incredulous public. All new things, much out of the ordinary way, must
make a struggle for existence. It is but the way of the world. The
Jesuits of Peru introduced into Protestant England the Peruvian bark;
but being a remedy used by Jesuits, the Protestant English at once
rejected the drug as the invention of the devil. Paracelsus introduced
antimony as a valuable medicine; he was prosecuted for the innovation,
and the French Parliament passed an act making it a penal offense to
prescribe it. Dr. Groenvelt first employed cantharides internally, and
no sooner did his cures begin to make a noise, than he was at once
committed to Newgate by warrant of the President of the College of
Physicians. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu first introduced into England the
practice of inoculation for the small-pox, by which malady she had lost
an only brother and her own fine eye-lashes. She applied the process,
after earnest examination, to her only son, five years old; and on her
return to England, the experiment was tried, at her suggestion, on five
persons under sentence of death. The success of the trial did not
prevent the most violent clamors against the innovation. The faculty
predicted unknown disastrous consequences, the clergy regarded it as an
interference with Divine Providence, and the common people were taught
to look upon her as an unnatural mother, who had imperiled the safety
of her own child. Although she soon gained influential supporters, the
obloquy which she endured was such as to make her sometimes repent her
philanthropy. Jenner, who introduced the still greater discovery of
vaccination, was treated with ridicule and contempt, and was persecuted,
prosecuted, and oppressed by the Royal College of Physicians. After
nearly twenty years of patient and sagacious study and experiment, he
went to London to communicate the process to the profession, and to
endeavor to procure its general adoption. His reception was
disheartening in the extreme. Not only did the doctors refuse to make
trial of the process, but the discoverer was accused of an attempt to
"bestialize" his species by introducing into the system diseased matter
from a cow's udder; vaccination was denounced from the pulpit as
"diabolical," and the most monstrous statements respecting its effects
upon the human system were disseminated and believed. Early in the
fourteenth century a law was passed making it a capital offense to burn
coal within the precincts of London. In the reign of Edward I. a man was
actually executed for the commission of the crime. The prejudice
continued to the close of the sixteenth century. Not more than three
quarters of a century ago, an ambassador at Paris issued cards for a
large party, and found, to his dismay, that only gentlemen attended, the
ladies having absented themselves on hearing that his lordship warmed
his house by means of English coal. The use of forks was at first much
ridiculed in England; in one of Beaumont and Fletcher's plays, "your
fork-carving traveler" is spoken of very contemptuously; and Ben Jonson
has also ridiculed them in one of his comedies. "On the invention of
scissors," says Voltaire, "what was not said of those who pared their
nails and cut off some of their hair that was hanging down over their
noses? They were undoubtedly considered as prodigals and coxcombs, who
bought at an extravagant price an instrument just calculated to spoil
the work of the Creator. What an enormous sin to pare the horn which God
himself made to grow at our fingers' ends! It was absolutely an insult
to the Divine Being himself. When shirts and stockings were invented, it
was far worse. It is well known with what warmth and indignation the old
counselors, who had never worn socks, exclaimed against the youthful
magistrates who encouraged so dreadful and fatal a luxury." The fashion
of plaiting shirts began in Rabelais' time; and it was said that the
gathers were fit for nothing but to harbor lice and fleas. Robespierre's
first important cause was a defense of the introduction of Franklin's
lightning-rods against the charge of impiety. When threshing-machines
were first introduced into England, there was such an opposition to
them, and arson became so common in consequence, that such farmers as
had them were obliged to surrender them, or expose them broken on the
high-road. The fashion of wearing boots with pointed toes was supposed
to have been peculiarly offensive to the Almighty, and was believed by
many to have been the cause of the black death, which carried off, it is
estimated, in six years, twenty-five millions, or a fourth part of the
population of Europe. Another opinion, we are informed, gained ground,
that the Jews were responsible for the ravages of the plague. It was
claimed that the Rabbi of Toledo had sent out a venomous mixture
concocted of consecrated wafers and the blood of Christian hearts to the
various congregations, with orders to poison the wells. The Pope himself
undertook to plead for their innocency, but even papal bulls were
powerless to stay the popular madness. In Dekkendorf a church was built
in honor of the massacre of the Jews of that town, and the spot thus
consecrated has remained a favorite resort of pilgrims down to the
present time.
Amongst the curiosities of literature is "a narrative extracted from
Luther's writings, of the dialogue related by Luther himself to have
been carried on between him and the devil, who, Luther declares, was the
first who pointed out to him the absurdity and evil of private mass. Of
course it is strongly pressed upon the pious reader that even Luther
himself confesses that the Father of Lies was the author of the
Reformation; and a pretty good story is made out for the Catholics."
John Galt, in his Life of Wolsey, says, "Those pious Presbyterians, who
inveigh against cards as the devil's books, are little aware that they
were an instrument in the great work of the Reformation. The vulgar game
about that time was the devil and the priest; and the skill of the
players consisted in preserving the priest from the devil; but the devil
in the end always got hold of him."
Mighty means indeed trifles have sometimes proved. The foolish ballad of
Lilli Burlero, treating the Papists, and chiefly the Irish, in a very
ridiculous manner, slight and insignificant as it now seems, had once a
more powerful effect than the Philippics of either Demosthenes or
Cicero; it contributed not a little toward the great revolution in 1688;
the whole army and the people in country and city caught it up, and
"sang a deluded prince out of three kingdoms." Percy has preserved the
ballad in his Reliques, but who remembers the air? My Uncle Toby, it
seems, was about the last to whistle it.
The most popular song ever written in the British Islands, that of Auld
Lang Syne, is anonymous, and we know no more of the author of the music
than we do of the author of the words. Much of Burns' great fame rests
upon this song, in which his share amounts only to a few emendations.
The Last Rose of Summer is said to be made up in great part of an old
Sicilian air, originating nobody knows when. Old Hundred, they say, was
constructed out of fragments as old as music itself--strains that are as
immortal as the instinct of music. Home, Sweet Home was written in a
garret in the Palais Royal, Paris, when poor Payne was so utterly
destitute and friendless that he knew not where the next day's dinner
was to come from. It appeared originally in a diminutive opera called
Clari, the Maid of Milan. The opera is seldom seen or heard of now, but
the song grows nearer and dearer as the years roll away. More than once
the unfortunate author, walking the lonely streets of London or Paris
amid the storm and darkness, hungry, houseless, and penniless, saw the
cheerful light gleaming through the windows of happy homes, and heard
the music of his own song drifting out upon the gloomy night to mock the
wanderer's heart with visions of comfort and of joy, whose blessed
reality was forever denied to him. Home, Sweet Home was written by a
homeless man. Lamartine, in his History of the Girondists, has given an
account of the origin of the French national air, the Marseillaise. In
the garrison of Strasburg was quartered a young artillery officer, named
Rouget de l'Isle. He had a great taste for music and poetry, and often
entertained his comrades during their long and tedious hours in the
garrison. Sought after for his musical and poetical talent, he was a
frequent and familiar guest at the house of one Dietrich, an Alsacian
patriot, mayor of Strasburg. The winter of 1792 was a period of great
scarcity at Strasburg. The house of Dietrich was poor, his table was
frugal, but a seat was always open for Rouget de l'Isle. One day there
was nothing but bread and some slices of smoked ham on the table.
Dietrich, regarding the young officer, said to him with sad serenity,
"Abundance fails at our boards; but what matters that, if enthusiasm
fails not at our civic fetes, nor courage in the hearts of our soldiers.
I have still a last bottle of wine in my cellar. Bring it," said he to
one of his daughters, "and let us drink France and Liberty! Strasburg
should have its patriotic solemnity. De l'Isle must draw from these
last drops one of those hymns which raise the soul of the people." The
wine was brought and drank, after which the officer departed. The night
was cold. De l'Isle was thoughtful. His heart was moved, his head
heated. He returned, staggering, to his solitary room, and slowly sought
inspiration, sometimes in the fervor of his citizen soul, and anon on
the keys of his instrument, composing now the air before the words, and
then the words before the air. He sang all and wrote nothing, and at
last, exhausted, fell asleep, with his head resting on his instrument,
and woke not till day-break. The music of the night returned to his mind
like the impression of a dream. He wrote it, and ran to Dietrich, whom
he found in the garden, engaged with his winter lettuces. The wife and
daughters of the old man were not up. Dietrich awoke them, and called in
some friends, all as passionate as himself for music, and able to
execute the composition of De l'Isle. At the first stanza, cheeks grew
pale; at the second, tears flowed; and at last, the delirium of
enthusiasm burst forth. The wife of Dietrich, his daughters, himself,
and the young officer threw themselves, crying, into each other's arms.
The hymn of the country was found. Executed some days afterward in
Strasburg, the new song flew from city to city, and was played by all
the popular orchestras. Marseilles adopted it to be sung at the
commencement of the sittings of the clubs, and the Marseillaise spread
it through France, singing it along the public roads. From this came the
name of Marseillaise. It was the song for excited men under the fiery
impulse of liberty. Those melodies for little children, just as
immortal, owe their existence to circumstances just as accidental. We
mean the melodies of Mother Goose. The story of this Iliad of the
nursery is told as follows: The mother-in-law of Thomas Fleet, the
editor, in 1731, of the Boston Weekly Rehearsal, was the original Mother
Goose--the Mother Goose of the world-famous melodies. Mother Goose
belonged to a wealthy family in Boston, where her eldest daughter,
Elizabeth Goose, was married by Cotton Mather, in 1715, to Fleet, and in
due time gave birth to a son. Like most mothers-in-law in our own day,
the importance of Mrs. Goose increased with the appearance of her
grandchild, and poor Mr. Fleet, half distracted with her endless nursery
ditties, finding all other means fail, tried what ridicule could effect,
and actually printed a book, with the title "Songs for the Nursery, or
Mother Goose's Melodies for Children, printed by T. Fleet, at his
printing house, Pudding Lane, Boston. Price, ten coppers." Mother Goose
was the mother of nineteen children, and hence we may easily trace the
origin of that famous classic, "There was an old woman who lived in a
shoe; she had so many children she didn't know what to do."
As to the plays of the stage, we all know how some of them have
gradually, in the long years, grown to be there, from additions by
actors and managers, so wholly different from what they are in
literature, that in important parts they would hardly be recognized as
the same. Sheridan's Critic, with the numerous "gags" by Jack Bannister,
King, Miss Pope, Richard Jones, Liston, Mrs. Gibbs, Charles Mathews, and
other great actors, is a famous instance of the kind. And as to playing,
Mathews says it is possible for a man, absurd as it may seem, to obtain
favor with the public by merely attending to the mechanical portion of
the profession, without any exertion of his intellect beyond committing
his words to memory, and speaking to his "cues" at the right moment and
with the proper emphasis. He gives a remarkable illustration of this
strange possibility. When Douglas Jerrold's play of the Bubbles of the
Day was produced at Covent Garden Theatre, there was a long-experienced
actor, standing exceedingly well with the public, and an undoubted
favorite, who played one of the parts so admirably that he met with
unqualified success with the audience, and was a prominent feature in
the piece, highly praised by the press, and complimented by the author
himself, as having perfectly embodied his conception. After the play had
run for some ten or fifteen nights, he one day came to Mathews and asked
him as a favor that he would let him have the manuscript of the piece
for a short time. Certainly, said Mathews; but what do you want it for?
Why, said he, I was unfortunately absent from the reading; and I have
not the slightest idea what it is about, or who and what I am in it. He
had literally, according to Mathews, played his part admirably for many
nights to the gratification of the public, the press, and the author;
and he had never even had the curiosity to inquire in what way he was
mixed up with the plot. He had seized the instructions given him by
Jerrold during the rehearsals, and adopted his suggestions so correctly
that he was able to fulfill all the requirements of the character
assigned to him without the least idea of what he was doing, or of the
person whom he represented. So it would seem that ignorance is not
always a hinderance to success; on the contrary, it is sometimes the
very foundation of what passes for knowledge. Take the wise doctor's
remedies. They are adopted for the number that recover who use them, not
for the numbers that die, who used them also. "The sun gives light to
their success, and the earth covers their failures." "If your
physician," says Montaigne, "does not think it good for you to sleep, to
drink wine, or to eat such and such meats, never trouble yourself; I
will find you another that shall not be of his opinion." Heine, during
the eight years he lay bed-ridden with a kind of paralysis, read all the
medical books which treated of his complaint. "But," said he to some one
who found him thus engaged, "what good this reading is to do me I don't
know, except that it will qualify me to give lectures in heaven on the
ignorance of doctors on earth about diseases of the spinal marrow." What
is often accepted as high moral truth is only a small part of what the
philosopher has thought--the result less of faith than of skepticism;
the two being in about the proportion of Falstaff's bread to his sack.
To get away from the ideal to the physical, what can at first blush be
so absurd as the climatic changes believed by some to be produced by
railroads? The desert of Western America has been transformed into a
fertile plain: the railroad, they say, has brought rain. No element, we
are told, was wanting in the earth itself, nor was aught in excess to
enforce sterility, but everywhere there was drought. In the hot dust
nothing grew but stunted hardy grass and sage brush. All seemed
desolation and utter hopelessness. Wherever irrigation was tried, its
success exceeded expectation in developing an almost miraculous
productiveness in the soil. No enthusiast dared, however, to dream of
the possibility of artificial irrigation over all that enormous expanse.
Rivers entering there would soon have been drunk up by the thirsty earth
and sky. Yet man's work, it would seem, has irrigated that whole desert
by unexpected means. The railroad brought rain. Year by year, since the
Union Pacific Railroad has been operated through, the rain-fall had
steadily increased until the summer of 1873, when it became, to the
operators of the road, a positive nuisance. Icicles, paradoxical as it
may seem, are formed, science tells us, by the process of freezing in
sunshine hot enough to melt snow, blister the human skin, and even, when
concentrated, to burn up the human body itself. They result from the
fact that air is all but completely transparent to the heat rays emitted
by the sun--that is, such rays pass through the air without warming it.
Only the scanty fraction of rays to which air is not transparent expend
their force in raising its temperature. In the Alps, Tyndall tells us,
when the liquefaction is copious and the cold intense, icicles grow to
an enormous size. Over the edges (mostly the southern edges) of the
chasms hangs a coping of snow, and from this depend, like stalactites,
rows of transparent icicles, ten, twenty, thirty feet long, constituting
one of the most beautiful features of the higher crevasses. An icicle
would be incomprehensible if we did not know that the solar beams may
pass through the air, and still leave it at an icy temperature. One of
the contradictions of ice is, that, formed at a temperature of
twenty-five to thirty degrees Fahrenheit, it is as different from that
which is formed when the temperature has ranged for some time between
ten degrees and one degree, as chalk is from granite. The ice at the
lower temperature is dense and hard as flint. It strikes fire at the
prick of a skate. In St. Petersburg, in 1740, when masses of it were
turned and bored for cannon, though but four inches thick, they were
loaded with iron cannon-balls and a charge of a quarter of a pound of
powder, and fired without explosion.
The warm-blooded, fur-covered cat is just as contradictory--in one
peculiarity at least. Gilbert White says, "There is a propensity
belonging to common house-cats that is very remarkable; that is, their
violent fondness for fish, which appears to be their most favorite food:
and yet nature in this instance seems to have planted in them an
appetite that, unassisted, they know not how to gratify; for of all
quadrupeds cats are the least disposed toward water; and will not, when
they can avoid it, deign to wet a foot, much less to plunge into that
element." And there is quite as curious a fact pertaining to the rat.
Naturalists say that his propensity to gnaw must not be attributed
altogether to a reckless determination to overcome impediments. The
never-ceasing action of his teeth is not a pastime, but a necessity of
his existence. The ceaseless working of his incisors against some hard
substance is necessary to keep them down, and if he did not gnaw for
his subsistence he would be compelled to gnaw to prevent his jaw being
gradually locked by their rapid development. And there is the tortoise.
The same delightful naturalist we have quoted had a pet one, of whose
habits he made many curious notes. He says no part of its behavior ever
struck him more than the extreme timidity it always expressed with
regard to rain; for though it had a shell that would secure it against
the wheel of a loaded cart, yet did it discover as much solicitude about
rain as a lady dressed in all her best attire, shuffling away on the
first sprinklings, and running its head up in a corner.
But man, at last, is the creature fullest of contradictions, and his
vanity is at the bottom of most of them. "What a sensible and agreeable
companion is that gentleman who has just left us," said the famous
Charles Townshend to the worthy and sensible Fitzherbert; "I never
passed an evening with a more entertaining acquaintance in my life."
"What could entertain you? the gentleman never opened his lips." "I
grant you, my dear Fitz, but he listened faithfully to what I said, and
always laughed in the right place." Darwin, speaking of one of his walks
in New Zealand, says, "I should have enjoyed it more, if my companion,
the chief, had not possessed extraordinary conversational powers. I knew
only three words--'good,' 'bad,' and 'yes;' and with these I answered
all his remarks, without, of course, having understood one word he said.
This, however, was quite sufficient; I was a good listener, an agreeable
person, and he never ceased talking to me." John Chester was a
delightful companion to Coleridge, on the same principle. This Chester,
says Hazlitt, was one of those who was attracted to Coleridge's
discourse as flies are to honey, or bees in swarming-time to the sound
of a brass pan. He gave Hazlitt his private opinion, though he rarely
opened his lips, that Coleridge was a wonderful man! "He followed
Coleridge into Germany, where the Kantian philosophers were puzzled how
to bring him under any of their categories. When he sat down at table
with his idol, John's felicity was complete; Sir Walter Scott's, or
Blackwood's, when they sat down at the table with the king, was not more
so. Once he was astonished," continues Hazlitt, "that I should be able
to suggest anything to Coleridge that he did not already know!"
"Demosthenes Taylor, as he was called (that is, the editor of
Demosthenes), was the most silent man," said Dr. Johnson to Boswell,
"the merest statue of a man, that I have ever seen. I once dined in
company with him, and all he said during the whole time was not more
than Richard. How a man should say only Richard, it is not easy to
imagine. But it was thus: Dr. Douglass was talking of Dr. Zachary Grey,
and was ascribing to him something that was written by Dr. Richard Grey.
So, to correct him, Taylor said (imitating his affected sententious
emphasis and nod) 'Richard.'" "Demosthenes" must have been "a sensible
and agreeable companion." That one word was to the point, and was more
effective than a dozen would have been to a man like Johnson. Two words,
however, if we are to believe the story chronicled by John of Brompton
of the mother of Thomas a Becket, performed a still more memorable
service. His father, Gilbert a Becket, was taken prisoner during one of
the Crusades by a Syrian emir, and held for a considerable period in a
kind of honorable captivity. A daughter of the emir saw him at her
father's table, heard him converse, fell in love with him, and offered
to arrange the means by which both might escape to Europe. The project
only partly succeeded; he escaped, but she was left behind. Soon
afterward, however, she contrived to elude her attendants, and after
many marvelous adventures by sea and land arrived in England, knowing
but two English words, "London" and "Gilbert." By constantly repeating
the first, she was directed to the city; and there, followed by a mob,
she walked for months from street to street, crying as she went,
"Gilbert! Gilbert!" She at last came to the street in which her lover
lived. The mob and the name attracted the attention of a servant in the
house; Gilbert recognized her; and they were married! But there remains
one to be spoken of who gained immortal reputation for his sayings, who
may be said to have never said anything at all of his own. Joe Miller,
whose name as a wit is now current wherever the English language is
spoken, was, when living, himself a jest for dullness. According to
report, Miller, who was an excellent comic actor, but taciturn and
saturnine, "was in the habit of spending his afternoons at the Black
Jack, a well-known public-house in London, which at that time was
frequented by the most respectable tradesmen in the neighborhood, who
from Joe's imperturbable gravity, whenever any risible saying was
recounted, ironically ascribed it to him. After his death, having left
his family unprovided for, advantage was taken of this badinage. A Mr.
Motley, a well-known dramatist of that day, was employed to collect all
the stray jests then current on the town. Joe Miller's name was affixed
to them, and from that day to this the man who never uttered a jest has
been the reputed author of every jest."
VIII.
MUTATIONS.
Swift left some thoughts on various subjects--acute and profound--which
it would appear were jotted down at different periods of life, and in
different humors. In his most prosperous days, when he dreamed of
becoming a bishop, he might have written hopefully, "No wise man ever
wished to be younger." At a much later time in life he might have
written, sagely and sadly, "Every man desireth to live long, but no man
would be old." We can imagine that he wrote the former just after he
received the deanery of St. Patrick, and the latter just after he
returned from the walk in the neighborhood of Dublin, referred to by the
author of Night Thoughts. "Perceiving he did not follow us," says Young,
"I went back, and found him fixed as a statue, and earnestly gazing
upward at a noble elm, which in its uppermost branches was much decayed.
Pointing at it, he said, 'I shall be like that tree; I shall die at the
top.'"
Bolingbroke, writing to Swift, says, "It is now six in the morning; I
recall the time--and am glad it is over--when about this hour I used to
be going to bed surfeited with pleasure, or jaded with business; my head
often full of schemes, and my heart as often full of anxiety. Is it a
misfortune, think you, that I rise at this hour refreshed, serene, and
calm: that the past and even the present affairs of life stand like
objects at a distance from me, where I can keep off the disagreeable, so
as not to be strongly affected by them, and from whence I can draw the
others nearer to me?"
De Foe moralizes in memorable language: "I know too much of the world to
expect good in it, and have learned to value it too little to be
concerned at the evil. I have gone through a life of wonders, and am the
subject of a vast variety of providences. I have been fed more by
miracles than Elijah when the ravens were his purveyors. I have some
time ago summed up the scenes of my life in this distich:--
'No man has tasted differing fortunes more;
And thirteen times I have been rich and poor.'
In the school of affliction I have learnt more philosophy than at the
academy, and more divinity than from the pulpit. In prison I have learnt
that liberty does not consist in open doors and the egress and regress
of locomotion. I have seen the rough side of the world as well as the
smooth; and have in less than half a year tasted the difference between
the closet of a king and the dungeon of Newgate. I have suffered deeply
for cleaving to principles, of which integrity I have lived to say, none
but those I suffered for ever reproached me with."