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THE CORNHILL MAGAZINE.

MARCH, 1860.

CONTENTS.

PAGE

A FEW WORDS ON JUNIUS AND MACAULAY 257

WILLIAM HOGARTH: PAINTER, ENGRAVER, AND PHILOSOPHER. Essays

on the Man, the Work, and the Time. 264

_II.—Mr. Gamble’s Apprentice._ (With an Illustration.)

MABEL 282

STUDIES IN ANIMAL LIFE 283

CHAPTER III.—_A garden wall, and its traces of past life—Not

a breath perishes—A bit of dry moss and its inhabitants—The

“Wheel-bearers”—Resuscitation of Rotifers: drowned into

life—Current belief that animals can be revived after complete

desiccation—Experiments contradicting the belief—Spallanzani’s

testimony—Value of biology as a means of culture—Classification

of animals: the five great types—Criticism of Cuvier’s

arrangement._

FRAMLEY PARSONAGE 296

CHAPTER VII.—_Sunday Morning._

” VIII.—_Gatherum Castle._

” IX.—_The Vicar’s Return._

SIR JOSHUA AND HOLBEIN 322

A CHANGELING 329

LOVEL THE WIDOWER 330

CHAPTER III.—_In which I play the Spy._ (With an Illustration.)

THE NATIONAL GALLERY DIFFICULTY SOLVED 346

A WINTER WEDDING-PARTY IN THE WILDS 356

STUDENT LIFE IN SCOTLAND 366

ROUNDABOUT PAPERS.—NO. 2 380

_On Two Children in Black._

LONDON: SMITH, ELDER AND CO.,

65, CORNHILL.

THE CORNHILL MAGAZINE.

CONTENTS of No. 1.

JANUARY, 1860.

FRAMLEY PARSONAGE. Chapters 1, 2 and 3.

THE CHINESE AND THE “OUTER BARBARIANS.”

LOVEL THE WIDOWER. Chapter 1. (With an Illustration.)

STUDIES IN ANIMAL LIFE. Chapter 1.

FATHER PROUT’S INAUGURATIVE ODE TO THE AUTHOR OF “VANITY FAIR.”

OUR VOLUNTEERS.

A MAN OF LETTERS OF THE LAST GENERATION.

THE SEARCH FOR SIR JOHN FRANKLIN (from the Private Journal of an

Officer of the _Fox_). (With an Illustration and Map.)

THE FIRST MORNING OF 1860.

ROUNDABOUT PAPERS.—No. 1.

_On a Lazy Idle Boy._

CONTENTS of No. 2.

FEBRUARY, 1860.

NIL NISI BONUM.

INVASION PANICS.

TO GOLDENHAIR (FROM HORACE). By THOMAS HOOD.

FRAMLEY PARSONAGE. Chapters 4, 5 and 6.

TITHONUS. By ALFRED TENNYSON.

WILLIAM HOGARTH: PAINTER, ENGRAVER, AND PHILOSOPHER. Essays on the Man,

the Work, and the Time.—_I. Little Boy Hogarth._

UNSPOKEN DIALOGUE. By R. MONCKTON MILNES. (With an Illustration.)

STUDIES IN ANIMAL LIFE. Chapter 2.

CURIOUS IF TRUE. (Extract from a Letter from Richard Whittingham, Esq.)

LIFE AMONG THE LIGHTHOUSES.

LOVEL THE WIDOWER. Chapter 2. (With an Illustration.)

AS ESSAY WITHOUT END.

NOTICE TO CORRESPONDENTS.

⁂ _Communications for the Editor should be addressed to the care of

Messrs. SMITH, ELDER AND CO., 65, Cornhill, and not to the Editor’s

private residence. The Editor cannot be responsible for the return of

rejected contributions._

THE CORNHILL MAGAZINE.

MARCH, 1860.

A Few Words on Junius and Macaulay.

The “secret of Junius” has been kept until, like over-ripe wines, the

subject has lost its flavour. Languid indeed is the disposition of mind

in which any, except a few veterans who still prefer the old post-road to

the modern railway, take up an essay or an article professing to throw

new light on that wearisome mystery, or to add some hitherto unknown

name to the ghostly crowd of candidates for that antiquated prize. And

yet there is a deep interest about the inquiry, after all, to those

who, from any special cause, are induced to overcome the feeling of

satiety which it at first excites, and plunge into the controversy with

the energy of their grandfathers. The real force and virulence of those

powerful writings, unrivalled then, and scarcely equalled since, let

critics say what they may; the strangeness of the fact that none of the

quick-sighted, unscrupulous, revengeful men who surrounded Junius at the

time of his writing, who brushed past him in the street, drank with him

at dinner, sat opposite him in the office, could ever attain to even a

probable conjecture of his identity; the irresistible character of the

external evidence which fixes the authorship on Francis, contrasted with

those startling internal improbabilities which make the Franciscan theory

to this day the least popular, although the learned regard it as all

but established—the eccentric, repulsive, “dour” character of Francis

himself, and the kind of pertinacious longing which besets us to know

the interior of a man who shuts himself up against his fellow-men in

fixed disdain and silence:—these are powerful incentives, and produce

an attraction, of which we are sometimes ourselves ashamed, towards the

occupation of treading over and over again this often beaten ground of

literary curiosity.

Never have I felt this more strongly, than when accident led me, a few

years ago, into Leigh and Sotheby’s sale-room, when the library of Sir

Philip Francis was on view previous to auction. I know not whether any

reader will sympathize with me in what I am about to say: but to me

there is a solemn and rather oppressive feeling, which attends these

exposures of books for sale, where the death is recent, and where the

owner and collector was a man of this world, taking an interest in the

everyday literature which occupies myself and those around me. There

stands his copy of a memoir of some one whom both he and I knew well—he

had just had time to read it, as I see by the date, and with interest,

as I judge by the pencil marks—in what mysteriously separate relation do

he and I now respectively stand towards that common acquaintance? There

is his copy of the latest volume of Travels—he had only accompanied the

adventurer, I see, as far as the First Cataract—what matters now to

him the problem of the Source of the Nile? There is his last unbound

number of the _Quarterly_—he had studied it for many a year: at such a

page, the paper-cutter rested from its work, the marginal notes ended,

the influx of knowledge stopped, the chain of thought was snapped, the

mental perceptions darkened. Can it be, that the active mind of our

fellow-worker ceased then and there from that continuous exertion of

so many years, and became that we wot not of—a living Intelligence,

it may be, but removed into another sphere, with which its habitual

region of labour—the cycle in which it moved and had its being—had no

connection whatever? Must it be (as Charles Lamb so quaintly expresses

it) that “knowledge now comes to him, if it comes at all, by some awkward

experiment of intuition, and no longer by this familiar process of

reading?”

But I do not wish to dally, here and now, with fancies like these. I

only introduced the subject, because Sir Philip Francis’ library was a

good deal calculated to suggest this class of thoughts. He was a great

marginal note-maker. He criticized all that came under his eye, and

especially what related to political events, even to his latest hour.

And—singular enough, yet in accordance with much that we know of him, and

with all that we must suppose, if Junius he was—he had avoided keeping

up, in this way, his connection with the time in which his sinister

and anonymous fame was achieved. So far as I remember, his books of

the Junian period were little noted. He seemed to have exercised his

memory and judgment on the records of Warren Hastings’ trial, the French

Revolution, the revolutionary war—not on those of Burke and Chatham.

This, however, is all by the way, and I must crave pardon for the

digression. I lost myself, and wandered off, it seems, just when I

was reminding the reader that the subsidiary features of the Junian

controversy have now become much more interesting than the old question

of authorship itself, and that it is an admirable exercise for the

intellectual faculties to trace the way in which different lines of

reasoning, wholly distinct and yet severally complete, converge towards

the “Franciscan” conclusion. It was in this light, especially, that the

subject appeared to captivate the mind of that great historical genius

whom we have lost: whom we have just seen in the ample enjoyment of most

rare faculties, the fulness of fame, and the height of fortune, committed

to the soft arms of an euthanasia such as has rarely waited on man. The

“Junian controversy” was with Macaulay an endless subject of ingenious

talk. It suited certain peculiarities of his mind. As he was the very

clearest of writers, so he was also, in a special sense and manner,

the most acute of reasoners. In limited, close historical argument—in

the power to infer a third proposition from a second, a second from a

first—the power to expand a fact, either proved or assumed as a trifling

postulate, into a series of facts, with undeniable cogency—I think we

must go far to find his equal.

If you gave Cuvier a tarsal bone, he constructed you, with unerring

certainty, a humming-bird or an elephant. If you gave Macaulay a casual

passage from a letter, he would divine, with strange precision, the

circumstances of that letter: the occasion of its writing, the reason

of its publication or non-publication, the way in which the writer was

connected with some great event of the time, and in which the letter bore

on that event. But his judgment of the character of the man, or character

of the event, was another matter altogether, and tasked a different order

of faculties, with which we are not now concerned. If we were to seek a

rival to Macaulay in this peculiar province of clear and cogent reasoning

from fact A to fact X, imparting to conjecture the force of truth, we

should probably find him rather among lawyers than writers. In truth, the

historian always retained, and to his great advantage, many of the mental

habits, as well as many of the tastes and joyous recollections of the

bar. He was at once the most Paleyan and the most forensic of historical

inquirers. When he entered the arena of controversy, you might doubt

whether he had donned his armour in the Senate House of Cambridge or the

Assize Court of Lancaster. We may assume (as Coke assumed, lamentingly,

of Bacon) that had he only stuck to the law he would have made a great

lawyer. But it is open to doubt whether, as a judge, he would have done

more of service by the marvellous lucidity with which he would have drawn

out a series of circumstantial evidence before a jury, or more of harm by

his tendency to force the various considerations attending a complicated

case into conformity with his own too complete and too vivid ideal of

that case.

There is no better way towards appreciating the intensity of this

peculiar faculty in Macaulay, than to study the various controversies

into which his essays and his history led him: both the few in which he

vouchsafed a reply, and the many more in which he rested contented with

his first statement—his issues with Dixon, Paget, the High Churchmen,

the Scotch, the Quakers, and the like—and to contrast his method with

that of his antagonists. They all beat the bush, more or less, and

flounder in every variety of historical fallacy. They beg the question,

frame “vicious processes” from their premisses, “pole” themselves on

self-created dilemmas, commit, in short, every error which logicians

denounce in their fantastic terminology—in Macaulay’s reasoning, simply

as such, you will never detect a flaw. His conclusion follows his

premisses as surely and safely as “the night the day.” You may agree

with his antagonist, and not with him; but you will find that what you

consider to be his error lies quite in another direction, and consists,

not in misusing his own facts, but in ignoring or neglecting true and

material facts adduced by his opponents. And beware, O young and ardent

Reader, too readily pleased with seeing a hole picked in a great man’s

coat, lest the triumphant crow, with which these opponents invariably

trumpet their supposed victory, seduce you into premature acquiescence.

By-and-by, when cooler and steadier, you may be inclined to conjecture

that Macaulay’s piercing instinct was right after all, and that the facts

evoked against him are in reality either doubtful or immaterial to the

argument.

It was, as I have said, this fondness and aptitude for following up with

accuracy converging lines of evidence, which gave Macaulay so great an

interest in the Junian controversy, and made him so ready to allude to it

incidentally both in writing and conversation. He contributed, himself,

two, at least, of the most remarkable collateral proofs which tend to fix

the authorship on Francis—the curious error of the English War-office

clerk about the rules of Irish pensions, in the correspondence with Sir

William Draper—the personal hostility of the Francis family towards the

Luttrells, which accounts for the savage treatment by Junius of such

obscure offenders. And now, having used the great historian’s name,

somewhat unfairly, by way of shoeing-horn, to draw on a fresh chapter on

the old controversy, let me place before you another singular instance

of this class of collateral proofs, which, I believe, has not been made

public before, but which greatly excited the curiosity of Macaulay, and

which he would have followed out—if ever he had taken up the question

again—with all the force of his inductive mind.

In one of the early letters of Woodfall’s collection, under the signature

“Bifrons” (April 23, 1768: vol. ii. p. 175, of Bohn’s Edition), the

writer, after accusing the Duke of Grafton of being a ‘casuist,’ proceeds

as follows:—

“I am not deeply read in authors of that professed title: but _I remember

seeing_ Busenbaum, Suares, Molina, and a score of other Jesuitical books,

burnt at Paris, for their sound casuistry, by the hand of the common

hangman.”

I shall assume at once that Bifrons was the same writer as Junius. The

general reasons for the assumption are familiar to those versed in the

controversy. And even were those general grounds of identity less strong

than they are, every one would allow that to prove that Francis was

Bifrons, would go a long way towards proving him Junius.

A passage so pregnant with suggestion has of course provoked abundant

comment: but all of the loosest description. No one seems to have taken

the pains to follow out for himself a hint pointing to conclusions of so

much importance, both negative and affirmative.

Mr. W. H. Smith, the recent editor of the _Grenville Papers_, thus

presses it into the service of his theory, attributing the authorship of

Junius to Lord Temple:

“The ceremony here alluded to _probably_ took place in or about the year

1732, when the disputes between the King of France and his parliaments,

relative to the Jesuits, had arrived at the highest point of acrimony.

Several burnings of obnoxious and prohibited books and writings

are described by cotemporary authorities at this time; and as Lord

Temple, then Richard Grenville, was in France, and chiefly at Paris,

from the autumn of 1731 to the spring of 1733, he had, consequently,

many opportunities of witnessing the ceremonies of the burning of

‘scores of Jesuitical books’ by the common hangman, as described by

Junius.”—(_Introductory notes relating to the authorship of Junius_, p.

cxliv.)

Mr. Smith is scarcely so familiar with the details of French as of

English history. No doubt books were publicly burnt in Paris about the

time he mentions: but the books were Jansenist, not Jesuit: the letters

concerning the Miracles of M. de Paris, the Nouvelles Ecclésiastiques,

and the like—not the works of the Casuists. In 1732, the Jesuits were the

executioners: their turn, as victims, came a generation later.

A writer, who endeavours to establish a claim for Lord Lyttelton, is

nearer the mark: but, unluckily, just misses it:——

“We may assume,” says he, “that this burning took place in 1764, as it

was in that year that Choiseul suppressed the Jesuits. Thomas Lyttelton

was on the continent during the whole of 1764, and for part of the time

resided at Paris.”

The burning of books, so accurately described by Bifrons, took place,

beyond a doubt, as we shall presently see, on August the 7th, 1761. Now

this date raises a curious question, which is indicated, but in a very

careless manner, by Mr. Wade (in his notes to Junius, Bohn’s edition):——

“It may be doubted, indeed, whether Bifrons was an Englishman, or _even_

an Irishman: _he certainly could not have been a British subject in

1761, unless he was a prisoner of war: for in that year we were at war

with France_. But if a prisoner of war, how unlikely that he could be at

Paris to witness an _auto-da-fé_ of heretical works: he would have been

confined in the interior of the kingdom, not left at large to indulge his

curiosity in the capital.”

Now, assuming (as all these writers do), that Bifrons-Junius actually saw

what he says he saw, how does the circumstance bear on the claims of the

several candidates?

What was Lyttelton in August, 1761? An Eton boy, enjoying his holidays.

Where was Lord Temple? At Stowe (see the _Grenville Letters_) caballing

with Pitt.

Where was Burke? At Battersea, preparing to join Gerard Hamilton in

Ireland.

Where were Burke the younger, Lord George Sackville, and the rest of the

illustrious persons implicated in some people’s suspicions? Not in Paris,

we may safely answer, without pursuing our inquiry farther.

But it is undoubtedly possible that Bifrons-Junius, after all, did not

himself see the _auto-da-fé_ in question: he may have heard of it, or

read of it, and may have described himself as a witness for effect, by

way of a flourish, or even by way of false lure to throw inquirers off

the scent.

It would then only remain to inquire, in what way, by what association of

ideas, Bifrons-Junius came to give so circumstantial a description, and

in so prominent a manner, of an occurrence which had passed in a time

of war, almost unmarked by the English public, and which had excited in

England but very little attention or interest since?

Now let us see how either supposition bears on the “Franciscan theory.”

Francis was a very young clerk in Mr. Pitt’s department (which answered

to the Foreign Office of these days) in 1759. In that year he accompanied

Lord Kinnoul on his special mission to Portugal. His lordship returned

in November, 1760, with all his staff, and the youthful Francis (in all

probability) returned to his desk at the same time.

He was certainly at work in the same office between October, 1761, and

August 1768; for he says of himself (_Parl. Debates_, xxii. 97), that he

“possessed Lord Egremont’s favour in the Secretary of State’s Office.”

That nobleman came into office in October, 1761, and died in August,

1763. In the latter year Francis was removed to the War Office, where he

remained until 1772.

Where was he in August, 1761?

According to all reasonable presumption, at work in Pitt’s department.

And yet Lady Francis, in that biographical account of her husband which

was published by Lord Campbell—an account evidently incorrect in some

details, yet authentic in striking particulars, as might be expected from

a lady’s reminiscences of what she heard from an older man—says, “_He was

at the Court of France in Louis XV.’s time, when the Jesuits were driven

out by Madame de Pompadour_.”

This, it will be at once allowed, is a strange instance of coincidence

between Bifrons and the lady. The more striking, because the particulars

of disagreement show that the two stories do not come from the same

source. But how can we account for either story? How came Francis to be

in Paris—if in Paris he were—in time of war?

With a view to solve this question to my own satisfaction, I once

consulted the State Paper Office. It happens that during the summer

of 1761, Mr. Hans Stanley was in Paris, on a diplomatic mission, to

negotiate terms of peace with Choiseul. He failed in that object—some

folks thought Mr. Pitt never meant he should succeed—and returned home

in _September_ of that year. His correspondence with Pitt, as Secretary

of State, is preserved in the office aforesaid. He seems to have had the

ordinary staff of assistants from Pitt’s department: but I could not find

any record of their names. His despatches are entirely confined to the

subject of the negotiation on which he was engaged, _with one exception_.

He seems, for some reason or other, to have taken much interest in the

affair of the Jesuits. On August 10, he writes at length on the whole

of that matter. To his despatch is annexed a careful _précis_, in

Downing Street language, of the history of the Jesuits’ quarrel with the

parliament: evidently drawn up by one of his subordinates. Enclosed in

this _précis_ is the original printed _Arrêt de la Cour du Parlement,

du 6 Août_, 1761, condemning _Molina_, _de Justitiâ et Jure_; _Suares_,

_Defensio Fidei Catholicæ_; _Busenbaum_, _Theologia Moralis_; and several

other books of the same class, to be _lacérés et brûlés en la cour du

Palais_. And a MS. note at the foot of the _Arrêt_ states that the books

were burnt on the 7th accordingly.

Thus much, therefore, is all but certain; some member of Mr. Stanley’s

mission, or other confidential subordinate, was present in the _Cour du

Palais_ when that _arrêt_ was executed, and reported it to his principal,

who reported it to Mr. Pitt: and Francis was at that time a clerk in

Pitt’s office, which was in constant communication with Stanley’s

mission. We do not know the names of the individual clerks who were

attached to that mission, or passed backwards and forwards between Paris

and London in connection with it. But we do know that Francis had been

twice employed in a similar way (to accompany General Bligh’s expedition

to Cherbourg, and Lord Kinnoul’s mission to Portugal). Evidently,

therefore, he was very likely to be thus employed again. He may then

assuredly have witnessed with his own bodily eyes what no Englishman,

unconnected with that mission, could well have witnessed: may have stood

on the steps of the _Palais de Justice_, watched the absurd execution

taking place in the courtyard below, and treasured up the details as food

for his sarcastic spirit; or (to take the other supposition) he may have

read at his desk in the office that curious despatch of Mr. Stanley’s;

may have retained it in his tenacious memory; and, writing a few years

afterwards, may have thought proper, for the sake of effect, to represent

himself as an eye-witness of what he only knew by reading.

All this I once detailed to Macaulay, who, as I have said, was much

interested by the argument, and took an eager part in discussing it. But

one circumstance (I said) perplexed me, and seemed to interfere with

the probabilities of the case. How came Junius, whose excessive fear

of detection betrays itself throughout so much of his correspondence,

and led him to employ all manner of shifts and devices for the sake of

concealment, to give the public, as if in mere bravado, such a key to his

identity as this little piece of autobiography affords?

The answer is plain, replied Macaulay on the instant, with one of those

electric flashes of rapid perception which seemed in him to pass direct

from the brain to the eye. The letter of Bifrons is one of Junius’s

earliest productions—its date, half-a-year before the formidable

signature of Junius was adopted at all. The first letter so signed is

dated in _November, 1768_. In _April_, the writer had neither earned

his fame, nor incurred his personal danger. A mere unknown scatterer

of abuse, he could have little or no fear of directing inquiry towards

himself.

But (he added) I much prefer your first supposition to your second. It is

not only the most picturesque, but it is really the most probable. And

unless the contrary can be shown, I shall believe in the actual presence

of the writer at the burning of the books. Remember, this fact explains

what otherwise seems inexplicable, Lady Francis’s imperfect story, that

her husband “_was at the court of France when Madame de Pompadour drove

out the Jesuits_.” Depend on it, you have caught Junius in the fact.

Francis was _there_.

William Hogarth:

PAINTER, ENGRAVER, AND PHILOSOPHER.

_Essays on the Man, the Work, and the Time._

II.—MR. GAMBLE’S APPRENTICE.

How often have I envied those who—were not my envy dead and buried—would

now be sixty years old! I mean the persons who were born at the

commencement of the present century, and who saw its glories evolved

each year with a more astonishing grandeur and brilliance, till they

culminated in that universal “transformation scene” of ’15. For the

appreciation of things began to dawn on me only in an era of internecine

frays and feuds:—theological controversies, reform agitations,

corporation squabbles, boroughmongering debates, and the like: a time

of sad seditions and unwholesome social misunderstandings; Captain Rock

shooting tithe-proctors in Ireland yonder; Captain Swing burning hayricks

here; Captains Ignorance and Starvation wandering up and down, smashing

machinery, demolishing toll-bars, screeching out “Bread or blood!” at the

carriage-windows of the nobility and gentry going to the drawing-room,

and otherwise proceeding the wretchedest of ways for the redress of their

grievances. Surely, I thought, when I began to think at all, I was born

in the worst of times. Could that stern nobleman, whom the mob hated,

and hooted, and pelted—could the detested “Nosey,” who was beset by a

furious crowd in the Minories, and would have been torn off his horse,

perchance slain, but for the timely aid of Chelsea Pensioners and City

Marshalmen,—and who was compelled to screen his palace windows with iron

shutters from onslaughts of Radical macadamites—could _he_ be that grand

Duke Arthur, Conqueror and Captain, who had lived through so much glory,

and had been so much adored an idol? Oh, to have been born in 1800! At

six, I might just have remembered the mingled exultation and passionate

grief of Trafalgar; have seen the lying in state at Greenwich, the great

procession, and the trophied car that bore the mighty admiral’s remains

to his last home beneath the dome of Paul’s. I might have heard of the

crowning of the great usurper of Gaul: of his putting away his Creole

wife, and taking an emperor’s daughter; of his congress at Erfurt,—and

Talma, his tragedian, playing to a pit full of kings, of his triumphal

march to Moscow, and dismal melting away—he and his hosts—therefrom; of

his last defeat and spectral appearance among us—a wan, fat, captive

man, in a battered cocked hat, on the poop of an English war-ship in

Plymouth Sound—just before his transportation to the rock appointed to

him to eat his heart upon. I envied the nurse who told upon her fingers

the names of the famous victories of the British army under WELLINGTON in

Spain; Vimieira, Talavera, Vittoria, Salamanca, Ciudad Rodrigo, Badajos,

Fuentes d’Onore,—_mille e tre_; in fine—at last, WATERLOO. Why had I not

lived in that grand time, when the very history itself was acting? Strong

men there were who lived before Agamemnon; but for the accident of a few

years, I might have seen, at least, Agamemnon in the flesh. ’Tis true,

I knew then only about the rejoicings and fireworks, the bell-ringings,

and thanksgiving sermons, the Extraordinary Gazettes, and peerages and

ribbons bestowed in reward for those deeds of valour. I do not remember

that I was told anything about Walcheren, or about New Orleans; about

the trade driven by the cutters of gravestones, or the furnishers of

funeral urns, broken columns, and extinguished torches; about the sore

taxes, and the swollen national debt. So I envied; and much disdained the

piping times of peace descended to me; and wondered if the same soldiers

I saw or heard about, with scarcely anything more to do than lounge on

Brighton Cliff, hunt up surreptitious whisky-stills, expectorate over

bridges, and now and then be lapidated at a contested election, could

be the descendants of the heroes who had swarmed into the bloody breach

at Badajos, and died, shoulder to shoulder, on the plateau of Mont St.

Jean.

[Illustration: MR. GAMBLE’S APPRENTICE.]

Came 1848, with its revolutions, barricades, states of siege, movements

of vast armies, great battles and victories, with their multiplied

hecatombs of slain even; but they did not belong to us; victors and

vanquished were aliens; and I went on envying the people who had heard

the Tower guns fire, and joybells ring, who had seen the fireworks,

and read the Extraordinary Gazettes during the first fifteen years of

the century! Was I never to live in the history of England? Then, as

you all remember, came the great millennium or peace year ’51. Did not

sages deliberate as to whether it would not be better to exclude warlike

weapons from the congress of industry in Hyde Park? By the side of Joseph

Paxton with his crystal verge there seemed to stand a more angelic

figure, waving wide her myrtle wand, and striking universal peace through

sea and land. It was to be, we fondly imagined, as the immortal blind man

of Cripplegate sang:—

“No war or battle’s sound

Was heard the world around:

The idle spear and shield were high uphung,

The hookèd chariot stood

Unstain’d with hostile blood,

The trumpet spake not to the armèd throng;

And kings sate still with awful eye,

As if they sorely knew their Sovereign Lord was by.”

O blind man! it was but for an instant. The trodden grass had scarcely

begun to grow again where nave and transept had been, when the wicked

world was all in a blaze; and then the very minstrels of peace began to

sharpen swords and heat shot red-hot about the Holy Places; and then the

Guards went to Gallipoli, and farther on to Bulgaria, and farther on to

Old Fort; and the news of the Alma, Inkermann, Balaklava, the Redan, the

Tchernaya, the Mamelon, the Malakhoff came to us, hot and hot, and we

were all living in the history of England. And lo! it was very much like

the history of any other day in the year—or in the years that had gone

before. The movements of the allied forces were discussed at breakfast,

over the sipping of coffee, the munching of muffins, and the chipping

of eggs. Newspaper-writers, parliament-men, club-orators took official

bungling or military mismanagement as their cue for the smart leader of

the morrow, the stinging query to Mr. Secretary at the evening sitting,

or the bow-window exordium in the afternoon; and then everything went on

pretty much as usual. We had plenty of time and interest to spare for the

petty police case, the silly scandal, the sniggering joke of the day. The

cut of the coat and the roasting of the mutton, the non-adhesiveness of

the postage-stamp, or the misdemeanors of the servant-maid, were matters

of as relative importance to us as the great and gloomy news of battle

and pestilence from beyond sea. At least I lived in actual history, and

my envy was cured for ever.

I have often thought that next to Asclepiades, the comic cynic,[1]

Buonaparte Smith was the greatest philosopher that ever existed. B.

Smith was by some thought to have been the original of Jeremy Diddler.

He was an inveterate borrower of small sums. On a certain Wednesday in

1821, _un sien-ami_ accosted him. Says the friend: “Smith, have you heard

that Buonaparte is dead?” To which retorts the philosopher: “Buonaparte

be ——!” but I disdain to quote his irreverent expletive—“Buonaparte

be somethinged. _Can you lend me ninepence?_” What was the history of

Europe or its eventualities to Buonaparte Smith? The immediate possession

of three-fourths of a shilling was of far more importance to him than

the death of that tremendous exile in his eyrie in the Atlantic Ocean,

thousands of miles away. Thus, too, I daresay it was with a certain

small philosopher, who lived through a very exciting epoch of the

history of England: I mean LITTLE BOY HOGARTH. It was his fortune to see

the first famous fifteen years of the eighteenth century, when there

were victories as immense as Salamanca or Waterloo; when there was a

magnificent parallel to Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington, existent,

in the person of John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough. I once knew a

man who had lived in Paris, and throughout the Reign of Terror, in a

second floor of the Rue St. Honoré. “What did you do?” I asked, almost

breathlessly, thinking to hear of tumbrils, Carmagnoles, gibbet-lanterns,

conventions, _poissarde_-revolts, and the like. “_Eh! parbleu_,” he

answered, “_je m’occupais d’ornithologie_.” This philosopher had been

quietly birdstuffing while royalty’s head was rolling in the gutter, and

Carrier was drowning his hundreds at Nantes. To this young Hogarth of

mine, what may Marlborough and his great victories, Anne and her “silver

age” of poets, statesmen, and essayists, have been? Would the War of

the Succession assist young William in learning his accidence? Would

their High Mightinesses of the States-General of the United Provinces

supply him with that fourpence he required for purchases of marbles or

sweetmeats? What had Marshal Tallard to do with his negotiations with

the old woman who kept the apple-stall at the corner of Ship Court?

What was the Marquis de Guiscard’s murderous penknife compared with

that horn-handled, three-bladed one, which the Hebrew youth in Duke’s

Place offered him at the price of twentypence, and which he could not

purchase, _faute de quoi_? At most, the rejoicings consequent on the

battles of Blenheim or Ramillies, or Oudenarde or Malplaquet, might have

saved William from a whipping promised him for the morrow; yet, even

under those circumstances, it is painful to reflect that staying out

too late to see the fireworks, or singeing his clothes at some blazing

fagot, might have brought upon him on that very morrow a castigation more

unmerciful than the one from which he had been prospectively spared.

Every biographer of Hogarth that I have consulted—and I take this

opportunity to return my warmest thanks to the courteous book distributor

at the British Museum who, so soon as he sees me enter the Reading

Room, proceeds, knowing my errand, to overwhelm me with folios, and

heap up barricades of eighteenth century lore round me—every one of the

biographers, Nichols, Steevens, Ireland, Trusler, Phillips, Cunningham,

the author of the article “Thornhill,” in the _Biographia Britannica_—the

rest are mainly copyists from one another, often handing down blunders

and perpetuating errors—every Hogarthian Dryasdust makes a clean leap

from the hero’s birth and little schoolboy noviciate to the period of

his apprenticeship to Ellis Gamble the silversmith. Refined Mr. Walpole,

otherwise very appreciative of Hogarth, flirting over the papers he

got from Vertue’s widow, indites some delicate manuscript for the

typographers of his private press at Strawberry Hill, and tells us that

the artist, whom he condescends to introduce into his _Anecdotes of

Painting_, was bound apprentice to a “mean engraver of arms upon plate.”

I see nothing mean in the calling which Benvenuto Cellini (they say),

and Marc Antonio Raimondi (it is certain), perhaps Albert Durer, too,

followed for a time. I have heard of great artists who did not disdain

to paint dinner plates, soup tureens, and apothecary’s jars. Not quite

unknown to the world is one Rafaelle Sanzio d’Urbino, who designed

tapestry for the Flemish weavers, or a certain Flaxman, who was of great

service to Mr. Wedgwood, when he began to think that platters and

pipkins might be brought to serve some very noble uses. Horace Walpole,

cleverest and most refined of _dilettanti_—who could, and did say the

coarsest of things in the most elegant of language—you were not fit to be

an Englishman. Fribble, your place was in France. Putative son of Orford,

there seems sad ground for the scandal that some of Lord Fanny’s blood

flowed in your veins; and that Carr, Lord Hervey, was your real papa. You

might have made a collection of the great King Louis’s shoes, the heels

and soles of which were painted by Vandermeulen with pictures of Rhenish

and Palatinate victories. _Mignon_ of arts and letters, you should have

had a _petite maison_ at Monçeaux or at the Roule. Surrounded by your

_abbés au petit collet_, teacups of _pâte tendre_, fans of chicken-skin

painted by Leleux or Lantara, jewelled snuff-boxes, handsome chocolate

girls, gems and intaglios, the brothers to those in the Museo Borbonico

at Naples, _che non si mostrano alle donne_, you might have been happy.

You were good enough to admire Hogarth, but you didn’t quite understand

him. He was too vigorous, downright, virile for you; and upon my word,

Horace Walpole, I don’t think you understood anything belonging to

England—nor her customs, nor her character, nor her constitution, nor

her laws. I don’t think that you would have been anywhere more in your

element than in France, to make epigrams and orange-flower water, and to

have your head cut off in that unsparing harvest of ’93, with many more

noble heads of corn as clever and as worthless for any purpose of human

beneficence as yours, Horace.

For you see, this poor Old Bailey schoolmaster’s son—this scion of a

line of north-country peasants and swineherds, had in him pre-eminently

that which scholiast Warton called the “ἩΘΟΣ,” the strong sledgehammer

force of Morality, not given to Walpole—not given to you, fribbles of

the present as of the past—to understand. He was scarcely aware of the

possession of this quality himself, Hogarth; and when Warton talked

pompously of the _Ethos_ in his works, the painter went about with a

blank, bewildered face, asking his friends what the doctor meant, and

half-inclined to be angry lest the learned scholiast should be quizzing

him. It is in the probabilities, however, that William had some little

Latin. The dominie in Ship Court did manage to drum some of his grammar

disputations into him, and to the end of his life William Hogarth

preserved a seemly reverence for classical learning. Often has his

etching-needle scratched out some old Roman motto or wise saw upon the

gleaming copper. A man need not flout and sneer at the classics because

he knows them not. He need not declare Parnassus to be a molehill,

because he has lost his alpenstock and cannot pay guides to assist him

in that tremendous ascent. There is no necessity to gird at Pyrrha, and

declare her to be a worthless jade, because she has never braided her

golden hair for you. Of Greek I imagine W. H. to have been destitute;

unless, with that ingenious special pleading, which has been made use of

to prove that Shakspeare was a lawyer, apothecary, Scotchman, conjuror,

poacher, scrivener, courtier—what you please—we assume that Hogarth

was a Hellenist because he once sent, as a dinner invite to a friend, a

card on which he had sketched a knife, fork, and pasty, and these words,

“Come and Eta Beta Pi.” No wonder the ἩΘΟΣ puzzled him. He was not deeply

learned in anything save human nature, and of this knowledge even he

may have been half unconscious, thinking himself to be more historical

painter than philosopher. He never was a connoisseur. He was shamefully

disrespectful to the darkened daubs which the picture-quacks palmed on

the curious of the period as genuine works of the old masters. He painted

“Time smoking a picture,” and did not think much of the collection of

Sir Luke Schaub. His knowledge of books was defective; although another

scholiast (not Warton) proved, in a most learned pamphlet, that he had

illustrated, _sans le savoir_, above five hundred passages in Horace,

Virgil, Juvenal, and Ovid. He had read Swift. He had illustrated and

evidently understood Hudibras. He was afraid of Pope, and only made a

timid, bird-like, solitary dash at him in one of his earliest _charges_;

and, curiously, Alexander the Great of Twickenham seemed to be afraid of

Hogarth, and shook not the slightest drop of his gall vial over him. What

a quarrel it might have been between the acrimonious little scorpion of

“Twitnam,” and the sturdy bluebottle of Leicester Fields! Imagine Pope

_versus_ Hogarth, pencil against pen; not when the painter was old and

feeble, half but not quite doting indeed, as when he warred with Wilkes

and Churchill, but in the strength and pride of his swingeing satire.

Perhaps William and Alexander respected one another; but I think there

must have been some tacit “hit me and I’ll hit you” kind of rivalry

between them, as between two cocks of two different schools who meet now

and then on the public promenades—meet with a significant half-smile and

a clenching of the fist under the cuff of the jacket.

To the end of his life Hogarth could not spell; at least, his was not

the orthography expected from educated persons in a polite age. In

almost the last plate he engraved, the famous portrait of Churchill as

a Bear, the “lies,” with which the knots of Bruin’s club are inscribed,

are all “lyes.” This may be passed over, considering how very lax and

vague were our orthographical canons not more than a century ago, and

how many ministers, divines, poets—nay, princes, and crowned heads,

and nabobs—permitted themselves greater liberties than “lye” for “lie”

in the Georgian era. At this I have elsewhere hinted, and I think the

biographers of Hogarth are somewhat harsh in accusing him of crass

ignorance, when he only wrote as My Lord Keeper, or as Lady Betty, or

as his grace the Archbishop was wont to write. Hogarth, too, was an

author. He published a book—to say nothing of the manuscript notes of his

life he left. The whole structure, soul, and strength of the _Analysis

of Beauty_ are undoubtedly his; although he very probably profited by

the assistance—grammatical as well as critical—of some of the clerical

dignitaries who loved the good man. That he did so has been positively

asserted; but it is forestalling matters to trot out an old man’s hobby,

when our beardless lad is not bound ’prentice yet. I cannot, however,

defend him from the charges of writing “militia,” “milicia,” “Prussia,”

“Prusia”—why didn’t he hazard “Prooshia” at once?[2]—“knuckles,”

“nuckles”—oh, fie!—“Chalcedonians,” “Calcidonians;” “pity,” “pitty;”

and “volumes,” “volumns.” It is somewhat strange that Hogarth himself

tells us that his first graphic exercise was to “draw the alphabet with

great correctness.” I am afraid that he never succeeded in writing it

very correctly. He hated the French too sincerely to care to learn

_their_ language; and it is not surprising that in the first shop card

he engraved for his master there should be in the French translation of

Mr. Gamble’s style and titles a trifling pleonasm: “bijouxs,” instead of

“bijoux.”

No date of the apprenticeship of Hogarth is anywhere given. We must

fix it by internal evidence. He was out of his time in the South Sea

Bubble year, 1720. On the 29th of April[3] in the same year, he started

in business for himself. The neatness and dexterity of the shop card

he executed for his master forbid us to assume that he was aught but

the most industrious of apprentices. The freedom of handling, the bold

sweep of line, the honest incisive play of the graver manifested in

this performance could have been attained by no Thomas Idle; and we

must, therefore, in justice grant him his full seven years of ’prentice

servitude. Say then that William Hogarth was bound apprentice to Mr.

Ellis Gamble,[4] at the Golden Angel, in Cranbourn Street, Leicester

Fields, in the winter of the year of our Lord, Seventeen hundred and

twelve. He began to engrave arms and cyphers on tankards, salvers, and

spoons, at just about the time that it occurred to a sapient legislature

to cause certain heraldic hieroglyphics surmounted by the Queen’s

crown, and encircled by the words “One halfpenny,” to be engraven on

a metal die, the which being the first newspaper stamp ever known to

our grateful British nation, was forthwith impressed on every single

half-sheet of printed matter issued as a newspaper or a periodical. “Have

you seen the new red stamp?” writes his reverence Doctor Swift. Grub

Street is forthwith laid desolate. Down go _Observators_, _Examiners_,

_Medleys_, _Flying Posts_, and other diurnals, and the undertakers of

the _Spectator_ are compelled to raise the price of their entertaining

miscellany.

One of the last head Assay Masters at Goldsmith Hall told one of

Hogarth’s biographers, when a very—very old man, that he himself had

been ’prentice in Cranbourn Street, and that he remembered very well

William serving his time to Mr. Gamble. The register of the boy’s

indenture should also surely be among the archives of that sumptuous

structure behind the Post Office, where the worthy goldsmiths have such

a sideboard of massy plate, and give such jovial banquets to ministers

and city magnates. And, doubt it not, Ellis Gamble was a freeman, albeit,

ultimately, a dweller at the West-end, and dined with his Company when

the goldsmiths entertained the ministers and magnates of those days.

Yes, gentles; ministers, magnates, kings, czars, and princes were their

guests, and King Charles the Second did not disdain to get tipsy with

Sir Robert Viner, Lord Mayor and Alderman, at Guildhall. The monarch’s

boon companion got so fond of him as to lend him, _dit-on_, enormous sums

of money. More than that, he set up a brazen statue of the royal toper

in the Stocks flower-market at the meeting of Lombard Street and the

Poultry. Although it must be confessed that the effigy had originally

been cast for John Sobieski trampling on the Turk. The Polish hero had a

Carlovingian periwig given to him, and the prostrate and miscreant Moslem

was “improved” into Oliver Cromwell. [Mem.:—A pair of correctional stocks

having given their name to the flower-market; on the other hand, may not

the market have given _its_ name to the pretty, pale, red flowers, very

dear to Cockneys, and called “stocks?”]

How was William’s premium paid when he was bound ’prentice? Be it

remembered that silver-plate engraving, albeit Mr. Walpole of Strawberry

Hill calls it “mean,” was a great and cunning art and mystery. These

engravers claimed to descend in right line from the old ciseleurs and

workers in niello of the middle ages. Benvenuto, as I have hinted,

graved as well as modelled. Marc Antonio flourished many a cardinal’s

hat and tassels on a _bicchiére_ before he began to cut from Rafaelle

and Giulio Romano’s pictures. The engraver of arms on plate was the same

artist who executed delightful arabesques and damascenings on suits of

armour of silver and Milan steel. They had cabalistic secrets, these

workers of the precious, these producers of the beautiful. With the

smiths, “back-hammering” and “boss-beating” were secrets;—parcel-gilding

an especial mystery; the bluish-black composition for niello a recipe

only to be imparted to adepts. With the engravers, the “cross-hatch” and

the “double cypher,” as I cursorily mentioned at the end of the last

chapter, were secrets. A certain kind of cross-hatching went out with

Albert Durer, and had since been as undiscoverable as the art of making

the _real_ ruby tint in glass. No beggar’s brat, no parish _protégé_,

could be apprenticed to this delicate, artistic, and responsible

calling. For in graving deep, tiny spirals of gold and silver curl away

from the trenchant tool, and there is precious ullage in chasing and

burnishing—spirals and ullage worth money in the market. Ask the Jews

in Duke’s Place, who sweat the guineas in horsehair bags, and clip the

Jacobuses, and rasp the new-milled money with tiny files, if there be not

profit to be had from the minutest surplusage of gold and silver.

Goldsmiths and silversmiths were proud folk. They pointed to George

Heriot, King James’s friend, and the great things he did. They pointed

to the peerage. Did not a Duke of Beaufort, in 1683, marry a daughter of

Sir Josiah Child, goldsmith and banker? Was not Earl Tylney, his son,

half-brother to Dame Elizabeth Howland, mother of a Duchess of Bedford,

one of whose daughters married the Duke of Bridgewater, another, the

Earl of Essex? Was not Sir William Ward, goldsmith, father to Humble

Ward, created Baron Ward by Charles I.? and from him springs there

not the present Lord Dudley and Ward?[5] O you grand people who came

over with the Conqueror, where would you be now without your snug city

marriages, your comfortable alliances with Cornhill and Chepe? Leigh

of Stoneleigh comes from a lord mayor of Queen Bess’s time. Fulke

Greville, Lord Brooke, married an alderman’s daughter two years ere

Hogarth was apprenticed. The ancestor to the Lords Clifton was agent

to the London Adventurers in Oliver’s time, and acquired his estate

in their service. George the Second’s Earl of Rockingham married the

daughter of Sir Henry Furnese, the money-lender and stock-jobber. The

great Duke of Argyll and Greenwich married a lord mayor’s niece. The

Earl of Denbigh’s ancestor married the daughter of Basil Firebrace, the

wine merchant. Brewers, money-scriveners, Turkey merchants, Burgomasters

of Utrecht’s daughters,—all these married blithely into the _haute

pairie_. If I am wrong in my genealogies, ’tis Daniel Defoe who is to

blame, not I; for that immortal drudge of literature is my informant.

Of course such marriages never take place now. Alliances between the

_sacs et parchemins_ are never heard of. Mayfair never meets the Mansion

House, nor Botolph Lane Belgravia, save at a Ninth of November banquet.

I question if I am not inopportune, and impertinent even, in hinting at

the dukes and belted earls who married the rich citizens’ daughters, were

it not that by and by ’prentice Hogarth will paint some scenes from a

great life drama full of Warton’s ἩΘΟΣ, called _Marriage à la Mode_. Ah!

those two perspectives seen through the open windows! In the first, the

courtyard of the proud noble’s mansion; in the last, busy, mercantile

London Bridge: court and city, city and court, and which the saddest

picture!

Dominie Hogarth had but a hard time of it, and must have been pinched

in a gruesome manner to make both ends meet. That dictionary of his,

painfully compiled, and at last with infinite care and labour completed,

brought no grist to the mill in Ship Court. The manuscript was placed

in the hands of a bookseller, who did what booksellers often do when one

places manuscripts in their hands. He let it drop. “The booksellers,”

writes Hogarth himself, “used my father with great cruelty.” In his

loving simplicity he tells us that many of the most eminent and learned

persons in England, Ireland, and Scotland, wrote encomiastic notices of

the erudition and diligence displayed in the work, but all to no purpose.

I suppose the bookseller’s final answer was similar to that Hogarth has

scribbled in the Manager Rich’s reply to Tom Rakewell, in the prison

scene:—“Sir, I have read your play, and it will not _doo_.” A dreadful,

heartrending trade was average authorship, even in the “silver age” of

Anna Augusta. A lottery, if you will: the prizeholders secretaries of

state, ambassadors, hangers-on to dukes and duchesses, gentlemen ushers

to baby princesses, commissioners of hackney coaches or plantations;

but innumerable possessors of blanks. Walla Billa! they were in evil

case. For them the garret in Grub or Monmouth Street, or in Moorfields;

for them the Welshwoman dunning for the milkscore; for them the dirty

bread flung disdainfully by bookselling wretches like Curll. For them

the shrewish landlady, the broker’s man, the catchpole, the dedication

addressed to my lord, and which seldom got beyond his lacquey;—hold! let

me mind my Hogarth and his silver-plate engraving. Only a little may I

touch on literary woes when I come to the picture of the _Distressed

Poet_. For the rest, the calamities of authors have been food for the

commentaries of the wisest and most eloquent of their more modern

brethren, and my bald philosophizings thereupon can well be spared.

But this premium, this indenture money, this ’prentice fee for young

William: _unde derivatur_? In the beginning, as you should know, this

same ’prentice fee was but a sort of “sweetener,” peace-offering, or

_pot de vin_ to the tradesman’s wife. The ’prentice’s mother slipped a

few pieces into madam’s hand when the boy put his finger on the blue

seal. The money was given that mistresses should be kind to the little

lads; that they should see that the trenchers they scraped were not quite

bare, nor the blackjacks they licked quite empty; that they should give

an eye to the due combing and soaping of those young heads, and now and

then extend a matronly ægis, lest Tommy or Billy should have somewhat

more cuffing and cudgelling than was quite good for them. By degree this

gift money grew to be demanded as a right; and by-and-by comes thrifty

Master Tradesman, and pops the broad pieces into his till, calling

them premium. Poor little shopkeepers in this “silver age” will take a

’prentice from the parish for five pounds, or from an acquaintance that

is broken, for nothing perhaps, and will teach him the great arts and

mysteries of sweeping out the shop, sleeping under the counter, fetching

his master from the tavern or the mughouse when a customer comes in,

or waiting at table; but a rich silversmith or mercer will have as

much as a thousand pounds with an apprentice. There is value received

on either side. The master is, and generally feels, bound to teach his

apprentice _everything_ he knows, else, as worthy Master Defoe puts it,

it is “somewhat like Laban’s usage to Jacob, viz. keeping back the

beloved Rachel, whom he served seven years for, and putting him off with

a blear-eyed Leah in her stead;” and again, it is “sending him into the

world like a man out of a ship set ashore among savages, who, instead

of feeding him, are indeed more ready to eat him up and devour him.”

You have little idea of the state, pomp, and circumstance of a rich

tradesman, when the eighteenth century was young. Now-a-days, when he

becomes affluent, he sells his stock and good-will, emigrates from the

shop-world, takes a palace in Tyburnia or a villa at Florence, and denies

that he has ever been in trade at all. Retired tailors become country

squires, living at “Places” and “Priories.” Enriched ironmongers and

their families saunter about Pau, and Hombourg, and Nice, passing for

British Brahmins, from whose foreheads the yellow streak has never been

absent since the earth first stood on the elephant, and the elephant on

the tortoise, and the tortoise on nothing that I am aware of, save the

primeval mud from which you and I, and the Great Mogul, and the legless

beggar trundling himself along in a gocart, and all humanity, sprang. But

then, Anna D. G., it was different. The tradesman was nothing away from

his shop. In it he was a hundred times more ostentatious. He may have

had his country box at Hampstead, Highgate, Edmonton, Edgeware; but his

home was in the city. Behind the hovel stuffed with rich merchandise,

sheltered by a huge timber bulk, and heralded to passers by an enormous

sheet of iron and painters’ work—his Sign—he built often a stately

mansion, with painted ceilings, with carved wainscoting or rich tapestry

and gilt leather-work, with cupboards full of rich plate, with wide

staircases, and furniture of velvet and brocade. To the entrance of the

noisome _cul-de-sac_, leading to the carved and panelled door (with

its tall flight of steps) of the rich tradesman’s mansion, came his

coach—yes, madam, his coach, with the Flanders mares, to take his wife

and daughters for an airing. In that same mansion, behind the hovel of

merchandise, uncompromising Daniel Defoe accuses the tradesman of keeping

servants in blue liveries richly laced, like unto the nobility’s. In that

same mansion the tradesman holds his Christmas and Shrovetide feasts,

the anniversaries of his birthday and his wedding-day, all with much

merrymaking and junketing, and an enormous amount of eating and drinking.

In that same mansion, in the fulness of time and trade, he dies; and in

that same mansion, upon my word, _he lies in state_,—yes, in state: on a

_lit de parade_, under a plumed tester, with flambeaux and sconces, with

blacks and weepers, with the walls hung with sable cloth, et cætera, et

cætera, et cætera.[6] ’Tis not only “Vulture Hopkins” whom a “thousand

lights attend” to the tomb, but very many wealthy tradesmen are so

buried, and with such pomp and ceremony. Not till the mid-reign of George

the Third did this custom expire.

[I should properly in a footnote, but prefer in brackets, to qualify the

expression “hovel,” as applied to London tradesmen’s shops at this time,

1712-20. The majority, indeed, merit no better appellation: the windows

oft-times are not glazed, albeit the sign may be an elaborate and even

artistic performance, framed in curious scroll-work, and costing not

unfrequently a hundred pounds. The exceptions to the structural poverty

of the shops themselves are to be found in the toymen’s—mostly in Fleet

Street,—and the pastrycooks’—mainly in Leadenhall. There is a mania for

toys; and the toyshop people realize fortunes. Horace Walpole bought

his toy-villa at Strawberry Hill—which he afterwards improved into a

Gothic doll’s-house—of a retired _Marchand de Joujoux_. The toy-merchants

dealt in other wares besides playthings. They dealt in cogged dice.

They dealt in assignations and _billet-doux_. They dealt in masks and

dominos. Counsellor Silvertongue may have called at the toyshop coming

from the Temple, and have there learnt what hour the countess would

be at Heidegger’s masquerade. Woe to the wicked city! Thank Heaven we

can go and purchase Noah’s arks and flexible acrobats for our children

now, without rubbing shoulders with Counsellor Silvertongue or Lord

Fanny Sporus, on their bad errands. Frequented as they were by rank and

fashion, the toyshops threw themselves into outward decoration. Many

of these shops were kept by Frenchmen and Frenchwomen, and it has ever

been the custom of that fantastic nation to gild the outside of pills,

be the inside ever so nauseous. Next in splendour to the toyshops were

the pastrycooks. Such a bill as can be seen of the charges for fresh

furnishing one of these establishments about Twelfth Night time! “Sash

windows, all of looking-glass plates; the walls of the shop lined up with

galley-tiles in panels, finely painted in forest-work and figures; two

large branches of candlesticks; three great glass lanterns; twenty-five

sconces against the wall; fine large silver salvers to serve sweetmeats;

large high stands of rings for jellies; painting the ceiling, and gilding

the lanterns, the sashes, and the carved work!” Think of this, Master

Brook! What be your _Cafés des Mille Colonnes_, your Véfours, your Vérys,

your _Maisons-dorées_, after this magnificence? And at what sum, think

you, does the stern censor, crying out against it meanwhile as wicked

luxury and extravagance, estimate this Arabian Nights’ pastrycookery? At

three hundred pounds sterling! Grant that the sum represents six hundred

of our money. The Lorenzos the Magnificent, of Cornhill and Regent

Street, would think little of as many thousands for the building and

ornamentation of their palaces of trade. Not for selling tarts or toys

though. The tide has taken a turn; yet some comfortable reminiscences of

the old celebrity of the city toy and tart shops linger between Temple

Bar and Leadenhall. Farley, you yet delight the young. Holt, Birch,

Button, Purssell, at your sober warehouses the most urbane and beautiful

young ladies—how pale the pasty exhalations make them!—yet dispense the

most delightful of indigestions.]

So he must have scraped this apprenticeship money together, Dominie

Hogarth: laid it by, by cheeseparing from his meagre school fees,

borrowed it from some rich scholar who pitied his learning and his

poverty, or perhaps become acquainted with Ellis Gamble, who may have

frequented the club held at the “Eagle and Child,” in the little Old

Bailey. “A wonderful turn for limning has my son,” I think I hear Dominie

Hogarth cry, holding up some precocious cartoon of William’s. “I doubt

not, sir, that were he to study the humanities of the Italian bustos,

and the just rules of Jesuit’s perspective, and the anatomies of the

learned Albinus, that he would paint as well as Signor Verrio, who hath

lately done that noble piece in the new hall Sir Christopher hath built

for the blue-coat children in Newgate Street.” “Plague on the Jesuits,”

answers honest (and supposititious) Mr. Ellis Gamble. “Plague on all

foreigners and papists, goodman Hogarth. If you will have your lad draw

bustos and paint ceilings, forsooth, you must get one of the great court

lords to be his patron, and send him to Italy, where he shall learn

not only the cunningness of limning, but to dance, and to dice, and to

break all the commandments, and to play on the viol-di-gamby. But if you

want to make an honest man and a fair tradesman of him, Master Hogarth,

and one who will be a loyal subject to the Queen, and hate the French,

you shall e’en bind him ’prentice to me; and I will be answerable for

all his concernments, and send him to church and catechize, and all at

small charges to you.” Might not such a conversation have taken place? I

think so. Is it not very probable that the lad Hogarth being then some

fourteen years old, was forthwith combed his straightest, and brushed

his neatest, and his bundle or his box of needments being made up by the

hands of his loving mother and sisters, despatched westward, and with

all due solemnity of parchment and blue seal, bound ’prentice to Mr.

Ellis Gamble? I am sure, by the way in which he talks of the poor old

Dominie and the dictionary, that he was a loving son. I know he was a

tender brother. Good Ellis Gamble—the lad being industrious, quick, and

dexterous of hand—must have allowed him to earn some journeyman’s wages

during his ’prentice-time; for that probation being out, he set not only

himself, but his two sisters, Mary and Ann, up in business. They were in

some small hosiery line, and William engraved a shop-card for them, which

did not, I am afraid, prosper with these unsubstantial spinsters any more

than did the celebrated lollipop emporium established in _The House with

the Seven Gables_. One sister survived him, and to her, by his will, he

left an annuity of eighty pounds.

Already have I spoken of the Leicester Square gold and silver smith’s

style and titles. It is meet that you should peruse them in full:—

[Illustration]

So to Cranbourn Street, Leicester Fields, is William Hogarth bound for

seven long years. Very curious is it to mark how old trades and old types

of inhabitants linger about localities. They were obliged to pull old

Cranbourn Street and Cranbourn Alley quite down before they could get rid

of the silversmiths, and even now I see them sprouting forth again round

about the familiar haunt; the latest ensample thereof being in the shop

of a pawnbroker—of immense wealth, I presume, who, gorged and fevered by

multitudes of unredeemed pledges, has suddenly astonished New Cranbourn

Street with plate-glass windows, overflowing with plate, jewellery, and

trinkets; buhl cabinets, gilt consoles, suits of armour, antique china,

Pompadour clocks, bronze monsters, and other articles of _virtù_. But

don’t you remember Hamlet’s in the dear old Dædalean, bonnet-building

Cranbourn Alley days?—that long low shop whose windows seemed to have

no end, and not to have been dusted for centuries; those dim vistas of

dish-covers, coffee biggins and centre-pieces. You must think of Crœsus

when you speak of the reputed wealth of Hamlet. His stock was said to be

worth millions. Seven watchmen kept guard over it every night. Half the

aristocracy were in his debt. Royalty itself had gone credit for plate

and jewellery at Hamlet’s. Rest his bones, poor old gentleman, if he be

departed. He took to building and came to grief. His shop is no more, and

his name is but a noise.

In our time, Cranbourn Street and Cranbourn Alley were dingy labyrinths

of dish-covers, bonnets, boots, coffee-shops, and cutlers; but what must

the place have been like in Hogarth’s time? We can have no realizable

conception; for late in George the Third’s reign, or early in George the

Fourth’s, the whole _pâté_ of lanes and courts between Leicester Square

and St. Martin’s Lane had become so shamefully rotten and decayed, that

they half tumbled, and were half pulled down. The labyrinth was rebuilt;

but, to the shame of the surveyors and architects of the noble landlord,

on the same labyrinthine principle of mean and shabby tenements. You

see, rents are rents, little fishes eat sweet, and many a little makes a

mickle. Since that period, however, better ideas of architectural economy

have prevailed; and, although part of the labyrinth remains, there has

still been erected a really handsome thoroughfare from Leicester Square

to Long Acre. As a sad and natural consequence, the shops don’t let,

while the little tenements in the alleys that remain are crowded; but let

us hope that the example of the feverish pawnbroker who has burst out in

an eruption of jewellery and art fabrics, may be speedily followed by

other professors of _bricabrac_.

Gay’s _Trivia_, in miniature, must have been manifest every hour in the

day in Hogarth’s Cranbourn Alley. Fights for the wall must have taken

place between fops. Sweeps and small coalmen must have interfered with

the “nice conduct of a clouded cane.” The beggars must have swarmed here:

the blind beggar, and the lame beggar, the stump-in-the-bowl, and the

woman bent double: the beggar who blew a trumpet—the impudent varlet!—to

announce his destitution;—the beggar with a beard like unto Belisarius,

the beggar who couldn’t eat cold meat, the beggar who had been to Ireland

and the Seven United Provinces—was this “Philip in the tub” that W. H.

afterwards drew?—the beggar in the blue apron, the leathern cap, and the

wen on his forehead, who was supposed to be so like the late Monsieur de

St. Evremonde, Governor of Duck Island; not forgetting the beggar in the

ragged red coat and the black patch over his eye, who by his own showing

had been one of the army that swore so terribly in Flanders, and howled

Tom D’Urfey’s song, “The Queene’s old souldiers, and the ould souldiers

of the Queene.” Then there was the day watchman, who cried the hour

when nobody wanted to hear it, and to whose “half-past one,” the muddy

goose that waddled after him, cried “quack.” And then there must have

been the silent mendicant, of whom Mr. _Spectator_ says (1712), “He has

nothing to sell, but very gravely receives the bounty of the people for

no other merit than the homage due to his manner of signifying to them

that he wants a subsidy.”[7] Said I not truly that the old types _will_

linger in the old localities? What is this silent mendicant but the

“serious poor young man” we have all seen standing mute on the edge of

the kerb, his head downcast, his hands meekly folded before him, himself

attired in speckless but shabby black, and a spotless though frayed white

neckerchief?

Mixed up among the beggars, among the costermongers and hucksters who

lounge or brawl on the pavement, undeterred by fear of barrow-impounding

policemen; among the varlets who have “young lambs to sell”—they have

sold those sweet cakes since Elizabeth’s time;—among the descendants

and progenitors of hundreds of “Tiddy Dolls,” and “Colly Molly Puffs;”

among bailiffs prowling for their prey, and ruffian cheats and

gamesters from the back-waters of Covent Garden; among the fellows

with hares-and-tabors, the matchsellers, the masksellers—for in this

inconceivable period ladies and gentlemen wanted vizors at twelve o’clock

at noon—be it admitted, nevertheless, that the real “quality” ceased

to wear them about the end of William’s reign—among the tradesmen,

wigs awry, and apron-girt, darting out from their shops to swallow

their matutinal pint of wine, or dram of strong waters; among all this

_tohu-bohu_, this Galimatias of small industries and small vices,

chairmen come swaggering and jolting along with the gilded sedans between

poles; and lo! the periwigged, Mechlin-laced, gold-embroidered beau hands

out Belinda, radiant, charming, powdered, patched, fanned, perfumed, who

is come to Cranbourn Alley to choose new diamonds. And more beaux’ shins

are wounded by more whalebone petticoats, and Sir Fopling Flutter treads

on Aramanta’s brocaded _queue_; and the heavens above are almost shut out

by the great projecting, clattering signs. Conspicuous among them is the

“Golden Angel,” kept by Ellis Gamble.

Mark, too, that Leicester Fields were then as now the favourite resort

of foreigners. Green Street, Bear Street, Castle Street, Panton Street,

formed a district called, as was a purlieu in Westminster too, by the

Sanctuary, “Petty France.” Theodore Gardelle, the murderer, lived about

Leicester Fields. Legions of high-dried Mounseers, not so criminal as he,

but peaceable, honest, industrious folk enough, peered out of the garret

windows of Petty France with their blue, bristly gills, red nightcaps,

and filthy indoor gear. They were always cooking hideous messes, and

made the already unwholesome atmosphere intolerable with garlic. They

wrought at water-gilding, clock-making, sign-painting, engraving for book

illustrations—although in this department the Germans and Dutch were

dangerous rivals. A very few offshoots from the great Huguenot colony

in Spitalfields were silk-weavers. There were then as now many savoury,

tasting and unsavoury-smelling French ordinaries; and again, then as now,

some French washerwomen and clearstarchers. But the dwellers in Leicester

Fields slums and in Soho were mainly Catholics frequenting the Sardinian

ambassador’s chapel in Duke Street, Lincoln’s Inn Fields. French

hairdressers and perfumers lived mostly under Covent Garden Piazza, in

Bow Street and in Long Acre. Very few contrived to pass Temple Bar. The

citizens appeared to have as great a horror of them as of the players,

and so far as they could, by law, banished them their bounds, rigorously.

French dancing, fencing, and posture masters, and quack doctors, lived

at the court end of the town, and kept, many of them, their coaches.

Not a few of the grinning, fantastic French community were spies of

the magnificent King Louis. Sunday was the Frenchmen’s great day, and

the Mall in St. James’s park their favourite resort and fashionable

promenade. It answered for them all the purposes which the old colonnade

of the Quadrant was wont to serve, and which the flags of Regent Street

serve now. On Sunday the blue, bristly gills were clean shaven, the

red nightcaps replaced by full-bottomed wigs, superlatively curled and

powdered. The filthy indoor gear gave way to embroidered coats of gay

colours, with prodigious cuffs, and the skirts stiffened with buckram.

Lacquer-hilted swords stuck out behind them. Paste buckles glittered

in their shoon. Glass rings bedecked their lean paws. They held their

_tricornes_ beneath their arms, flourished their canes and inhaled their

snuff with the best beaux on town. We are apt to laugh at the popular old

caricatures of the French Mounseer, and think those engravings unkind,

unnatural, and overdrawn; but just shave me this bearded, moustached,

braided and be-ringed Jules, Gustave, or Adolphe who comes swaggering

to-day from the back of Sherrard Street or Marylebone Street, round by

the County Fire Office into Regent Street; shave me the modern Mounseer

quite clean, clap a periwig on his head, a _chapeau bras_ beneath his

arm, a sword by his side; clothe his shrunken limbs in eighteenth century

costume; or better, see the French comedian in some old comedy at the

_Français_ or the _Odéon_, and you will cry out at once: “There is the

Mounseer whom Hogarth, Gilray, Bunbury, and Rowlandson drew.” And yet

I owe an apology, here, to the Mounseers; for it was very likely some

courteous, albeit grimacing denizen of Petty France who supplied our

Hogarth with the necessary French translation of the gold and silver

smith’s style and titles to engrave on his shop-card.

I am to be pardoned, I hope, for lingering long in Leicester Fields.

I shall have to return to the place often, for William Hogarth much

affected it. In Leicester Fields he lived years afterwards when he was

celebrated and prosperous. Where Pagliano’s Hotel is now, had he his

house, the sign, the “Golden Head,” and not the “Painter’s Head,”

as I have elsewhere put it. There he died. There his widow lived for

many—many years afterwards, always loving and lamenting the great artist

and good man, her husband. It was about Leicester Fields too—nay,

unless I mistake, in Cranbourn Alley itself, that old nutcracker-faced

Nollekens the sculptor pointed out William to Northcote the painter.

“There,” he cried, “see, there’s Hogarth.” He pointed to where stood a

little stout-faced sturdy man in a sky-blue coat, who was attentively

watching a quarrel between two street boys. It was Mr. Mulready’s “Wolf

and the Lamb” story a little before its time. The bigger boy oppressed

the smaller; whereupon Hogarth patted the diminutive victim on the head,

and gave him a coin, and said with something like a naughty word that he

wouldn’t stand it, if he was the small boy: no, not he.

Seven years at cross-hatch and double cypher. Seven years turning and

re-turning salvers and tankards on the leathern pad, and every month

and every year wielding the graver and burnisher with greater strength

and dexterity. What legions of alphabets, in double cypher, he must

have “drawn with great correctness;” what dictionary loads of Latin and

Norman-French mottoes he must have flourished beneath the coats of arms!

Oh, the scutcheons he must have blazoned in the symbolism of lines!

Blank for argent, dots for or, horizontal for azure, vertical for gules,

close-chequer for sable. The griffins, the lions, the dragons, rampant,

couchant, regardant, langued, gorged, he must have drawn! The chevrons,

the fesses, the sinoples of the first! He himself confesses that his

just notions of natural history were for a time vitiated by the constant

contemplation and delineation of these fabulous monsters, and that when

he was out of his time he was compelled to unlearn all his heraldic

zoology. To the end his dogs were very much in the “supporter” style, and

the horses in the illustrations in Hudibras strongly resemble hippogriffs.

He must have been studying, and studying hard, too, at drawing, from the

round and plane during his ’prentice years. Sir Godfrey Kneller had a

kind of academy at his own house in 1711; but Sir James Thornhill did

not establish his till long after Hogarth had left the service of Ellis

Gamble. Hogarth tells us that as a boy he had access to the studio of a

neighbouring painter. Who may this have been? Francis Hoffmann; Hubertz;

Hulzberg, the warden of the Lutheran Church in the Savoy; Samuel Moore

of the Custom House? Perhaps his earliest instructor was some High Dutch

etcher of illustrations living eastwards to be near the booksellers in

Paternoster Row; or perhaps the “neighbouring painter” was an artist in

tavern and shop signs. Men of no mean proficiency wrought in that humble

but lucrative line of emblematic art in Anna’s “silver age.”

That Hogarth possessed considerable graphic powers when he engraved Ellis

Gamble’s shop-card, you have only to glance at the angel holding the

palm above the commercial announcement, to be at once convinced. This

figure, however admirably posed and draped, _may_ have been copied from

some foreign frontispiece. The engraving, however, as an example of pure

line, is excellent. We are left to wonder whether it was by accident or

by design of quaint conceit that the right hand of the angel has a finger

too many.

Of Hogarth’s adventures during his apprenticeship, with the single

exception of his holiday excursion to Highgate, when there was a

battle-royal in a suburban public-house, and when he drew a capital

portrait of one of the enraged combatants, the Muse is dumb. He led, very

probably, the life of nineteen-twentieths of the London ’prentices of

that period: only he must have worked harder and more zealously than the

majority of his fellows. Concerning the next epoch of his life the Muse

deigns to be far more explicit, and, I trust, will prove more eloquent on

your worships’ behalf. I have done with the mists and fogs that envelop

the early part of my hero’s career, and shall be able to trace it now

year by year until his death.

FOOTNOTES

[1] According to Tertullian, Asclepiades, the comic cynic, advocated

riding on cow-back as the most healthful, and especially the most

independent means of locomotion in the world; for, said he, she goes so

slowly that she can never get tired. Wherever there is a field, there is

her banquet; _and you may live on her milk all the way_. But I think that

the most economical and the merriest traveller on record was the Giant

Hurtali (though the Rabbins will have that it was Og, King of Basan), who

sat astride the roof of Noah’s ark _à la_ cockhorse, steering that great

galleon with his gigantic legs, getting his washing for nothing, and

having his victuals handed up to him through the chimney.—See _Menage_

and _Le Pelletier_; _l’Arche de Noé_, c. 25.

[2] This “Prusia” occurred in the dedication of the “March to Finchley”

to Frederick the Great. His friends quizzed him a good deal about the

error, and he undertook to correct it by hand in every proof of the

plate sold. But he soon grew tired of making the mark ~ with a pen over

the single s, and at last had the offensive “Prusia” burnished out

of the copper, and the orthodox “Prussia” substituted. But even then

the quizzers were not tired, and showed him a Prussian thaler bearing

Frederick’s effigy, and the legend of which spoke of him as _Borussiæ

Rex_. ’Twas the story of the old man and his donkey over again.

[3] Till the legislature deprives the people of their “eleven days,” I am

using the old-style calendar.

[4] I have seen it somewhere stated that Gamble was a “silversmith of

eminence,” residing on or near Snow Hill. “_Cela n’empêche pas_,” as the

Hanoverian Queen on her death-bed said to her repentant husband. I see no

reason why Gamble should not have been originally of Snow Hill, and have

emigrated before 1720 to the Court end of the town.

[5] “The Complete English Tradesman,” i. 234.

[6] “Let it be interred after the manner of the country, and the laws

of the place, and the _dignity of the person_. And Ælian tells us that

excellent persons were buried in purple, and men of an ordinary fortune

had their graves only trimmed with branches of olive and mourning

flowers.” So Bishop Taylor in _Holy Dying_. The tide of feeling in this

age of ours sets strongly against mortuary pomp; yet should we remember

that with the old pomps and obsequies of our forefathers much real

charity was mingled. All the money was not spent in wax-tapers and grim

feastings. At the death of a wealthy citizen, hundreds of poor men and

women had complete suits of mourning given to them, and the fragments

of the “funeral baked meats” furnished forth scores of pauper tables

before evensong. Lazarus had his portion when Dives passed away. Now, who

profits by a funeral beyond half a dozen lacqueys, and Messrs. Tressel

and Hatchment, the undertakers?

[7] I can’t resist the opportunity here to tell a story of a Beggar,

the more so, that it made me laugh, and was told me by an Austrian

officer; and Austrian officers are not the most laughter-compelling

people in the world. My informant happened to alight one day at some

post town in Italy, and was at once surrounded by the usual swarm

of beggars, who, of course, fought for the honour (and profit) of

carrying his baggage. Equally, of course, each beggar took a separate

portion of the _impedimenta_—one a hat-box, one an umbrella, and so

on—so that each would claim a separate reward. At the expenditure of

much patience, and some small change, the traveller had at last paid

each extortionate impostor that which was not due to him; when there

approached a reverend, but ragged-looking man, with a long white beard,

and who, with an indescribable look of dirty dignity, held out his hand

like the rest. The traveller had remarked that this patriarch had stood

aloof during the squabble for the luggage, and had moved neither hand

nor foot in pretending to carry it. Naturally, before the traveller

disbursed more coin, he briefly desired the man with the white beard

to define his claim. The reply was, I think, incomparable for cool and

dignified impudence. The patriarch drew himself up to his full height,

placed his right hand on his breast, and in slow and solemn accents made

answer:—“_Ed anche io sono stato presente._” “I, too, was present!”

Sublime beggar!

Mabel.

I.

In the sunlight:—

Little Mab, the keeper’s daughter, singing by the brooklet’s side,

With her playmates singing carols of the gracious Easter-tide;

And the violet and the primrose make sweet incense for the quire,

In the springlight, when the rosebuds hide the thorns upon the briar.

II.

In the lamplight:—

With a proud defiant beauty, Mab, the fallen, flaunts along,

Speaking sin’s words, wildly laughing, she who sang that Paschal song,

And a mother lies a-dying in the cottage far away,

And a father cries to Heaven, “THOU hast said, ‘_I will repay_.’”

III.

In the moonlight:—

By the gravestone in the churchyard, Mabel, where her mother sleeps,

Like the tearful saint of Magdala, an Easter vigil keeps:—

There, trailing cruel thorns, storm-drenched, plaining with piteous

bleat,

The lost lamb (so her mother prayed) and the Good Shepherd meet.

S. R. H.

Studies in Animal Life.

“Authentic tidings of invisible things;

Of ebb and flow, and ever-during power,

And central peace subsisting at the heart

Of endless agitation.”—THE EXCURSION.

CHAPTER III.

A garden wall, and its traces of past life—Not a breath

perishes—A bit of dry moss and its inhabitants—The

“Wheel-bearers”—Resuscitation of Rotifers: drowned into

life—Current belief that animals can be revived after complete

desiccation—Experiments contradicting the belief—Spallanzani’s

testimony—Value of biology as a means of culture—Classification

of animals: the five great types—Criticism of Cuvier’s

arrangement.

Pleasant, both to eye and mind, is an old garden wall, dark with age,

gray with lichens, green with mosses of beautiful hues and fairy elegance

of form: a wall shutting in some sequestered home, far from “the din of

murmurous cities vast:” a home where, as we fondly, foolishly think,

Life must needs throb placidly, and all its tragedies and pettinesses be

unknown. As we pass alongside this wall, the sight of the overhanging

branches suggests an image of some charming nook; or our thoughts wander

about the wall itself, calling up the years during which it has been

warmed by the sun, chilled by the night airs and the dews, and dashed

against by the wild winds of March: all of which have made it quite

another wall from what it was when the trowel first settled its bricks.

The old wall has a past, a life, a story; as Wordsworth finely says of

the mountain, it is “familiar with forgotten years.” Not only are there

obvious traces of age in the crumbling mortar and the battered brick, but

there are traces, not obvious, except to the inner eye, left by every ray

of light, every raindrop, every gust. Nothing perishes. In the wondrous

metamorphosis momently going on everywhere in the universe, there is

_change_, but no _loss_.

Lest you should imagine this to be poetry, and not science, I will touch

on the evidence that every beam of light, or every breath of air, which

falls upon an object, permanently affects it. In photography we see the

effect of light very strikingly exhibited; but perhaps you will object

that this proves nothing more than that light acts upon an iodized

surface. Yet in truth light acts upon, and more or less alters, the

structure of every object on which it falls. Nor is this all. If a wafer

be laid on a surface of polished metal, which is then breathed upon, and

if, when the moisture of the breath has evaporated, the wafer be shaken

off, we shall find that the whole polished surface is not as it was

before, although our senses can detect no difference; for if we breathe

again upon it, the surface will be moist everywhere except on the spot

previously sheltered by the wafer, which will now appear as a spectral

image on the surface. Again and again we breathe, and the moisture

evaporates, but still the spectral wafer reappears. This experiment

succeeds after a lapse of many months, if the metal be carefully put

aside where its surface cannot be disturbed. If a sheet of paper, on

which a key has been laid, be exposed for some minutes to the sunshine,

and then instantaneously viewed in the dark, the key being removed, a

fading spectre of the key will be visible. Let this paper be put aside

for many months where nothing can disturb it, and then in darkness be

laid on a plate of hot metal, the spectre of the key will again appear.

In the case of bodies more highly phosphorescent than paper, the spectres

of many different objects which may have been laid on in succession will,

on warming, emerge in their proper order.[8]

This is equally true of our bodies, and our minds. We are involved in the

universal metamorphosis. Nothing leaves us wholly as it found us. Every

man we meet, every book we read, every picture or landscape we see, every

word or tone we hear, mingles with our being and modifies it. There are

cases on record of ignorant women, in states of insanity, uttering Greek

and Hebrew phrases, which in past years they had heard their masters

utter, without of course comprehending them. These tones had long been

forgotten: the traces were so faint that under ordinary conditions they

were invisible; but the traces were there, and in the intense light of

cerebral excitement they started into prominence, just as the spectral

image of the key started into sight on the application of heat. It is

thus with all the influences to which we are subjected.

If a garden wall can lead our vagabond thoughts into such speculations

as these, surely it may also furnish us with matter for our Studies in

Animal Life? Those patches of moss must be colonies. Suppose we examine

them? I pull away a small bit, which is so dry that the dust crumbles at

a touch; this may be wrapped in a piece of paper—dirt and all—and carried

home. Get the microscope ready, and now attend.

I moisten a fragment of this moss with distilled water. Any water will do

as well, but the use of distilled water prevents your supposing that the

animals you are about to watch were brought in it, and were not already

in the moss. I now squeeze the bit between my fingers, and a drop of

the contained water—somewhat turbid with dirt—falls on the glass slide,

which we may now put on the microscope stage. A rapid survey assures us

that there is no animal visible. The moss is squeezed again; and this

time little yellowish bodies of an irregular oval are noticeable among

the particles of dust and moss. Watch one of these, and presently you

will observe a slow bulging at one end, and then a bulging at the other

end. The oval has elongated itself into a form not unlike that of a fat

caterpillar, except that there is a tapering at one end. Now a forked

tail is visible; this fixes on to the glass, while the body sways to and

fro. Now the head is drawn in—as if it were swallowed—and, suddenly,

in its place are unfolded two broad membranes, having each a circle of

waving _cilia_. The lifeless oval has become a living animal! You have

assisted at a resuscitation, not from death by drowning, but by drying:

the animal has been drowned into life! The unfolded membranes, with

their cilia, have so much the appearance of wheels that the name of

“Wheel-bearer” (_Rotifera_) or “Wheel Animalcule” has been given to the

animal.

The Rotifera (also—and more correctly—called _Rotatoria_) form an

interesting study. Let us glance at their organization:—

[Illustration: Fig. 16.

ROTIFER VULGARIS. A, with the wheels drawn in (at _c_). B, with wheels

expanded; _b_, eye spots; _c_, jaws and teeth; _f_, alimentary canal;

_g_, embryo; _h_, embryo further developed; _i_, water-vascular system;

_k_, vent.]

There are many different kinds of Rotifers, varying very materially in

size and shape; the males, as was stated in the last chapter, being

more imperfectly organized than the females. They may be seen either

swimming rapidly through the water by means of the vibratile cilia

called “wheels,” because the optical effect is very much that of a

toothed-wheel; or crawling along the side of the glass, fastening to it

by the head, and then curving the body till the tail is brought up to the

spot, which is then fastened on by the tail, and the head is set free.

They may also be seen fastened to a weed, or the glass, by the tail, the

body waving to and fro, or thrusting itself straight out, and setting

the wheels in active motion. In this attitude the aspect of the jaws is

very striking. Leuwenhoek mistook it for the pulsation of a heart, which

its incessant rhythm much resembles. The tail, and the upper part of

the body, have a singular power of being drawn out, or drawn in, like

the tube of a telescope. There is sometimes a shell, or carapace, but

often the body is covered only with a smooth firm skin, which, however,

presents decided indications of being segmented.

The first person who described these Rotifers was the excellent old

Leuwenhoek;[9] and his animals were got from the gutter of a house-top.

Since then, they have been minutely studied, and have been shown to

be, not Infusoria, as Ehrenberg imagined, but Crustacea.[10] Your

attention is requested to the one point which has most contributed to the

celebrity of these creatures—their power of resuscitation. Leuwenhoek

described—what you have just witnessed, namely—the slow resuscitation of

the animal (which seemed as dry as dust, and might have been blown about

like any particle of dust,) directly a little moisture was brought to it.

Spallanzani startled the world with the announcement that this process of

drying and moistening—of killing and reviving—could be repeated fifteen

times in succession; so that the Rotifer, whose natural term of life is

about eighteen days, might, it was said, be dried and kept for years,

and at any time revived by moisture. That which seems now no better than

a grain of dust will suddenly awaken to the energetic life of a complex

organism, and may again be made as dust by evaporation of the water.

This is very marvellous: so marvellous that a mind, trained in the

cultivated caution of science, will demand the evidence on which it

is based. Two months ago I should have dismissed the doubt with the

assurance that the evidence was ample and rigorous, and the fact

indisputable. For not only had the fact been confirmed by the united

experience of several investigators: it had stood the test of very severe

experiment. Thus in 1842, M. Doyère published experiments which seemed to

place it beyond scepticism. Under the air-pump he set some moss, together

with vessels containing sulphuric acid, which would absorb every trace of

moisture. After leaving the moss thus for a week, he removed it into an

oven, the temperature of which was raised to 300° Fahrenheit. Yet even

this treatment did not prevent the animals from resuscitating when water

was added.

In presence of testimony like this, doubt will seem next to impossible.

Nevertheless, my own experiments leave me no choice but to doubt. Not

having witnessed M. Doyère’s experiment, I am not prepared to say wherein

its fallacy lies; but that there _is_ a fallacy, seems to me capable of

decisive proof. In M. Pouchet’s recent work[11] I first read a distinct

denial of the pretended resuscitation of the Rotifers; this denial was

the more startling to me, because I had myself often witnessed the

reawakening of these dried animals. Nevertheless, whenever a doubt is

fairly started, we have not done justice to it until we have brought it

to the test of experiment; accordingly I tested this, and quickly came

upon what seems to me the source of the general misconception. Day after

day experiments were repeated, varied, and controlled, and with results

so unvarying that hesitation vanished; and as some of these experiments

are of extreme simplicity, you may verify what I say with little trouble.

Squeeze a drop from the moss, taking care that there is scarcely

any dirt in it; and, having ascertained that it contains Rotifers,

or Tardigrades,[12] alive and moving, place the glass-slide under a

bell-glass, to shield it from currents of air, and there allow the water

to evaporate slowly, but completely, by means of chloride of calcium, or

sulphuric acid, placed under the bell-glass; or, what is still simpler,

place a slide with the live animals on the mantelpiece when a fire is

burning in the grate. If on the day following you examine this perfectly

dry glass, you will see the contracted bodies of the Rotifers, presenting

the aspect of yellowish oval bodies; but attempt to resuscitate them by

the addition of a little fresh water, and you will find that they do not

revive, as they revived when dried in the moss: they sometimes swell a

little, and elongate themselves, and you imagine this is a commencement

of resuscitation; but continue watching for two or three days, and you

will find it goes no further. Never do these oval bodies become active

crawling Rotifers; never do they expand their wheels, and set the

œsophagus at work. No: the Rotifer once _dried_ is dead, and dead for

ever.

But if, like a cautious experimenter, you vary and control the

experiment, and beside the glass-slide place a watch-glass containing

Rotifers with dirt, or moss, you will find that the addition of water

to the contents of the watch-glass will often (not always) revive the

animals. What you cannot effect on a glass-slide without dirt, or with

very little, you easily effect in a watch-glass with dirt, or moss;

and if you give due attention you will find that in each case the

result depends upon the quantity of the dirt. And this leads to a clear

understanding of the whole mystery; this reconciles the conflicting

statements. The reason why Rotifers ever revive is, because they have

not been _dried_—they have not lost by evaporation that small quantity

of water which forms _an integral constituent of their tissues_; and

it is the presence of dirt, or moss, which prevents this complete

evaporation. No one, I suppose, believes that the Rotifer actually

revives after once being dead. If it has a power of remaining in a state

of suspended animation, like that of a frozen frog, it can do so only

on the condition that its _organism_ is not destroyed; and destroyed it

would be, if the water were removed from its tissues: for, strange as

it may seem, water is not an _accessory_, but a _constituent element_

of every tissue; and this cannot be replaced _mechanically_—it can only

be replaced by _vital processes_. Every one who has made microscopic

preparations must be aware that when once a tissue is desiccated, it is

spoiled: it will not recover its form and properties on the application

of water; because the water was not originally worked into the web by

a mere process of imbibition—like water in a sponge—but by a molecular

process of assimilation, like albumen in a muscle. Therefore, I say, that

desiccation is necessarily death; and the Rotifer which revives cannot

have been desiccated. This being granted, we have only to ask, What

prevents the Rotifer from becoming completely dried? Experiment shows

that it is the presence of dirt, or moss, which does this. The whole

marvel of the Rotifer’s resuscitation, therefore, amounts to this:—that

if the water in which it lives be evaporated, the animal passes into a

state of suspended animation, and remains so, as long as its _own water_

is protected from evaporation.

I am aware that this is not easily to be reconciled with M. Doyère’s

experiments, since the application of a temperature so high as 300°

Fahr. (nearly a hundred degrees above boiling water) must, one would

imagine, have completely desiccated the animals, in spite of any amount

of protecting dirt. It is possible that M. Doyère may have mistaken

that previously-noted swelling-up of the bodies, on the application

of water, for a return to vital activity. If not, I am at a loss to

explain the contradiction; for certainly in my experience a much more

moderate desiccation—namely, that obtained by simple evaporation over a

mantelpiece, or under a large bell-glass—_always_ destroyed the animals,

if little or no dirt were present.

The subject has recently been brought before the French Academy of

Sciences by M. Davaine, whose experiments[13] lead him to the conclusion

that those Rotifers which habitually live in ponds will not revive after

desiccation: whereas those which live in moss always do so. I believe the

explanation to be this: the Rotifers living in ponds are dried without

any protecting dirt, or moss, and that is the reason they do not revive.

After having satisfied myself on this point, I did what perhaps would

have saved me some trouble if thought of before. I took down Spallanzani,

and read his account of his celebrated experiments. To my surprise and

satisfaction, it appeared that he had accurately observed the same facts,

but curiously missed their real significance. Nothing can be plainer

than the following passage: “But there is one condition indispensable

to the resurrection of wheel-animals: it is absolutely necessary that

there should be a certain quantity of sand; without it they will not

revive. One day I had two wheel-animals traversing a drop of water

about to evaporate, which contained very little sand. Three quarters of

an hour after evaporation, they were dry and motionless. I moistened

them with water to revive them; but in vain, notwithstanding that they

were immersed in water many hours. Their members swelled to thrice the

original size, but they remained motionless. To ascertain whether the

fact was accidental, I spread a portion of sand, containing animals, on a

glass slide, and waited till it became dry in order to wet it anew. The

sand was carelessly scattered on the glass, so as to be a thin covering

on some parts, and on others in a very small quantity: here the animals

did not revive: but all that were in those parts with abundance of sand

revived.”[14] He further says that if sand be spread out in considerable

quantities in some places, much less in others, and very little in the

rest, on moistening it the revived animals will be numerous in the first,

less numerous in the second, and none at all in the third.

It is not a little remarkable that observations so precise as these

should have for many years passed unregarded, and not led to the true

explanation of the mystery. Perhaps an inherent love of the marvellous

made men greedily accept the idea of resuscitation, and indisposed them

to attempt an explanation of it. Spallanzani’s own attempt is certainly

not felicitous. He supposes that the dust prevents the lacerating

influence of the air from irritating and injuring the animals. And this

explanation is accepted by his Translator.

[Since the foregoing remarks were in type, M. Gavarret has published

(_Annales des Sciences Naturelles_, 1859, xi. p. 315) the account of his

experiments on Rotifers and Tardigrades, in which he found that after

subjecting the _moss_ to a desiccation the most complete according to our

present means, the _animals_ revived after twenty-four hours’ immersion

of the moss in water. This result seems flatly to contradict the result

I arrived at; but only _seems_ to contradict it, for in my experiments

the _animals_, not the moss, were subjected to desiccation. Nevertheless,

I confess that my confidence was shaken by experiments so precise, and

performed by so distinguished an investigator, and I once more resumed

the experiments, feeling persuaded that the detection of the fallacy,

wherever it might be, would be well worth the trouble. The results of

these controlling experiments are all I can find room for here:—_Whenever

the animals were completely separated from the dirt, they perished_; in

two cases there was a very little dirt—a mere film, so to speak—in the

watch-glass, and glass-cell, and this, slight as it was, sufficed to

protect two out of eight, and three out of ten Rotifers, which revived

on the second day; the others did not revive even on the third day after

their immersion. In one instance, a thin covering-glass was placed over

the water on the slide, and the evaporation of the water seemed complete,

yet this glass-cover sufficed to protect a Rotifer, which revived in

three hours.

If we compare these results with those obtained by M. Davaine, we can

scarcely avoid the conclusion that it is only when the desiccation of

the Rotifers is prevented by the presence of a small quantity of moss,

or of dirt—between the particles of which they find shelter—that they

revive on the application of water. And even in the severe experiments

of M. Doyère and M. Gavarret, _some_ of the animals must have been thus

protected; and I call particular attention to the fact that, although

some animals revived, others always perished. But if the organization of

the Rotifer, or Tardigrade, is such that it can withstand desiccation—if

it only needs the fresh applications of moisture to restore its

activity—all, or almost all, the animals experimented on ought to revive;

and the fact that only some revive leads us to suspect that these have

not been desiccated—a suspicion which is warranted by direct experiments.

I believe, then, that the discrepancy amounts to this: investigators who

have desiccated the moss containing animals, find some of the animals

revive on the application of moisture; but those who desiccate the

animals themselves, will find no instances of revival.]

The time spent on these Rotifers will not have been misspent if it

has taught us the necessity of caution in all experimental inquiries.

Although Experiment is valuable—nay, indispensable—as a means of

interrogating Nature, it is constantly liable to mislead us into the

idea that we have rightly interrogated, and rightly interpreted the

replies; and this danger arises from the complexity of the cases with

which we are dealing, and our proneness to overlook, or disregard, some

seemingly trifling condition—a trifle which may turn out of the utmost

importance. The one reason why the study of Science is valuable as a

means of culture, over and above its own immediate objects, is that in

it the mind learns to _submit_ to realities, instead of thrusting its

figments in the place of realities—endeavours to ascertain accurately

what the order of Nature _is_, and not what it ought to be, or might be.

The one reason why, of all sciences, Biology is pre-eminent as a means

of culture, is, that owing to the great complexity of all the cases it

investigates, it familiarizes the mind with the necessity of attending

to _all_ the conditions, and it thus keeps the mind alert. It cultivates

caution, which, considering the tendency there is in men to “anticipate

Nature,” is a mental tonic of inestimable worth. I am far from asserting

that biologists are more accurate reasoners than other men; indeed, the

mass of crude hypothesis which passes unchallenged by them, is against

such an idea. But whether its advantages be used or neglected, the truth

nevertheless is, that Biology, from the complexity of its problems, and

the necessity of incessant verification of its details, offers greater

advantages for culture than any other branch of science.

I have once or twice mentioned the words Mollusc and Crustacean, to

which the reader unfamiliar with the language of Natural History will

have attached but vague ideas; and although I wanted to explain these,

and convey a distinct conception of the general facts of Classification,

it would have then been too great an interruption. So I will here

make an opportunity, and finish the chapter with an indication of the

five Types, or plans of structure, under one of which every animal is

classed. Without being versed in science, you discern at once whether

the book before you is mathematical, physical, chemical, botanical,

or physiological. In like manner, without being versed in Natural

History, you ought to know whether the animal before you belongs to the

Vertebrata, Mollusca, Articulata, Radiata, or Protozoa.

[Illustration: Fig. 17.

MALE TRITON, or WATER-NEWT.]

A glance at the contents of our glass vases will yield us samples of each

of these five divisions of the animal kingdom. We begin with this Triton.

It is a representative of the VERTEBRATE division, or sub-kingdom. You

have merely to remember that it possesses a backbone and an internal

skeleton, and you will at once recognize the cardinal character which

makes this Triton range under the same general head as men, elephants,

whales, birds, reptiles, or fishes. All these, in spite of their manifold

differences, have this one character in common:—they are all backboned;

they have all an internal skeleton; they are all formed according to

one general type. In all vertebrate animals the skeleton is found

to be identical in plan. Every bone in the body of a triton has its

corresponding bone in the body of a man, or of a mouse; and every bone

preserves the same connection with other bones, no matter how unlike may

be the various limbs in which we detect its presence. Thus, widely as

the arm of a man differs from the fin of a whale, or the wing of a bird,

or the wing of a bat, or the leg of a horse, the same number of bones,

and the same connections of the bones, are found in each. A fin is one

modified form of the typical limb; an arm is another; a wing another.

That which is true of the limbs, is also true of all the organs; and it

is on this ground that we speak of the vertebrate type. From fish to man

one common plan of structure prevails; and the presence of a backbone is

the index by which to recognize this plan.

The Triton has been wriggling grotesquely in our grasp while we have

made him our text, and, now he is restored to his vase, plunges to the

bottom with great satisfaction at his escape. This water-snail, crawling

slowly up the side of the vase, and cleaning it of the green growth of

microscopic plants, which he devours, shall be our representative of

the second great division—the MOLLUSCA. I cannot suggest any obvious

character so distinctive as a backbone, by which the word Mollusc may

at once call up an idea of the type which prevails in the group. It

won’t do to say “shell-fish,” because many molluscs have no shells,

and many animals which have shells are not molluscs. The name was

originally bestowed on account of the softness of the animals. But they

are not softer than worms, and much less so than jelly-fish. You may

know that snails and slugs, oysters and cuttlefish, are molluscs; but

if you want some one character by which the type may be remembered,

you must fix on the imperfect symmetry of the mollusc’s organs. I say

_imperfect_ symmetry, because it is an error, though a common one, to

speak of the mollusc’s body not being _bilateral_—that is to say, of its

not being composed of two symmetrical halves. A vertebrate animal may

be divided lengthwise, and each half will closely resemble the other;

the backbone forms, as it were, an axis, on either side of which the

organs are disposed; but the mollusc is said to have no such axis, no

such symmetry. I admit the absence of an axis, but I deny the total

absence of symmetry. Many of its organs are as symmetrical as those

of a vertebrate animal—_i.e._ the eyes, the feelers, the jaws—and the

gills in Cuttlefish, Eolids, and Pteropods; while, on the other hand,

several organs in the vertebrate animal are as _un_symmetrical as any of

those in the mollusc, _i.e._ the liver, spleen, pancreas, stomach, and

intestines.[15] As regards bilateral structure, therefore, it is only a

question of degree. The vertebrate animal is not entirely symmetrical,

nor is the mollusc entirely unsymmetrical. But there is a characteristic

disposition of the nervous system peculiar to molluscs: it neither forms

an _axis_ for the body—as it does in the Vertebrata and Articulata—nor

a _centre_—as it does in the Radiata—but is altogether irregular and

unsymmetrical. This will be intelligible from the following diagram of

the nervous systems of a Mollusc and an insect, with which that of a

Star-fish may be compared (Fig. 18). Here you perceive how the nervous

centres, and the nerves which issue from them, are irregularly disposed

in the molluscs, and symmetrically in the insect.

But the recognition of a mollusc will be easier when you have learned

to distinguish it from one of the ARTICULATA, forming the third great

division,—the third animal Type. Of these, our vases present numerous

representatives: prawns, beetles, water-spiders, insect-larvæ,

entomostraca, and worms. There is a very obvious character by which

these may be recognized: they have all bodies composed of numerous

_segments_, and their limbs are _jointed_, and they have mostly an

_external_ skeleton from which their limbs are developed. Sometimes the

segments of their bodies are numerous, as in the centipede, lobster,

&c.; sometimes several segments are fused together, as in the crab;

and sometimes, as in worms, they are indicated by slight markings or

depressions of the skin, which give the appearance of little rings, and

hence the worms have been named _Annelida_, or _Annulata_, or _Annulosa_.

In these last-named cases the segmental nature of the type is detected in

the fact that the worms grow, segment by segment; and also in the fact

that in most of them each segment has its own nerves, heart, stomach,

&c.—each segment is, in fact, a zöoid.[16]

[Illustration: Fig. 18.

NERVOUS SYSTEM OF SEA-HARE (A) and CENTIPEDE (B).]

Just as we recognize a vertebrate by the presence of a backbone and

internal skeleton, we recognize an articulate by its jointed body

and external skeleton. In both, the nervous system forms the axis of

the body. The Mollusc, on the contrary, has no skeleton, internal

or external;[17] and its nervous system does not form an axis. As a

rule, both vertebrates and articulates have limbs—although there are

exceptions in serpents, fishes, and worms. The Molluscs have no limbs.

Backboned,—jointed,—and non-jointed,—therefore, are the three leading

characteristics of the three types.

Let us now glance at the fourth division—the RADIATA,—so called because

of the disposition of the organs round a centre, which is the mouth. Our

fresh-water vases afford us only _one_ representative of this type—the

_Hydra_, or fresh-water Polype, whose capture was recorded in the last

chapter. Is it not strange that while _all_ the Radiata are aquatic, not

a single terrestrial representative having been discovered, only one

should be found in fresh water? Think of the richness of the seas, with

their hosts of Polypes, Actiniæ, Jelly-fish, Star-fishes, Sea-urchins,

Sea-pens (_Pennatulæ_), Lily-stars (_Comatulæ_), and Sea-cucumbers

(_Holothuriæ_), and then compare the poverty of rivers, lakes, and

ponds, reduced to their single representative, the _Hydra_. The radiate

structure may best be exhibited by this diagram of the nervous system of

the Star-fish.[18]

[Illustration: Fig. 19.

NERVOUS SYSTEM OF STAR-FISH.]

Cuvier, to whom we owe this classification of the animal kingdom into

four great divisions, would have been the first to recognize the chaotic

condition in which he left this last division, and would have acquiesced

in the separation of the PROTOZOA, which has since been made. This fifth

division includes many of the microscopic animals known as _Infusoria_;

and receives its name from the idea that these simplest of all animals

represent, as it were, the beginnings of life.[19]

But Cuvier’s arrangement is open to a more serious objection. The state

of science in his day excused the imperfection of classing the Infusoria

and parasites under the Radiata; but it was owing, I conceive, to an

unphilosophical view of morphology, that he placed the molluscs next to

the Vertebrata, instead of placing the Articulata in that position. He

was secretly determined by the desire to show that there are four very

distinct types, or plans of structure, which cannot by any transitions

be brought under one law of development. Lamarck and Geoffroy St.

Hilaire maintained the idea of unity of composition throughout the

animal kingdom;—in other words, that all the varieties of animal forms

were produced by successive modifications: and several of the German

naturalists maintained that the vertebrata in their embryonic stages

passed through forms which were permanent in the lower animals. This

idea Cuvier always opposed. He held that the four types were altogether

distinct; and by his arrangement of them, their distinctness certainly

appears much greater than would be the case on another arrangement. But

without discussing this question here, it is enough to point out the

fact of the enormous superiority in intelligence, in sociality, and in

complexity of animal functions, which insects and spiders exhibit, when

compared with the highest of the molluscs, to justify the removal of the

mollusca, and the elevation of the articulata to the second place in the

animal hierarchy. Nor is this all. If we divide animals into four groups,

these four naturally dispose themselves into two larger groups: the

first of these, comprising Vertebrata and Articulata, is characterized

by a _nervous axis_ and a _skeleton_; the second, comprising Mollusca

and Radiata, is characterized by the absence of both nervous axis

and skeleton. It is obvious that a bee much more closely resembles a

bird, than any mollusc resembles any vertebrate. If there are many and

important differences between the vertebrate and articulate types, there

are also many and important resemblances; if the nervous axis is _above_

the viscera, and forms the dorsal line of the vertebrate, whereas it is

_underneath_ the viscera, and forms the ventral line in the articulate,

it is, nevertheless, in both, the axis of the body, and in both it sends

off nerves to supply symmetrical limbs; in both it has similar functions.

And while the articulata thus approach in structure the vertebrate type,

the mollusca are not only removed from that type by many diversities, but

a number of them have such affinities with the Radiate type, that it is

only in quite recent days that the whole class of Polyzoa (or Bryozoa, as

they are also called) has been removed from the Radiata, and ranged under

the Mollusca.

To quit this topic, and recur once more to the five divisions, we

have only the broad outlines of the picture in Vertebrata, Mollusca,

Articulata, Radiata, and Protozoa; but this is a good beginning, and

we can now proceed to the further sub-divisions. Each of these five

sub-kingdoms is divided into Classes; these again into Orders; these

into Families; these into Genera; these into Species; and these finally

into Varieties. Thus suppose a dwarf terrier is presented to us with

a request that we should indicate its various titles in the scheme of

classification: we begin by calling it a vertebrate; we proceed to assign

its Class as the mammalian; its Order is obviously that of the carnivora;

its Family is that of the fox, wolf, jackal, &c., named _Canidæ_; its

Genus is, of course, that of _Canis_; its Species, terrier; its Variety,

dwarf-terrier. Inasmuch as all these denominations are the expressions of

scientific research, and not at all arbitrary or fanciful, they imply an

immense amount of labour and sagacity in their establishment; and when we

remember that naturalists have thus classed upwards of half a million of

distinct species, it becomes an interesting inquiry,—What has been the

guiding principle of this successful labour? on what basis is so large a

superstructure raised? This question we shall answer in the next chapter.

FOOTNOTES

[8] DRAPER: _Human Physiology_, p. 288.

[9] LEUWENHOEK: _Select Works_, ii. p. 210. His figures, however, are

very incorrect.

[10] See LEYDIG: _Ueber den Bau und die systematische Stellung der

Räderthiere_, in SIEBOLD _und_ KÖLLIKER’S _Zeitschrift_, vi., and _Ueber

Hydatina Senta_, in MÜLLER’S _Archiv_: 1857.

[11] POUCHET: _Hétérogénie, ou Traité de la Génération Spontanée_, 1859,

p. 453.

[12] The _Tardigrade_, or microscopic _Sloth_, belongs to the order of

_Arachnida_, and is occasionally found in moss, stagnant ponds, &c. I

have only met with four specimens in all my investigations, and they were

all found in moss. SPALLANZANI described and figured it (very badly), and

M. DOYÈRE has given a fuller description in the _Annales des Sciences_,

2nd series, vols. xiv. xvii. and xviii.

[13] DAVAINE in _Annales des Sciences Naturelles_, 1858, x. p. 335.

[14] SPALLANZANI: _Tracts on the Natural History of Animals and

Vegetables_: Translated by Dalyell, ii. p. 129.

[15] In some cases of monstrosity, these organs are transposed, the liver

being on the left, and the pancreas on the right side. It was in allusion

to a case of this kind, then occupying the attention of Paris, that

MOLIÈRE made his _Médecin malgré Lui_ describe the heart as on the right

side, the liver on the left; on the mistake being noticed, he replies:

“_Oui, autrefois; mais nous avons changé tout cela._”

[16] The term zöoid was explained in our last.

[17] In the cuttlefish there is the commencement of an internal skeleton

in the cartilage-plates protecting the brain.

[18] It is right to add, that there are serious doubts entertained

respecting the claim of a star-fish to the possession of a nervous system

at all; but the radiate structure is represented in the diagram; as it

also is, very clearly, in a Sea-anemone.

[19] Protozoa, from _proton_, first, and _zoon_, animal.

Framley Parsonage.