learned, even the meanest, yet every one thinks himself sufficiently
qualified for the hardest of all trades, that of government.
"Whoever would aim directly at a cure of a public evil," says Montaigne,
"and would consider of it before he began, would be very willing to
withdraw his hands from meddling in it. Pacuvius Calavius, according to
Livy, corrected the vice of this proceeding by a notable example. His
fellow-citizens were in mutiny against their magistrates; he, being a
man of great authority in the city of Capua, found means one day to shut
up the senators in the palace, and calling the people together in the
market-place, he told them that the day was now come wherein, at full
liberty, they might revenge themselves on the tyrants by whom they had
been so long oppressed, and whom he had now, all alone and unarmed, at
his mercy; and advised that they should call them out one by one by lot,
and should particularly determine of every one, causing whatever should
be decreed to be immediately executed; with this caution, that they
should at the same time depute some honest man in the place of him that
was condemned, to the end that there might be no vacancy in the senate.
They had no sooner heard the name of one senator, but a great cry of
universal dislike was raised up against him. 'I see,' said Pacuvius, 'we
must get rid of him; he is a wicked fellow; let us look out a good one
in his room.' Immediately there was a profound silence, every one being
at a stand who to choose. But one, more impudent than the rest, having
named his man, there arose yet a greater consent of voices against him,
a hundred imperfections being laid to his charge, and as many just
reasons being presently given why he should not stand. These
contradictory humors growing hot, it fared worse with the second senator
and the third, there being as much disagreement in the election of the
new, as consent in the putting out of the old. In the end, growing weary
of this bustle to no purpose, they began, some one way and some another,
to steal out of the assembly; every one carrying back this resolution in
his mind, that the oldest and best known evil was ever more supportable
than one that was new and untried."
"Among all animals man is the only one who tries to pass for more than
he is, and so involves himself in the condemnation of seeming less."
"The negro king desired to be portrayed as white. But do not laugh at
the poor African," pleads Heine, "for every man is but another negro
king, and would like to appear in a color different from that with which
Fate has bedaubed him."
It is even harder, when he is most barbarous and besotted in his
ignorance, to disturb his complacency and self-conceit. "It was most
ludicrous," says Darwin, "to watch through a glass the Indians, as often
as the shot struck the water, take up stones, and, as a bold defiance,
throw them toward the ship, though about a mile and a half distant! A
boat was then sent with orders to fire a few musket-shots wide of them.
The Fuegians hid themselves behind the trees, and for every discharge of
the muskets they fired their arrows; all, however, fell short of the
boat, and the officer as he pointed at them laughed. This made the
Fuegians frantic with passion, and they shook their mantles in vain
rage. At last, seeing the balls cut and strike the trees, they ran away,
and we were left in peace and quietness."
Mungo Park, while traveling in Africa, once entered a region until that
time unexplored by civilized man. His escort of Guinea negroes carried
him to witness a gala-day jollification. The sable chief was sitting on
a stump in the centre of a cleared half-acre, his face tattooed,
trinkets dangling from his nose, ears, chin, etc., and his subjects were
dancing around him. Having sold negroes, captured in war, to the
slave-traders on the coast, the chief had learned to speak a little
outlandish English. When the visitor approached His Majesty,--the dance
suspended,--he exclaimed: "English?" "Yes," said Park, "I am an
Englishman." "Way over yonder?" said the chief, pointing westward.
"Yes," answered Park; "three thousand miles off." "What folks say 'bout
me dar?" was the eager inquiry of his African Majesty.
The half-naked barbarians of Abyssinia claim descent from King Solomon
and the Queen of Sheba, and boast that all other kings are but upstarts
and pretenders compared to theirs. Reminding the reader of the "most
mighty emperor of Lilliput" (six inches in height), described in the
famous state paper as the "delight and terror of the universe, whose
dominions extend (about twelve miles in circumference) to the
extremities of the globe; monarch of all monarchs, taller than the sons
of men; whose feet press down to the centre, and whose head strikes
against the sun; at whose nod the princes of the earth shake their
knees; pleasant as the spring, comfortable as the summer, fruitful as
autumn, dreadful as winter."
You remember the famous contest of an eminent wit, in Billingsgate. He
was passing through the market, as the story goes, when he was rudely
jostled and profanely addressed by a monstrous fish-woman. "See how I
will bring her down without degrading myself," whispered he to his
companion. Looking straight at the creature, he said to her,
deliberately and emphatically, "You are a triangle!" which made her
swear louder than ever. He then called her "a rectangle! a
parallelogram!" That made her eloquent; but the great man with a big
voice again broke through her volubility, screaming fiercely, "You are a
miserable, wicked hypothenuse!" That dumfounded the brute. She had never
heard swearing like that.
Curran used to tell of a like ludicrous encounter between himself and a
fish-woman on the quay at Cork. This lady, whose tongue would have put
Billingsgate to the blush, was urged one day to assail him, which she
did with very little reluctance. "I thought myself a match for her,"
said he, "and valorously took up the gauntlet. But such a virago never
skinned an eel. My whole vocabulary made not the least impression. On
the contrary, she was manifestly becoming more vigorous every moment,
and I had nothing for it but to beat a retreat. This, however, was to be
done with dignity; so, drawing myself up disdainfully, I said, 'Madam, I
scorn all further discourse with such an individual!' She did not
understand the word, and thought it, no doubt, the very hyperbole of
opprobrium. 'Individual, you wagabone!' she screamed, 'what do you mean
by that? I'm no more an individual than your mother was?' Never was
victory more complete. The whole sisterhood did homage to me, and I left
the quay of Cork covered with glory."
The discomfiture of Miss Pinkerton, who attempted once to scold Becky
Sharp in public, is familiar to every reader of Thackeray. Rebecca hit
upon the plan of answering her in French, which quite routed the old
woman.
A wise man, who lived a long life of virtue, study, travel, society, and
reflection; who read the best books and conversed with the greatest and
best men; the companion of philosophers and scientists; familiar with
all important discoveries and experiments; after he was three-score and
ten, wrote, "It is remarkable that the more there is known, the more it
is perceived there is to be known. And the infinity of knowledge to be
acquired runs parallel with the infinite faculty of knowing, and its
development. Sometimes I feel reconciled to my extreme ignorance, by
thinking, If I know nothing, the most learned know next to nothing."
"Had I earlier known," said Goethe, "how many excellent things have been
in existence, for hundreds and thousands of years, I should have written
no line; I should have had enough else to do." Cardinal Farnese one day
found Michel Angelo, when an old man, walking alone in the Coliseum, and
expressed his surprise at finding him solitary amidst the ruins; to
which he replied, "I go yet to school, that I may continue to learn." In
his last days, he made a design of himself as a child in a go-cart, with
this motto under it, "I am yet learning." Rubens complained, that just
as he was beginning to understand his profession he was forced to quit
it. Mozart declared on his death-bed, that he began to see what may be
done in music. Buffon told a friend that, after passing fifty years at
his desk, he was every day learning to write. Macaulay, the year before
his death, after spending some hours over his own writings, wrote in his
diary: "Alas! how short life and how long art! I feel as if I had just
begun to understand how to write; and the probability is that I have
very nearly done writing." Theophrastus, one hundred and seven years
old, St. Jerome assures us, lamented that he was obliged to quit life at
a time when he just began to be wise. Mrs. Jameson once asked Mrs.
Siddons which of her great characters she preferred to play? She
replied, after a moment's consideration, "Lady Macbeth is the character
I have most studied." She afterward said that she had played the
character during thirty years, and scarcely acted it once without
carefully reading over the part, and generally the whole play, in the
morning; and that she never read over the play without finding something
new in it; "something," she said, "which had not struck me so much as it
ought to have struck me." Dugald Stewart said of Bacon's Essays that in
reading them for the twentieth time he observed something which had
escaped his attention in the nineteenth. "I do not know," said Newton,
"what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only
like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and
then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, while
the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me." Said Bossuet,
"The term of my existence will be eighty years at most, but let us allow
it an hundred. What ages have rolled before I had my being! How many
will flow after I am gone! And what a small space do I occupy in this
grand succession of years! I am as a blank; this diminutive interval is
not sufficient to distinguish me from that nothing to which I must
inevitably return. I seem only to have made my appearance for the
purpose of increasing the number; and I am even useless--for the play
would have been just as well performed, had I remained behind the
scenes." Wrote Voltaire, "I am ignorant how I was formed, and how I was
born. I was perfectly ignorant, for a quarter of my life, of the reasons
of all that I saw, heard, and felt, and was a mere parrot, talking by
rote in imitation of other parrots. When I looked about me and within
me, I conceived that something existed from all eternity. Since there
are beings actually existing, I concluded that there is some being
necessary and necessarily eternal. Thus the first step which I took to
extricate myself from my ignorance overpassed the limits of all
ages--the boundaries of time. But when I was desirous of proceeding in
this infinite career, I could neither perceive a single path, nor
clearly distinguish a single object; and from the flight which I took to
contemplate eternity, I have fallen back into the abyss of my original
ignorance." "Heads of capacity, and such as are not full with a handful,
or easy measure of knowledge, think they know nothing till they know
all; which being impossible, they fall," said Sir Thomas Browne, "upon
the opinion of Socrates, and only know they know not anything." Hiero,
tyrant of Sicily, asked old Simonides to tell him what God is. The poet
answered him that it was not a question that could be immediately
answered, and that he wanted a whole day to think upon it. When that
term was over, Hiero asked the answer; but Simonides desired two days
more to consider of it. This was not the last delay he asked; he was
often called on to give an answer, and every time he desired double the
time he had last demanded. The tyrant, wondering at it, desired to know
the reason of it. I do so, answered Simonides, because the more I
examine the matter, the more obscure it appears to me. "After reading
all that has been written," says the poet Poe, "and all that can be
thought, on the topics of God and the soul, the man who has a right to
say that he thinks at all, will find himself face to face with the
conclusion that, on these topics, the most profound thought is that
which can be the least easily distinguished from the most superficial
sentiment." "I am a fragment, and this is a fragment of me," says
Emerson.... "I am very content with knowing, if only I could know.... To
know a little, would be worth the expense of this world." "You read of
but one wise man," says Congreve, "and all that he knew was--that he
knew nothing." "The curiosity of knowing things has been given to man
for a scourge." "If God," said Lessing, "held all truth shut in his
right hand, and in his left nothing but the restless instinct for truth,
though with the condition of forever and ever erring, and should say to
me, Choose! I would bow reverently to his left hand, and say, Father,
give! Pure truth is for Thee alone!"
II.
EXTREMES.
In man, it has been said, there will be a layer of fierce hyena, or of
timid deer, running through the nature in the most uncertain and
tortuous manner. Nero is sensitive to poetry and music, but not to human
suffering: Marcus Aurelius is tolerant and good to all men but
Christians. The Tlascalans of Mexico loved, and even worshiped, flowers;
but they were cruel to excess, and sacrificed human victims with savage
delight. The body of the sacrificed captive, we are told by Prescott,
was delivered to the warrior who had taken him in battle, and by him,
after being dressed, was served up in an entertainment to his friends.
This was not the coarse repast of famished cannibals, but a banquet
teeming with delicious beverages and delicate viands, prepared with art,
and attended by both sexes, who conducted themselves with all the
decorum of civilized life. The Aztec priests were more wild and
ferocious than the soldiery, their hair was long and matted, and their
garments were stained with human blood. The good and the evil lie close
together; the virtues and the vices alternate; so is human power
accumulated; alternately the metals and the rags; a terrible Voltaic
pile. In the well-bred animal the claw is nicely cushioned; the old Adam
is presentable. Overhear a beautiful young woman swear, and meet her an
hour afterward, all smiles and loveliness, in the drawing-room. Speak
with unreserved kindness of one lady to another,--both of them very
lovely creatures, so far as you know,--and receive in reply, "Don't!
She, of all persons I know, is the only one I hate to hear praised."
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu said of the Duchess of Marlborough, "We
continue to see one another like two persons who are resolved to hate
with civility." "It goes far to reconcile me to being a woman," she said
on another occasion, "when I reflect that I am thus in no danger of ever
marrying one." Madame de Maintenon and Madame de Montespan met in
public, talked with vivacity, and, to those who judged only by
appearances, seemed excellent friends. Once when they had to make a
journey in the same carriage, Madame de Montespan said, "Let us talk as
if there were no difference between us, but on condition that we resume
our disputes when we return." Pietro Della Valle says that when the Ecce
Homo was exposed during the sermon in the Jesuit church at Goa, the
women used to beat their servants, if they did not cry enough to please
them. Saint-Simon relates of the Marechale de la Ferte and her sister,
both beautiful women, but very dissolute, that upon one occasion they
heard a sermon on penitence which terrified them. "My sister," one said
on their return, "it was all true; we must do penance or we are lost.
But, my sister, what shall we do?" After having well turned it over, "My
sister," replied the other, "This is what we must do--we must make our
servants fast." When Moore's Life of Byron first appeared, it was in two
large, quarto volumes, and the first came out alone. Murray told Leslie
that a lady said to him, "I hear it is dull;" and he told her the
scandal was all to be in the second volume. "And is the second volume to
be had separately?" asked the lady. I was once, says a writer, passing
through Moorfields, with a young girl, aged about nine or ten years,
born and educated in Portugal, but in the Protestant faith; and,
observing a large concourse of people assembled around a pile of fagots
on fire, I expressed a curiosity to know the cause. She very composedly
answered, "I suppose that it is nothing more than that they are going
to burn a Jew." Isabella the Catholic was wont to rejoice and give
thanks at the sight of a gallows with a man hanging therefrom. Charlotte
Cushman related an incident that occurred at a theatre. A man in the
gallery made such a disturbance that the play could not proceed. Cries
of "Throw him over," arose from all parts of the house, and the noise
became furious. All was tumultuous chaos until a sweet and gentle female
voice was heard in the pit, exclaiming, "No! I pray you don't throw him
over! I beg of you, dear friends, don't throw him over, but--kill him
where he is." It is recorded that after the massacre of St. Bartholomew
the ladies of the court of Paris went out to examine the long row of the
bodies of the Huguenot cavaliers who had been slain during the tumult,
and curiously turning them over, when half-stripped of their garments,
said to each other, "This must have been a charming lover; that was not
worth looking at;" and when a fanatic assassin was brought out in the
square of the Louvre to undergo during four hours the most frightful
tortures which human ingenuity or malignity could devise, or the human
frame endure, all the ladies of the court assembled to witness the
spectacle, and paid high prices for seats nearest the scene of agony. In
the Conciergerie, during the Reign of Terror, a corridor was common in
the day-time to both sexes, and here, it is stated, there was as much
dressing, talking, flirting, and love-making as in the salons of Paris.
Most of the women contrived to change their dress three times a day,
though in the interval they had often to wash or mend the garment they
were about to put on. The tone of conversation was gay and animated, and
the people seemed bent on proving that though the Reign of Terror might
imprison and kill them, it could not make them dull or disagreeable.
It is related that Della Valle, the distinguished Italian traveler, had
such an absorbing fondness for his wife that, when she died, on the
shore of the Persian Gulf, he embalmed her body, and spent one whole
year conveying it back through India to Rome, where he celebrated her
obsequies by pronouncing a funeral oration, during the delivery of which
his emotions became so violent as to choke his utterance. Not long
after, in a fit of anger, he killed his coachman, in the area before St.
Peter's, while the pope was pronouncing a benediction. "I remember,"
says Patmore, in his personal recollections of Hazlitt, "having
occasionally played at whist with a person who, on any occurrence of
extraordinary ill-luck, used to lay his cards down deliberately, and
bite a piece out of the back of his hand! This person was, under
ordinary circumstances, the very ideal of a 'gentleman'--bland,
polished, courteous, forbearing, kind, and self-possessed to an
extraordinary degree; and his personal appearance in every respect
corresponded with his manners and bearing. Hazlitt's passions sometimes
produced similar results. I have seen him more than once, at the Fives
Court in St. Martin Street, on making a bad stroke or missing his ball
at some critical point of the game, fling his racket to the other end of
the court, walk deliberately to the centre, with uplifted hands
imprecate the most fearful curses on his head, for his stupidity, and
then rush to the side wall and literally dash his head against it!"
Shortly before the Chinese Emperor's death, a gigantic image, the
goddess of small-pox, was paraded round the city of Pekin in solemn
procession, and then taken into the bedroom of the dying youth, where it
was worshiped and honored with many propitiatory offerings. As, however,
the goddess continued obdurate, she was subjected to a severe flogging,
and finally burned.
In the early history of New England the law compelled the people to
attend church, the services commencing at nine o'clock and continuing
six to eight hours. Near the church edifice stood the stocks and the
whipping-post, and a large wooden cage, in which to confine offenders
against the laws. The congregation had places assigned them upon the
rude benches, at the annual town-meeting, according to their age and
social position. A person was fined who occupied a seat assigned to
another. The boys were ordered to sit upon the gallery-stairs, and three
constables were employed to keep them in order. Prominent before the
assembly, some wretched male or female offender sat with a scarlet
letter on the breast, to denote some crime against the stern code.
Fleeing the mother-country for peace and freedom, the descendants of the
Puritans persecuted the Quakers, and burnt the incorrigible eccentrics
of society for witches.
John Howe's method of conducting public fasts was as follows: "He began
at nine o'clock with a prayer of a quarter of an hour, read and
expounded Scripture for about three quarters of an hour, prayed an hour,
preached another hour, then prayed half an hour; the people then sang
for about a quarter of an hour, during which he retired and took a
little refreshment; he then went into the pulpit again, prayed an hour
more, preached another hour, and then, with a prayer of half an hour,
concluded the services."
The clergy, too, were sometimes victims. An instance: "The rector of
Fittleworth, in Sussex, was dispossessed of his living for
Sabbath-breaking; the fact proved against him being, that as he was
stepping over a stile one Sunday, the button of his breeches came off,
and he got a tailor in the neighborhood presently to sew it on again."
We are told that at the time Ireland was called the Isle of Saints,
"when a child was immersed at baptism, it was customary not to dip the
right arm, to the intent that he might strike a more deadly and
ungracious blow therewith; and under an opinion, no doubt, that the rest
of the body would not be responsible at the resurrection for anything
which had been committed by the unbaptized hand. Thus, too, at the
baptism, the father took the wolves for his gossips, and thought by this
profanation he was forming an alliance, both for himself and the boy,
with the fiercest beasts of the woods. The son of a chief was baptized
in milk; water was not thought good enough, and whisky had not then been
invented. They used to rob in the beginning of the year as a point of
devotion, for the purpose of laying up a good stock of plunder against
Easter; and he whose spoils enabled him to furnish the best
entertainment at that time was looked upon as the best Christian; so
they robbed in emulation of each other; and reconciling their habits to
their conscience, they persuaded themselves that if robbery, murder, and
rape had been sins, Providence would never put such temptations in their
way: nay, that the sin would be, if they were so ungrateful as not to
take advantage of a good opportunity when it was offered them."
In North Wales, it is stated, when a person supposes himself highly
injured, it is not uncommon for him to go to some church dedicated to a
celebrated saint, as Llan Elian in Anglesea, and Clynog in
Carnarvonshire, and there to offer his enemy. He kneels down on his bare
knees in the church, and offering a piece of money to the saint, calls
down curses and misfortunes upon the offender and his family for
generations to come, in the most firm belief that the imprecations will
be fulfilled. Sometimes they repair to a sacred well instead of a
church.