The carelessness of the Romans during many ages as to the divisions of time, seems scarcely compatible even with the low degree of civilization which they had attained. We are told that when the Twelve Tables were formed, no other distinctions of the day than those of sunrise and sunset were known among them by name; that some time after they begun to compute from noon to noon; and that for three hundred years they had nothing whereby to measure an hour, nor knew of any such denomination, tamdiu populi Romani indiscreta lux fait. A brazen pillar, which marked the hour of noon by its shortest shadow, was the only means of measuring time, till, in the first Punic war, the Consul M. Valerius Messala brought thither a sun-dial from the spoils of Catana in Sicily. This was in the 477th year of the City; and by that dial the Romans went ninety-nine years without adapting it to the meridian of Rome. A better was then erected; but they were still without any guide in cloudy weather, till in the year 595 after the building of the City, Scipio Nasica introduced the water-clock, which is said to have been invented about eighty years before by Ctesibius of Alexandria. When the Romans had begun to advance in civilization, no people ever made a more rapid progress in all the arts and abuses which follow in its train. Astrology came with astronomy from the East, for science had speedily been converted into a craft, and in the age of the Cæsars the Egyptian professors of that craft were among the pests of Rome.
More than one Roman calendar is in existence, preserved by the durability of the material, which is a square block of marble. Each side contains three months, in parallel columns, headed by the appropriate signs of the zodiac. In these the astronomical information was given, with directions for the agricultural business of the month, and notices of the respective gods under whose tutelage the months were placed, and of the religious festivals in their course, with a warning to the husbandmen against neglecting those religious duties, upon the due performance of which the success of their labours depended.
Those learned authors who look in the Scriptures for what is not to be found there, and supply by conjectures whatever they wish to find, have not decided whether astronomy was part of Adam's infused knowledge, or whether it was acquired by him, and his son Seth; but from Seth they say it descended to Abraham, and he imparted it to the Egyptians. Whatever may be thought of this derivation, the Egyptian mind seems always to have pullulated with superstition, as the slime of their own Nile is said to have fermented into low and loathsome forms of miscreated life. The Rabbis say that ten measures of witchcraft were sent into the world, and Egypt got nine of them.
The Greeks are said to have learnt from the Babylonians the twelve divisions of the day. The arrow-headed inscriptions at Babylon are supposed by some of those who have bestowed most attention upon them to be calendars: and there can be little doubt that where the divisions of time were first scientifically observed, there the first calendar would be formed. In Egypt however it is that we hear of them first; and such resemblances exist between the Egyptian calendar, and the oldest of those which have been discovered in the north of Europe, that Court de Gebelin supposes they must have had a common origin, and in an age anterior to those Chaldeans whose astronomical observations ascended nineteen hundred years before the age of Alexander. This is too wild an assumption to be soberly maintained. What is common to both found its way to Scandinavia in far later times. Christianity was imported into those countries with all the corruptions which it had gathered in the East as well as in the West; and the Christian calendar brought with it as many superstitions of European growth, as there was room for inserting. There was room for many even upon the Norwegian staff.
The lineal descendant of that rimstoke was still in use in the middle of England at the close of the 17th century; though it was then, says Plot, a sort of antiquity so little known that it had hardly been heard of in the southern parts, and was understood but by few of the gentry in the northern. Clogg was the English name, whether so called from the word log, because they were generally made of wood, and not so commonly of oak or fir as of box; or from the resemblance of the larger ones to the clogs, “wherewith we restrain the wild, extravagant, mischievous motions of some of our dogs,” he knew not. There were some few of brass. Some were of convenient size for the pocket; and there were larger ones, which used to hang at one end of the mantle tree of the chimney for family use; as in Denmark the rimstoke was found in every respectable yeoman's house at the head of the table, or suspended from a beam. Plot minutely and carefully described these, and endeavoured, but not always with success, to explain some of the hieroglyphes or symbols by which the festivals were denoted; all which he had seen had only the Prime (or Golden Number) and the immoveable feasts; the Prime, so called as indicating primas lunas through the year, our ancestors set in the margin of their calendars in characters of gold,—and thence its other name.
The rudest that has ever been discovered was found in pulling down part of a chateau in Bretagne. Its characters had so magical an appearance, that it would have been condemned by acclamation to the flames, if the Lord of the Chateau had not rescued it, thinking it was more likely to puzzle an antiquary than to raise the Devil. He sent it to Sainte-Palaye, and M. Lancelot succeeded in fully explaining it. Most barbarous as it was, there is reason for concluding that it was not older than the middle of the 17th century.
In Peter Hopkins's time the clogg was still found in farm houses. He remembered when a countryman had walked to the nearest large town, thirty miles distant, for the express purpose of seeing an almanack, the first that had been heard of in those parts. His enquiring neighbours crowded round the man on his return. “Well—well,” said he, “I know not! it maffles and talks. But all I could make out is that Collop Monday falls on a Tuesday next year.”
CHAPTER XCI.
THE AUTHOR DISPLAYS A LITTLE MORE OF SUCH READING AS IS SELDOM READ, AND SHOWS THAT LORD BYRON AND AN ESSEX WIDOW DIFFERED IN OPINION CONCERNING FRIDAY.