Some gastronomic enthusiasts, unable to wait for their favourite birds, have gone in search of them. This was the case with the oily Jesuit, Fabi, who so loved beccaficoes. “As soon as the cry of the bird was heard in the fields around Belley,” says the author of the “Physiologie du Goût,” “the general cry was, ‘The beccaficoes are come, we shall soon have Father Fabi among us.’ And never did he fail to arrive, with a friend, on the 1st of September. They came for the express purpose of regaling themselves on beccaficoes, during the period of the passage of the bird across the district. To every house they were invited in town, and they took their departure again about the 23rd.” This good Father died in our “glorious memory” year of 1688; and one of his choice bits of delirium was, that he had discovered the circulation of the blood before Harvey!
And now do I not hear that gentleman-like person at the lower end of the table remark, that the circulation of the blood was a conceived idea long before Harvey? You are quite right, my dear Sir; and your remark is a very appropriate one, both as to time and theme, for the circulation of the blood is one of the results of cooking. As for preconception of the idea, it is sufficient for Harvey, that he demonstrated the fact. The Doctors of ancient Roman days supposed that the blood came from the liver; and that, in passing through the vena cava and its branches, a considerable quantity of it turned about, and entered into the right cavity of the heart. What Harvey demonstrated was, that the blood flows from the heart into all parts of the body, by the arteries, from whence it is brought back to the heart again, by the veins. Well, Sir, I know what you are about to remark,—that Paolo Sarpi, that pleasantest of table-companions, claimed to have made the demonstration before Harvey. True, Sarpi used to say, that he did not dare publish his discovery, for dread of the Inquisition; but that he confided it to brother Fabi da Aqua-pendente, who kept it close for the same reason, but told it in confidence to Harvey, who published it as his own. Well, Sir, Sir George Ent exploded all that, by proving that Sarpi himself had first learned the fact from Harvey’s lips. The Italians have the same right in this case, as they have to their boast of having produced what old Ritson used to style, “that thing you choose to call a poem, ‘Paradise Lost.’” It was an invention or discovery at second-hand.
What conceits Cowley has in his verses on Harvey! He makes the philosophical Doctor pursue coy Nature through sap, and catch her at last in the human blood. He speaks, too, of the heart beating tuneful marches to its vital heat; a conceit which Longfellow twisted into prettiness, when he said, that our “muffled hearts were beating funeral marches to the grave.” You will remember, Sir, that Shakspeare makes Brutus say, that Portia was to him “dear as the drops that visit this sad heart.” Brutus himself would, perhaps, have said “liver;” and, by the way, how very much to the same tune is the line in Gray’s “Bard,” wherein we find,—
“Dear as the light that visits these sad eyes.”
But there is in tuneful Edmund, in our ever-glorious friend Spenser, a stanza which contains something that may pass for the circulation theory. You remember, in the first canto of the Second Book, where the bleeding lady is found by the good Sir Guyon:—
“Out of her goréd wound the cruel steel
He lightly snatch’d, and did the flood-gates stop
With his faire garment; then ’gan softly feel
Her feeble pulse, to prove if any drop
Of living blood yet in her veynes did hop;