Christopher North! You remember the scene of his triumph on the occasion
of his first lecture to the moral philosophy class in the University of
Edinburgh. It deserves to be thought of along with the "trial scenes" we
have been reviewing. The contest for the professorship had been bitterly
fought over a period of four months, with Sir William Hamilton for
competitor,--Sir James Mackintosh and Mr. Malthus being only possible
candidates. Austerity and prejudice--essential and saintly elements in
all good Scotsmen--instinctively combined against him, and inveterately
pursued him. "When it was found useless to gainsay his mental
qualifications for the office, or to excite odium on the ground of his
literary offenses, the attack was directed against his moral character,
and it was broadly insinuated that this candidate for the chair of
ethics was himself a man of more than doubtful morality; that he was, in
fact, not merely a 'reveler,' and a 'blasphemer,' but a bad husband, a
bad father, a person not fit to be trusted as a teacher of youth." A
"bad husband" to the good woman he thus memorably characterized in a
letter to one of his friends: "I was this morning married to Jane
Penney, and doubt not of receiving your blessing, which, from your
brotherly heart, will delight me, and doubtless not be unheard by the
Almighty. She is gentleness, innocence, sense, and feeling, surpassed by
no woman, and has remained pure, as from her Maker's hands;" the mother
of all those children he loved so,--the death of whom, in his ripe
manhood and in the bloom of his fame, nearly broke his heart! Sir Walter
and other powerful friends repelled the slanders. Wilson triumphed.
Still he was pursued; his enemies determined he should be put down,
humiliated, even in his own class-room. An eye-witness thus describes
the scene on the occasion of the delivery of the professor's first
lecture: "There was a furious bitterness of feeling against him among
the classes of which probably most of his pupils would consist, and
although I had no prospect of being among them, I went to his first
lecture, prepared to join in a cabal, which I understood was formed to
put him down. The lecture-room was crowded to the ceiling. Such a
collection of hard-browed, scowling Scotsmen, muttering over their
knobsticks, I never saw. The professor entered with a bold step, amid
profound silence. Every one expected some deprecatory or propitiatory
introduction of himself and his subject, upon which the mass was to
decide against him, reason or no reason; but he began in a voice of
thunder right into the matter of his lecture, kept up unflinchingly and
unhesitatingly, without a pause, a flow of rhetoric such as Dugald
Stewart or Thomas Brown, his predecessors, never delivered in the same
place. Not a word, not a murmur escaped his captivated, I ought to say
his conquered audience, and at the end they gave him a downright
unanimous burst of applause. Those who came to scoff remained to
praise." The ruling classes in educational matters could not conceive of
the fitness of a man like Wilson for the moral philosophy chair in a
university. The giant he was physically, with appetites and passions to
match, he was a reproach to the feeble, a terror to the timid, and a
horror to the "unco guid, or the rigidly righteous." The truth of him
was such an exaggeration of the average man that the scholars and
pedagogues and parsons could only look upon him as a monster, with a
character as monstrous as his nature. He is described as "long-maned and
mighty, whose eyes were 'as the lightnings of fiery flame,' and his
voice like an organ bass; who laid about him, when the fit was on, like
a Titan, breaking small men's bones; who was loose and careless in his
apparel, even as in all things he seemed too strong and primitive to
heed much the niceties of custom." In his youth, he "ran three miles for
a wager against a chaise," and came out ahead. Somewhat later he "gained
a bet by walking, toe and heel, six miles in two minutes within the
hour." When he was twenty-one, height five feet eleven inches, weight
eleven stone, he leaped, with a run, twenty-three feet "on a slightly
inclined plane, perhaps an inch to a yard," and "was admitted to be
(Ireland excepted) the best far leaper of his day in England." He could
jump twelve yards in three jumps, with a great stone in each hand. "With
him the angler's silent trade was a ruling passion. He did not
exaggerate to the Shepherd in the Noctes, when he said that he had taken
'a hundred and thirty in one day out of Loch Aire,' as we see by his
letters that even larger numbers were taken by him." Of his pugilistic
skill, it is said by De Quincey that "there was no man who had any
talents, real or fancied, for thumping or being thumped, but he had
experienced some preening of his merits from Mr. Wilson." "Meeting one
day with a rough and unruly wayfarer, who showed inclination to pick a
quarrel concerning right of passage across a certain bridge, the fellow
obstructed the way, and making himself decidedly obnoxious, Wilson lost
all patience, and offered to fight him. The man made no objection to the
proposal, but replied that he had better not fight with him, as he was
so and so, mentioning the name of a (then not unknown) pugilist. This
statement had, as may be supposed, no effect in dampening the
belligerent intentions of the Oxonian; he knew his own strength, and his
skill too. In one moment off went his coat, and he set to upon his
antagonist in splendid style. The astonished and punished rival, on
recovering from his blows and surprise, accosted him thus: 'You can only
be one of the two: you are either Jack Wilson or the devil.'" His
pedestrian feats were marvelous. "On one occasion," writes an old
classmate of Wilson's at Oxford, "having been absent a day or two, we
asked him, on his return to the common room, where he had been. He said,
In London. When did you return? This morning. How did you come? On foot.
As we all expressed surprise, he said, 'Why, the fact is, I dined
yesterday with a friend in Grosvenor (I think it was) Square, and as I
quitted the house, a fellow who was passing was impertinent and insulted
me, upon which I knocked him down; and as I did not choose to have
myself called in question for a street row, I at once started, as I was,
in my dinner dress, and never stopped until I got to the college gate
this morning, as it was being opened.' Now this was a walk of
fifty-eight miles at least, which he must have got over in eight or nine
hours at most, supposing him to have left the dinner-party at nine in
the evening." Some years later, he walked--his wife accompanying
him--"three hundred and fifty miles in the Highlands, between the 5th of
July and the 26th of August, sojourning in divers glens from Sabbath
unto Sabbath, fishing, eating, and staring." Mrs. Wilson returned from
this wonderful tour "bonnier than ever," and Wilson himself, to use his
own phrase, "strong as an eagle." One of their resting-places was at the
school-master's house in Glenorchy. While there "his time was much
occupied by fishing, and distance was not considered an obstacle. He
started one morning at an early hour to fish in a loch which at that
time abounded in trout, in the Braes of Glenorchy, called Loch Toila.
Its nearest point was thirteen miles distant from his lodgings at the
school-house. On reaching it, and unscrewing the butt-end of his
fishing-rod to get the top, he found he had it not. Nothing daunted, he
walked back, breakfasted, got his fishing-rod, made all complete, and
off again to Loch Toila. He could not resist fishing on the river when a
pool looked inviting, but he went always onward, reaching the loch a
second time, fished round it, and found that the long summer day had
come to an end. He set off for his home again with his fishing-basket
full, and confessing somewhat to weariness. Passing near a farm-house
whose inmates he knew (for he had formed acquaintance with all), he went
to get some food. They were in bed, for it was eleven o'clock at night,
and after rousing them, the hostess hastened to supply him; but he
requested her to get him some whisky and milk. She came with a bottle
full, and a can of milk, with a tumbler. Instead of a tumbler, he
requested a bowl, and poured the half of the whisky in, along with half
the milk. He drank the mixture at a draught, and while his kind hostess
was looking on with amazement, he poured the remainder of the whisky and
milk into the bowl, and drank that also. He then proceeded homeward,
performing a journey of not less than seventy miles." Prodigious! It
beat the achievement of Phidippides, who, according to tradition, ran
from Athens to Sparta, one hundred and twenty miles, in two days. But
here is a street scene, related to his daughter by a lady who saw it,
which illustrates the tremendous professor of moral philosophy still
further. "One summer afternoon, as she was about to sit down to dinner,
her servant requested her to look out of the window, to see a man
cruelly beating his horse. The sight not being a very gratifying one,
she declined, and proceeded to take her seat at table. It was quite
evident that the servant had discovered something more than the
ill-usage of the horse to divert his attention, for he kept his eyes
fixed on the window, again suggesting to his mistress that she ought to
look out. Her interest was at length excited, and she rose to see what
was going on. In front of her house (Moray Place) stood a cart of coals,
which the poor victim of the carter was unable to drag along. He had
been beating the beast most unmercifully, when at that moment Professor
Wilson, walking past, had seen the outrage and immediately interfered.
The lady said that from the expression of his face, and vehemence of his
manner, the man was evidently 'getting it,' though she was unable to
hear what was said. The carter, exasperated at this interference, took
up his whip in a threatening way, as if with the intent to strike the
professor. In an instant that well-nerved hand twisted it from the
coarse fist of the man as if it had been a straw, and walking quietly up
to the cart he unfastened its trams, and hurled the whole weight of
coals into the street. The rapidity with which this was done left the
driver of the cart speechless. Meanwhile, poor Rosinante, freed from his
burden, crept slowly away, and the professor, still clutching the whip
in one hand, and leading the horse in the other, proceeded through Moray
Place to deposit the wretched animal in better keeping than that of his
driver." Another of his "interferences" occurred during vacation time,
in the south of Scotland, when the professor had exchanged the gown for
the old "sporting jacket." "On his return to Edinburgh, he was obliged
to pass through Hawick, where, on his arrival, finding it to be
fair-day, he readily availed himself of the opportunity to witness the
amusements going on. These happened to include a 'little mill' between
two members of the local 'fancy.' His interest in pugilism attracted him
to the spot, where he soon discovered something very wrong, and a degree
of injustice being perpetrated which he could not stand. It was the work
of a moment to espouse the weaker side, a proceeding which naturally
drew down upon him the hostility of the opposite party. This result was
to him, however, of little consequence. There was nothing for it but to
beat or be beaten. He was soon 'in position;' and, before his unknown
adversary well knew what was coming, the skilled fist of the professor
had planted such a 'facer' as did not require repetition. Another
'round' was not called for; and leaving the discomfited champion to
recover at his leisure, the professor walked coolly away to take his
seat in the stage-coach, about to start for Edinburgh." Is it any wonder
that such a gigantic specimen of human nature was thought by the
steady-going and saintly Edinburghers, who tried men by mathematics and
the catechism, to be preposterously unfit for the chair of ethics in
their hallowed university? They did not know then that the monster they
hunted was capable of producing a description of a fairy's funeral--one
of the most exquisite bits of prose composition in literature, which is
said to have so impressed Lord Jeffrey's mind that he never was tired of
repeating it. Read it, and say you if anybody but Christopher North
could have written it: "There it was, on a little river island, that
once, whether sleeping or waking we know not, we saw celebrated a
fairy's funeral. First we heard small pipes playing, as if no bigger
than hollow rushes that whisper to the night winds; and more piteous
than aught that trills from earthly instrument was the scarce audible
dirge! It seemed to float over the stream, every foam-bell emitting a
plaintive note, till the fairy anthem came floating over our couch, and
then alighting without footsteps among the heather. The pattering of
little feet was then heard, as if living creatures were arranging
themselves in order, and then there was nothing but a more ordered hymn.
The harmony was like the melting of musical dew-drops, and sang, without
words, of sorrow and death. We opened our eyes, or rather sight came to
them when closed, and dream was vision. Hundreds of creatures, no taller
than the crest of the lapwing, and all hanging down their veiled heads,
stood in a circle on a green plat among the rocks; and in the midst was
a bier, framed as it seemed of flowers unknown to the Highland hills;
and on the bier a fairy lying with uncovered face, pale as a lily, and
motionless as the snow. The dirge grew fainter and fainter, and then
died quite away; when two of the creatures came from the circle, and
took their station, one at the head, the other at the foot of the bier.
They sang alternate measures, not louder than the twitter of the
awakened woodlark before it goes up the dewy air, but dolorous and full
of the desolation of death. The flower-bier stirred; for the spot on
which it lay sank slowly down, and in a few moments the greensward was
smooth as ever, the very dews glittering above the buried fairy. A cloud
passed over the moon; and, with a choral lament, the funeral troop
sailed duskily away, heard afar off, so still was the midnight solitude
of the glen. Then the disenthralled Orchy began to rejoice as before,
through all her streams and falls; and at the sudden leaping of the
waters and outbursting of the moon, we awoke."
XI.
TYPES.
"It never rains but it pours," is the pat proverb of all the world to
express its belief in the inevitableness and omnipotence of extremes.
Carlyle has enlarged upon it significantly, in that famous passage in
which he likens men collectively to sheep. Like sheep, he says, are we
seen ever running in torrents and mobs, if we ever run at all. "Neither
know we, except by blind habit, where the good pastures lie: solely when
the sweet grass is between our teeth, we know it, and chew it; also when
the grass is bitter and scant, we know it,--and bleat and butt: these
last two facts we know of a truth, and in very deed. Thus do men and
sheep play their parts on this nether earth; wandering restlessly in
large masses, they know not whither; for most part, each following his
neighbor, and his own nose. Nevertheless, not always; look better, you
shall find certain that do, in some small degree, know whither. Sheep
have their bell-wether, some ram of the folds, endued with more valor,
with clearer vision than other sheep; he leads them through the wolds,
by height and hollow, to the woods and water-courses, for covert or for
pleasant provender; courageously marching, and if need be leaping, and
with hoof and horn doing battle, in the van: him they courageously, and
with assured heart, follow. Touching it is, as every herdsman will
inform you, with what chivalrous devotedness these woolly hosts adhere
to their wether; and rush after him, through good report and through bad
report, were it into safe shelters and green thymy nooks, or into
asphaltic lakes and the jaws of devouring lions. Even also must we
recall that fact which we owe Jean Paul's quick eye: 'If you hold a
stick before the wether, so that he, by necessity, leaps in passing you,
and then withdraw your stick, the flock will nevertheless all leap as he
did; and the thousandth sheep shall be found impetuously vaulting over
air, as the first did over an otherwise impassable barrier.'"
Society is always swaying backward and forward--vibrating, like the
pendulum, from one extreme to another; for a moment only, now and then,
is it upright, and governed by reason. Moderation is hateful to it.
There is a pretty passage in one of Lucian's dialogues, where Jupiter
complains to Cupid that, though he has had so many intrigues, he was
never sincerely beloved. In order to be loved, says Cupid, you must lay
aside your aegis and your thunder-bolts, and you must curl and perfume
your hair, and place a garland on your head, and walk with a soft step,
and assume a winning, obsequious deportment. But, replied Jupiter, I am
not willing to resign so much of my dignity. Then, replied Cupid, leave
off desiring to be loved. He wanted to be Jupiter and Adonis at the same
time. "It is natural," says Brackenridge, in Modern Chivalry, "to
distrust him who proposes to stop short of what seems a complete reform.
We are right, say the people. You are right, says the man of prudence.
We were wrong, say the people. You were wrong, says the same man." The
majority rules. In the grove of Gotama lived a Brahman, who, having
bought a sheep in another village, and carrying it home on his shoulder
to sacrifice, was seen by three rogues, who resolved to take the animal
from him by the following stratagem: Having separated, they agreed to
encounter the Brahman on his road as if coming from different parts. One
of them cried out, "O Brahman! why dost thou carry that dog on thy
shoulder?" "It is not a dog," replied the Brahman; "it is a sheep for
sacrifice." As he went on, the second knave met him, and put the same
question; whereupon the Brahman, throwing the sheep on the ground,
looked at it again and again. Having replaced it on his shoulder, the
good man went with mind wavering like a string. But when the third rogue
met him and said, "Father, where art thou taking that dog?" the Brahman,
believing his eyes bewitched, threw down the sheep and hurried home,
leaving the thieves to feast on that which he had provided for the gods.
The world grows tired of admiring, and delights to limit its admiration.
"Garrick," said Hazlitt, "kept up the fever of public admiration as long
as anybody, but when he returned to the stage after a short absence no
one went to see him." "The old Earl of Norwich, who," said Sir William
Temple, "was esteemed the greatest wit in Charles the First's reign,
when Charles the Second came to the throne was thought nothing of."
Happy if the world's favorite to-day be not its victim to-morrow.
Traveling through Switzerland, Napoleon was greeted with such enthusiasm
that Bourrienne said to him, "It must be delightful to be greeted with
such demonstrations of enthusiastic admiration." "Bah!" replied
Napoleon, "this same unthinking crowd, under a slight change of
circumstances, would follow me just as eagerly to the scaffold." "I
have," said an eminent American general to Baron de Huebner, "the
greatest horror of popular demonstrations. These very men who deafen you
with their cheers to-day are capable of throwing stones and mud at you
to-morrow." Mirabeau, on a famous occasion, amid the threatening clamors
of an angry crowd, said, "A few days ago I too was to be carried in
triumph, and now they are bawling through the streets, 'the great
treason of the Count of Mirabeau.' This lesson was not necessary to
remind me that the distance is short between the Capitol and the
Tarpeian Rock." "What throngs! what acclamations," exclaimed the
flatterers of Cromwell, when he was proclaimed Protector of the
Commonwealth of England. Cromwell replied, "There would be still more,
if they were going to hang me." The multitudes that went before and that
followed Christ into Jerusalem, crying, "Hosanna to the Son of David:
Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord: Hosanna in the
highest," "cried out again, Crucify him. Then Pilate said unto them,
Why, what evil hath he done? and they cried out the more exceedingly,
Crucify him." Madame Roland wrote from her prison-cell to Robespierre,
"It is not, Robespierre, to excite your compassion, that I present you
with a picture less melancholy than the truth. I am above asking your
pity; and were it offered, I should perhaps deem it an insult. I write
for your instruction. Fortune is fickle; and popular power is liable to
change." "Society," said Macaulay, writing of Byron, "capricious in its
indignation, as it had been capricious in its fondness, flew into a rage
with its froward and petted darling. He had been worshiped with an
irrational idolatry. He was persecuted with an irrational fury." Junius,
in the celebrated letter, warns the king that "while he plumes himself
upon the security of his title to the crown, he should remember that, as
it was acquired by one revolution, it may be lost by another." The Jews,
said Luther, have a story of a king of Bashan, whom they call Og; they
say he had lifted a great rock to throw at his enemies, but God made a
hole in the middle, so that it slipped down upon the giant's neck, and
he could never rid himself of it.
Causes of good or evil seem to accumulate, when a very slight thing is
the beginning of a succession of blessings or curses. All things
conspire, till the recipients of blessings are smothered, or the victims
of curses are crushed. Till the cup is full, overflowing; till the
burden is unbearable, merciless; till good becomes satiety, or evil
cruelty, all the world seems to delight in contributing or robbing,
deifying or anathematizing.
"Never stoops the soaring vulture
On his quarry in the desert,
On the sick or wounded bison,
But another vulture, watching
From his high aerial lookout,
Sees the downward plunge and follows;
And a third pursues the second,
Coming from the invisible ether,
First a speck, and then a vulture,
Till the air is dark with pinions.
So disasters come not singly;
But as if they watched and waited,
Scanning one another's motions,
When the first descends, the others
Follow, follow, gathering flock-wise
Round their victim, sick and wounded,
First a shadow, then a sorrow,
Till the air is dark with anguish."
"What a noise out-of-doors!" exclaimed Souvestre's Philosopher from his
attic in Paris. "What is the meaning of all these shouts and cries? Ah!
I recollect: this is the last day of the carnival, and the maskers are
passing. Christianity has not been able to abolish the noisy
bacchanalian festivals of the pagan times, but it has changed the names.
That which it has given to these 'days of liberty' announces the ending
of the feasts, and the month of fasting which should follow;
'carn-a-val' means literally 'down with flesh meat!' It is a forty days'
farewell to the 'blessed pullets and fat hams,' so celebrated by
Pantagruel's minstrel. Man prepares for privation by satiety, and
finishes his sins thoroughly before he begins to repent. Why, in all
ages and among every people, do we meet with some one of these mad
festivals? Must we believe that it requires such an effort for men to be
reasonable, that the weaker ones have need of rest at intervals. The
monks of La Trappe, who are condemned to silence by their rule, are
allowed to speak once in a month, and on this day, they all talk at once
from the rising to the setting of the sun."
It is reported of Scaramouche, the first famous Italian comedian, that
being in Paris, and in great want, he bethought himself of constantly
plying near the door of a noted perfumer in that city, and when any one
came out who had been buying snuff, never failed to desire a taste of
them: when he had by this means got together a quantity made up of
several different sorts, he sold it again at a lower rate to the same
perfumer, who, finding out the trick, called it "snuff of a thousand
flowers." The story further tells us that by this means he got a very
comfortable subsistence, until, making too great haste to grow rich, he
one day took such an unreasonable pinch out of the box of a Swiss
officer as engaged him in a quarrel, and obliged him to quit this
ingenious way of life.
"I remember," says Cumberland, in his Memoirs, "the predicament of an
ingenious mechanic and artist, who, when Rich the harlequin was the
great dramatic author of his time, and wrote successfully for the stage,
contrived and executed a most delicious serpent for one of those
inimitable productions, in which Mr. Rich, justly disdaining the weak
aid of language, had selected the classical fable, if I rightly
recollect, of Orpheus and Eurydice, and, having conceived a very capital
part for the serpent, was justly anxious to provide himself with a
performer who could support a character of that consequence with credit
to himself and his author. The event answered his most ardent hopes:
nothing could be more perfect than his entrances and exits; nothing ever
crawled across the stage with more accomplished sinuosity than this
enchanting serpent; every one was charmed with its performance; it
twirled and twisted, and wriggled itself about in so divine a manner,
that the whole world was ravished by the lovely snake; nobles and
non-nobles, rich and poor, old and young, reps and demi-reps, flocked to
see it and admire it. The artist, who had been the master of the
movement, was intoxicated with his success; he turned his hand and head
to nothing else but serpents; he made them of all sizes; they crawled
about his shop as if he had been chief snake-catcher to the furies; the
public curiosity was satisfied with one serpent, and he had nests of
them yet unsold; his stock lay dead upon his hands, his trade was lost,
and the man was ruined, bankrupt, and undone."
Lecky observes that when, after long years of obstinate disbelief, the
reality of the great discovery of Harvey dawned upon the medical world,
the first result was a school of medicine which regarded man simply as
an hydraulic machine, and found the principle of every malady in
imperfections of circulation.
In the Arctic region, says Dr. Kane, the frost is so intense as to burn.
Sudden putrefaction of meat takes place at a temperature of thirty-five
degrees below zero. The Greenlanders consider extreme cold as favorable
to putrefaction. The Esquimaux withdraw the viscera immediately after
death, and fill the cavity with stones. Dr. Kane was told that the musk
ox is sometimes tainted after five minutes exposure to great cold. In
Italy, south of the great alluvial plain of Lombardy, and away from the
immediate sea-coast, the lakes occupy the craters of extinguished
volcanoes. In Arabia, travelers declare, the silence of the desert is so
profound that it soon ceases to be soothing or solemn, and becomes
absolutely painful, if not appalling. In Java, that magnificent and
fearful clime, the most lovely flowers are found to conceal hidden
reptiles; the most tempting fruits are tinctured with subtle poisons;
there grow those splendid trees whose shadow is death; there the
vampire, an enormous bat, sucks the blood of the victims whose sleep he
prolongs, by wafting over them an air full of freshness and perfume.
Darwin, in his Voyage, speaks of the strange mixture of sound and
silence which pervades the shady parts of the wood on the shore of
Brazil. The noise from the insects is so loud that it may be heard even
in a vessel anchored several hundred yards from the shore; yet within
the recesses of the forest a universal silence appears to reign. At
Syracuse, an English gentleman was taken to a dirty cistern; seventy
women were washing, with their clothes tucked up, and themselves
standing in a pool,--a disgusting scene. "What do you bring me here
for?" said he to the guide. "Why, sir, this is the Fountain of
Arethusa." In the Fourth Circle of Dante's Hell are the souls of the
Prodigal and the Avaricious: they are forever rolling great weights, and
forever smiting each other. "To all eternity," says the poet, "they
shall continue butting one another." A dung-hill at a distance, said
Coleridge, sometimes smells like musk, and a dead dog like
elder-flowers. Scargill declared that an Englishman is never happy but
when he is miserable; a Scotchman is never at home but when he is
abroad; an Irishman is at peace only when he is fighting. The
melancholy, says Horace, hate the merry, the jocose the melancholy; the
volatile dislike the sedate, the indolent the stirring and vivacious;
the modest man generally carries the look of a churl. Meyer, in
conversation with Goethe, said he saw a shoemaker in Italy who hammered
his leather upon the antique marble head of a Roman emperor. The lark,
that sings out of the sky, purifies himself, like the pious Mussulman,
in the dust of the ground. The nightingale, they say, sings with his
breast against a thorn. The fragrant white pond lily springs from the
same black mud out of which the yellow lily sucks its obscene life and
noisome odor. An elephant, that no quadruped has the temerity to attack,
is said to be the favorite victim of a worm that bores into his foot and
slowly tortures him to death. A gnat, according to a tradition of the
Arabs, overcame the mighty Nimrod. Enraged at the destruction of his
gods by the prophet Abraham, he sought to slay him, and waged war
against him. But the prophet prayed to God, and said, "Deliver me, O
God, from this man, who worships stones, and boasts himself to be the
lord of all beings;" and God said to him, "How shall I punish him?" And
the prophet answered, "To Thee armies are as nothing, and the strength
and power of men likewise. Before the smallest of thy creatures will
they perish." And God was pleased at the faith of the prophet, and he
sent a gnat, which vexed Nimrod night and day, so that he built a room
of glass in his palace, that he might dwell therein, and shut out the
insect. But the gnat entered also, and passed by his ear into his brain,
upon which it fed, and increased in size day by day, so that the
servants of Nimrod beat his head with a hammer continually, that he
might have some ease from his pain; but he died, after suffering these
torments for four hundred years.
"The grandiose statues of Michel Angelo," said a traveler, descanting
upon the art and architecture of old Rome, "appear to the greatest
advantage under the bold arches of Bramante. There--between those broad
lines, under those prodigious curves--placed in one of those courts, or
near one of the great temples where the perspective is incomplete--the
statues of Michel Angelo display their tragic attitudes, their gigantic
members, which seem animated by a ray from the divinity, and struggling
to mount from earth to heaven. Bramante and Michel Angelo detested but
completed each other. Thus it is often in human nature. Those two men
knew not that they were laborers in the same work. And history is silent
upon such points till death has passed over her heroes. Armies have
fought until they have been almost annihilated on the field of battle;
men have hated and injured one another by their calumnies; the learned
and powerful persecute and seek to blot their fellows from the earth, as
if there was not air and space for all; they know not, blinded by their
passions, and warped by the prejudices of envy, that the future will
blend them in the same glory, that to posterity they will represent but
one sentiment. Bramante and Michel Angelo, enemies during life, are
reconciled in immortality."