We once listened to a discussion between English sportsmen about the travels of the pheasant from its native home by the banks of the river Phasis at Colchis, and the time when it reached this island. Both parties agreed in believing its coming hither to have been somewhat late. Be that as it may, our country gentlemen will see their favourite bird figured here, [No. 1325], p. 60.
About the far-famed hunting cheetahs of India, we have heard, and still hear much; and on pieces of silk from eastern looms, in this collection, they are often to be seen figured.
With regard to the way in which all kinds of fowl, as well as animals are represented on these stuffs, there is one thing which we think will strike most observers who compare the drawing of them here with that of the same objects among the illuminations in old MSS. The birds and beasts on the textiles are always very much better rendered than in the wood-cuts to be found in our old black-letter books, from Caxton’s days upwards, especially in such works as that of Æsop and the rest. Figures of animals and of birds in manuscripts are hardly better, as we may see in the prints of our own Sir John Maundevile’s Travels, and the French “Bestiaire d’Amour,” par R. de Fournival, lately edited by C. Hippeau. Scarcely better does their design fare in illuminated MSS. Belonging to the Duke of Northumberland, and now in the library at Alnwick castle is the finest Salisbury missal we have ever beheld. This tall thick folio volume was, some time during the end of the fourteenth century, begun to be written and illuminated by a Benedictine monk—one John Whas—who carried on this gorgeous book as far as page 661. From the two Leonine verses which we read there, it would seem that this labour of love carried on for years at early morn in the scriptorium belonging to Sherbourne Abbey, Dorsetshire, had broken, as well it might, the health of the monk artist, of whom it is said:—
“Librum scribendo Ion Whas monachus laborabat;
Et mane surgendo multum corpus macerabat.”
Among his other tastes, this Benedictine had that for Natural History, and in the beautifully illuminated Kalendar at the beginning of this full missal, almost every month is pointed out by the presence of some bird, or fish, or flower, peculiar to that season, with its name beneath it,—for instance, “Ys is a throstle,” &c. However much the thrush’s song may have cheered him at his work at Spring-tide peep of day, Whas did not draw his bird with half the individuality and truthfulness which we find in birds of all sorts that are figured upon Sicilian stuffs woven at the very period when the English Benedictine was at work within the cloisters of his house in Dorsetshire—a fact which may lead the ornithologist to look with more complacency upon those textiles here patterned with Italian birds.
For Botany, it has not gone so well; yet, notwithstanding this drawback, there are to be seen figured upon these textiles plants and trees which, though strangers to this land and to Europe, and their forms no doubt, oddly and clumsily represented, yet, as they keep about them the same character, we may safely believe to have a true type in nature, which at last by their help we shall be able to find out. Such is the famous “homa,” or “hom,”—the sacred tree—among the ancient followers of Zoroaster, as well as the later Persians. It is to be seen figured on many silks in this collection of real or imitated Persian textiles, woven at various periods during the middle ages.
From the earliest antiquity a tradition came down throughout middle Asia, of some holy tree—perhaps the tree of life spoken of as growing in Paradise.—Gen. ii. 9. Some such a tree is very often to be seen sculptured on Assyrian monuments; and, by the place which it holds there, must have been held in peculiar, nay religious veneration. Upon those important remains from Nineveh, now in the British Museum, and figured in Mr. Layard’s fine work, it appears as the object of homage for the two men symbolized as sacerdotal or as kingly personages, between whom it invariably stands. It is to be found equally figured upon the small bucket meant for religious rites,[459] as embroidered upon the upper sleeve of the monarch’s tunic.[460] From Fergusson’s “Palaces of Nineveh, and Persepolis restored,” we learn that it was frequently to be found sculptured as an architectural ornament. When seen done in needlework upon dresses, the two animals—sometimes winged bulls, sometimes gazelles—which its umbel of seven flowers is separating, are shown with bended knees, as if in worship of it. Always this plant is represented as a shrub, sometimes bearing a series of umbels with seven flowers sprouting, each at the end of a tangled bough; sometimes as a stunted tree with branches growing all the way up right out of a thick trunk with ovated leaves; but the height never looks beyond that of a good sized man. Never for one moment can it be taken as any conventionalism for a tree, since it is as distinct an imitation of a particular plant, as is the figure of the palm which occurs along with it. To us, it has every look of belonging to the family of Asclepiadeæ, or one of its near kindred.
The few Parsees still to be found in East India, are the only followers of Persia’s olden religious practices; and in his “Essays on the sacred writings, language, and religion of the Parsees,” Haug tells us,[461] that those people yet hold a certain plant—the Homa, or hom?—to be sacred, and from it squeeze a juice to be used by them in their religious services. To our seeming, those buckets in the left hand of many an Assyrian figure were for holding this same liquor.
Can the “hom” of the old Persians be the same as the famous Sidral Almuntaha which bears as many leaves inscribed with names as there are men living on the earth? At each birth a fresh leaf bearing the name of the newly born bursts out, and, when any one has reached the end of his life, the leaf withers and falls off.[462]