The use of the Hour-glass can be traced to ancient Greece. In Christie’s
Greek Vases, one is engraved from a scarabæus of sardonyx, in the
Towneley collection: it is exactly like the modern hour-glass. The first
mention of it occurs in a Greek tragedian named Bato. On a bas-relief of
the Mattei Palace, of the marriage of Thetis and Peleus, Morpheus holds
an hour-glass; and from Athenæus it appears that persons, when going
out, carried it about with them, as we do a watch. In a woodcut in
Hawkins’s _History of Music_, the frame is more solid, and the glass
probably slipped in and out. There is another cut of one in Boissard,
held by Death, precisely of the modern form.
The hour or sand-glass is liable to the objection, that it requires a
horary attendant, as is intimated in the glee:
Five times by the taper’s light
The hour-glass we have turned to-night.
But the Hour-glass is a better measurer of time than is generally
imagined. The flow of the sand from one bulb to another is perfectly
equable, whatever may be the quantity of sand above the aperture. The
stream flows no faster when the upper bulb is almost full than when it
is almost empty; the lower heap not being influenced by the pressure of
the heap above.[11] Bloomfield, in one of his rural tales, “The Widow to
her Hour-glass,” sings:
I’ve often watched thy streaming sand,
And seen the growing mountain rise,
And often found life’s hope to stand
On props as weak in wisdom’s eyes:
Its conic crown
Still sliding down,
Again heaped up, then down again:
The sand above more hollow grew,
Like days and years still filtering through,
And mingling joy and pain.
Ford, contemporary with Massinger, has this impressive picture of the
primitive time-keeper:
Minutes are number’d by the fall of sands,
As, by an hour-glass, the span of time
Doth waste us to our graves; and we look on it.
An age of pleasures, revell’d out, comes home
At last, and ends in sorrow: but the life,
Weary of riot, numbers every sand,
Wailing in sighs, until the last drop down;
So to conclude calamity in rest: numbering wasted life.
How cleverly the old dramatist, Shirley, illustrates this philosopher in
glass:
Let princes gather
My dust into a glass, and learn to spend
Their hour of state, that’s all they have; for when
That’s out, Time never turns the glass again.
The Hour-glass has almost entirely given place to the more useful,
because to a greater extent self-acting, instrument; and it is now
seldom seen except upon the table of the lecturer or private teacher, in
the study of the philosopher, in the cottage of the peasant, or in the
hand of the old emblematic figure of Time.[12] We still sometimes see it
in the workshop of the cork-cutter. The half-minute glass is still
employed on board ship; and the two and a half or three minute glass for
boiling an egg with exactness.
Preaching by the Hour-glass was formerly common; and public speakers
are _timed_, in the present day, by the same means. In the
church-wardens’ books of St. Helen’s, Abingdon, date 1599, is a
charge of fourpence for an hour-glass for the pulpit; in 1564, we
find in the books of St. Katherine’s, Christ Church, Aldgate, “paid
for an hour-glass that hangeth by the pulpit when the preacher doth
make a sermon, that he may know how the hour passeth away—one
shilling;” and in the books of St. Mary’s, Lambeth, 1579 and 1615,
are similar entries. Butler, in _Hudibras_, alludes to pulpit
hour-glasses having been used by the Puritans: the preacher having
named the text, turned up the glass; and if the sermon did not last
till the sand was out, it was said by the congregation that the
preacher was lazy; but if, on the other hand, he continued much
longer, they would yawn and stretch till the discourse was finished.
At the old church of St. Dunstan-in-the-West, Fleet-street, was a
large hour-glass in a silver frame, of which latter, when the
instrument was taken down, in 1723, two heads were made for the
parish staves. Hogarth, in his “Sleepy Congregation,” has introduced
an hour-glass on the west side of the pulpit. A very perfect
hour-glass is preserved in the church of St. Alban, Wood-street,
Cheapside; it is placed on the right of the reading-desk within a
frame of twisted columns and arches, supported on a spiral column:
the four sides have angels sounding trumpets; and each end has a
line of crosses _patées_ and fleurs-de-lis, somewhat resembling the
imperial crown.
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Footnote 11:
Le Jeune has painted two children watching with wonder the sand
flowing in the hour-glass.
Footnote 12:
The Hour-glass is the sign of Calvert’s Brewery, in Upper
Thames-street.
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