Some Are Unblushing Contradictions,
While Others Might be Classed With
the Milder White Lie.
Custom and usage have made the misapplication of some words so familiar
that they have lost their original meaning and now signify quite the
opposite. The word “slave,” for instance, is a striking example of this
fact. The Slavi were a tribe which once dwelt on the banks of the
Dneiper and derived their name from “slav,” which means noble or
illustrious. In the later days of the Roman Empire vast numbers of them
spread over Europe in the condition of captive servants, and the name of
the tribe came to mean the lowest state of servitude—the very antithesis
of its original sense.
Some of our commonest expressions are misnomers which seem to be
absolutely unaccountable, yet we shall probably go on using them to the
end of time.
Irish stew is a dish unknown in Ireland.
Kid gloves are not made of kid, but of lambskin or sheepskin.
German silver is not silver at all, nor of German origin, but has been
used in China for centuries.
Dutch clocks are of German manufacture.
Baffin’s Bay is not a bay.
Turkish baths are unknown to the Turks.
There are no leaves in Vallombrosa, Milton to the contrary
notwithstanding.
Turkey rhubarb should be called Russian rhubarb, as it is a Russian
monopoly.
Why are turkeys so called? They do not come from Turkey.
Titmouse is a bird.
Sealing-wax contains no wax.
Shrew-mouse is no mouse.
Rice-paper is not made of rice or the rice plant.
Catgut should be sheepgut.
Blind worms have eyes and can see.
Cleopatra’s needles should be named after Thothmes III.
* * * * *
And so, I say it most confidently, the first intellectual task of our
age is rightly to order and make serviceable the vast realm of printed
material which four centuries have swept across our path. To organize
our knowledge, to systematize our reading, to save, out of the
relentless cataract of ink, the immortal thoughts of the greatest—this
is a necessity unless the productive ingenuity of man is to lead us at
last to a measureless and pathless chaos. To know anything that turns up
is in the infinity of knowledge to know nothing. To read the first book
we come across in the wilderness of books is to learn nothing. To turn
over the pages of ten thousand volumes is to be practically indifferent
to all that is good.—=Frederic Harrison.= (1831– .) Essay on the
“Choice of Books.” 1886.
Cooks’ Caps and Coronets.
True Stories of Members of the European Nobility Who Were Domestic
Servants Before or After Fortune Smiled Upon Them—Several Society
Leaders Came from the Kitchen.
Extremes often meet, and probably nothing better illustrates this than
the many instances that exist of the elevation of persons of lowly birth
to positions of great dignity and importance, while many others who have
been delicately nurtured and enjoyed the highest culture have been
forced to resort to the humblest forms of hard labor in order to earn
the bread which they would eat.
Wicked little Cupid is responsible for many of the former cases, for he
dearly loves a joke, and frequently has it at the expense of the rank
and traditional glory of some ancient house and name. The world has
always been rather democratic when love has stepped in, and some of the
great personages of history have contracted alliances which might have
been expected to turn things topsy-turvy, yet nothing has been seriously
ruffled.
In Paris one of the most influential and popular leaders of society is
the Baroness de Waru, the wife of the only son and heir of the
multimillionaire president of the Orleans Railroad Company. Her blonde
beauty is of the most ethereal kind, and her dainty person is
distinguished by so much aristocratic elegance that no one to look at
her would ever dream that her father had begun his career as a mere
stable-boy, who, in the service of the last reigning Duke of Parma,
was promoted from one post to another until he blossomed forth as a
general, a baron, and as Prime Minister of the Duchy of Parma, besides
being decorated with the grand crosses of most of the orders of
chivalry of Europe.
Chambermaid Became Lady Mayoress.
Lady Evans, who, several years ago, as Lady Mayoress of London, was
dispensing magnificent hospitality at the Mansion House to crowned
heads and royal personages, foreign as well as English, was a
chambermaid at the Oak Hotel, at Sevenoaks, in Kent, when her husband
first met and married her. Her father was a village plumber, and her
mother, until the date of her own marriage, was a cook and general
servant.
On the Continent there is no more ancient or illustrious family than
that of Kinsky, the chief of which bears the title of Prince of the
Holy Roman Empire. Two of its most distinguished members—the Counts
Eugene and Octavius, both of them Privy Councilors of the Emperor and
Knights of the Golden Fleece—married domestic servants, Eugene taking
his wife from the laundry, while the Countess Octavius Kinsky was
formerly the chambermaid at a small inn.
The Countess Octavius has rendered herself very obnoxious to her
husband’s family by her grasping propensities. But the late Countess
Eugene, the ex-washerwoman of Ischal, was a singularly charming woman,
universally beloved at Vienna, and, although she never asked for a
presentation at court, the names of quite a number of members of the
imperial family figured on her visiting list.
Lady Hawkins Was a Cook.
The widowed Princess Alexander of Battenberg, whose husband at one
time ruled over Bulgaria, may likewise be said to have sprung from the
kitchen, her father having been the valet and her mother the cook of
the old Austrian General de Martini. Yet in spite of this parentage,
Princess Alexander is treated as a sister-in-law by the similarly
widowed Princess Henry of Battenberg, who is a daughter of Queen
Victoria. The late queen showed great kindness and consideration
toward Princess Alexander of Battenberg, acknowledging her as a
kinswoman.
The second wife of the late Lord Bramwell had originally been his
cook, while Lady Hawkins, who is the better half of the eminent
English judge of that name, and the aunt by marriage of “Anthony
Hope,” the novelist, was originally a housemaid, as was also the widow
of the “Grand Old Man” of Australia, Sir Henry Parkes.
King Joachim of Naples, from whom the entire princely house of Murat
is descended, began life at the close of the last century as a mere
stable-boy, while the first Prince Kutusoff, founder of the grand
Russian family of that name, achieved his greatness a hundred years
ago by the skill which he displayed as the valet and barber to Czar
Paul, a monarch whose own great-grandmother, Empress Catherine, was
the chambermaid of a village inn, where she first attracted the
attention of Peter the Great, who ultimately married her.
Earl Served as Porter.
That the prejudice which formerly existed in exalted circles against
menial occupation is rapidly disappearing is abundantly proved by the
number of titled personages who are content to take at meal-time their
place, not at the table of the master of the house, but at that of the
domestics in the servants’ hall.
Thus in the course of a civil suit against Sir Charles Nugent it came
out that he was earning his livelihood as a groom, while Lady Nugent
was taking in washing. Yet the Nugents are among the most ancient and
illustrious of all the grand houses of the nobility of Europe, some of
their members being princes of the Austrian Empire, while the head of
the family is the Earl of Westmeath.
Here in this country Lord Drummond, the grandson and heir of the
British Earl of Perth and the French Duke of Melfort, died several
years ago while occupying a menial position—that of door-porter in the
establishment of one of the proprietors of the great New York daily
newspapers; and the writer can remember having found, a few years ago,
Prince Benjamin Rohan, who by virtue of his birth is the titular
cousin of every crowned head in Europe, and is descended in a direct
line from Godfrey, Duke of Bouillon, leader of the First Crusade, and
the first Crusader King of Jerusalem, serving as a waiter in one of
the smaller restaurants in Second Avenue, New York City.
Sir Thomas Echlin, head of the ancient house of Echlins, which has
been settled in Ireland since the reign of King James I, and whose
baronetcy is nearly three hundred years old, recently was employed on
the Dublin police force in the humble capacity of an ordinary “bobby”
at six dollars a week, and was formerly footman in a London family.
One of the last things that Lord Beaconsfield did before his death was
to obtain from the queen a pension of five hundred dollars a year for
the widow of the late Lord Kingsland, whom, in spite of her rank as a
peeress of the realm, he had discovered earning a bare living as a
washerwoman in a large family at Kensington.
Lord Kingsland, prior to his accession to this ancient peerage, had
been a waiter in a Dublin hotel, but on becoming a lord, through the
death of his uncle, abandoned this calling and preferred to rely upon
his wife’s earnings at the washtub.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Happiness.]
Happiness in this world, when it comes, comes incidentally. Make it the
object of pursuit, and it leads us a wild goose chase, and is never
attained. Follow some other object, and very possibly we may find that
we have caught happiness without dreaming of it, but likely enough it is
gone the moment we say to ourselves, “Here it is!” like the chest of
gold that treasure-seekers find.... There is something more awful in
happiness than in sorrow,—the latter being earthly and finite, the
former composed of the substance and texture of eternity, so that
spirits still embodied may well tremble at it.—Nathaniel Hawthorne.