FOOTNOTES:
[M] The origin of the name of Bacon is thus explained by Richard Verstegan, famous for Saxon lore and historical research:
"Bacon, that is, 'of the beechen tree,' anciently called Bucon; and whereas swines' flesh is now called by the name of bacon, it grew only at the first unto such as were fatted with Bucon or beech-mast."
It is, as a writer in Notes and Queries points out, a curious authentication of this derivation that Collins, in his Baronetage, mentions that the first man of the name of Bacon of whom there is record in the Herald's College, bore for his arms "argent, a beech tree proper." Additional confirmation seems afforded by the fact that in certain places in England boys call beechen tops "bacons."
[N] "My father," says Thomas Shirley to the king, "being a man of excellent and working wit, did find out the device of making baronets, which brought to Your Majesty's coffers wellnigh one hundred thousand pounds, for which he was promised by the late Lord Salisbury (son of Miss Cooke, Bacon's aunt), lord-treasurer, a good recompense, which he never had." Ninety-three patents were sold within six years. It was promised in the patents that no new title of honor should be created between barons and baronets, and that when the number of two hundred had been filled up, no more should ever after be added. The first promise has been kept.
[O] This recalls a story of the Marquis of L——, Sydney Smith's friend, grandfather of the present peer. His lordship's gallantries were notorious, though most carefully concealed. On one occasion he went to visit a lady with whom he maintained very intimate relations. Not choosing to take a groom on such an occasion, he gave his horse to a boy in the street to hold. On coming out he looked up and down the street, but in vain, and at length had to go home steedless. On reaching L—— House, the groom, waiting at the door for his return, said, "Shall I go for the horse, my lord?" "The horse is dead," was the brief response. "Where shall I send for the saddle and bridle, my lord?" "Oh—a—a—h" (and then with emphasis), "they're dead too!"
NOTES.
As a knowledge of the circumstances under which a work of art is composed occasionally gives a clearer insight into certain of its peculiarities, so perhaps an analysis of the individual elements which go to make up the present Assembly of Versailles may give the reader a clue to the reason of some of its legislative measures, as well as to its possibilities for the future and its political tendencies. Such an analysis is made by the Rappel of Paris in an elaborate article, from which we must only cite a few points. The Assembly, then, contains, it appears, 2 princes (the princes d'Orléans), 7 dukes, 30 marquises, 52 counts, 17 viscounts, 18 barons and 97 untitled nobles, or those "n'ayant que la particule;" which last phrase we may explain to mean having the de prefixed to their names, without other titular distinction. Next, it contains 163 great landed proprietors, including the richest in France; 155 advocates; 48 leading manufacturers; 45 officers or ex-officers of the army, chiefly of high rank; 35 magistrates or ex-magistrates; 25 engineers; 23 physicians; 21 professors; 19 notaries or ex-notaries; 16 wholesale merchants; 14 officers or ex-officers of the navy; 10 attorneys; 5 bankers; 2 druggists; 1 bishop; 1 curate; 1 Protestant minister; and 10 others of sundry occupations. The difference in composition between this republican Assembly and our own Congresses is in some respects remarkable; for, independently of the very large and indeed altogether disproportionate representation of the nobility or titled classes, we observe a very great preponderance of rich land-owners, representing in their own persons the agricultural and vine-growing interests. Very singular, also, is the small proportion of lawyers, only 155 being classed as advocates, and the magistrates and attorneys swelling the number only to 200. In an ordinary American Congress at least one-half, and usually two-thirds, of the members are or have been lawyers by profession. The clerical representation seems to reach a total of three, all told, Catholic and Protestant; and as trivial is that of the retail traders and mechanics, of whom there are but two or three in all. We may add that a full-blooded negro member, M. Pory-Papy, came as deputy from Martinique. The standard of intelligence and political experience is rather high: it is said, for example, that no less than 33 members have been ministers. Altogether, the Assembly may be considered as rather fortunately constituted.
During the session of the medical congress at Lyons one day was set apart for the study of alcoholic stimulants. On that occasion the physician of Sainte-Anne asylum, Dr. Magnan, comparing the chemical action of alcohol and absinthe on man, drew the conclusion that the former acts more slowly, gradually provoking delirium and digestive derangement, while absinthe rapidly results in epilepsy. Then, producing a couple of dogs, he treated one with alcohol and the other with essence of absinthe, this latter being the active principle of the absinthe liquor which is commonly drunk. The alcoholized brute could not stand up, became sleepy and stupid, and, when set on his legs, trembled in an inert mass: the other dog experienced at once frightful attacks of epilepsy. Analogous effects are produced in mankind. Surely the "absinthe duel" which is said to have taken place at Cannes, when both the combatants perished after drinking an extraordinary quantity, may be strictly denominated a duel with deadly weapons. In the south of France, it is said, one person sometimes invites another to partake of absinthe by the slang phrase, "Take a shovelful of earth;" as if an American bar-room lounger, recognizing with grim humor the deadly quality of his liquor, should say, "Come and get measured for your coffin." The French expression has certainly, in view of Dr. Magnan's disclosures, a melancholy picturesqueness. This subject has to France a national importance, since, if the recent report of Dr. Bergeron does not exaggerate, the absintism introduced amongst the French army in general by the Algerian officers did its part toward producing that inertness and lack of vigor which generals often complained of in their subordinates during the disastrous invasion of 1870.
Richard II., in the play of that name, disheartened by his calamities, responds to all the encouraging words of his lords and followers with a bitter satire on the wretchedness of royalty:
For God's sake, let us sit upon the ground,
And tell sad stories of the death of kings:
How some have been depos'd; some slain in war;
Some haunted by the ghosts they have depos'd;
Some poison'd by their wives; some sleeping kill'd;
All murther'd; for within the hollow crown
That rounds the mortal temples of a king
Keeps Death his court.
The unhappy monarch was destined to furnish in his own tragic fate one more illustration of his homily. His words come vividly to mind in reviewing the curious catalogue which a European statistician lately furnished of the number of sovereigns who have perished by violent deaths or been discrowned by disaster. The list, which must perforce be incomplete, embraces 2540 emperors or kings, who have ruled over 64 nations. Of these, 299 were dethroned; 151 were assassinated; 123 died in captivity; 108 were formally condemned and executed; 100 were killed in battle; 64 abdicated; 62 were poisoned; 25 died the death of martyrs; 20 committed suicide; and 11 died insane. Even these lists do not probably include all the unnatural deaths and dethronements that have occurred among the 2540 rulers thus tabulated, for it was often deemed politic to conceal the circumstances of a monarch's death, and history mentions many such instances in which the cause of death is doubtful; so that, for example, the 11 insane and the 20 suicides and the 62 poisoned doubtless do not comprise the whole number of deaths which ought to be included under those descriptions. Nevertheless, taking these figures as they are, they furnish a striking comment on King Richard's melancholy words; which, by the way, Richard's own conqueror and successor almost paralleled in his lamentations over the anxieties and perils that encompass the kingly state. We may add that the death of Napoleon III. at Chiselhurst has now, by one more name, increased the number of sovereigns dying in exile, while giving the whole subject a fresh interest.
The authority of Professor Godebski of St. Petersburg is given for the extraordinary statement that the Russian authorities in Poland have prohibited the contemplated erection of a monument to Chopin in his native Warsaw, on the ground that it might become an occasion for a political manifestation. M. Godebski was to have executed the statue, a plan had been submitted and accepted, musical admirers of Chopin had favored the project, Prince Orloff, Princess Czartoryska and many ladies of the Polish nobility had contributed the necessary funds, when the whole scheme was vetoed by Count von Berg, on the pretext already stated. Surely this was pushing caution to extremes, even in Poland. It was Chopin's fate to be driven from his country in 1836 by revolutionary disorders; but the very composition of the monumental committee, which was under the direction of Madame Mouchanoff, an ardent admirer of the master, indicated that the enterprise was an artistic, not a political one. Chopin, reposing between Bellini and Cherubini in the Père la Chaise, his chosen burial-place, has long since passed from the narrow confines of his Polish nationality to the worldwide and immortal realm of art. In pretending, thirty years after his death, that the genius of the artist is of less account than the accident of his birthplace, and in reviving against this memorial project the entirely secondary facts of the revolutionary epoch (when Chopin's career was not in politics, but in art), the Russian authorities are wondrously sensitive, to say the least. A chagrined friend of the sculptor has proposed that a piece of ground should be bought, a temporary wooden house built on it, the statue set up as if in a private courtyard or gallery, and the doors then thrown open to the public, while, after some days or months, the building could be taken down, leaving the statue substantially on a public square. But the prohibition which vetoed the original project would of course cover this stratagem also, and besides, it would be rather too petty a device to engage in.
LITERATURE OF THE DAY.
Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life. By George Eliot. Vol. II. New York: Harper & Brothers.
As a "study of provincial life" Middlemarch appeals to a class of readers who might have little taste for the psychological studies in which the book abounds, and which give it a much deeper import. Its variety, spirit and truth of local color are Hogarthian, while it shows a figure, in the heroine, of far higher beauty and belonging to the great circle of epic characters. Dorothea, with her loveliness and her history of divine blunders, is fit to stand with any queen of song or story. This volume begins with the closing scenes in her scholar-husband's life. The character is a curious, and, after all, a pathetic one. What Philadelphia reader, at least, can pursue the narrative of poor Casaubon's misplaced study and ill-judged bequest without being reminded of another career of futile scholarship near home? Like him, as it will seem to the curious annalist, Richard Rush was a student without an audience, and like him a mistaken testator. Locking up his mind from the public amidst a company of ideas imbibed in the day when his city was the great book-producing city of the country, Rush prosecuted his barren researches in a moral prison, saw domestic life only through a grating woven from his own prejudices, and died in the confidence falsely sustaining him that the inefficiency of a lifetime would be amended by the bequests of an impracticable will. Rush, too, was wealthy, of influential family, studious, sterile, and apt to put off present action in the hope that the grave would one day co-operate with his motives; and Rush, like the imagined author of the Key to all Mythologies, finds the grave a treacherous trustee. The heroine of Middlemarch, in her action over her husband's testament, behaves as every true and lovable woman, obeying the emotions, will behave while the world lasts: a flippant, easy, youthful censor has told her, in a boudoir in the Via Sistina at Rome, that her husband's labor was thrown away because the Germans had taken the lead in historical inquiries, and that they laughed at those who groped about in woods where they had made good roads. The censor is agreeable, curly, and has engaging ways of lying about on hearth-rugs and giving his arm to quaint old maids: his criticism is therefore securely effective against all the conclusions of a life of dry labor; and so it comes that Dorothea writes on her husband's posthumous schedule: "I could not use it. Do you not see now that I could not submit my soul to yours by working hopelessly at what I have no belief in?" That is the way in which schemes of more or less erudition will for ever be lost to the world when entrusted to those who reason as Nature imperiously teaches them to do, through their affinity with blooming cheeks, curled locks and versatile intellects. It is inevitable that Dorothea must sink, from her dreams of emulating Saint Theresa, to comradeship with the glossy occupant of the hearth-rug. George Eliot, as a true artist, sees what is faulty in the catastrophe, but she will not unsex her creation. Another of her characters, Rosamond, she pursues with a minute, withering, one would say vindictive, contempt. It is the beautiful, distinguished young creature who marries Lydgate on account of his high connections, and who trains him to do up her plaits of hair for her, and allows him to talk the "little language" of affection, which Rosamond, though not returning it, "accepted as if she had been a serene and lovely image, now and then miraculously dimpling toward her votary." How such a creature can become the cool blighting Nemesis of a hopeful home, ruining it by extravagance, and taking credit to herself for every act of calm revolt, until her wretched husband, who had meant to be another Vesalius, compares her to Boccaccio's basil, that flourished upon the brains of a massacred man, the author sees only too plainly, and shows forth in some of the most cutting scenes she has ever written. Her "Study of Provincial Life," while it reveals her warm poet's love for a lofty nature defeated by its conditions, shows still plainer her intimate and personal dread of the cold thin nature that kills by its commonplace. The last she rewards contemptuously with a carriage in the Park and a rich second match: the first she punishes with exquisite Junonine tenderness by giving her a little boy in the bride-chamber of the home of the clever young politician whom the local editor has called a "violent energumen."
In laying down the book the reader is conscious of a different feeling from that with which he ordinarily parts with a work of fiction which has gratified his artistic tastes and furnished him with a high intellectual pleasure. Comparing the productions of George Eliot with those of other novelists, we are tempted to think of these as trivial fond records, which might well be blotted from the tablets of the memory, leaving the inscription she has placed there to live alone in ineffaceable characters. It is not that they show her to be endowed with a larger measure of those gifts which constitute the artist. In each of these she has perhaps been equaled or surpassed by one or another of her predecessors. As a painter of manners, of all that belongs to the surface of life, she is rivaled in fidelity, if not in breadth and force, by Fielding, Thackeray and Miss Austen. Her observation is less keen than theirs, her portraiture less vivid, her humor less cordial and abundant. Her conceptions have not the intensity of Charlotte Bronté's, nor her great scenes the dramatic fire of Scott's. In the minor matters of invention and plot she sometimes has recourse to shifts that betray the deficiencies they are intended to conceal. The quality in which she is supreme is one that lies beyond the strict domain of art. It is the power of penetrating to the roots of human character and action—a power which seems to be something more than insight, but for which sympathy would be a still less adequate term, indicating as it does a nature harmonious and complete, one in which intellect and feeling are resolved into an element that overflows and envelops its object without effort or repulsion. In other novelists we admire a subtlety that winds through the intricacies of motives, unmasking deceptions, revealing weaknesses and flaws but half suspected, or delicacies and beauties but half appreciated: George Eliot drops a plummet that sinks straight and steadily, through turbid waves and calm under-current, reaching depths before unexplored. We can claim no part in her discoveries, however our faculties may be exercised in grasping or in testing them. They more often correct than confirm our impressions; they make large additions to our knowledge; they suggest the necessity of reconstructing our theories and placing them on a new and wider base.
A Memorial of Alice and Phœbe Cary. By Mary Clemmer Ames. New York: Hurd & Houghton.
Alice Cary was a poetess of feeling, tender, prolific, overworked, unhealthy, and cooked to desiccation in a New York "elegant residence" that was but one enormous stove. Phœbe, working less, was amusing, plump, gay and original. Alice, obediently grinding out her sweet morning poem for the Ledger before she went to market, died at her desk, and then Phœbe died of loneliness. It is a gentle and a thoroughly American history. In the eyes of both these Ohio women, New York was the market where they could easiest sell their wares, and their poems were commodities from which they were determined to derive as comfortable an existence as possible. Any strict idea of duty to their art, as the responsibility committed to them above all things on earth, seems never to have crossed the mind of either sister, though Alice, who wrote a great many volumes, would occasionally complain—not, however, more feelingly than all sincere authors do—that she knew her labors were overtaxing her faculty. They arranged, at their handsome residence on Twentieth street, a salon of Sunday evenings, where Mr. Greeley, Robert Bonner and Whitelaw Reid used to meet and converse kindly with the minor literati, and which were believed to have much of the pleasantness and life of French conversaziones. Alice Cary has left a profusion of pensive poetry: the following is the most beautiful extract she affords:
The fisher droppeth his net in the stream,
And a hundred streams are the same as one;
And the maiden dreameth her lovelit dream;
And what is it all when all is done?
The net of the fisher the burden breaks,
And always the dreaming the dreamer wakes.
Phœbe, who was reckoned less clever than Alice, excites a great deal more sympathy, quietly accepting a position of admiring secondariness, and yielding occasional good things in wit or poetry: she was famed among her friends as a punster and parodist, and once answered at a dinner to a question what wine they used, "Oh, we drink Heidsick, but we keep mum." An irresistibly taking and womanly remark of hers, disposing in its own way of whole schemes of Calvinistic theology, was her reply to the argument for endless punishment: "Well, if God ever sends me into such misery, I know He will give me a constitution to bear it." Again, as the least laborious of the sisters, her talent had moments of greater felicity than that of Alice, and she has left one hymn which has all the promise of a lasting favorite. The sacred lyric, "One sweetly solemn thought comes to me o'er and o'er," is sung, as it deserves to be, wherever Christianity is known, and there is an attested story of its having aroused a pair of gamblers in China to repentance and permanent reform. It is imprudent to predict a permanent place for even the best of Alice Carey's gentle songs; but Phœbe's utterance may very possibly be quoted, from her unpretending station as adviser and alleviator of every-day life, after her name shall be forgotten and her religion shall have become impersonal.
How I Found Livingstone. By Henry M. Stanley. New York: Scribner, Armstrong & Co.
This book, the circumstances of its writing considered, is a literary curiosity. It contains seven hundred and twenty pages octavo, and it was composed in an incredibly short time, while the stomach of its author was digesting a series of stout English dinners, and his attention dissipating among speech-makings and speech-listenings, feasts, meetings and visits. Only a New York reporter could have achieved the feat. The faculty acquired by men of Mr. Stanley's trade, of acting with the intense decision and energy of great military captains, and then relating the action with the voluble unction of bar-rooms or political stumps, is a strange mixed faculty, and is found to perfection in the reporters' rooms of the New York Herald. The tale has the Herald's well-known style, and is a correspondent's letter in a state of amplification. It is always energetic, often tinged with real heroism and romance, and adorned sometimes with an ambition of classical allusions that resemble Egyptian jewels worn by a Nubian savage. It has not the least self-restraint or good taste, but it sounds fresh, genuine and sincere. It brings out with fine distinctness the feudal fidelity of a reporter-errant, whose whole soul is dyed with belief in the great establishment whose behest he obeys—one of the last refuges in which mediæval humility is to be found. As a part of the same habit of mind, Mr. Stanley shows a fine, literal, unquestioning championship of the object of his quest, Dr. Livingstone; but he seems to admire the doctor, after all, rather as an ornamental possession of the New York Herald. The great traveler's good-nature to Mr. Bennett, as a voluntary correspondent and coadjutor by brevet with the journal, disarms and enchants him: beginning with a prejudice, he ends by saying, "I grant he is not an angel, but he approaches to that being as near as the nature of a living man will allow." In every trait Stanley shows himself whole-souled, ignorant of half measures, unscrupulous, cruel on occasion, driving, positive, and furnished with a sure instinct of success. The book, from its hasty construction, admits many inconsistencies, the worst of which is its long tirade against the Geographical Society, nullified finally by gracious thanks for their medal; but it has the energetic virtue of a book written while memory was fresh, and is often truly dramatic and pictorial. It is the garrulous appendage of a strange and solid achievement, the feather-end of the arrow, which advertises the hit of the steel.
The Minnesinger of Germany. By A. E. Kroeger. New York: Hurd & Houghton.
Mr. Kroeger appears to have an antiquarian's thoroughness in his subject, and he has made it an interesting one to Western readers. But he has not succeeded in his translations, partly because he does not respect the usage and associations of the English words he rivets incompatibly together, and partly because success, even for a more poetical translator, is impossible in the premises. The authors of the Minnelay, in their elaborate rhyme-caprice, must have remained harmonious and lyrical, which is not the case with a version like this:
I look so Esau-like, perdu,
My hair hangs rough and unkempt. Hu!
Gentle Summer, where are you?
Ah, were the world no more so dhu!
Rather than bide in this purlieu,
Longer to stay I'll say, Adieu!
And go as monk to Toberlu.
Or like this, which Mr. Kroeger, without the fear of Maud's author before his eyes, compares to Tennyson:
Rosy-colored meadows
To shadows we see vanish everywhere,
Wood-birds' warbling dieth,
Sore-trieth them the snow of wintry year.
Woe, woe! what red mouth's glow
Hovers now o'er the valley?
Ah, ah, the hours of woe!
Lovers it doth rally
No more; yet its caress seems cosy.
These studies of intricate rhymes concealed in and terminating the lines are at least as hard for the reader as for the writer; yet we hope Mr. Kroeger will not lose his readers before they arrive at the historical and critical parts of the work, which are really valuable. The narrative of Ulrich von Lichtenstein of the thirteenth century, who sent one of his fingers to an exacting lady-love, and paraded through Europe on her quests disguised variously as King Arthur, Queen Venus or as a leper, is one which makes the maddest deeds of Quixote seem sane, although he was a true singer and an admired chevalier of his period. Gottfried von Strassburg, whose excellent poem of Tristan and Isolde inspires the writer with his least unhappy translation, leads the subject away from the mere love-carolers toward the authors of the metrical romances, the bards of Germany. It is at this point that he introduces some forcible criticisms on Tennyson's poetry of that character, and makes it evident that the Laureate might have improved his Idyls by extending his readings among the German chanters of Arthurian legend. The following seems practical and just: "If Tennyson was determined to make the love-passion the chief theme of his work, rather than the religious element of the St. Graal, he had at hand in one of his legends that very same relation between the sexes which existed between Queen Guinevere and Launcelot, and yet deprived in the essential point of all disgusting characteristics. It seems strange that the impropriety of making this adulterous connection between the king and queen the chief theme of his song should not have struck Tennyson when he dedicated his legends to the husband of Queen Victoria, even in that dedication drawing comparisons: strange that he should have taken no means to hide it, by at least bringing the king into some position of interest, whereas he is made so little of that he seems a mild, inoffensive, gentle soul, who is ready even to shake hands with the seducer of his wife." In this connection it will repay the reader to peruse, even if the version has not much charm, the long extract from Gottfried's Tristan, with an eye to the noble and knightly way in which the legend is conceived and taken up. Mr. Kroeger, who can give it no grace in translation, is a warm partisan in matters of melody and rhythm, appreciating Coleridge and Swinburne. Altogether, he is a sincere and useful interpreter between our public—rather careless of musty poetry—and the fine old German singers.
Books Received.
History of English Literature. By H. A. Taine. Abridged from the translation of H. van Laun, by John Fiske, Assistant Librarian of Harvard University. New York: Holt & Williams.
The Polytechnic: A Collection of Music for Schools, Classes and Clubs. Arranged and Written by U. C. Burnap and Dr. W. J. Wetmore. New York: J. W. Schermerhorn.
The Athenæum: A Collection of Part Songs. Arranged and Written by U. C. Burnap and Dr. W. J. Wetmore. New York: J. W. Schermerhorn & Co.
Joseph Noirel's Revenge. By Victor Cherbuliez. Translated from the French by William F. West, A. M. New York: Holt & Williams.
A New Theory of the Origin of Species. By B. G. Ferris. New Haven, Connecticut: C. C. Chatfield & Co.
Johnson's Natural Philosophy. By Frank G. Johnson, A.M., M.D. New York: J. W. Schermerhorn & Co.
The Ordeal for Wives. By the author of "Ought We to Visit Her?" New York: Sheldon & Co.
The Higher Ministry of Nature. By John Leifchild, A.M. New York: G. P. Putnam & Sons.
A Manual of Pottery and Porcelain. By John H. Treadwell. New York: G. P. Putnam & Sons.
The Outcast, and Other Poems. By J. W. Watson. Philadelphia: T. B. Peterson & Brothers.
The Catholic Family Almanac for 1873. New York: The Catholic Publication Society.
Off the Skelligs. By Jean Ingelow. Boston: Roberts Brothers.