BLACKWOOD'S
Edinburgh
MAGAZINE.
VOL. LXVI.
JULY--DECEMBER, 1849.
[Illustration]
WILLIAM BLACKWOOD & SONS, EDINBURGH;
AND
37, PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON.
* * * * *
1849.
BLACKWOOD'S
EDINBURGH MAGAZINE.
NO. CCCCV. JULY, 1849. VOL. LXVI.
CONTENTS.
DIES BOREALES. NO. II. CHRISTOPHER UNDER CANVASS, 1
THE ISLAND OF SARDINIA, 33
THE CAXTONS.--PART XIV. 48
THE GAME LAWS IN SCOTLAND, 63
DOMINIQUE, 77
PESTALOZZIANA, 93
THE CROWNING OF THE COLUMN, AND CRUSHING OF THE
PEDESTAL, 108
POSTSCRIPT, 131
EDINBURGH:
WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS, 45, GEORGE STREET;
AND 37, PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON.
_To whom all Communications (post paid) must be addressed._
SOLD BY ALL THE BOOKSELLERS IN THE UNITED KINGDOM.
PRINTED BY WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS, EDINBURGH.
BLACKWOOD'S
EDINBURGH MAGAZINE.
NO. CCCCV. JULY, 1849. VOL. LXVI.
Dies Boreales.
NO. II.
CHRISTOPHER UNDER CANVASS.
ENCAMPMENT AT CLADICH. TIME--_Eleven_, A.M.
SCENE--_The Portal of the Pavilion._
NORTH--BULLER--SEWARD.
* * * * *
BULLER.
I know there is nothing you dislike so much as personal observations----
NORTH.
On myself to myself--not at all on others.
BULLER.
Yet I cannot help telling you to your face, sir, that you are one of
the finest-looking old men----
NORTH.
Elderly gentlemen, if you please, sir.
BULLER.
In Britain, in Europe, in the World. I am perfectly serious, sir. You
are.
NORTH.
You needed not to say you were perfectly serious: for I suffer no man
to be ironical on Me, Mr Buller. I am.
BULLER.
Such a change since we came to Cladich! Seward was equally shocked,
with myself, at your looks on board the Steamer. So lean--so bent--so
sallow--so haggard--in a word--so aged!
NORTH.
Were you shocked, Seward?
SEWARD.
Buller has such a blunt way with him that he often makes me blush. I
was not shocked, my dear sir, but I was affected.
BULLER.
Turning to me, he said in a whisper, "What a wreck!"
NORTH.
I saw little alteration on you, Mr Seward; but as to Buller, it was
with the utmost difficulty I could be brought, by his reiterated
asseverations, into a sort of quasi-belief in his personal identity;
and even now, it is far from amounting to anything like a settled
conviction. Why, his face is twice the breadth it used to be--and
so red! It used to be narrow and pale. Then what a bushy head--now,
cocker it as he will, bald. In figure was he not slim? Now, stout's the
word. Stout--stout--yes, Buller, you have grown stout, and will grow
stouter--your doom is to be fat--I prophesy paunch----
BULLER.
Spare me--spare me, sir. Seward should not have interrupted me--'twas
but the first impression--and soon wore off--those Edinboro' people
have much to answer for--unmercifully wearing you out at their
ceaseless _soirées_--but since you came to Cladich, sir, CHRISTOPHER'S
HIMSELF AGAIN--pardon my familiarity--nor can I now, after the minutest
inspection, and severest scrutiny, detect one single additional wrinkle
on face or forehead--nay, not a wrinkle at all--not one--so fresh of
colour, too, sir, that the irradiation is at times ruddy--and without
losing an atom of expression, the countenance absolutely--plump. Yes,
sir, plump's the word--plump, plump, plump.
NORTH.
Now you speak sensibly, and like yourself, my dear Buller. I wear well.
BULLER.
Your enemies circulated a report--
NORTH.
I did not think I had an enemy in the world.
BULLER.
Your friends, sir, had heard a rumour--that you had mounted a wig.
NORTH.
And was there, among them all, one so weak-minded as to believe it? But
to be sure, there are no bounds to the credulity of mankind.
BULLER.
That you had lost your hair--and that, like Sampson--
NORTH.
And by what Delilah had my locks been shorn?
SEWARD.
It all originated, I verily believe, sir, in the moved imagination of
the Pensive Public:
"Res est soliciti plena timoris Amor."
NORTH.
Buller, I see little, if any--no change whatever--on you, since the
days of Deeside--nor on you, Seward. Yes, I do. Not now, when by
yourselves; but when your boys are in Tent, ah! then I do indeed--a
pleasant, a happy, a blessed change! Bright boys they are--delightful
lads--noble youths--and so are my Two--emphasis on _my_--
SEWARD AND BULLER.
Yes, all emphasis, and may the Four be friends for life.
NORTH.
In presence of us old folks, composed and respectful--in manly modesty
attentive to every word we say--at times no doubt wearisome enough!
Yet each ready, at a look or pause, to join in when we are at our
gravest--and the solemn may be getting dull--enlivening the sleepy flow
of our conversation as with rivulets issuing from pure sources in the
hills of the morning--
SEWARD.
Ay--ay; heaven bless them all!
NORTH.
Why, there is more than sense--more than talent--there is _genius_
among them--in their eyes and on their tongues--though they have
no suspicion of it--and that is the charm. Then how they rally one
another! Witty fellows all Four. And the right sort of raillery.
Gentlemen by birth and breeding, to whom in their wildest sallies
vulgarity is impossible--to whom, on the giddy brink--the perilous
edge--still adheres a native Decorum superior to that of all the
Schools.
SEWARD.
They have their faults, sir--
NORTH.
So have we. And 'tis well for us. Without faults we should be
unloveable.
SEWARD.
In affection I spake.
NORTH.
I know you did. There is no such hateful sight on earth as a perfect
character. He is one mass of corruption--for he is a hypocrite--_intus
et in cute_--by the necessity of nature. The moment a perfect character
enters a room--I leave it.
SEWARD.
What if you happened to live in the neighbourhood of the nuisance?
NORTH.
Emigrate. Or remain here--encamped for life--with imperfect
characters--till the order should issue--Strike Tent.
BULLER.
My Boy has a temper of his own.
NORTH.
Original--or acquired?
BULLER.
Naturally sweet-blooded--assuredly by the mother's side--but in her
goodness she did all she could to spoil him. Some excuse--We have but
Marmy.
NORTH.
And his father, naturally not quite so sweet-blooded, does all he can
to preserve him? Between the two, a pretty Pickle he is. Has thine a
temper of his own, too, Seward?
SEWARD.
Hot.
NORTH.
Hereditary.
SEWARD.
No--North. A milder, meeker, Christian Lady than his mother is not in
England.
NORTH.
I confess I was at the moment not thinking of his mother. But somewhat
too much of this. I hereby authorise the Boys of this Empire to have
what tempers they choose--with one sole exception--THE SULKY.
BULLER.
The Edict is promulged.
NORTH.
Once, and once only, during one of the longest and best-spent lives on
record, was I in the mood proscribed--and it endured most part of a
whole day. The Anniversary of that day I observe, in severest solitude,
with a salutary horror. And it is my Birthday. Ask me not, my friends,
to reveal the Cause. Aloof from confession before man--we must keep
to ourselves--as John Foster says--a corner of our own souls. A black
corner it is--and enter it with or without a light--you see, here and
there, something dismal--hideous--shapeless--nameless--each lying in
its own place on the floor. There lies the CAUSE. It was the morning
of my Ninth Year. As I kept sitting high upstairs by myself--one
familiar face after another kept ever and anon looking in upon me--all
with one expression! And one familiar voice after another--all with
one tone--kept muttering at me--"_He's still in the Sulks!_" How I
hated them with an intenser hatred--and chief them I before had loved
best--at each opening and each shutting of that door! How I hated
myself, as my blubbered face felt hotter and hotter--and I knew how
ugly I must be, with my fixed fiery eyes. It was painful to sit on
such a chair for hours in one posture, and to have so chained a child
would have been great cruelty--but I was resolved to die, rather than
change it; and had I been told by any one under an angel to get up and
go to play, I would have spat in his face. It was a lonesome attic,
and I had the fear of ghosts. But not then--my superstitious fancy
was quelled by my troubled heart. Had I not deserved to be allowed to
go? Did they not all know that all my happiness in this life depended
on my being allowed to go? Could any one of them give a reason for
not allowing me to go? What right had they to say that if I did go, I
should never be able to find my way, by myself, back? What right had
they to say that Roundy was a blackguard, and that he would lead me to
the gallows? Never before, in all the world, had a good boy been used
so on his birthday. They pretend to be sorry when I am sick--and when I
say my prayers, they say theirs too; but I am sicker now--and they are
not sorry, but angry--there's no use in prayers--and I won't read one
verse in the Bible this night, should my aunt go down on her knees. And
in the midst of such unworded soliloquies did the young blasphemer fall
asleep.
BULLER.
Young Christopher North! Incredible.
NORTH.
I know not how long I slept; but on awaking, I saw an angel with a most
beautiful face and most beautiful hair--a little young angel--about the
same size as myself--sitting on a stool by my feet. "Are you quite well
now, Christopher? Let us go to the meadows and gather flowers." Shame,
sorrow, remorse, contrition, came to me with those innocent words--we
wept together, and I was comforted. "I have been sinful"--"but you are
forgiven." Down all the stairs hand in hand we glided; and there was
no longer anger in any eyes--the whole house was happy. All voices
were kinder--if that were possible--than they had been when I rose
in the morning--a Boy in his Ninth Year. Parental hands smoothed my
hair--parental lips kissed it--and parental greetings, only a little
more cheerful than prayers, restored me to the Love I had never lost,
and which I felt now had animated that brief and just displeasure. I
had never heard then of Elysian fields; but I had often heard, and
often had dreamt happy, happy dreams of fields of light in heaven. And
such looked the fields to be, where fairest Mary Gordon and I gathered
flowers, and spoke to the birds, and to one another, all day long--and
again, when the day was gone, and the evening going, on till moon-time,
below and among the soft-burning stars.
BULLER.
And never has _Christopher been in the Sulks_ since that day.
NORTH.
Under heaven I owe it all to that child's eyes. Still I sternly keep
the Anniversary--for, beyond doubt, I was that day possessed with a
Devil--and an angel it was, though human, that drove him out.
SEWARD.
Your first Love?
NORTH.
In a week she was in heaven. My friends--in childhood--our whole future
life would sometimes seem to be at the mercy of such small events
as these. Small call them not--for they are great for good or for
evil--because of the unfathomable mysteries that lie shrouded in the
growth, on earth, of an immortal soul.
SEWARD.
May I dare to ask you, sir--it is indeed a delicate--a more than
delicate question--if the Anniversary--has been brought round with the
revolving year since we encamped?
NORTH.
It has.
SEWARD.
Ah! Buller! we know now the reason of his absence that day from the
Pavilion and Deeside--of his utter seclusion--he was doing penance in
the Swiss Giantess--a severe sojourn.
NORTH.
A Good Temper, friends--not a good Conscience--is the Blessing of Life.
BULLER.
Shocked to hear you say so, sir. Unsay it, my dear sir--unsay
it--pernicious doctrine. It may get abroad.
NORTH.
THE SULKS!--the CELESTIALS. The Sulks are hell, sirs--the Celestials,
by the very name, heaven. I take temper in its all-embracing sense
of Physical, Mental, and Moral Atmosphere. Pure and serene--then we
respire God's gifts, and are happier than we desire! Is not that
divine? Foul and disturbed--then we are stifled by God's gifts--and are
wickeder than we fear! Is not that devilish? A good Conscience and a
bad Temper! Talk not to me, Young Men, of pernicious doctrine--it is
a soul-saving doctrine--"millions of spiritual creatures walk unseen"
teaching it--men's Thoughts, communing with heaven, have been teaching
it--surely not all in vain--since Cain slew Abel.
SEWARD.
The Sage!
BULLER.
Socrates.
NORTH.
Morose! Think for five minutes on what that word means--and on what
that word contains--and you see the Man must be an Atheist. Sitting in
the House of God _morosely_! Bright, bold, beautiful boys of ours, ye
are not morose--heaven's air has free access through your open souls--a
clear conscience carries the Friends in their pastimes up the Mountains.
SEWARD.
And their fathers before them.
NORTH.
And their great-grandfather--I mean their spiritual
great-grandfather--myself--Christopher North. They are gathering
up--even as we gathered up--images that will never die. Evanescent!
Clouds--lights--shadows--glooms--the falling sound--the running
murmur--and the swinging roar--as cataract, stream, and forest all
alike seem wheeling by--these are not evanescent--for they will all
keep coming and going--before their Imagination--all life-long at the
bidding of the Will--or obedient to a Wish! Or by benign Law, whose
might is a mystery, coming back from the far profound--remembered
apparitions!
SEWARD.
Dear sir.
NORTH.
Even my Image will sometimes reappear--and the Tents of Cladich--the
Camp on Lochawe-side.
BULLER.
My dear sir--it will not be evanescent----
NORTH.
And withal such Devils! But I have given them _carte blanche_.
SEWARD.
Nor will they abuse it.
NORTH.
I wonder when they sleep. Each has his own dormitory--the cluster
forming the left wing of the Camp--but Deeside is not seldom broad
awake till midnight; and though I am always up and out by six at the
latest, never once have I caught a man of them napping, but either
there they are each more blooming than the other, getting ready their
gear for a start;--or, on sweeping the Loch with my glass, I see their
heads, like wild-ducks--swimming--round Rabbit Island--as some wretch
has baptised Inishail--or away to Inistrynish--or, for anything I know,
to Port-Sonachan--swimming for a Medal given by the Club! Or there
goes _Gutta-Percha_ by the Pass of Brandir, or shooting away into the
woods near Kilchurn. Twice have they been on the top of Cruachan--once
for a clear hour, and once for a dark day--the very next morning,
Marmaduke said, they would have "some more mountain," and the Four
Cloud-compellers swept the whole range of Ben-Bhuridh and Bein-Lurachan
as far as the head of Glensrea. Though they said nothing about it, I
heard of their having been over the hills behind us, t'other night, at
Cairndow, at a wedding. Why, only think, sirs, yesterday they were off
by daylight to try their luck in Loch Dochart, and again I heard their
merriment soon after we had retired. They must have footed it above
forty miles. That Cornwall Clipper will be their death. And off again
this morning--all on foot--to the Black Mount.
BULLER.
For what?
NORTH.
By permission of the Marquis, to shoot an Eagle. She is said to be
again on egg--and to cliff-climbers her eyrie is within rifle-range.
But let us forget the Boys--as they have forgot us.
SEWARD.
The Loch is calmer to-day, sir, than we have yet seen it; but the
calm is of a different character from yesterday's--that was serene,
this is solemn--I had almost said austere. Yesterday there were few
clouds; and such was the prevailing power of all those lovely woods on
the islands, and along the mainland shores--that the whole reflexion
seemed sylvan. When gazing on such a sight, does not our feeling of the
unrealities--the shadows--attach to the realities--the substances? So
that the living trees--earth-rooted, and growing upwards--become almost
as visionary as their inverted semblances in that commingling clime?
Or is it that the life of the trees gives life to the images, and
imagination believes that the whole, in its beauty, must belong, by the
same law, to the same world?
NORTH.
Let us understand, without seeking to destroy, our delusions--for has
not this life of ours been wisely called the dream of a shadow!
SEWARD.
To-day there are many clouds, and aloft they are beautiful; nor is the
light of the sun not most gracious; but the repose of all that downward
world affects me--I know not why--with sadness--it is beginning to look
almost gloomy--and I seem to see the hush not of sleep, but of death.
There is not the unboundaried expanse of yesterday--the loch looks
narrower--and Cruachan closer to us, with all his heights.
BULLER.
I felt a drop of rain on the back of my hand.
SEWARD.
It must have been, then, from your nose. There will be no rain this
week. But a breath of air there is somewhere--for the mirror is dimmed,
and the vision gone.
NORTH.
The drop was not from his nose, Seward, for here are three--and clear,
pure drops too--on my Milton. I should not be at all surprised if we
were to have a little rain.
SEWARD.
Odd enough. I cannot conjecture where it comes from. It must be dew.
BULLER.
Who ever heard of dew dropping in large fat globules at meridian on a
summer's day? It is getting very close and sultry. The interior must
be, as Wordsworth says, "Like a Lion's den." Did you whisper, sir?
NORTH.
No. But something did. Look at the quicksilver, Buller.
BULLER.
Thermometer 85. Barometer I can say nothing about--but that it is very
low indeed. A long way below Stormy.
NORTH.
What colour would you call that Glare about the Crown of Cruachan?
Yellow?
SEWARD.
You may just as well call it yellow as not. I never saw such a colour
before--and don't care though I never see such again--for it is horrid.
That _is_ a--Glare.
NORTH.
Cowper says grandly,
"A terrible sagacity informs
The Poet's heart: he looks to distant storms;
He hears the thunder ere the tempest lowers."
He is speaking of tempests in the moral world. You know the passage--it
is a fine one--so indeed is the whole Epistle--Table-Talk. I am a bit
of a Poet myself in smelling thunder. Early this morning I set it down
for mid-day--and it is mid-day now.
BULLER.
Liker Evening.
NORTH.
Dimmish and darkish, certainly--but unlike Evening. I pray you look at
the Sun.
BULLER.
What about him?
NORTH.
Though unclouded--he seems shrouded in his own solemn light--expecting
thunder.
BULLER.
There is not much motion among the clouds.
NORTH.
Not yet. Merely what in Scotland we call a carry--yet that great
central mass is double the size it was ten minutes ago--the City
Churches are crowding round the Cathedral--and the whole assemblage
lies under the shadow of the Citadel--with battlements and colonnades
at once Fort and Temple.
BULLER.
Still some blue sky. Not very much. But some.
NORTH.
Cruachan! you are changing colour.
BULLER.
Grim--very.
NORTH.
The Loch's like ink. I could dip my pen in it.
SEWARD.
We are about to have thunder.
NORTH.
Weather-wise wizard--we are. That mutter was thunder. In five seconds
you will hear some more. One--two--three--four--there; that was a
growl. I call that good growling--sulky, sullen, savage growling, that
makes the heart of Silence quake.
SEWARD.
And mine.
NORTH.
What? Dying away! Some incomprehensible cause is turning the thunderous
masses round towards Appin.
SEWARD.
And I wish them a safe journey.
NORTH.
All right. They are coming this way--all at once--the whole
Thunderstorm. Flash--roar.
"Be thou as lightning in the eyes of France;
For ere thou canst report I will be there,
The thunder of my cannon shall be heard."
Who but Willy could have said _that_?
SEWARD.
Who said what?
NORTH.
How ghastly all the trees!
SEWARD.
I see no trees--nor anything else.
NORTH.
How can you, with that Flying Dutchman over your eyes?
BULLER.
I gave him my handkerchief--for at this moment I know his head is like
to rend. I wish I had kept it to myself; but no use--the lightning is
seen through lids and hands, and would be through stone walls.
NORTH.
Each flash has, of course, a thunder-clap of its own--if we knew
where to look for it; but, to our senses, all connexion between cause
and effect is lost--such incessant flashings--and such multitudinous
outbreaks--and such a continuous roll of outrageous echoes!
BULLER.
Coruscation--explosion--are but feeble words.
NORTH.
The Cathedral's on Fire.
BULLER.
I don't mind so much those wide flarings among the piled clouds, as
these gleams----oh!
NORTH.
Where art thou, Cruachan! Ay--methinks I see thee--methinks I do
not--thy Three Peaks may not pierce the masses that now oppress
thee--but behind the broken midway clouds, those black purple breadths
of solid earth are thine--thine those unmistakeable Cliffs--thine the
assured beauty of that fearless Forest--and may the lightning scathe
not one single tree!
BULLER.
Nor man.
NORTH.
This is your true total Eclipse of the Sun. Day, not night, is the time
for thunder and lightning. Night can be dark of itself--nay, cannot
help it; but when Day grows black, then is the blackness of darkness
in the Bright One terrible;--and terror--Burke said well--is at the
heart of the sublime. The Light, such as it is, sets off the power of
the lightning--it pales to that flashing--and is forgotten in Fire. It
smells of hell.
SEWARD.
It is constitutional in the Sewards. North, I am sick.
NORTH.
Give way to gasping--and lie down--nothing can be done for you. The
danger is not--
SEWARD.
I am not afraid--I am faint.
NORTH.
You must speak louder, if you expect to be heard by ears of clay. Peals
is not the word. "Peals on peals redoubled" is worse. There never
was--and never will be a word in any language--for _all that_.
BULLER.
Unreasonable to expect it. Try twenty--in twenty languages.
NORTH.
Buller, you may count ten individual deluges--besides the descent of
three at hand--conspicuous in the general Rain, which without them
would be Rain sufficient for a Flood. Now the Camp has it--and let us
enter the Pavilion. I don't think there is much wind here--yet far
down the black Loch is silently whitening with waves like breakers;
for here the Rain alone rules, and its rushing deadens the retiring
thunder. The ebbing thunder! Still louder than any sea on any
shore--but a diminishing loudness, though really vast, seems quelled;
and, losing its power over the present, imagination follows it not into
the distant region where it may be raging as bad as ever. Buller?
BULLER.
What?
NORTH.
How's Seward?
SEWARD.
Much better. It was very, very kind of you, my dear sir, to carry me
in your arms, and place me in your own Swing-chair. The change of
atmosphere has revived me--but the Boys!
NORTH.
The Boys--why, they went to the Black Mount to shoot an eagle, and
see a thunder-storm, and long before this they have had their heart's
desire. There are caves, Seward, in Buachail-Mor; and one recess I
know--not a cave--but grander far than any cave--near the Fall of
Eas-a-Bhrogich--far down below the bottom of the Fall, which in its
long descent whitens the sable cliffs. Thither leads a winding access
no storm can shake. In that recess you sit rock-surrounded--but with
elbow-room for five hundred men--and all the light you have--and you
would not wish for more--comes down upon you from a cupola far nearer
heaven than that hung by Michael Angelo.
SEWARD.
The Boys are safe.
NORTH.
Or the lone House of Dalness has received them--hospitable now as
of yore--or the Huntsman's hut--or the Shepherd's shieling--that
word I love, and shall use it now--though shieling it is not, but a
comfortable cottage--and the dwellers there fear not the thunder and
the lightning--for they know they are in His hands--and talk cheerfully
in the storm.
SEWARD.
Over and gone. How breathable the atmosphere!
NORTH.
In the Forests of the Marquis and of Monzie, the horns of the
Red-deer are again in motion. In my mind's eye--Harry--I see one--an
enormous fellow--bigger than the big stag of Benmore himself--and
not to be so easily brought to perform, by particular desire, the
part of Moriens--giving himself a shake of his whole huge bulk, and
a _caive_ of his whole wide antlery--and then leading down from the
Corrie, with Platonic affection, a herd of Hinds to the greensward
islanded among brackens and heather--a spot equally adapted for feed,
play, rumination, and sleep. And the Roes are glinting through the
glades--and the Fleece are nibbling on the mountains' glittering
breast--and the Cattle are grazing, and galloping, and lowing on the
hills--and the furred folk, who are always dry, come out from crevices
for a mouthful of the fresh air; and the whole four-footed creation are
jocund--are happy!
BULLER.
What a picture!
NORTH.
And the Fowls of the Air--think ye not the Eagle, storm-driven not
unalarmed along that league-long face of cliff, is now glad at heart,
pruning the wing that shall carry him again, like a meteor, into the
subsided skies?
BULLER.
What it is to have an imagination! Worth all my Estate.
NORTH.
Let us exchange.
BULLER.
Not possible. Strictly entailed.
NORTH.
Dock.
BULLER.
Mno.
NORTH.
And the little wren flits out from the back door of her nest--too happy
she to sing--and in a minute is back again, with a worm in her mouth,
to her half-score gaping babies--the sole family in all the dell. And
the seamews, sore against their will driven seawards, are returning
by ones and twos, and thirties, and thousands, up Loch-Etive, and,
dallying with what wind is still alive above the green transparency,
drop down in successive parties of pleasure on the silver sands of
Ardmatty, or lured onwards into the still leas of Glenliver, or the
profounder quietude of the low mounds of Dalness.
SEWARD.
My fancy is contented to feed on what is before my eyes.
BULLER.
Doff, then, the Flying Dutchman.
NORTH.
And thousands of Rills, on the first day of their apparent existence,
are all happy too, and make me happy to look on them leaping and
dancing down the rocks--and the River Etive rejoicing in his strength,
from far Kingshouse all along to the end of his journey, is happiest
of them all; for the storm that has swollen has not discoloured him,
and with a pomp of clouds on his breast, he is flowing in his expanded
beauty into his own desired Loch.
SEWARD.
Gaze with me, my dear sir, on what lies before our eyes.
NORTH.
The Rainbow!
BULLER.
Four miles wide, and half a mile broad.
NORTH.
Thy own Rainbow, Cruachan--from end to end.
SEWARD.
Is it fading--or is it brightening?--no, it is not fading--and to
brighten is impossible. It is the beautiful at perfection--it is
dissolving--it is gone.
BULLER.
I asked you, sir, have the Poets well handled Thunder?
NORTH.
I was waiting for the Rainbow. Many eyes besides ours are now regarding
it--many hearts gladdened--but have you not often felt, Seward, as if
such Apparitions came at a silent call in our souls--that we might
behold them--and that the hour--or the moment--was given to us alone!
So have I felt when walking alone among the great solitudes of Nature.
SEWARD.
Lochawe is the name now for a dozen little lovely lakes! For, lo! as
the vapours are rising, they disclose, here a bay that does not seem to
be a bay, but complete in its own encircled stillness,--there a bare
grass island--yes, it is Inishail--with a shore of mists,--and there,
with its Pines and Castle, Freoch, as if it were Loch Freoch, and not
itself an Isle. Beautiful bewilderment! but of our own creating!--for
thus Fancy is fain to dally with what we love--and would seek to
estrange the familiar--as if Lochawe in its own simple grandeur were
not all-sufficient for our gaze.
BULLER.
Let me try my hand. No--no--no--I can see and feel, have an eye and a
heart for Scenery, as it is called, but am no hand at a description.
My dear, sweet, soft-breasted, fair-fronted, bright-headed, delightful
Cruachan--thy very name, how liquid with open vowels--not a consonant
among them all--no Man-Mountain Thou--Thou art the LADY OF THE LAKE.
I am in love with Thee--Thou must not think of retiring from the
earth--Thou must not take the veil--off with it--off with it from
those glorious shoulders--and come, in all Thy loveliness, to my
long--my longing arms!
SEWARD.
Is that the singing of larks?
NORTH.
No larks live here. The laverock is a Lowland bird, and loves our
brairded fields and our pastoral braes; but the Highland mountains are
not for him--he knows by instinct that they are haunted--though he
never saw the shadow nor heard the sugh of the eagle's wing.
SEWARD.
The singing from the woods seems to reach the sky. They have utterly
forgotten their fear; or think you, sir, that birds know that what
frightened them is gone, and that they sing with intenser joy because
of the fear that kept them mute?
NORTH.
The lambs are frisking--and the sheep staring placidly at the Tents. I
hear the hum of bees--returned--and returning from their straw-built
Citadels. In the primal hour of his winged life, that wavering
butterfly goes by in search of the sunshine that meets him; and happy
for this generation of ephemerals that they first took wing on the
afternoon of the day of the Great Storm.
BULLER.
How have the Poets, sir, handled thunder and lightning?
NORTH.
Sæpe ego, cum flavis messorem induceret arvis
Agricola, et fragili jam stringeret hordea culmo,
Omnia ventorum concurrere prælia vidi,
Quæ gravidam latè segetem ab radicibus imis
Sublimè expulsam eruerent: ita turbine nigro
Ferret hyems culmumque levem, stipulasque volantes.
Sæpe etiam immensum coelo venit agmen aquarum,
Et foedam glomerant tempestatem imbribus atris
Collectæ ex alto nubes: ruit arduus æther,
Et pluviâ ingenti sata læta, boumque labores
Diluit: implentur fossæ, et cava flumina crescunt
Cum sonitu, fervetque fretis spirantibus æquor.
Ipse Pater, mediâ nimborum in nocte, corusca
Fulmina molitur dextrâ: quo maxima motu
Terra tremit: fugêre feræ, et mortalia corda
Per gentes humilis stravit pavor: ille flagranti
Aut Atho, aut Rhodopen, aut alta Ceraunia telo
Dejicit: ingeminant Austri, et densissimus imber:
Nunc nemora ingenti vento, nunc littora plangunt.
BULLER.
You recite well, sir, and Latin better than English--not so
sing-songy--and as sonorous: then Virgil, to be sure, is fitter for
recitation than any Laker of you all----
NORTH.
I am not a Laker--I am a Locher.
BULLER.
Tweedledum--Tweedledee.
NORTH.
That means the Tweed and the Dee? Content. One might have thought,
Buller, that our Scottish Critics would have been puzzled to find a
fault in that strain----
BULLER.
It is faultless; but not a Scotch critic worth a curse but yourself----
NORTH.
I cannot accept a compliment at the expense of all the rest of my
countrymen. I cannot indeed.
BULLER.
Yes, you can.
NORTH.
There was Lord Kames--a man of great talents--a most ingenious man--and
with an insight----
BULLER.
I never heard of him--was he a Scotch Peer?
NORTH.
One of the Fifteen. A strained elevation--says his Lordship--I am sure
of the words, though I have not seen his Elements of Criticism for
fifty years----
BULLER.
You are a creature of a wonderful memory.
NORTH.
"A strained elevation is attended with another inconvenience, that
the author is apt to fall suddenly, as well as the reader; because
it is not a little difficult to descend sweetly and easily from such
elevation to the ordinary tone of the subject. The following is a good
illustration of that observation"--and then his Lordship quotes the
passage I recited--stopping with the words, "_densissimus imber_,"
which are thus made to conclude the description!
BULLER.
Oh! oh! oh! That's murder.
NORTH.
In the description of a storm--continues his Lordship--"to figure
Jupiter throwing down huge mountains with his thunderbolts, is
hyperbolically sublime, if I may use the expression: the tone of mind
produced by that image is so distinct from the tone produced by a thick
shower of rain, that the sudden transition _must be very unpleasant_."
BULLER.
Suggestive of a great-coat. That's the way to deal with a great Poet.
Clap your hand on the Poet's mouth in its fervour--shut up the words
in mid-volley--and then tell him that he does not know how to descend
sweetly and easily from strained elevation!
NORTH.
Nor do I agree with his Lordship that "to figure Jupiter throwing
down huge mountains with his thunderbolts is hyperbolically sublime."
As a part for a whole is a figure of speech, so is a whole for a
part. Virgil says, "dejicit;" but he did not mean to say that Jupiter
"tumbled down" Athos or Rhodope or the Acroceraunian range. He
knew--for he saw them--that there they were in all their altitude
after the storm--little if at all the worse. But Jupiter had
struck--smitten--splintered--rent--trees and rocks--midway or on the
summits--and the sight was terrific--and "dejicit" brings it before our
imagination which not for a moment pictures the whole mountain tumbling
down. But great Poets know the power of words, and on great occasions
how to use them--in this case--one--and small critics will not suffer
their own senses to instruct them in Poetry--and hence the Elements
of Criticism are not the Elements of Nature, and assist us not in
comprehending the grandeur of reported storms.
BULLER.
Lay it into them, sir.
NORTH.
Good Dr Hugh Blair again, who in his day had a high character for taste
and judgment, agreed with Henry Home that "the transition is made too
hastily--I am afraid--from the preceding sublime images, to a thick
shower and the blowing of the south wind, and shows how difficult it
frequently is to descend with grace, without seeming to fall." Nay,
even Mr Alison himself--one of the finest spirits that ever breathed
on earth, says--"I acknowledge, indeed, that the 'pluviâ ingenti sata
læta, boumque labores diluit' is defensible from the connexion of the
imagery with the subject of the poem; but the 'implentur fossæ' is both
an unnecessary and a degrading circumstance when compared with the
magnificent effects that are described in the rest of the passage." In
his quotation, too, the final grand line is inadvertently omitted--
"Nunc nemora ingenti vento, nunc litora plangunt."
BULLER.
I never read Hugh Blair--but I have read--often, and always with
increased delight--Mr Alison's exquisite Essays on the Nature and
Principles of Taste, and Lord Jeffrey's admirable exposition of the
Theory--in statement so clear, and in illustration so rich--worth all
the Æsthetics of the Germans--Schiller excepted--in one Volume of Mist.
NORTH.
Mr Alison had an original as well as a fine mind; and here he seems to
have been momentarily beguiled into mistake by unconscious deference
to the judgment of men--in his province far inferior to himself--whom
in his modesty he admired. Mark. Virgil's main purpose is to describe
the dangers--the losses to which the agriculturist is at all seasons
exposed from wind and weather. And he sets them before us in plain
and perspicuous language, not rising above the proper level of the
didactic. Yet being a Poet he puts poetry into his description from
the first and throughout. To say that the line "Et pluviâ" &c. is
"_defensible_ from the connexion of the imagery with the subject of
the Poem" is not enough. It is _necessitated_. Strike it out and you
abolish the subject. And just so with "implentur fossæ." The "fossæ"
we know in that country were numerous and wide, and, when swollen,
dangerous--and the "cava flumina" well follow instantly--for the
"fossæ" were their feeders--and we hear as well as see the rivers
rushing to the sea--and we hear too, as well as see, the sea itself.
_There the description ends._ Virgil has done his work. But his
imagination is moved, and there arises a new strain altogether. He is
done with the agriculturists. And now he deals with man at large--with
the whole human race. He is now a Boanerges--a son of thunder--and he
begins with Jove. The sublimity comes in a moment. "Ipse Pater, mediâ
nimborum in nocte"--and is sustained to the close--the last line being
great as the first--and all between accordant, and all true to nature.
Without rain and wind, what would be a thunder-storm? The "densissimus
imber" obeys the laws--and so do the ingeminanting Austri--and the
shaken woods and the stricken shores.
BULLER.
Well done, Virgil--well done, North.
NORTH.
I cannot rest, Buller--I can have no peace of mind but in a successful
defence of these Ditches. Why is a Ditch to be despised? Because it
is dug? So is a grave. Is the Ditch--wet or dry--that must be passed
by the Volunteers of the Fighting Division before the Fort can be
stormed, too low a word for a Poet to use? Alas! on such an occasion
well might he say, as he looked after the assault and saw the floating
tartans--_implentur fossæ_--the Ditch is filled!
BULLER.
Ay, Mr North, in that case the word Ditch--and the thing--would be
dignified by danger, daring, and death. But here----
NORTH.
The case is the same--with a difference, for there is all the
Danger--all the Daring--all the Death--that the incident or event
admits of--and they are not small. Think for a moment. The Rain
falls over the whole broad heart of the tilled earth--from the
face of the fields it runs into the Ditches--the first unavoidable
receptacles--these pour into the rivers--the rivers into the river
mouths--and then you are in the Sea.
BULLER.
Go on, sir, go on.
NORTH.
I am amazed--I am indignant, Buller. _Ruit arduus æther._ The steep or
high ether rushes down! as we saw it rush down a few minutes ago. What
happens?
"Et pluvià ingenti sata læta, boumque labores
Diluit!"
Alas! for the hopeful--hopeless husbandman now. What a multiplied and
magnified expression have we here for the arable lands. All the glad
seed-time vain--vain all industry of man and oxen--there you have the
true agricultural pathos--washed away--set in a swim--deluged! Well has
the Poet--in one great line--spoke the greatness of a great matter.
Sudden affliction--visible desolation--imagined dearth.
BULLER.
Don't stop, sir, you speak to the President of our Agricultural
Society--go on, sir, go on.
NORTH.
Now drop in--in its veriest place, and in two words, the _necessitated
Implentur fossæ_. No pretence--no display--no phraseology--the
nakedest, but quite effectual statement of the fact--which the
farmer--I love that word farmer--has witnessed as often as he has ever
seen the Coming--the Ditches that were dry ran full to the brim. The
homely rustic fact, strong and impressive to the husbandman, cannot
be dealt with by poetry otherwise than by setting it down in its bald
simplicity. Seek to raise--to dress--to disguise--and you make it
ridiculous. The Mantuan knew better--he says what must be said--and
goes on--
BULLER.
He goes on--so do you, sir--you both get on.
NORTH.
And now again begins Magnification,
"Et cava flumina crescunt
Cum sonitu."
The "hollow-bedded rivers" grow, swell, visibly wax mighty and
turbulent. You imagine that you stand on the bank and see the river
that had shrunk into a thread getting broad enough to fill the capacity
of its whole hollow bed. The rushing of arduous ether would not of
itself have proved sufficient. Therefore glory to the Italian Ditches
and glory to the Dumfriesshire Drains, which I have seen, in an hour,
change the white murmuring Esk into a red rolling river, with as
sweeping sway as ever attended the Arno on its way to inundate Florence.
BULLER.
Glory to the Ditches of the Vale of Arno--glory to the Drains of
Dumfriesshire. Draw breath, sir. Now go on, sir.
NORTH.
"Cum sonitu." Not as Father Thames rises--_silently_--till the flow
lapse over lateral meadow-grounds for a mile on either side. But "cum
sonitu," with a voice--with a roar--a mischievous roar--a roar of--ten
thousand Ditches.
BULLER.
And then the "flumina"--"cava" no more--will be as clear as mud.
NORTH.
You have hit it. They will be--for the Arno in flood is like liquid
mud--by no means enamouring, perhaps not even sublime--but showing
you that it comes off the fields and along the Ditches--that you see
swillings of the "sata læta boumque labores."
BULLER.
Agricultural Produce!
NORTH.
For a moment--a single moment--leave out the Ditches, and say merely,
"The rain falls over the fields--the rivers swell roaring." No picture
at all. You must have the fall over the surface--the gathering in the
narrower artificial--the delivery into the wider natural channels--the
fight of spate and surge at river mouth--
"Fervetque fretis spirantibus æquor."
The Ditches are indispensable in nature and in Virgil.
BULLER.
Put this glass of water to your lips, sir--not that I would
recommend water to a man in a fit of eloquence--but I know you are
abstinent--infatuated in your abjuration of wine. Go on--half-minute
time.
NORTH.
I swear to defend--at the pen's point--against all Comers--this
position--that the line
"Diluit: implentur fossæ, cava flumina crescunt
Cum sonitu--"
is, where it stands--and looking before and after--a perfect line;
and that to strike out "implentur fossæ" would be an outrage on
it--just equal, Buller, to my knocking out, without hesitation, your
brains--for your brains do not contribute more to the flow of our
conversation--than do the Ditches to that other Spate.
BULLER.
That will do--you may stop.
NORTH.
I ask no man's permission--I obey no man's mandate--to stop. Now Virgil
takes wing--now he blazes and soars. Now comes the power and spirit
of the Storm gathered in the Person of the Sire--of him who wields
the thunderbolt into which the Cyclops have forged storms of all
sorts--wind and rain together--"_Tres Imbri torti radios!_" &c. You
remember the magnificent mixture. And there we have VIRGILIUS _versus_
HOMERUM.
BULLER.
You may sit down, sir.
NORTH.
I did not know I had stood up. Beg pardon.
BULLER.
I am putting Swing to rights for you, Sir.
NORTH.
Methinks Jupiter is _twice_ apparent--the first time, as the President
of the Storm, which is agreeable to the dictates of reason and
necessity;--the second--to my fancy--as delighting himself in the
conscious exertion of power. What is he splintering Athos, or Rhodope,
or the Acroceraunians for? The divine use of the Fulmen is to quell
Titans, and to kill that mad fellow who was running up the ladder at
Thebes, Capaneus. Let the Great Gods find _out their enemies now_--find
out and finish them--and enemies they must have not a few among those
prostrate crowds--"per gentes humilis stravit pavor." But shattering
and shivering the mountain tops--which, as I take it, is here the
prominent affair--and, as I said, the true meaning of "dejicit"--is
mere pastime--as if Jupiter Tonans were disporting himself on a holiday.
BULLER.
Oh! sir, you have exhausted the subject--if not yourself--and
us;--I beseech you sit down;--see, Swing solicits you--and oh! sir,
you--we--all of us will find in a few minutes' silence a great relief
after all that thunder.
NORTH.
You remember Lucretius?
BULLER.
No, I don't. To you I am not ashamed to confess that I read him with
some difficulty. With ease, sir, do you?
NORTH.
I never knew a man who did but Bobus Smith; and so thoroughly was he
imbued with the spirit of the great Epicurean, that Landor--himself the
best Latinist living--equals him with Lucretius. The famous Thunder
passage is very fine, but I cannot recollect every word; and the man
who, in recitation, haggles and boggles at a great strain of a great
poet deserves death without benefit of clergy. I do remember, however,
that he does not descend from his elevation with such ease and grace as
would have satisfied Henry Home and Hugh Blair--for he has so little
notion of true dignity as to mention rain, as Virgil afterwards did, in
immediate connexion with thunder.
"Quo de concussu sequitur _gravis imber_ et uber,
Omnis utei videatur in imbrem vortier æther,
Atque ita præcipitans ad diluviem revocare."
BULLER.
What think you of the thunder in Thomson's Seasons?
NORTH.
What all the world thinks--that it is our very best British Thunder.
He gives the Gathering, the General engagement, and the Retreat. In
the Gathering there are touches and strokes that make all mankind
shudder--the foreboding--the ominous! And the terror, when it comes,
aggrandises the premonitory symptoms. "Follows the loosened aggravated
roar" is a line of power to bring the voice of thunder upon your soul
on the most peaceable day. He, too--prevailing poet--feels the grandeur
of the Rain. For instant on the words "convulsing heaven and earth,"
ensue,
"Down comes a deluge of sonorous hail,
Or prone-descending rain."
Thomson had been in the heart of thunder-storms many a time before
he left Scotland; and what always impresses me is the want of
method--the confusion, I might almost say--in his description.
Nothing contradictory in the proceedings of the storm; they all go on
obediently to what we know of Nature's laws. But the effects of their
agency on man and nature are given--not according to any scheme--but
as they happen to come before the Poet's imagination, as they happened
in reality. The pine is struck first--then the cattle and the sheep
below--and then the castled cliff--and then the
"Gloomy woods
Start at the flash, and from their deep recess
Wide-flaming out, their trembling inmates shake."
No regular ascending--or descending scale here; but wherever
the lightning chooses to go, there it goes--the blind agent of
indiscriminating destruction.
BULLER.
Capricious Zig-zag.
NORTH.
Jemmy was overmuch given to mouthing in the _Seasons_; and in this
description--matchless though it be--he sometimes out-mouths the
big-mouthed thunder at his own bombast. Perhaps that is inevitable--you
must, in confabulating with that Meteor, either imitate him, to keep
him and yourself in countenance, or be, if not mute as a mouse, as
thin-piped as a fly. In youth I used to go sounding to myself among the
mountains the concluding lines of the Retreat.
"Amid Carnarvon's mountains rages loud
The repercussive roar; with mighty crush,
Into the flashing deep, from the rude rocks
Of Penmanmaur heap'd hideous to the sky,
Tumble the smitten cliffs, and Snowdon's peak,
Dissolving, instant yields his wintry load:
Far seen, the heights of heathy Cheviot blaze,
And Thule bellows through her utmost isles."
Are they good--or are they bad? I fear--not good. But I am dubious. The
previous picture has been of one locality--a wide one--but within the
visible horizon--enlarged somewhat by the imagination, which, as the
schoolmen said, inflows into every act of the senses--and powerfully,
no doubt, into the senses engaged in witnessing a thunder-storm. Many
of the effects so faithfully, and some of them so tenderly painted,
interest us by their picturesque particularity.
"Here the soft flocks, with that same harmless look
They wore alive, and ruminating still
In fancy's eye; and there the frowning bull,
And ox half-raised."
We are here in a confined world--close to us and near; and our
sympathies with its inhabitants--human or brute--comprehend the
very attitudes or postures in which the lightning found and left
them; but the final verses waft us away from all that terror and
pity--the geographical takes place of the pathetic--a visionary
panorama of material objects supersedes the heart-throbbing region of
the spiritual--for a mournful song instinct with the humanities, an
ambitious bravura displaying the power and pride of the musician, now
thinking not at all of us, and following the thunder only as affording
him an opportunity for the display of his own art.
BULLER.
Are they good--or are they bad? I am dubious.
NORTH.
Thunder-storms travel fast and far--but here they seem simultaneous;
Thule is more vociferous than the whole of Wales together--yet perhaps
the sound itself of the verses is the loudest of all--and we cease to
hear the thunder in the din that describes it.
BULLER.
Severe--but just.
NORTH.
Ha! Thou comest in such a questionable shape--
ENTRANT.
That I will speak to thee. How do you do, my dear sir? God bless you,
how do you do?
NORTH.
Art thou a spirit of health or goblin damned?
ENTRANT.
A spirit of health.
NORTH.
It is--it is the voice of TALBOYS. Don't move an inch. Stand still for
ten seconds--on the very same site, that I may have one steady look at
you, to make assurance doubly sure--and then let us meet each other
half-way in a Cornish hug.
TALBOYS.
Are we going to wrestle already, Mr North?
NORTH.
Stand still ten seconds more. He _is_ He--You _are_ You--gentlemen--H.
G. Talboys--Seward, my crutch--Buller, your arm--
TALBOYS.
Wonderful feat of agility! Feet up to the ceiling--
NORTH.
Don't say ceiling--
TALBOYS.
Why not? ceiling--coelum. Feet up to heaven.
NORTH.
An involuntary feat--the fault of Swing--sole fault--but I always
forget it when agitated--
BULLER.
Some time or other, sir, you will fly backwards and fracture your skull.
NORTH.
There, we have recovered our equilibrium--now we are in grips, don't
fear a fall--I hope you are not displeased with your reception.
TALBOYS.
I wrote last night, sir, to say I was coming--but there being no
speedier conveyance--I put the letter in my pocket, and there it is--
NORTH.
(_On reading_ "_Dies Boreales._--No. 1.")
A friend returned! spring bursting forth again!
The song of other years! which, when we roam,
Brings up all sweet and common things of home,
And sinks into the thirsty heart like rain!
Such the strong influence of the thrilling strain
By human love made sad and musical,
Yet full of high philosophy withal,
Poured from thy wizard harp o'er land and main!
A thousand hearts will waken at its call,
And breathe the prayer they breathed in earlier youth,--
May o'er thy brow no envious shadow fall!
Blaze in thine eye the eloquence of truth!
Thy righteous wrath the soul of guilt appal,
As lion's streaming hair or dragon's fiery tooth!
TALBOYS.
I blush to think I have given you the wrong paper.
NORTH.
It is the right one. But may I ask what you have on your head?
TALBOYS.
A hat. At least it was so an hour ago.
NORTH.
It never will be a hat again.
TALBOYS.
A patent hat--a waterproof hat--it was swimming, when I purchased it
yesterday, in a pail--warranted against Lammas floods--
NORTH.
And in an hour it has come to this! Why, it has no more shape than a
coal-heaver's.
TALBOYS.
Oh! then it can be little the worse. For that is its natural artificial
shape. It is constructed on that principle--and the patentee prides
himself on its affording equal protection to head, shoulders, and
back--helmet at once and shield.
NORTH.
But you must immediately put on dry clothes--
TALBOYS.
The clothes I have on are as dry as if they had been taking
horse-exercise all morning before a laundry-fire. I am waterproof all
over--and I had need to be so--for between Inverary and Cladich there
was much moisture in the atmosphere.
NORTH.
Do--do--go and put on dry clothes. Why the spot you stand on is
absolutely swimming--
TALBOYS.
My Sporting-jacket, sir, is a new invention--an invention of my own--to
the sight silk--to the feel feathers--and of feathers is the texture---
but that is a secret, don't blab it--and to rain I am impervious as a
plover.
NORTH.
Do--do--go and put on dry clothes.
TALBOYS.
Intended to have been here last night--left Glasgow yesterday
morning--and had a most delightful forenoon of it in the Steamer to
Tarbert. Loch Lomond fairly outshone herself--never before had I
felt the full force of the words--"Fortunate Isles." The Bens were
magnificent. At Tarbert--just as I was disembarking--who should be
embarking but our friends Outram, M'Culloch, Macnee----
NORTH.
And why are they not here?
TALBOYS.
And I was induced--I could not resist them--to take a trip on to
Inverarnan. We returned to Tarbert and had a glorious afternoon
till two this morning--thought I might lie down for an hour or
two--but, after undressing, it occurred to me that it was advisable
to redress--and be off instanter--so, wheeling round the head of Loch
Long--never beheld the bay so lovely--I glided up the gentle slope of
Glencroe and sat down on "Rest and be thankful"--to hold a minute's
colloquy with a hawk--or some sort of eagle or another, who seemed to
think nobody at that hour had a right to be there but himself--covered
him to a nicety with my rod--and had it been a gun, he was a dead
bird. Down the other--that is, this side of the glen, which, so far
from being precipitous, is known to be a descent but by the pretty
little cataracts playing at leap-frog--from your description I knew
that must be Loch Fine--and that St Catherine's. Shall I drop down
and signalise the Inverary Steamer? I have not time--so through the
woods of Ardkinglass--surely the most beautiful in this world--to
Cairndow. Looked at my watch--had forgot to wind her up--set her by
the sun--and on nearing the inn door an unaccountable impulse landed
me in the parlour to the right. Breakfast on the table for somebody
up stairs--whom nobody--so the girl said--could awaken--ate it--and
the ten miles were but one to that celebrated Circuit Town. Saluted
Dun-nu-quech for your sake--and the Castle for the Duke's--and could
have lingered all June among those gorgeous groves.
NORTH.
Do--do--go and put on dry clothes.
TALBOYS.
Hitherto it had been cool--shady--breezy--the very day for such a
saunter--when all at once it was an oven. I had occasion to note that
fine line of the Poet's--"Where not a lime-leaf moves," as I passed
under a tree of that species, with an umbrage some hundred feet in
circumference, and a presentiment of what was coming whispered "Stop
here"--but the Fates tempted me on--and if I am rather wet, sir, there
is some excuse for it--for there was thunder and lightning, and a great
tempest.
NORTH.
Not to-day? Here all has been hush.
TALBOYS.
It came at once from all points of the compass--and they all met--all
the storms--every mother's son of them--at a central point--where I
happened to be. Of course, no house. Look for a house on an emergency,
and if once in a million times you see one--the door is locked, and the
people gone to Australia.
NORTH.
I insist on you putting on dry clothes. Don't try my temper.
TALBOYS.
By-and-by I began to have my suspicions that I had been distracted
from the road--and was in the Channel of the Airey. But on looking
down I saw the Airey in his own channel--almost as drumly as the
mire-burn--vulgarly called road--I was plashing up. Altogether the
scene was most animating--and in a moment of intense exhilaration--not
to weather-fend, but in defiance--I unfurled my Umbrella.
NORTH.
What, a Plover with a Parapluie?
TALBOYS.
I use it, sir, but as a Parasol. Never but on this one occasion had it
affronted rain.
NORTH.
The same we sat under, that dog-day, at Dunoon?
TALBOYS.
The same. Whew! Up into the sky like the incarnation of a whirlwind! No
turning outside in--too strong-ribbed for inversion--before the wind he
flew--like a creature of the element--and gracefully accomplished the
descent on an eminence about a mile off.
NORTH.
Near Orain-imali-chauan-mala-chuilish?
TALBOYS.
I eyed him where he lay--not without anger. It had manifestly been a
wilful act--he had torn himself from my grasp--and now he kept looking
at me--at safe distance as he thought--like a wild animal suddenly
undomesticated--and escaped into his native liberty. If he had sailed
before the wind--why might not I? No need to _stalk_ him--so I went at
him right in front--but such another flounder! Then, sir, I first knew
fatigue.
NORTH.
"So eagerly THE FIEND
O'er bog, or steep, through strait, rough, dense, or rare,
With head, hands, wings, or feet pursues his way,
And swims, or sinks, or wades, or creeps, or flies."
TALBOYS.
Finally I reached him--closed on him--when Eolus, or Eurus, or Notus,
or Favonius--for all the heathen wind-gods were abroad--inflated
him, and away he flew--rustling like a dragon-fly--and zig-zagging
all fiery-green in the gloom--sat down--as composedly as you would
yourself, sir--on a knoll, in another region--engirdled with young
birch-groves--as beautiful a resting-place, I must acknowledge as,
after a lyrical flight, could have been selected for repose by Mr
Wordsworth.
NORTH.
I know it--Arash-alaba-chalin-ora-begota-la-chona-hurie. Archy will go
for it in the evening--all safe. But do go and put on dry clothes. What
now, Billy?
BILLY BALMER.
Here are Mr Talboys' trunk, sir.
NORTH.
Who brought it?
BILLY.
Nea, Maister--I dan't kna'--I s'pose Carrier. I ken't reet weell--ance
at Windermere-watter.
NORTH.
Swiss Giantess--Billy.
BILLY.
Ay--ay--sir.
NORTH.
You will find the Swiss Giantess as complete a dormitory as man can
desire, Talboys. I reserve it for myself, in event of rheumatism.
Though lined with velvet, it is always cool--ventilated on a new
principle--of which I took merely a hint from the Punka. My cot hangs
in what used to be the Exhibition-room--and her Retreat is now a
commodious Dressing-room. Billy, show Mr Talboys to the Swiss Giantess.
BILLY.
Ay--ay, sir. This way, Mr Talboy--this way, sir.
TALBOYS.
What is your dinner-hour, Mr North?
NORTH.
Sharp seven--seven sharp.
TALBOYS.
And now 'tis but half-past two. Four hours for work. The Cladich--or
whatever you call him--is rumbling disorderly in the wood; and
I noted, as I crossed the bridge, that he was proud as a piper
of being in Spate--but he looks more rational down in yonder
meadows--and----HEAVEN HAVE MERCY ON ME! THERE'S LOCH AWE!!
NORTH.
I thought it queer that you never looked at it.
TALBOYS.
Looked at it? How could I look at it? I don't believe it was there.
If it was--from the hill-top I had eyes but for the Camp--the Tents
and the Trees--and "Thee the spirit of them all!" Let me have another
eye-full--another soul-full of the Loch. But 'twill never do to be
losing time in this way. Where's my creel--where's my creel?
NORTH.
On your shoulders--
TALBOYS.
And my Book? Lost--lost--lost! Not in any one of all my pockets. I
shall go mad.
NORTH.
Not far to go. Why your Book's in your hand.
TALBOYS.
At eight?
NORTH.
Seven. Archy, follow him--In that state of excitement he will be
walking with his spectacles on over some precipice. Keep your eye on
him, Archy--
ARCHY.
I can pretend to be carrying the landing-net, sir.
NORTH.
There's a specimen of a Scottish Lawyer, gentlemen. What do you think
of him?
BULLER.
That he is without exception the most agreeable fellow, at first sight,
I ever met in my life.
NORTH.
And so you would continue to think him, were you to see him twice
a-week for twenty years. But he is far more than that--though, as the
world goes, that is much: his mind is steel to the back-bone--his
heart is sound as his lungs--his talents great--in literature, had he
liked it, he might have excelled; but he has wisely chosen a better
Profession--and his character now stands high as a Lawyer and a Judge.
Yonder he goes! As fresh as a kitten after a score and three quarter
miles at the least.
BULLER.
Seward--let's after him. Billy--the minnows.
BILLY.
Here's the Can, sirs.
_Scene closes._
* * * * *
SCENE II.
_Interior of Deeside._--TIME--_Seven_ P.M.
NORTH--TALBOYS--BULLER--SEWARD.
NORTH.
Seward, face Buller. Talboys, face North. Fall too, gentlemen; to-day
we dispense with regular service. Each man has his own distinct dinner
before him, or in the immediate vicinity--soup, fish, flesh, fowl--and
with all necessary accompaniments and sequences. How do you like the
arrangement of the table, Talboys?
TALBOYS.
The principle shows a profound knowledge of human nature, sir. In
theory, self-love and social are the same--but in practice, self-love
looks to your own plate--social to your neighbours. By this felicitous
multiplication of dinners--this One in Four--this Four in One--the
harmony of the moral system is preserved--and all works together for
the general good. Looked at artistically, we have here what the Germans
and others say is essential to the beautiful and the sublime--Unity.
NORTH.
I believe the Four Dinners--if weighed separately--would be found not
to differ by a pound. This man's fish might prove in the scale a few
ounces heavier than that man's--but in such case, his fowl would be
found just so many ounces lighter. And so on. The Puddings are cast in
the same mould--and things equal to the same thing, are equal to one
another.
TALBOYS.
The weight of each repast?
NORTH.
Calculated at twenty-five pounds.
TALBOYS.
Grand total, one hundred. The golden mean.
NORTH.
From these general views, to descend to particulars. Soup (turtle) two
pounds--Hotch, ditto--Fish (Trout) two pounds--Flesh, (Jigot--black
face five-year-old,) six pounds--Fowl (Howtowdie boiled) five
pounds--Duck, (wild) three pounds--Tart (gooseberry) one pound--Pud
(Variorum Edition) two pounds.
BULLER.
That is but twenty-three, sir! I have taken down the gentleman's words.
NORTH.
Polite--and grateful. But you have omitted sauces and creams, breads
and cheeses. Did you ever know me incorrect in my figures, in any
affirmation or denial, private or public?
BULLER.
Never. Beg pardon.
NORTH.
Now that the soups and fishes seem disposed of, I boldly ask you, one
and all, gentlemen, if you ever beheld Four more tempting Jigots?
TALBOYS.
I am still at my Fish. No fish so sweet as of one's own catching--so
I have the advantage of you all. This one here--the one I am eating
at this blessed moment--I killed in what the man with the Landing-net
called the Birk Pool. I know him by his peculiar physiognomy--an odd
cast in his eye--which has not left him on the gridiron. That Trout of
my killing on your plate, Mr Seward, made the fatal plunge at the tail
of the stream so overhung with Alders that you can take it successfully
only by the tail--and I know him by his colour, almost as silvery as
a whitling. Yours, Mr Buller, was the third I killed--just where the
river--for a river he is to-day, whatever he may be to-morrow--goes
whirling into the Loch--and I can swear to him from his leopard spots.
Illustrious sir, of him whom you have now disposed of--the finest of
the Four--I remember saying inwardly, as with difficulty I encreeled
him--for his shoulders were like a hog's--this for the King.
NORTH.
Your perfect Pounder, Talboys, is the beau-ideal of a Scottish Trout.
How he cuts up! If much heavier--you are frustrated in your attempts
to eat him thoroughly--have to search--probably in vain--for what
in a perfect Pounder lies patent to the day--he is to back-bone
comeatable--from gill to fork, Seward, you are an artist. Good creel?
SEWARD.
I gave Mr Talboys the first of the water, and followed him--a mere
caprice--with the Archimedean Minnow. I had a run--but just as the
monster opened his jaws to absorb--he suddenly eschewed the scentless
phenomenon, and with a sullen plunge, sunk into the deep.
BULLER.
I tried the natural minnow after Seward--but I wished Archimedes at
Syracuse--for the Screw had spread a panic--and in a panic the scaly
people lose all power of discrimination, and fear to touch a minnow,
lest it turn up a bit of tin or some other precious metal.
NORTH.
I have often been lost in conjecturing how you always manage to fill
your creel, Talboys; for the truth is--and it must be spoken--you are
no angler.
TALBOYS.
I can afford to smile! I was no angler, sir, ten years ago--now
I am. But how did I become one? By attending you, sir--for seven
seasons--along the Tweed and the Yarrow, the Clyde and the Daer, the
Tay and the Tummel, the Don and the Dee--and treasuring up lessons from
the Great Master of the Art.
NORTH.
You surprise me! Why, you never put a single question to me about
the art--always declined taking rod in hand--seemed reading some
book or other, held close to your eyes--or lying on banks a-dose
or poetising--or facetious with the Old Man--or with the Old Man
serious--and sometimes more than serious, as, sauntering along our
winding way, we conversed of man, of nature, and of human life.
TALBOYS.
I never lost a single word you said, sir, during those days, breathing
in every sense "vernal delight and joy," yet all the while I was taking
lessons in the art. The flexure of your shoulder--the sweep of your
arm--the twist of your wrist--your Delivery, and your Recover--that
union of grace and power--the utmost delicacy, with the most perfect
precision--All these qualities of a heaven-born Angler, by which you
might be known from all other men on the banks of the Whittadder on a
Fast-day----
NORTH.
I never angled on a Fast-day.
TALBOYS.
A _lapsus linguæ_--From a hundred anglers on the Daer, on the Queen's
Birthday----
NORTH.
My dear Friend, you ex----
TALBOYS.
All those qualities of a heaven-born Angler I learned first to
admire--then to understand--and then to imitate. For three years I
practised on the carpet--for three I essayed on a pond--for three I
strove by the running waters--and still the Image of Christopher North
was before me--till emboldened by conscious acquisition and constant
success, I came forth and took my place among the Anglers of my country.
BULLER.
To-day I saw you fast in a tree.
TALBOYS.
You mean my Fly.
BULLER.
First your Fly, and then, I think, yourself.
TALBOYS.
I have seen _Il Maestro_ himself in Timber, and in brushwood too. From
him I learned to disentangle knots, intricate and perplexed far beyond
the Gordian--"with frizzled hair implicit"--round twig, branch, or
bole. Not more than half-a-dozen times of the forty that I may have
been fast aloft--I speak mainly of my noviciate--have I had to effect
liberation by sacrifice.
SEWARD.
Pardon me, Mr Talboys, for hinting that you smacked off your tail-fly
to-day--I knew it by the sound.
TALBOYS.
The sound! No trusting to an uncertain sound, Mr Seward. Oh! I did so
once--but intentionally--the hook had lost the barb--not a fish would
it hold--so I whipped it off, and on with a Professor.
BULLER.
You lost one good fish in rather an awkward manner, Mr Talboys.
TALBOYS.
I did--that metal minnow of yours came with a splash within an inch of
his nose--and no wonder he broke me--nay, I believe it was the minnow
that broke me--and yet you can speak of _my_ losing a good fish in
rather an awkward manner!
NORTH.
It is melancholy to think that I have taught young Scotland to excel
myself in all the Arts that adorn and dignify life. Till I rose,
Scotland was a barbarous country--
TALBOYS.
Do say, my dear sir, semi-civilised.
NORTH.
Now it heads the Nations--and I may set.
TALBOYS.
And why should that be a melancholy thought, sir?
NORTH.
Oh, Talboys--National Ingratitude! They are fast forgetting the man
who made them what they are--in a few fleeting centuries the name of
Christopher North will be in oblivion! Would you believe it possible,
gentlemen, that even now, there are Scotsmen who never heard of the Fly
that bears the name of me, its Inventor--Killing Kit!
BULLER.
In Cornwall it is a household word.
SEWARD.
And in all the Devons.
BULLER.
Men in Scotland who never heard the name of North!
NORTH.
Christopher North--who is he? Who do you mean by the Man of the
Crutch?--The Knight of the Knout? Better never to have been born than
thus to be virtually dead.
SEWARD.
Sir, be comforted--you are under a delusion--Britain is ringing with
your name.
NORTH.
Not that I care for noisy fame--but I do dearly love the still.
TALBOYS.
And you have it, sir--enjoy it and be thankful.
NORTH.
But it may be too still.
TALBOYS.
My dear sir, what would you have?
NORTH.
I taught you, Talboys, to play Chess--and now you trumpet Staunton.
TALBOYS.
Chess--where's the board? Let us have a game.
NORTH.
Drafts--and you quote Anderson and the Shepherd Laddie.
TALBOYS.
Mr North, why so querulous?
NORTH.
Where was the Art of Criticism? Where Prose? Young Scotland owes
all her Composition to me--buries me in the earth--and then claims
inspiration from heaven. "How sharper than a Serpent's tooth it is to
have a thankless Child!" Peter--Peterkin--Pym--Stretch--where are your
lazinesses--clear decks.
"Away with Melancholy--
Nor doleful changes ring
On Life and human Folly,
But merrily, merrily sing--fal la!"
BULLER.
What a sweet pipe! A single snatch of an old song from you, sir--
NORTH.
Why are you glowering at me, Talboys?
TALBOYS.
It has come into my head, I know not how, to ask you a question.
NORTH.
Let it be an easy one--for I am languid.
TALBOYS.
Pray, sir, what is the precise signification of the word "Classical?"
NORTH.
My dear Talboys, you seem to think that I have the power of answering,
off-hand, any and every question a first-rate fellow chooses to ask me.
Classical--classical! Why, I should say, in the first place--One and
one other Mighty People--Those, the Kings of Thought--These, the Kings
of the Earth.
TALBOYS.
The Greeks--and Romans.
NORTH.
In the second place--
TALBOYS.
Attend--do attend, gentlemen. And I hope I am not too much presuming on
our not ancient friendship--for I feel that a few hours on Lochawe-side
give the privilege of years--in suggesting that you will have the
goodness to use the metal nut-crackers; they are more euphonious than
ivory with walnuts.
NORTH.
In the second place--let me consider--Mr Talboys--I should say--in the
second place--yes, I have it--a Character of Art expressing itself by
words: a mode--a mode of Poetry and Eloquence--FITNESS AND BEAUTY.
TALBOYS.
Thank you, sir. Fitness and Beauty. Anything more?
NORTH.
Much more. We think of the Greeks and Romans, sir, as those in whom the
Human Mind reached Superhuman Power.
TALBOYS.
Superhuman?
NORTH.
We think so--comparing ourselves with them, we cannot help it. In the
Hellenic Wit, we suppose Genius and Taste met at their height--the
Inspiration Omnipotent--the Instinct unerring! The creations of Greek
Poetry!--~Poiêsis~--a Making! There the soul seems to be free from
its chains--happily self-lawed. "The Earth we pace" is there peopled
with divine Forms. Sculpture was the human Form glorified--deified.
And as in Marble, so in Song. Something common--terrestrial--adheres
to _our_ being, and weighs _us_ down. They--the Hellenes--appear to us
to have _really_ walked--as we walk in our visions of exaltation--as
if the Graces and the Muses held sway over daily and hourly existence,
and not alone over work of Art and solemn occasion. No moral stain or
imperfection can hinder them from appearing to us as the Light of human
kind. Singular, that in Greece we reconcile ourselves to Heathenism.
TALBOYS.
It may be that we are all Heathens at heart.
NORTH.
The enthusiast adores Greece--not knowing that Greece monarchies over
him, only because it is a miraculous mirror that resplendently and more
beautifully reflects--himself--
"Divisque videbit
Permixtos Heroas, et IPSE, videbitur illis."
SEWARD.
Very fine.
NORTH.
O life of old, and long, long ago! In the meek, solemn, soul-stilling
hush of Academic Bowers!
SEWARD.
The Isis!
NORTH.
My youth returns. Come, spirits of the world that has been! Throw
open the valvules of these your shrines, in which you stand around
me, niched side by side, in visible presence, in this cathedral-like
Library! I read Historian, Poet, Orator, Voyager--a life that slid
silently away in shades, or that bounded like a bark over the billows.
I lift up the curtain of all ages--I stand under all skies--on the
Capitol--on the Acropolis. Like that magician whose spirit, with a
magical word, could leave his own bosom to inhabit another, I take upon
myself every mode of existence. I read Thucydides, and I would be a
Historian--Demosthenes, and I would be an Orator--Homer, and I dread to
believe myself called to be, in some shape or other, a servant of the
Muse. Heroes and Hermits of Thought--Seers of the Invisible--Prophets
of the Ineffable--Hierophants of profitable mysteries--Oracles of the
Nations--Luminaries of that spiritual Heaven! I bid ye, hail!
BULLER.
The fit is on him--he has not the slightest idea that he is in Deeside.
NORTH.
Ay--from the beginning a part of the race have separated themselves
from the dusty, and the dust-devoured, turmoil of Action to
Contemplation. Have thought--known--worshipped! And such knowledge
Books keep. Books now crumbling like Towers and Pyramids--now
outlasting them! Books that, from age to age, and all the sections of
mankind helping, build up the pile of Knowledge--a trophied Citadel.
He who can read Books as they should be read, peruses the operation of
the Creator in his conscious, and in his unconscious Works, which yet
we call upon to join, as if conscious, in our worship. Yet why--oh! why
all this pains to attain that, through the labour of ages, which in
the dewy, sunny prime of morn, one thrill of transport gives to me and
to the Lark alike, summoning, lifting both heavenwards? Ah! perchance
because the dewy, sunny prime does not last through the day! Because
light poured into the eyes, and sweet breath inhaled, are not the whole
of man's life here below--and because there is an Hereafter!
SEWARD.
I know where he is, Buller. He called it well a Cathedral-like Library.
NORTH.
The breath of departed years floats here for my respiration. The pure
air of heaven flows round about, but enters not. The sunbeams glide
in, bedimmed as if in some haunt half-separated from Life, yet on our
side of Death. Recess, hardly accessible--profound--of which I, the
sole inmate, held under an uncomprehended restraint, breathe, move, and
follow my own way and wise, apart from human mortals! Ye! tall, thick
Volumes, that are each a treasure-house of austere or blazing thoughts,
which of you shall I touch with sensitive fingers, of which violate the
calmly austere repose? I dread what I desire. You may disturb--you may
destroy me! Knowledge _pulsates_ in me, as I receive it, communing with
myself on my unquiet or tearful pillow--or as it visits me, brought on
the streaming moonlight, or from the fields afire with noon-splendour,
or looking at me from human eyes, and stirring round and around me
in the tumult of men--Your knowledge comes in a holy stillness and
chillness, as if spelt off tombstones.
SEWARD.
Magdalen College Library, I do believe. Mr North--Mr
North--awake--awake--here we are all in Deeside.
NORTH.
Ay--ay--you say well, Seward. "Look at the studies of the Great
Scholar, and see from how many quarters of the mind impulses may mingle
to compose the motives that bear him on with indefatigable strength in
his laborious career."
SEWARD.
These were not my very words, sir--
NORTH.
Ay, Seward, you say well. From how many indeed! First among the prime,
that peculiar aptitude and faculty, which may be called--a Taste and
Genius for--Words.
BULLER.
I rather failed there in the Schools.
NORTH.
Yet you were in the First Class. There is implied in it, Seward,
a readiness of logical discrimination in the Understanding, which
apprehends the propriety of Words.
BULLER.
I got up my Logic passably and a little more.
NORTH.
For, Seward, the Thoughts, the Notions themselves--must be
distinctly dissevered in the mind, which shall exactly apply to each
Thought--Notion--its appropriate sign, its own Word.
BULLER.
You might as well have said "Buller"--for I beat Seward in my Logic.
NORTH.
But even to this task, Seward, of rightly distinguishing the meaning of
Words, more than a mere precision of thinking--more than a clearness
and strictness of the intellectual action is requisite.
BULLER.
And in Classics we were equal.
NORTH.
You will be convinced of this, Buller, if you recollect what Words
express. The mind itself. For all its affections and sensibilities,
Talboys, furnish a whole host of meanings, which must have names
in Language. For mankind do not rest from enriching and refining
their languages, until they have made them capable of giving the
representation of their whole Spirit.
TALBOYS.
The pupil of language, therefore, sir--pardon my presumption--before he
can recognise the appropriation of the Sign, must recognise the Thing
signified?
NORTH.
And if the Thing signified, Talboys, by the Word, be some profound,
solemn, and moral affection--or if it be some wild, fanciful
impression--or if it be some delicate shade or tinge of a tender
sensibility--can anything be more evident than that the Scholar must
have experienced in himself the solemn, or the wild, or the tenderly
delicate feeling before he is in the condition of affixing the right
and true sense to the Word that expresses it?
TALBOYS.
I should think so, sir.
SEWARD.
The Words of Man paint the spirit of Man. The Words of a People
depicture the Spirit of a People.
NORTH.
Well said, Seward. And, therefore, the Understanding that is to possess
the Words of a language, in the Spirit in which they were or are
spoken and written, must, by self-experience and sympathy, be able to
converse, and have conversed, with the Spirit of the People, now and of
old.
BULLER.
And yet what coarse fellows hold up their dunderheads as Scholars,
forsooth, in these our days!
NORTH.
Hence it is an impossibility that a low and hard moral nature should
furnish a high and fine Scholar. The intellectual endowments must
be supported and made available by the concurrence of the sensitive
nature--of the moral and the imaginative sensibilities.
BULLER.
What moral and imaginative sensibilities have they--the blear-eyed--the
purblind--the pompous and the pedantic! But we have some true
scholars--for example----
NORTH.
No names, Buller. Yes, Seward, the knowledge of Words is the Gate of
Scholarship. Therefore I lay down upon the threshold of the Scholar's
Studies this first condition of his high and worthy success, that he
will not pluck the loftiest palm by means of acute, quick, clear,
penetrating, sagacious, intellectual faculties alone--let him not hope
it: that he requires to the highest renown also a capacious, profound,
and tender soul.
SEWARD.
Ay, sir, and I say so in all humility, this at the gateway, and upon
the threshold. How much more when he _reads_.
NORTH.
Ay, Seward, you laid the emphasis well there--_reads_.
SEWARD.
When the written Volumes of Mind from different and distant ages of
the world, from its different and distant climates, are successively
unrolled before his insatiable sight and his insatiable soul!
BULLER.
Take all things in moderation.
NORTH.
No--not the sacred hunger and thirst of the soul.
BULLER.
Greed--give--give.
NORTH.
From what unknown recesses, from what unlocked fountains in the
depth of his own being, shall he bring into the light of day the
thoughts by means of which he shall understand Homer, Pindar,
Æschylus, Demosthenes, Plato, Aristotle--DISCOURSING! Shall understand
them, as the younger did the elder--the contemporaries did the
contemporaries--as each sublime spirit understood--himself?
BULLER.
Did each sublime spirit always understand himself?
TALBOYS.
Urge that, Mr Buller.
NORTH.
So--and so only--to read, is to be a Scholar.
BULLER.
Then I am none.
NORTH.
I did not say you were.
BULLER.
Thank you. What do you think of that, Mr Talboys? Address Seward, sir.
NORTH.
I address you all three. Is the student smitten with the sacred love of
Song? Is he sensible to the profound allurement of philosophic truth?
Does he yearn to acquaint himself with the fates and fortunes of his
kind? All these several desires are so many several inducements of
learned study.
BULLER.
I understand that.
TALBOYS.
Ditto.
NORTH.
And another inducement to such study is--an ear sensible to the Beauty
of the Music of Words--and the metaphysical faculty of unravelling the
causal process which the human mind followed in imparting to a Word,
originally the sign of one Thought only, the power to signify a cognate
second Thought, which shall displace the first possessor and exponent,
usurp the throne, and rule for ever over an extended empire in the
minds, or the hearts, or the souls of men.
BULLER.
Let him have his swing, Mr Talboys.
TALBOYS.
He has it in that chair.
NORTH.
A Taste and a Genius for Words! An ear for the beautiful music of
Words! A happy justness in the perception of their strict proprieties!
A fine skill in apprehending the secret relations of Thought with
Thought--relations along which the mind moves with creative power, to
find out for its own use, and for the use of all minds to come, some
hitherto uncreated expression of an idea--an image--a sentiment--a
passion! These dispositions, and these faculties of the Scholar in
another Mind falling in with other faculties of genius, produce a
student of a different name--THE POET.
BULLER.
Oh! my dear dear sir, of Poetry we surely had enough--I don't say more
than enough--a few days ago, sir.
NORTH.
Who is the Poet?
BULLER.
I beseech you let the Poet alone for this evening.
NORTH.
Well--I will. I remember the time, Seward, when there was a great
clamour for a Standard of Taste. A definite measure of the indefinite!
TALBOYS.
Which is impossible.
NORTH.
And there is a great clamour for a Standard of Morals. A definite
measure of the indefinite!
TALBOYS.
Which is impossible.
NORTH.
Why, gentlemen, the Faculty of Beauty _lives_; and in finite beings,
which we are, Life changes incessantly. The Faculty of Moral Perception
_lives_--and thereby it too changes for better and for worse. This
is the Divine Law--at once encouraging and fearful--that Obedience
brightens the moral eyesight--Sin darkens. Let all men know this,
and keep it in mind always--that a single narrowest, simplest Duty,
steadily practised day after day, does more to support, and may do more
to enlighten the soul of the Doer, than a course of Moral Philosophy
taught by a tongue which a soul compounded of Bacon, Spenser,
Shakspeare, Homer, Demosthenes, and Burke--to say nothing of Socrates,
and Plato, and Aristotle, should inspire.
BULLER.
You put it strongly, sir.
TALBOYS.
Undeniable doctrine.
NORTH.
Gentlemen, you will often find this question--"Is there a Standard of
Taste?" inextricably confused with the question "Is there a true and a
false Taste?" He who denies the one seems to deny the other. In like
manner, "Is there a Right and Wrong?" And "is there accessible to us
an infallible measure of Right and Wrong" are two questions entirely
distinct, but often confused--for Logic fled the earth with Astræa.
TALBOYS.
She did.
NORTH.
Talboys, you understand well enough the sense and culture of the
Beautiful?
TALBOYS.
Something of it perhaps I do.
NORTH.
To feel--to love--to be swallowed up in the spirit and works of the
Beautiful--in verse and in the visible Universe! That is a life--an
enthusiasm--a worship. You find those who would if they could, and who
pretend they can, attain the same end at less cost. They have taken
lessons, and they will have their formalities go valid against the
intuitions of the dedicated soul.
TALBOYS.
But the lessons perish--the dedicated soul is a Power in all
emergencies and extremities.
NORTH.
There are Pharisees of Beauty--and Pharisees of Morality.
SEWARD.
At this day spiritual Christians lament that nine-tenths of Christians
Judaise.
NORTH.
Nor without good reason. The Gospel is the Standard of Christian
Morality. That is unquestionable. It is an authority without appeal,
and under which undoubtedly all matters, uncertain before, will
fall. But pray mark this--it is not a _positive standard_, in the
ordinary meaning of that word--it is not one of which our common human
understanding has only to require and to obtain the indications--which
it has only to apply and observe.
SEWARD.
I see your meaning, sir. The Gospel refers all moral intelligence to
the Light of Love within our hearts. Therefore, the very reading of the
canons, of every prescriptive line in it, must be by this light.
NORTH.
That is my meaning--but not my whole meaning, dear Seward. For take it,
as it unequivocally declares itself to be, a Revelation--not simply of
instruction, committed now and for ever to men in written human words,
and so left--but accompanied with a perpetual agency to enable Will and
Understanding to receive it; and then it will follow, I believe, that
it is at every moment intelligible and applicable in its full sense,
only by a direct and present inspiration--is it too much to say--anew
revealing itself? "They shall be taught of God."
SEWARD.
So far, then, from the Christian Morality being one of which the
Standard is applicable by every Understanding, with like result
in given cases, it is one that is different to every Christian in
proportion to his obedience?
NORTH.
Even so. I suppose that none have ever reached the full understanding
of it. It is an evergrowing illumination--a light more and more unto
the perfect day--which day I suppose cannot be of the same life, in
which we see as through a glass darkly.
TALBOYS.
May I offer an illustration? The land shall descend to the eldest
son--you shall love your neighbour as yourself. In the two codes these
are foundation-stones. But see how they differ! There is the land--here
is the eldest son--the right is clear and fast--and the case done with.
But--do to thy neighbour! Do what? and to whom?
NORTH.
All human actions, all human affections, all human thoughts are
then contained in the one Law--as the _subject_ of which it defines
the disposal. All mankind, but distributed into communities, and
individuals all differently related to me are contained in it, as the
parties in respect of whom it defines the disposal!
SEWARD.
And what is the Form? Do as thou wouldst it be done to thee!
NORTH.
Ay--my dear friend--The form resolves into a feeling. Love thy
neighbour. That is all. Is a measure given? As thyself.
SEWARD.
And is there no limitation?
NORTH.
By the whole apposition, thy love to thyself and thy neighbour are both
to be put together in subordination to, and limitation and regulation
by--thy Love to God. Love Him utterly--infinitely--with all thy mind,
all thy heart, all thy strength. This is the entire book or canon--THE
STANDARD. How wholly indefinite and formless, to the Understanding! How
full of light and form to the believing and loving Heart!
SEWARD.
The Moon is up--how calm the night after all that tempest--and how
steady the Stars! Images of enduring peace in the heart of nature--and
of man. They, too, are a Revelation.
NORTH.
They, too, are the legible Book of God. Try to conceive how different
the World must be to its rational inhabitant--with or without a Maker!
Think of it as a soulless--will-less World. In one sense, it abounds
as much with good to enjoy. But there is no good-giver. The banquet
spread, but the Lord of the Mansion away. The feast--and neither grace
nor welcome. The heaped enjoyment, without the gratitude.
SEWARD.
Yet there have been Philosophers who so misbelieved!
NORTH.
Alas! there have been--and alas! there are. And what low souls must
be theirs! The tone and temper of our feelings are determined by the
objects with which we habitually converse. If we see beautiful scenes,
they impart serenity--if sublime scenes, they elevate us. Will no
serenity, no elevation come from contemplating Him, of whose Thought
the Beautiful and the Sublime are but shadows!
SEWARD.
No sincere or elevating influence be lost out of a World out of which
He is lost?
NORTH.
_Now_ we look upon Planets and Suns, and see Intelligence ruling
them--on Seasons that succeed each other, we apprehend Design--on
plant and animal fitted to its place in the world, and furnished with
its due means of existence, and repeated for ever in its kind--and we
admire Wisdom. Oh! Atheist or Sceptic--what a difference to Us if the
marvellous Laws are here without a Lawgiver--If Design be here without
a Designer--all the Order that wisdom could mean and effect, and not
the Wisdom--if Chance, or Necessity, or Fate reigns here, and not
Mind--if this Universe is matter of Astonishment merely, and not of
adoration!
SEWARD.
We are made better, nobler, sir, by the society of the good and the
noble. Perhaps of ourselves unable to think high thoughts, and without
the bold warmth that dares generously, we catch by degrees something
of the mounting spirit, and of the ardour proper to the stronger souls
with whom we live familiarly, and become sharers and imitators of
virtues to which we could not have given birth. The devoted courage
of a leader turns his followers into heroes--the patient death of one
martyr inflames in a thousand slumbering bosoms a zeal answerable to
his own. And shall Perfect Goodness contemplated move no goodness in
us? Shall His Holiness and Purity raise in us no desire to be holy and
pure?--His infinite Love towards His creatures kindle no spark of love
in us towards our fellow-creatures!
NORTH.
God bless you, my dear Seward--but you speak well. Our
fellow-creatures! The name, the binding title, dissolves in air, if
He be not our common Creator. Take away that bond of relationship
among men, and according to circumstances they confront one another
as friends or foes--but Brothers no longer--if not children of one
celestial Father.
TALBOYS.
And if they no longer have immortal souls!
NORTH.
Oh! my friends--if this winged and swift life be all our life, what
a mournful taste have we had of possible happiness? We have, as it
were, from some dark and cold edge of a bright world, just looked in
and been plucked away again! Have we come to experience pleasure by
fits and glimpses; but intertwined with pain, burdensome labour, with
weariness, and with indifference? Have we come to try the solace and
joy of a warm, fearless, and confiding affection, to be then chilled
or blighted by bitterness, by separation, by change of heart, or by
the dread sunderer of loves--Death? Have we found the gladness and the
strength of knowledge, when some rays of truth have flashed in upon our
souls, in the midst of error and uncertainty, or amidst continuous,
necessitated, uninstructive avocations of the Understanding--and is
that all? Have we felt in fortunate hour the charm of the Beautiful,
that invests, as with a mantle, this visible Creation, or have we
found ourselves lifted above the earth by sudden apprehension of
sublimity? Have we had the consciousness of such feelings, which have
seemed to us as if they might themselves make up a life--almost an
angel's life--and were they "instant come and instant gone?" Have
we known the consolation of DOING RIGHT, in the midst of much that
we have done wrong? and was that also a corruscation of a transient
sunshine? Have we lifted up our thoughts to see Him who is Love, and
Light, and Truth, and Bliss, to be in the next instant plunged into the
darkness of annihilation? Have all these things been but flowers that
we have pulled by the side of a hard and tedious way, and that, after
gladdening us for a brief season with hue and odour, wither in our
hands, and are like ourselves--nothing?
BULLER.
I love you, sir, better and better every day.
NORTH.
We step the earth--we look abroad over it, and it seems immense--so
does the sea. What ages had men lived--and knew but a small portion.
They circumnavigate it now with a speed under which its vast bulk
shrinks. But let the astronomer lift up his glass and he learns to
believe in a total mass of matter, compared with which this great globe
itself becomes an imponderable grain of dust. And so to each of us
walking along the road of life, a year, a day, or an hour shall seem
long. As we grow older, the time shortens; but when we lift up our eyes
to look beyond this earth, our seventy years, and the few thousands of
years which have rolled over the human race, vanish into a point; for
then we are measuring Time against Eternity.
TALBOYS.
And if we can find ground for believing that this quickly-measured span
of Life is but the beginning--the dim daybreak of a Life immeasurable,
never attaining to its night--what _weight_ shall we any longer allow
to the cares, fears, toils, troubles, afflictions--which here have
sometimes bowed down our strength to the ground--a burden more than we
could bear?
NORTH.
They then all acquire a new character. That they are then felt as
transitory must do something towards lightening their load. But more is
disclosed in them; for they then appear as having an unsuspected worth
and use. If this life be but the beginning of another, then it may be
believed that the accidents and passages thereof have some bearing upon
the conditions of that other, and we learn to look on this as a state
of Probation. Let us out, and look at the sky.
THE ISLAND OF SARDINIA.[1]
The opinion of Nelson with regard to the importance of Sardinia,--that
it is "worth a hundred Maltas," is well known; and that he strongly
recommended its purchase to our government, thinking it might be
obtained for £500,000. We can scarcely believe that Nelson failed
to make an impression on the government, and conjecture rather that
it was with the King of Sardinia the precious inheritance of a
Naboth's vineyard. We do not remember to have met with a Sardinian
tourist. Travellers as we are, with our ready "Hand-Books" for the
remote corners of the earth, we seem, by a general consent, to have
cut Sardinia from the map of observable countries. "Nos numerus
sumus"--we plead guilty to this ignorance and neglect, and should have
remained unconcerned about Sardinia still, had we not, in the work of
Mr Tyndale, dipped into a few extracts from Lord Nelson's letters.
Extending our reading, we find in these three volumes so much research,
learning, historical speculation, and interesting matter, interspersed
with amusing narrative, that we think a notice in Maga of this valuable
and agreeable work may be not unacceptable.
The very circumstance that Sardinia is little known, renders it an
agreeable speculation. The _ignotum_ makes the charm. Our pleasure
is in the fabulous, the dubious, the unexplained. In the ecstacy of
ignorance the reader stands by the side of Mr Layard, watching the
exhumation of the unknown gods or demons of Nineveh. "Ignorance is
bliss,"--for the subject-matter of ignorance is fact--fact isolated--or
the broken links in time's long chain. The mind longs to fabricate,
and connect. Were it possible that other sibylline books should be
offered for sale, it would be preferable that Mr Murray should act
the part of Tarquin than publish them as "Hand-Books." In truth,
curiosity, that happy ingredient in the clay of the human mind, if so
material an expression be allowed, is fed by ignorance, but dies under
a surfeit of knowledge. Now, to apply this to our subject--Sardinia.
The island is full of monuments, as mysterious to us as the Pyramids.
There is sufficient obscurity to make a "sublime." It is happy for
the reader, who has not lost his natural propensity to wonder, that
there is so little known respecting them, and yet such grounds
for conjecture; for he may be sure that, if any documents existed
anywhere, Mr Tyndale would have discovered them, for he is the most
indefatigable of authors in exploring in all the mines of literature.
But he has to treat of things that were before literature was. The
traveller who should first discover a Stonehenge--one who, walking on
a hitherto untrodden plain, should come suddenly upon two such great
sedate sitting images in stone as look over Egyptian sands--is he not
greatly to be envied? We, who peer about our cities and villages,
raking out decayed stone and mortar for broken pieces of antique art
or memorial, as we facetiously term the remnants of a few hundred
years, and of whose "whereabouts," from the beginning, we can receive
some tolerable assurance, have but a slight glimpse of the delight
experienced by the first finder of a monument of the Pelasgi, or
even Cyclopean walls. But to make conjecture upon monuments beyond
centuries--to count by thousands of years, and make out of them a
dream that shall, like an Arabian magician, take the dreamer back to
the Flood--is a happiness enjoyed by few. We never envied traveller
more than we once did that lady who came suddenly upon the Etrurian
monument, in which there was just aperture enough to see for a moment
only a sitting figure, with its look and drapery of more than thousands
of years; who just saw it for a few seconds, preserved only in the
stillness of antiquity, and falling to dust at her very breathing. Not
so ancient the monument, but of like character the discovery of him
who, digging within the walls of his own house at Portici, came upon
marble steps that led him down and down, till he found before him,
in the obscure, a white marble equestrian statue the size of life.
If one could be _made_ a poet, these two incidents were enough. The
interior of Sardinia has been hitherto a kind of "terra incognita."
Mr Tyndale must therefore have ascended and descended its craggy or
wooded mountains, and threaded its ravines, and crossed its fertile
or desolate plains, with no common feeling of expectation; and though
the frequent "Noraghe" and "Sepolture de is Gigantes," and their
accompanying strange conical stones, were not of a character to fill
him with that amazement produced by the above-mentioned incidents,
they were sufficiently mysterious, and the attempt to reach them in
some instances sufficiently adventurous--to keep alive the mind, and
stir the imagination to the working out visions, and conjuring up the
seeming-probable existences of the past, or wilder dreams, in such
variety as reason deduced or fancy willed. On one occasion he descended
an aperture, in a domed chamber of a Noraghe, groped his way through
a subterranean passage, and came upon some finely-pulverised matter,
"about fifteen inches deep, which at first appeared to be earth, but
on scraping into it were several human bones, some broken and others
mouldering away on being touched." But here the reader unacquainted
with Sardinia, as it may be presumed very many are, may ask something
about these Noraghe, with their domed chambers, and the Sepolture.
There may be a preliminary inquiry into the origin of the inhabitants.
Various are the statements of different authors: without following
chronological order, we may readily concur in their conclusions, that
the island was peopled by Phoenician, Libyan, Tyrrhenian, Greek,
Trojan, and other colonies--unless the disquisitions of some historians
of our day would compel us to reject the Trojans, in the doubt as
to the existence of Troy itself. But many of these may have been
only partial, temporary immigrations, which found a people in prior
possession. The argument is strongly in favour of the supposition that
the Sarde nation are of Phoenician origin, and that its antiquities are
Phoenician, or of a still earlier epoch. In descending to more historic
times, we find the Carthaginians exercising influence there as early
as 700 B.C., and that the island suffered severely from the alternate
sway of the rival powers of Rome and Carthage. And here we are disposed
to rest, utterly disinclined to follow the labyrinth of cruelties
which the history of every people, nation, and language under the sun
presents.
If, at least for the present moment, a disgust of history is a
disqualification for the notice of such a work as this before us, the
reader must be referred to the book itself at once; but there are in
it so many subjects of interest, both as to customs, manners, and
some characters that shine out from the dark pages of history here
and there, that we venture on, not careful of the thread, but with a
purpose of taking it up, wherever there may be a promise of amusement.
There is little pleasure in recording how many hundreds of thousands
were put to the sword by Carthaginians, Romans, and, subsequently,
Vandals and Goths; nor the various tyrannies arising out of contests
for the possession of the island, which have been continually inflicted
upon the people by the European powers of Christian times. Mankind
never did, and it may be supposed never will, let each other alone. We
are willing to believe that peace and security, for any continuance,
is not for man on earth, and that his nature requires this universal
stirring activity of aggression and defence, for the development of
his powers--and that out of this evil comes good. Where would be
virtue without suffering? Yet we are not always in the humour to sit
out the tragedy of human life. There are moments when the present and
real troubles of our own times press too heavily on the spirits, and
we shrink from the scrutiny of past results, through a dread of a
similar future, and gladly seek relief from bitter truths in lighter
speculations. In such a humour we confess a dislike to biography, in
which kind of reading the future does cast its dark shadow before,
and we are constantly haunted by the ghost of the last pages, amid
the earnest pursuits and perhaps gaieties of the first. But what that
last page of biography is, we find nearly every page of history to be,
only far sadder, and far more cruel. The man's tale may tell us that
at least he died in his bed; but history draws up the curtain at every
act, presenting to the unquiet sight, scenes of wholesale tortures,
poisonings, slaughters, and fields of unburied and mutilated carcases.
It is time to say something of these monuments of great antiquity, the
Noraghe, and what they are, before speculating upon who built them. We
extract the following account, unable to make it more concise:--
"All are built on natural or artificial mounds, whether in
valleys, plains, or on mountains, and some are partially enclosed
at a slight distance, by a low wall of a similar construction to
the building. Their essential architectural feature is a truncated
cone or tower, averaging from thirty to sixty feet in height, and
from one hundred to three hundred in circumference at the base.
The majority have no basement, but the rest are raised on one
extending either in corresponding or in irregular shape, and of
which the perimeter varies from three hundred to six hundred and
fifty-three feet, the largest yet measured. The inward inclination
of the exterior wall of the principal tower, which almost always
is the centre of the building, is so well executed as to present,
in its elevation, a perfect and continuously symmetrical line; but
sometimes a small portion of the external face of the outer-works
of the basements, which are not regular, is straight and
perpendicular: such instances are, however, very rare. There is
every reason to believe, though without positive proof--for none
of the Noraghe are quite perfect--that the cone was originally
truncated, and formed thereby a platform on its summit. The
material of which they are built being always the natural stone
of the locality, we accordingly find them of granite, limestone,
basalt, trachyte porphyry, lava, and tufa; the blocks varying in
shape and size from three to nine cubic feet, while those forming
the architraves of the passages are sometimes twelve feet long,
five feet wide, and the same in depth. The surfaces present that
slight irregularity which proves the blocks to have been rudely
worked by the hammer, but with sufficient exactness to form
regular horizontal layers. With few exceptions, the stones are not
polygonal, but, when so, are without that regularity of form which
would indicate the use of the rule; nor is their construction
of the Cyclopean and Pelasgic styles; neither have they any
sculpture, ornamental work, or cement. The external entrance,
invariably between the E.S.E. and S. by W., but generally to the
east of south, seldom exceeds five feet high and two feet wide,
and is often so small as to necessitate crawling on all fours. The
architrave, as previously mentioned, is very large; but having
once passed it, a passage varying from three to six feet high,
and two to four wide, leads to the principal domed chamber, the
entrance to which is sometimes by another low aperture as small
as the first. The interior of the cone consists of one, two, or
three domed chambers, placed one above the other, and diminishing
in size in proportion to the external inclination; the lowest
averaging from fifteen to twenty feet in diameter, and from twenty
to twenty-five in height. The base of each is always circular,
but, when otherwise, elliptical; the edges of the stones, where
the tiers overlay each other, are worked off, so that the exterior
assumes a semi-ovoidal form, or that of which the section would
be a parabola, the apex being crowned with a large flat stone,
resting on the last circular layer, which is reduced to a small
diameter." "In the interior of the lowest chamber, and on a
level with the floor, are frequently from two to four cells or
niches, formed in the thickness of the masonry without external
communication, varying from three to six feet long, two to four
wide, and two to five high, and only accessible by very small
entrances. The access to the second and third chambers, as well as
to the platform on the top of those Noraghe which have only one
chamber, is by a spiral corridor made in the building, either as a
simple ramp, with a gradual ascent, or with rough irregular steps
made in the stones. The corridor varies from three to six feet in
height, and from two to four in width, and the outer side either
inclines according to the external wall of the cone, and the inner
side according to the domed chamber, or resembles in the section
a segment of a circle. The entrance to this spiral corridor is
generally in the horizontal passage which leads from the external
entrance to the first-floor chamber of the cone; though sometimes
it is by a small aperture in the chamber, about six or eight feet
from the base, and very difficult of entry. The upper chambers are
entered by a small passage at right angles to this corridor; and
opposite to this passage, is often a small aperture in the outer
wall, having apparently no regular position, though frequently
over the external entrance to the ground floor; while, in some
instances, there are several apertures so made that only the sky,
or most distant objects in the horizon, are visible."
Such is the description of these singular structures--when and by whom
built? Their number must have been very great indeed; for although
there have ever been decay and abstraction of the materials for
common purposes going on, there are now upwards of three thousand in
existence; yet, not one has been built during the last 2500 years. Not
only is the inquiry, by whom, and when were they erected, but for what
purpose? On all these points, various opinions have been given. Mr
Tyndale, who has well weighed all that has been written on the subject,
is of opinion that they were built by the very early Canaanites,
when, expelled from their country, they migrated to Sardinia. There
are visible indications of other migrations of the Canaanites, but
nowhere are exactly, or even nearly similar buildings found. We know,
upon the authority of Procopius, that in Mauritania were two columns,
on which were inscribed in Phoenician characters, "We are those who
fled from the face of Joshua, the robber, the son of Nane." There is
certainly a kind of similarity between these buildings and the round
towers of Ireland--a subject examined by our author; but there is also
a striking dissimilarity in dimensions, they not being more than from
eight to fifteen feet in diameter. But there is a tumulus on the banks
of the Boyne, between Drogheda and Slane, which in its passages, domed
chambers, and general dimensions, may find some affinity with the Sarde
Noraghe. It certainly is curious that an opinion has been formed, not
without show of reason for the conjecture, that these people, whether
as Canaanites, Phoenicians, or Carthaginians, reached Ireland; and it
is well known that the single specimen of the Carthaginian language,
in a passage in Plautus, is very intelligible Irish. It has been
observed that when Cato, in the Roman senate, uttered those celebrated
and significant words, "Delenda est Carthago," he was unconsciously
fulfilling a decree against that denounced people. We should be
unwilling to trace the denunciation further. There are, however, few
things more astonishing in history, than that so powerful a people
as the Carthaginians were--the great rivals of the masters of the
world, should have been apparently so utterly swept from the face of
the world, and nothing left, even of their language, but those few
unintelligible (unless they be Irish) words in Plautus.
The "Sepolture de is Gigantes" should also be here noticed.
"They may be described as a series of large stones placed together
without any cement, enclosing a foss or vacuum, from fifteen to
thirty-six feet long, from three to six wide, the same in depth,
with immense flat stones resting on them as a covering; but though
the latter are not always found, it is evident, by a comparison
with the more perfect sepulture, that they once existed, and
have been destroyed or removed. The foss runs invariably from
north-west to south-east; and at the latter point is a large
upright headstone, averaging from ten to fifteen feet high,
varying in its form from the square, elliptical, and conical, to
that of three quarters of an egg, and having in many instances an
aperture about eighteen inches square at its base. On either side
of this still commences a series of separate stones, irregular in
size and shape, but forming an arc, the chord of which varies from
twenty to forty feet, so that the whole figure somewhat resembles
the bow and shank of a spear."
Their number must have been very great. They are called sepulchres
of giants by the Sardes, who believe that giants were buried within
them. There is no doubt that these Sepolture and Noraghe were works
of one and the same people. Mr Tyndale thinks, if the one kind of
structure were tombs, so were the other: we should draw a different
conclusion from their general contiguity to each other. It should be
mentioned, that in the Noraghe have been found several earthenware
figures, which are described in La Marmora's work as Phoenician idols.
There is another very remarkable object of antiquity--"a row of six
conical stones near the Sepoltura, standing in a straight line, a few
paces apart from each other, with the exception of one, which has
been upset, and lies on the ground, but in the sketch is represented
as standing. They are about four feet eight inches high, of two kinds,
and have been designated male and female, from three of them having
two globular projections from the surface of the stone, resembling
the breasts of a woman." He meets elsewhere with five others, there
evidently having been a sixth, but without the above remarkable
significance. We know, from Herodotus, that columns were set up with
female emblems, denoting the conquest over an effeminate people, but
can scarcely attribute to these such a meaning, for they are together
of both kinds. For a curious and learned dissertation upon the subject
of these antiquities, we confidently refer the reader to Mr Tyndale's
book.
After the mention of these singular monuments, perhaps of three
thousand years ago, it may be scarcely worth while to notice the
antiquities of, comparatively speaking, a modern date, Roman or other.
Nor do we intend to speak of the history of the people under the Romans
or Carthaginians, and but shortly notice that kind of government
under "Giudici," as princes presiding over the several provinces some
centuries before the Pisan, Genoese, and Aragon possession of the
island. The origin of this government is involved in much obscurity;
there are, however, documents of the eleventh and twelfth centuries,
which speak of preceding Giudici, and their acts. It would be idle to
inquire why they were called Giudici: it may suffice, that the "judges"
were the actual rulers.
"It is supposed," says our author, "that the whole island was
originally comprehended in one Giudicato, of which Cagliari was the
capital; but, in the course of time, the local interests of each grew
sufficiently self-important to cause a subdivision and establishment of
separate Giudicati." The minor ones were in time swallowed up by the
others, and only four remained, of which there is a precise history,
Cagliari, Arborea, Gallura, and Logudoro.
To us, the government of Giudicati is interesting from its similarity
to the condition of England under the Heptarchy. This similarity is
traced through its detail by Mr Tyndale. The Giudici are mentioned as
early as 598, though there is no account of any direct succession till
about 900. "In both countries the ecclesiastics took a leading part in
the administration of public affairs; and the hierarchy of Sardinia was
as sacred and honoured as that of England, where, by the laws of some
of the provinces of the Heptarchy, the price of the archbishop's head
was even higher than that of the king's. It is unnecessary, though it
would be easy, to give further proofs of similarity in the institutions
of the two countries; but those above are sufficient to show their
analogy, without the appearance of there having been the slightest
connexion or communication with each other, or derived from the same
origin." Perhaps something may be attributed to the long possession of
both countries by the Romans. We have not certainly lost all trace of
them in our own.
The government of the Giudici was not characterised by feudalism,
before the Pisan, Genoese, and Aragon influence. It did, however,
become established in all its usual forms. Feudalism has, however, been
abolished by the present reigning family; and we trust, notwithstanding
our author's evident doubts and suspicious, that the change will
ultimately, if not immediately, be for the happiness of the Sardes.
It requires a very intimate knowledge of a people, of their habits,
their modes of thinking, their character as a race, as well as their
character from custom, to say that this or that form of government is
best suited to them.
The constitution-mongering fancy is a very mischievous one, and is
generally that of a very self-conceited mind. There are some among us,
in high places, who have dabbled very unsuccessfully that way; and
there is now enough going on in the state of Europe to read them a
good lesson. Carlo Alberto is no great favourite with Mr Tyndale; yet
we are not sure that he has not done more wisely for Sardinia than if
the barons had set aside their "pride and ignorance," and made such
"spontaneous concessions" as we find elsewhere have not had very happy
terminations. We conclude the following was written prior to events
which throw rather a new light on the nature of constitutional reforms,
as they are called: "In Hungary and Sicily the nobles, with generous
patriotism, voluntarily conceded, not only privileges, but pecuniary
advantages, and the people have reaped the benefit. In Sardinia, the
empty pride and ignorance of the greater part of the feudal barons
always prevented such a spontaneous concession." We beg Mr Tyndale to
reflect upon the peculiar _benefits_ those two happy people are now
reaping. A man cannot tell his own growth of mind and character, how
he comes to be what he is; but he must have little reflection indeed
not to know, that, under other circumstances than those in which he has
been placed, he must have been a very different man, and have required
a very different kind of self, or other government, to regulate his own
happiness. So institutions grow--and so governments. Paper changes are
very pretty pieces for declamation; but for sudden application, and
that to all, whatever their condition in morals and knowledge, they are
but "~sêmata lygra~," and indicate bloodshed.
To return, however. We will not dismiss the subject of the Giudici
without the mention of two persons whose romantic histories are
intimately connected with Sardinian affairs. The celebrated Enzio,
illegitimate son of the Emperor Frederick II. and the Giudicessa
Eleonora. More than a century elapsed between these two extraordinary
characters; the benefits conferred on Sardinia by the latter may be
said to still live in some of the excellent laws which she established.
Enzio, not a Sarde by birth, by his marriage with Adelasia, a widow,
Giudicessa of Torres, and Gallura, and a part of Cagliari, came into
possession of those provinces, and soon, by treaty and force of arms,
became powerful over the whole island. The favourite son of Frederick
II., as a matter of course, he obtained the enmity of Gregory IX.,
who had, by this marriage, been foiled in his schemes upon Sardinia,
through a marriage he contemplated between Adelasia and one of his
own relatives. Enzio bore an illustrious part in the warfare of those
times, between the Pope and the Emperor; and such was his success,
that, after his celebrated engagement of the fleets near Leghorn, and
the capture of the prelates who had been summoned from the Empire to
the Pope--to prevent whose arrival this armament was undertaken--Pope
Gregory died in his hundredth year, his disease having been greatly
aggravated by this disastrous event. The quarrel was, however,
continued by his successor, Innocent IV., and the fortune of events
turned against the Emperor. Enzio was taken prisoner in an unsuccessful
battle near Modena, by the Bolognese, and was, though handsomely
treated, detained captive twenty years, during which all the members of
his family quitted this life. He consoled the hours of his captivity by
music and poetry, in which he excelled, so as to have obtained eminence
as a poet amongst the poets of Italy. But he enjoyed a still sweeter
solace. When he had been led in triumph as prisoner into Bologna, in
his twenty-fifth year, so early had he distinguished himself as a
warrior, the beauty of his person, and the elegance of his deportment,
awakened in all the tenderest sympathies. An accomplished maiden of
Bologna, Lucia Viadagoli, besides the pity and admiration which all
felt, entertained for him the most ardent passion; an intimacy ensued,
and the passion was as mutual as it was ardent. From this connexion, as
it is said, arose the founder of the family of Bentivoglio, who were,
in after years, the avengers of his sufferings, and lords over the
proud republic. He had likewise obtained the devoted attachment of a
youth, Pietro Asinelli; through this faithful friend, a plan was laid
down for his escape, which was very nearly successful. He was carried
out in a tun, in which some excellent wine for the King Enzio's use
had been brought. His friends Asinelli and Rainerio de' Gonfalioneri
were waiting near, with horses for his escape, when a lock of beautiful
hair, protruding from the barrel, was discovered, either by a soldier,
or, as some say, a maid, or an old mad woman, for accounts vary. Alarm
was given, and the prisoner rescued in his place of confinement.
Gonfalioneri was arrested and executed; his friend Asinelli escaped,
but was banished for life. Enzio died in this captivity in the 47th
year of his age, 15th March 1272, on the anniversary of his father
the Emperor's death, ad the saints' day of his beloved Lucia. He was
buried magnificently at the expense of the republic. It might have been
recorded of him, that he possessed every virtue, had not his conduct to
his wife left a stain on his name. His early and ill-assorted marriage
may offer some excuse for one who showed himself so amiable on all
other occasions. He had won and governed Sardinia, and "conquered a
great part of Italy, at an age when the vast majority of youths, even
under the most favourable circumstances, are but beginning to aspire
to glory and active life; while, equally fitted for the duties of a
peaceful statesman, he was, at the same early age, intrusted with a
highly important charge, and opposed to the most subtle politicians."
Should any future Hesiod meditate another poem on illustrious women,
Eleonora of Sardinia will have a conspicuous place among the "~Êoiai~."
This Giudicessa was born about the middle of the fourteenth century.
Her father was Mariano IV., Giudice of Arborea. She was married to
Brancaleone Doria, a man altogether inferior to his wife. On the
death of her brother Ugone IV., a man worthy of note, she assumed the
government, styling herself Giudicessa of Arborea, in the name of her
infant son; in this she displayed a talent and vigour superior even to
her father.
"The first occasion on which her courage and political sagacity
were tried, was on the murder of her brother Ugone, and his
daughter Benedetta, when the insurgents sought to destroy the
whole reigning family, and to form themselves into a republic.
Perceiving the danger which threatened the lives and rights of her
sons, and undismayed by the pusillanimous conduct of her husband,
who fled for succour to the court of Aragon, she promptly took
the command in the state, and placing herself in arms, at the
head of such troops as remained faithful, speedily and entirely
discomfited the rebels. She lost no time in taking possession of
the territories and castles belonging to the Giudici of Arborea,
causing all people to do homage, and swear fealty to the young
prince, her son; and wrote to obtain assistance from the King
of Aragon, in restoring order in her Giudicato. Brancaleone,
encouraged by his wife's intrepidity and success, asked permission
from the King of Aragon to return to Sardinia with the promised
auxiliaries; but the king, alarmed at the high spirit of the
Giudicessa, prevented his departure, and kept him in stricter
confinement, under pretence of conferring greater honours on him.
He was, however, at last allowed to depart, under certain heavy
conditions, one of them being the surrender of Frederic, his son,
as a hostage for the performance of a treaty then commenced. On
his arrival at Cagliari in 1384, with the Aragonese army, he
repeatedly besought his wife to submit to the king, in pursuance
of the treaties. It was in vain. Despising alike the pusillanimous
recommendation of her husband, and the threats of the Aragonese
general, she for two years kept up a courageous and successful
warfare against the latter, till having, by her exertions,
acquired an advantageous position, she commenced a treaty with
her enemy respecting the sovereignty in dispute, and for the
deliverance of her husband, who, during the whole of the time, was
kept in close confinement at Cagliari."
Finally, these terms of peace, so honourable to her, were signed by Don
Juan I., who succeeded his brother Pedro, who died in 1387.
"The peace was but ill kept, for Brancaleone, when at liberty, and
once more under the influence of his high-minded wife, regained
his courage, and in 1390, renewing the war more fiercely than
ever, he continued it for many years, without the Kings of Aragon
ever reducing Eleonora to submission, or obtaining possession of
her dominions. She formed alliances with Genoa, and, with the
aid of their fleet, took such vigorous measures that nearly the
whole of Logoduro was in a short time subdued; while Brancaleone,
inspired by her example, reconquered Sassari, the castle of Osilo,
and besieged the royal fortresses of Alghero and Chivia."
After this, Don Martino, who succeeded his brother Don Juan I. of
Aragon, made peace, which secured the prosperity and honour of Arborea
during the life of Eleonora. But this extraordinary woman not only,
in a remarkable degree, exhibited the talents of a great general, and
the genius of a consummate politician, but, for that age, a wonderful
forethought, sagacity, and humanity, in the fabrication of a code of
laws for her people. As Debora _judged_ Israel, and the people came to
her for judgment, so might it be said of Eleonora.
"The Carta di Logu, so called from its being the code of laws in
her own dominions, had been commenced by her father, Mariano IV.,
but being compiled, finished, and promulgated by Eleonora, to her
is chiefly due the merit of the undertaking, and the worthy title
of enlightened legislatrix. It was first published on 11th April
1395, and by its provisions, the forms of legal proceedings and
of criminal law are established, the civil and customary laws
defined, those for the protection of agriculture enjoined, the
rights and duties of every subject explained, the punishments for
offences regulated; and, in these last provisions, when compared
with the cruelty of the jurisprudence of that age, we are struck
with the humanity of the Carta de Logu, and its superiority to
the other institutions of that period. The framing of a body of
laws so far in advance of those of other countries, where greater
civilisation existed, must ever be the highest ornament in the
diadem of the Giudicessa. Its merits were so generally felt, that,
though intended only for the use of the dominions subject to her
own sceptre, it was some years after her death adopted throughout
the island, at a parliament held under Don Alfonzo V., in 1421.
This great princess died of the plague in 1403 or 1404, regretted
by all her subjects."
Of the natural curiosities, the Antro de Nettuno, a stalactitic grotto,
about twelve miles from Alghero, is one of the most interesting. It
was seen by Mr Tyndale under very favourable circumstances, he having
been invited by the civic authorities to visit it in the suite of
the King of Sardinia. The Antro de Nettuno is under the stupendous
cliffs of Capo Caccia, close to the little island of Foradala. "In
parts of the grotto were corridors and galleries some 300 or 400 feet
long, reminding one, if the comparison is allowable, of the Moorish
architecture of the Alhambra. One of them terminates abruptly in a
deep cavern, into which we were prevented descending." "Some of the
columns, in different parts of the grotto, are from seventy to eighty
feet in circumference, and the masses of drapery, drooping in exquisite
elegance, are of equally grand proportions."
The coast of Alghero is noted for the Pinna marina, of the mussel
tribe, whose bivalved shell frequently exceeds two feet in length. As
the shark is accompanied by its pilot fish, so is this huge mussel by
a diminutive shrimp, supposed to be appointed by nature as a watchman,
but in fact the prey of the Pinna. The Pinna is fastened by its
hinges to the rock, and is itself a prey to a most wily creature, the
Polypus octopodia. This crafty creature may be seen, in fine weather,
approaching its victim with a pebble in its claws, which it adroitly
darts into the aperture of the yawning shells, so that the Pinna can
neither shut itself close, to pinch off the feelers of the polypus,
nor save itself from being devoured. The tunny fishery is of some
importance to the Sardes. Mr Tyndale was present at one of their great
days of operation, the Tonnara. A large inclosure is artificially made,
into which the fish pass, when the "portcullis" is let down, and a
great slaughter commences.
"Fears now began to be expressed lest the wind, which had
increased, should make it too rough for the Mattanza, but, while
discussing it, a loud cry broke upon us of 'Guarda sotto'--'look
beneath.' The ever watchful Rais, (commander,) whose eye had
never been off its victims, in a moment had perceived by their
movements that they were making for the Foratico, and, obeying
his warning voice, we all were immediately on our knees,
bending over the sides of the barges, to watch the irruption,
and, from the dead silence and our position, it appeared as if
we were all at prayers. In less than two minutes the shoal of
nearly 500 had passed through. The well-known voice shouted out
'Ammorsella'--'let down the portcullis,'--down it went amid the
general and hearty cheers of all present; and the fatal Foratico,
into which 'Lasciate ogni speranza voi che entrate,' was for ever
closed on them."
Whatever foundation there may be for conjecture as to the origin of
the races, and extent of Phoenician migrations, we are continually
struck with the resemblance between the Sardes and the native Irish.
There is the same indolence, the same recklessness, superstition,
and Vendetta--that disregard of shedding human blood, and the same
screening of the murderers, who, we are told, though well known,
visit the towns on "festa" days, fearlessly and with impunity. But the
Vendetta of the Sardes is not only more excusable, from a habitual
denial or perversion of justice, but it has its own honourable and
humane laws, not under any circumstances to be infringed, which
place it in conspicuous contrast with the too common barbarities and
cruelties of our unfortunate sister island.
The Sardinian "fuorusciti" are not the Italian banditti. The term
includes, with the robber, those who escape from the arm of the law,
and the avenger of injuries. These take to the mountains. The common
robbers are few, and their attacks on passengers are for necessary
subsistence, and more commonly for gunpowder with which they may
obtain it. Those who escape from the consequences of crime for
vengeance--Vendetta--are many; but these, as we related, have their
humane code, we might almost say their romantic--for the presence of
a woman is a perfect security. It is their law that no atrocity, no
Vendetta, is allowable when a woman is in the company. A foe travelling
with wife or child is safe. A melancholy instance of a breach of this
law is thus given:--
"A brigand was conducting his wife on horseback through the
mountains when he suddenly met his adversary, who, regardless of
the conventional and living flag of truce, attacked and slew him,
together with his pregnant wife. The relations and friends of the
deceased were not the only outraged parties; a general feeling
of indignation and vengeance was kindled throughout the whole
province. Every bandit felt it to be a breach of their laws of
honour; and even the murderer's partisans not only denounced the
act, but 'refused him the kiss of peace.' The mangled corpses were
conveyed home, and the friends of the deceased having sworn, on
the body of the unfortunate Teodora, a perpetual Vendetta against
the family of the assassin, a system of revenge and bloodshed
was framed and carried out to such an extent, that hundreds of
victims, perfectly innocent of even indirect participation in this
single act of dishonour, fell in all parts of Gallura."
Another characteristic story is told. A party of six females were
sojourning at a church, performing a "Novena." Some banditti, knowing
this, descended from their mountains to visit them, and proposed the
hospitality of the mountains. The women assented, and accompanied
the bandits, who treated them with respect, and they closed their
evenings with songs and dancing. The banditti kept watch the whole
night guarding their fair guests: one of the bandits had been the
rejected lover of one of the party, whose husband and other friends,
hearing of this departure to the mountains, in fear and for vengeance,
collected in force to rescue the women. The bandits, in their descent,
to conduct back their guests, met the other party ascending. The
presence of women prohibited Vendetta; a truce was therefore demanded,
when the bridegroom and the rejected lover met, with feelings of past
injuries, and fears of more recent on one side. Each had his gun
cocked; they felt them, and gazed at each other. Their lives were at
instant peril, when the bride rushed into the arms of her husband,
seized his gun, and discharged it; then, placing herself in front to
protect him, she led him up to the bandit, and demanded from him his
gun. He yielded it, and she discharged it also. The rest of the party
pressed on, an explanation was given of the nature of the visit, and
both parties joined in a feast, and mutual explanations of former
differences were given and received, their Vendetta terminated, and
a general and lasting reconciliation took place. Such quarrels are,
however, sometimes settled otherwise than by Vendetta. The "Paci" are
reconciliations through means of the priest. The parties meet in the
open air near some chapel, and such settlements are perpetual. But
another mode is preferred, by "Ragionatori" or umpires; but appeals may
be made from these to a greater number, whose decision is final. An
interesting anecdote showing their power is thus told:--
"It was the case of a young shepherd who had been too ardent
in his advances to a young maiden. On the youth demurring to
the decision as too severe, the Ragionatori, indignant at his
presumption, arose from under the shady wild olive, and saying
to the surprised spectators, 'we have spoken, and done justice,'
saluted them and turned towards their homes. But one of his
nearest relations, who was leaning against the knotted trunk of
an oak, with his bearded chin resting on the back of his hand on
the muzzle of his gun, raised his head, and, with a fierce look,
extended his right hand to the Ragionatori: 'Stop, friends!' he
exclaimed, 'the thing must be finished at this moment.' Then
turning to his nephew, with a determined and resolute countenance,
and placing his right hand upon his chest, he said to him, 'Come,
instantly!--either obey the verdict of the Ragionatori, or----'.
The offender, at this deadly threat, no longer hesitated, but
approached the offended party and sued for pardon. The uncle,
thus satisfied, advanced, and demanded for him the hand of the
maiden; the betrothal took place, and things being thus happily
terminated, they betook themselves to prepare the feast."
We could wish that we had space to describe an interview our author
had with one of the Fuorusciti, and of his rescue of his guide from
the Vendetta. But we must refer to the book for this, and many other
well-told incidents respecting these strange people; and particularly
a romantic tale of "Il Rosario e La Palla," which, if not in all its
parts to be credited, is no bad invention--"_Se non e vero e ben'
trovato._"
We would make some inquiry into the habits and manners of the Sardes.
We have before observed their resemblance to the Irish. A description
of the houses, or rather huts or hovels in the country, will remind
the reader of the Irish cabin, where a hole in the roof serves for
chimney, and the pig and the family associate on terms of mutual right.
Like Italians in general, they are under a nervous hydrophobia, and
prefer dirt to cleanliness, and, in common with really savage nations,
lard their hair with an inordinate quantity of grease. Washing is very
superfluous, as if they considered the removal of dirt as the taking
off a natural clothing. Upon one occasion Mr Tyndale, arriving at a
friend's house, and retiring to his room, sent his servant to request
some jugs of water, for ablution after a hot ride. This unusual demand
put the whole habitation into commotion, and brought the host and
several visitors in his rear, into the room, while Mr Tyndale was in
a state of nudity, to ascertain the use of so much water. They had no
idea of this being an indelicate intrusion. Finding that the water was
for a kind of cold bath, they were astonished--"What, wash in cold
water? what is the good of it? do all your countrymen do such things?
are they very dirty in England? we do not wash in that way--why do
you?" Such were the questions, on the spot, which he was required
to answer. But they were reiterated by the ladies below stairs, who
expressed amazement at the eccentricities of the English.
Hospitality is the common virtue of the Sardes. "In most houses
admitting of an extra room, one is set apart for the guests--the
_hospitale cubiculum_ of the Romans--ready and open to all strangers."
It would be the highest offence to offer the smallest gratuity to the
host, however humble, though a trifle may be given to a servant. "La
mia casa è piccola, ma il cuore é grande," (my house is small, but my
heart is large,) was the apology on one occasion of his Cavallante,
on his arrival in Tempio, where, owing to the presence of the King,
not a bed was to be had, and the Cavallante earnestly entreated the
use of his hospitality, which, indeed, seemed in the proof to bear
no proportion to his means of exercising it. Even the family bed
was emptied of four children and a wife's sister, in spite of all
remonstrance, for his accommodation.
Where hospitality is a custom stronger than law, inns offer few
comforts and fewer luxuries--the traveller is supposed to bring, not
only his own provisions, but his own furniture. Our traveller arriving
at Ozieri, a town with more than eight thousand inhabitants, "mine
host" was astonished at the unreasonable demand of a bed. Finding how
things were, Mr Tyndale stood in the court-yard, contemplating the
alternative of presenting some of his letters to parties in the town,
when he was attracted to a window on the other side of the court, from
whence this invitation issued: "Sir, it is impossible for you to go to
the Osteria; there is no accommodation fit for you. Apparently you are
a stranger, and if you have no friends here, pray accept what little
we can do for you." He ascended the stairs to thank his hostess, who
sent for her husband, holding a high government appointment in the
town, who received and entertained him as if they had been his intimate
friends. On another occasion, in search of the Perdas Lungas stones,
antiquarian curiosities, he met a stranger, who, though going to Nuovo
in a great hurry, and anxious to return for the Festa, on finding he
was a foreigner, insisted on accompanying him, as he was acquainted
with the way--"one of the many instances," says Mr Tyndale, "of Sarde
civility and kindness." And such hospitable kindness he invariably
received, whether in towns or among the poorest in the mountain
villages, or more lonely places. It has been cynically observed, that
hospitality is the virtue of uncivilised nations. However selfishly
gratifying the exercise of it may have been to that wealthy Scotch
laird, who said that his nearest neighbour, as a gentleman, was the
King of Denmark, among such a people as the Sardes, it surely may be an
indication of natural kindness, and, in some degree, of honesty, for
our civilised roguery is a sore destroyer of open-housed hospitality.
A royal return for hospitable care is, however, not to be altogether
rejected. When the King of Sardinia visited the island, a shepherd of
the little island of Tavolara, the ancient Hermea, near the port of
Terranova, of simple manners and notions, sent his majesty some sheep
and wild goats, judging that the royal larder might not be over-richly
stored. His majesty properly, in turn, requested to know if he could
grant him anything. The shepherd consulted his family upon all their
real and imaginary wants, and finally decided against luxuries, but
"would not mind if the king gave him a pound of gunpowder." On the
royal messenger, therefore, suggesting that he should ask for something
else, the dilemma was greater than ever; but, after strolling about,
and torturing his imagination for several minutes, he suddenly broke
out--"Oh, tell the King of Terra-firma that I should like to be the
king of Tavolara; and that if any people come to live in the island,
that they must obey me, as the people obey him in Terra-firma." What
compromise his majesty made between the regal crown and the pound of
gunpowder, we are not told. Though we would by no means vouch for this
shepherd's story, which is nevertheless very probable, we can vouch for
one not very dissimilar.
Not very long since, a small farmer in a little village in
Somersetshire, who prided himself on his cheeses, in a fit of unwonted
generosity--for he was a penurious man--sent to her majesty Queen
Victoria a prime cheese. A person given to practical jokes knowing
this, bought an eighteen-penny gilt chain, and sent it in a letter,
purporting to be from her majesty, appointing him her "well beloved"
mayor of the village, in the document exalted into a corporate town,
but whereof he, the said mayor, formed the sole body and whole
authority. The ignorant poor man swallowed the bait, and called the
village together; gave an ox to be roasted whole, and walked at the
head of the invited procession, wearing his chain of office; and for
several weeks exhibited the insignia of royal favour, the chain and
royal autograph, at church and at markets. It is a doubt if he be yet
undeceived, and lowered from his imaginary brief authority. We know
not what our farmer would say to the use to which the Sardes apply
their cheeses, or what may be expected from a free trade with them in
this article; but we learn that so plentiful was cheese in the Donori
district, in 1842, that some of it was used for manuring the ground,
which practice would amount to throwing it away, for they are not given
to any industrial means of agriculture. So fertile was Sardinia under
the Romans, that, in the last years of the second Punic war, corn was
so abundant that it was sold for the mere price of the freight. Should
the reader be curious to know the result of this cheapness, he may see
it in the present condition of Sardinia compared with its former, a
population diminished from about two millions to about five hundred and
twenty-four thousand, and full three quarters of the land uncultivated.
The "Attitu," or custom of mourning around the body of the dead,
will bring to mind, to those who have witnessed such a ceremony, the
Irish hovel. The "Conducti" are ever more vehement than the _verè
plorantibus_. The word Attitu is supposed to be derived from the _atat_
of the Romans, but it was not an original word of their language,
nor may it have been so with the Greeks, from whom they took it. The
Sarde Attitadores are thus described, and the description perfectly
answers to exhibitions we have witnessed in some remote parts of
Ireland. "They wear black stuff gowns, with a species of Capucin hood,
and, maintaining a perfect silence, assume the air of total ignorance
as to there having been a death in the family, till, suddenly and
accidentally seeing the dead body, they simultaneously commence a
weeping, wailing, and gnashing of teeth, accompanied with groans and
ejaculations,--tearing their hair, throwing themselves on the ground,
raising their clenched fists maniacally to heaven, and carrying on
the attitudes and expressions of real anguish." It is curious that
the "ailinon" of the Greeks is traced to the Phoenicians, and, on
the authority of Athenæus, "Linus was a mythological personage, who
gave his name to a song of a mournful character." It is said that the
Phoenician "Lin" signifies complaint.
It would be well if writers, especially travellers, would exercise a
little more forbearance in speaking of the superstitions of the people
amongst whom they are thrown. It is too prevalent a custom to attribute
every superstition to the priesthood, whereas the mere traveller can
scarcely be able to distinguish what belongs wholly and hereditarily to
the people, and what the priests enjoin. We suspect in most instances
the foundation is in the people, and that the priests could not,
though in many cases it may be admitted they would not, put a stop to
them. They would too often lose their influence in the attempt, and
find themselves compelled to acquiesce in practices and ceremonies of
which they do not approve. Those who treat with contempt and ridicule
the superstitions of other countries do not scrutinise those of their
own. It is true ours are wearing out, and before their expiration
become very innocent: attempts to suppress them by authority would
only tend to perpetuate them. It would be very silly, for instance,
to issue a proclamation against "May day," or to remind the innocents
who crown the Maypole that they are following a pagan and not very
decent worship and ceremony. Superstitions are the natural tares of
the mind, and spring up spontaneously, and among the wheat, too, it
should be observed; and we should remember the warning not to be over
eager to uproot the tares, lest we uproot the wheat also. It is the
object of travel to gratify curiosity, and the nature of travel to
increase the appetite for it. It is, therefore, like wholesome food,
which by giving health promotes a fresh relish; but there arises from
this traveller's habit a less nice distinction as to quality, and at
length a practised voracity is not dismayed by quantity. The inquirer
is on the look-out, and overlooks but little; and in all Roman Catholic
countries there is no lack of infidels, happy to have their tongues
loosened in the presence of questioning Englishmen, and to pour into
their listening ears multitudes of tales, fabricated or true, as it may
chance, with a feeling of hatred for the religion of their country--for
the superstition of unbelief is inventive and persecuting. We are
not for a moment meditating a defence of Romish superstitions, but
we think they are too widespread, and too mixed up with the entire
habit of thought of the general population, to render a sudden removal
possible, or every attempt safe. The reformation will not commence with
the unlearned. In the meanwhile, there is a demand on the traveller's
candour and benevolence for the exercise of forbearance; for we doubt
if a foreign traveller in our own country would not, were he bent
upon the search, pick up, amongst both our rural and town population,
a tolerably large collection of the "Admiranda" of superstition, and
sectarian and other saints, with surprising lives and anecdotes, to
rival the Romish calendar and the "Aurea Leggenda." We offer these
few remarks, because we think our author in his anti-popish zeal, and
abhorrence of "ignorance," is too much inclined to see all the wrong,
and overlook the good in--shall we say the superstitions he meets
with, and to conclude that the clergy encourage, where, and possibly
wisely, they only tolerate. It may not be amiss here to refer to a
fact narrated by our author, that a Capucin convent at Ozieri is at
present indebted for the severity with which its laws are enforced,
to the interference of the bishop, not to establish but to put down
a pretended miracle. A nun had announced that she had received the
"stigmata;" pilgrims flocked, and offerings were made. The bishop
suspected, perhaps more than suspected, fraud, caused a strict inquiry,
and the miraculous Stigmata disappeared. But let us come to an instance
where the clergy encouraged, or, to be candid, assuming the perfect
truth of the narration, originated a superstitious fear. It is one that
had so much reverence of a right kind in it, and so much of _truth_ at
least in the feeling, if not in the fact, as may well pass for a kind
of belief in the minds of those who propagated it.
When the King of Sardinia visited the island, he caused some
excavations to be made at Terranova. Tombs were broken into, and
the dead despoiled of their rings, buckles, and other ornaments;
upon which, Mr Tyndale says, "a heavy gale of wind and storm, having
done some damage to the town, during the progress of digging up the
graves, the priests assured the people, and the people reiterated the
assurance, that the calamity arose from, and was a punishment for
having disturbed and dug up the tombs of the holy saints and martyrs of
Terranova!"
Is the mark of admiration one of approbation or the reverse? We cannot
believe it to be one of contempt, and are sure our author would not
wish to see the feeling--to the credit of human nature, a common
one--eradicated. When the Scythians were taunted with flying before
their invaders, they simply replied, "We will stay and fight at the
burial places of our fathers." They considered no possession so well
worth preserving intact.
When Mr Tyndale was receiving hospitality in a shepherd's hut among
the mountains, a Ronuts arrived with a box of relics. The household
within doors, a mother and daughters, placed themselves on their knees
before it. They embraced the box, and three times affectionately
kissed it, and expressed dismay in their looks that their guest did
not do likewise. He admits they looked upon him as an infidel, but
they did not treat him, on that account, as Franklin's apologue
feigned that Abraham treated his unbelieving aged stranger guest, but
bore with him, as the warning and reproving voice told Abraham to
do. The poor hostess, in her ignorance, knew not even whose relics
she had reverenced, for hers was the common answer, when inquired
of as to this particular--"Senza dubbio la reliquia d'una Santa del
Paese, ben conosciuta da per tutto." But this poor family superstition
did not harden the heart; the shepherd's wife believed at least in
the _sanctity_ of some saint, and that veneration for a life passed
in holiness, by whomsoever, demanded of her goodwill to all, and
kindly hospitality, and such as should overcome even the prejudice
of an ignorant shepherd's wife; and therefore we must quote Mr
Tyndale's confession to this virtue of her faith. "If the ignorance
and superstitious credulity of my present hostess were great, her
hospitality and generosity were no less. She soon recovered from her
momentary horror of my heretical irreverence, and, though not the
bearer of a holy relic, it was with some difficulty I could get away
without having several cheeses put into my saddle-bags; and when my
repeated assurances that I was not partial to them at length induced
her to desist, she wanted to send her husband to bring me home a kid
or a lamb. She would have considered it an insult to have been offered
any payment for her gifts, had they been even accepted; and after
repeated expressions of her wish to supply me from her humble store, we
parted with a shower of mutual benedictions." We have brought to our
remembrance patriarchal times, when kids and lambs were readily set
before wayfaring strangers. There have been, and are, worse people in
the world than those poor ignorant superstitious Sardes.
Not far from San Martino our traveller halted, to inquire his way
at an "ovile," the shepherd's hut. It may not be unsatisfactory to
describe the dwellings whose inhabitants are thus hospitable. The
hut here spoken of was rude enough--a mass of stones in a circle of
about twelve feet diameter, and eight feet high, with a conical roof
made of sticks and reeds. The whole family had but one bed; a few
ashes were burning in a hole in the ground; a bundle of clothes, some
flat loaves of bread, and three or four pans, made up the inventory
of goods. The shepherd was preparing to kill a lamb for his family,
yet he offered to accompany the stranger, which he did, and went
with him a distance of three miles. "After showing me the spot, and
sharing a light meal, I offered him a trifle for his trouble; but he
indignantly refused it, and, on leaving to return home, gave me an
adieu with a fervent but courteous demeanour, which would have shamed
many a mitred and coroneted head." We are not, however, to conclude
that all the shepherd districts, however they may bear no reproach on
the score of hospitality, are regions of innocence and virtue. We are
told, on the authority of a Padre Angius, that the people of Bonorva
are quarrelsome and vindictive; and a story is told of their envious
character. A certain Don Pietrino Prunas was the owner of much cattle,
and ninety-nine flocks of sheep; he was assassinated on the very day he
had brought the number to a hundred, for no other reason than out of
envy of his happiness. And here Mr Tyndale remarks, in a note, a French
translator's carelessness. "Valery, in mentioning the circumstance,
says that he was murdered 'le jour même où il atteignait sa centième
année.'" The words professed to be translated are, "Padrone di 99
greggi di pecori, trucidato nel giorno istesso che ei doneva formarsi
la centessima."
The reader will not expect to find accounts of many treasures of the
fine arts in Sardinia. Convents and churches are, however, not without
statues and pictures. Nor do the clergy or inmates of convents possess
much knowledge on the subject. If a picture is pronounced a Michael
Angelo, without doubt the possessors, with a charming simplicity, would
inquire "who Michael Angelo was." We quote the following as worthy the
notice of the Arundel Society, particularly as it is out of the general
tourings of connoisseurs.
"The screen of the high altar (the church at Ardara) is covered
with portraits of apostles, saints, and martyrs, apparently a work
of the thirteenth or early part of the fourteenth century; and,
notwithstanding the neglect and damp, the colours and gildings
are still bright and untarnished. Many of them are exquisitely
finished, with all the fineness of an Albert Durer and Holbein,
and will vie with the best specimens of the early masters in the
gallery of Dresden, or the Pinakothek at Munich."
Valery, the mis-translator just mentioned, is in ecstacy in his notice
of these works. He considers them worthy the perpetuity which the
graver alone can give them, and considers how great their reputation
would be had they found a Lanzi, a d'Agincour, or a Cicognara.
We have now travelled with our agreeable, well-informed author over
much country--wild, and partially cultivated; have speculated with
him upon all things that attracted attention by the way; and, though
the roads have been somewhat rough, we have kept our tempers pretty
well--no light accomplishment for fellow-travellers; and our disputes
have been rather amusing than serious. We now enter with him the
capital of Sardinia--Cagliari. We shall not follow him, however,
through the modern town, though there can be no better cicerone; nor
look in at the museum, fearful of long detention; not even to examine
the Phoenician curiosities, or discuss the identity in character, with
them, of some seals found in the bogs of Ireland; or to speculate
with Sir George Staunton as to their Chinese origin, and how they
unaccountably found themselves, some in an Irish bog and some in
excavated earth in Sardinia, and from thence into the museum at
Cagliari. We are content to visit some Roman antiquities, and read
inscriptions probably of the age of the Antonines, or of an earlier
period. The monuments are sepulchral: one is of a very interesting
character. It is of some architectural pretensions--in honour of
an exemplary wife, who, like Alcestis, is said to have died for
her husband. The prose tale, were it in existence, might have told,
perhaps, how Pomptilla--for that is her name--attended her husband
in a sickness, caught his fever, and died, while he recovered. The
inscriptions are many. Some have been made out tolerably well: they
are in Latin and Greek. One, in Greek, has so much tenderness, that,
deeming it quite worthy the melancholy cadence of verse, we have been
tempted to substitute our own translation for that of Mr Tyndale in
prose, with which we are not quite satisfied.
Pomptilla, from thy dew-embalmèd earth,
Which mournful homage of our love receives,
May fairest lilies rise,
Pale flow'rets of a sad funereal birth--
And roses opening their scarce-blushing leaves,
Of tenderest dyes,
And violets, that from their languid eyes,
Shed perfumed shower--
And blessèd amaranth that never dies.
O! be thyself a flower,
Th' unsullied snow-drop--being and witness true
Of thy pure self, e'en to perpetual years--
As erst a flow'ret fair Narcissus grew--
And Hyacinthus all bedew'd with tears.
For when, now in the tremulous hour of death,
Her spouse Philippus near to Lethe drew
His unresisting lips and fainting breath,
A woman's duteous vow she vow'd--
And gently put aside his drooping head,
And her firm presence to the waters bow'd,
And drank the fatal stream instead.
Such perfect union did stern Death divide,
Th' unwilling husband and the willing wife--
Willing to die, while he, now loathing life,
Through the dear love of his devoted bride--
Still lives, and weeps, and prays that he may die--
That his releasèd spirit to hers may fly,
And mingled evermore with hers abide.
In taking leave of our author, we confidently recommend the three
volumes on Sardinia to the general reader--we say general reader,
for, whatever be his taste or pursuit, he will find amusement and
information. The work is a _full_ work. If the reader be an antiquary,
he will be gratified with deep research and historic lore; if an
economist, he will have tabular detail and close statistics; an
agriculturist, and would he emigrate from his own persecuted lands,
he will learn the nature of soils, their capabilities, and how fair
a field is offered for that importable and exportable commodity, his
industry, so much wanted in Sardinia, and so little encouraged at home;
if a sportsman, besides the use of the gun, which he knows already, he
will be initiated into the mystery of tunny fishing, and, would he turn
it to his profit, have license to dispose of his game. Nay, even the
wide-awake shopkeeper may learn how to set up his "store" in Sassari or
Cagliari, and what stock he had best take out. If he be a ne'er-do-well
just returned from California, and surprised into the possession of a
sackful of gold, Mr Tyndale will conduct him to the Barathra into which
he may throw it, whether they be sea-fisheries or land-marshes; or into
whose pockets he may deposit the wealth, whose burthen he is of course
wearied in bearing, for the excitement of generosity in becoming a
benefactor, or for the amusement of corrupting.
The work is indeed a "guide book," as well as much more, for it
tells every one what he may do profitably or unprofitably in
Sardinia--whether as traveller and private speculator, minding his own
concerns; or as an enthusiastic disperser of ignorance, and renovator
of the customs, manners, religion, and political condition of a people
as unlike his own race and kindred as possible.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] _The Island of Sardinia._ By JOHN WARRE TYNDALE. 3 vols., post 8vo.
THE CAXTONS.--PART XIV.