and
painted glass, and monuments, the plunder of
the secret almerys, the intoxicated triumph
of those rude northern hordes let loose in our
fair and lovely island; what scenes of savagery,
where now the jackdaw builds, and
the blackbird whistles, and the wild water-rat
plays with her brood amongst the tangled
weeds!

The fierce sea-kings being driven back to
their frozen land, King Edgar, willing to
serve God after the fashion of his times, refounded
the Abbey of Chertsey, dedicating it
to St. Peter, and vying with Pope Alexander
in augmenting its privileges and its wealth.

Some of the abbots took great interest in
home improvements, planting woods, conducting
streams, enlarging ponds—building,
now a mill, now a dove-cot, according to the
wants of the abbey or their own fancies.
Henry I. granted them permission to keep
dogs, that, according to the old chronicle,
they might take “hare, fox, and cats.” King
John, in the first year of his reign, gave them
ample confirmation of all their privileges,
which, it would seem, they had somewhat
abused, for we find that the sovereign seized
their manors of Egham and “Torp” (Thorp)
on account of a servant of the abbot’s having
killed “Hagh de Torp.” Oh, rare “old
times!” The abbot was mulcted in a heavy
fine. Then, while Bartholomew de Winchester
was abbot, from 1272 until 1307, during
the reign of our first Edward, complaints were
made to Pope Gregory X. that the possessions
of the abbey were alienated to civilians
and laymen, whereupon the pope issued a
bull ordering such grants to be revoked.

It is worthy of note, that the Chertsey monastery
sheltered, for a time, the remains of
the pious, but unfortunate, Henry VI.

And the reader of Shakespeare will recall the
scene in which Richard meets the Lady Anne
on her way to Chertsey with her husband’s
body. This poor king’s remains had a claim to
be well received by the monks of Chertsey Abbey,
for he had granted to the abbot the privilege
of holding a fair on St. Anne’s-hill,
then called Mount Eldebury, on the feast of
St. Anne’s (the 26th of July): the fair has
changed its time and quarters as well as its
patron, and is held in the town on the 6th of
August, and called Black Cherry Fair. Manning,
in his history of Surrey, says, that the
tolls of this fair were taken by the abbot, and
are now taken by the owner of the site of the
Abbey House; thus the memory of King Henry
VI. is commemorated in the town of Chertsey
to this day, by the sale of black cherries
in the harvest month of August!

“THE NUN’S WELL.”

Centuries passed over those magnificent
abbeys, whose ruins in many places add so
much beauty to our fertile landscapes; they
grew and grew, and added acre to acre, and
stone to stone, and knowledge to knowledge;
but most they cherished the knowledge which
blazed like a lamp under a bushel, and kept
all but themselves in darkness; they preached
no freedom in Christ to the Christian
world, they abolished no serfdom, they taught
no liberty, they enslaved even those who in
their turn enslaved their “born thralls,” and
saw no evil in it. Oh, rare old times! Better
it is for us that the site of Chertsey Abbey
should be scarcely traceable now-a-days
than that it should be as it was, with its proud
pageants and pent-up learning!—Yet we have
neither sympathy no respect for that foul
king, who, to serve his own carnal purposes,
overthrew the very faith which had hallowed
his throne. But he did not attack and storm
the Abbey of Chertsey, as he did other religious
houses. He came to them, this Eighth[pg 148]
Harry, with a fair show of kindness, saying
that “to the honor of God, and for the health
of his soul, he proposed and most nobly intended
to refound the late Monastery, Priory,
or Abbey of Bisham in Berks, and to incorporate
and establish the Abbot and Convent
of Chertsey, as Abbot and Convent of Bisham,
and to endow them with all the Manors
late belonging to Bisham.” How the then
Abbot John Cordrey, and his brethren, must
have shivered at the conditions; how they
must have grieved at quitting their cherished
home, their stews and fish-ponds, their
rich meadows of Thorpe, overlooked by the
woods of Eldebury hill, their nursing ground
where their calves and young lambs were
stowed in luxurious safety in the pleasant farm
of Simple Marsh at Addlestone!

But their star was setting, and they were
forced to “give, sell, grant and confirm, to the
king their house and all manors belonging to
them.”

The total destruction of the Abbey must
have amazed the whole country. An earthquake
could hardly have obliterated it more
entirely. Aubrey, writing in the year 1673,
says “of this great Abbey, scarce any thing
of the old building remains, except the out
walls about it. Out of this ruin, is built a
‘fair house,’ which is now in possession of
Sir Nicholas Carew, master of the Buckhounds.”
Dr. Stukeley alludes to this house,
in a letter written in 1752; he speaks of the
inveterate destruction, and of “the gardener”
carrying him through a “court” where he
saw the remains of the church of the Abbey.
He says the “east end reached up to an artificial
mount along the garden wall; that
mount and all the terraces of the pleasure
garden, to the back front of the house, are
entirely made up of the sacred rudera or rubbish
of continual devastations. Bones of abbots,
monks, and great personages, who were
buried in large numbers in the church and
cloisters which lay on the south side of the
church, were spread thick all over the garden,
so that one may pick up whole handsfull
of them every where amongst the garden stuff.”
Brayley mentions in his pleasant History of
Surrey, that this artificial mount was levelled
in 1810, and its materials employed to fill
up a pond. Many human skulls and bones
were found intermixed with the chalk and
mortar of which it had been formed. Fragments
of old tiles were also frequently found,
and are still sometimes turned up. No trace
even of the “Abbey house” is left; it was
purchased in 1809 by a stock-broker, who in
the following year sold the materials—and so
ends the great monastic history of Chertsey.
Where are now its spiritualities in Surrey?—its
temporalities in Berkshire and Hampshire?—its
revenues of Stanwell, and rents of assize?—its
spiritualities in Cardiganshire?
Alas! they have left no sign, except on the yellow
parchment—of rare value to the antiquary.

Those who desire, like ourselves, to investigate
what tradition has sanctified, will do
well to turn down a lane beyond Chertsey
Church, which leads directly to the Abbey[pg 149]
bridge, and there, amid tangled hedge rows
and orchards, stands the fragment of an arch,
partly built up, and so to say, disfigured by
brick-work, and an old wall, both evidently
portions of the Abbey. In the wall are a
great number of what the people call “black
stones,” a geological formation, making them
seem fused by fire. Layers of tiles were also
inserted in this wall, and where the cement
has dropped away they can be distinctly
traced; there is also an ivy, very aged indeed;
it is so knotted and thick that it seems
to grow through the stones, the soil has so
evidently encroached on the wall that it is
most probably rooted at the foundation. The
pleasant market garden of Mr. Roake covers
the actual ground on which the Abbey stood.
The workmen frequently turn up broken tiles
and human bones, and there is no doubt that
by digging deeper much would be discovered
that might elucidate the history of the past.
At the farther end of the market garden a
vault has been discovered which is of considerable
length and breadth; but the water
rises so high in it (except after a long continuance
of dry weather has sealed the land
springs) that it is impossible to get to the end
without wading. An enormous quantity of
richly-colored and decorated encaustic tiles
have been found here; some are preserved in
our local museum. But the most interesting
remains in this place are the “stews,” or fish-ponds,
which run parallel to each other like
the bars of a gridiron; these ponds do not
communicate one with the other, nor has the
water any outlet: a little care and attention
might make them valuable for their old purposes;
but they are deplorably neglected.
Occasionally you see the fin of some huge
fish, whose slow movement partakes of the
character of the stagnant water he has inhabited
for years;—who can tall how many?

“THE GOLDEN GROVE.”

“The Abbey River,” as it is still called,
travels slowly along its way, fertilizing the
meadows and imparting life and freshness to
the placid scene. The denizens of Chertsey
have planted orchards, and in a few instances
gardens on its banks. One, the garden of Mr.
Herring, is a model of neatness, almost concealed
by its roses and carefully tended shrubs.
We wandered from orchard to orchard, amid
the trees and over the uneven ground; all
was so still and lonely that it required the
suggestions of an active imagination to believe
it had ever been the scene of contention
by flood and field. From the Abbey Bridge
the richness of the meadow scenery is exceedingly
refreshing, the grass is deep and
verdant, as it cannot fail to be, lying so low,
and fertilized by perpetual moisture.

During their wide-spreading magnificence,
the abbots of Chertsey erected a picturesque
chapel on the lovely hill of St. Anne: this
was done somewhat about the year 1334.
Orleton, Bishop of Winchester, granted an indulgence
of forty days to such persons as
should repair to, and contribute to the fabric
and its ornaments.

There is nowhere a more delightful road,
than that which leads from the “Golden
Grove,” rendered picturesque by its old tree,
the plantations of Monksgrove on one side,
and those of the once residence of Charles
James Fox on the other. The road is perfectly
embowered, and so close is the foliage
that you have no idea of the beautiful view
which awaits you, until leaving the statesman’s
house to the left, you pass through a
sort of wicket gate on the right, and follow a
foot-path to where two magnificent trees crown
the hill; it is wisest to wait until passing along
the level ridge you arrive at the “view point,”
and there, spread around you in such a panorama
as England only can show, and show
against the world for its extreme richness.
On the left is Cooper’s Hill, which Denham,
that high-priest of “Local poetry,” long ago
made famous; in the bend just where it
meets the plain, you see the towers of Windsor
Castle; there is Harrow Hill, the sun[pg 150]
shining brightly on its tall church; a deep
pall hovers over London, but you can see
the dome of St. Paul’s looming through the
mist; nay, we have heard of those who have
told the hour of the day upon its broad-faced
clock, with the assistance of a good glass.
How beautifully the Thames winds! Ay!
there is the grand stand at Epsom, and there
Twickenham, delicious, soft, balmy Twickenham;
and Richmond Hill—a very queen of
beauty!

REMAINS OF CHERTSEY ABBEY.

Yonder, beyond the valley, are Foxes Hills
crowned with lofty pines—and that is the
church at Staines, and as you turn, there again
is Cooper’s Hill; Laleham seems spread as a
tribute at your feet, and there is no end to
the villages and mansions—the parks, and
cottages like snow-drops in a parterre, and
church spires more than we can number;
while close behind us are the stones piled
thickly one on the other—the only relics of
the holy Chapel of St. Anne.

How grandly the promontory of St. George’s
Hill stands out—sheltering Weybridge, and
forming a beautiful back-ground to Byfleet
and the banks of the Way; not forgetting its
ruins—a Roman encampment of two thousand
years age, and its modern ornaments of
rare trees, of which a generous nobleman has
made common property, to be enjoyed daily
by all who choose. At the foot of this richly
planted hill, is the beautiful park of Oatlands—on
the eve of becoming an assemblage of
villa-grounds. How pleasant to feel that we
can account, by our own knowledge of that
glowing mount, for all the shades formed by
the hills and hollows, and different growths
of trees in the depths or heights of “the encampment,”
which forms the delight of many
a toilsome antiquary. Beyond are the more
distant eminences of the North Downs, and
a tract of country extending into Kent. But
we have not yet explored the beauties of this
our own hill of Chertsey; truly, to do so,
would take a day as long as that of its own
black cherry fair.

A path to the left, among the fern and
heather, leads to a well, famed for its healing
properties—it is called the Nun’s Well; even
now, the peasants believe that its waters are
a cure for diseases of the eye; the path is
steep and dangerous, and it is far pleasanter
to walk round the brow of the hill and overlook
the dense wood which conceals the well,
fringing the meadows of Thorpe, than to
seek its tangled hiding-place in the dell. The
monks of old would be sorely perplexed if
they could arise, to account for the long line
of smoke which marks the passage of the
different trains along their railroads. But we
turn from them to enjoy a ramble round the
brow of St. Anne’s Hill; the coppice which
clothes the descent into the valley, is so thick,
that though it is intersected by many paths,
you might lose yourself half-a-dozen times
within an hour; if it be evening, the nightingales
in the thickets of Monksgrove have commenced
their chorus, and the town of Chertsey,
down below, is seen to its full extent, its
church tower toned into beauty by the rich
light of the setting sun, while through the trees
and holly thickets you obtain glimpses of the
Guildford and Leatherhead hills, so softly blue,
that they meet and mingle with the sky.

GATE OF FOX’S HOUSE.

SUMMER HOUSE IN FOX’S GARDEN.

TEMPLE OF FRIENDSHIP.

Those who feel no interest in monkish
chronicles, may reverence St. Anne’s Hill,[pg 151]
because of its having been the favorite residence
of Charles James Fox, the contemporary
of Pitt and Burke and Sheridan and
Grattan, at a period when men felt strongly
and spoke eloquently. The site of the house
on the south-eastern site of the hill is extremely
beautiful, and it is much regretted in
the neighborhood that it finds so little favor
in the heart of its present noble proprietor.
The grounds are laid out with much taste;
there is a noble cedar planted by Mrs. Fox
when only the size of a wand. The statesman’s
widow survived her husband more than
thirty-six years, but never outlived her friends
or her faculties. There is a temple dedicated
to Friendship, which was erected to perpetuate
the coming of age of one of the late Lords
Holland; on a pedestal ornamented by a vase,
are inscribed some verses by General Fitzpatrick;
another placed by Mrs. Fox to mark a[pg 152]
favorite spot where Mr. Fox loved to muse,
is enriched by a quotation from the “Flower
and the Leaf,” concluded by two graceful
stanzas:

At the bottom of the garden is a grotto,
which must have once possessed many attractions,
and above it there is a pretty little
quaint chamber that was used as a tea-room,
when, according to the custom of the time,
the English drank tea by daylight; it is adorned
by painted glass windows; there are portraits
of the Prince of Wales and Mr. Fox,
when both were looking their best, and the
balcony in front commands a delicious view
of the surrounding country.

The peasantry are still loud in their praise
of “Madam Fox;” and some remember with
gratitude the education they received at her
school, and love to tell how the old lady was
drawn there at “feast times,” to see how they
all looked in their new dresses. She certainly
retained her sympathy with the young, and
put away the feelings and habits of old age
with a determined hand, for it is said, when
she was eighty she took lessons on the harp.
The present generation remember personally
nothing of the great statesman; he has become
history to us, and we must look to history,
garbled as it always is, and always will
be, by the opinions and feelings of its writers,
to determine the position of Charles
James Fox in the annals of his country.
Those who were admitted to his society have
written with enthusiasm of his social qualities,
and bestow equal praise on his brilliant
talents, his affability of manner, and the generosity
of his disposition. He was the third
son of Henry Fox, afterwards Lord Holland,
and his mother was the eldest daughter of
Charles, second Duke of Richmond, and consequently
great-granddaughter to Charles II.;
the material descent is one of blotted royalty,
of which a man like Fox could not have
been proud. His academic course was unmarked
by any of those honors of which Oxford
men are so ambitious, and yet, like his
great rival, William Pitt, he became a statesman
before he was of age.

FOX’S ARBOR.

At St. Anne’s Hill he enjoyed as many intervals
of repose and tranquillity as could fall
to a statesman’s lot; in the time of wars and
tumults, how he must have luxuriated in its
delicious quiet, surrounded by friends who
dearly loved him; and swayed only for good
by the wife who (although it is known that
her early intimacy with him was such as prevented
her general recognition in society) according
to the evidence of all who knew her,
was the minister only to his better thoughts
and nobler ambitions, and who weaned him
from nearly all the follies and vices which
stained his youth and earlier manhood. Various
causes led to his death, before age had
added infirmities to disease. He died at Chiswick
House, and his last words, addressed to
Mrs. Fox were, “I die happy.” It is said he
wished to be buried at Chertsey, but his remains
were interred in Westminister Abbey.

The brilliant Sheridan pronounced so elegant
an eulogium on his character, that it is
pleasant to think of it in those shades where,
as we have said, he so often sought and found
repose: “When Mr. Fox ceased to live, the
cause of private honor and friendship lost its
highest glory, public liberty its most undaunted
champion, and general humanity its
most active and ardent assertor. In him was
united the most amiable disposition with the
most firm and resolute spirit; the mildest
manners, with the most exalted mind. With
regard to that great man it might, indeed, be
well said, that in him the bravest heart and
most exalted mind sat upon the seat of gentleness.”

[pg 153]

COWLEY’S SEAT.

COWLEY’S HOUSE—STREET FRONT.

There is, at all events, an imaginary pleasure
in turning from the wearing out turmoil
of a statesman’s life, to what the world believes
the tranquil dreams of a poet’s existence.
But there are few things the worldling
so little understands as literary industry,
or so little sympathizes with as literary care.
We have no inclination to over-rate either its
toils or its pleasures, and perhaps no life is
more abundantly supplied with both. Its
toils must be evident to any who have noted
the increasing literary labor which is necessary
to produce the ordinary sources of comforts;
but its high and holy enjoyments are
not so apparent; they are so different from
those of almost all others as not to be easily
explained or understood; but above all other
gifts, the marvellous gift of poesy is a distinction
conferred by the Almighty, and should
be acknowledged and treasured as such. We
know little of a poet’s studies except by their
imperishable produce, and it is a common but
ill-founded prejudice to imagine regularity
or diligence incompatible with high genius.
Genius is neither above law, nor opposed to
it; but as many have a poetic taste and temperament
without the inspiration, the world is
apt to mistake the eccentricity of the pretender
for the outward and visible sign of
genius. Whether or not the poet of the
Porch-house of Chertsey had the actual poetic
fire we do not venture to determine.
Abraham Cowley takes a prominent position,
amongst the poets of our land, and the eventful[pg 154]
times in which he lived, and his participation
in their tumults give him additional
interest in all the relations of his anxious and
not over-happy life. It is recorded of him
that he became a poet in consequence of
reading the Faery Queene, which chance
threw in his way while yet a child. In allusion
to this, Dr. Johnson gave his well-known
definition of genius: “A mind of large
general powers, accidentally determined to
some particular direction.” We had almost
dared to say this is rather the definition of a
philosopher than of one who comprehended
the spirituality of a marvellous gift. Abraham
Cowley—the posthumous son of a London
grocer—owed much to his mother. She,
by her exertions, procured him a classical
education at Westminster School. She lived
to see him loved, honored, and great,
and what was better still, and more uncommon,
grateful. At the age of fifteen he published
a volume called “Poetic Blossoms,”
which he afterwards described as “commendable
extravagancies in a boy.” He obtained
a scholarship in Trinity College, Cambridge,
in 1686, and there took his degree;
but was ejected by the Parliament, and thence
removed to Oxford. Shortly after, he followed
the Queen Henrietta to Paris, as Secretary
to the Earl of St. Albans, and was employed
in the court of the exiles in the most
confidential capacity. In 1656 he returned
to England, and was immediately arrested as
a suspected spy. He submitted quietly—the
royalists thought too quietly—to the dominion
of the Protector, but his whole life proved
that he was no traitor. At the Restoration,
that great national disappointment, his claims
upon the ungrateful monarch were met by a
taunt and a false insinuation—he was told
that his pardon was his reward! Wood said,
“he lost the place by certain enemies of the
Muses;” certain “friends of the Muses,” however,
procured for him the lease of the Porch-house
and farm at Chertsey, held under the
Queen, and the great desire of his life—solitude—was
obtained.

COWLEY’S HOUSE—GARDEN FRONT.

The place still seems a meet dwelling for a
poet, and is, perhaps, even more attractive
to strangers than St. Anne’s hill. The porch,
which caused his residence to be called “The
Porch-house,” was taken down during the
last century by the father of its present proprietor,
the Rev. John Crosby Clarke, and
the house is now known as “Cowley House.”1
It is situated near the bridge which crosses a
narrow and rapid stream, in a lonely part of
Guildford Street; a latticed window which
overhangs the road is the window of the
room in which the poet expired; on the outside
wall Mr. Clarke has recorded his reason
for removing the porch. “The porch of this
house, which projected ten feet into the highway,
was taken down in the year 1786, for
the safety and accommodation of the public.”

STAIRCASE—COWLEY’S HOUSE.

The appearance of the house from Guildford[pg 155]
Street, is no index to its size or conveniences.2
You enter by a side gate, and the
new front of the dwelling is that of a comfortable
and gentlemanly home; the old part
it is said was built in the reign of James the
First, and what remains is sufficiently quaint
to bear out the legend; the old and new are
much mingled, and the modern part consists
of one or two bed-rooms, a large dining-room,
and a drawing-room, commanding a delicious
garden view, the meanderings of the stream,
and a long tract of luxuriant meadows, terminated
by the high and richly timbered
ground of St. Anne’s Hill. A portion of the
old stairway is preserved, the wood is not as
has been stated oak, but sweet chestnut. One
of the rooms is panelled with oak, and Cowley’s
study is a small closet-like chamber, the
window looking towards St. Anne’s Hill. It
is never difficult to imagine a poet in a small
chamber, particularly when his mind may imbibe
inspiration from so rich and lovely a
landscape. Beside the group of trees, beneath
whose shadow the poet frequently sat,
there is a horse chestnut of such exceeding
size and beauty, that it is worthy a pilgrimage,
and no lover of nature could look upon
it without mingled feelings of reverence and
affection.

Here then amid such tranquil scenes, and
such placid beauty, the “melancholy Cowley,”
passed the later days of big anxious existence;
here we may fancy him receiving Evelyn and
Denham, the poets and men of letters of his
troubled day, who found the disappointments
of courtly life more than their philosophy
could endure. Here his friendly biographer,
Doctor Spratt, cheered his lonely hours.

Cowley was one of those fortunate bards
who obtain fame and honor during life. His
learning was deep, his reading extensive, his
acquaintance with mankind large. “To him,”
says Denham in his famous elegy,

His biographer adds, “There was nothing
affected or singular in his habit, or person, or
gesture; he understood the forms of good
breeding enough to practise them without burdening
himself or others.” This indeed is the
perfection of good breeding and good sense.

Having obtained, as we have said, the
Porch-house at Chertsey, his mind dwelt
with pleasure—a philosophic pleasure—upon[pg 156]
the hereafter, which he hoped for in this life
of tranquillity, and the silent labor he so dearly
loved; but he was destined to prove the
reality of his own poesy:

The career of Abraham Cowley was never
sullied by vice,3 he was loyal without being
servile, and at once modest, independent and
sincere. His character is eloquently drawn
by Doctor Spratt. “He governed his passions
with great moderation, his virtues were never
troublesome or uneasy to any, whatever
he disliked in others he only corrected by the
silent reproof of a better practice.”

He died at Chertsey on the 28th of July,
1667, and was interred in Westminster Abbey.
A throng of nobles followed him to
his grave, and the worthless king who had
deserted him is reported to have said, that
Mr. Cowley had not left a better man behind
him in England.

It is said the body of Cowley was removed
from Chertsey by water, thus making the
Thames he loved so well, the highway to his
grave; there is something highly poetic in
this idea of a funeral, so still and solemn,
with the oars dropping noiselessly in the blue
water. Pope in allusion to it, says:

which rather inclines us to the belief, that in
this, as in many other instances, the poetic
reading is not the true one,

but the fact that he died at Chertsey, as much
respected as a man, as he was admired as a
poet, is certain, and his house is often visited
by strangers, who are permitted to see his
favorite haunts by the kindness of its proprietor,
who honors the spot so hallowed by
memories of “the melancholy Cowley:”—he
who considered and described “business” as:

But we must postpone our farther rambles
for the present.

TREES ON ST ANNE’S HILL.

Chertsey loses half its romantic interest by
the intrusion of the progressive agents of our
time—our noisy time, of which the spirit willingly
brooks no souvenirs of monastic repose.
The old quaint quiet town has now its railroad,
and the shades of its heroes have departed.

TRAUGOTT BROMME ON THE UNITED STATES OF NORTH AMERICA,
TEXAS AND THE COLONIES.

We have at different times, by reviews
or translations, endeavored to give our
readers some idea of what people think of us,
in continental Europe. But there are two
sides to every thing—or there is an universal
dualism, as Emerson declares—which is perfectly
true as to the method which might be
adopted in the execution of this self-imposed
task. One class of readers understand by
the word people the beau monde, and would
have us invariably follow the school of the
Countesses Hahn-Hahn or Ladies Blessington
or Milords Fitz-Flummery, contented if we
have but a fair name in society. Another and
more reasonable class would be satisfied to
know the opinion of the literati, or perhaps
the poets, particularly when they do fit homage
to our “grand old woods,” and to Niagara.
Others regard with most respect a plain
literal account of our branches of industry—our
railroads, factories, and canals. They
would have the country judged purely from a
mechanical or practical point of view—contenting
themselves as to other matters with
the reflection. “Oh, sensible people care very
little about any thing else. If they know
what we produce, and what our resources
are, they’ll understand and respect us sufficiently.”

Now the opinion of each of these classes
has its weight, and though not of the greatest
ultimate importance, is always to be respected.
If we were questioned as to the views
of which of them we yielded full regard, we
should candidly say, “to none.” It is the
general, universal opinion, of a nation at large
that we deem authoritative, and none other. It
is that popular opinion so readily yet often so
falsely formed (at times from trifles of almost
incredible levity), and which when once fairly
developed, is well-nigh ineradicable. In a
word, it is to the views of the people.

We propose, as opportunity shall offer, to
make our readers familiar with the writings
of all these different classes of travellers—and
in the present article, we shall make
a few extracts from a work interesting, as
having probably contributed more than any
other to a general knowledge of the United
States in Germany. It is the book which has
had the greatest currency among all classes,
but particularly with the lower order of readers
and emigrants.

Before proceeding, however, to the work
itself, it may be as well to answer a question
which has perhaps been suggested to the
minds of a certain class of readers. Of what
great use, after all, is this nervous regard as
to the opinion of the world? Is not our character
established—are not our characteristics
known, to the uttermost corners of the earth?
To which question we may answer, Not quite.
In avoiding that ridiculous sensitiveness which
prompts so many Americans to feel personally
insulted by the weak remarks of every
wandering ignoramus, we would by no means
fall into the opposite error of attaching no
importance whatever to the good opinion or
the degree of consciousness as to our existence
entertained by the world at large.

Should any feel disposed to smile at such
an expression, as “the consciousness of our
existence,” we will take the liberty of citing
a few curious instances, for the authenticity
of which we assume the entire responsibility—instances
which may perhaps astonish a
few even of the better informed. There are
in many districts (not altogether provincial)
of Italy and France great numbers, who
would not even in America be classed as ignorant
in regard to other matters, who have
not the remotest idea as to the nature or geography
of our country. An instance has
come to our knowledge of an intelligent Hungarian
who, by intercourse with the world,
had acquired a fluency in five languages, and
who inquired of an American gentleman if his
country were not situated somewhere in England.
The late Mr. Cooper, when placing
his daughters at a celebrated seminary on the
continent, found a great curiosity had been
created by the rumor that they were coming,
some supposing they were black, some that
they were copper-colored, and all unprepared
to see American girls looking for all the world
like the young German ladies. We have
heard of a similar instance in which an English
gentleman—a Cambridge graduate—inquired
of an American what was the current
language of the United States. Lastly, we
may cite the case of an English author, well
known to our own public, and favorably
mentioned not long since in these pages, who
was under the impression that owing to the
great emigration from Germany, the English
language must with us, in a very few years,
yield to that of the Vaterland. Now our
commercial and industrial relations are seriously
hindered by this absurd ignorance of
America, which in a word prevails to such
an extent, that we have known an American,
who—probably from having been over-questioned
and speered at in New England—had
imbibed such a wholesome hatred of inquisitiveness,
that he wished the French government
would hang up, for the benefit of all
concerned, the following list of questions,
with satisfactory answers annexed, in all the
cafés of the politest nation in Europe:

The reader is not to infer that this is the
general state of knowledge regarding our
country. But it is worth nothing as a curious
illustration of the vast number of individuals
who derive their ideas, not from what
is going on at the present day, or from available
sources of information, but from the[pg 158]
antiquated views of a by-gone generation.
And we trust it will not be deemed inappropriate
that we here speak a word of the
want of opportunities of acquiring very general
information under which the ordinary
readers of continental Europe suffer. With
all their libraries, all their immense arrays of
magazines and journals, we find among them
an apathy in regard to the world without (to
the Fan-Qui), which appears incredible until
we reflect on the deadening influences of the
censorship, which views with distrust all information
in regard to the Land of Liberty.
We are not aware, throughout the whole of
continental Europe, of a single publication so
thoroughly cosmopolite in its character, so
general in the scope of its information, or
which is so universally disseminated among
all classes of readers, as The International;
and we trust we do not go too far when we
assert, that it is to an extended sale of periodical
publications somewhat approaching it
in the concentration and dissemination of
news from the world at large, that our countrymen
owe that superior intelligence and
citizen-of-the-world character which distinguish
them from the insular Briton, self-important
Frenchman, or abstracted German.

The work from which we propose to make
some extracts, is Traugott Bromme‘s Hand
und Reisebuch für Auswanderer nach den
Vereinigten Staaten (or Traugott Bromme’s
Journey and Handbook for Emigrants to the
United States). As we have already stated,
no work on America is at the present day
more familiarly known to that class of readers
to whom it is addressed. Certain remarks
on the present condition of German emigration
with which it is prefaced, may not be
devoid of interest to our readers, though not
constituting a part of such observations as we
have more particularly referred to:

After accurately sketching the extreme
misery and poverty oppressing the inhabitants
of many districts of Germany, of late years
sadly increased by the falling off in manufactures
since the political disturbances, our author
proceeds to set forth the advantages offered
by America:

The richness of the soil, the excellence of
the climate, and the demand for labor, are
then described; to which, as the greatest inducement,
he adds the fact that in America
the fullest “liberty of labor and mechanical
calling or trade,” is allowed. Also, that the
taxes are so light that an industrious man is
able not only to live, but even to lay up something
for his old age, or his children, or to
employ in the extension of his business.

In the following extract, our author proceeds
to set forth the national character of
the American:

We have made these quotations less on account
of any merit which they possess, than
to give our readers an idea of the general
opinion prevailing in Germany in regard to
our country; and to confirm an assertion
made in a recent number of the International,
that in no country in Europe are we so impartially
and favorably judged. There is one
particular, however, in which we find this
book worthy of especial praise. The author
highly commends the flourishing state of religion
in the United States, declaring that we
are in this respect superior to the Germans,
and that on the Sabbath the churches are
filled to a degree unknown in Europe. It is
from our deep-rooted attachment to domestic
life, and our observance of religion, that he
correctly deduces our true happiness, as separated
from the natural advantages of the
country. It is greatly to be desired that the
majority of his countrymen resident in America,
would allow themselves to be impressed
in a similar manner as to the advantages of
piety and Sabbath-keeping. There is in the
United States a vast number of German newspapers—conducted
we should imagine for the
greater part by unprincipled and worthless
adventurers of the red republican, socialist
stamp, who, despite the protection which they
here enjoy, incessantly and spitefully abuse
every institution to which they are really indebted
for their asylum among us, and most
of all our observation of the Sabbath, in a
style which entitles them to something severer
than mere contempt. But Herr Bromme
is right. Respect for morality and religion,
a due regard for the Sabbath, and a dependence
on the home-circle for pleasure and recreation,
are the surest safeguard of peace,
happiness, and prosperity.

A VISIT TO THE FIRE WORSHIPPERS’ TEMPLE AT BAKU.

In a recent number of the Russian Archives
for Scientific Information, is an account
of a visit made by a Russian lady of distinction,
in company with her husband and sons,
to a temple of the Indian sect of Gebers, or
Fire Worshippers, near Baku, a city of Georgia,
lying on the Caspian Sea. We translate
this interesting narrative for the International,
as follows:

In order the better to enjoy the spectacle
of the fire, we chose the evening for our excursion
thither; but a thick fog came on,
which made the road difficult and dangerous.
When we finally reached the place it was
pitch dark; the flames were rising in beautiful
purity to the peaceful sky of night, and
the entire castle, within which was the temple,
seemed to be surrounded by a circle of
watch-fires. These were lighted by Persians
from the neighborhood, who were busy
burning lime and baking bread, dark forms
like those which worked on the tower of
Babel, and burnt lime for it. They were now
brought here by the ease and cheapness of
carrying on their occupations. All that is
necessary is to make a hole in the ground,
touch a burning coal to it, and an inexhaustible
flame rises forth like a spring. Behind
this range of little flames and fires, rose, in
the pale light, the dirty white walls of the[pg 161]
castle, in the centre of which there flashed from
the summit of two lofty pillars great masses of
the purest, clearest, and keenest flame, which
were now bent down horizontally and wreathed
like serpents by the force of the wind, and
now rose perpendicularly to the sky, whose
dome they lighted up like two vast altar tapers.
We drove around the edifice, and stopped on
one side where there were no flames rising
from the earth. A fine rain was falling, but we
remained without while our guide went in to
announce us. He came back immediately
with a swarthy Hindoo. The sight of this
man impressed me strangely, and I forgot
that he belonged to a remote colony of a few
individuals, and asked myself if we had been
suddenly transported to India, or if India had
been brought up to the Caspian.

We went into the court-yard, in which
stands the temple, with its two fire-pillars.
About half way up hang a couple of large
bells, which the Hindoo sounded by way of
preparing us for what we were to see. There
was something fearful in the loud clangor,
and my boys crowded close beside me. Except
our party, no one was to be seen except
the swart Geber, in his white turban and
long brown robe, with just enough of a pair
of light blue trowsers visible to bring into distinctness
his naked black feet. His features
were noble, and his beard long and black.
He looked like a conjurer, like the lord of an
enchanted castle, summoning his spirits. The
hissing fire, as if obeying him, flashed up
more brightly at the crash of the bells; now
it was clear as day around us, and now it was
twilight as the wind lowered the flame. My
husband and sons and the guide who had
brought us to the place, were all dressed in
oriental costume, and I alone seemed to
belong to Europe. A shudder of home-sickness
came over me, and at every moment
I expected to see something monstrous, to
behold all the cruelties of a heathenish and
barbarous worship.

The interpreter now summoned us to
follow the Geber. We were told that the
castle was built by a rich Indian nabob, who
was a fire worshipper, and who, with his
followers, long inhabited it. Now, only three
Hindoos remain from that period of splendor.
But nature remains eternally the same, and
whether worshipped or not, the flames still
shine and awe the superstitious, and so great
is the fame of the place that many pilgrims
come yearly from distant India to pray, and
to have prayers said for them, here in the
visible presence of the primeval light.

At last we came to the cell of the priest,
and on his invitation entered it. We passed
through a low door, and down a few steps,
and found ourselves in a small, semicircular,
low, but very white room, with a floor of
mason-work, and a small altar in the centre.
Around the wall were seats, also of mason-work.
In the altar there was an opening as
large as a gun-barrel, from which rose a slender
flame that lighted the room very clearly.
There were other little openings on the sides
of the altar. The Hindoo took a wisp of
straw, lighted it, and touched these openings,
from which the most beautiful flames at once
issued. The children, who had never seen
gas lights, or at least did not remember them,
regarded all this as the most perfect witchery.
On a second altar, which, like the first, was
about the height of a common table, lay or
stood the idols and treasures of our priest.
Small steps led up to it, which were used
to hold muscles, stones, shells, and other
instruments employed in the sacred rites.
The idols were of metal, and ugly and monstrous,
like Chinese images. Beside these
figures, we were astonished to see crosses of
various forms and sizes. We asked the Geber
about them, and he answered with oriental
emphasis: “There is one God, and no one
has seen him; therefore every one adores
him after his own way, and represents him
after his own way.” The reply was diplomatic
enough, and we could not ascertain
how the crosses had come there.

On the altar and its steps lay a great number
of singularly beautiful Indian stones,
which the boys wanted very much, but
which, in spite of our large offers, we could
not obtain. They were mementoes from the
distant fatherland, and possibly they served
as sacred ornaments for the little cell. There
were also several censers, lamps, and little
silver plates and salvers. The air was stifling
from the fumes of gas, and the heat was like
that of a vapor bath. The priest took from
the altar some pieces of red and white candied
sugar, held them, praying, before his idols,
sprinkled them with holy water, and handed
them to us on a silver plate.

A second Hindoo now came in, a tall old
man, whose name, as he told us, was Amintaas.
He invited us into his cell, which was
larger and differently arranged. In the centre
was a large kettle, set in mason-work,
with water in it, and a gas flame burning
under it; the altar was in another apartment
beyond, and separated from the first by a
low wall or fence, with a passage through.
Another apartment, similarly divided off,
was spread with carpets for sleeping. After
we had seen the stones, shells, and
idols, which were richer and more numerous
than in the former cell, the Hindoos
asked us if they should pray for us. We
agreed, and the ceremony began. A large
muscle shell was washed in the kettle, the
plates were set in order at the foot of the
altar, a censer began to smoke, the silver
plate with candied sugar was set over a lamp
Between two bells, whose handles were the
most monstrous figures of idols. These bells
Amintaas took and began to ring vehemently.
The other Hindoos stood behind him and
beat two big cymbals, accompanying this
noise with the most inhuman and frightful
howling that a man’s lungs ever produced.[pg 162]
Still, there was method and a regular cadence
in it. Finally, they made a pause, bowed
before the images, murmuring softly, after
which they arranged the plates anew, and
sprinkled the sugar with holy water. My
husband whispered in my ear a line from
the conjuration in “Faust,” and the whole of
that scene rushed vividly into my memory.

Meanwhile the lungs of the old Amintaas
had recovered their power, for he now seized
a conch shell, held it in both hands, and
with incredible strength blew long wild notes,
with scarce any thing like a tune. I grew
dizzy in listening to this clamor, and at once
understood what is meant by the heathen
making a “vain noise,” This cannibalistic
music was kept up for a long time, and
seemed to form the climax of the sacred rites.
The finale was a combination of wild shouting,
banging of the cymbals, ringing and murmuring.
At last the concert was over, and we
breathed freely. Amintaas handed us the
candied sugar, and my husband laid down
two ducats in its place. They were received
with warm expressions of gratitude, and laid
upon the altar. We went out into the open
air, but the scene had changed. The lonely
castle was crowded with Persians who had
come from their lime-burning to see the Europeans.
Persian women were sitting around
by sundry little ovens of masonry, where, by
the help of gas flames, they baked their
Tsheuks, thin cakes of unleavened bread.
Followed by the crowd, we were led a couple
of hundred steps from the castle to a spring
that was covered over; the cover was taken
off, and a bundle of burning straw thrown in,
when, crackling and hissing, sprung up a splendid
pillar of fire, vanishing in sparks like stars.
This beautiful spectacle lasted but for a moment,
and a quarter of an hour was necessary
to collect gas enough to repeat the experiment.

We returned to Baku in the rain, more
dead than alive. It was the eve of Easter.
The next morning, as I was sitting on the
sofa with the children, there came in a tall,
meagre Hindoo, with gray hair; he was
dressed in a white robe, and brought me
white and red sugar on a silver plate. He
was the chief priest from the temple of the
Gebers, and had come to Baku to see the
Easter festivities. We took a few grains of
his sugar, and I laid a silver rouble on the
plate. While he was making his bows for
this, my husband came in and told him,
partly in Tartar, partly in Russian, and partly
in pantomime, that we had been to his temple
the night before, and had prayers said there.
He asked at once, with eagerness, how much
we had given, and when he learned the sum,
asked for a certificate to that effect, as, without
it, the others would give him no part of
the money. We sent him away without
granting his request, for the two screamers
of the night previous had earned all we gave
them. We learned afterwards that the gifts
of visitors occasioned quarrels, and often
blows, in the romantic fire-castle. This disgusted
me, and yet it is not the fault of these
poor fellows. They must necessarily become
covetous, since they profane their most sacred
ceremonies as a means of living. They have
neither fields nor gardens, and the only thing
like vegetation that I saw was some lone
boxes in the court yard, filled with shrubs
and plants, remains, no doubt, from the time
of the Indian nabob, who sought in vain to
establish cultivation in a soil impregnated
with inflammable gas. However, I learned
to my sorrow that grass at least grows there,
for, in going through it to the spring, my feet
became perfectly wet.

The air of the locality does not seem to be
unwholesome for man. At least, the Geber
priests, who had lived there for years, were
perfect lions for health and vigor.

A NEW PORTRAIT OF CICERO.

In the third volume of his History of the
Romans under the Empire, just published
in London, Mr. Merivale gives some elaborate
pieces of character writing, one of which
has for its subject Cicero. It is not good for
a man to think harshly of Cicero, and however
easy it may seem to be to condemn manifest
faults in his character, it is by no means
easy to be fair in the estimate we make. Mr.
Merivale sums up a character which has too
often been roughly put down as that of a
great writer and a little man, as follows:

LORD MAHON’S HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION.

Incomparably the best history of our
struggle for independence that has been
written by a foreigner is that of which we
have the larger portion in the just-published
fifth and sixth volumes of Lord Mahon’s
History of England from the Peace of Utrecht,
comprising the period from 1763 to 1780—from
the commencement of the popular discontents
until the virtual conclusion of the
war.

The character of Lord Mahon as a historian
has long been established. When Sismondi,
in 1842, had brought his History of France
down to the peace of Aix-la-Chapelle, he lamented
that he could no longer be guided by
Lord Mahon, and expressed a hope that his
“brilliant labors” would be continued. The
portion of his work on which the illustrious
Frenchman thus set the seal of his approval
has been reprinted in this country by the
Appletons, in two large volumes (embracing
the first four of the original impression), carefully
and judiciously edited by Professor Henry
Reed, of Philadelphia. It well indicates the
right of its author to a place with the best
British writers in this department. History
was never before written so brilliantly or profoundly
as in the last half century. Germany
in this period has boasted her Schiller, Niebuhr,
Von Hammer, Heeren, Ranke, and
two Mullers; France her Sismondi, Barrante,
Thierrys, Michelet, Mignet, Guizot, and
Thiers; England her Mitford, Arnold, Thirlwall,
Grote, Napier, Hallam, Mackintosh,
Macaulay, Palgrave, and Mahon; and we
have ourselves the noble names of Bancroft,
Prescott, and Irving, to send to the next ages.
Of the English authors we have mentioned,
we regard Lord Mahon as in many respects
the first; Hallam is a laborious and wise critic;
Thirlwall and Grote, in their province,
have greatly increased the fame of British
scholarship; and Macaulay, brilliant and picturesque
beyond any of his contemporaries,
has an unprecedented popularity, which will
last until the worthlessness of his opinions
and the viciousness of his style are more justly
appreciated than they are likely to be by
the mobs of novel readers who in this generation
have preferred him to James and Ainsworth.
Lord Mahon is the most legitimate
successor of the greatest historian of his country,
David Hume.

Although the chief subject of these new
volumes is the American war, the general
political history of England, from the decline
of the fortunes of Bute through the administration
of Grenville, Rockingham, Chatham,
the Duke of Grafton, and Lord North, is illustrated
and commented on as largely as the
special purpose of the author permitted; and
we have many striking passages respecting
Wilkes and his various persecutions, the Letters
of Junius and their authorship, and the
common intellectual and material progress of
the British empire. The spirit in which he regards
our Revolution is illustrated by the following
paragraph, on the rejection, by the
House of Peers, of the conciliatory Bill by
which Lord Chatham hoped, in 1775, to prevent
the threatened separation of the colonies:

The opinion of Lord Mahon that, even after
Burgoyne’s surrender, and the treaty of alliance
between France and America, the colonies
might have been preserved, had Lord
Chatham lived and returned to office, we
think entirely erroneous. Our separation
from England, though there had been no
stamp act or tea tax, was inevitable.

Lord Mahon is exceedingly fond of personal
portraiture, in which he is sometimes very
successful. One of his most carefully-elaborated
performances in this way has for its subject
Washington, and in the dozen pages he
devotes to the analysis of the character of
the great chief he has displayed his best abilities,
though, we confess, without suggesting
any thing very novel. He dislikes Franklin,
and loses no opportunity of imputing to him
personal dishonesty. We think the influence
of Mr. William B. Reed’s Life of President
Reed is traceable in almost every allusion
made by Lord Mahon to our philosopher.
Without further observation upon the qualities
of the work, we avail ourselves of the possession
of an early copy of it to present our
readers with some of the most striking passages
pencilled in a hasty reading.

[pg 167]

[pg 170]

We have no more room for further extracts;
those we have made illustrate the
temper and the style of the work, and will
commend it to the favorable consideration of
American readers. Among subjects treated
most elaborately is that of the authorship of
Junius; but Lord Mahon has no new facts
for the vindication of his judgment, that Sir
Philip Francis was unquestionably the writer
of the famous letters under that name.

There is an appendix to each volume; and
in the appendix of one, and in the notes of
both, are some curious illustrations of the
worthlessness of Mr. Sparks’s editions of the
writings of Washington and Franklin. We
first called attention to this subject some five
years ago, and after the changes, &c. of Mr.
Sparks had been pointed out in The International,
a series of carefully prepared criticisms
appeared in the Evening Post, in which the
discrepancies between the original letters of
Washington were exhibited to a degree that at
once and for ever destroyed the good reputation
of Mr. Sparks in this department. He chose
not to take any notice of the disclosures to
which we refer, but it may be that Lord Mahon’s
criticism will secure his attention, and
an attempt, at least, for his vindication. Besides
his comparisons of MS. and printed letters
in the appendix, Lord Mahon has several
allusions to the subject, of which we quote
specimens:

A complete errata to Mr. Sparks’s editions
of Washington, Franklin, and Gouverneur
Morris, would occupy several volumes; and
we do not remember one instance in which
his alterations were justifiable, or in which
they were really an improvement in point
of style. The reprobation with which Mr.
Sparks has been visited by the learned and
judicious of his own country and England will
be a warning to future laborers in the same
field. The works edited by Mr. Sparks are
no longer, we believe, regarded by historical
students as of the slightest value as authorities,
and no faithfulness or excellence which
may be displayed in future works from his
hand will retrieve his lost reputation.

These volumes will be reprinted immediately
by the Appletons.

FAUST OF WITTENBERG AND FUST OF MENTZ.

It were well if writers on the origin of typography
would obey the injunction of Sir
Thomas Browne, who thought it not inexpedient
for those who seek to enlighten mankind
on any particular subject, first to acquire
some knowledge thereof themselves, so that
the labor of readers should not so generally
be profitless. In an article by Bishop McIlvaine,
and another in Frazer’s Magazine, by
an anonymous contributor, the exercise of
necromancy is imputed to Fust, the inventor
or supposed inventor of printing. Nine of
every ten persons who write any thing on the
subject fall into the same error; they have
something always to say of Fust and the devil;
curious anecdotes to rehearse of the multiplication
of copies of the Scriptures in Paris
and elsewhere; spells and incantations by
the inventor of the “black” art to describe,
&c. But this is all induced by ignorance of
the facts. John Fust, the putative inventor
of printing, was a shrewd silversmith, and
we suspect a knavish one, for without having
any thing to do with the invention of the
“art preservative of arts,” he managed to
rob another of the credit and profit of it. He
was, however, never in Paris; he was never
in his lifetime accused of the exercise of magical
arts; he simply endeavored to make
as much money as he could in Germany by
underselling the copyists in the book market.
All stories in which necromancy is attributed
to him or to any other printer; all accounts
of the opposition of the priests to typography
as an infernal invention; in fine, the whole
popular idea of Faust and the devil, is a modern
contrivance, and originated in this manner:
Some bookmaker, about the year 1580,
undertook to write a history of printing; he
had an indistinct recollection of Professor
Faustus of the University of Wittenberg, and
in his book blended as many of his adventures
as he could remember with the memoirs of
John Fust the printer; and from that day a
succession of ignorant chroniclers have considered
two men, of totally different characters,
living at different times, as one individual.

Faust, the necromancer, was born in the
duchy of Weimer in 1491, twenty-five years
after the printer is understood to have died.
He is mentioned by Melancthon, Wierus, and
many other cotemporary writers, and was
probably in his time not less distinguished as
a magician than Agrippa or Albertus Magnus.
It is related of him by Godwin, that he was
in his youth adopted by an uncle, dwelling in
the city of Wittenberg, who had no children.
Here he was sent to college, and was soon
distinguished by the greatness of his talents,
and the rapid progress he made in every species
of learning that was put before him. He
was destined by his relative to the profession
of theology. But he is said ungraciously to
have set at naught his uncle’s pious intentions.
He went through his examinations with applause,
and carried off all the first prizes
among sixteen competitors; he therefore obtained
the degree of doctor in divinity; but
his success only made him proud and headstrong.
He disdained his theological eminence,
and sighed for distinction as a man of
the world. He took his degree as a doctor
of medicine, and aspired to celebrity as a
practitioner of physic. About the same time
he fell in with certain cotemporaries, of tastes
similar to his own, and associated with them
in the study of Chaldean, Greek, and Arabic
science, of strange incantations and supernatural
influences, in short, of all the arts of a
sorcerer.

Having made such progress as he could by
dint of study and intense application, he at
length resolved to prosecute his purposes still
further by actually raising the devil. He happened
one evening to walk in a thick, dark
wood, within a short distance from Wittenberg,
when it occurred to him that that was
a fit place for executing his design. He stopped
at a solitary spot where four roads met,
and made use of his wand to mark out a large
circle, and then two small ones within the
larger. In one of these he fixed himself, appropriating
the other for the use of his expected
visitor. He went over the precise
range of charms and incantations, omitting
nothing. It was now dark night, between
the ninth and tenth hours. The devil manifested
himself by the usual signs of his appearance.
“Wherefore am I called?” said
he, “and what is it that you demand?” “I
require,” rejoined Faustus, “that you should
sedulously attend unto me, answer my inquiries,
and fulfil my behests.”

Immediately upon Faustus pronouncing
these words, there followed a tumult overhead,
as if heaven and earth were coming together.
The trees in their topmost branches
bended to their very roots. It seemed as if
the whole forest were peopled with devils,
making a crash like a thousand wagons, hurrying
to the right and left, before and behind,
in every possible direction, with thunder and
lightning, and the continual discharge of great
cannon. Hell appeared to have emptied itself
to have furnished the din. There succeeded
the most charming music from all sorts
of instruments, and sounds of hilarity and
dancing. Next came a report as of a tournament,
and the clashing of innumerable lances.
This lasted so long, that Faustus was many
times about to rush out of the circle in which
he had inclosed himself, and to abandon his
preparations. His courage and resolution,
however, got the better; and he remained
immovable. He pursued his incantations
without intermission. Then came to the very
edge of the circle a griffin first, and next a
dragon, which in the midst of his enchantments
grinned at him horribly with his teeth,
but finally fell down at his feet, and extended
his length to many a rood. Faustus persisted.
Then succeeded a sort of fireworks, a pillar[pg 173]
of fire, and a man on fire at the top, who
leaped down; and there immediately appeared
a number of globes here and there
red-hot, while the man on fire went and came
to every part of the circle for a quarter of an
hour. At length the devil came forward in
the shape of a gray monk, and asked Faustus
what he wanted. Faustus adjourned their further
conference, and appointed the devil to
comes to him at his lodging.

He in the mean time busied himself in the
necessary preparations. He entered his study
at the appointed time, and found the devil
waiting for him. Faustus told him that he
had prepared certain articles, to which it was
necessary that the demon should fully accord,—that
he should attend him at all times,
when required, for all the days of his life;
that he should bring him every thing he
wanted; that he should come to him in any
shape that Faustus required, or be invisible,
and Faustus should be invisible too whenever
he desired it; that he should deny him nothing,
and answer him with perfect veracity
to every thing he demanded. To some of
these requisitions the spirit could not consent,
without authority from his master, the chief
of devils. At length all these concessions
were adjusted. The devil on his part also
prescribed his conditions. That Faustus
should abjure the Christian religion and all
reverence for the supreme God; that he
should enjoy the entire command of his attendant
demon for a certain term of years;
and that at the end of that period the devil
should dispose of him, body and soul, at his
pleasure [the term was fixed for twenty-four
years]; that he should at all times steadfastly
refuse to listen to any one who should desire
to convert him, or convince him of the error
of his ways, and lead him to repentance; that
Faustus should draw up a writing containing
these particulars, and sign it with his blood;
that he should deliver this writing to the
devil, and keep a duplicate of it himself, that
so there might be no misunderstanding. It
was further appointed by Faustus, that the
devil should usually attend him in the habit
of a cordelier, with a pleasing countenance
and an insinuating demeanor. Faustus also
asked the devil his name, who answered that
he was usually called Mephistophiles.

Numerous adventures of Faustus are related
in the German histories. It is said that
the emperor Charles V. was at Inspruck, at
a time when Faustus also resided there. His
courtiers informed the emperor that Faustus
was in the town, and Charles expressed a desire
to see him. He was introduced. Charles
asked him whether he could really perform
such wondrous feats as were reported of
him. Faustus modestly replied, inviting the
emperor to make trial of his skill. “Then,”
said Charles, “of all the eminent personages
I have ever read of, Alexander the Great is
the man who most excites my curiosity, and
whom it would most gratify my wishes to see
in the very form in which he lived.” Faustus
rejoined that it was out of his power truly to
raise the dead, but that he had spirits at his
command who had often seen that great conqueror,
and that Faustus would willingly
place him before the emperor as he required.
He conditioned that Charles should not speak
to him, nor attempt to touch him. The emperor
promised compliance. After a few
ceremonies, therefore, Faustus opened a door,
and brought in Alexander exactly in the form
in which he had lived, with the same garments,
and every circumstance corresponding.
Alexander made his obeisance to the
emperor, and walked several times round
him. The queen of Alexander was then introduced
in the same manner. Charles just
then recollected he had read that Alexander
had a wart on the nape of his neck; and
with proper precautions Faustus allowed the
emperor to examine the apparition by this
test. Alexander then vanished.

As Faustus was approaching the last year
of his term, he seemed resolved to pamper
his appetite with every species of luxury.
He carefully accumulated all the materials of
voluptuousness and magnificence. He was
particularly anxious in the selection of women
who should serve for his pleasures. He
had one Englishwoman, one Hungarian, one
French, two of Germany, and two from different
parts of Italy, all of them eminent for
the perfections which characterized their different
countries.

At length he arrived at the end of the term
for which he had contracted with the devil.
For two or three years before it expired his
character gradually altered. He became subject
to fits of despondency, was no longer
susceptible of mirth and amusement, and reflected
with bitter agony on the close in
which the whole must terminate. He assembled
his friends together at a grand entertainment,
and when it was over, addressed them,
telling them that this was the last day of his
life, reminding them of the wonders with
which he had frequently astonished them,
and informing them of the condition upon
which he had held this power. They, one
and all, expressed the deepest sorrow at the
intelligence. They had had the idea of something
unlawful in his proceedings; but their
notions had been very far from coming up to
the truth. They regretted exceedingly that
he had not been unreserved in his communications
at an earlier period. They would
have had recourse in his behalf, to the means
of religion, and have applied to pious men,
desiring them to employ their power to intercede
with Heaven in his favor. Prayer and
penitence might have done much for him;
and the mercy of Heaven was unbounded.
They advised him to still call upon God, and
endeavor to secure an interest in the merits
of the Saviour.

Faustus assured them that it was all in
vain, and that his tragical fate was inevitable.[pg 174]
He led them to their sleeping apartment, and
recommended to them to pass the night as
they could, but by no means, whatever they
might happen to hear, to come out of it; as
their interference could in no way be beneficial
to him, and might be attended with the
most serious injury to themselves. They lay
still, therefore, as he had enjoined them; but
not one of them could close his eyes. Between
twelve and one in the night they heard
first a furious storm of wind round all sides
of the house, as if it would have torn away
the walls from their foundations. This no
sooner somewhat abated, than a noise was
heard of discordant and violent hissing, as if
the house was full of all sorts of venomous
reptiles, but which plainly proceeded from
Faustus’s chamber. Next they heard the
doctor’s room-door vehemently burst open,
and cries for help uttered with dreadful agony,
but in a half-suppressed voice, which presently
grew fainter and fainter. Then every
thing became still, as if the everlasting motion
of the world was suspended.

When at length it became broad day, the
students went in a body to the doctor’s apartment.
But he was nowhere to be seen. Only
the walls were found smeared with his blood,
and marks as if his brains had been dashed
out. His body was finally discovered at some
distance from the house, his limbs dismembered,
and marks of great violence about the
features of his face. The students gathered
up the mutilated parts of his body, and afforded
them private burial at the temple of
Mars, in the village where he died.

SOME SMALL POEMS.

WRITTEN FOR THE INTERNATIONAL MONTHLY MAGAZINE.

BY R. H. STODDARD.

A PROLOGUE.

BY THE SEA.

WHEAT AND SHEAVES.

FRAGMENT.

CERTAIN MERRY STANZAS.

MR. JUSTICE STORY, WITH SOME REMINISCENT REFLECTIONS.4

WRITTEN FOR THE INTERNATIONAL MAGAZINE.

BY A. OAKEY HALL.

The hurrying pedestrian in Wall-street, or
in some of its bisecting avenues of commercial
bustle, if he have time to glance over
his shoulder, is sure to observe a freshly-painted
piece of tin (its brief rhetoric revelling in
the pride and pomp of gold leaf alphabetically
shaped), denominated by lawyers “a
shingle”—setting forth that some sanguine
gentleman has then and there established
himself as an Attorney and Counsellor at Law.

The sign is by the front door, shining with
self-conceit at the passers by; and its owner
is up some weary stairway, yawning over
“twice told tales” of legal lore, copying precedents
for the sake of practice, or keeping
hope alive upon the back benches of the
court-rooms in listening to the eloquence of
his seniors while he is waiting for clients.

Heaven help many a young attorney in this
“babel” of money-getting. The race should
be prayed for in churches: and it should meet
with a consideration as nearly divine as mortals
can call up from crowded heart-chambers.

Well: the sign keeps nailed up: and by
and by the sun blisters it, and dries out the
pomp of the gilded letters, and perhaps the
owner yawns over his one case, or sitting
upon a front bench in the court-room while
case number thirty is being heard, waits for
case nine hundred and thirty, against which
on the calendar that is reposing by the side
of the complaisant clerk in the corner, his
name is placed as counsel—shining there like
a pebble on a wide and extended beach.

The Physiology of the Medical Student
from facetious pens was reached to us over the
Atlantic by friendly booksellers some years
ago; and we should have had by this time
“the Physiology of the young Attorney.”
He is a good subject for dissection; there’s
plenty of venous humor in his composition;
and oh! a deal of nerve!

Talk of exploring expeditions to the Arctic
regions as offering specimens of courage and
prowess; or of scientific excursions into the
wilds of Africa to the same purport! These
instances are trivial compared to the courage
and prowess yearly displayed by hundreds of
attorneys who plunge into the ocean of litigation
in order to swim towards the distant
buoys which the sun of prosperity always
cheers with enlivening beams.

Don’t waste sympathy in this connection
for the young Sawbones. His thirst for action
can be slaked at pauper fountains. For
him the emigrant’s chamber, the cabin of the
arriving ship, the dispensary, the asylums,
the hospitals, and the poor-houses, are always
open; and if his “soul be in arms,” there are
(Heaven knows) “frays” in this city numerous
enough for any ambitious surgical eagerness.

But for the aspiring attorney where are
the avenues open for gratuitous action? Do
merchants nail up promissory notes upon awning
posts for attorneys to seize and put in
suit? What “old nobs” of Wall-street are
willing to put themselves “in chancery” to
oblige Hopper Tape, Esq., your humble attendant
upon the
Where are the courts possessing suits without
counsel?

We may be told of unfortunate wretches
who murder in drunken fits to whom counsel
are assigned. But what are ten crusts of
bread per annum among a thousand hungry
dogs?

Thou must face the truth, young college
boy, who now and then dost stroll into court-rooms,
or who dost lounge away an hour in
a friend’s law office admiring his books and
piles of papers—thinking the while of the
time when thou wilt have graduated and obtained
permission to hang up thy pomp-gilded
“shingle:” thou must face the truth! The
counsel who so attracts thy admiration, in
thy court-room lounging, has fought weary
years with myriad obstacles; there are the
ashes of many nights and days of toil and
struggle sprinkled upon his hair; he has
fought his way (from where thou sittest a
listener to where he stands a speaker), as if
through an Indian gauntlet file. There were
a hundred mouths waiting for the first crumbs
which came to his impatient legal digestion;
and a hundred envious heads and hearts to
worry him if possible into a dyspepsia over
those crumbs. He has began with an office
in a fifth story, and climbed down towards the
street. He commenced to hive his honey
near the roof! While out of his office he
climbed a professional ladder, the holding on
to which tasked all his powers of physical,
mental, and pecuniary endurance. Face the
truth!

Reach me yonder diary and legal register.
Two thousand practising lawyers in the city
of New-York! Out of these one hundred
are “notables;” fifty are “distinguished;”
twenty-five are eminent.

A large body of them are “conveyancers”
growing thin in person and thinner in mind
over deeds and titles; a larger body “attorneys”—getters
up and supervisors of suits—providers
of ammunition for “distinguished
counsel” to discharge with loud reports (the
said counsel brilliant by the flash: the attorney
obscured in the smoke); many, very
many, chained to “larcenies” at the Sessions,
“landlord dispossessions” at the Marine Court,
suits on butcher’s bills at Ward Courts, or
“malicious prosecutions” in the Common
Pleas.

Yet there are hundreds of coral reefs and
pearls for persevering divers in this ocean
of litigation. Three thousand pending cases
every month are three thousand nutshells[pg 176]
where the meat is often fresh and oily, even
with the weary keeping on the calendar for
months and years. There are some counsel
who pocket fees and costs to the tune of twenty
thousand a year. We know many a Quirk,
Gammon and Snap, who realize an undoubted
“ten thousand a year,” with no Tittlebat Titmouse
for a standing annoyance. And we
can taper off on the finger many who do not
realize five hundred a year, and work like negro
slaves at that: they are continually rough
hewing, but no divinity shapes their ends.

Five years of “starvation,” and five more
years of toil and trouble, constitute the depth
of a lawyer’s slough of despond in New-York;
to say nothing of the giants’ castles
to storm upon the way, or the fights with the
Apolyons of Envy. Obviously so!

A man now-a-days will let a young Sawbones
advise ice for his child’s croup, or even
experiment with his own much-abused liver,
when he would not intrust a young attorney
with the suing a note where ten witnesses
saw the note signed and the “consideration
money” paid over. And if the public really
knew how much danger their pockets were
in when the “buttons” were under the control
of inexperienced lawyers, the number of
“starvers” would be doubled. What “eminent”
lawyer is there who does not look back
to the “practice” of his youth, in perfect terror
to witness the mistakes he made, as the
helmsman, who has scudded through the
breakers to the open sea, glances back at the
dangers he escaped?

The young lawyers of a year back are,
however, five years—perhaps ten—in advance
of the lawyers of this year’s growth.
The latter have greater rivalry in the hordes
of practitioners from the interior whom the
“new code” have driven from their trespass
quare clausum fregit into the city. Many of
them, too, were men of mark in their ports of
departure, bold and confident in their new
haven!

One field, however, in the legal township
of this city, offers room upon its face for
tillers—the field of advocacy! It is ploughed
by some twenty or thirty, and harrowed by
some fifty or sixty. There are a dozen whom
the ghosts of Nisi Prius flock to hear upon
great occasions. And these will long hold
the monopoly.

Why?

Because the advocate and barrister must
have had vast experience at Nisi Prius (or the
court where matters of fact are investigated
by judge and jury); have acquired a practised
tact; have had opportunities of testing their
own calibre to know if they are fitted for
emergencies—as the gunsmith tests his barrels
before he “stocks” them. And the
young lawyer has small opportunity afforded
him to acquire this tact—to permit this testing.
If he can play “devil” for a few years
to some barrister of extended practice, or
scent “occasions” like a blood-hound on the
trail of the valuable fugitive from justice,
then he is a happy man, and is in the fair way
of soon becoming a monopolist himself.

Any juryman of two years’ standing will
corroborate our statement as to the openness
of the field of legal advocacy. How often
has he seen cause after cause “set down,”
“reserved,” or “put off,” because counsel
are engaged elsewhere? How often has he
heard the same advocate in four or five causes
in the same week, in the same court, changing
positions like the queen of an active chess-board;
profiting his fame and pocket by
means of only a hurried glance at the elaborate
brief which his junior has “got up” for
him?

Some one has said that the barrister works
hard, lives well, and dies poor. Regarding
the first two conditions of his life there is little
doubt upon the question of truth; the dying
in poverty may be problematical. Yet in
a recent print, professing to furnish a list of
wealthy tax-payers, the list contained four
lawyers, and only one was a barrister. The
instance proves little, for a lawyer may be
very rich and yet pay no taxes. The assessors
may fight shy of his bell-pull as they go
their rounds, because of his penchant to find
flaws in their actions and bring them official
discredit in an apparently laborious task, but
in reality a sinecure of an employment.

We have often asked ourselves if barristers
have stomachs. Bowels of compassion they
have not, that is certain; but have they stomachs?
Say nine times in a year they dine
at the same hour of the day; and then spoon
their soup with the blood all drawn from the
digestive apparatus to feed the brain. Yet
they eat like aldermen and drink like German
princes….

This much of idle reverie, as, with pen in
hand, we laid down the two bulky and elaborately-published
volumes whose title we have
taken as text; this much of glance at the
condition of the young and old advocate of
to-day, before we digest our reflections upon
the advocate and jurist of the past.

It was our privilege in our legal novitiate
(this is but a phrase; for a lawyer is always
in his novitiate) to have been, at the Cambridge
Law School, a pupil of Mr. Justice
Story; and thus to have drank at the very
fountain head of constitutional law—that
branch of our national jurisprudence which
can least fluctuate. Judges of a day and not
of a generation, or crazy legislators with spasmodic
wisdom, may alter, and overturn, and
mystify by simplification, the laws and usages
of every-day life; but it is scarcely to be apprehended
that the current of our constitutional
law will ever be diverted from original
channels. There is danger rather of its being
dammed into stagnation.

While fully aware of his faults and foibles
as a man, and his idiosyncracies as a judge
and a legal writer, we have never wavered
in loyalty to his judicial majesty, or found a[pg 177]
flaw in the regard we paid to his memory.
And no book was more welcome to Zimmerman
in his solitude than these volumes regarding
the illustrious judge, prepared by his
son, were welcome to our Christmas-holiday
leisure.

Joseph Story was the eldest of eleven children,
and lived to be indeed the “Joseph”
of mark and renown to his father and brothers.
He was born in Marblehead, September
18th, 1779. His father was a physician,
and served during a portion of the Revolution
as army surgeon. He died when the future
judge was twenty-six years of age: yet what
the son then was is best told by one sentence
from the father’s will—after making his wife
sole executrix, he recommends her to his son
Joseph, adding, “and although this perhaps
is needless, I do it to mark my special confidence
in his affections, skill, and abilities.”
From the father, our lawyer thus panegyrized
received friendly geniality and broad understanding;
from the mother, indomitable will,
vigor and enthusiasm.

Habit of observation and desire of knowledge
were the prominent attributes of his
childish character; nevertheless he was ardent
in all the sports of boyhood. To the
last he maintained a regard for his honor,
which induced him while yet a lad, and under
promise not to divulge the name of a schoolmate
offender, to receive a severe flogging
rather than to yield up his knowledge upon
the subject. At the age of sixteen, in the
midst of a Freshman term at Harvard College,
he thought of matriculation; but upon inquiry
learned that he must not only be examined
upon the works of ordinary preparatory
reading, but that it was necessary for
him to expect a call upon the volumes which
his class had dispatched during the past half
year. At first he was daunted, but remembering
there yet remained six weeks of vacation,
he addressed himself to the necessary
labor—the severity of which is best evidenced
by the fact that in the short time above
mentioned he read Sallust, the odes of Horace,
two books of Livy, three books of the
Anabasis, two books of the Iliad, and certain
English treatises. This sounds like the railroad
instruction now much in vogue; but its
effects were permanent in value upon his
mind. Few readers of his works will accuse
him of a want of proficiency in Latin! But
the often reading—the saepe legendo was
ever his habit: for he remembered the couplet:

He passed muster with the college tutors
in January, 1795. Among his classmates were
the (afterwards Reverends) Dr. Tuckerman
and Wm. E. Channing—to the genius and
character of the latter of whom he always
bore the most enthusiastic and hearty testimony.
Indeed he contested with Channing
for the highest honor. Channing won it, but
always gave the honor himself to Story;
while the latter always declared that the former
won the just meed of his genius and
scholarship.

Their graduation was in the summer of
1798: and immediately upon quitting college
Mr. Story commenced the study of the law
with Mr. Samuel Sewall, afterwards Chief Justice
in the Supreme Court of Massachusetts.
Fourteen hours a day was over his quantum
of study. Although sometimes disheartened,
he never surrendered his determination to
master the elements and details of his new
profession.

Studying law in those days was a far different
thing from its reading now. Then it
was multum: now it is multa. No copious
indexes and multifarious treatises were counted
by thousands: no digests (directories to
the streets, the avenues, the fountains and the
temples of the science), abounded by scores.
Libraries were carried about in wheelbarrows
and not in processions of vans, when the inexorable
moving day came around. Learned
judges were not then compelled to hold courts
in remote villages (resorting hereby to a coup
de loi), in order to escape the cacoethes loquendi
of case lawyers and presuming juniors.
Legal lore was builded up like the massive
stone and hard grained mortar of the
edifices of that olden time—slowly, carefully,
but lastingly; not as are builded now the
brick and stuccoed mansions of the snob and
parvenu. Not that abounding treatises and
familiarizing digests forbid the idea of the
perfect lawyer now-a-days: only that to-day
the law student in the midst of a large library
stands more in need (when thinking of the
otium which accompanies certain dignity), to
utter the ejaculation, “lead us not into temptation”—the
temptation of possessing that
knowledge which teaches where to seek for
information, and not the kind which is information
of itself.

In 1801 Mr. Story came to the Salem bar
while at the age of twenty-two. After being
three years at practice he married his first
wife, who died within two years afterward,
plunging him into the deepest grief. During
his courtship he dabbled (as almost every
young lawyer does until he finds that clients
are severe critics) in poetry, and wrote a
didactic poem of two parts in heroic verse,
entitled “The Power of Solitude.” Adopting
the criticism of the biographers—its prominent
defects were exaggeration of feeling,
confusion of imagery, want of simplicity of
expression, stilted and artificial style. But
though dull as a poem, it shows facility and
talent for versification, breathes a warm aspiration
for virtue and truth, and is creditable
to the scholarship of its author.

After the loss of his wife he sought relief
from painful thoughts in the laborious duties
of a large and increasing business. His position
at the bar was prominent, and he was
engaged in nearly all the cases of importance.[pg 178]
His manner to the jury was earnest and
spirited; he managed his causes with tact
(that great acquirement of the successful
lawyer: being, as a distinguished barrister
now dead and gone said to Dr. Hosack, the
same sheet anchor to the advocate which mercury
or bark is to the physician), was ready
in attack or defence, and possessed great eloquence
of expression. As an advocate he
showed a sagacity of perception which no intricacy
of detail could blind, no suddenness
of attack confuse, and which afterwards so
distinguished him as a Judge. He was thrown
among the leading lawyers; and undaunted
as all young lawyers should be (although preserving
their modesty of deportment and learning),
he measured swords with the most accomplished.
Although sometimes vanquished, he
always received honors from even the victors.

It is a prevailing opinion with the junior
members of the legal profession, that their
seniors delight in snubbing them; that they
are fond of being discourteous, and arrogant;
that they are envious of some and insulting
to others. But it is rare indeed that the seniors
err on other ground in this respect than
magnanimity. The industrious youngster,
the self-reliant youngster, the firm but respectful
youngster, the versed in elementary
principles among youngsters, are always received
with open arms. Law begets law. If
the junior commences a suit a senior may answer
it: and the reverse. The parson and
the doctor are in perpetual interference with
the neighbors and brethren of their particular
calling. But lawyers, like bees in the
beehive, must of necessity assist and succor
each other, or there will be less honey laid
away when the summer is past and the harvest
ended.

Early in his professional career he became
an ardent politician. He was a Jeffersonian
Democrat, and at the bar of his residence
stood almost alone in his partisan position.
As such a party man he went into the State
Legislature, and became an acknowledged
leader. He possessed that great quality for
a leader, the faculty of extempore speaking,
joined with the ability to condense and elucidate
the topics he took in hand. But he
never submitted the convictions of his judgment
to party dictation; and soon after his
entering the arena of legislative warfare, he
bravely stemmed party tide in advocating an
increase of salaries for the State judges. The
latter were all federalists, and it was not to
be wondered that the republicans of that
day, who wore in their noses the rings of
party, should shrug their shoulders at the
prospect of benefiting political opponents.
But by his firm conduct, and by his confident
assertion and able arguments in favor of the
measure, it was carried. And to Joseph
Story, more than any other man, Massachusetts
is indebted for the opportunity of employing
ablest judicial officers, without making
their families beggars.

It is the disgrace of our country that its
judicial officers are the most poorly paid of
all professions and pursuits. And in every
section of the Union, that distinguished lawyer
who accepts a seat upon the bench, must
hold the glories of his honor at a very high
price, to surrender his ordinary professional
emoluments for the wretched pittance which
the various States dole out for days of public
toil and nights of private study. We desire
to look no further than this Empire State for
examples. This Empire State, with its magnificent
resources and proudly developing
energies, should be the last to unite in adjudging
its judicial officers to the labors of
galley slaves, and to then pay them by the
year less than a ballet-dancer receives by
the month in all its principal cities. Two
thousand five hundred dollars per year is the
astounding sum which this same Empire
State pays to its highest judicial officers. If
we reverse the saying of Walpole, and read
“every price has its man,” we may not wonder
if Dogberries and grandmothers are occasionally
found upon the bench, dispensing
their honest but destructive platitudes, and
their Malaprop constructions of commercial
law, to juries of astounded merchants.

From the arena of State politics, Mr. Story
next changed his position to the temple of
national discussions at Washington. His career
in Congress was, however, limited to one
session, and to a vacancy-seat occasioned by
a death. He declined re-election; for in the
words of his autobiographical account of this
portion of his career, he had lost all relish
for political controversy, and had found that
an entire obedience to party projects required
such constant sacrifices of opinion and feeling,
that he preferred to devote himself with singleness
of heart to the study of the law,
which was at all times the object of his admiration
and almost exclusive devotion.
Public sentiment, however, forced him again
into the State councils at home, where more
liberty of professional engagement was permitted.
He was in political life but a brief
period again, before, in his thirty-second
year, President Madison pressed his acceptance
of a vacant Associate Justiceship in the
Supreme Court of the United States, which
had been declined by Levi Lincoln and by
John Quincy Adams, then in Russia. Although
the acceptance involved the surrender
of heavy professional emolument, the high
honor, the permanence of the tenure, and
the opportunity of gratifying his juridical
studies that he so much loved, joined in compelling
his acquiescence.

“The atrocious crime of being a young
man,” which had compelled a hatred of William
Pitt the younger, in a former day, was
now brought up against him by many whose
party subserviency fairly blushed before his
manly integrity, and by others who envied
him his success. But one year at the Circuit
silenced all complaint. And in his thirty-third[pg 179]
year he was acknowledged to be the
able jurist whom, at his death in his sixty-sixth
year of age, a whole nation mourned.

Dismissing for the present all consideration
of his judicial life, and all estimate of his
ability upon the bench, and passing over
nearly twenty years of his life, we meet him
in the possession of his fourth great honor in
life—but an honor which was ever the first
prized by him in all his after career—the appointment
of Law Professor in Cambrige
Law School.

Mr. Nathan Dane, whose Abridgement of
American law in many volumes had obtained
for him the gratitude of the profession at
large, and the more substantial testimonial
of pecuniary profit, had determined, about the
fiftieth year of Judge Story’s life, to repay
the law some of the profits which its votaries
had bestowed upon him, by donating ten
thousand dollars for the establishment of a
new professorship. He annexed to his donation,
however, the condition that Judge Story
should be the incumbent. To the great delight
of the donor, and of the College Fellows,
the Judge assented, and was inaugurated
as Dane Professor of Law, with a special
view to Lectures upon the Law of Nations,
Commercial and Maritime Law, Federal Law
and Equity—a station which he filled to the
day of his lamented death.

This brief survey of his life presents him
then in several public aspects; as a student, as
an advocate, as a statesman, as a judge, and
as an expounder of the great principles of law,
which he worshipped with an idolatry of love.

To speak of his political career would not
belong to the scope of our article. And to
sit in judgment upon his judicial career would
be our presumption. Older and abler pens
must render their tributes to the extent and
varied richness of his legal lore, which, taking
root in principles, branched into the minutiæ
of detail, under every sun and in every clime
where law is recognized as a rule of human
action. His judicial fame can never be increased
or diminished by individual estimate.
The law of patents, of admiralty and prizes,
the jurisprudence of equity, and above all,
his luminous explorations of what were once
constitutional labyrinths, are monuments as
indestructible as the Pyramids. If every
trace of their original oneness be lost, they
will yet live in the hours of future judicial
days, in professional acts, and in the guiding
policy of a remote posterity. His library of
treatises are legal classics; and the worst defects
which flippant carpers and canvassers
of their claims to merit have discovered in
their pages, have been their richness of detail
and polish of learning! And no one can
deny that as a judge he was the very example
which ‘Hobbes’ in his ‘Leviathan,’ carried
in mind when he thus wrote—”the
things that make a good judge or good interpreter
of the laws, are first—a right understanding
of that principal law of nature
called Equity, which depending not on the
reading of other men’s writings, but on the
goodness of a man’s own natural reason and
meditation, is presumed to be in those most
who have had most leisure and the most inclination
to meditate thereon; second—contempt
of unnecessary riches and preferments;
third—to be able in judgment to divest himself
of all fear, anger, hatred, love and compassion;
fourthly and lastly—patience to
hear, diligent attention in hearing, and
memory to retain, digest, and apply what he
hath heard.”

Not the least amiable phase of the life of
Judge Story, was the attention which he
gave to letters and literary pursuits. He was
no mere lawyer: no stringer of professional
centos. He never hid his heart with the
veil of dignity; nor smothered his fresh impulses
(preserved intact from worldly rust
since boyhood) with the weight of his judicial
and professional labors. While he believed
that the law was a jealous mistress, he
knew that this mistress was too stable and
sensible to decree that a gentle dalliance or
seasonable flirtation with her maids of honor—Poetry,
or the Arts, or Literature, or Love—was
an unloyal act. He could turn from
Grotius to Dickens, from Vattel to Thackeray.
He could digest the points of the elaborate
arguments of eminent counsel, and then turn
aside to a gentle tonic from the administrating
hand of Smollett or Walter Scott.
Method was his master-key to all the combinations
in the locks of labor.

Twice married he never ceased to eulogize
the bliss of domesticity. Surrounded by loving
eyes, the currents of his freshened affection
flowed deeper and clearer every year. How
he treasured home and home joys may be
collected in the following lines from his
poem on solitude (before referred to), written
in his twenty-second year.

Touching the poem from which these lines
are taken, we remember being shown the
only copy of the published book which was
known to exist, by the family of the Judge.
The Assistant Librarian (who was born for
his station in all that regards enthusiastic
love of his duties), of the Harvard College
library, showed us, with great triumph, a
small sheep-bound volume, entitled “Solitude
and other Poems, by Joseph Story,”
printed sometime in the commencement of
this century: saying, “the Judge has burned
all the copies he can pick up, and this is only
to be read here.” This poem was a sore
subject to the author. He viewed it as not[pg 180]
only a blot upon his dignity, but an annoyance
to his professional fame. Numerous
critics have laughed at it; but apart from the
shorter poems, the main theme showed much
aptitude of poetic imagery, invention, and
harmony of expression. Glance at the following
lines, which contain much of the
genuine spark:

Or this—

Or this—

It is highly probable that the learned Justice,
knowing his taste for the poetical and
fanciful, and his aptitude at the harmony of
language, often erred in his judicial writings
and treatises, by avoiding beauty of expression,
in fear lest the dignity of his subject
should be injured by too much association
with the creatures of fancy. We have known
most accomplished lawyers err through this
same caution. Our biographer himself (Mr.
William W. Story) has certainly done himself
great injustice as a writer in his work on
“Contracts,” when, in the pages before us,
he presents us with so much delicacy of fancy
and rhetorical finish. Blackstone in his
“Commentaries,” Jones in his “Bailment”
treatise, Stephens in his essay upon “Pleading,”
time-honored Fearne in his “Contingent
Remainders,” have shown how grateful and
how suitable it is for the legal readers to find
brilliancy of rhetoric adorning the most profound
learning.

But certainly Judge Story possessed to a
remarkable degree the faculty of condensation
in his poetical works. His rhyme was
not reason run mad; but reason in modest
holiday attire. Where are lines at once so
compact and so searching in their wisdom as
the following, penned in 1832, as matters of
advice to a young law student:

If Mr. Story had never been elevated to
the bench it is not likely his name would ever
have become national property. Although
plunged into politics in his earlier life, he was
not fitted for the life. His devotion to the
law, and his dread of becoming that slave to
party usages which all public men must necessarily
more or less fashion of themselves,
would have retained him in his native state,
and made his usefulness sectional. To the
politicians of the school of General Jackson,
and to the administration of that President, he
was particularly distasteful. His tenacious
conservatism drew forth from the “old hero,”
on one occasion, the remark, that “he was
the most dangerous man in the country.”
Lord Eldon, with his doubts and pertinacious
toryism was not more unpopular among the
reformers in England than was Judge Story—the
last of the old regime of federal judges—with
the bank radicals of 1832.

When Chief Justice Marshall died he felt
almost broken-hearted. A new race of constitutional
expounders had arisen around him.
Brother justices, with modern constructions,
and more liberal notions of national law,
were by his side. In many decisions he was
now a sole dissenter. His pride was invaded;
his self-love tortured; his adoration of certain
legal constructions which he had deemed
immutable in their nature, was desecrated.
And, for many years previous to his decease,
he had contemplated resigning from the federal
judiciary, and living alone for his darling
law school.

This school was his adopted child. He had
taken it in a feeble and helpless infancy. He
had given it strength and increased vitality.
He brought it up to a vigorous and useful
maturity. It was loved by only a handful of
students when he gave his name and talents
to aid its life: but when he died, a hundred
and fifty pupils were its warm suitors, and
hundreds of lawyers over the whole union
cherished its prosperity as a link in their own
chains of happiness.

And, although he thought not of it, his labors
in the law school secure for his memory
in the present generation a more brilliant existence
than his array of judicial decisions,
and his thousands of written pages, can ever
bestow. In some pine forest settlement of
Maine, or in some rude court-house in California,
there are lawyers who bring before
them every day his genial smiles and his impressive
lectures, looked upon and heard by
them in former times at Cambridge. Over
all the Union, in almost every village, town,
and city, are his pupils. Each one of them
may sometimes reflect with rapture upon
their days of college life, or remember with[pg 181]
pride their first professional success: but
not one of these considerations of reminiscence
is so grateful to his mind as the thought
of his novitiate with Justice Story. Depend
upon it he treasures up those Cambridge text-books,
those Cambridge note-books whose
leaves daguerreotype the learning of the eminent
deceased, those catalogues of students
where his name is proudly found, as the most
valuable portions of his library. He will never
part with them: but they will descend
to his children.

It was our privilege and pleasure also to
know Mr. Justice Story at Cambridge; to
have spent days of pleasure in the hours of his
society; to have rendered to his teachings
the tribute of delighted attention and grateful
recollection. We, too, have been fascinated
with that conversation, whose variety of exuberance
and sometimes egotism, were its
greatest ornaments. In the sunshine of his
intellect our mind has sunned itself, and been
warmed into zealous and proselyting admiration.
To his gray-haired teachings we have
paid personal reverence, and we unaffectedly
hope to have caught from his society and intercourse
a spark of that professional enthusiasm
which is the only true guiding-star of
the plodding lawyer.

The December blasts are hoarsely sobbing
to-night through Mount Auburn, the garden
of his mortal repose—the hallowed spot
which his eloquence consecrated in its origin,
and which his religious love in his lifetime
sacredly cherished. The snows of winter
and the autumn-woven carpet of fallen leaves
are heaped upon his honored grave, the sodded
paths to which, in the glowing spring-time
and fragrant summer, are pressed most
frequent with the tread of faithful mourners.
Years have passed since that honored grave
was first closed upon him. Longer years have
flown since we were under his teachings. But
we seem to view him the same as of yore.
Again the class is assembled in the hushed
lecture-room as his familiar tread is heard at
the door; or as the burst of applause, where
there is no sycophantic flattery known or
felt, greets his entrance to his seat. Again
we see him adjusting his genial spectacles,
and looking around upon the upturned faces
with parental pride. Again we hear his
mellowed, although often impetuous accents,
expounding familiar principles of law, and
descending to the consideration of “first
things” with as much pride and carefulness as
the artist treats his Rubens or Titian, which
for years and years has hung before him in
all lights and shades and in every combination
of position.

Again, we occupy a modest corner of the
library while he is holding his moot court;
infusing into the dignity of his manner a
marked suavity of disposition which never
forsook him; or he is perpetrating some appropriate
legal joke to his audience, who
never played upon his ease or good nature.

Again, we have stolen into the self-same
library while he is holding an equity term of
his circuit, to listen to the words of judicial
wisdom which came from his utterance, exuberant
as pearls of fancy from the mouth of
an inspired poet.

Again, we see him at the summer twilight,
seated by the trellised portico of his hospitable
and happy homestead, surrounded by
family or friends, enjoying the amenities of
life with unaffected pleasure, and sometimes
awakening the garden echoes with his cheerful
ringing laugh; or we see him in the same
hour of the day driving under the venerable
elms of the numerous commons, gazing and
bowing around with all the pleasure which
the king of the fairy book marked upon his
face when the love of his subjects, among
whom he passed, came forth with the evening
breeze to bless and greet him.

And then we pass into “reverie,” and live
a few minutes of “dream-life,” recalling to
mind the maxims and sayings which were uttered
in our presence; and the many bright
exemplars placed before his pupils, and the
kindly greetings which were showered all
about—for he was no distinguisher of persons
so long as honor of feeling and uprightness
of motive abounded in his presence.

He is gone! Yet in these pages of biography
before us he will always live. From infancy
to the ripened greatness of old age, his
life is preserved to posterity by the hand of
his faithful and grateful son, whose duty has
been most ably and interestingly performed.
The very minutiæ of his life are presented
with fidelity and modesty of reference. Some
may carp at this; to these let us say with
the French proverbialist, Rien n’est indifférent
dans la vie d’un grand homme; le genie
se revéle dans ses moindres actions. The
straws of every day life mark the direction
of the breezes of individual action.

To the hearts of his pupils we would send
this epitaph, and ask them if aught less tributary
could be said of one who was and is to
them a father.

Here sleeps the mortality of Joseph Story,
who lived his days so well that he won in a
short lifetime an immortality of fame. His
career as a Man reflected lustre upon the
lustre of an honored father’s manhood, and
added to the virtues which his mother bequeathed
him. As a Politician, he rendered
obeisance only to his conscience. As a
Lawyer, he never disgraced his profession by
a thought, and even honored it by his slightest
acts. The colleague of Marshall, the two
now shine together as twin stars in the often
contemplated firmament of Judicial Renown.
Not selfish of his Learning, it is scattered to
the uttermost parts of the earth, and is treasured
wherever it has fallen. The learning
which he borrowed from continental Europe
he repaid with magnificent interest. In Westminster
Hall his name is associated with Nottingham,
Hale, Mansfield, and Stowell. Counting[pg 182]
as dross the wealth of professional eminence,
he became from the love of it an expounder
of law to its tyros. He has spread
for thousands of adopted children a banquet
of the treasures of legal lore, and next to reverencing
his paternal love they cherish with
profound gratitude the memory of his slightest
instructions. While the Union of his birthplace
exists, her citizens will regard with unfeigned
admiration his constitutional teachings.

COLUMBUS AT THE GATES OF GENOA.

WRITTEN FOR THE INTERNATIONAL MAGAZINE

BY THE AUTHOR OF “NILE NOTES OF A HOWADJI.”

Christopher Columbus was born at Genoa in 1437. In 1851 the Genoese
are finishing his monument.

FEATHERTOP: A MORALIZED LEGEND.

WRITTEN FOR THE INTERNATIONAL MONTHLY MAGAZINE

BY NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE.

“Dickon,” cried Mother Rigby, “a coal
for my pipe!”

The pipe was in the old dame’s mouth,
when she said these words. She had thrust
it there after filling it with tobacco, but without
stooping to light it at the hearth; where,
indeed, there was no appearance of a fire
having been kindled, that morning. Forthwith,
however, as soon as the order was
given, there was an intense red glow out of
the bowl of the pipe, and a whiff of smoke
from Mother Rigby’s lips. Whence the coal
came, and how brought thither by an invisible
hand, I have never been able to discover.

“Good!” quoth Mother Rigby, with a nod
of her head. “Thank ye, Dickon! And
now for making this scarecrow. Be within
call, Dickon, in case I need you again!”

The good woman had risen thus early (for
as yet it was scarcely sunrise), in order to set
about making a scarecrow, which she intended
to put in the middle of her corn patch.
It was now the latter week of May, and the
crows and blackbirds had already discovered
the little, green, rolled-up leaf of the Indian
corn, just peeping out of the soil. She was
determined, therefore, to contrive as lifelike
a scarecrow as ever was seen, and to finish it
immediately, from top to toe, so that it should
begin its sentinel’s duty that very morning.
Now, mother Rigby (as every body must have
heard) was one of the most cunning and potent
witches in New England, and might,
with very little trouble, have made a scarecrow[pg 183]
ugly enough to frighten the minister
himself. But, on this occasion, as she had
awakened in an uncommonly pleasant humor,
and was further dulcified by her pipe of tobacco,
she resolved to produce something
fine, beautiful, and splendid, rather than hideous
and horrible.

“I don’t want to set up a hobgoblin in my
own corn-patch, and almost at my own doorstep,”
said Mother Rigby to herself, puffing
out a whiff of smoke; “I could do it if I pleased;
but I’m tired of doing marvellous things,
and so I’ll keep within the bounds of everyday
business, just for variety’s sake. Besides,
there is no use in scaring the little children,
for a mile roundabout, though ’tis true I’m a
witch!”

It was settled, therefore, in her own mind,
that the scarecrow should represent a fine
gentleman of the period, so far as the materials
at hand would allow. Perhaps it may be
as well to enumerate the chief of the articles
that went to the composition of this figure.

The most important item of all, probably,
although it made so little show, was a certain
broomstick, on which Mother Rigby had
taken many an airy gallop at midnight, and
which now served the scarecrow by way of
a spinal column, or, as the unlearned phrase
it, a backbone. One of its arms was a disabled
flail which used to be wielded by Goodman
Rigby, before his spouse worried him
out of this troublesome world; the other, if
I mistake not, was composed of the pudding-stick
and a broken rung of a chair, tied loosely
together at the elbow. As for its legs,
the right was a hoe-handle, and the left an
undistinguished and miscellaneous stick from
the wood pile. Its lungs, stomach, and other
affairs of that kind, were nothing better than
a meal bag, stuffed with straw. Thus, we
have made out the skeleton and entire corporcity
of the scarecrow, with the exception
of its head; and this was admirably supplied
by a somewhat withered and shrivelled pumpkin,
in which Mother Rigby cut two holes for
the eyes and a slit for the mouth, leaving a
bluish-colored knob in the middle, to pass for
a nose. It was really quite a respectable face.

“I’ve seen worse ones on human shoulders,
at any rate,” said Mother Rigby. “And many
a fine gentleman has a pumpkin head, as well
as my scarecrow!”

But the clothes, in this case, were to be
the making of the man. So the good old
woman took down from a peg an ancient
plum-colored coat, of London make, and with
relics of embroidery on its seams, cuffs,
pocket-flabs, and button-holes, but lamentably
worn and faded, patched at the elbows,
tattered at the skirts, and threadbare all over.
On the left breast was a round hole, whence
either a star of nobility had been rent away,
or else the hot heart of some former wearer
had scorched it through and through. The
neighbors said, that this rich garment belonged
to the Black Man’s wardrobe, and that
he kept it at Mother Rigby’s cottage for the
convenience of slipping it on whenever he
wished to make a grand appearance at the
governor’s table. To match the coat, there
was a velvet waistcoat of very ample size,
and formerly embroidered with foliage, that
had been as brightly golden as the maple-leaves
in October, but which had now quite
vanished out of the substance of the velvet.
Next came a pair of scarlet breeches, once
worn by the French governor of Louisbourg,
and the knees of which had touched the lower
step of the throne of Louis le Grand. The
Frenchman had given these small-clothes to
an Indian powwow, who parted with them
to the old witch for a gill of strong waters,
at one of their dances in the forest. Furthermore,
Mother Rigby produced a pair of silk
stockings, and put them on the figure’s legs,
where they showed as unsubstantial as a
dream, with the wooden reality of the two
sticks making itself miserably apparent
through the holes. Lastly, she put her dead
husband’s wig on the bare scalp of the pumpkin,
and surmounted the whole with a dusty
three-cornered hat, in which was stuck the
longest tail feather of a rooster.

Then the old dame stood the figure up in
a corner of her cottage, and chuckled to behold
its yellow semblance of a visage, with
its nobby little nose thrust into the air. It
had a strangely self-satisfied aspect, and seemed
to say, “Come look at me!”

“And you are well worth looking at—that’s
a fact!” quoth Mother Rigby, in admiration
at her own handiwork: “I’ve made
many a puppet, since I’ve been a witch; but
methinks this is the finest of them all. ‘Tis
almost too good for a scarecrow. And, by
the by, I’ll just fill a fresh pipe of tobacco,
and then take him out to the corn-patch.”

While filling her pipe, the old woman continued
to gaze with almost motherly affection
at the figure in the corner. To say the truth,
whether it were chance, or skill, or downright
witchcraft, there was something wonderfully
human in this ridiculous shape, bedizened
with its tattered finery; and as for the
countenance, it appeared to shrivel its yellow
surface into a grin—a funny kind of expression,
betwixt scorn and merriment, as if it
understood itself to be a jest at mankind.
The more Mother Rigby looked, the better
she was pleased.

“Dickon,” cried she sharply, “another
coal for my pipe!”

Hardly had she spoken than, just as before,
there was a red-glowing coal on the top of
the tobacco. She drew in a long whiff, and
puffed it forth again into the bar of morning
sunshine, which struggled through the one
dusty pane of her cottage window. Mother
Rigby always liked to flavor her pipe with a
coal of fire from the particular chimney corner
whence this had been brought. But
where that chimney corner might be, or who
brought the coal from it—further than that[pg 184]
the invisible messenger seemed to respond to
the name of Dickon—I cannot tell.

“That puppet, yonder,” thought Mother
Rigby, still with her eyes fixed on the scarecrow,
“is too good a piece of work to stand
all summer in a corn-patch, frightening away
the crows and blackbirds. He’s capable of
better things. Why, I’ve danced with a
worse one, when partners happened to be
scarce, at our witch-meetings in the forest!
What if I should let him take his chance
among the other men of straw and empty
fellows, who go bustling about the world?”

The old witch took three or four more
whiffs of her pipe, and smiled.

“He’ll meet plenty of his brethren at every
street-corner!” continued she. “Well; I
didn’t mean to dabble in witchcraft to-day,
further than the lighting of my pipe; but a
witch I am, and a witch I’m likely to be, and
there’s no use trying to shirk it. I’ll make a
man of my scarecrow, were it only for the
joke’s sake!”

While muttering these words, Mother Rigby
took the pipe from her own mouth, and
thrust it into the crevice which represented
the same feature in the pumpkin-visage of
the scarecrow.

“Puff, darling, puff!” said she. “Puff
away, my fine fellow! your life depends on
it!”

This was a strange exhortation, undoubtedly,
to be addressed to a mere thing of sticks,
straw, and old clothes, with nothing better
than a shrivelled pumpkin for a head; as we
know to have been the scarecrow’s case.
Nevertheless, as we must carefully hold in
remembrance, Mother Rigby was a witch of
singular power and dexterity; and, keeping
this fact duly before our minds, we shall see
nothing beyond credibility in the remarkable
incidents of our story. Indeed, the great
difficulty will be at once got over, if we can
only bring ourselves to believe, that, as soon
as the old dame bade him puff, there came a
whiff of smoke from the scarecrow’s mouth.
It was the very feeblest of whiffs, to be sure;
but it was followed by another and another,
each more decided than the preceding one.

“Puff away, my pet! puff away, my pretty
one!” Mother Rigby kept repeating, with her
pleasantest smile. “It is the breath of life
to ye; and that you may take my word for!”

Beyond all question the pipe was bewitched.
There must have been a spell either in
the tobacco or in the fiercely glowing coal
that so mysteriously burned on top of it, or
in the pungent aromatic smoke which exhaled
from the kindled weed. The figure,
after a few doubtful attempts, at length blew
forth a volley of smoke, extending all the
way from the obscure corner into the bar of
sunshine. There it eddied and melted away
among the motes of dust. It seemed a convulsive
effort; for the two or three next
whiffs were fainter, although the coal still
glowed, and threw a gleam over the scarecrow’s
visage. The old witch clapt her skinny
hands together, and smiled encouragingly
upon her handiwork. She saw that the
charm worked well. The shrivelled, yellow
face, which heretofore had been no face at
all, had already a thin, fantastic haze, as it
were, of human likeness, shifting to and fro
across it; sometimes vanishing entirely, but
growing more perceptible than ever with
the next whiff from the pipe. The whole
figure, in like manner, assumed a show of
life, such as we impart to ill-defined shapes
among the clouds, and half-deceive ourselves
with the pastime of our own fancy.

If we must needs pry closely into the matter,
it may be doubted whether there was
any real change, after all, in the sordid,
worn-out, worthless, and ill-jointed substance
of the scarecrow; but merely a spectral illusion,
and a cunning effect of light and shade,
so colored and contrived as to delude the eyes
of most men. The miracles of witchcraft
seem always to have had a very shallow subtlety;
and, at least, if the above explanation
do not hit the truth of the process, I can
suggest no better.

“Well puffed, my pretty lad!” still cried
old Mother Rigby. “Come, another good,
stout whiff, and let it be with might and
main! Puff for thy life, I tell thee! Puff
out of the very bottom of thy heart; if any
heart thou hast, or any bottom to it! Well
done, again! Thou didst suck in that mouthfull
as if for the pure love of it.”

And then the witch beckoned to the scarecrow,
throwing so much magnetic potency
into her gesture, that it seemed as if it must
inevitably be obeyed, like the mystic call of
the loadstone, when it summons the iron.

“Why lurkest thou in the corner, lazy
one?” said she. “Step forth! Thou hast
the world before thee?”

Upon my word, if the legend were not one
which I heard on my grandmother’s knee,
and which had established its place among
things credible before my childish judgment
could analyze its probability, I question whether
I should have the face to tell it now!

In obedience to Mother Rigby’s word, and
extending its arm as if to reach her out-stretched
hand, the figure made a step forward—a
kind of hitch and jerk, however,
rather than a step—then tottered, and almost
lost its balance. What could the witch expect?
It was nothing, after all, but a scarecrow,
stuck upon two sticks. But the strong-willed
old beldam scowled, and beckoned,
and flung the energy of her purpose so forcibly
at this poor combination of rotten wood,
and musty straw, and ragged garments, that
it was compelled to show itself a man, in spite
of the reality of things. So it stepped into the
bar of sunshine. There it stood—poor devil
of a contrivance that it was!—with only the
thinnest vesture of human similitude about
it, through which was evident the stiff, ricketty,
incongruous, faded, tattered, good-for-nothing[pg 185]
patchwork of its substance, ready to
sink in a heap upon the floor, as conscious of
its own unworthiness to be erect. Shall I
confess the truth? At its present point of
vivification, the scarecrow reminds me of
some of the lukewarm and abortive characters,
composed of heterogeneous materials,
used for the thousandth time, and never
worth using, with which romance-writers
(and myself, no doubt, among the rest), have
so over-peopled the world of fiction.

But the fierce old hag began to get angry,
and show a glimpse of her diabolic nature
(like a snake’s head, peeping with a hiss out
of her bosom,) at this pusillanimous behavior
of the thing, which she had taken the trouble
to put together.

“Puff away, wretch!” cried she, wrathfully.
“Puff, puff, puff, thou thing of straw
and emptiness!—thou rag or two!—thou
meal-bag!—thou pumpkin-head!—thou nothing!—where
shall I find a name vile
enough to call thee by! Puff, I say, and suck
in thy fantastic life along with the smoke; else
I snatch the pipe from thy mouth, and hurl
thee where that red coal came from!”

Thus threatened, the unhappy scarecrow
had nothing for it, but to puff away for dear
life. As need was, therefore, it applied itself
lustily to the pipe, and sent forth such abundant
volleys of tobacco-smoke, that the small
cottage-kitchen became all vaporous. The
one sunbeam struggled mistily through, and
could but imperfectly define the image of the
cracked and dusty window-pane on the opposite
wall. Mother Rigby, meanwhile, with
one brown arm akimbo, and the other
stretched towards the figure, loomed grimly
amid the obscurity, with such port and expression
as when she was wont to heave a
ponderous nightmare on her victims, and
stand at the bedside to enjoy their agony. In
fear and trembling did this poor scarecrow
puff. But its efforts, it must be acknowledged,
served an excellent purpose; for, with
each successive whiff, the figure lost more
and more of its dizzy and perplexing tenuity,
and seemed to take denser substance. Its
very garments, moreover, partook of the magical
change, and shone with the gloss of
novelty, and glistened with the skilfully embroidered
gold that had long ago been rent
away. And, half-revealed among the smoke,
a yellow visage bent its lustreless eyes on
Mother Rigby.

At last, the old witch clenched her fist,
and shook it at the figure. Not that she was
positively angry, but merely acting on the
principle—perhaps untrue, or not the only
truth, though as high a one as Mother Rigby
could be expected to attain—that feeble and
torpid natures, being incapable of better inspiration,
must be stirred up by fear. But
here was the crisis. Should she fail in what
she now sought to effect, it was her ruthless
purpose to scatter the miserable simulacre
into its original elements.

“Thou hast a man’s aspect,” said she,
sternly. “Have also the echo and mockery
of a voice! I bid thee speak!”

The scarecrow gasped, struggled, and at
length emitted a murmur, which was so incorporated
with its smoky breath that you
could scarcely tell whether it were indeed a
voice, or only a whiff of tobacco. Some
narrators of this legend, hold the opinion,
that Mother Rigby’s conjurations, and the
fierceness of her will, had compelled a familiar
spirit into the figure, and that the voice was
his.

“Mother,” mumbled the poor stifled voice,
“be not so awful with me! I would fain
speak; but being without wits, what can I
say?”

“Thou canst speak, darling, canst thou?”
cried Mother Rigby, relaxing her grim countenance
into a smile. “And what shalt thou
say, quoth-a! Say, indeed! Art thou of the
brotherhood of the empty skull, and demandest
of me what thou shalt say? Thou shalt say
a thousand things, and saying them a thousand
times over, thou shalt still have said
nothing! Be not afraid, I tell thee! When
thou comest into the world (whither I purpose
sending thee, forthwith), thou shalt not
lack the wherewithal to talk. Talk! Why,
thou shalt babble like a mill-stream, if thou
wilt. Thou hast brains enough for that, I
trow!”

“At your service, mother,” responded the
figure.

“And that was well said, my pretty one!”
answered Mother Rigby. “Then thou spakest
like thyself, and meant nothing. Thou shalt
have a hundred such set phrases, and five
hundred to the boot of them. And now,
darling, I have taken so much pains with
thee, and thou art so beautiful, that, by my
troth, I love thee better than any witch’s
puppet in the world; and I’ve made them of
all sorts—clay, wax, straw, sticks, night-fog,
morning-mist, sea-foam, and chimney-smoke!
But thou art the very best. So give heed
to what I say!”

“Yes, kind mother,” said the figure,
“with all my heart!”

“With all thy heart!” cried the old witch,
setting her hands to her sides, and laughing
loudly. “Thou hast such a pretty way of
speaking! With all thy heart! And thou
didst put thy hand to the left side of thy
waistcoat, as if thou really hadst one!”

So now, in high good humor with this fantastic
contrivance of hers, Mother Rigby told
the scarecrow that it must go and play its
part in the great world, where not one man
in a hundred, she affirmed, was gifted with
more real substance than itself. And, that
he might hold up his head with the best of
them, she endowed him, on the spot, with an
unreckonable amount of wealth. It consisted
partly of a gold mine in Eldorado, and of ten
thousand shares in a broken bubble, and of
half a million acres of vineyard at the North[pg 186]
Pole, and of a castle in the air and a chateau
in Spain, together with all the rents and income
therefrom accruing. She further made
over to him the cargo of a certain ship, laden
with salt of Cadiz, which she herself, by her
necromantic arts, had caused to founder, ten
years before, in the deepest part of mid-ocean.
If the salt were not dissolved, and could be
brought to market, it would fetch a pretty
penny among the fishermen. That he might
not lack ready money, she gave him a copper
farthing, of Birmingham manufacture, being
all the coin she had about her, and likewise
a great deal of brass, which she applied to
his forehead, thus making it yellower than
ever.

SMILES AND TEARS.

WRITTEN FOR THE INTERNATIONAL MAGAZINE,

BY RICHARD COE.

FREEDOM OF THOUGHT AND THE LATEST MIRACLES.

Archbishop Hughes, in a late speech
attempted an exposition of the relations
between the Roman Catholic Church and
Liberty, with special reference to the position
assumed by him and other prelates, that
the Roman Catholics are, not less than Protestants,
upholders of freedom in opinion and
in discussion. The interesting brochure of
his Grace will be better appreciated by our
readers, perhaps, if we mention a few recent
facts illustrative of the subject, as it affects
“authors and books.” The French Roman
Catholic Bishop of Lucan has a pastoral
in the Univers condemning Walter Scott’s
works, without exception. He does the same
by Chateaubriand, and the Arabian Nights,
and Don Quixote—the first as Protestant,
the second as insufficiently Catholic, the third
as no Christian, the fourth as of no religion
at all. One unhappy writer of school-books
is condemned because he cites Guizot and
Thierry; another because he blames the massacres
of Saint Bartholomew, and thinks they
were caused by “religious fanaticism.” But
first of all, and more than all, the bishop condemns
“that irreligious” Parisian journal, La
Presse. “The number of its subscribers is
deplorable; but they are becoming and shall
become less; no priest must subscribe to it.
No priest must be seen with it. No priest
must ‘ordinarily’ read it.” This is all very
proper, according to antecedents, but we
should not like it if Bishop Hughes deprived
us of the Tribune, the Herald, or the Journal
of Commerce, all of which are as bad, in the
same way, as the Presse. Another example
of the prohibition of books, we add from the
cyclic letter just issued by Cardinal Lambruschini,
condemning Professor Nuytz’s works
on ecclesiastical law:

One of the latest miracles is described is the
Paris Univers, as follows—in the most perfect
good faith:—

Of course the girl never was ill at all.

Miraculous agencies, it appears, have been
applied to by the highest powers at Rome,
with the purpose which actuates the old ladies
who study Zadkiel. A young peasant
girl living at Sezza, near the Neapolitan frontier,
has been for some time in a kind of ecstatic,
or, as non-believers in miracles would
call it, magnetic state, and in that part of the
province of Marittima and Campagna, is already
known under the denomination of St.
Catherine. Her fame seems to have originated
in a miracle which she worked some time ago
on the person of an old woman, who came
to her in great distress because her daughter
had died in childbed, leaving the grandmother
of the infant without pecuniary means
for its support. “St. Catherine” is said to
have directed the old woman to suckle the
baby herself, assuring her that, before she
reached home, she would find herself in a
condition to do so—a direction which the
venerable applicant strictly obeyed, and
found her hopes realized! Other supernatural
answers were subsequently given by the
saint to various applications of the neighboring
peasantry, and stolen fowls and stray
cattle were recovered by her indications.
But the concourse of people at last grew so
great that that the ecclesiastical authorities interfered
in behalf of the sybil, whom they
placed in safety and repose within the walls
of a convent, prohibiting, at the same time,
any one from coming to consult her without
the express permission of the bishop:—

The Bolognese paper, Vero Amico, which
is thoroughly devoted to the ecclesiastical
cause, occasionally devotes some of its columns
to war in favor of miracles, especially
as wrought by images. The following is its
account of a recent miraculous change of the
weather at the intercession of the Virgin:—

These poor absurdities, so suggestive of
pity and contempt, may he compared with
the tricks of Rochester knockers and travelling
mountebanks generally in this country,
and no “authority of the church” can raise
them, in the minds of sensible men, to a
higher respectability.

THE SONG QUEEN.

Our excellent friend James T. Fields, now
in Europe, sends us from his note book the
following fine apostrophe to Jenny Lind:

WRITTEN IN A CONCERT ROOM, LONDON, 1847.

LOVE SONG.

WRITTEN FOR THE INTERNATIONAL MAGAZINE

BY R. S. CHILTON.

AUTUMN LINES.

WRITTEN FOR THE INTERNATIONAL MAGAZINE

BY J. R. THOMPSON.

THE PUNISHMENT OF GINA MONTANI.

From Colburn’s New Monthly Magazine.

VISION OF CHARLES XI.

From Sharpe’s Magazine

We are in the habit of laughing incredulously
at stories of visions and supernatural
apparitions, yet some are so well authenticated,
that if we refuse to believe them, we
should, in consistency, reject all historical
evidence. The fact I am about to relate is
guaranteed by a declaration signed by four
credible witnesses; I will only add, that the
prediction contained in this declaration was
well known, and generally spoken of, long
before the occurrence of the events which
have apparently fulfilled it.

Charles XI., father of the celebrated Charles
XII., was one of the most despotic, but, at
the same time, wisest monarchs, who ever
reigned in Sweden. He curtailed the enormous
privileges of the nobility, abolished the
power of the Senate, made laws on his own
authority; in a word, he changed the constitution
of the country, hitherto an oligarchy,
and forced the States to invest him with absolute
power. He was a man of enlightened[pg 197]
and strong mind, firmly attached to the Lutheran
religion; his disposition was cold, unfeeling,
and phlegmatic, utterly destitute of
imagination. He had just lost his queen,
Ulrica Eleonora, and he appeared to feel her
death more than could have been expected
from a man of his character. He became
even more gloomy and silent than before, and
his incessant application to business proved
his anxiety to banish painful reflections.

Towards the close of an autumn evening,
he was sitting in his dressing-gown and slippers,
before a large fire, in his private apartment.
His chamberlain, Count Brahe, and
his physician, Baumgarten, were with him.
The evening wore away, and his majesty did
not dismiss them as usual; with his head
down and his eyes fixed on the fire, he maintained
a profound silence, weary of his guests,
and fearing, half unconsciously, to remain
alone. The count and his companion tried
various subjects of conversation, but could
interest him in nothing. At length Brahe,
who supposed that sorrow for the queen was
the cause of his depression, said with a deep
sigh, and pointing to her portrait, which hung
in the room,

“What a likeness that is! How truly it
gives the expression, at once so gentle and so
dignified!”

“Nonsense!” said the king, angrily, “the
portrait is far too flattering; the queen was
decidedly plain.”

Then, vexed at his unkind words, he rose
and walked up and down the room, to hide
an emotion at which he blushed. After a few
minutes he stopped before the window looking
into the court; the night was black, and
the moon in her first quarter.

The palace where the kings of Sweden now
reside was not completed, and Charles XI.
who commenced it, inhabited the old palace,
situated on the Ritzholm, facing Lake Modu.
It is a large building in the form of a horseshoe:
the king’s private apartments were in
one of the extremities; opposite was the great
hall where the States assembled to receive
communications from the crown. The windows
of that hall suddenly appeared illuminated.
The king was startled, but at first
supposed that a servant with a light was passing
through; but then, that hall was never
opened except on state occasions, and the
light was too brilliant to be caused by a single
lamp. It then occurred to him that it
must be a conflagration; but there was no
smoke, and the glass was not broken; it had
rather the appearance of an illumination.
Brahe’s attention being called to it, he proposed
sending one of the pages to ascertain
the cause of the light, but the king stopped
him, saying, he would go himself to the hall.
He left the room, followed by the count and
doctor, with lighted torches. Baumgarten
called the man who had charge of the keys,
and ordered him, in the king’s name, to open
the doors of the great hall. Great was his
surprise at this unexpected command. He
dressed himself quickly, and came to the king
with his bunch of keys. He opened the first
door of a gallery which served as an antechamber
to the hall. The king entered, and
what was his amazement at finding the walls
hung with black.

“What is the meaning of this?” asked he.

The man replied, that he did not know
what to make of it, adding, “When the gallery
was last opened, there was certainly no
hanging over the oak panelling.”

The king walked on to the door of the hall.

“Go no further, for heaven’s sake,” exclaimed
the man; “surely there is sorcery
going on inside. At this hour, since the
queen’s death, they say she walks up and
down here. May God protect us!”

“Stop, sire,” cried the count and Baumgarten
together, “don’t you hear that noise?
Who knows to what dangers you are exposing
yourself! At all events, allow me to
summon the guards.”

“I will go in,” said the king, firmly; “open
the door at once.”

The man’s hand trembled so that he could
not turn the key.

“A fine thing to see an old soldier frightened,”
said the king, shrugging his shoulders;
“come, Count, will you open the door?”

“Sire,” replied Brahe, “let your majesty
command me to march to the mouth of a
Danish or German cannon, and I will obey
unhesitatingly, but I cannot defy hell itself.”

“Well,” said the king, in a tone of contempt,
“I can do it myself.”

He took the key, opened the massive oak
door, and entered the hall, pronouncing the
words, “With the help of God.” His three
attendants, whose curiosity overcame their
fears, or who, perhaps, were ashamed to desert
their sovereign, followed him. The hall
was lighted by an innumerable number of
torches. A black hanging had replaced the
old tapestry. The benches round the hall
were occupied by a multitude, all dressed in
black; their faces were so dazzlingly bright
that the four spectators of this scene were
unable to distinguish one amongst them. On
an elevated throne, from which the king was
accustomed to address the assembly, sat a
bloody corpse, as if wounded in several parts,
and covered with the ensigns of royalty; on
his right stood a child, a crown on his head,
and a sceptre in his hand; at his left an old
man leant on the throne; he was dressed in
the mantle formerly worn by the administrators
of Sweden, before it became a kingdom
under Gustavus Vasa. Before the throne
were seated several grave, austere looking
personages, in long black robes. Between
the throne and the benches of the assembly
was a block covered with black crape; an
axe lay beside it. No one in the vast assembly
appeared conscious of the presence of
Charles and his companions. On their entrance
they heard nothing but a confused[pg 198]
murmur, in which they could distinguish no
words. Then the most venerable of the
judges in the black robes, he who seemed to
be their president, rose, and struck his hand
five times on a folio volume which lay open
before him. Immediately there was a profound
silence, and some young men, richly
dressed, their hands tied behind their backs,
entered the hall by a door opposite to that
which Charles had opened. He who walked
first, and who appeared the most important
of the prisoners, stopped in the middle of the
hall, before the block, which he looked at
with supreme contempt. At the same time
the corpse on the throne trembled convulsively,
and a crimson stream flowed from his
wounds. The young man knelt down, laid
his head on the block, the axe glittered in the
air for a moment, descended on the block, the
head railed over the marble pavement, and
reached the feet of the king, and stained his
slipper with blood. Until this moment surprise
had kept Charles silent, but this horrible
spectacle roused him, and advancing two
or three steps towards the throne, he boldly
addressed the figure on its left in the well-known
formulary, “If thou art of God, speak;
if of the other, leave us in peace.”

The phantom answered slowly and solemnly,
“King Charles, this blood will not flow
in thy time, but five reigns after.” Here the
voice became less distinct, “Woe, woe, woe
to the blood of Vasa!” The forms of all the
assembly now became less clear, and seemed
but colored shades: soon they entirely disappeared;
the lights were extinguished; still
they heard a melodious noise, which one of
the witnesses compared to the murmuring of
the wind among the trees, another to the
sound a harp string gives in breaking. All
agreed as to the duration of the apparition,
which they said lasted ten minutes. The
hangings, the head, the waves of blood, all had
disappeared with the phantoms, but Charles’s
slipper still retained a crimson stain, which
alone would have served to remind him of
the scenes of this night, if indeed they had
not been too well engraven on his memory.

When the king returned to his apartment,
he wrote an account of what he had seen,
and he and his companions signed it. In spite
of all the precautions taken to keep these circumstances
private, they were well known,
even during the lifetime of Charles, and no
one hitherto has thought fit to raise doubts as
to their authenticity.

DIVINATION, WITCHCRAFT, AND MESMERISM.

From the Dublin University Magazine.

It seems strange that so obvious a case as
that of Barlaam and the monks of Mount
Athos has not been brought into the mesmerical
collection of pièces justificatives. The
first compiler of the authorities on which it
rests is Ughelli. The story is told in modern
language by Mosheim, by Fleury, and by
Gibbon at the years 1341-51. In taking the
version of it by the last (Decline and Fall, c.
63,) we shall run least risk of being imposed
on by over-credulity.

“The Fakirs of India and the monks of the
Oriental Church,” says the complacent philosopher
of Lausanne, “were alike persuaded
that in total abstraction of the mind and body,
the purer spirit may ascend to the enjoyment
and vision of the Deity. The opinions
and practices of the monasteries of Mount
Athos will be best represented in the words
of an abbot who flourished in the eleventh
century. ‘When thou art alone in thy cell,’
says the ascetic teacher, ‘shut thy door and
seat thyself in a corner: raise thy mind above
all things vain and transitory; recline thy
beard and chin on thy breast; turn thine
eyes and thy thoughts towards the middle of
thy belly, the region of the naval; and search
the place of the heart, the seat of the soul.
At first all will be dark and comfortless; but
if you persevere day and night you will feel
an ineffable joy; and no sooner has the soul
discovered the place of the heart, than it is
involved in a mystic and etherial light.’ This
light, the production of a distempered fancy,
the creature of an empty stomach and an
empty brain, was adored by the Quietists as
the pure and perfect essence of God himself;
and as long as the folly was confined to Mount
Athos, the simple solitaries were not inquisitive
how the divine essence could be a material
substance, or how an immaterial substance
could be perceived by the eyes of the
body. But in the reign of the younger Andronicus
these monasteries were visited by
Barlaam, a Calabrian monk, who was equally
skilled in philosophy and theology. The indiscretion
of an ascetic revealed to the curious
traveller the secrets of mental prayer,
and Barlaam embraced the opportunity of
ridiculing the Quietists who placed the soul
in the naval; of accusing the monks of Mount
Athos of heresy and blasphemy. His attack
compelled the more learned to renounce or
dissemble the simple devotion of their brethren;
and Gregory Palamas introduced a scholastic
distinction between the essence and operation
of God.”

Gregory illustrated his argument by a reference
to the celestial light manifested in the
transfiguration of our Lord on Mount Thabor.
On this distinction issue was taken by
the disputatious Calabrian, and the result was
the convocation of a synod at Constantinople,
whose decree “established as an article
of faith the uncreated light of Mount Thabor;
and, after so many insults, the reason of mankind
was slightly wounded by the addition of
a single absurdity.”

Of the truth of facts so long and openly
discussed, there can be no question. The
monks of Mount Athos did indeed put themselves
into a state which may with safety be
called one of mental lucidity, by fixing their
eyes intently on a point. Mr. Robertson, who[pg 199]
used to induce the mesmeric sleep by causing
his votaries to fix their eyes on a wafer, had
better precedent than he supposed for his
practice; and Miss Martineau, who, in her
artificial trances, saw all objects illuminated
has been unconsciously repeating a monastic
method of worship. The contemptuous indifference
of Gibbon for once arises from defect
of information; and when in a note he
observes that Mosheim “unfolds the causes
with the judgment of a philosopher,” while
Fleury “transcribes and translates with the
prejudices of a Catholic priest,” himself gives
a luculent example of the errors of philosophy,
and of the often unsuspected approach of prejudice
to truth. Mosheim’s observation, notwithstanding
the damaging approval of Gibbon,
is not without its value. “There is no
reason,” he says, “for any to be surprised at
this account, or to question its correctness.
For among the precepts and rules of all those
in the East who teach men how to withdraw
the mind from the body, and to unite it with
God, or inculcate what the Latins call a contemplative
and mystic life, whether they are
Christians, or Mohammedans, or Pagans, there
is this precept, viz., that the eyes must be fixed
every day for some hours upon some particular
object, and that whoever does this
will be rapt into a kind of ecstasy. See what
Engelbert Kempfer states concerning the
monks and mystics of Japan; and the account
of those of India by Francis Bernier.”
Strange that Mosheim, observing the uniformity
both of the process and of its results in
so many different parts of the world, should
not have suspected that there was something
more in this species of lucidity than the merely
casual effects of a distempered imagination.
By fixing the gaze even of the lower animals
on an immovable point, they fall into a condition
equally unnatural, and which, if they
had language to express their visions, would
probably be found equally clairvoyant.

A favorite subject of mediæval art is the
life of the Christian ascetic in the Desert. In
these representations a human skull may generally
be seen placed before the eyes of the
devotee. Such an object would fix the gaze
and induce the ecstasy as well as any other.
The charm of this species of contemplation
must have been intense, since in search of its
exaltations and illuminations the very convents
were deserted; and during the fourth
and fifth centuries the deserts of Idumea, of
Egypt, and of Pontus, swarmed with anchorites,
who seemed to live only for the sake
of escaping from life, and in their fasts and
mortifications rivalled, if they did not for a
time even surpass, the Fakirs of the East. To
such an extent was this religious enthusiasm
carried, that in Egypt the number of the
monks was thought to equal that of the rest
of the male population. Strange consideration,
if it be the fact, that a few passes of a
mesmeric operator should produce the same
effects which these multitudes procured
through toils so painful and sacrifices to themselves
and to society so costly.

The Egyptian method of inducing clairvoyance
in boys, by causing them to gaze on a
pool of ink in the palm of the hand, has already
been identified with the practice of Dr.
Dee, whose blank spherical mirror is now
said to be in the possession and use of a distinguished
modern mesmeriser. Divination
by the crystal is a well-known mediæval
practice; and from the accounts of it which
Delrio and others have handed down it appears
to have resembled, in some remarkable
particulars, the method now in use among
the soothsayers of Cairo. It does not appear
to make any difference whether the polished
object be black or white, a mirror, a solid
ball, or a transparent globe containing water:
the same extraordinary series of appearances
is alleged to follow an earnest inspection of
it. Before proceeding to Delrio’s singular
corroboration of this use of the crystal, it
will be well to state what is known of divination
by the phial and by the mirror. Divination
by the phial is technically known as
gasteromancy. “In this kind of divination,”
says Peucer, “the response is given by pictures,
not by sounds. They procured glass
vessels of a globular shape, filled with fair
water, and set round them lighted tapers;
and after invoking the demon with a muttered
incantation, and proposing the question,
they brought forward a pure boy-child, or a
pregnant woman, who, gazing intently on the
glass, and searching it with their eyes, called
for, and demanded, a solution of the question
proposed. The devil then answered these
inquiries by certain images, which, by a kind
of refraction, shone from the water on the
polished and mirror-like surface of the phial.”

Catoptromancy, or divination by the mirror,
is as old as the time of the Roman Emperors.
In one of the passages relating to
this method of inducing what is called clairvoyance,
we have an illustration of the early
acquaintance of mankind with some of the
forms of mesmerism. The passage is found
in Spartian’s life of Ditius Julian, the rich Roman
who purchased the Empire when it was
put up to auction by the Prætorian guards.
“Julian was also addicted to the madness of
consulting magicians, through whom he hoped
either to appease the indignation of the people,
or to control the violence of the soldiery.
For they immolated certain victims (human?)
not agreeable to the course of Roman sacrifice;
and they performed certain profane incantations;
and those things, too, which are
done at the mirror, in which boys with their
eyes blindfolded are said, by means of incantations,
to see objects with the top of the
head, Julian had recourse to. And the boy
is said to have seen (in the mirror) both the
approach of Severus and the death of Julian.”

The passage may be variously rendered,
according to different readings and punctuations,
either as “boys, who can see with their[pg 200]
eyes blindfolded, by reason of incantations
made over the top of the head;” or, “boys,
who, having their eyes blindfolded, can see
with the top of the head, by reason of incantations;”
or, “boys, who, having their eyes
blindfolded, can see with the top of the head,
it being operated on by way of incantation.”
This seeing, or seeming to see, with the top
of the head, is one alleged variety of the
modes of modern clairvoyance. It seems
difficult to imagine that the boy Horner,
whose case is related by Mr. Topham, in a
letter to Dr. Elliotson, dated May 31, 1847,
could have heard any thing of these pagan
practices. Mr. Topham, a barrister and man
of credit, states: “After five or six weeks’
mesmerism, he began spontaneously to exhibit
instances of clairvoyance. The first occasion
was on the 11th of September. It
was in the dusk of the evening, so that the
room where he was mesmerised was nearly
dark. My previous mode of mesmerising
him had been by pointing at his eyes, but on
this occasion I began by making passes over
the top of his head, and continued them after
he was in the sleep. In the course of five or
six minutes after the sleep was induced, he
suddenly exclaimed that he could see into the
room above us (the drawing-room). I said,
‘Your eyes are closed; how can you see?’
And he replied, ‘I don’t see with my eyes;
I see from the top of my head. All the top
of my head seems open.’ He then described,
&c. I found every thing as he had described,
&c.” Mr. Topham, it need scarcely be
added, does not appear to have been at all
aware of the passage in Spartian, which, indeed,
has not been cited or referred to in any
published work for nearly two hundred years
back.

A like use of the suspended ring, indicating
the early acquaintance of practitioners in
these arts with one of the alleged evidences
of the so-called odylic force, is thus described
by Peucer among various modes of hydromancy:
“A bowl was filled with water, and
a ring suspended from the finger was librated
in the water; and so, according as the question
was propounded, a declaration or confirmation
of its truth, or otherwise, was obtained.
If what was proposed was true, the
ring, of its own accord, without any impulse,
struck the sides of the goblet a certain number
of times. They say that Numa Pompilius
used to practise this method, and that he
evoked the gods, and consulted them in water,
in this way.”

Crystallomancy is the art of divining by
figures, which appear on the surface of a crystal
ball, in like manner as on the phial filled
with water. Concerning this practice, Delrio
has the following remarkable passage, citing
his contemporary, Spengler: “A man
well versed in the Greek and Latin fathers,
and happy, if he had not presumed, with unclean
hands, to dabble in the mysteries of our
faith (Spenger), has published in Germany a
learned commentary on the nature of demons,
which he has prefixed to Plutarch’s Essay,
De Defectu Oraculorum. From this (says
Delrio) I extract, in his own words, the following
narrative. There are some (he says)
who, being consulted on matters unknown,
distinctly see every thing that is inquired after
in crystals; and a little further on proceeds
to state, that he once had an acquaintance,
a man of one of the best families of
Nuremberg, and that this acquaintance of his
came to him on one occasion, bringing with
him a crystal gem, of a round form, wrapped
up in a piece of silk, which he told him he
had received from a stranger, who encountering
him several years before in the market-place,
had asked his hospitality, and
whom he had brought home with him and
lodged for the space of three days; and that
when the stranger was departing, he had left
him the crystal as a present, in token of his
obligation, and had taught him the use of it;
thus, that if there was any thing he particularly
wished to be informed of, he should
take out this crystal and desire a pure male
child to look into it and say what he should
see there; and that it would come to pass that
whatever he desired to be informed of, would
be indicated by appearances seen by the boy.
And he affirmed that he never was deceived
in any instance, and that he learned matters
of a wonderful kind from the representations
of those boys, although no one else, by the
closest inspection, could see any thing except
the clear and shining gem. At a certain time,
however, when his wife was pregnant of a
male child, appearances were visible to her
also in the crystal. First of all, there used
to appear the form of a man clad in the ordinary
habit of the times, and then would open
the representation of whatever was inquired
after; and when all was explained, the same
figure of the man would depart and disappear;
but in his departure would often appear to
perambulate the town and enter the churches.
But the report of these appearances having
spread in all directions, they began to be
threatened by the populace. It also appeared,
that certain men of learning had read in
the crystal some statements respecting doubts
entertained by them in their studies; and
moved by these and other reasons, Spengler
stated that the owner of the crystal came to
him, representing that he thought the time
was come when he ought to cease making such
a use of it; for that he was now persuaded
he had sinned in no light degree in doing so,
and had for a long time suffered grievous
pangs of a disturbed conscience on that account,
and had come to the determination of
having nothing further to do with experiments
of that kind, and had accordingly
brought the crystal to him to do with it
whatever he pleased. Then Spengler, highly
approving his resolution, states that he took
the crystal, and having pounded it into minute
fragments, threw them, together with[pg 201]
the silk wrapper, into a draw-well.” So far
Delrio.

Another variety of this process is found in
the Onuchomanteia, or nail-divinition, also
spoken of by Delrio. “In this species,” says
he, “male children, before they have lost
their purity, smear their nails with oil and
lamp-black, and then, holding up the nail
against the sun, repeating some charm, see in
it what they desire. This mischief,” he goes
on to say, “has gone even farther in our own
time. I myself knew one Quevedo, a veteran
Spanish soldier, but more distinguished in
war and arms than in piety, who, being in
Brussels at the time when the Duke of Medina
Cæli set sail from Gallicia for Belgium,
clearly showed in more than one of his nails
the fleet leaving the port of Corunna, and
soon after dreadfully tossed by a tempest.
Thus this man, who could also cure the
wounds of others by his words alone, rendered
his own spiritual state incurable by any
one.”

The like use of the crystal ball and spherical
phial, containing water, suggests a version
of the epigrams of Claudian—”De crystallo
in quo aqua inclusa”—which has not
been afforded by any of the commentators.
Globules of water are sometimes found inclosed
in crystals, as well as in amber. On
one of those singular gems Claudian has composed
a series of epigrams, which ascribe properties
to the stone, and make allusion to uses
of it hardly reconcileable with the idea of its
being a merely puerile curiosity. The earlier
epigrams of the series are neat and playful,
but insignificant:—

And so on through several others, until he
comes to that one which seems to indicate
something beyond a merely figurative use of
the word “nymphs;” though, after all, it is
possible that the word was originally written
with an l, instead of n, which would
make all the difference between “nymphs”
and “waters”:—

The Latin is subjoined:—

Not the least remarkable of the qualities
here ascribed to the crystal ball is its energy
in imparting the sensation of cold. Dom
Chifflet, who, in 1665, published his learned
treatise at Antwerp on the objects then recently
discovered in the supposed tomb of
King Childeric, at Tournay, says of the crystal
ball which was found amongst them,
“You would say it was petrified ice; so cold
it was, that my palm and fingers, after handling
it, were quite torpid.” And cites Anslem
Boetius, in his book on stones and gems,
as saying, “the crystal is of so cold and dry
a nature, that placed beneath the tongue of
a feverish person, it allays the thirst; and
held in the hands even of those violently fevered,
it refreshes and cools them, especially
if it be of considerable size, and of a spherical
figure;” and another writer on the same
subject, Andreas Cisalpinus, who states of
the marble called ophite, that “they make of
it little globes, for the handling of such as are
in burning fever, the coldness of the stone
expelling the disease.” So far Dom Chifflet.
It seems almost as if we were reading Reichenbach.
“He (Reichenbach) found that
crystals are capable of producing all the phenomena
resulting from the action of a magnet
on cataleptic patients. Thus, for instance,
a large piece of rock crystal, placed in the
hand of a nervous patient, affects the fingers
so as to make them grasp the crystal involuntarily,
and shut the fist. Reichenbach found
that more than half of all the persons he tried
were sensible of its action.” Chifflet probably
was a man of a nervous temperament.
Those who desire to see the crystal ball in
question, may inspect it, where it is still preserved,
with other objects found in the tomb,
at the Gallerie de Medailles, in Paris. Two
similar balls may be seen here in the collection
of the Royal Irish Academy.