Curiosities of Olden Times

by S. Baring-Gould

A cavalier was troubled with the same infirmity. He saw a large salmon hanging up outside a fishmonger’s shop, and, mistaking it for a young lady of his acquaintance, removed his cap and addressed it with courtesy. Another youth having made great fun of the mistake, the short-sighted cavalier felt himself constrained in honour to call him out. In the duel he received a sword wound over his left eye, and this completely cured his vision.

For deafness Dr. Paullini recommends a box on the ear. Especially successful is this treatment in the case of children who do not attend to the commands and advice of their parents on the plea of “not having heard.” In such cases the employment of corporal punishment cannot be too highly estimated. The doctor tells the story of a boy destined for the ministry who ran away from school and apprenticed himself to a tailor, and who was cured of deafness and tailoring propensities by the application of a large pair of drumsticks to a sensitive part of his person, and who eventually became a Lutheran pastor, and was, to the end of his days, able to mend his own clothes.

This story furnishes the author of Flagellum Salutis with matter for a digression on clerical education. He quotes with approval the sentiments of his old patron, Dr. Schupp, expressed thus: “Nowadays that every bumpkin makes his son study for the ministry, we have them scrambling about the country begging for promotion, and grumbling because it does not come as fast as they expect. The learned son is a poor curate, with no benefice. Such a to-do about this—complaints, murmurs, and what not! Why did he not learn a trade in addition to his theology? Luke the Evangelist was a theologus and medicus as well, and a painter to boot. Paul in his youth studied divinity at the feet of Gamaliel, but he was a carpet manufacturer besides. Was the Kaiser Rudolph a worse Emperor for being as well a clever craftsman? ‘If I could recall my past years and begin life again,’ said Dr. Schupp, ‘I would not become a student only, but learn a trade besides. Then, if the thankless world kicked me, I would measure its foot for a boot; if it made faces at me, I would paint its portrait for it; if my divinity did not agree with its stomach, I would dose it with purgatives like Luke. I would make the world respect me for my diligence in trade, if it turned up its nose at my theology. Anyhow, I would not go about snivelling and crying poverty and want of promotion.’”

To this speech of Dr. Schupp, Paullini adds a few pertinent remarks. “The lad I was telling you about,” he says, “had a hankering after tailoring. Well, tailoring is an honourable and useful profession. Was not Moses bidden, ‘Thou shalt make holy garments for Aaron thy brother, for glory and for beauty. And thou shalt speak unto all that are wise-hearted, whom I have filled with the spirit of wisdom, that they may make Aaron garments.’ Tailors filled with the spirit of wisdom! Why despise the craft which God has honoured?”

It must be allowed that there is sense in this little digression. Doubtless it would be well if not only those destined for the ministry, but all the sons of the higher classes of society, were taught some manual employment in addition to the cultivation of their intellectual faculties. That our grammar schools should take the hint is not to be anticipated; masters and governors have the same implicit confidence in classic studies as the universal panacea that Dr. Paullini professes for the rod and Dr. Sangrado for cold water and blood-letting. I do not dispute the fact that the most useful knowledge for a lad to acquire who is destined for colonial farming, or for a mercantile life at home, is Greek prosody; but I suggest that an acquaintance with carpentering, land-surveying, or book-keeping might be found advantageous in a secondary degree.

Lockjaw is to be treated in the same manner, asserts our author, and he tells an amusing anecdote on the subject from Volquard Iversen.

Nicolas Vorburg was an Oriental traveller. In the course of his wanderings he reached Agra, the capital of the Great Cham. The European was introduced to His Majesty at the dinner-hour, and found the monarch just returned from the expedition, and as hungry as a hunter. A bowl of rice was brought in. The Great Cham dipped his hands into it, and ladled so much rice as they would hold into his capacious mouth, distended to the utmost conceivable extent. But the Great Cham had overestimated the capabilities of the distension of his jaws, and they became dislocated. At the sight, the servants were distracted with fear. The nobles stroked their chins in uncertainty how to act, the priests had recourse to their devotions, but no one assisted the monarch out of his dilemma. He sat upon his imperial throne purple in the face, his eyes distended with horror, his mouth gaping, and full of rice. Suffocation was imminent. Nicolas Vorburg, without even prostrating himself before the emperor, ran up the steps of his throne, and hit him a violent crack with the palm of his hand upon the cheek. The rice fell out of his mouth upon the imperial lap, some, it is surmised, descended the imperial red-lane. Another slap accomplished the relief of the monarch, and set the jaw once more in working order. At the same moment the servants screamed at the outrage committed upon the sacred majesty of the emperor, the nobles drew their swords to avenge it, and the priests converted their prayers for the recovery of their king into curses on the head of him who had sacrilegiously raised his hand to violate his divinity. Poor Vorburg would have been made into mincemeat, had not the emperor providentially recovered his breath in time to administer a reproof to his over-zealous subjects. He acknowledged the relief afforded him by the stranger by a present of a thousand rupees.

A tailor had a son who was half-witted. The father was out one day, and the child, who was left in the house, after the manner of children, looked about him in quest of some mischief which he might perpetrate. A pair of elegant breeches, just completed by his father, and designed for the legs of a nobleman, hung suspended from the wall. The child made a figured pattern upon the amber silk with his finger, dipped at intervals in the ink-pot. The mother was the first to discover the transformation of the breeches, and, not regarding the alteration in the same light as did her child, caught up the yard-measure and administered a castigation to the culprit, sufficient to “stir up the stagnating juices, dissolve the precipitating salts, and purify the coagulating humours,” in at least one portion of the lad’s body. The youth, under the impression that high art is never appreciated at first sight, made himself scarce for some hours. The father, on his return, used every effort to obliterate the flowering of ink which his son had drawn over the amber breeches, but with only a limited degree of success—so limited, in fact, that the nobleman for whom they were destined utterly refused to invest his person in them, and they were returned on the tailor’s hands. The boy, towards evening, impelled by hunger, had returned home, and was soothing his injured feelings with bread and butter, when the father re-entered the house. In a moment the parental left hand had grasped the scruff of his neck, whilst the right hand dexterously completed the stirring up the stagnant juices, dissolving of precipitating salts, and purifying of coagulating humours with such success, that Dr. Paullini assures us the child grew up a miracle of discretion, and never after decorated articles of clothing other than his own pinafore.

Under the heading of “Swollen Breasts,” the learned doctor gives us his ideas on the subject of schoolmasters and their titles. These remarks are sensible enough in their way, but hardly come under the heading he has selected for the chapter. Connected still more vaguely with swollen breasts is the commentary on some verses in the twenty-first chapter of St. John’s Gospel, which closes the section.

To those who suffer from toothaches he recommends the practice of a learned professor under whom he studied. This man suffered excruciating torture from his teeth at night. The professor, the moment that his sufferings began, was wont to leave his bed and spend his night in jumping on to his table, and then jumping down again, till the pain ceased. Paullini does not state the feelings of those who slept in the room immediately underneath that occupied by Dr. Erasmus Vinding; neither does it seem clear at first sight how the jumping diversion is connected with the subject of the rod, concerning the merits of which the book treats; but on further consideration the connection becomes apparent. Dr. Paullini being silent on this point, we have but the light of nature to guide us to the conclusion that the saltatory performances of Dr. Erasmus would arouse and exasperate the other lodgers into an application of the universal panacea to his scantily protected person.