The discomfiture of Miss Pinkerton, who attempted once to scold Becky Sharp in public, is familiar to every reader of Thackeray. Rebecca hit upon the plan of answering her in French, which quite routed the old woman.
A wise man, who lived a long life of virtue, study, travel, society, and reflection; who read the best books and conversed with the greatest and best men; the companion of philosophers and scientists; familiar with all important discoveries and experiments; after he was three-score and ten, wrote, "It is remarkable that the more there is known, the more it is perceived there is to be known. And the infinity of knowledge to be acquired runs parallel with the infinite faculty of knowing, and its development. Sometimes I feel reconciled to my extreme ignorance, by thinking, If I know nothing, the most learned know next to nothing." "Had I earlier known," said Goethe, "how many excellent things have been in existence, for hundreds and thousands of years, I should have written no line; I should have had enough else to do." Cardinal Farnese one day found Michel Angelo, when an old man, walking alone in the Coliseum, and expressed his surprise at finding him solitary amidst the ruins; to which he replied, "I go yet to school, that I may continue to learn." In his last days, he made a design of himself as a child in a go-cart, with this motto under it, "I am yet learning." Rubens complained, that just as he was beginning to understand his profession he was forced to quit it. Mozart declared on his death-bed, that he began to see what may be done in music. Buffon told a friend that, after passing fifty years at his desk, he was every day learning to write. Macaulay, the year before his death, after spending some hours over his own writings, wrote in his diary: "Alas! how short life and how long art! I feel as if I had just begun to understand how to write; and the probability is that I have very nearly done writing." Theophrastus, one hundred and seven years old, St. Jerome assures us, lamented that he was obliged to quit life at a time when he just began to be wise. Mrs. Jameson once asked Mrs. Siddons which of her great characters she preferred to play? She replied, after a moment's consideration, "Lady Macbeth is the character I have most studied." She afterward said that she had played the character during thirty years, and scarcely acted it once without carefully reading over the part, and generally the whole play, in the morning; and that she never read over the play without finding something new in it; "something," she said, "which had not struck me so much as it ought to have struck me." Dugald Stewart said of Bacon's Essays that in reading them for the twentieth time he observed something which had escaped his attention in the nineteenth. "I do not know," said Newton, "what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, while the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me." Said Bossuet, "The term of my existence will be eighty years at most, but let us allow it an hundred. What ages have rolled before I had my being! How many will flow after I am gone! And what a small space do I occupy in this grand succession of years! I am as a blank; this diminutive interval is not sufficient to distinguish me from that nothing to which I must inevitably return. I seem only to have made my appearance for the purpose of increasing the number; and I am even useless—for the play would have been just as well performed, had I remained behind the scenes." Wrote Voltaire, "I am ignorant how I was formed, and how I was born. I was perfectly ignorant, for a quarter of my life, of the reasons of all that I saw, heard, and felt, and was a mere parrot, talking by rote in imitation of other parrots. When I looked about me and within me, I conceived that something existed from all eternity. Since there are beings actually existing, I concluded that there is some being necessary and necessarily eternal. Thus the first step which I took to extricate myself from my ignorance overpassed the limits of all ages—the boundaries of time. But when I was desirous of proceeding in this infinite career, I could neither perceive a single path, nor clearly distinguish a single object; and from the flight which I took to contemplate eternity, I have fallen back into the abyss of my original ignorance." "Heads of capacity, and such as are not full with a handful, or easy measure of knowledge, think they know nothing till they know all; which being impossible, they fall," said Sir Thomas Browne, "upon the opinion of Socrates, and only know they know not anything." Hiero, tyrant of Sicily, asked old Simonides to tell him what God is. The poet answered him that it was not a question that could be immediately answered, and that he wanted a whole day to think upon it. When that term was over, Hiero asked the answer; but Simonides desired two days more to consider of it. This was not the last delay he asked; he was often called on to give an answer, and every time he desired double the time he had last demanded. The tyrant, wondering at it, desired to know the reason of it. I do so, answered Simonides, because the more I examine the matter, the more obscure it appears to me. "After reading all that has been written," says the poet Poe, "and all that can be thought, on the topics of God and the soul, the man who has a right to say that he thinks at all, will find himself face to face with the conclusion that, on these topics, the most profound thought is that which can be the least easily distinguished from the most superficial sentiment." "I am a fragment, and this is a fragment of me," says Emerson.... "I am very content with knowing, if only I could know.... To know a little, would be worth the expense of this world." "You read of but one wise man," says Congreve, "and all that he knew was—that he knew nothing." "The curiosity of knowing things has been given to man for a scourge." "If God," said Lessing, "held all truth shut in his right hand, and in his left nothing but the restless instinct for truth, though with the condition of forever and ever erring, and should say to me, Choose! I would bow reverently to his left hand, and say, Father, give! Pure truth is for Thee alone!"
II.
EXTREMES.
In man, it has been said, there will be a layer of fierce hyena, or of timid deer, running through the nature in the most uncertain and tortuous manner. Nero is sensitive to poetry and music, but not to human suffering: Marcus Aurelius is tolerant and good to all men but Christians. The Tlascalans of Mexico loved, and even worshiped, flowers; but they were cruel to excess, and sacrificed human victims with savage delight. The body of the sacrificed captive, we are told by Prescott, was delivered to the warrior who had taken him in battle, and by him, after being dressed, was served up in an entertainment to his friends. This was not the coarse repast of famished cannibals, but a banquet teeming with delicious beverages and delicate viands, prepared with art, and attended by both sexes, who conducted themselves with all the decorum of civilized life. The Aztec priests were more wild and ferocious than the soldiery, their hair was long and matted, and their garments were stained with human blood. The good and the evil lie close together; the virtues and the vices alternate; so is human power accumulated; alternately the metals and the rags; a terrible Voltaic pile. In the well-bred animal the claw is nicely cushioned; the old Adam is presentable. Overhear a beautiful young woman swear, and meet her an hour afterward, all smiles and loveliness, in the drawing-room. Speak with unreserved kindness of one lady to another,—both of them very lovely creatures, so far as you know,—and receive in reply, "Don't! She, of all persons I know, is the only one I hate to hear praised." Lady Mary Wortley Montagu said of the Duchess of Marlborough, "We continue to see one another like two persons who are resolved to hate with civility." "It goes far to reconcile me to being a woman," she said on another occasion, "when I reflect that I am thus in no danger of ever marrying one." Madame de Maintenon and Madame de Montespan met in public, talked with vivacity, and, to those who judged only by appearances, seemed excellent friends. Once when they had to make a journey in the same carriage, Madame de Montespan said, "Let us talk as if there were no difference between us, but on condition that we resume our disputes when we return." Pietro Della Valle says that when the Ecce Homo was exposed during the sermon in the Jesuit church at Goa, the women used to beat their servants, if they did not cry enough to please them. Saint-Simon relates of the Marechale de la Ferte and her sister, both beautiful women, but very dissolute, that upon one occasion they heard a sermon on penitence which terrified them. "My sister," one said on their return, "it was all true; we must do penance or we are lost. But, my sister, what shall we do?" After having well turned it over, "My sister," replied the other, "This is what we must do—we must make our servants fast." When Moore's Life of Byron first appeared, it was in two large, quarto volumes, and the first came out alone. Murray told Leslie that a lady said to him, "I hear it is dull;" and he told her the scandal was all to be in the second volume. "And is the second volume to be had separately?" asked the lady. I was once, says a writer, passing through Moorfields, with a young girl, aged about nine or ten years, born and educated in Portugal, but in the Protestant faith; and, observing a large concourse of people assembled around a pile of fagots on fire, I expressed a curiosity to know the cause. She very composedly answered, "I suppose that it is nothing more than that they are going to burn a Jew." Isabella the Catholic was wont to rejoice and give thanks at the sight of a gallows with a man hanging therefrom. Charlotte Cushman related an incident that occurred at a theatre. A man in the gallery made such a disturbance that the play could not proceed. Cries of "Throw him over," arose from all parts of the house, and the noise became furious. All was tumultuous chaos until a sweet and gentle female voice was heard in the pit, exclaiming, "No! I pray you don't throw him over! I beg of you, dear friends, don't throw him over, but—kill him where he is." It is recorded that after the massacre of St. Bartholomew the ladies of the court of Paris went out to examine the long row of the bodies of the Huguenot cavaliers who had been slain during the tumult, and curiously turning them over, when half-stripped of their garments, said to each other, "This must have been a charming lover; that was not worth looking at;" and when a fanatic assassin was brought out in the square of the Louvre to undergo during four hours the most frightful tortures which human ingenuity or malignity could devise, or the human frame endure, all the ladies of the court assembled to witness the spectacle, and paid high prices for seats nearest the scene of agony. In the Conciergerie, during the Reign of Terror, a corridor was common in the day-time to both sexes, and here, it is stated, there was as much dressing, talking, flirting, and love-making as in the salons of Paris. Most of the women contrived to change their dress three times a day, though in the interval they had often to wash or mend the garment they were about to put on. The tone of conversation was gay and animated, and the people seemed bent on proving that though the Reign of Terror might imprison and kill them, it could not make them dull or disagreeable.
It is related that Della Valle, the distinguished Italian traveler, had such an absorbing fondness for his wife that, when she died, on the shore of the Persian Gulf, he embalmed her body, and spent one whole year conveying it back through India to Rome, where he celebrated her obsequies by pronouncing a funeral oration, during the delivery of which his emotions became so violent as to choke his utterance. Not long after, in a fit of anger, he killed his coachman, in the area before St. Peter's, while the pope was pronouncing a benediction. "I remember," says Patmore, in his personal recollections of Hazlitt, "having occasionally played at whist with a person who, on any occurrence of extraordinary ill-luck, used to lay his cards down deliberately, and bite a piece out of the back of his hand! This person was, under ordinary circumstances, the very ideal of a 'gentleman'—bland, polished, courteous, forbearing, kind, and self-possessed to an extraordinary degree; and his personal appearance in every respect corresponded with his manners and bearing. Hazlitt's passions sometimes produced similar results. I have seen him more than once, at the Fives Court in St. Martin Street, on making a bad stroke or missing his ball at some critical point of the game, fling his racket to the other end of the court, walk deliberately to the centre, with uplifted hands imprecate the most fearful curses on his head, for his stupidity, and then rush to the side wall and literally dash his head against it!" Shortly before the Chinese Emperor's death, a gigantic image, the goddess of small-pox, was paraded round the city of Pekin in solemn procession, and then taken into the bedroom of the dying youth, where it was worshiped and honored with many propitiatory offerings. As, however, the goddess continued obdurate, she was subjected to a severe flogging, and finally burned.
In the early history of New England the law compelled the people to attend church, the services commencing at nine o'clock and continuing six to eight hours. Near the church edifice stood the stocks and the whipping-post, and a large wooden cage, in which to confine offenders against the laws. The congregation had places assigned them upon the rude benches, at the annual town-meeting, according to their age and social position. A person was fined who occupied a seat assigned to another. The boys were ordered to sit upon the gallery-stairs, and three constables were employed to keep them in order. Prominent before the assembly, some wretched male or female offender sat with a scarlet letter on the breast, to denote some crime against the stern code. Fleeing the mother-country for peace and freedom, the descendants of the Puritans persecuted the Quakers, and burnt the incorrigible eccentrics of society for witches.
John Howe's method of conducting public fasts was as follows: "He began at nine o'clock with a prayer of a quarter of an hour, read and expounded Scripture for about three quarters of an hour, prayed an hour, preached another hour, then prayed half an hour; the people then sang for about a quarter of an hour, during which he retired and took a little refreshment; he then went into the pulpit again, prayed an hour more, preached another hour, and then, with a prayer of half an hour, concluded the services."