his term as quaestor, he made the tour of the island, to see everything
in it that was curious, and especially the city of Syracuse, which had
always made the principal figure in its history. Here his first request
to the magistrates, who were showing him the curiosities of the place,
was to let him see the tomb of Archimedes, whose name had done so much
honor to it; but to his surprise, he perceived that they knew nothing at
all of the matter, and even denied that there was any such tomb
remaining; yet as he was assured of it beyond all doubt, by the
concurrent testimony of writers, and remembered the verses inscribed,
and that there was a sphere with a cylinder engraved on some part of it,
he would not be dissuaded from the pains of searching it out. When they
had carried him, therefore, to the gate where the greatest number of
their old sepulchres stood, he observed, in a spot overgrown with shrubs
and briers, a small column, whose head just appeared above the bushes,
'with the figure of a sphere and a cylinder upon it; this, he presently
told the company, was the thing they were looking for; and sending in
some men to clear the ground of the brambles and rubbish, he found the
inscription also which he expected, though the latter part of all the
verses was effaced. Thus,' says he, 'one of the noblest cities of
Greece, and once likewise the most learned, had known nothing of the
monument of its most deserving and ingenious citizen, if it had not been
discovered to them by a native of Arpinum.'"
Anaxagoras knew the short memory of the people, and chose a happy way to
lengthen it, and at the same time to perpetuate himself. When the chief
persons of the city paid him a visit, and asked him whether he had any
commands for them, he answered that he only desired that children might
be permitted to play every year during the month in which he died. His
request was respected, and the custom continued for ages.
"Ruins," in the impressive language of Alger, "symbolize the wishes and
fate of man; the weakness of his works, the fleetingness of his
existence. Who can visit Thebes, in whose crowded crypts, as he enters,
a flight of bats chokes him with the dust of disintegrating priests and
kings; see the sheep nibbling herbage between the fallen cromlechs of
Stonehenge; or confront a dilapidated stronghold of the Middle Ages,
where the fox looks out of the window and the thistle nods on the wall,
without thinking of these things? They feelingly persuade him what he
is.... Tyre was situated of old at the entry of the sea, the beautiful
mistress of the earth, haughty in her purple garments, the tiara of
commerce on her brow. Now the dust has been scraped from her till she
has become a blistered rock, whereon the solitary fisher spreads his
nets. A few tattered huts stand among shapeless masses of masonry where
glorious Carthage stood; the homes of a few husbandmen where voluptuous
Corinth once lifted her splendid array of marble palaces and golden
towers. Many a nation, proud and populous in the elder days of history,
like Elephanta, or Memphis, is now merely a tomb and a shadowy name.
Pompeii and Herculaneum are empty sepulchres, which that fatal flight
before the storm of ashes and lava cheated of their occupants; the
traveler sees poppies blooming in the streets where chariots once
flashed.... Tigers foray in the palace yards of Persepolis, and camels
browse in Babylon on the site of Belshazzar's throne; at Baalbec,
lizards overrun the altars of the Temple of the Sun, and in the
sculptured friezes, here the nests of obscene birds, there the webs of
spiders."
"The Roman Emperor Hadrian," philosophizes Hillard, "after many years of
care and conquest, with a marked taste for architecture, and the
resources of the whole civilized world at his command, resolved to
surround his declining life with reproductions of all the striking
objects which he had seen in the course of his world-wide wanderings. He
selected for the site of this gigantic enterprise a spot singularly
favorable to his objects. It was a range of gently undulating hills, of
about three miles in extent, with a natural boundary, formed in part by
a winding valley, and partly by walls of rock. On the east, it was
overlooked by the wooded heights of the Sabine Mountains; and, on the
west, it commanded a view of the Campagna and the Eternal City, whose
temples and obelisks, relieved against the golden sky of sunset, must
have soothed the mind of its imperial master with thoughts of duties
performed and of repose, earned by toil. The natural inequalities and
undulations of the site, which furnished heights, plains, valleys, and
glens, aided and lightened the tasks of the architect and the landscape
gardener. The emperor is said to have inclosed a space of eight or ten
miles in circuit, so that, if the statement were true, the villa and its
appurtenances occupied an area greater than that of Pompeii. Here he set
to work with armies of laborers and mountains of gold, and, in an
incredibly short space of time, the ground was covered with an amazing
number of costly and extensive structures, which had risen like
exhalations from the soil. Besides the imperial palace, there was a
library, an academy, a lyceum, numerous temples, one or more theatres, a
covered walk or portico, and spacious barracks for the accommodation of
the Praetorian guards. Besides these, a glen through which a stream
flowed was made into a miniature likeness of the vale of Tempe; a
flowery plain was called by the name of the Elysian Fields; and an
immense cavern, filled with sunless waters, recalled the gloom of
Tartarus.... The ruins, at the present time, seen hastily and without
the interpretation of an intelligent guide, are a confused mass of
decay, revealing very little of their former destination or
structure.... A considerable portion of the space formerly occupied by
the villa is now under cultivation, and nature, aided by a soft sky and
a productive soil, has been busy in healing the gaping wounds of time,
and covering unsightly ruin with a mantle of bloom and beauty.... The
whole scene is now a broad page on which is stamped an impressive lesson
of the vanity of human wishes. The great emperor, even while his last
workmen were gathering up their tools to depart, was attacked by a
mortal disease; and, seventy years after his death, Caracalla began the
work of spoliation by carrying off its most costly marbles to decorate
the baths whose ruins are in turn monuments to his name in Rome. A
recent French traveler states that a species of syringa, which Hadrian
brought from the East and planted here, still sheds its fragrance over
these ruins; this delicate and fragile flower, a part of the perennial
life of Nature, remaining faithful to the emperor's memory, while stone,
marble, and bronze have long since betrayed their trust."
"Neither the troubles, Zenobia," mused La Bruyere, "which disturb your
empire, nor the war which since the death of the king, your husband, you
have so heroically maintained against a powerful nation, diminish
anything of your magnificence. You have preferred the banks of the
Euphrates to any other country, and resolved to raise a stately fabric
there. The air is healthful and temperate; the situation charming; that
sacred wood makes an awful shade on the west; the Syrian gods, who
sometimes dwell on earth, could not choose a finer abode. The plain
about it is peopled with men who are constantly employed in shaping and
cutting, going and coming, transporting the timber of Lebanon, brass,
and porphyry. Their tools and engines are heard in the air; and the
travelers who pass that way to Arabia expect on their return home to see
it finished with all the splendor you design to bestow on it, ere you or
the princes your children make it your dwelling. Spare nothing, great
queen, nor gold, nor the labor of the most excellent artists; let the
Phidiases and Zeuxises of your age show the utmost of their art on your
walls and ceilings. Mark out vast and delicious gardens, whose beauty
shall appear to be all enchantment, and not the workmanship of man.
Exhaust your treasures, and tire your industry on this incomparable
edifice, and after you have given it the last perfection, some grazier
or other, who lives on the neighboring sands of Palmyra, enriched by
taking toll on your rivers, shall buy with ready money this royal
mansion, to adorn it, and make it worthy of him and his fortune."
Gibbon thus concludes his review of the entire series of Byzantine
emperors: "In a composition of some days, in a perusal of some hours,
six hundred years have rolled away, and the duration of a life or reign
is contracted to a fleeting moment; the grave is ever beside the
throne: the success of a criminal is almost instantly followed by the
loss of his prize; and our immortal reason survives and disdains the
sixty phantoms of kings who have passed before our eyes, and faintly
dwell on our remembrance."
"I went to-day," said Cobbett, "to see the house I formerly occupied.
How small! It is always thus: the words large and small are carried
about with us in our minds, and we forget real dimensions. The idea,
such as it was received, remains during our absence from the object.
When I returned to England in 1800, after an absence from the country
parts of it for sixteen years, the trees, the hedges, even the parks and
woods, seemed so small! It made me laugh to hear little gutters, that I
could jump over, called rivers! The Thames was but a 'creek!' But when,
in about a month after my arrival in London, I went to Farnham, the
place of my birth, what was my surprise! Everything was become so
pitifully small!... There is a hill not far from the town called
Crooksbury Hill, which rises up out of a flat in the form of a cone, and
is planted with Scotch fir-trees. Here I used to take the eggs and young
ones of crows and magpies. This hill was a famous object in the
neighborhood. It served as the superlative degree of height. 'As high as
Crooksbury Hill' meant, with us, the utmost degree of height. Therefore
the first object that my eyes sought was this hill. I could not believe
my eyes! Literally speaking, I for a moment thought the famous hill
removed, and a little heap put in its stead; for I had seen in New
Brunswick a single rock, or hill of solid rock, ten times as big, and
four or five times as high.... What a change! What scenes I had gone
through! How altered my state! I had dined the day before at a secretary
of state's, in company with Mr. Pitt, and had been waited upon by men in
gaudy liveries! I had had nobody to assist me in the world. No teachers
of any sort. Nobody to shelter me from the consequences of bad, and no
one to counsel me to good behavior. I felt proud. The distinctions of
rank, birth, and wealth, all became nothing in my eyes; and from that
moment--less than a month from my arrival in England--I resolved never
to bend before them."
"We read in the Memoirs of Moore," says a writer on M. Guizot, in the
London Quarterly, 1854, "that in 1820 he was present at a performance in
Paris, of Tarare, an opera of Beaumarchais, which was written in 1787,
at a period when the promulgation of liberal ideas, with a certain
infusion of science, was the fashion in Paris. Accordingly, while Nature
and the Genius of Heat are trilling in a duet the laws of gravitation,
Tarare (a virtuous soldier) defends his wife from the assaults of the
monarch of Ormuz, who, being finally defeated, kills himself, and Tarare
is proclaimed king in his place. Only three years afterward Louis XVI.,
having become a constitutional sovereign, and Bailly (who had shortly to
pay with his head for his patriotic illusions) being Maire of Paris,
Tarare was not allowed to be acted in its original form. Beaumarchais
fitted it to the altered circumstances, and in its remodeled shape,
Tarare becomes a constitutional king. Under the Republic, Tarare was not
allowed to be a monarch at all; and when the opera was performed in
1795, the victorious soldier indignantly refuses the crown. Under
Bonaparte, Tarare was again recast to bring it into harmony with the
delusion of the hour; and lastly, when in 1820 the performance was
witnessed by Moore, Tarare, become more monarchal than ever, displays
his loyalty by defending the king of Ormuz from a popular insurrection,
and ultimately falls with emotion at the feet of the tyrant, who has the
magnanimity to restore his wife to him."
St. Austin, with his mother Monica, was led one day by a Roman praetor
to see the tomb of Caesar. Himself thus describes the corpse: "It looked
of a blue mould, the bone of the nose laid bare, the flesh of the nether
lip quite fallen off, his mouth full of worms, and in his eye-pit a
hungry toad, feasting upon the remnant portion of flesh and moisture:
and so he dwelt in his house of darkness."
A traveler in Ceylon, who visited the ruins of ancient Mahagam, says
that one of the ruined buildings had apparently rested upon seventy-two
pillars. These were still erect, standing in six lines of twelve
columns. This building must have formed an oblong of three hundred feet
by two hundred and fifty. The stone causeway which passed through the
ruins was about two miles in length, being for the most part overgrown
with low jungle and prickly cactus. The first we hear of this city is
286 B. C.; but we have no account of the era or cause of its
destruction. The records of Ceylon give no satisfactory account of it.
The wild elephants come out of the jungles and rub their backs against
the columns of this forgotten temple, as the naked Indians gamble with
forked sticks on the desolate ruins of Central America.
But a few years sometimes change the whole face of a country. Sir
Woodbine Parish informed Darwin that during the three years' drought in
Buenos Ayres, beginning in 1827, the ground being so long dry, such
quantities of dust were blown about that in the open country the
landmarks became obliterated, and people could not tell the limits of
their estates.
But what shall we say of the instability of human greatness? The career
and end of Pompey furnish a striking example. "He who a few days before
commanded kings and consuls, and all the noblest of Rome, was sentenced
to die by a council of slaves; murdered by a base deserter; cast out
naked and headless on the Egyptian strand; and when the whole earth, as
Velleius says, had scarce been sufficient for his victories, could not
find a spot upon it at last for a grave. His body was burnt on the shore
by one of his freedmen, with the planks of an old fishing-boat; and his
ashes, being conveyed to Rome, were deposited privately by his wife
Cornelia in a vault of his Alban villa."
Aristotle, that prince of all true thinkers, loaded with immortal glory,
was compelled to flee suddenly and by stealth to Chalcis, in order to
save his life, and spare, as he said, the Athenians a new crime against
philosophy. There, it is believed, the great man, in his old age,
wearied with persecutions, poisoned himself.
The venerable Hildebrand, the greatest of all the popes, after the
herculean labors of his self-devoted and mighty career, crushed by an
accumulation of hardships, said, "I have loved justice and hated
iniquity; therefore I die in exile."
"The ceremony of Galileo's abjuration," says Sir David Brewster, in his
biography of that great man, "was one of exciting interest and of awful
formality. Clothed in the sackcloth of a repentant criminal, the
venerable sage fell upon his knees before the assembled cardinals; and,
laying his hands upon the Holy Evangelists, he invoked the divine aid in
abjuring and detesting, and vowing never again to teach, the doctrine of
the earth's motion and of the sun's stability. He pledged himself that
he would never again, either in words or in writing, propagate such
heresies; and he swore that he would fulfill and observe the penances
which had been inflicted upon him. At the conclusion of this ceremony,
in which he recited his abjuration word for word, and then signed it, he
was conveyed, in conformity with his sentence, to the prison of the
Inquisition." All because it had been said that the "sun runneth about
from one end of heaven to the other," and that "the foundations of the
earth are so firmly fixed that they cannot be moved."
Think of this in connection with the fact that "in five years Charles
II. touched twenty-three thousand six hundred and one of his subjects
for the evil; that the bishops invented a sort of heathen service for
the occasion; that the unchristianlike, superstitious ceremony was
performed in public; and that, as soon as prayers were ended, the Duke
of Buckingham brought a towel, and the Earl of Pembroke a basin and
ewer, who, after they had made obeisance to his majesty, kneeled down
till his majesty had washed." Dr. Wiseman, an eminent surgeon of that
period, in writing on scrofula, says, "However, I must needs profess
that his majesty (Charles II.) cureth more in any one year than all the
chirurgeons of London have done in an age."
And think at the same time of the trial of a mother and her daughter,
eleven years old, before "the great and good Sir Matthew Hale," then
Lord Chief Baron, for witchcraft; and their conviction and execution at
Bury St. Edmunds, principally on the evidence of Sir Thomas Browne, one
of the first physicians and scholars of his day.
In Fuller's Church History there is a curious fact, showing the power of
superstition over even such a man as Wolsey. The great cardinal "in his
life-time was informed by some fortune-tellers that he should have his
end at Kingston. This his credulity interpreted of Kingston-on-Thames;
which made him always avoid the riding through that town, though the
nearest way from his house to the court. Afterward, understanding that
he was to be committed by the king's express orders to the charge of Sir
Anthony Kingston, it struck to his heart; too late perceiving himself
deceived by that father of lies in his homonymous prediction."
But credulity seems to have had a foundation place in the characters of
some of the world's greatest men. There, for instance, is Hooker, author
of that great work, Ecclesiastical Polity,--according to Hallam "the
finest as well as the most philosophical writer of the Elizabethan
period;" according to Lecky "the most majestic of English writers."
Being appointed to preach a sermon at St. Paul's Cross, London, he
lodged at the Shunamite's house, a dwelling appropriated to preachers,
and was skillfully persuaded by the landlady "that it was best for him
to have a wife that might prove a nurse to him, such an one as might
prolong his life, and make it more comfortable, and such an one as she
could and would provide for him if he thought fit to marry." The
unsuspecting young divine agreed to abide by her choice, which fell upon
her own daughter, who proved to be not only "a silly, clownish woman,"
but a very Xantippe. Izaak Walton, in his biography of Hooker, thus
philosophizes upon this remarkable marriage: "This choice of Mr. H. (if
it were his choice) may be wondered at; but let us consider that the
prophet Ezekiel says, 'There is a wheel within a wheel;' a secret,
sacred wheel of Providence (not visible in marriages), guided by his
hand, that 'allows not the race to the swift,' nor 'bread to the wise,'
nor good wives to good men; and He that can bring good out of evil (for
mortals are blind to this reason) only knows why this blessing was
denied to patient Job, to meek Moses, and to our as meek and patient Mr.
Hooker." Farther on, by way of explanation and apology, old Izaak
quaintly says, "God and nature blessed him with so blessed a
bashfulness, that as in his younger days his pupils might easily look
him out of countenance, so neither then, nor in his age, did he ever
willingly look any man in the face: and was of so mild and humble a
nature, that his poor parish clerk and he did never talk but with both
their hats on or both off at the same time: and to this may be added,
that though he was not purblind, yet he was short or weak sighted; and
where he fixed his eyes at the beginning of his sermon, there they
continued till it was ended: and the reader has a liberty to believe,
that his modesty and dim sight were some of the reasons why he trusted
Mrs. Churchman to choose his wife." His anger is said to have been like
a vial of clear water, which, when shook, beads at the top, but
instantly subsides, without any soil or sediment of uncharitableness.
Nobody knows, to say truth, how much the great, modest Hooker was
benefited by what appeared to his friends his calamitous marriage.
"There is no great evil," said Publius Syrus, "which does not bring with
it some advantage." Calamities, we know, have often proved blessings.
There are cases where blows on the head have benefited the brain, and
produced extraordinary changes for the better. Mabillon was almost an
idiot at the age of twenty-six. He fell down a stone staircase,
fractured his skull, and was trepanned. From that moment he became a
genius. Dr. Prichard mentioned a case of three brothers, who were all
nearly idiots. One of them was injured on the head, and from that time
he brightened up, and became a successful barrister. Wallenstein, too,
they say, was a mere fool, till he fell out of a window, and awoke with
enlarged capabilities. Here is an instance noted by Robinson in his
Diary: "After dinner called on the Flaxmans. Mrs. Flaxman--wife of the
sculptor--admitted me to her room. She had about a fortnight before
broken her leg, and sprained it besides, by falling down-stairs. This
misfortune, however, instead of occasioning a repetition of the
paralytic stroke which she had a year ago, seemed to have improved her
health. She had actually recovered the use of her hand in some degree,
and her friends expect that she will be benefited by the accident."
There is Cowper. But for his mental malady the world would have had much
less of good poetry and fewer perfect letters. The thought of a
clerkship in the House of Lords made him insane! "Innocent, pious, and
confiding, he lived in perpetual dread of everlasting punishment: he
could only see between him and heaven a high wall which he despaired of
ever being able to scale; yet his intellectual vigor was not subdued by
affliction. What he wrote for amusement or relief in the midst of
'supreme distress,' surpasses the elaborate efforts of others made under
the most favorable circumstances; and in the very winter of his days,
his fancy was as fresh and blooming as in the spring and morning of his
existence." The Diverting History of John Gilpin, the production of a
single night, was, curious to say, written by a man who lived in
perpetual dread of eternal punishment; and while it was being read by
Henderson, the actor, to large audiences in London, "all through Lent,
at high prices," its author was raving mad. The ballad, which had become
the town talk, was reprinted from the newspaper, wherein it had lain
three years dormant. Gilpin, passing at full stretch by the Bell at
Edmonton, was to be seen at all print-shops. One print-seller sold six
thousand. What had succeeded so well in London was repeated with
inferior ability, but with equal success, on provincial stages, and the
ballad became in the highest degree popular before the author's name
became known. The last reading to which Cowper listened appears to have
been that of his own works. Beginning with the first volume, Mr. Johnson
went through them, and he listened to them in silence till he came to
John Gilpin, which he begged not to hear. It reminded him of cheerful
days, and of those of whom he could not bear to think. "The grinners at
John Gilpin," he said, "little dream what the author sometimes suffers.
How I hated myself yesterday for having ever wrote it!" On his
death-bed, when the clergyman told him to confide in the love of the
Redeemer, who desired to save all men, Cowper gave a passionate cry,
begging him not to give him such consolations. To our ignorant eyes it
looks strange that the author of our best and most popular hymns should
have thought his sins unpardonable; should have believed himself already
damned.
One of Cowper's visitors and pensioners at Olney was a poor
school-master (Teedon) who thought himself specially favored by
Providence, and to whom Cowper communicated his waking dreams, and
consulted, as a person whom the Lord was pleased to answer in prayer.
This recalls a similar fact of the illustrious Tycho Brahe. When he
lived in Uraniberg he maintained an idiot of the name of Lep, who lay at
his feet whenever he sat down to dinner, and whom he fed with his own
hand. Persuaded that his mind, when moved, was capable of fore-telling
future events, Tycho carefully marked everything he said. (Striking
instances, it may be observed, of the tribute which intelligence and
science unconsciously pay to faith.)