“The adder is a poisonous snake, and hatha forked double tongue; and

so men speak lies, and utter slanders against their neighbours, when

_the poison of asps is under their lips_. The devil, who deceiveth

with lies, and would destroy all mankind, is the _old serpent_, who

brought death into the world by the venom of his bite. He would kill

me, and all the children that are born, if God would let him; but

Jesus Christ came to save us from his power, and to _destroy the works

of the Devil_.

“Lord thou hast made me a man for thy service: O let me not dishonour

thy work, by turning myself into the likeness of some evil beast: let

me not be as the fox, who is a thief and a robber: let me never be

cruel, as a wolf, to any of thy creatures; especially to my dear

fellow-creatures, and my dearer fellow Christians; but let me be

harmless as the lamb; quiet and submissive as the sheep; that so I may

be fit to live, and be fed on thy pasture, under the good shepherd,

Jesus Christ. It is far better to be the poorest of his flock, than to

be proud and cruel, as the lion or the tiger, who go about seeking

what they may devour.”

THE QUESTIONS.

“_Q_. What is the child that will not learn?

_A_. An ass, which is ignorant and unruly.

_Q_. What are wicked men, who hurt and cheat others?

_A_. They are wolves and foxes, and bloodthirsty lions.

_Q_. What are ill-natured people, who trouble their neighbours and

rail at them?

_A_. They are dogs, who bark at every body.

_Q_. But what are good and peaceable people?

_A_. They are harmless sheep; and little children, under the grace of

God, are innocent lambs.

_Q_. But what are liars?

_A_. They are snakes and vipers, with double tongues and poison under

their lips.

_Q_. Who is the good shepherd?

_A_. Jesus Christ.”

* * * * *

There is a passage not less apposite in Donne's Epistle to Sir Edward,

afterwards Lord Herbert of Cherbury.

Man is a lump where all beasts kneaded be;

Wisdom makes him an Ark where all agree.

The fool in whom these beasts do live at jar,

Is sport to others and a theatre;

Nor 'scapes he so, but is himself their prey,

All that was man in him is ate away;

And now his beasts on one another feed,

Yet couple in anger and new monsters breed.

How happy he which hath due place assign'd

To his beasts, and disaforested his mind,

Empaled himself to keep them out, not in;

Can sow and dares trust corn where they have been,

Can use his horse, goat, wolf and every beast,

And is not ass himself to all the rest.

To this purport the Patriarch of the Quakers writes where he saith

“now some men have the nature of Swine, wallowing in the mire: and

some men have the nature of Dogs, to bite both the sheep and one

another: and some men have the nature of Lions, to tear, devour and

destroy: and some men have the nature of Wolves, to tear and devour

the lambs and sheep of Christ: and some men have the nature of the

Serpent (that old destroyer) to sting, envenom and poison. _He that

hath an ear to hear, let him hear_, and learn these things within

himself. And some men have the natures of other beasts and creatures,

minding nothing but earthly and visible things, and feeding without

the fear of God. Some men have the nature of an Horse, to prance and

vapour in their strength, and to be swift in doing evil. And some men

have the nature of tall sturdy Oaks, to flourish and spread in wisdom

and strength, who are strong in evil, which must perish and come to

the fire. Thus the Evil is but _one in all_, but worketh many ways;

and whatsoever a Man's or Woman's nature is addicted to that is

outward, the Evil one will fit him with that, and will please his

nature and appetite, to keep his mind in his inventions, and in the

creatures from the Creator.”

To this purport the so-called Clemens writes in the Apostolical

Constitutions when he complains that the flock of Christ was devoured

by Demons and wicked men, or rather not men but wild beasts in the

shape of men, _πονηροῖς ἀνθρώποις, μᾶλλον δὲ οὐκ ἀνθρώποις, ἀλλὰ

θηρίοις ἀνθρωποείδεσιν,_ by Heathens, Jews and godless heretics.

With equal triumph too did he read a passage in one of the numbers of

the Connoisseur, which made him wonder that the writer from whom it

proceeded in levity should not have been led on by it to the clear

perception of a great truth. “The affinity,” says that writer, who is

now known to have been no less a person than the author of the Task,

“the affinity between chatterers and monkeys, and praters and parrots,

is too obvious not to occur at once. Grunters and growlers may be

justly compared to hogs. Snarlers are curs that continually shew their

teeth, but never bite; and the spitfire passionate are a sort of wild

cats, that will not bear stroking, but will purr when they are

pleased. Complainers are screech-owls; and story-tellers always

repeating the same dull note are cuckoos. Poets that prick up their

ears at their own hideous braying are no better than asses; critics in

general are venomous serpents that delight in hissing; and some of

them, who have got by heart a few technical terms without knowing

their meaning, are no better than magpies.”

So too the polyonomous Arabian philosopher Zechariah Ben Mohammed Ben

Mahmud Al Camuni Al Cazvini. “Man,” he says, “partakes of the nature

of vegetables, because like them he grows and is nourished; he stands

in this farther relation to the irrational animals, that he feels and

moves; by his intellectual faculties he resembles the higher orders of

intelligences, and he partakes more or less of these various classes,

as his inclination leads him. If his sole wish be to satisfy the wants

of existence, then he is content to vegetate. If he partakes more of

the animal than the vegetable nature, we find him fierce as the lion,

greedy as the bull, impure as the hog, cruel as the leopard, or

cunning as the fox; and if as is sometimes the case, he possesses all

these bad qualities, he is then a demon in human shape.”

Gratifying as these passages were to him, some of them being mere

sports of wit, and others only the produce of fancy, he would have

been indeed delighted if he had known what was in his days known by no

European scholar, that in the Institutes of Menu, his notion is

distinctly declared as a revealed truth; there it is said, “In

whatever occupation the Supreme Lord first employed any vital soul,

that occupation the same soul attaches itself spontaneously, when it

receives a new body again and again. Whatever quality, noxious or

innocent, harsh or mild, unjust or just, false or true, he conferred

on any being at its creation, the same quality enters it of course on

its future births.”[2]

[Footnote 2: SIR W. JONES.]

Still more would it have gratified him if he had known (as has before

been cursorily observed) how entirely his own theory coincided with

the Druidical philosophy, a philosophy which he would rather have

traced to the Patriarchs, than to the Canaanites. Their doctrine, as

explained by the Welsh translator of the Paradise Lost, in the sketch

of Bardism which he has prefixed to the poems of Llywarc the Aged, was

that “the whole animated creation originated in the lowest point of

existence, and arrived by a regular train of gradations at the

probationary state of humanity, the intermediate stages being all

necessarily evil, but more or less so as they were removed from the

beginning, which was evil in the extreme. In the state of humanity,

good and evil were equally balanced, consequently it was a state of

liberty, in which if the conduct of the free agent preponderated

towards evil, death gave but an awful passage whereby he returned to

animal life, in a condition below humanity equal to the degree of

turpitude to which he had debased himself, when free to chuse between

good and evil: and if his life were desperately wicked, it was

possible for him to fall to his original vileness, in the lowest point

of existence, there to recommence his painful progression through the

ascending series of brute being. But if he had acted well in this his

stage of probation, death was then to the soul thus tried and

approved, what the word by which in the language of the Druids it is

denoted, literally means, enlargement. The soul was removed from the

sphere wherein evil hath any place, into a state necessarily good; not

to continue there in one eternal condition of blessedness, eternity

being what no inferior existence could endure, but to pass from one

gradation to another, gaining at every ascent increase of knowledge,

and retaining the consciousness of its whole preceding progress

through all. For the good of the human race, such a soul might again

be sent on earth, but the human being of which it then formed the life

was incapable of falling.” In this fancy the Bardic system approached

that of the Bramins, this Celtic avatar of a happy soul, corresponding

to the twice-born man of the Hindus. And the Doctor would have

extracted some confirmation for the ground of the theory from that

verse of the Psalm which speaks of us as “curiously wrought in the

lowest parts of the earth.”

Young, he used to say, expressed unconsciously this system of

progressive life, when he spoke of man as a creature

From different natures marvellously mix'd;

Connection exquisite of distant worlds;

Distinguish'd link in being's endless chain,

Midway from nothing to the Deity.

It was more distinctly enounced by Akenside.

The same paternal hand

From the mute shell-fish gasping on the shore

To men, to angels, to celestial minds,

Will ever lead the generations on

Through higher scenes of being: while, supplied

From day to day with his enlivening breath,

Inferior orders in succession rise

To fill the void below. As flame ascends,

As vapours to the earth in showers return,

As the pois'd ocean toward the attracting moon

Swells, and the ever listening planets charmed

By the Sun's call their onward pace incline,

So all things which have life aspire to God,

Exhaustless fount of intellectual day!

Centre of souls! nor doth the mastering voice

Of nature cease within to prompt aright

Their steps; nor is the care of heaven withheld

From sending to the toil external aid,

That in their stations all may persevere

To climb the ascent of being, and approach

For ever nearer to the Life Divine.

The Bardic system bears in itself intrinsic evidence of its antiquity;

for no such philosophy could have been devised among any Celtic people

in later ages; nor could the Britons have derived any part of it from

any nation with whom they had any opportunity of intercourse, at any

time within reach of history. The Druids, or rather the Bards, (for

these, according to those by whom their traditionary wisdom has been

preserved, were the superior order,) deduced as corollaries from the

theory of Progressive Existence, these beautiful Triads.[3]

[Footnote 3: Originally quoted in the notes to Madoc to illustrate the

lines which follow.

“Let the Bard,

Exclaim'd the King, give his accustom'd lay:

For sweet, I know, to Madoc is the song

He loved in earlier years.

Then strong of voice,

The officer proclaim'd the sovereign will,

Bidding the hall be silent; loud he spake

And smote the sounding pillar with his wand

And hush'd the banqueters. The chief of Bards

Then raised the ancient lay.

_Thee, Lord! he sung,

O Father! Thee, whose wisdom, Thee, whose power,

Whose love,—all love, all power, all wisdom. Thou!

Tongue cannot utter, nor can heart conceive.

He in the lowest depth of Being framed

The imperishable mind; in every change

Through the great circle of progressive life,

He guides and guards, till evil shall be known,

And being known as evil, cease to be;

And the pure soul emancipate by death,

The Enlarger, shall attain its end predoom'd,

The eternal newness of eternal joy._]

“There are three Circles of Existence; the Circle of Infinity, where

there is nothing but God, of living or dead, and none but God can

traverse it; the Circle of Inchoation, where all things are by nature

derived from Death,—this Circle hath been traversed by man; and the

Circle of happiness, where all things spring from life,—this man shall

traverse in heaven.

“Animated beings having three states of Existence; that of Inchoation

in the Great Deep, or lowest point of Existence; that of Liberty in

the State of Humanity; and that of Love, which is the Happiness of

Heaven.

“All Animated Beings are subject to three Necessities; beginning in

the Great Deep; Progression in the Circle of Inchoation; and Plenitude

in the Circle of Happiness. Without these things nothing can possibly

exist but God.

“Three things are necessary in the Circle of Inchoation; the least of

all, Animation, and thence beginning; the materials of all things, and

thence Increase, which cannot take place in any other state; the

formation of all things out of the dead mass, and thence Discriminate

Individuality.

“Three things cannot but exist towards all animated Beings from the

Nature of Divine Justice: Co-sufferance in the Circle of Inchoation,

because without that none could attain to the perfect knowledge of

anything; Co-participation in the Divine Love; and Co-ultimity from

the nature of God's Power, and its attributes of Justice and Mercy.

“There are three necessary occasions of Inchoation: to collect the

materials and properties of every nature; to collect the knowledge of

everything; and to collect power towards subduing the Adverse and the

Devastative, and for the divestation of Evil. Without this traversing

every mode of animated existence, no state of animation, or of any

thing in nature, can attain to plenitude.”

“By the knowledge of three things will all Evil and Death be

diminished and subdued; their nature, their cause, and their

operation. This knowledge will be obtained in the Circle of

Happiness.”

“The three Plenitudes of Happiness:—Participation of every nature,

with a plenitude of One predominant; conformity to every cast of

genius and character, possessing superior excellence in one; the love

of all Beings and Existences, but chiefly concentred in one object,

which is God; and in the predominant One of each of these, will the

Plenitude of Happiness consist.”

Triads it may be observed are found in the Proverbs of Solomon: so

that to the evidence of antiquity which these Bardic remains present

in their doctrines, a presumption is to be added from the peculiar

form in which they are conveyed.

Whether Sir Philip Sydney had any such theory in his mind or not,

there is an approach to it in that fable which he says old Lanquet

taught him of the Beasts desiring from Jupiter a King, Jupiter

consented, but on condition that they should contribute the qualities

convenient for the new and superior creature.

Full glad they were, and took the naked sprite,

Which straight the Earth yclothed in her clay;

The Lion heart, the Ounce gave active might;

The Horse, good shape; the Sparrow lust to play;

Nightingale, voice enticing songs to say;

Elephant gave a perfect memory,

And Parrot, ready tongue that to apply.

The Fox gave craft; the Dog gave flattery;

Ass, patience; the Mole, a working thought;

Eagle, high look; Wolf, secret cruelty;

Monkey, sweet breath; the Cow, her fair eyes brought:

The Ermine, whitest skin, spotted with nought.

The Sheep, mild-seeming face; climbing the Bear,

The Stag did give his harm-eschewing fear.

The Hare, her slights; the Cat, her melancholy;

Ant, industry; and Coney, skill to build;

Cranes, order; Storks, to be appearing holy;

Cameleons, ease to change; Duck, ease to yield;

Crocodile, tears which might be falsely spill'd;

Ape, great thing gave, tho' he did mowing stand,

The instrument of instruments, the hand.

Thus Man was made, thus Man their Lord became.

At such a system he thought Milton glanced when his Satan speaks of

the influences of the heavenly bodies, as

Productive in herb, plant, and nobler birth

Of creatures animate with gradual life

Of growth, sense, reason, all summ'd up in man:

for that the lines, though capable of another interpretation, ought to

be interpreted as referring to a scheme of progressive life, appears

by this fuller developement in the speech of Raphaël;

O Adam, one Almighty is, from whom

All things proceed, and up to him return,

If not deprav'd from good, created all

Such to perfection, one first matter all,

Indued with various forms, various degrees

Of substance, and in things that live, of life;

But more refin'd, more spiritous, and pure,

As nearer to him plac'd, or nearer tending

Each in their several active spheres assign'd,

Till body up to spirit work, in bounds

Proportion'd to each kind. So from the root

Springs lighter the green stalk, from thence the leaves

More aery, last the bright consummate flower

Spirits odorous breathes: flow'rs and their fruit,

Man's nourishment, by gradual scale sublimed,

To vital spirits aspire, to animal,

To intellectual; give both life and sense

Fancy and understanding; whence the soul

Reason received, and reason is her being

Discursive, or intuitive; discourse

Is oftest yours, the latter most is ours,

Differing but in degree, of kind the same.[4]

[Footnote 4: Spenser in his “Hymne of Heavenly Beautie” falls into a

similar train of thought, as is observed by Thyer.

By view whereof it plainly may appeare

That still as everything doth upward tend,

And further is from earth, so still more cleare

And faire it grows, till to his perfect end

Of purest beautie it at last ascend;

Ayre more than water, fire much more than ayre,

And heaven than fire, appeares more pure and fayre.

But these are somewhat of Pythagorean speculations—caught up by

Lucretius and Virgil.]

Whether that true philosopher, in the exact import of the word, Sir

Thomas Browne, had formed a system of this kind, or only threw out a

seminal idea from which it might be evolved, the Doctor, who dearly

loved the writings of this most meditative author, would not say. But

that Sir Thomas had opened the same vein of thought appears in what

Dr. Johnson censured in “a very fanciful and indefensible section” of

his Christian Morals; for there, and not among his Pseudodoxia

Epidemica, that is to say Vulgar Errors, the passage is found. Our

Doctor would not only have deemed it defensible, but would have proved

it to be so by defending it. “Since the brow,” says the Philosopher of

Norwich, “speaks often truth, since eyes and noses have tongues, and

the countenance proclaims the heart and inclinations; let observation

so far instruct thee in physiognomical lines, as to be some rule for

thy distinction, and guide to for thy affection unto such as look most

like men. Mankind methinks, is comprehended in a few faces, if we

exclude all visages which any way participate of symmetries and

schemes of look common unto other animals. For as though man were the

extract of the world, in whom all were _in coagulato_, which in their

forms were _in soluto_, and at extension, we often observe that men do

most act those creatures whose constitution, parts and complexion, do

most predominate in their mixtures. This is a corner-stone in

physiognomy, and holds some truth not only in particular persons but

also in whole nations.”

But Dr. Johnson must cordially have assented to Sir Thomas Browne's

inferential admonition. “Live,” says that Religious Physician and

Christian Moralist,—“live unto the dignity of thy nature, and leave it

not disputable at last whether thou hast been a man, or since thou art

a composition of man and beast, how thou hast predominantly passed thy

days, to state the denomination. Un-man not, therefore, thyself by a

bestial transformation, nor realize old fables. Expose not thyself by

fourfooted manners unto monstrous draughts and caricature

representations. Think not after the old Pythagorean concert what

beast thou mayest be after death. Be not under any brutal

metempsychosis while thou livest and walkest about erectly under that

scheme of man. In thine own circumference, as in that of the earth,

let the rational horizon be larger than the sensible, and the circle

of reason than of sense: let the divine part be upward, and the region

of beast below: otherwise it is but to live invertedly, and with thy

head unto the heels of thy antipodes. Desert not thy title to a divine

particle and union with invisibles. Let true knowledge and virtue tell

the lower world thou art a part of the higher. Let thy thoughts be of

things which have not entered into the hearts of beasts; think of

things long past, and long to come; acquaint thyself with the

choragium of the stars, and consider the vast expansion beyond them.

Let intellectual tubes give thee a glance of things which visive

organs reach not. Have a glimpse of incomprehensible, and thoughts of

things, which thoughts but tenderly touch. Lodge immaterials in thy

head, ascend unto invisibles; fill thy spirit with spirituals, with

the mysteries of faith, the magnalities of religion, and thy life with

the honour of God; without which, though giants in wealth and dignity,

we are but dwarfs and pygmies in humanity, and may hold a pitiful rank

in that triple division of mankind into heroes, men and beasts. For

though human souls are said to be equal, yet is there no small

inequality in their operations; some maintain the allowable station of

men, many are far below it; and some have been so divine as to

approach the apogeum of their natures, and to be in the confinium of

spirits.”

CHAPTER CCX.

A QUOTATION FROM BISHOP BERKELEY, AND A HIT AT THE SMALL CRITICS.

_Plusieurs blameront l'entassement de passages que l'on vient de voir;

j'ai prévu leurs dédains, leurs dégoûts, et leurs censures

magistrales; et n'ai pas voulu y avoir égard._

BAYLE.

Here I shall inform the small critic, what it is, “a thousand pounds

to one penny,” as the nursery song says, or as the newspaper reporters

of the Ring have it, Lombard Street to a China Orange,—no small critic

already knows, whether he be diurnal, hebdomadal, monthly or

trimestral,—that a notion of progressive Life is mentioned in Bishop

Berkeley's Minute Philosopher, not as derived from any old system of

philosophy or religion, but as the original speculation of one who

belonged to a club of Freethinkers. Another member of that worshipful

society explains the system of his acquaintance, thus:

“He made a threefold partition of the human species into Birds, Beasts

and Fishes, being of opinion that the Road of Life lies upwards in a

perpetual ascent, through the scale of Being: in such sort, that the

souls of insects after death make their second appearance in the shape

of perfect animals, Birds, Beasts or Fishes; which upon their death

are preferred into human bodies, and in the next stage into Beings of

a higher and more perfect kind. This man we considered at first as a

sort of heretic, because his scheme seemed not to consist with our

fundamental tenet, the Mortality of the Soul: but he justified the

notion to be innocent, inasmuch as it included nothing of reward or

punishment, and was not proved by any argument which supposed, or

implied either incorporeal spirit, or Providence, being only inferred,

by way of analogy, from what he had observed in human affairs, the

Court, the Church, and the Army, wherein the tendency is always

upwards, from lower posts to higher. According to this system, the

Fishes are those men who swim in pleasure, such as _petits maitres_,

_bons vivans_, and honest fellows. The Beasts are dry, drudging,

covetous, rapacious folk, and all those addicted to care and business

like oxen, and other dry land animals, which spend their lives in

labour and fatigue. The Birds are airy, notional men, Enthusiasts,

Projectors, Philosophers, and such like; in each species every

individual retaining a tincture of his former state, which constitutes

what is called genius.”

The quiet reader who sometimes lifts his eyes from the page (and

closes them perhaps) to meditate upon what he has been reading, will

perhaps ask himself wherefore I consider it to be as certain that no

small critic should have read the Minute Philosopher, as that children

can not be drowned while “sliding on dry ground?”—My reason for so

thinking is, that small critics never read any thing so good. Like

town ducks they dabble in the gutter, but never purify themselves in

clear streams, nor take to the deep waters.

CHAPTER CCXI.

SOMETHING IN HONOUR OF BISHOP WATSON.—CUDWORTH.—JACKSON OF OXFORD AND

NEWCASTLE.—A BAXTERIAN SCRUPLE.

_S'il y a des lecteurs qui se soucient peu de cela, on les prie de se

souvenir qu'un auteur n'est pas obligé à ne rien dire que ce qui est

de leur goût._

BAYLE.

Had my ever-by-me-to-be-lamented friend, and from this time forth, I

trust, ever-by-the-public-to-be-honoured-philosopher, been a Welshman;

or had he lived to become acquainted with the treasures of Welsh lore

which Edward Williams, William Owen, and Edward Davies, the Curate of

Olveston, have brought to light; he would have believed in the Bardic

system as heartily as the Glamorganshire and Merionethshire Bards

themselves, and have fitted it, without any apprehension of heresy, to

his own religious creed. And although he would have perceived with the

Curate of Olveston (worthy of the best Welsh Bishoprick for his

labours; O George the Third, why did no one tell thee that he was so,

when he dedicated to thee his Celtic Researches?)—although (I say) he

would have perceived that certain of the Druidical rites were derived

from an accursed origin,—a fact authenticated by their abominations,

and rendered certain by the historical proof that the Celtic language

affords in both those dialects wherein any genuine remains have been

preserved,—that knowledge would still have left him at liberty to

adopt such other parts of the system as harmonized with his own

speculations, and were not incompatible with the Christian faith. How

he would have reconciled them shall be explained when I have taken

this opportunity of relating something of the late Right Reverend

Father in God, Richard Watson, Lord Bishop of Llandaff, which is more

to his honour than anything that he has related of himself. He gave

the Curate of Olveston, upon George Hardinge's recommendation, a Welsh

Rectory, which though no splendid preferment, placed that patient, and

learned, and able and meritorious _poor_ man, in a respectable

station, and conferred upon him (as he gratefully acknowledged) the

comfort of independence.

My friend had been led by Cudworth to this reasonable conclusion that

there was a theology of divine tradition, or revelation, or a divine

cabala, amongst the Hebrews first, and from them afterward

communicated to the Egyptians and other nations. He had learnt also

from that greater theologian Jackson of Corpus (whom the Laureate

Southey (himself to be commended for so doing,) loses no opportunity

of commending)[1] that divine communion was not confined to the

Israelites before their distinction from other nations and that

“idolatry and superstition could not have increased so much in the old

world, unless there had been evident documents of a divine power in

ages precedent;” for “strange fables and lying wonders receive being

from notable and admirable decayed truths, as baser creatures do life

from the dissolution of more noble bodies.” These were the deliberate

opinions of men not more distinguished among their contemporaries and

eminent above their successors, for the extent of their erudition than

remarkable for capacity of mind and sobriety of judgment. And with

these the history of the Druidical system entirely accords. It arose

“from the gradual or accidental corruption of the patriarchal

religion, by the abuse of certain commemorative honours which were

paid to the ancestors of the human race, and by the admixture of

Sabæan idolatry;” and on the religion thus corrupted some Canaanite

abominations were engrafted by the Phœnicians. But as in other

apostacies, a portion of original truth was retained in it.

[Footnote 1: Since Southey's death, Jackson's Works, to the much

satisfaction of all sound theologians, have been reprinted at the

Clarendon Press. I once heard Mr. Parker the Bookseller—the Uncle of

the present Mr. Parker—say, that he recollected the sheets of the

Folio Edition being used as wrappers in the shops! Alexander's dust as

a bung to a beer-barrel, quotha!]

Indeed just as remains of the antediluvian world are found everywhere

in the bowels of the earth, so are traces not of scriptural history

alone, but of primæval truths to be discovered in the tradition of

savages, their wild fables, and their bewildered belief; as well as in

the elaborate systems of heathen mythology and the principles of what

may deserve to be called divine philosophy. The farther our researches

are extended the more of these collateral proofs are collected, and

consequently the stronger their collective force becomes. Research and

reflection lead also to conclusions as congenial to the truly

christian heart as they may seem startling to that which is christian

in every thing except in charity. Impostors acting only for their own

purposes have enunciated holy truths, which in many of their followers

have brought forth fruits of holiness. True miracles have been worked

in false religions. Nor ought it to be doubted that prayers which have

been directed to false Gods in erring, but innocent, because

unavoidable misbelief, have been heard and accepted by that most

merciful Father, whose eye is over all his creatures, and who hateth

nothing that he hath made.—Here be it remarked that Baxter has

protested against this fine expression in that paper of exceptions

against the Common Prayer which he prepared for the Savoy Meeting, and

which his colleagues were prudent enough to set aside, lest it should

give offence, they said, but probably because the more moderate of

them were ashamed of its frivolous and captious cavillings; the

Collect in which it occurs, he said, hath no reason for appropriation

to the first day of Lent, and this part of it is unhandsomely said,

being true only in a formal sense _quâ talis_, for “he hateth all the

works of iniquity.” Thus did he make iniquity the work of God, a

blasphemy from which he would have revolted with just abhorrence if it

had been advanced by another person: but dissent had become in him a

cachexy of the intellect.

CHAPTER CCXII.

SPECULATIONS CONNECTED WITH THE DOCTOR'S THEORY.—DOUBTS AND

DIFFICULTIES.

_Voilà bien des mysteres, dira-t-on; j'en conviens; aussi le sujet le

mérite-t-il bien. Au reste, il est certain que ces mysteres ne cachent

rien de mauvais._

GOMGAM.

But although the conformity of the Bardic system to his own notions of

progressive existence would have appeared to the Doctor

—confirmation strong

As proof of holy writ,—

he would have assented to that system no farther than such preceding

conformity extended. Holding it only as the result of his own

speculations,—as hypothesis,—a mere fancy,—a toy of the mind,—a

plaything for the intellect in its lighter moments, and sometimes in

its graver ones the subject of a dream,—he valued it accordingly. And

yet the more he sported with it, and the farther he pursued it in his

reveries, the more plausible it appeared, and the better did it seem

to explain some of the physical phenomena, and some of the else

seemingly inexplicable varieties of human nature. It was Henry More's

opinion that the Pre-existence of the Soul, which is so explicit and

frequent a doctrine of the Platonists, “was a tenet for which there

are many plausible reasons, and against which there is nothing

considerable to be alleged; being a key, he said, for some main

mysteries of Providence which no other can so handsomely unlock.” More

however, the Doctor thought might be advanced against that tenet, than

against his own scheme, for to that no valid objection could be

opposed. But the metempsychosis in a descending scale as a scheme of

punishment would have been regarded by him as one of those corruptions

which the Bards derived from the vain philosophy or false religions of

the Levant.

Not that this part of their scheme was without a certain plausibility

on the surface which might recommend it to inconsiderate minds. He

himself would have thought that no Judge ever pronounced a more just

decision than the three Infernal Lord Chancellors of the dead would

do, if they condemned his townsman the pettyfogger to skulk upon earth

again as a pole-cat, creep into holes as an earwig, and be flattened

again between the thumbnails of a London chambermaid, or exposed to

the fatal lotion of Mr. Tiffin, bug-destroyer to his Majesty. It was

fitting he thought that every keen sportsman, for once at least should

take the part of the inferior creature in those amusements of the

field which he had followed so joyously, and that he should be winged

in the shape of a partridge, run down in the form of a hare by the

hounds, and Actæonized in a stag: that the winner of a Welsh main

should be the cock of one, and die of the wounds received in the last

fight; that the merciless postmaster should become a posthorse at his

own inn; and that they who have devised, or practised, or knowingly

permitted any wanton cruelty for the sake of pampering their

appetites, should in the next stage of their existence, feel in their

own person the effect of those devices, which in their human state

they had only tasted. And not being addicted himself to “the most

honest, ingenuous, quiet, and harmless art of angling,” (forgive him

Sir Humphrey Davy! forgive him Chantrey! forgive him, thou best of all

publishers, John Major, who mightest write _Ne plus ultra_ upon thy

edition of any book which thou delightest to honour) he allowed that

even Izaak Walton of blessed memory could not have shown cause for

mitigation of the sentence, if Rhadamanthus and his colleagues in the

Court below, had condemned him to be spitted upon the hook of some

dear lover and ornament of the art, in the shape of “a black snail

with his belly slit to shew the white;” or of a perch which of fish,

he tells us, is the longest lived on a hook; or sewed him

metempsycho-sized into a frog, to the arming iron, with a fine needle

and silk, with only one stitch, using him in so doing, according to

his own minute directions, as if he loved him, that is, harming him as

little as he possibly might, that he might live the longer.

This would be fitting he thought, and there would have been enough of

purgatory in it to satisfy the sense of vindictive justice, if any

scheme of purgatory had been reconcilable with his scriptural belief.

Bishop Hall has a passage in his Choice Helps for a Pious spirit,

which might be taken in the sense of this opinion, though certainly no

such meaning was intended by the writer. “Man,” he says, “as he

consists of a double nature, flesh and spirit, so is he placed in a

middle rank, betwixt an angel, which is a spirit, and a beast, which

is flesh: partaking of the qualities and performing the acts of both.

He is angelical in his understanding, in his sensual affections

bestial; and to whether of these he most incline and comforteth

himself, that part wins more of the other, and gives a denomination to

him; so as he that was before half angel, half beast, if he be drowned

in sensuality, hath lost the angel and is become a beast; if he be

wholly taken up with heavenly meditations, he hath quit the beast, and

is improved angelical. It is hard to hold an equal temper, either he

must degenerate into a beast, or be advanced to an angel.”

Had the Doctor held this opinion according to the letter, and believed

that those who brutalized their nature in the stage of humanity, were

degraded to the condition of brutes after death, he could even have

persuaded himself that intelligible indications of such a

transmigration might be discovered in the eyes of a dog when he looks

to some hard master for mercy, or to some kind one for notice, and as

it were for a recognition of the feelings and thoughts which had no

other means of expression. But he could not have endured to think it

possible that the spaniel who stood beside him in mute supplication,

with half-erected ears, looking for a morsel of food, might be a

friend or relation; and that in making a troublesome or a thievish cur

slink away with his tail between his legs, he might be hurting the

feelings of an old acquaintance.

And indeed on the whole it would have disturbed his sense of order, to

think that while some inferior creatures were innocently and

unconsciously ascending in the scale of existence through their

appointed gradations, others were being degraded to a condition below

humanity for their sins committed in the human state. Punishment such

degradation could not be deemed, unless the soul so punished retained

its consciousness; and such consciousness would make it a different

being from those who were externally of its fellow kind, and thus

would the harmony of nature be destroyed: and to introduce discord

there were to bring back Chaos. Bad enough as he saw is the inequality

which prevails among mankind, though without it men would soon be all

upon the dead level of animal and ferine life: But what is it to that

which would appear in the lower world, if in the same species some

individuals were guided only by their own proper instincts, and others

endued with the consciousness of a human and reasonable mind.

The consequences also of such a doctrine where it was believed could

not but lead to pitiable follies, and melancholy superstitions. Has

humanity ever been put to a viler use than by the Banians at Surat,

who support a hospital for vermin in that city, and regale the souls

of their friends who are undergoing penance in the shape of fleas, or

in loathsome pedicular form, by hiring beggars to go in among them,

and afford them pasture for the night!

Even from his own system consequences followed which he could not

reconcile to his wishes. Fond as he was of animals, it would have been

a delight to him if he could have believed with the certainty of faith

that he should have with him in Heaven all that he had loved on earth.

But if they were only so many vehicles of the living spirit during its

ascent to humanity,—only the egg, the caterpillar and the aurelia from

which the human but immortal Psyche was to come forth at last, then

must their uses be at an end in this earthly state: and Paradise he

was sometimes tempted to think would want something if there were no

beautiful insects to hover about its flowers, no birds to warble in

its groves or glide upon its waters,—would not be the Paradise he

longed for unless the lion were there to lie down with the lamb, and

the antelope reclined its gentle head upon the leopard's breast.

Fitting and desirable and necessary he considered the extinction of

all noxious kinds, all which were connected with corruption, and might

strictly be said to be of the earth earthly. But in his Paradise he

would fain have whatever had been in Eden, before Paradise was lost,

except the serpent.

“I can hardly,” says an English officer who was encamped in India near

a lake overstocked with fish, “I can hardly censure the taste of the

Indians who banish from a consecrated pond, the net of the fisher, the

angler's hook and the fowler's gun. Shoals of large fish giving life

to the clear water of a large lake covered with flocks of aquatic

birds, afford to the sight a gratification which would be ill

exchanged for the momentary indulgence of appetite.” My excellent

friend would heartily have agreed with this Englishman: but in the

waters of Paradise he would have thought, neither did the fish prey

upon each other, nor the birds upon them, death not being necessary

there as the means of providing aliment for life.

That there are waters in the Regions of the Blessed, Bede it is said,

assures us for this reason, that they are necessary there to temper

the heat of the Sun. And Cornelius à Lapide has found out a most

admirable use for them above the firmament,—which is to make rivers

and fountains and waterworks for the recreation of the souls in bliss,

whose seat is in the Empyrean Heaven.

“If an herd of kine,” says Fuller, “should meet together to fancy and

define happiness,—(that is to imagine a Paradise for themselves,)—they

would place it to consist in fine pastures, sweet grass, clear water,

shadowy groves, constant summer; but if any winter, then warm shelter

and dainty hay, with company after their kind, counting these low

things the highest happiness, because their conceit can reach no

higher. Little better do the heathen poets describe Heaven, paving it

with pearl and roofing it with stars, filling it with Gods and

Goddesses, and allowing them to drink, (as if without it, no poet's

Paradise) nectar and ambrosia.”

CHAPTER CCXIII.

BIRDS OF PARADISE.—THE ZIZ.—STORY OF THE ABBOT OF ST. SALVADOR DE

VILLAR.—HOLY COLETTE'S NONDESCRIPT PET.—THE ANIMALCULAR

WORLD.—GIORDANO BRUNO.

And so I came to Fancy's meadows, strow'd

With many a flower;

Fain would I here have made abode,

But I was quickened by my hour.

HERBERT.

Hindoos and Mahommedans have stocked their heavens not only with

mythological monsters but with beautiful birds of celestial kind. They

who have read Thalaba will remember the

Green warbler of the bowers of Paradise:

and they who will read the history of the Nella-Rajah,—which whosoever

reads or relates, shall (according to the author) enjoy all manner of

happiness and planetary bliss,—that is to say, all the good fortune

that can be bestowed by the nine great luminaries which influence

human events,—they who read that amusing story will find that in the

world of Daivers, or Genii, there are milk white birds called Aunnays,

remarkable for the gracefulness of their walk, wonderfully endowed

with knowledge and speech, incapable of deceit, and having power to

look into the thoughts of men.

These creatures of imagination are conceived in better taste than the

Rabbis have displayed in the invention of their great bird Ziz, whose

head when he stands in the deep sea reaches up to Heaven; whose wings

when they are extended darken the sun; and one of whose eggs happening

to fall crushed three hundred cedars and breaking in the fall, drowned

sixty cities in its yolk. That fowl is reserved for the dinner of the

Jews in heaven, at which Leviathan is to be the fish, and Behemoth the

roast meat. There will be cut and come again at all of them; and the

carvers of whatever rank in the hierarchy they may be, will have no

sinecure office that day.

The monks have given us a prettier tale;—praise be to him who

composed,—but the lyar's portion to those who made it pass for truth.

There was an Abbot of S. Salvador de Villar who lived in times when

piety flourished, and Saints on earth enjoyed a visible communion with

Heaven. This holy man used in the intervals of his liturgical duties

to recreate himself by walking in a pine forest near his monastery,

employing his thoughts the while in divine meditations. One day when

thus engaged during his customary walk, a bird in size and appearance

resembling a black bird alighted before him on one of the trees, and

began so sweet a song, that in the delight of listening the good Abbot

lost all sense of time and place, and of all earthly things, remaining

motionless and in extasy. He returned not to the Convent at his

accustomed hour, and the Monks supposed that he had withdrawn to some

secret solitude; and would resume his office when his intended

devotion there should have been compleated. So long a time elapsed

without his reappearance that it was necessary to appoint a substitute

for him _pro tempore_; his disappearance and the forms observed upon

this occasion being duly registered. Seventy years past by, during all

which time no one who entered the pine forest ever lighted upon the

Abbot, nor did he think of any thing but the bird before him, nor hear

any thing but the song which filled his soul with contentment, nor

eat, nor drink, nor sleep, nor feel either want or weariness or

exhaustion. The bird at length ceased to sing and took flight: and the

Abbot then as if he had remained there only a few minutes returned to

the monastery. He marvelled as he approached at certain alterations

about the place, and still more when upon entering the house, he knew

none of the brethren whom he saw, nor did any one appear to know him.

The matter was soon explained, his name being well known, and the

manner of his disappearance matter of tradition there as well as of

record: miracles were not so uncommon then as to render any proof of

identity necessary, and they proposed to reinstate him in his office.

But the holy man was sensible that after so great a favour had been

vouchsafed him, he was not to remain a sojourner upon earth: so he

exhorted them to live in peace with one another, and in the fear of

God, and in the strict observance of their rule, and to let him end

his days in quietness; and in a few days, even as he expected, it came

to pass, and he fell asleep in the Lord.

The dishonest monks who for the honour of their Convent and the lucre

of gain palmed this lay (for such in its origin it was) upon their

neighbours as a true legend, added to it, that the holy Abbot was

interred in the cloisters; that so long as the brethren continued in

the observance of their rule, and the place of his interment was

devoutly visited, the earth about it proved a certain cure for many

maladies, but that in process of time both church and cloisters became

so dilapidated through decay of devotion, that cattle strayed into

them, till the monks and the people of the vicinity were awakened to a

sense of their sin and of their duty, by observing that every animal

which trod upon the Abbot's grave, fell and broke its leg.[1] The

relics therefore were translated with due solemnity, and deposited in

a new monument, on which the story of the miracle, _in perpetuam rei

memoriam_, was represented in bas-relief.

[Footnote 1: Superstition is confined to no country, but is spread,

more or less, over all. The classical reader will call to mind what

Herodotus tells happened in the territory of Agyllæi. _Clio. c. 167,

ἐγίνετο διάστροφα καὶ ἔμπηρα καὶ ἀπόπληκτα, ὁμοίως πρόβατα καὶ

ὑποζύγια καὶ ἄνθρωποι._]

The Welsh have a tradition concerning the Birds of Rhianon,—a female

personage who hath a principal part in carrying on the spells in Gwlad

yr Hud or the Enchanted Land of Pembrokeshire. Whoso happened to hear

the singing of her birds, stood seven years listening, though he

supposed the while that only an hour or two had elapsed. Owen Pughe

could have told us more of these Birds.

Some Romish legends speak of birds which were of no species known on

earth and who by the place and manner of their appearances were

concluded to have come from Paradise, or to have been celestial

spirits in that form. Holy Colette of portentous sanctity, the

Reformeress of the Poor Clares, and from whom a short-lived variety of

the Franciscans were called Colettines, was favoured, according to her

biographers, with frequent visits by a four-footed pet, which was no

mortal creature. It was small, resembling a squirrel in agility, and

an ermine in the snowy whiteness of its skin, but not in other

respects like either; and it had this advantage over all earthly pets,

that it was sweetly and singularly fragrant. It would play about the

saint, and invite her attention by its gambols. Colette felt a

peculiar and mysterious kind of pleasure when it showed itself; and

for awhile not supposing that there was anything supernatural in its

appearance, endeavoured to catch it, for she delighted in having lambs

and innocent birds to fondle: but though the Nuns closed the door, and

used every art and effort to entice or catch it, the little

nondescript always either eluded them, or vanished; and it never

tasted of any food which they set before it. This miracle being unique

in its kind is related with becoming admiration by the chroniclers of

the Seraphic Order; as it well may, for, for a monastic writer to

invent a new miracle of any kind evinces no ordinary power of

invention.

If this story be true, and true it must be unless holy Colette's

reverend Roman Catholic biographers are liars, its truth cannot be

admitted _sans tirer à consequence_; and it would follow as a

corollary not to be disputed, that there are animals in the world of

Angels. And on the whole it accorded with the general bearing of the

Doctor's notions (notions rather than opinions he liked to call them

where they were merely speculative) to suppose that there may be as

much difference between the zoology of that world, and of this, as is

found in the zoology and botany of widely distant regions here,

according to different circumstances of climate: and rather to imagine

that there were celestial birds, beasts, fishes, and insects, exempt

from evil, and each happy in its kind to the full measure of its

capacity for happiness, than to hold the immortality of brutes.

Cudworth's authority had some weight with him on this subject, where

the Platonical divine says that as “human souls could not possibly be

generated out of matter, but were sometime or other created by the

Almighty out of nothing preexisting, either in generations, or before

them,” so if it be admitted that brute animals are “not mere machines,

or _automata_ (as some seem inclinable to believe), but conscious and

thinking beings; then from the same principle of reason, it will

likewise follow, that their souls cannot be generated out of matter

neither, and therefore must be derived from the fountain of all life,

and created out of nothing by Him: who, since he can as easily

annihilate as create, and does all for the best, no man need at all to

trouble himself about their permanency, or immortality.”

Now though the Doctor would have been pleased to think, with the rude

Indian, that when he was in a state of existence wherein no evil could

enter

His faithful dog should bear him company,

he felt the force of this reasoning; and he perceived also that

something analogous to the annihilation there intended, might be

discerned in his own hypothesis. For in what may be called the visible

creation he found nothing resembling that animalcular world which the

microscope has placed within reach of our senses; nothing like those

monstrous and prodigious forms which Leeuwenhoeck, it must be

believed, has faithfully delineated.—Bishop has a beautiful epigram

upon the theme _καλὰ πέφανται_

When thro a chink,[2] a darkened room

Admits the solar beam,

Down the long light that breaks the gloom,

Millions of atoms stream.

In sparkling agitation bright,

Alternate dies they bear;

Too small for any sense but sight,

Or any sight, but _there_.

Nature reveals not all her store

To human search, or skill;

And when she deigns to shew us more

She shows us Beauty still.

But the microscopic world affords us exceptions to this great moral

truth. The forms which are there discovered might well be called

Abominable, inutterable, and worse

Than fables yet have feign'd, or fear conceived,

Gorgons and Hydras, and Chimæras dire.

Such verily they would be, if they were in magnitude equal to the

common animals by which we are surrounded. But Nature has left all

these seemingly misformed creatures in the lowest stage of

existence,—the circle of inchoation; neither are any of the hideous

forms of insects repeated in the higher grades of animal life; the sea

indeed contains creatures marvellously uncouth and ugly, _beaucoup

plus de monstres, sans comparaison, que la terre,_ and the Sieur de

Brocourt, who was as curious in collecting the opinions of men as our

philosopher, though no man could make more dissimilar uses of their

knowledge, explains it _à cause de la facilité de la generation qui

est en elle, dont se procreent si diverses figures, à raison de la

grande chaleur qui se trouve en la mer, l'humeur y estant gras, et

l'aliment abondant; toute generation se faisant par chaleur et

humidité, qui produisent toutes choses._ With such reasoning our

Doctor was little satisfied; it was enough to know that as the sea

produces monsters, so the sea covers them, and that fish are evidently

lower in the scale of being than the creatures of earth and air. It is

the system of Nature then that whatever is unseemly should be left in

the earliest and lowest stages; that life as it ascends should cast

off all deformity, as the butterfly leaves its _exuviæ_ when its

perfect form is developed; and finally that whatever is imperfect

should be thrown off, and nothing survive in immortality but what is

beautiful as well as good.

[Footnote 2: The Reader may not be displeased to read the following

beautiful passage from Jeremy Taylor.

“If God is glorified in the sun and moon, in the rare fabric of the

honeycombs, in the discipline of bees, in the economy of pismires, in

the little houses of birds, in the curiosity of an eye, God being

pleased to delight in those little images and reflexes of himself from

those pretty mirrors, which, _like a crevice in the wall, through a

narrow perspective, transmit the species of a vast excellency_: much

rather shall God be pleased to behold himself in the glasses of our

obedience, in the emissions of our will and understanding; these being

rational and apt instruments to express him, far better than the

natural, as being near communications of himself.”—_Invalidity of a

late or Death-bed Repentance_, _Vol. v. p. 464_.]

He was not acquainted with the speculation, or conception (as the

Philotheistic philosopher himself called it) of Giordano Bruno, that

_deformium animalium formæ, formosæ sunt in cœlo_. Nor would he have

assented to some of the other opinions which that pious and high

minded victim of papal intolerance, connected with it. That

_metallorum in se non lucentium formæ, lucent in planetis suis_, he

might have supposed, if he had believed in the relationship between

metals and planets. And if Bruno's remark applied to the Planets only,

as so many other worlds, and did not regard the future state of the

creatures of this our globe, the Doctor might then have agreed to his

assertion that _non enim homo, nec animalia, nec metalla ut hic sunt,

illic existunt_. But the Philotheist of Nola, in the remaining part of

this his twelfth _Conceptus Idearum_ soared above the Doctor's pitch:

_Quod nempe hic discurrit_, he says, _illic actu viget, discursione

superiori. Virtutes enim quæ versus materiam explicantur: versus actum

primum uniuntur, et complicantur. Unde patet quod dicunt Platonici,

ideam quamlibet rerum etiam non viventium, vitam esse et

intelligentiam quandam. Item et in Primâ Mente unam esse rerum omnium

ideam. Illuminando igitur, vivificando, et uniendo est quod te

superioribus agentibus conformans, in conceptionem et retentionem

specierum efferaris._ Here the Philosopher of Doncaster would have

found himself in the dark, but whether because “blinded by excess of

light,” or because the subject is within the confines of uttermost

darkness, is not for me his biographer to determine.

CHAPTER CCXIV.

FURTHER DIFFICULTIES.—QUESTION CONCERNING INFERIOR APPARITIONS.—BLAKE

THE PAINTER, AND THE GHOST OF A FLEA.

_In amplissimâ causâ, quasi magno mari, pluribus ventis sumus vecti._

PLINY.

There was another argument against the immortality of brutes, to which

it may be, he allowed the more weight, because it was of his own

excogitating. Often as he had heard of apparitions in animal forms,

all such tales were of some spirit or hobgoblin which had assumed that

appearance; as, for instance that _simulacrum admodum monstruosum_,

that portentous figure in which Pope Gregory the ninth after his death

was met roaming about the woods by a holy hermit: it was in the form

of a wild beast with the head of an ass, the body of a bear, and the

tail of a cat. Well might the good hermit fortify himself with making

the sign of the cross when he beheld this monster: he approved himself

a courageous man by speaking to the apparition which certainly was not

“in such a questionable shape” as to invite discourse: and we are

beholden to him for having transmitted to posterity the bestial Pope's

confession, that because he had lived an unreasonable and lawless

life, it was the will of God and of St. Peter whose chair he had

defiled by all kinds of abominations, that he should thus wander about

in a form of ferine monstrosity.

He had read of such apparitions, and been sufficiently afraid of

meeting a barguest[1] in his boyish days; but in no instance had he

ever heard of the ghost of an animal. Yet if the immaterial part of

such creatures survived in a separate state of consciousness why

should not their spirits sometimes have been seen as well as those of

our departed fellow creatures? No cock or hen ghost ever haunted its

own barn door; no child was ever alarmed by the spirit of its pet

lamb; no dog or cat ever came like a shadow to visit the hearth on

which it rested when living. It is laid down as a certain truth

deduced from the surest principles of demonology by the Jesuit

Thyræus, who had profoundly studied that science that whenever the

apparition of a brute beast or monster was seen, it was a Devil in

that shape. _Quotiescumque sub brutorum animantium forma conspiciuntur

spiritus, quotiescumque monstra exhibentur dubium non est,_

autoprosopos _adesse Dæmoniorum spiritus._ For such forms were not

suitable for human spirits, but for evil Demons they were in many

respects peculiarly so: and such apparitions were frequent.

[Footnote 1: A northern word, used in Cumberland and Yorkshire.

Brocket and Grose neither of them seem aware that this spirit or dæmon

had the form of the beast. Their derivations are severally “_Berg_ a

hill, and _geest_ ghost;”—“_Bar_, a gate or style, and _gheist_.”

The locality of the spirit will suggest a reference to the Icelandic

_Berserkr_. In that language _Bera_ and _Bersi_ both signify a

_bear_.]

Thus the Jesuit reasoned, the possibility that the spirit of a brute

might appear never occurring to him, because he would have deemed it

heretical to allow that there was anything in the brute creation

partaking of immortality. No such objection occurred to the Doctor in

his reasonings upon this point. His was a more comprehensive creed;

the doubt which he felt was not concerning the spirit of brute

animals, but whether it ever existed in a separate state after death,

which the Ghost of one, were there but one such appearance well

attested, would sufficiently prove.

He admitted indeed that for every authenticated case of an apparition,

a peculiar cause was to be assigned, or presumed; but that for the

apparition of an inferior animal, there could in general be no such

cause. Yet cases are imaginable wherein there might be such peculiar

cause, and some final purpose only to be brought about by such

preternatural means. The strong affection which leads a dog to die

upon his master's grave, might bring back the spirit of a dog to watch

for the safety of a living master. That no animal ghosts should have

been seen afforded therefore in this judgment no weak presumption

against their existence.

O Dove, “my guide, philosopher and friend!” that thou hadst lived to

see what I have seen, the portrait of the Ghost of a Flea, engraved by

Varley, from the original by Blake! The engraver was present when the

likeness was taken, and relates the circumstances thus in his Treatise

on Zodiacal Physiognomy.

“This spirit visited his imagination in such a figure as he never

anticipated in an insect. As I was anxious to make the most correct

investigation in my power of the truth of these visions, on hearing of

this spiritual apparition of a Flea, I asked him if he could draw for

me the resemblance of what he saw. He instantly said, ‘I see him now

before me.’ I therefore gave him paper and a pencil, with which he

drew the portrait of which a fac-simile is given in this number. I

felt convinced by his mode of proceeding, that he had a real image

before him; for he left off, and began on another part of the paper to

make a separate drawing of the mouth of the Flea, which the spirit

having opened, he was prevented from proceeding with the first sketch

till he had closed it. During the time occupied in compleating the

drawing, the Flea told him that all fleas were inhabited by the souls

of such men as were by nature blood-thirsty to excess, and were

therefore providentially confined to the size and form of insects;

otherwise, were he himself, for instance, the size of a horse, he

would depopulate a great portion of the country. He added that if in

attempting to leap from one island to another he should fall into the

sea, he could swim, and should not be lost.”

The Ghost of the Flea spoke truly when he said what a formidable beast

he should be, if with such power of leg and of proboscis, and such an

appetite for blood he were as large as a horse. And if all things came

by chance, it would necessarily follow from the laws of chance that

such monsters there would be; but because all things are wisely and

mercifully ordered, it is, that these varieties of form and power

which would be hideous, and beyond measure destructive upon a larger

scale, are left in the lower stages of being, the existence of such

deformity and such means of destruction there, and their non-existence

as the scale of life ascends, alike tending to prove the wisdom and

the benevolence of the Almighty Creator.

CHAPTER CCXV.

FACTS AND FANCIES CONNECTING THE DOCTOR'S THEORY WITH THE VEGETABLE

WORLD.

We will not be too peremptory herein: and build standing structures of

bold assertions on so uncertain a foundation; rather with the

Rechabites we will live in tents of conjecture, which on better reason

we may easily alter and remove.

FULLER.

It may have been observed by the attentive reader—(and all my readers

will be attentive, except those who are in love) that although the

Doctor traced many of his acquaintance to their prior allotments in

the vegetable creation, he did not discover such symptoms in any of

them as led him to infer that the object of his speculations had

existed in the form of a tree;—crabbed tempers, sour plums,

cherry-cheeks, and hearts of oak being nothing more than metaphorical

expressions of similitude. But it would be a rash and untenable

deduction were we to conclude from the apparent omission that the

arboreal world was excluded from his system. On the contrary, the

analogies between animal and vegetable life led him to believe that

the Archeus of the human frame, received no unimportant part of his

preparatory education in the woods.

Steele in a playful allegory has observed “that there is a sort of

vegetable principle in the mind of every man when he comes into the

world. In infants, the seeds lie buried and undiscovered, till after a

while they sprout forth in a kind of rational leaves, which are words;

and in due season the flowers begin to appear in variety of beautiful

colours, and all the gay pictures of youthful fancy and imagination;

at last the fruit knits and is formed, which is green perhaps at

first, sour and unpleasant to the taste, and not fit to be gathered;

till ripened by due care and application, it discovers itself in all

the noble productions of philosophy, mathematics, close reasoning and

handsome argumentation. I reflected further on the intellectual leaves

before mentioned, and found almost as great a variety among them as in

the vegetable world.” In this passage, though written only as a sport

of fancy, there was more our speculator thought, than was dreamt of in

Steele's philosophy.

Empedocles, if the fragment which is ascribed to him be genuine,

pretended to remember that he had pre-existed not only in the forms of

maiden and youth, fowl and fish, but of a shrub also;

_Ἤδη γάρ ποτ᾽ ἐγὼ γενόμην κούρη τε κόρος τε,

Θάμνος τ᾽, οἰωνός τε, καὶ εἰν ἅλι ἔλλοπος ἰχθῦς._

But upon such authority the Doctor placed as little reliance as upon

the pretended recollections of Pythagoras, whether really asserted by

that philosopher or falsely imputed to him by fablers in prose or

verse. When man shall have effected his passage from the mortal and

terrestrial state into the sphere where there is nothing that is

impure, nothing that is evil, nothing that is perishable, then indeed

it is a probable supposition that he may look back into the lowest

deep from whence he hath ascended, recall to mind his progress step by

step, through every stage of the ascent, and understand the process by

which it had been appointed for him, (applying to Plato's words a

different meaning from that in which they were intended) _ἐκ πολλῶν

ἕνα γεγονότα εὐδαίμονα ἔσεσθαι_, to become of many creatures, one

happy one. In that sphere such a retrospect would enlarge the

knowledge, and consequently the happiness also of the soul which has

there attained the perfection of its nature—the end for which it was

created and redeemed. But any such consciousness of pre-existence

would in this stage of our mortal being be so incompatible with the

condition of humanity, that the opinion itself can be held only as a

speculation, of which no certainty can ever have been made known to

man, because that alone has been revealed, the knowledge of which is

necessary: the philosophers therefore who pretended to it, if they

were sincere in the pretension (which may be doubted) are entitled to

no more credit, than the poor hypochondriac who fancies himself a

bottle or a tea-pot.

Thus our philosopher reasoned, who either in earnest or in jest, or in

serious sportiveness, _παίζων καὶ σπουδάζων ἄμα_, was careful never to

lean more upon an argument than it would bear. Sometimes he prest the

lame and halt into his service, but it was with a clear perception of

their defects, and he placed them always in positions where they were

efficient for the service required for them, and where more valid ones

would not have been more available. He formed therefore, no system of

dendranthropology, nor attempted any classification in it; there were

not facts enough whereon to found one. Yet in more than one

circumstance which observant writers have recorded, something he

thought might be discerned which bore upon this part of the

theory,—some traces of

those first affections,

Those shadowy recollections,

on which Wordsworth (in whose mystic strains he would have delighted)

dwells. Thus he inferred that the soul of Xerxes must once have

animated a plane tree, and retained a vivid feeling connected with his

arboreal existence, when he read in Evelyn how that great king

“stopped his prodigious army of seventeen hundred thousand soldiers to

admire the pulchritude and procerity of one of those goodly trees; and

became so fond of it, that spoiling both himself, his concubines, and

great persons of all their jewels, he covered it with gold, gems,

necklaces, scarfs and bracelets, and infinite riches; in sum, was so

enamoured of it, that for some days, neither the concernment of his

grand expedition, nor interest of honour, nor the necessary motion of

his portentous army, could persuade him from it. He stiled it his

mistress, his minion, his goddess; and when he was forced to part from

it, he caused the figure of it to be stamped on a medal of gold, which

he continually wore about him.”

“That prudent Consul Passianus Crispus” must have been influenced by a

like feeling, when he “fell in love with a prodigious beech of a

wonderful age and stature, used to sleep under it, and would sometimes

refresh it with pouring wine at the root.” Certainly as Evelyn has

observed, “a goodly tree was a powerful attractive” to this person.

The practice of regaling trees with such libations was not uncommon

among the wealthy Romans; they seem to have supposed that because wine

gladdened their own hearts, it must in like manner comfort the root of

a tree: and Pliny assures us that it did so, _compertum id maximè

prodesse radicibus_, he says, _docuimusque etiam arbores vina potare._

If this were so, the Doctor reasoned that there would be a peculiar

fitness in fertilizing the vine with its own generous juice, which it

might be expected to return with increase in richer and more abundant

clusters: forgetting, ignoring, or disregarding this opinion which

John Lily has recorded that the vine watered (as he calls it) with

wine is soon withered. He was not wealthy enough to afford such an

experiment upon that which clothed the garden-front of his house, for

this is not a land flowing with wine and oil; but he indulged a

favourite apple-tree (it was a Ribstone pippin) with cider; and when

no sensible improvement in the produce could be perceived, he imputed

the disappointment rather to the parsimonious allowance of that

congenial liquor, than to any error in the theory.

But this has led me astray, and I must return to Xerxes the Great

King. The predilection or passion which he discovered for the plane,

the sage of Doncaster explained by deriving it from a dim reminiscence

of his former existence in a tree of the same kind; or which was not

less likely in the wanton ivy which had clasped one, or in the wild

vine which had festooned its branches with greener leaves, or even in

the agaric which had grown out of its decaying substance. And he would

have quoted Wordsworth if the Sage of Rydal had not been of a later

generation:

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting;

The soul that rises with us, our life's star,

Hath had elsewhere its setting,

And cometh from afar.

Other examples of men who have doated upon particular trees he

accounted for by the same philosophy. But in the case of the Consul

Crispus he was more inclined to hold the first supposition,—to wit,

that he had been a beech himself, and that the tree which he loved so

dearly had sprung from his own mast, so that the feeling with which he

regarded it was a parental one. For that man should thus unconsciously

afford proof of his relationship to tree, was rendered more probable

by a singular, though peradventure single fact in which a tree so

entirely recognized its affinity with man, that a slip accidentally

grafted on the human subject, took root in the body, grew there,

flourished, blossomed and produced fruit after its kind. “A shepherd

of Tarragon had fallen into a sloe tree, and a sharp point thereof

having run into his breast, in two years time it took such root, that,

after many branches had been cut off, there sprang up some at last

which bare both flowers and fruit.” “Peiresc,” as Gassendi the writer

of his life assures us, “would never be quiet till Cardinal Barberino

procured the Archbishop of that place to testify the truth of the

story; and Putean the knight received not only letters testifying the

same, but also certain branches thereof, which he sent unto him.”

CHAPTER CCXVI.

A SPANISH AUTHORESS.—HOW THE DOCTOR OBTAINED HER WORKS FROM

MADRID.—THE PLEASURE AND ADVANTAGES WHICH THE AUTHOR DERIVES FROM HIS

LANDMARKS IN THE BOOKS WHICH HE HAD PERUSED.

ALEX. _Quel es D. Diego aquel Arbol,

que tiene la copa en tierra

y las raizes arriba?_

DIEG. _El hombre._

EL LETRADO DEL CIELO.

Man is a Tree that hath no top in cares,

No root in comforts.[1]

This is one of the many poetical passages in which the sound is better

than the sense;—yet it is not without its beauty. The same similitude

has been presented by Henry More in lines which please the ear less,

but satisfy the understanding.

The lower man is nought but a fair plant

Whose grosser matter is from the base ground.

“A plant,” says Jones of Nayland, “is a system of life, but

insensitive and fixed to a certain spot. An animal hath voluntary

motion, sense, or perception, and is capable of pain and pleasure. Yet

in the construction of each there are some general principles which

very obviously connect them. It is literally as well as metaphorically

true, that trees have limbs, and an animal body branches. A vascular

system is also common to both, in the channels of which life is

maintained and circulated. When the trachea, with its branches in the

lungs, or the veins and arteries, or the nerves, are separately

represented, we have the figure of a tree. The leaves of trees have a

fibrous and fleshy part; their bark is a covering which answers to the

skin in animals. An active vapour pervades them both, and perspires

from both, which is necessary for the preservation of health and

vigour. The _vis vitæ_, or involuntary, mechanical force of animal

life, is kept up by the same elements which act upon plants for their

growth and support.”[2]

[Footnote 1: CHAPMAN.]

[Footnote 2: The reader of Berkeley will naturally turn to the Siris

of that author—called by Southey in his life of Wesley “one of the

best, wisest, and greatest men whom Ireland, with all its fertility of

genius, has produced.” Vol. ii. 260., 2nd _Edit._]

“Plants,” says Novalis, “are Children of the Earth; we are Children of

the Æther. Our lungs are properly our root; we live when we breathe;

we begin our life with breathing.” Plato also compared man to a Tree,

but his was a physical similitude, he likened the human vegetable to a

tree inverted, with the root above and the branches below. Antonio

Perez allegorized the similitude in one of his epistles to Essex,

thus, _unde credis hominem inversam arborem appellari? Inversam

nostris oculis humanis et terrenis; rectam verò verè, viridemque, si

radicem defixam habuerit in suo naturali loco, cœlo, unde orta._ And

Rabelais pursues the resemblance farther, saying that trees differ

from beasts in this, _qu'elles ont la teste, c'est le tronc, en bas;

les cheveulx, ce sont les racines, en terre; et les pieds, ce sont les

rameaulx, contremont; comme si un homme faisoit le chesne fourchu._

The thought that man is like a tree arose in the Doctor's mind more

naturally when he first saw the representation of the veins and

arteries in the old translation of Ambrose Paré's works. And when in

course of time he became a curious enquirer into the history of her

art, he was less disposed to smile at any of the fancies into which

Doña Oliva Sabuco Barrera had been led by this resemblance than to

admire the novelty and ingenuity of the theory which she deduced from

it.

Bless ye the memory of this Spanish Lady, all ye who bear, or aspire

to, the honour of the bloody hand as Knights of Esculapius! For from

her, according to Father Feyjoo, the English first, and afterwards the

physicians of other countries learnt the theory of nervous

diseases;—never therefore did any other individual contribute so

largely to the gratification of fee-feeling fingers!

Feyjoo has properly enumerated her among the women who have done

honour to their country: and later Spaniards have called her the

immortal glory not of Spain alone, but of all Europe: She was born,

and dwelt in the city of Alcaraz, and flourished in the reign of

Philip II. to whom she dedicated in 1587 her “New Philosophy of the

Nature of Man,”[3] appealing to the ancient law of chivalry, whereby

great Lords and high born Knights were bound always to favour women in

their adventures. In placing under the eagle wings of his Catholic

Majesty this child which she had engendered, she told the King that he

was then receiving from a woman greater service than any that men had

rendered him, with whatever zeal and success they had exerted

themselves to serve him. The work which she laid before him would

better the world, she said, in many things, and if he could not attend

to it, those who came after him, peradventure would. For though they

were already all too-many books in the world, yet this one was

wanting.

[Footnote 3: It should seem by her name, as suffixed to the Carta

Dedicatorie, that she was of French or Breton extraction, for she

signs herself, Oliva de Nantes, Sabuco Barrera. _R. S._]

The brief and imperfect notices of this Lady's system, which the

Doctor had met with in the course of his reading, made him very

desirous of procuring her works: this it would not be easy to do in

England at this time, and then it was impossible. He obtained them

however through the kindness of Mason's friend, Mr. Burgh, whom he

used to meet at Mr. Copley's at Netterhall, and who in great or in

little things was always ready to render any good office in his power

to any person. Burgh procured the book through the Rev. Edward Clarke

(father of Dr. Clarke the traveller) then Chaplain to the British

Embassador in Spain. The volume came with the despatches from Madrid,

it was forwarded to Mr. Burgh in an official frank, and the Doctor

marked with a white stone the day on which the York carrier delivered

it at his house. That precious copy is now in my possession;[4] my

friend has noted in it, as was his custom, every passage that seemed

worthy of observation, with the initial of his own name—a small

capital, neatly written in red ink. Such of his books as I have been

able to collect are full of these marks, showing how carefully he had

read them. These notations have been of much use to me in my perusal,

leading me to pause where he had paused, to observe what he had noted

and to consider what had to him seemed worthy of consideration. And

though I must of necessity more frequently have failed to connect the

passages so noted with my previous knowledge as he had done, and for

that reason to see their bearings in the same point of view, yet

undoubtedly I have often thus been guided into the same track of

thought which he had pursued before me. Long will it be before some of

these volumes meet with a third reader; never with one in whom these

vestiges of their former owner can awaken a feeling like that which

they never fail to excite in me!

[Footnote 4: This curious book I unluckily missed at the Sale of

Southey's Library. I was absent at the time, and it passed into

private hands. It sold for thirteen shillings only. See No. 3453. The

title is as follows;—_Sabuco (Olivia) Nueva Filosofia de la Naturaleza

del hombre, no conocida ni alcançada de los Grandes Filosofos

Antiguos_. FIRST EDITION. _Madrid, 1587_.]

But the red letters in this volume have led me from its contents; and

before I proceed to enter upon them in another chapter, I will

conclude this, recurring to the similitude at its commencement, with

an extract from one of Yorick's Sermons. “It is very remarkable,” he

says, “that the Apostle St. Paul calls a bad man a wild olive _tree_,

not barely a branch,” (as in the opposite case where our Saviour told

his disciples that He was the vine, and that they were only

branches)—“but a Tree, which having a root of its own supports itself,

and stands in its own strength, and brings forth its own fruit. And so

does every bad man in respect of the wild and sour fruit of a vicious

and corrupt heart. According to the resemblance, if the Apostle

intended it, he is a Tree,—has a root of his own, and fruitfulness

such as it is, with a power to bring it forth without help. But in

respect of religion and the moral improvements of virtue and goodness,

the Apostle calls us, and reason tells us, we are no more than a

_branch_, and all our fruitfulness, and all our support, depend so

much upon the influence and communications of God, that without Him we

can do nothing, as our Saviour declares.”

CHAPTER CCXVII.

SOME ACCOUNT OF D. OLIVA SABUCO'S MEDICAL THEORIES AND PRACTICE.

_Yo—volveré

A nueva diligencia y paso largo,

Que es breve el tiempo, 's grande la memoria

Que para darla al mundo está á mi cargo._

BALBUENA.

Carew the poet speaking metaphorically of his mistress calls her foot,

the precious root

On which the goodly cedar grows.

Doña Oliva on the contrary thought that the human body might be called

a tree reversed, the brain being the root, and the other the bark. She

did not know what great authority there is for thinking that trees

stand upon their heads, for though we use vulgarly but improperly to

call the uppermost of the branches the top of a tree, we are

corrected, the learned John Gregory tells us, by Aristotle in his

books _De Animâ_,[1] where we are taught to call the root the head,

and the top the feet.

[Footnote 1: Quære? Lib. ii. c. ii. § 6. _αἱ δὲ ρἵζαι τῷ στόματι

ἀνάλογον κ. τ. ἑ._]

The _pia mater_ according to her theory diffuses through this bark by

the nerves that substance, moisture, sap, or white chyle which when it

flows in its proper course, preserves the human vegetable in a state

of well being, but when its course is reverted it becomes the cause of

diseases. This nervous fluid, the brain derived principally from the

air, which she held to be water in a state of rarefaction, air being

the chyle of the upper world, water of the inferior, and the Moon with

air and water, as with milk, feeding like a nursing mother, all

sublunary creatures, and imparting moisture for their increase, as the

Sun imparteth heat and life. Clouds are the milk of the Moon, from

which, if she may so express herself, she says it rains air and wind

as well as water, wind being air, or rarefied water rarefied still

farther. The mutation or rarefaction of water into air takes place by

day, the remutation or condensation of air into water by night: this

is shown by the dew and by this the ebbing and flowing of the sea are

caused.

In the brain, as in the root of the animal tree, all diseases,

according to Doña Oliva, had their origin. From this theory she

deduced a mode of practice, which if it did not facilitate the

patient's recovery, was at least not likely to retard it; and tended

in no way to counteract, or interfere with the restorative efforts of

nature. And although fanciful in its foundation, it was always so

humane and generally so reasonable as in a great degree to justify the

confidence with which she advanced it. She requested that a board of

learned men might be appointed, before whom she might defend her

system of philosophy and of therapeutics, and that her practice might

be tried for one year, that of Hippocrates and Galen having been tried

for two thousand with what effect was daily and miserably seen, when

of a thousand persons there were scarcely three who reached the proper

termination of life and died by natural decay, the rest being cut off

by some violent disease. For, according to her, the natural

termination of life is produced by the exhaustion of the radical

moisture, which in the course of nature is dried, or consumed,

gradually and imperceptibly; death therefore, when that course is not

disturbed, being an easy passage to eternity. This gradual desiccation

it is which gives to old age the perfection of judgment that

distinguishes it; and for the same reason the children of old men are

more judicious than others, young men being deficient in judgment by

reason of the excess of radical moisture, children still more so.

She had never studied medicine, she said; but it was clear as the

light of day that the old system was erroneous, and must needs be so,

because its founders were ignorant of the nature of man, upon which

being rightly understood the true system must, of necessity, be

founded. Hope is what supports health and life; fear, the worst enemy

of both. Among the best preservatives and restoratives she recommended

therefore cheerfulness, sweet odours, music, the country, the sound of

woods and waters, agreeable conversation, and pleasant pastimes.

Music, of all external things, she held to be that which tends most to

comfort, rejoice and strengthen the brain, being as it were a

spiritual pleasure in which the mind sympathizes; and the first of all

remedies, in this, her true system of medicine, was to bring the mind

and body into unison, removing thus that discord which is occasioned

when they are ill at ease; this was to be done by administering

cheerfulness, content, and hope to the mind, and in such words and

actions as produced these, the best medicine was contained. Next to

this it imported to comfort the stomach, and to cherish the root of

man, that is to say the brain, with its proper corroborants,

especially with sweet odours and with music. For music was so good a

remedy for melancholy, so great an alleviator of pain, such a soother

of uneasy emotions, and of passion, that she marvelled wherefore so

excellent a medicine should not be more in use, seeing that

undoubtedly many grievous diseases, as for example epilepsy, might be

disarmed and cured by it; and it would operate with the more effect if

accompanied with hopeful words and with grateful odours, for Doña

Oliva thought with Solomon that “pleasant words are as an honeycomb,

sweet to the soul, and health to the bones.”

Consequently unpleasant sounds and ill smells, were, according to her

philosophy injurious. The latter she confounded with noxious air,

which was an error to be expected in those days, when nothing

concerning the composition of the atmosphere had been discovered. Thus

she thought it was by their ill odour that limekilns and

charcoal-fires occasioned death; and that owing to the same cause

horses were frequently killed when the filth of a stable was removed,

and men who were employed in cleaning vaults. Upon the same principle,

in recommending perfumes as alexipharmic, she fell in with the usual

practice. The plague according to her, might be received not by the

breath alone, but at the eyes also, for through the sight there was

ready access to the brain; it was prudent therefore to close the

nostrils when there might be reason to apprehend that the air was

tainted; and when conversing with an infected person, not to talk face

to face, but to avert the countenance. In changing the air with the

hope of escaping an endemic disease, the place to go to should be that

from whence the pestilence had come, rather than one whither it might

be going.

Ill sounds were noxious in like manner, though not in like degree,

because no discord can be so grating as to prove fatal; but any sound

which is at once loud and discordant she held to be unwholesome, and

that to hear any one sing badly, read ill, or talk importunately like

a fool was sufficient to cause a defluxion from the brain; if this

latter opinion were well founded, no Speaker of the House of Commons

could hold his office for a single Session without being talked to

death. With these she classed the sound of a hiccup, the whetting of a

saw, and the cry of bitter lamentation.

Doña Oliva it may be presumed was endued with a sensitive ear and a

quick perception of odours, as well as with a cheerful temper, and an

active mind. Her whole course of practice was intended to cheer and

comfort the patient, if that was possible. She allowed the free use of

water, and fresh air, and recommended that the apartments of the sick

should be well ventilated. She prescribed refreshing odours, among

others that of bread fresh from the oven, and that wine should be

placed near the pillow, in order to induce sleep. She even thought

that cheerful apparel conduced to health, and that the fashion of

wearing black which prevailed in her time was repugnant to reason.

Pursuing her theory that the brain was the original seat of disease,

she advised that the excessive moisture which would otherwise take a

wrong course from thence, should be drawn off through the natural

channels by sneezing powders, or by pungent odours which provoke a

discharge from the eyes and nostrils, by sudorifics also, exercise,

and whatever might cause a diversion to the skin. When any part was

wounded, or painful, or there was a tumour, she recommended

compression above the part affected, with a woollen bandage, tightly

bound, but not so as to occasion pain. And to comfort the root of the

animal tree she prescribes scratching the head with the fingers, or

combing it with an ivory comb,—a general and admirable remedy she

calls this, against which some former possessor of the book who seems

to have been a practitioner upon the old system, and has frequently

entered his protest against the medical heresies of the authoress, has

written in the margin “bad advice.” She recommended also cutting the

hair, and washing the head with white wine, which as it were renovated

the skin, and improved the vegetation.

But Doña Oliva did not reject more active remedies, on the contrary

she advised all such as men had learnt from animals, and this included

a powerful list, for she seems to have believed all the fables with

which natural history in old times abounded, and of which indeed it

may almost be said to have consisted. More reasonably she observed

that animals might teach us the utility of exercise, seeing how the

young lambs sported in the field, and dogs played with each other, and

birds rejoiced in the air. When the stomach required clearing she

prescribed a rough practice, that the patient should drink copiously

of weak wine and water, and of tepid water with a few drops of vinegar

and an infusion of camomile flowers; and that he should eat also

things difficult of digestion, such as radishes, figs, carrots,

onions, anchovies, oil and vinegar, with plenty of Indian pepper, and

with something acid the better to cut the phlegm which was to be got

rid of; having thus stored the stomach well for the expenditure which

was to be required from it, the patient was then to lay himself on a

pillow across a chair, and produce the desired effect either by his

fingers or by feathers dipt in oil. After this rude operation which

was to refresh the brain and elevate the pia mater, the stomach was to

be comforted.

To bathe the whole body with white wine was another mode of

invigorating the pia mater; for there it was that all maladies

originated, none from the liver; the nature of the liver, said she, is

that it cannot err; _es docta sin doctor._

The latter treatises in her book are in Latin, but she not

unfrequently passes, as if unconsciously, into her own language,

writing always livelily and forcibly, with a clear perception of the

fallacy of the established system, and with a confidence, not so well

founded, that she had discovered the real nature of man and thereby

laid the foundation of a rational practice, conformable to it.

CHAPTER CCXVIII.

THE MUNDANE SYSTEM AS COMMONLY HELD IN D. OLIVA'S AGE.—MODERN

OBJECTIONS TO A PLURALITY OF WORLDS BY THE REV. JAMES MILLER.

_Un cerchio immaginato ci bisogna,

A voler ben la spera contemplare;

Cosi chi intender questa storia agogna

Conviensi altro per altro immaginare;

Perchè qui non si canta, e finge, e sogna;

Venuto è il tempo da filosofare._

PULCI.

One of Doña Oliva's treatises is upon the _Compostura del Mundo_,

which may best be interpreted the Mundane System; herein she laid no

claim to the merit of discovery, only to that of briefly explaining

what had been treated of by many before her. The mundane system she

illustrates by comparing it to a large ostrich's egg, with three

whites and eleven shells, our earth being the yolk. The water which

according to this theory surrounded the globe she likened to the first

or innermost _albumen_, the second and more extensive was the air; the

third and much the largest consisted of fire. The eleven shells, were

so many leaves one inclosing the other, circle within circle, like a

nest of boxes. The first of these was the first heaven wherein the

Moon hath her appointed place, the second that of the planet Mercury,

the third that of Venus; the fourth was the circle of the Sun; Mars,

Jupiter and Saturn moved in the fifth, sixth and seventh; the eighth

was the starry sky; the ninth the chrystalline; the tenth the _primum

mobile_, which imparted motion to all; and the eleventh was the

_immobile_, or empyreum, surrounding all, containing all, and bounding

all; for beyond this there was no created thing, either good or evil.

A living writer of no ordinary powers agrees in this conclusion with

the old philosophers whom Doña Oliva followed; and in declaring his

opinion he treats the men of science with as much contempt as they

bestow upon their unscientific predecessors in astronomy.

Reader if thou art capable of receiving pleasure from such

speculations, (and if thou art not, thou art little better than an

Oran-Otang) send for a little book entitled the Progress of the Human

Mind, its objects, conditions and issue: with the relation which the

Progress of Religion bears to the general growth of mind; by the Rev.

James Miller. Send also for the “Sibyl's Leaves, or the Fancies,

Sentiments and Opinions of Silvanus, miscellaneous, moral and

religious,” by the same author, the former published in 1823, the

latter in 1829. Very probably you may never have heard of either: but

if you are a buyer of books, I say unto you, buy them both.

“Infinity,” says this very able and original thinker, “is the

retirement in which perfect love and wisdom only dwell with God.

“In Infinity and Eternity the sceptic sees an abyss in which all is

lost, I see in them the residence of Almighty Power, in which my

reason and my wishes find equally a firm support.—Here holding by the

pillars of Heaven, I exist—I stand fast.

“Surround our material system with a void, and mind itself becoming

blind and impotent in attempting to travel through it, will return to

our little lights, like the dove which found no rest for the sole of

her foot. But when I find Infinity filled with light and life and

love, I will come back to you with my olive branch: follow me, or

farewell! you shall shut me up in your cabins no more.”

“In stretching our view through the wide expanse which surrounds us,

we perceive a system of bodies receding behind one another, till they

are lost in immeasureable distance. This region beyond though to us

dark and unexplored, from the impossibility of a limit, yet gives us

its infinity as the most unquestionable of all principles. But though

the actual extent to which this infinite region is occupied by the

bodies of which the universe is composed, is far beyond our measure

and our view, and though there be nothing without to compel us

anywhere to stop in enlarging its bounds, Nature herself gives us

other principles not less certain, which prove that she must have

limits, and that it is impossible her frame can fill the abyss which

surrounds her. Her different parts have each their fixed place, their

stated distance. You may as well measure infinity by mile-stones as

fill it with stars. To remove any one from an infinite distance from

another, you must in fixing their place, set limits to the infinity

you assume. You can advance from unity as far as you please, but there

is no actual number at an infinite distance from it. You may in the

same manner, add world to world as long as you please, only because no

number of them can fill infinity, or approach nearer to fill it. We

have the doctrine of Nature's abhorrence of a _vacuum_; it is from a

_plenum_ like this she shrinks, as from a region in which all her

substance would be dissipated into nothing. Her frame is composed of

parts which have each their certain proportion and relation. It

subsists by mutual attractions and repulsions, lessening and

increasing with distance; by a circulation which, actually passing

through, every part rejects the idea of a space which it could never

pervade. Infinity cannot revolve; the circulation of Nature cannot

pervade infinity. The globe we inhabit, and all its kindred planets,

revolve in orbits which embrace a common power in the centre which

animates and regulates their motions, and on the influence of which

their internal energies evidently depend. That we may not be lost in

looking for it in the boundless regions without, our great physical

power is all within, in the bosom of our own circle; and the same

facts which prove the greatness of this power to uphold, to penetrate,

to enliven at such a distance, shew in what manner it might at last

become weak,—become nothing. Whatever relations we may have to bodies

without, or whatever they may have to one another, their influence is

all directed to particular points,—to given distances. Material Nature

has no substance, can make no effort, capable of pervading infinity.

The light itself of all her powers the most expansive, in diffusing

itself through her own frame, shews most of all her incapacity to

occupy the region beyond, in which (as the necessary result of its own

effort) it soon sinks, feeble and faint, where all its motion is but

as rest, in an extent to which the utmost possible magnitude of Nature

is but a point.”

The reader will now be prepared for the remarks of this free thinker

upon the Plurality of Worlds. Observe I call him free thinker not in

disparagement, but in honour; he belongs to that service in which

alone is perfect freedom.

“Perceiving,” he says, “as it is easy to do, the imperfection of our

present system, instead of contemplating the immense prospect opened

to our view in the progress of man, in the powers and the means he

possesses, the philosopher sees through his telescope worlds and

scales of being to his liking. By means of these, without the least

reference to the Bible, or the human heart, Pope, the pretty talking

parrot of Bolingbroke, with the assistance of his pampered goose,

finds it easy to justify the ways of God to man. From worlds he never

saw, he proves ours is as it should be.”

“To form the children of God for himself, to raise them to a capacity

to converse with him, to enjoy all his love, this grand scenery is not

unnecessary,—not extravagant. A smaller exhibition would not have

demonstrated his wisdom and power. You would make an orrery serve

perhaps! By a plurality of Gods, error degraded the Supreme Being in

early ages; by a plurality of worlds it would now degrade his

children, deprive them of their inheritance.”

“What are they doing in these planets? Peeping at us through

telescopes? We may be their Venus or Jupiter. They are perhaps praying

to us, sending up clouds of incense to regale our nostrils. Hear them,

far-seeing Herschel! gauger of stars. I will pray to One only, who is

above them all; and if your worlds come between me and Him, I will

kick them out of my way. In banishing your new ones, I put more into

the old than is worth them all put together.”

“These expanding heavens, the residence of so many luminous bodies of

immeasurable distance and magnitude, and which the philosopher thinks

must be a desert if devoted to man, at present possessing but so small

a portion of his own globe, shall yet be too little for him,—the womb

only in which the infant was inclosed, incapable of containing the

mature birth.”

“We shall yet explore all these celestial bodies more perfectly than

we have hitherto done our own globe, analyse them better than the

substances we can shut up in our retorts, count their number, tell

their measure.”

“As nature grows, mind grows. It grows to God, and in union with him

shall fill, possess all.”

“Our rank among worlds is indeed insignificant if we are to receive it

from the magnitude of our globe compared with others, compared with

space. Put Herschel with his telescope on Saturn, he would scarcely

think us worthy of the name of even a German prince. We may well be

the sport of Jupiter, the little spot round which Mars and Venus

coquette with one another. Little as it is however,—pepper-corn, clod

of clay as it is, with its solitary satellite, and all its spots and

vapours, I prefer it to them all. I am glad I was born in it, I love

its men, and its women, and its laws. It's people shall be my people;

it's God shall be my God. Here I am content to lodge and here to be

buried. What Abanas and Pharphars may flow in these planets I know

not: there is Jordan, here is the river of life. From this world I

shall take possession of all these; while those, who in quest of

strange worlds have forsaken God, shall be desolate.”

“This globe is large enough to contain man; man will yet grow large

enough to fill Heaven.”

“Fear not, there is no empty space in the universe, none in eternity:

nothing lost. God possesses all, and there is room for nothing but the

objects of his affections.”

CHAPTER CCXIX.

THE ARGUMENT AGAINST CHRISTIANITY DRAWN FROM A PLURALITY OF WORLDS

SHEWN TO BE FUTILE: REMARKS ON THE OPPOSITE DISPOSITIONS BY WHICH MEN

ARE TEMPTED TO INFIDELITY.

—_ascolta

Siccome suomo di verace lingua;

E porgimi l'orecchio._

CHIABRERA.

The extracts with which the preceding Chapter concludes, will have put

thee in a thoughtful mood, Reader, if thou art one of those persons

whose brains are occasionally applied to the purpose of thinking upon

such subjects as are worthy of grave consideration. Since then I have

thee in this mood, let us be serious together. Egregiously is he

mistaken who supposes that this book consists of nothing more than

Fond Fancy's scum, and dregs of scattered thought.[1]

[Footnote 1: SIR P. SIDNEY.]

Every where I have set before thee what Bishop Reynolds calls _verba

desiderii_,—“pleasant, delightful, acceptable words, such as are

worthy of all entertainment, and may minister (not a few of them)

comfort and refreshment to the hearers.” I now come to thee with

_verba rectitudinis_,—“equal and right words; not loose, fabulous,

amorous, impertinent, which should satisfy the itch of ear, or tickle

only a wanton fancy; but profitable and wholesome words,—so to please

men as that it may be unto edification and for their profit; words

written to make men sound and upright;—to make their paths direct and

straight, without falseness or hypocrisy.” Yea they shall be _verba

veritatis_,—“words of truth, which will not deceive or misguide those

that yield up themselves to the direction of them: a truth which is

sanctifying and saving, and in these respects most worthy of our

attention and belief.”

Make up your mind then to be Tremayned in this chapter.

The benevolent reader will willingly do this, he I mean who is

benevolent to himself as well as towards me. The so-called philosopher

or man of liberal opinions, who cannot be so inimical in thought to

me, as they are indeed to themselves, will frown at it; one such

exclaims pshaw, or pish, according as he may affect the _forté_

manner, or the fine, of interjecting his contemptuous displeasure;

another already winces, feeling himself by anticipation touched upon a

sore place. To such readers it were hopeless to say _favete_,

“_Numquid æger laudat medicum secantem?_” But I shall say with the

Roman Philosopher of old, who is well entitled to that then honourable

designation, “_tacete,—et præbete vos curationi: etiam si

exclamaveritis, non aliter audiam, quam si ad tactum vitiorum

vestrorum ingemiscatis._”[2]

[Footnote 2: SENECA.]

My own observation has led me to believe with Mr. Miller, that some

persons are brought by speculating upon a Plurality of Worlds to

reason themselves out of their belief in Christianity: such

Christianity indeed it is as has no root, because the soil on which it

has fallen is shallow, and though the seed which has been sown there

springs up, it soon withers away. Thus the first system of

superstition, and the latest pretext for unbelief have both been

derived from the contemplation of the heavenly bodies. The former was

the far more pardonable error, being one to which men, in the first

ages, among whom the patriarchal religion had not been carefully

preserved, were led by natural piety. The latter is less imputable to

the prevalence of unnatural impiety,—than to that weakness of mind and

want of thought which renders men as easily the dupe of the infidel

propagandist in one age, as of the juggling friar in another. These

objectors proceed upon the gratuitous assumption that other worlds are

inhabited by beings of the same kind as ourselves, and moreover in the

same condition; that is having fallen, and being therefore in need of

a Redeemer. Ask of them upon what grounds they assume this, and they

can make no reply.

Too many alas there are who part with their heavenly birth-right at a

viler price than Esau! It is humiliating to see by what poor

sophistries they are deluded,—by what pitiable vanity they are led

astray! And it is curious to note how the same evil effect is produced

by causes the most opposite. The drunken pride of intellect makes one

man deny his Saviour and his God: another under the humiliating sense

of mortal insignificancy, feels as though he were “a worm and no man,”

and therefore concludes that men are beneath the notice, still more

beneath the care, of the Almighty. “When I consider thy Heavens, the

work of thy fingers, the Moon and the Stars, which thou hast ordained;

what is man that thou art mindful of him? and the son of man that thou

visitest him?” Of those who pursue this feeling to a consequence as

false as it is unhappy, there is yet hope; for the same arguments (and

they are all-sufficient) by which the existence of the Deity is

proved, prove also his infinite goodness; and he who believes in that

goodness, if he but feelingly believe, is not far from trusting in it,

_—σύ δέ κεν ῥεα πάντ᾽ ἐσορήσαις

Ἄι κεν ἴδης αὐτόν._[3]

[Footnote 3: ORPHEUS.]

It is a good remark of Mr. Riland's in his Estimate of the Religion of

the Times, that men quarrel with the Decalogue rather than with the

Creed. But the quarrel that begins with one, generally extends to the

other; we may indeed often perceive how manifestly men have made their

doctrines conform to their inclinations. _Αἱ ἀκροάσεις κατὰ τὰ ἔθη

συμβαίνουσιν· ὣς γὰρ εἰώθαμεν, οὕτως ἀξιοῦμεν λέγεσθαι._[4] They

listen only to what they like, as Aristotle has observed, and would be

instructed to walk on those ways only which they choose for

themselves. But if there be many who thus make their creed conform to

their conduct, and are led by an immoral life into irreligious

opinions, there are not a few whose error begins in the intellect and

from thence proceeds to their practice in their domestic and daily

concerns. Thus if unbelief begins not in the evil heart, it settles

there. But perhaps it is not so difficult to deal with an infidel who

is in either of these predicaments, as with one whose disposition is

naturally good, whose course of life is in no other respect blameless,

or meritorious, but who owing to unhappy circumstances has either been

allowed to grow up carelessly in unbelief, or trained in it

systematically, or driven to seek for shelter in it from the gross

impostures of popery, or the revolting tenets of Calvinism, the cant

of hypocrisy, or the crudities of cold Socinianism. Such persons

supposing themselves whole conclude that they have no need of a

physician, and are thus in the fearful condition of those righteous

ones of whom our Lord said that he came not to call them to

repentance! The sinner, brave it as he may, feels inwardly the want of

a Saviour, and this is much, though not enough to say with the poet

_Pars sanitatis velle sanari fuit,_[5]

nor with the philosopher, _et hoc multum est velle servari_: nor with

the Father _ὁ τὸ πρῶτον δοὺς καὶ το δεύτερον δώσει._ For if this be

rejected, then comes that “penal induration, as the consequent of

voluntary and contracted induration,” which one of our own great

Christian philosophers pronounces to be “the sorest judgement next to

hell itself.” Nevertheless it is much to feel this self-condemnation

and this want. But he who confides in the rectitude of his intentions,

and in his good works, and in that confidence rejects so great

salvation, is in a more aweful state, just as there is more hope of

him who suffers under an acute disease, than of a patient stricken

with the dead palsy.

[Footnote 4: Bp. Reynolds quotes this same passage in his Sermon on

“Brotherly Reconciliation,” and applies it in the same way. Works,

vol. v. p. 158.]

[Footnote 5: SENECA IN HIPPOL.]

CHAPTER CCXX.

DOÑA OLIVA'S PHILOSOPHY, AND VIEWS OF POLITICAL REFORMATION.

_Non vi par adunque che habbiamo ragionato a bastanza di questo?—A

bastanza parmi, rispose il Signor Gaspar; par desidero io d'intendere

qualche particolarita anchor._

CASTIGLIONE.

According to Doña Oliva's philosophy, the quantity of water is ten

times greater than that of earth, air in like manner exceeding water

in a ten fold degree, and fire in the same proportion out-measuring

air. From the centre of the earth to the first heaven the distance by

her computation is 36,292 leagues of three miles each and two thousand

paces to the mile. From the surface of the earth to its centre, that

centre being also the central point of the Infernal regions, her

computed distance is 117,472 leagues. How far it is to the confines,

has not been ascertained by discovery, and cannot be computed from any

known data.

Pliny has preserved an anecdote in geological history, which relates

to this point, and which, not without reason, he calls _exemplum

vanitatis Græcæ maximum_. It relates to a certain philosopher,

Dionysiodorus by name, who was celebrated for his mathematical

attainments, and who it seems retained his attachment to that science

after death, and continued the pursuit of it. For having died in a

good old age, and received all fitting sepulchral rites, he wrote a

letter from Hades to the female relations who had succeeded to his

property, and who probably were addicted to the same studies as

himself, for otherwise he would not have communicated with them upon

such a subject. They found the letter in his sepulchre, wherein he had

deposited it as at a post-office “till called for;” and whither he

knew they would repair for the due performance of certain ceremonies,

among others that of pouring libations through the perforated floor of

the Tomb-chamber upon the dust below. The purport of his writing was

not to inform them of his condition in the Shades, nor to communicate

any information concerning the World of Spirits, but simply to state

the scientific fact, that having arrived in the depths of the earth,

he had found the distance from the surface to be 42,000 stadia. The

philosophers to whom this _post-mortem_ communication was imparted,

reasonably inferred that he had reached the very centre, and measured

from that point; they calculated upon the data thus afforded them, and

ascertained that the globe was exactly 250,000 stadia in

circumference. Pliny however thought that this measurement was 12,000

stadia short of the true amount. _Harmonica ratio_, he says, _quæ

cogit rerum naturam sibi ipsam congruere, addit huic mensuræ stadia

xii. millia; terramque nonagesimam sextam totius mundi partem facit._

“What is the centre of the earth?” says the melancholy Burton. “Is it

pure element only as Aristotle decrees? Inhabited, as Paracelsus

thinks, with creatures whose chaos is the earth? Or with Faeries, as

the woods and waters, according to him, are with Nymphs? Or, as the

air, with Spirits? Dionysiodorus,” he adds, “might have done well to

have satisfied all these doubts?”

But the reason, according to Doña Oliva, wherefore the place of

punishment for sinful souls has been appointed in the centre of this

our habitable earth, is this; the soul being in its essence lighter

than air, fire, or any of the ten spheres, has its natural place in

the Empyreum or Heaven of Heavens, where the Celestial Court is fixed,

and whither it would naturally ascend when set free from the body, as

to its natural and proper place of rest. The punishment therefore is

appropriately appointed in the place which is most remote from its

native region, and most repugnant to its own nature, the pain

therefore must needs be _fort et dure_ which it endures when confined

within that core of the earth, to which all things that are heaviest

gravitate.

In these fancies she only followed or applied the received opinions of

the middle ages. A more remarkable part of her works, considering the

time and place in which they were composed, is a Colloquy[1] upon the

means by which the World and the Governments thereof might be

improved. Having in her former treatises laid down a better system for

treating the infirmities of the human microcosm, she enters nothing

loth, and nothing doubting her own capacity, upon the maladies of the

body politic.

[Footnote 1: _Colloquio de las Cosas que mejoraran este Mundo y sus

Republicas._]