the wine-bibbers. Her pious parents left their children to be brought
up by a servant-maid, who had more zeal than discretion, and who
would allow none of the children to drink, were they ever so thirsty,
except at meal-times, and then only a drop or two of water. “If you
cannot restrain your desire to drink now,” she would say, “what will
it be when you have wine at command?” Now, the effect of this speech
was exactly like that of the confessor to the hostler, when he asked
the latter, if he never greased the horses’ teeth in order to prevent
them eating their corn. It gave the young Monica a new idea. She was
accustomed to draw the wine for her father’s table, and she henceforth
began to drink a portion each time that she went to the cellar with
her pitcher. And I do not know that Mr. Millais, or any other of the
pre-Raphaelite gentlemen, could have a better subject for a picture,
than that representing the scene when the horrified nurse-maid beheld
her young charge indulging in her cups in the parental wine-vault.
The lecture she received worked her conversion, we are told; and she
married, and became the mother of St. Augustin, who so far followed the
maternal example that, in his earlier years, when, with his eyes upon
heaven, his heart was with the good things of the earth, his commonest
prayer used to be, “Lord, make me religious, _but not just yet_.”
The nurse-maid of Monica deserved to have been the wife,--and perhaps
she was,--of St. Theodotus, the vintner of Ancyra. He was a teetotaller
who kept a tavern, and who passed the live-long day in leaning over his
counter and begging his customers not to drink! Well, men have been
canonized for less useful service to their kind; and Theodotus was
more worthily employed in keeping drunkards from his wine-casks, than
St. Pius V. was when, every day before dinner, by way of mocking his
appetite, he resorted to the public hospitals, and kissed the ulcers
of the patients! Nay, biographers tell us that an English Protestant
gentleman was _suddenly converted_ to Romanism, by observing the
condescension and affection with which Pius kissed the ulcers on the
feet of some poor men! The pope, if he and the convert dined together
after this nasty ceremony, might have confessed that he had been sore
put to it for an argument that should carry conviction to an English
gentleman in search of a religion.
Let us contrast this pope in his pride with a cardinal in his fall.
“When Wolsey,” says Mr. Hunter the antiquary, “was dismissed by his
tyrannical master to his northern diocese, he passed many weeks
at Scrooby. It is a pleasing picture which his faithful servant,
Cavendish, gives of him at this period of his life:--‘Ministering many
deeds of charity, and attending on Sundays at some parish church in the
neighbourhood; hearing or saying mass himself, and causing some one of
his chaplains to preach to the people; and that done, he would dine
in some honest house of that town, where should be distributed to the
poor a great alms, as well of meat and drink, as of money to supply the
want of sufficient meat, if the number of the poor did so exceed of
necessity.’” Wolsey was no saint certainly, but he was as honest a man
as Pius, and a wiser when he fed the poor rather than kiss their ulcers.
But there is no accounting for taste; the Russian Boniface used to
roll himself among thorns and nettles, in order to get an appetite, or
to punish himself for indulging over much. St. Germanus, on the other
hand, commenced every repast by putting ashes into his mouth;--the
modern custom of beginning with oysters is certainly better both for
taste and stomach. St. Walthen took wine, but then he put spiders in
it. St. Dominic, too, was singular in his diet, and he sometimes spent
his half-hour before dinner in one of the most curious positions that
gentlemen could possibly fix upon. The Abbot of St. Vincent’s one day
desired his company at dinner, but at the usual hour the saint was in
church, and had forgotten the invitation. In the meantime the turkey
and chine were spoiling, and the hungry abbot despatched a monk in
quest of the loiterer; the messenger hurried to the church, where, to
his very considerable astonishment, he beheld St. Dominic “ravished in
an ecstasy,” whatever that may mean, “raised several cubits above the
ground, and without motion.” The Saint, on being told that dinner was
ready, graciously smiled at the intelligence, and gently descended to
the ground.
St. Laurence would have joked at this, as he did at his own grilling.
After he had lain for some time extended on his gridiron, he calmly
said to the executioner, “Will you have the kindness to turn me, as I
am quite done on the under side?” The executioner, a trifle astonished,
did as he was required, and soon after, the Saint, again speaking,
said, “I shall be obliged if you’ll take me up, as I am now fit for
eating.” This story reminds me of the remark made by an Irishman, when
first told that St. Patrick had crossed the ocean on a millstone:--“I
can’t contradict it! He was a lucky fellow!”
We are told of St. Bernard, who used to walk before dinner on the banks
of the Lake of Lausanne, that on hearing two of his monks speak of
the beauty of the lake, he declared that no such lake existed, or he
had been too much absorbed ever to have noticed it. So the Trappists
used to glory in not knowing where or how they dined, or recollecting
anything about it! All this shows less wisdom at table than was
exhibited by the royal St. Louis, who, when a certain friar began to
discuss doctrinal subjects with the pullets, stopped him with the
remark that “all things had their time, and joking was good sauce with
chickens!”
St. Laurence Justinian, the first patriarch of Venice, was far less
indulgent than the royal saint of France. He was so little so, that
when his thirsty monks sometimes asked for a little wine, declaring
that their throats felt as dry as the high road in summer, he used
quite as drily to remark, that if they could not bear parched throats
now, what would they do in the fires of purgatory? St. John the Dwarf,
Anchoret of Scete, cared as little for wine as St. Laurence, but he
was fond of fruit, and he obtained a supply from a strange source. An
old hermit bade him plant his walking-staff in the ground, and he not
only did so, but he watered it regularly for three years, when it
bore pippins, sweeter than those that grew at Ribstone up to the time
of the death of the late baronet. Before this miraculously-bearing
stick the little man used to read prayers as devoutly as Sir Hollyoak
Goodrick, the present Ribstone baronet, does to the villagers in his
own parish church, and for the same reason each had much to be thankful
for. It must be confessed that John the Dwarf had more taste than
his namesake of Cupertino, who not only ate nothing but vegetables,
but ate no vegetables that any other human being could be induced to
swallow. It was such garbage as only pigs would condescend to. _Arcades
ambo_--nasty creatures both!
St. Francis of Assisium exhibited something more of true humility at
his table, with a touch of the false metal notwithstanding. He ate
nothing dressed by fire, unless he were very ill, and even then he
covered it with ashes, or dipped it in cold water. His common daily
food was dry bread strewn with ashes; but this founder of the Friars’
Minors had the good sense not to condemn his followers to the rigorous
diet he observed himself; and “Brother Ass,” as he familiarly called
that self, was in his own opinion worthy of no better fare.
There was a founder of another community who exhibited more singularity
than St. Francis, who, despite some mistakes, was a man of whom
none other dare speak but with respect,--St. Ammon, founder of the
hermitages of Nitria. At the age of twenty-two this young Egyptian
noble married a fair girl of Memphis; and instead of a nuptial banquet,
he treated his bride to a reading of a particularly edifying chapter
from St. Paul, after which he withdrew to solitary meditation. During
eighteen years he occupied himself in training balsam-trees all day,
after which he returned home to a supper of fruit and herbs; then
came that terrible reiteration of advice from St. Paul, followed by a
separate solitary comment on the part of this exemplary pair. At the
end of the time above specified, he retired altogether from domestic
life, and settled alone on Mount Nitria, and his biographers naïvely
remark, this was “with his wife’s consent.” This saint was of such a
“complexion” of virtue, that one day, on accidentally catching sight of
an uncovered portion of his own body, he was so shocked that he fainted
away. If he had only read “Erasmus Wilson, on the Skin,” he would have
learned to look oftener at his own, and would have been a cleaner man,
a better husband, a more grateful feeder, and an improved Christian.
But St. Bruno, the founder of the Carthusians, probably exceeded all
other originators of communities in the “fierceness,” so to speak,
of his dietetic laws; he never spared himself, nor his disciples. A
Carthusian is never permitted to eat meat under any pretence whatever.
In addition to this, they fast eight months in the year, and I suppose
they starve in Lent, for during that season they are forbidden to eat
what is called “white meats,” that is, eggs, milk, butter, and cheese.
Dry bread with water is their Lenten fare; and a peculiar law connected
with them is, that they can never change into another order, because
they would thereby profit a little in the way of better living; but
a brother of any other order may become a Carthusian, as thereby he
increases his mortifications and diminishes his diet. Of course from
these remarks the Carthusians of the “Charterhouse” are excepted. If
the thin spirit of St. Bruno ever scents the juicy viands that adorn
the well-spread table _there_, it probably melts into thin air by the
very force of disgust or ghastly envy.
The table kept by St. Bridget, when she married Ulpho, prince of
Nericia, in Sweden, was a very modest one for so princely a pair, but
what was spared thereby was given to the poor. Bridget and Ulpho, she
sweet sixteen, he two years more, read every evening the soothing
chapter from St. Paul, which formed the favourite study of St. Ammon
and his wife; but, as it would appear, with indifferent success. “They
enrolled themselves,” say their various biographers, “in the Third
Order of St. Francis, and lived in their own house as if it had been
a regular and austere monastery.” The biographers immediately add
without comment,--“They afterwards had eight children: four boys and
four girls;” and as the same paragraph goes on to state that “all
these children were favoured with the blessings of divine grace,” it
may be fairly concluded that a domestic observation of a monastic
regularity and austerity, is a course that will purchase blessings and
olive-branches.
The case of St. Gomer and his wife, the Lady Gwinmary, may perhaps be
cited as an exception. But this Gwinmary was an exacting lady at all
times, and when St. Gomer betook himself from her to live in the desert
on bitterness and biscuits, he fared as sumptuously and lived far more
quietly than he had done at home. He was one of the most placid of
saints, and it is a positive libel upon him for the French Admiralty
to have given his name to one of the most thundering steamers in the
service. Its broadsides far more nearly resemble the tongue of Gwinmary
than the tones of Gomer.
In charming contrast with this truculent Gwinmary do we meet and greet
the gentle St. Elizabeth of Hungary. The record of her good deeds would
fill a volume, but out of them I have only to select an exquisite table
trait--to register which is also to eulogize it. I do not allude to her
habitual temperance, to her dry bread and thimble-full of wine, when
she sat at meat with kings and queens, her equals in birth; nor to her
small feasts with her two maids, in the absence of her consort, Louis
the Landgrave; but I allude--and listen, O ye Benedicts, with grateful
rapture--to the fact “that the kitchen she kept out of her own private
purse, not to be the least charge to her husband.” If celibate priests,
who can hardly be supposed capable of appreciating such a fact,
canonized so rare a lady, all married men who love banquets but dislike
the butchers’ bills, will cry “Well done!” and recommend their wives to
read the instructive life of Elizabeth of Hungary.
Who would expect to hear good of a Borgia?--St. Francis Borgia was
virtuous enough to save his family name from entire infamy. Of no
other man or woman of his house could it be said that they gave up
suppers, in order to have more time for prayers. It was not Alexander
VI., the papal glory of his house and the shame of mankind, that
would have been content with one meal a day, and that meal--a mess
of leeks, or some pulse, with a piece of bread, and a cup of water.
At the same time, Francis Borgia kept a table becoming a man of his
rank, for the gratification of his guests of high degree. There, while
they ate their venison, and quaffed their _lachrymæ Christi_, he
nibbled his leeks, and sipped his water, “and conversed facetiously
with them, though at table his discourse generally turned on piety.”
It was very like a Borgia to make piety facetious, but if fun in
holiness be of the ingredients necessary to the making of a saint,
Sidney Smith has as good a right as Borgia to be on the roll of the
_beati_. Our reverend “joker of jokes,” indeed, would not have smiled
at the cook who put wormwood instead of mint into his broth; and I
doubt if Peter Plimley ever thought of doing what Francis Borgia
did,--namely, chewing his pills, and swallowing physic slowly, as
works of meritorious mortification, bearing compound interest to the
profit of the practitioner. St. Wilfrid, who taught the half-starved
South Saxons to catch the fish that swam at their feet, and thereby
live, seems to me to have performed a far more meritorious work than
if he had passed his life in gnawing leeks or masticating pills. Our
native saint, a good man at table, was often better employed than St.
Theresa, who is so eulogized because when serving at table, or carrying
the dinner from the kitchen, “she was often seen suddenly absorbed in
God, with the utensils or instruments of her business in her hands.”
The hungry and expectant monks might have quoted against the rapt maid,
the assertion of the royal sage, that there is a time to eat, as well
as to fast and pray. But St. Theresa, with all her good qualities,
was as obstinate as the Polish saint Hedwiga, who not only abstained
from meat till abstinence had nearly proved suicidal, but who refused
to save her life by eating any, until the Pope’s legate had issued a
very peremptory precept to that effect. St. Peter of Alcantara lost
all taste by his nearly total-abstinence principle, and when some one
gave him warm water with vinegar in it, he thought it was his usual
dinner of bean broth! That actively good saint, Charles Borromeo, was
only wisely moderate. “His austerities were discreet,” is the phrase
of one of his biographers; and his abstemiousness made his health
rather than marred it. This was so well known, that they who dieted
themselves in order to recover or preserve health, were said to have
adopted the remedy of Doctor Borromeo. St. Francis Xavier had something
of the discretion of Charles Borromeo,--and of the modesty too, for
he dressed his own dinners, even when he was apostolic legate; and
that St. Clement of Alexandria belonged to the same class of sagely
temperate men, is proved by his maintaining that a little wine taken
at evening, after the labours of the day, was good for the body, and
cheering for the spirits. So the sainted Archbishop of York had no
repugnance to a slice of roast goose, for, as he truly remarked, so
good a thing was not designed especially for sinners. And this recalls
to my mind a comment, similar in spirit, made by St. Thomas à Becket.
A monk once saw him eating the wing of a pheasant with much relish, and
the pharisaical fellow thereon affected to be scandalized, saying that
he thought Thomas was more of a mortified man. “Thou art but a ninny,”
said the Archbishop; “knowest thou not that a man may be a glutton upon
horse-beans; while another may enjoy with refinement even the wing of a
pheasant, and have nature’s aid to digest what Heaven’s bounty gave?”
This was good sense in the Archbishop, who perhaps had been reading
Epicurus, before he sat down to his repast. However this may be, it is
certain that the philosopher in question says something very like what
Becket said to the friar. “Is man,” he asks, “made to disdain the gifts
of nature? Is he placed on earth only to gather bitter fruits? For whom
then are the flowers that the gods strew at the feet of mortals?...
We please Providence when we yield to the divers inclinations which
Providence suggests; our duties have reference to His laws; and our
innocent desires are born of His inspirations.”
* * * * *
There are few things more common in the Lives of the Saints, than to
find them, after spare banquets of their own, working penal miracles
at the banquets of others. St. Eloy was gifted with terrible power in
this way, and endless are the stories of revellers turned to stone
by the might of his magic right arm. Other saints had equal power
in turning the tables upon those who slighted them; and I will take
this opportunity of narrating one instance, and will set my Muse in
slippers, to detail what occurred at
THE BRIDAL AND BANQUET OF FERQUES.
Near the marble quarries of Ferques, adjacent to Landrecthun le
Nord, in the Boulonnais, may be seen a circular range of stones,
bearing a close resemblance in their shape, though little in their
magnitude, to those at Stonehenge; as also to the Devil’s Needles, near
Boroughbridge, and to the solitary block on the common at Harrogate.
Learned people recognise the stones at Ferques by the appellation of
the _Mallus_, a Druidical name for an altar; but the traditionary
folks, wiser in their generation, acknowledge no other title for these
remains of antiquity than _Neuches_, an old provincial word, the
corruption, I suppose, of _Noces_, and signifying a bridal, including
the banquet which followed it. According to them, the stones at Ferques
stand there as a testimony of divine vengeance, inflicted on a fiddler
and other individuals belonging to a wedding party who refused to kneel
before the Host, as it was being borne along by a priest to a dying
brother. Rabelais says, that a well-disposed and sensible man believes
all that he is told; (“Un homme de bien, un homme de bon sens, croit
toujours ce qu’on lui dit, et ce qu’il trouve par écrit;”) and _argal_,
as the logical grave-digger in _Hamlet_ has it, this story of a bridal
and banquet will be allowed to pass without question.
Though around the bleak district there is not a grove
That can boast of a shade, e’en in summer, for love,
Nor a walk by the side of a murmuring stream,
Where somnambulist lovers may talk as they dream;
Nor a valley retir’d, nor sweet mossy dell,
Where young hearts that are aching, their anguish may tell;
Nor a wood where a maiden deserted may sigh,
Or where youths, stripp’d of hope, may with decency die;--
Though all it can boast be a desolate heath,
Where ’twould puzzle young Cupid to find him a wreath,--
Yet e’en here the Idalian has furnish’d full work
For the hearts of the youths and the maidens of Ferques.
Of these there were two in the good days of old,
When the hard iron heel of the baron so bold
Ground those to the dust whom the mere chance of birth
Had deprived of the licence to lord it on earth.
The maid was as light and as shy as the fawn,
Her eyes dark as night, and her brow like the dawn;
And her lips, twice as rich and as red as the rose,
Were more warm than the sky at a summer eve’s close;
While a music fell from them made only to bless;
And her shape--nay! her shape I must leave you to guess.
’Twould require the power pictorial of Burke,
To record how sublime was this beauty of Ferques.
The swain was in manhood’s first op’ning bloom,
In doublet, slash’d hose, martial bonnet, and plume;
And he look’d, as he walk’d ’neath the moon’s silver light,
Half hero, half mortal;--half _bourgeois_, half knight.
If upward he gazed into heaven’s soft skies,
He saw nothing there half so soft as her eyes;
Or, at least, the young lover thus gallantly swore,
As he ran the long roll of his soft nonsense o’er,
And mincingly walk’d by the damosel’s side,--
The latter all fondness, the former all pride;--
With one arm round the maiden, one hand on his dirk,
Irresistibly fine look’d this gallant of Ferques.
These walkings, these gazings, the terrible sighing,
With death, or at least earnest threat’nings of dying;
These sinkings of spirit, these meltings away,
With the watchings by night and the dreamings by day,
What could such a mixture combustible bring,
But a state of incendiarism, like Swing?
When hearts are the haystack, and Love holds the torch,
’Tis odds but the haystack will soon get a scorch.
And what else could arise from those meetings at eve,
From those flaming assertions which maidens believe,
And those vows warmly breath’d ‘’twixt the gloam and the murk,’[2]
But a bridal and banquet to gladden all Ferques?
Love’s eddying current, I say it in sooth,
Ran, for this young couple, remarkably smooth;
For the fathers paternally look’d on each child,
While the mothers maternally wept as they smiled;
Fraternally too a whole bevy of brothers
Look’d on the alliance as fondly as mothers;
And, if the young bride had possess’d but a sister,
These lines would have told how she tenderly kiss’d her.
Suffice it to say, that there never was seen,
In valley, dale, hamlet, on moorland or green,
An assembly so joyous as met at the kirk,
To view and to envy the lovers of Ferques.
For, the youthful, the aged, the ugly, the fair,
The idle, the busy, grave and gay, all were there.
Maids with prayers on their lips, for the weal of the bride,
Some who long’d for her looks, some for _him_ by her side,
And, though last, yet most certain, by no means the least,
Stood his Rev’rence, who having been bid to the feast,
Look’d as jocund and joyous, and beaming with smiles,
As the fair Cytherean, when weaving her wiles.[3]
For where is the priest, be he Pagan, Hindoo,
Yellow Bonze from Japan, olive sage from Loo Choo,
A Franciscan Friar, an opium-drench’d Turk,
But loves a fair feast like this banquet at Ferques?
’Twould be tedious to tell, when the service was done,
How that of the gallants was warmly begun,
How, like the old suitors in Livy’s old story,
By ‘Cupiditate’ (his words) ‘et Amore,’[4]
The hearts of the damsels they ruthlessly task’d,
And finally gain’d twice as much as they ask’d.
Ah, sigh not to think that in Love’s stricken field,
The maidens of Ferques were so ready to yield;
For Livy declares that no maid can withstand
The wooer who comes with such arms in his hand.
They’re pleasant to talk of, but ’neath them doth lurk
A peril not felt less at Rome than at Ferques.
The banquet was sped, and the floor being clear’d,
Terpsichore’s summons distinctly was heard,
In the tuning Cremona that squeak’d forth its call,
Inviting all those light of foot to the ball.
Lovely dance! of thy charms how correct was the notion
Of her who the Poetry, called thee, of Motion![5]
When Beauty her features in smiles deigns to grace,
What are those same smiles but the dance of the face?
And when Dancing and Modesty happily meet,
What is Dancing just then but the smiles of the feet?[6]
I’d defy e’en a hermit the summons to shirk,
Ask’d a measure to tread by the beauties of Ferques.
When moonlight had risen to silver the scene,
The party adjourn’d from the hall to the green,
And their laughter was shaking the stars in the sky,
When by chance, on the heels of their mirth, there pass’d by
A Franciscan from Boulogne, Franciscanly shod,[7]
Who ask’d them to kneel at the sight of their God,
Whose presence mysterious he fully reveal’d.
But the fiddler, he swore, he’d be hang’d if he kneel’d,
And affirm’d--most irreverent charge ’gainst a monk--
That the bare-footed priest was decidedly drunk.
And the party applauded each quip and each quirk
That fell from this vile Paganini of Ferques.