Library Notes

by A. P. Russell

"Never stoops the soaring vulture
On his quarry in the desert,
On the sick or wounded bison,
But another vulture, watching
From his high aerial lookout,
Sees the downward plunge and follows;
And a third pursues the second,
Coming from the invisible ether,
First a speck, and then a vulture,
Till the air is dark with pinions.
So disasters come not singly;
But as if they watched and waited,
Scanning one another's motions,
When the first descends, the others
Follow, follow, gathering flock-wise
Round their victim, sick and wounded,
First a shadow, then a sorrow,
Till the air is dark with anguish."

"What a noise out-of-doors!" exclaimed Souvestre's Philosopher from his attic in Paris. "What is the meaning of all these shouts and cries? Ah! I recollect: this is the last day of the carnival, and the maskers are passing. Christianity has not been able to abolish the noisy bacchanalian festivals of the pagan times, but it has changed the names. That which it has given to these 'days of liberty' announces the ending of the feasts, and the month of fasting which should follow; 'carn-a-val' means literally 'down with flesh meat!' It is a forty days' farewell to the 'blessed pullets and fat hams,' so celebrated by Pantagruel's minstrel. Man prepares for privation by satiety, and finishes his sins thoroughly before he begins to repent. Why, in all ages and among every people, do we meet with some one of these mad festivals? Must we believe that it requires such an effort for men to be reasonable, that the weaker ones have need of rest at intervals. The monks of La Trappe, who are condemned to silence by their rule, are allowed to speak once in a month, and on this day, they all talk at once from the rising to the setting of the sun."

It is reported of Scaramouche, the first famous Italian comedian, that being in Paris, and in great want, he bethought himself of constantly plying near the door of a noted perfumer in that city, and when any one came out who had been buying snuff, never failed to desire a taste of them: when he had by this means got together a quantity made up of several different sorts, he sold it again at a lower rate to the same perfumer, who, finding out the trick, called it "snuff of a thousand flowers." The story further tells us that by this means he got a very comfortable subsistence, until, making too great haste to grow rich, he one day took such an unreasonable pinch out of the box of a Swiss officer as engaged him in a quarrel, and obliged him to quit this ingenious way of life.

"I remember," says Cumberland, in his Memoirs, "the predicament of an ingenious mechanic and artist, who, when Rich the harlequin was the great dramatic author of his time, and wrote successfully for the stage, contrived and executed a most delicious serpent for one of those inimitable productions, in which Mr. Rich, justly disdaining the weak aid of language, had selected the classical fable, if I rightly recollect, of Orpheus and Eurydice, and, having conceived a very capital part for the serpent, was justly anxious to provide himself with a performer who could support a character of that consequence with credit to himself and his author. The event answered his most ardent hopes: nothing could be more perfect than his entrances and exits; nothing ever crawled across the stage with more accomplished sinuosity than this enchanting serpent; every one was charmed with its performance; it twirled and twisted, and wriggled itself about in so divine a manner, that the whole world was ravished by the lovely snake; nobles and non-nobles, rich and poor, old and young, reps and demi-reps, flocked to see it and admire it. The artist, who had been the master of the movement, was intoxicated with his success; he turned his hand and head to nothing else but serpents; he made them of all sizes; they crawled about his shop as if he had been chief snake-catcher to the furies; the public curiosity was satisfied with one serpent, and he had nests of them yet unsold; his stock lay dead upon his hands, his trade was lost, and the man was ruined, bankrupt, and undone."

Lecky observes that when, after long years of obstinate disbelief, the reality of the great discovery of Harvey dawned upon the medical world, the first result was a school of medicine which regarded man simply as an hydraulic machine, and found the principle of every malady in imperfections of circulation.

In the Arctic region, says Dr. Kane, the frost is so intense as to burn. Sudden putrefaction of meat takes place at a temperature of thirty-five degrees below zero. The Greenlanders consider extreme cold as favorable to putrefaction. The Esquimaux withdraw the viscera immediately after death, and fill the cavity with stones. Dr. Kane was told that the musk ox is sometimes tainted after five minutes exposure to great cold. In Italy, south of the great alluvial plain of Lombardy, and away from the immediate sea-coast, the lakes occupy the craters of extinguished volcanoes. In Arabia, travelers declare, the silence of the desert is so profound that it soon ceases to be soothing or solemn, and becomes absolutely painful, if not appalling. In Java, that magnificent and fearful clime, the most lovely flowers are found to conceal hidden reptiles; the most tempting fruits are tinctured with subtle poisons; there grow those splendid trees whose shadow is death; there the vampire, an enormous bat, sucks the blood of the victims whose sleep he prolongs, by wafting over them an air full of freshness and perfume. Darwin, in his Voyage, speaks of the strange mixture of sound and silence which pervades the shady parts of the wood on the shore of Brazil. The noise from the insects is so loud that it may be heard even in a vessel anchored several hundred yards from the shore; yet within the recesses of the forest a universal silence appears to reign. At Syracuse, an English gentleman was taken to a dirty cistern; seventy women were washing, with their clothes tucked up, and themselves standing in a pool,—a disgusting scene. "What do you bring me here for?" said he to the guide. "Why, sir, this is the Fountain of Arethusa." In the Fourth Circle of Dante's Hell are the souls of the Prodigal and the Avaricious: they are forever rolling great weights, and forever smiting each other. "To all eternity," says the poet, "they shall continue butting one another." A dung-hill at a distance, said Coleridge, sometimes smells like musk, and a dead dog like elder-flowers. Scargill declared that an Englishman is never happy but when he is miserable; a Scotchman is never at home but when he is abroad; an Irishman is at peace only when he is fighting. The melancholy, says Horace, hate the merry, the jocose the melancholy; the volatile dislike the sedate, the indolent the stirring and vivacious; the modest man generally carries the look of a churl. Meyer, in conversation with Goethe, said he saw a shoemaker in Italy who hammered his leather upon the antique marble head of a Roman emperor. The lark, that sings out of the sky, purifies himself, like the pious Mussulman, in the dust of the ground. The nightingale, they say, sings with his breast against a thorn. The fragrant white pond lily springs from the same black mud out of which the yellow lily sucks its obscene life and noisome odor. An elephant, that no quadruped has the temerity to attack, is said to be the favorite victim of a worm that bores into his foot and slowly tortures him to death. A gnat, according to a tradition of the Arabs, overcame the mighty Nimrod. Enraged at the destruction of his gods by the prophet Abraham, he sought to slay him, and waged war against him. But the prophet prayed to God, and said, "Deliver me, O God, from this man, who worships stones, and boasts himself to be the lord of all beings;" and God said to him, "How shall I punish him?" And the prophet answered, "To Thee armies are as nothing, and the strength and power of men likewise. Before the smallest of thy creatures will they perish." And God was pleased at the faith of the prophet, and he sent a gnat, which vexed Nimrod night and day, so that he built a room of glass in his palace, that he might dwell therein, and shut out the insect. But the gnat entered also, and passed by his ear into his brain, upon which it fed, and increased in size day by day, so that the servants of Nimrod beat his head with a hammer continually, that he might have some ease from his pain; but he died, after suffering these torments for four hundred years.

"The grandiose statues of Michel Angelo," said a traveler, descanting upon the art and architecture of old Rome, "appear to the greatest advantage under the bold arches of Bramante. There—between those broad lines, under those prodigious curves—placed in one of those courts, or near one of the great temples where the perspective is incomplete—the statues of Michel Angelo display their tragic attitudes, their gigantic members, which seem animated by a ray from the divinity, and struggling to mount from earth to heaven. Bramante and Michel Angelo detested but completed each other. Thus it is often in human nature. Those two men knew not that they were laborers in the same work. And history is silent upon such points till death has passed over her heroes. Armies have fought until they have been almost annihilated on the field of battle; men have hated and injured one another by their calumnies; the learned and powerful persecute and seek to blot their fellows from the earth, as if there was not air and space for all; they know not, blinded by their passions, and warped by the prejudices of envy, that the future will blend them in the same glory, that to posterity they will represent but one sentiment. Bramante and Michel Angelo, enemies during life, are reconciled in immortality."

See how the extremes in morals and legislation met during the few years of English history covering the Protectorate and the Restoration. Puritanism and liberty of conscience, whose exponents were Cromwell and Milton, met licentiousness and corrupted loyalty, with Charles II. and Wycherley for representatives. Cromwell was "Puritanism armed and in power;" Milton was its apostle and poet. Charles II. was kingcraft besotted; Wycherley its jester and pimp. Cromwell—farmer, preacher, soldier, party leader, prince—radical, stern, hopeful; Charles—debauchee, persecuting skeptic, faithless ruler; Milton—lofty in his Paradise; Wycherley—nasty in his Love in a Wood, and Country Wife. "A larger soul never dwelt in a house of clay," said one who had been much about Cromwell, after his death, when flattery was mute. "Old Goat" was the name given to Charles by one who knew him best. Cromwell, "after all his battles and storms, and all the plots of assassins against his life, died of grief at the loss of his favorite daughter, and of watching at her side." Charles went out of life in a fit, the result of his horrible excesses, if not of poison,—as said and believed by many, administered by one of his own numerous mistresses.

First, "the Puritans," says Macaulay, "interdicted, under heavy penalties, the use of the Book of Common Prayer, not only in churches, but in private houses. It was a crime in a child to read by the bedside of a sick parent one of those beautiful collects which had soothed the griefs of forty generations of Christians. Severe punishments were denounced against such as should presume to blame the Calvinistic mode of worship. Clergymen of respectable character were not only ejected from their benefices by thousands, but were frequently exposed to the outrages of a fanatical rabble. Churches and sepulchres, fine works of art and curious remains of antiquity, were brutally defaced. The Parliament resolved that all pictures in the royal collection which contained representations of Jesus or of the Virgin Mother should be burned. Sculpture fared as ill as painting. Nymphs and graces, the work of Ionian chisels, were delivered over to Puritan stone-masons to be made decent. Against the lighter vices the ruling faction waged war with a zeal little tempered by humanity or by common-sense. Public amusements, from the masks which were exhibited at the mansions of the great down to the wrestling matches and grinning matches on village greens, were vigorously attacked. One ordinance directed that all the May-poles in England should forthwith be hewn down. One of the first resolutions adopted by Barebone's Parliament was that no person should be admitted into the public service till the house should be satisfied with his real godliness."