Library Notes

by A. P. Russell

A traveler in Ceylon, who visited the ruins of ancient Mahagam, says that one of the ruined buildings had apparently rested upon seventy-two pillars. These were still erect, standing in six lines of twelve columns. This building must have formed an oblong of three hundred feet by two hundred and fifty. The stone causeway which passed through the ruins was about two miles in length, being for the most part overgrown with low jungle and prickly cactus. The first we hear of this city is 286 B. C.; but we have no account of the era or cause of its destruction. The records of Ceylon give no satisfactory account of it. The wild elephants come out of the jungles and rub their backs against the columns of this forgotten temple, as the naked Indians gamble with forked sticks on the desolate ruins of Central America.

But a few years sometimes change the whole face of a country. Sir Woodbine Parish informed Darwin that during the three years' drought in Buenos Ayres, beginning in 1827, the ground being so long dry, such quantities of dust were blown about that in the open country the landmarks became obliterated, and people could not tell the limits of their estates.

But what shall we say of the instability of human greatness? The career and end of Pompey furnish a striking example. "He who a few days before commanded kings and consuls, and all the noblest of Rome, was sentenced to die by a council of slaves; murdered by a base deserter; cast out naked and headless on the Egyptian strand; and when the whole earth, as Velleius says, had scarce been sufficient for his victories, could not find a spot upon it at last for a grave. His body was burnt on the shore by one of his freedmen, with the planks of an old fishing-boat; and his ashes, being conveyed to Rome, were deposited privately by his wife Cornelia in a vault of his Alban villa."

Aristotle, that prince of all true thinkers, loaded with immortal glory, was compelled to flee suddenly and by stealth to Chalcis, in order to save his life, and spare, as he said, the Athenians a new crime against philosophy. There, it is believed, the great man, in his old age, wearied with persecutions, poisoned himself.

The venerable Hildebrand, the greatest of all the popes, after the herculean labors of his self-devoted and mighty career, crushed by an accumulation of hardships, said, "I have loved justice and hated iniquity; therefore I die in exile."

"The ceremony of Galileo's abjuration," says Sir David Brewster, in his biography of that great man, "was one of exciting interest and of awful formality. Clothed in the sackcloth of a repentant criminal, the venerable sage fell upon his knees before the assembled cardinals; and, laying his hands upon the Holy Evangelists, he invoked the divine aid in abjuring and detesting, and vowing never again to teach, the doctrine of the earth's motion and of the sun's stability. He pledged himself that he would never again, either in words or in writing, propagate such heresies; and he swore that he would fulfill and observe the penances which had been inflicted upon him. At the conclusion of this ceremony, in which he recited his abjuration word for word, and then signed it, he was conveyed, in conformity with his sentence, to the prison of the Inquisition." All because it had been said that the "sun runneth about from one end of heaven to the other," and that "the foundations of the earth are so firmly fixed that they cannot be moved."

Think of this in connection with the fact that "in five years Charles II. touched twenty-three thousand six hundred and one of his subjects for the evil; that the bishops invented a sort of heathen service for the occasion; that the unchristianlike, superstitious ceremony was performed in public; and that, as soon as prayers were ended, the Duke of Buckingham brought a towel, and the Earl of Pembroke a basin and ewer, who, after they had made obeisance to his majesty, kneeled down till his majesty had washed." Dr. Wiseman, an eminent surgeon of that period, in writing on scrofula, says, "However, I must needs profess that his majesty (Charles II.) cureth more in any one year than all the chirurgeons of London have done in an age."

And think at the same time of the trial of a mother and her daughter, eleven years old, before "the great and good Sir Matthew Hale," then Lord Chief Baron, for witchcraft; and their conviction and execution at Bury St. Edmunds, principally on the evidence of Sir Thomas Browne, one of the first physicians and scholars of his day.

In Fuller's Church History there is a curious fact, showing the power of superstition over even such a man as Wolsey. The great cardinal "in his life-time was informed by some fortune-tellers that he should have his end at Kingston. This his credulity interpreted of Kingston-on-Thames; which made him always avoid the riding through that town, though the nearest way from his house to the court. Afterward, understanding that he was to be committed by the king's express orders to the charge of Sir Anthony Kingston, it struck to his heart; too late perceiving himself deceived by that father of lies in his homonymous prediction."