Quam multæ pecudes humano in corpore vivunt!
PALINGENIUS.
Like Mason, Dr. Dove looked to the future in that sure and certain hope without which the present would be intolerable to a thinking mind and feeling heart. But in his speculations he looked to the past also.
Watson Bishop of Llandaff amused himself with asking from whom his mind descended? where it existed before he was born? and who he should have been if he had not been Richard Watson? “The Bishop was a philosopher,” says Dr. Jarrold, “and ought not to have asked such idle questions.”
My Doctor would not have agreed with Dr. Jarrold in this opinion. Who the Bishop might have been if he had not been the discontented hero of his own auto-biography, he could not indeed have pretended to divine; but what he was before he was Richard Watson, where his mind had existed before he was born, and from whom, or rather from what, it had been transmitted, were questions which according to his notions, might admit of a probable solution.
It will not surprise the judicious reader to be told that the Doctor was a professed physiognomist, though Lavater had not in those days made it fashionable to talk of physiognomy as a science. Baptista Porta led him to consider the subject; and the coarse wood-cuts of a bungling Italian elucidated the system as effectually as has since been done by Mr. Holloway's graver. But Dr. Dove carried it farther than the Swiss enthusiast after, or the Neapolitan physician before him. Conceiving in a deeper sense than Lebrun, que chacun avait sa bête dans la figure, he insisted that the strong animal likenesses which are often so distinctly to be traced in men, and the correspondent propensities wherewith they are frequently accompanied, are evidence of our having pre-existed in an inferior state of being. And he deduced from it a theory, or notion as he modestly called it, which he would have firmly believed to be a part of the patriarchal faith, if he had known how much it resembled the doctrine of the Druids.
His notion was that the Archeus, or living principle, acquires that perfect wisdom with which it acts, by passing through a long progression in the lower world, before it becomes capable of being united to a rational and immortal soul in the human body. He even persuaded himself that he could discover in particular individuals indications of the line by which their Archeus had travelled through the vegetable and animal kingdoms.
There was a little pragmatical exciseman, with a hungry face, sharp nose, red eyes, and thin, coarse, straggling hair of a yellow cast, (what was formerly called Judas-colour,) whom he pronounced to have been a ferret in his last stage. “Depend upon it,” he said, “no rat will come under the roof where he resides!” And he was particularly careful when they met in the open air always to take the wind of him.
One lawyer, a man of ability and fair character, but ready to avail himself of every advantage which his profession afforded, he traced from a bramble into a wasp, thence into a butcher-bird, and lastly into a fox, the vulpine character being manifestly retained in his countenance. There was another, who from sweeping his master's office and blacking his shoes, had risen to be the most noted pettifogger in those parts. This fellow was his peculiar abhorrence; his living principle, he affirmed, could never have existed in any other form than that of a nuisance; and accordingly he made out his genealogy thus:—a stinker (which is the trivial name of the phallus impudicus,) a London bug, an ear-wig, a pole-cat,—and, still worsening as he went on, a knavish attorney.