Library Notes

by A. P. Russell

In the school of affliction I have learnt more philosophy than at the academy, and more divinity than from the pulpit. In prison I have learnt that liberty does not consist in open doors and the egress and regress of locomotion. I have seen the rough side of the world as well as the smooth; and have in less than half a year tasted the difference between the closet of a king and the dungeon of Newgate. I have suffered deeply for cleaving to principles, of which integrity I have lived to say, none but those I suffered for ever reproached me with."

We are told by Middleton that "before Cicero left Sicily, at the end of his term as quæstor, he made the tour of the island, to see everything in it that was curious, and especially the city of Syracuse, which had always made the principal figure in its history. Here his first request to the magistrates, who were showing him the curiosities of the place, was to let him see the tomb of Archimedes, whose name had done so much honor to it; but to his surprise, he perceived that they knew nothing at all of the matter, and even denied that there was any such tomb remaining; yet as he was assured of it beyond all doubt, by the concurrent testimony of writers, and remembered the verses inscribed, and that there was a sphere with a cylinder engraved on some part of it, he would not be dissuaded from the pains of searching it out. When they had carried him, therefore, to the gate where the greatest number of their old sepulchres stood, he observed, in a spot overgrown with shrubs and briers, a small column, whose head just appeared above the bushes, 'with the figure of a sphere and a cylinder upon it; this, he presently told the company, was the thing they were looking for; and sending in some men to clear the ground of the brambles and rubbish, he found the inscription also which he expected, though the latter part of all the verses was effaced. Thus,' says he, 'one of the noblest cities of Greece, and once likewise the most learned, had known nothing of the monument of its most deserving and ingenious citizen, if it had not been discovered to them by a native of Arpinum.'"

Anaxagoras knew the short memory of the people, and chose a happy way to lengthen it, and at the same time to perpetuate himself. When the chief persons of the city paid him a visit, and asked him whether he had any commands for them, he answered that he only desired that children might be permitted to play every year during the month in which he died. His request was respected, and the custom continued for ages.

"Ruins," in the impressive language of Alger, "symbolize the wishes and fate of man; the weakness of his works, the fleetingness of his existence. Who can visit Thebes, in whose crowded crypts, as he enters, a flight of bats chokes him with the dust of disintegrating priests and kings; see the sheep nibbling herbage between the fallen cromlechs of Stonehenge; or confront a dilapidated stronghold of the Middle Ages, where the fox looks out of the window and the thistle nods on the wall, without thinking of these things? They feelingly persuade him what he is.... Tyre was situated of old at the entry of the sea, the beautiful mistress of the earth, haughty in her purple garments, the tiara of commerce on her brow. Now the dust has been scraped from her till she has become a blistered rock, whereon the solitary fisher spreads his nets. A few tattered huts stand among shapeless masses of masonry where glorious Carthage stood; the homes of a few husbandmen where voluptuous Corinth once lifted her splendid array of marble palaces and golden towers. Many a nation, proud and populous in the elder days of history, like Elephanta, or Memphis, is now merely a tomb and a shadowy name. Pompeii and Herculaneum are empty sepulchres, which that fatal flight before the storm of ashes and lava cheated of their occupants; the traveler sees poppies blooming in the streets where chariots once flashed.... Tigers foray in the palace yards of Persepolis, and camels browse in Babylon on the site of Belshazzar's throne; at Baalbec, lizards overrun the altars of the Temple of the Sun, and in the sculptured friezes, here the nests of obscene birds, there the webs of spiders."

"The Roman Emperor Hadrian," philosophizes Hillard, "after many years of care and conquest, with a marked taste for architecture, and the resources of the whole civilized world at his command, resolved to surround his declining life with reproductions of all the striking objects which he had seen in the course of his world-wide wanderings. He selected for the site of this gigantic enterprise a spot singularly favorable to his objects. It was a range of gently undulating hills, of about three miles in extent, with a natural boundary, formed in part by a winding valley, and partly by walls of rock. On the east, it was overlooked by the wooded heights of the Sabine Mountains; and, on the west, it commanded a view of the Campagna and the Eternal City, whose temples and obelisks, relieved against the golden sky of sunset, must have soothed the mind of its imperial master with thoughts of duties performed and of repose, earned by toil. The natural inequalities and undulations of the site, which furnished heights, plains, valleys, and glens, aided and lightened the tasks of the architect and the landscape gardener. The emperor is said to have inclosed a space of eight or ten miles in circuit, so that, if the statement were true, the villa and its appurtenances occupied an area greater than that of Pompeii. Here he set to work with armies of laborers and mountains of gold, and, in an incredibly short space of time, the ground was covered with an amazing number of costly and extensive structures, which had risen like exhalations from the soil. Besides the imperial palace, there was a library, an academy, a lyceum, numerous temples, one or more theatres, a covered walk or portico, and spacious barracks for the accommodation of the Prætorian guards. Besides these, a glen through which a stream flowed was made into a miniature likeness of the vale of Tempe; a flowery plain was called by the name of the Elysian Fields; and an immense cavern, filled with sunless waters, recalled the gloom of Tartarus.... The ruins, at the present time, seen hastily and without the interpretation of an intelligent guide, are a confused mass of decay, revealing very little of their former destination or structure.... A considerable portion of the space formerly occupied by the villa is now under cultivation, and nature, aided by a soft sky and a productive soil, has been busy in healing the gaping wounds of time, and covering unsightly ruin with a mantle of bloom and beauty.... The whole scene is now a broad page on which is stamped an impressive lesson of the vanity of human wishes. The great emperor, even while his last workmen were gathering up their tools to depart, was attacked by a mortal disease; and, seventy years after his death, Caracalla began the work of spoliation by carrying off its most costly marbles to decorate the baths whose ruins are in turn monuments to his name in Rome. A recent French traveler states that a species of syringa, which Hadrian brought from the East and planted here, still sheds its fragrance over these ruins; this delicate and fragile flower, a part of the perennial life of Nature, remaining faithful to the emperor's memory, while stone, marble, and bronze have long since betrayed their trust."

"Neither the troubles, Zenobia," mused La Bruyère, "which disturb your empire, nor the war which since the death of the king, your husband, you have so heroically maintained against a powerful nation, diminish anything of your magnificence. You have preferred the banks of the Euphrates to any other country, and resolved to raise a stately fabric there. The air is healthful and temperate; the situation charming; that sacred wood makes an awful shade on the west; the Syrian gods, who sometimes dwell on earth, could not choose a finer abode. The plain about it is peopled with men who are constantly employed in shaping and cutting, going and coming, transporting the timber of Lebanon, brass, and porphyry. Their tools and engines are heard in the air; and the travelers who pass that way to Arabia expect on their return home to see it finished with all the splendor you design to bestow on it, ere you or the princes your children make it your dwelling. Spare nothing, great queen, nor gold, nor the labor of the most excellent artists; let the Phidiases and Zeuxises of your age show the utmost of their art on your walls and ceilings. Mark out vast and delicious gardens, whose beauty shall appear to be all enchantment, and not the workmanship of man. Exhaust your treasures, and tire your industry on this incomparable edifice, and after you have given it the last perfection, some grazier or other, who lives on the neighboring sands of Palmyra, enriched by taking toll on your rivers, shall buy with ready money this royal mansion, to adorn it, and make it worthy of him and his fortune."

Gibbon thus concludes his review of the entire series of Byzantine emperors: "In a composition of some days, in a perusal of some hours, six hundred years have rolled away, and the duration of a life or reign is contracted to a fleeting moment; the grave is ever beside the throne: the success of a criminal is almost instantly followed by the loss of his prize; and our immortal reason survives and disdains the sixty phantoms of kings who have passed before our eyes, and faintly dwell on our remembrance."

"I went to-day," said Cobbett, "to see the house I formerly occupied. How small! It is always thus: the words large and small are carried about with us in our minds, and we forget real dimensions. The idea, such as it was received, remains during our absence from the object. When I returned to England in 1800, after an absence from the country parts of it for sixteen years, the trees, the hedges, even the parks and woods, seemed so small! It made me laugh to hear little gutters, that I could jump over, called rivers! The Thames was but a 'creek!' But when, in about a month after my arrival in London, I went to Farnham, the place of my birth, what was my surprise! Everything was become so pitifully small!... There is a hill not far from the town called Crooksbury Hill, which rises up out of a flat in the form of a cone, and is planted with Scotch fir-trees. Here I used to take the eggs and young ones of crows and magpies. This hill was a famous object in the neighborhood. It served as the superlative degree of height. 'As high as Crooksbury Hill' meant, with us, the utmost degree of height. Therefore the first object that my eyes sought was this hill. I could not believe my eyes! Literally speaking, I for a moment thought the famous hill removed, and a little heap put in its stead; for I had seen in New Brunswick a single rock, or hill of solid rock, ten times as big, and four or five times as high.... What a change! What scenes I had gone through! How altered my state! I had dined the day before at a secretary of state's, in company with Mr. Pitt, and had been waited upon by men in gaudy liveries! I had had nobody to assist me in the world. No teachers of any sort. Nobody to shelter me from the consequences of bad, and no one to counsel me to good behavior. I felt proud. The distinctions of rank, birth, and wealth, all became nothing in my eyes; and from that moment—less than a month from my arrival in England—I resolved never to bend before them."

"We read in the Memoirs of Moore," says a writer on M. Guizot, in the London Quarterly, 1854, "that in 1820 he was present at a performance in Paris, of Tarare, an opera of Beaumarchais, which was written in 1787, at a period when the promulgation of liberal ideas, with a certain infusion of science, was the fashion in Paris. Accordingly, while Nature and the Genius of Heat are trilling in a duet the laws of gravitation, Tarare (a virtuous soldier) defends his wife from the assaults of the monarch of Ormuz, who, being finally defeated, kills himself, and Tarare is proclaimed king in his place. Only three years afterward Louis XVI., having become a constitutional sovereign, and Bailly (who had shortly to pay with his head for his patriotic illusions) being Maire of Paris, Tarare was not allowed to be acted in its original form. Beaumarchais fitted it to the altered circumstances, and in its remodeled shape, Tarare becomes a constitutional king. Under the Republic, Tarare was not allowed to be a monarch at all; and when the opera was performed in 1795, the victorious soldier indignantly refuses the crown. Under Bonaparte, Tarare was again recast to bring it into harmony with the delusion of the hour; and lastly, when in 1820 the performance was witnessed by Moore, Tarare, become more monarchal than ever, displays his loyalty by defending the king of Ormuz from a popular insurrection, and ultimately falls with emotion at the feet of the tyrant, who has the magnanimity to restore his wife to him."

St. Austin, with his mother Monica, was led one day by a Roman prætor to see the tomb of Cæsar. Himself thus describes the corpse: "It looked of a blue mould, the bone of the nose laid bare, the flesh of the nether lip quite fallen off, his mouth full of worms, and in his eye-pit a hungry toad, feasting upon the remnant portion of flesh and moisture: and so he dwelt in his house of darkness."