Want of time prevented my visiting the camp or barracks of the Chinese soldiers, on the heights outside the eastern suburbs of the town. A large garden, attached to a temple on the Honan side, was the only other object I had time that day to inspect. The garden was principally stocked with orange-trees, also loquats and lychees, hundreds of which were on sale for the benefit of the good fathers, who are supported by the produce of the garden and the contributions of the piously disposed. On each side of the centre walk, beyond a little dirty pond, was a shed, with shelves, on which were ranged pots containing the ashes of the priests ("priests' bones," my guide irreverently called them); their bodies, after decease, undergoing incremation in an adjoining pit. Names, ages, and dates of decease are duly preserved, cut into slabs of stone on the concave face of a semicircular screen of masonry in the garden. Before leaving the garden I was not a little surprised by the appearance of a veritable magpie, identical, as it seemed to me, with our British bird, that I had not seen for many years.
After guiding me safely to my quarters—for so labyrinthine is every part of Canton and Honan that it would be hopeless to attempt to find one's way alone—my pilot left me and departed to his own home, which was, he told me, on the Canton side. The language he spoke is, as may be gathered from the specimens here given, not the ordinary "pigeon English" of Chinese servants; a style of gibberish which it is lamentable to think has become the ordinary channel of communication with all Chinamen. These sharp and intelligent people would soon learn to speak and understand better English than such sentences has "You go top-side and catchee one piecee book"—"You tell those two piecee cooly go chow-chow, and come back chop-chop." (Go up-stairs and fetch a book—Tell those two coolies to go to their dinner, and return quickly.) The good effects of the tuition afforded by schoolmasters and missionaries in China are much marred by the jargon used conventionally, with irrational adherence to defect, in all ordinary transactions of business, by masters and mistresses in intercourse with their servants, and by commercial men with their native assistants.
About seven hours' run, in one of the American steamers before mentioned, carries the passenger from Canton to Macao. The mouth of the river is cleared in four hours, and the rest of the voyage is over an open sea, which, with a fresh southerly breeze, is rather rough for a flat-bottomed steamer: the islands to eastward, though numerous, being too remote to check the swell of the Chinese ocean. After running for about an hour along the bold rocky peninsula at the point of which Macao is built, the steamer rounds in, and, entering a partially land-locked harbor between the town and some rocky islets to its south, anchors in smooth water. The town has a quaint picturesque look. Its old-fashioned houses extend to the water's edge. They are all of stone or brick, covering the face of the bold coast: the heights of which are crowned by castles, forts, batteries, and convents, and from whose ancient walls the last rays of a setting sun were fading as we entered the harbor. The [{662}] inhabitants are entirely Portuguese, Chinese, and a breed between the two. The jealousy of the Portuguese government effectually excludes foreigners from settling; a miserable policy, by which trade is almost extinct, the revenue being derived chiefly from licensing of gambling-houses. In front of the house of the governor I saw a guard of soldiers. They wore able-bodied, smart-looking young fellows in neat blue uniforms, detailed from a regiment in the fort. These soldiers, and a few half-castes, looking like our office keranies in India, together with some strangely dressed females, in appearance half aya, half sister of charity, were all that I saw of the Portuguese community. The non-military Portuguese looked jaded and lazy, almost every man with a cheroot in his mouth. The town, indeed, struck me as a very "Castle of Indolence."
Abridged from The Dublin University Magazine.
GLASTONBURY ABBEY, PAST AND PRESENT.
One of the most subtle operations of time is the tendency it has to transform the facts of one age into the phantasies of another, and to cause the dreams of the past to become the realities of the present. Far away in the remote distance of history, when a lonely monk in his cell mused of vessels going without sails and carriages without horses, it was a dream—a mere dream, produced probably by a brain disordered by over study, long vigils, and frequent fasts, but that dream of the thirteenth century has become the most incontrovertible fact of the nineteenth, a fact to whose influence all other hitherto immovable facts are giving way, even the great one, the impregnability of the Englishman's castle; for we find that before the obstinate march of one of these railway facts a thousand Englishmen's castles fall prostrate, and a thousand Englishmen are evicted, their avocations broken up, and themselves turned out upon the world as a new order of beings—outcasts with compensation.
The monastic life, so commonly regarded in these later times as a phantasy, was once a fact, a great universal fact; it was a fact for twelve or thirteen centuries; and when we remember that it extended its influence from the sunny heights of Palestine, across Europe, to the wild, bleak shores of western Ireland; that it did more in the world for the formation and embellishment of modern civilization than all the governments and systems of life the accompanied it in its course; that the best portions of ancient literature, the materials of history, the secrets of art, are the pearls torn from its treasure-house, we may form some idea of what a fact the monastic life must have been at one time, and may venture to assert that the history of that phase of existence, as in frock and cowl it prayed, and watched, and fasted; as in its quiet cloisters it studied, and copied, and labored; as outside its walls it mingled its influence with the web of human destiny, and as in process of time, becoming wealthy and powerful, it degenerated, and went the way of all human things—we say that the history of the development of this extinct world, however defective the execution of that history may be, will include in its review some of the most interesting portions of our national career, will furnish a clue to many of the mazes of historical speculation, or at least may be suggestive [{663}] to some more able intellect of a course of investigation which has been very little followed, and a mine of truth which to a great extent still remains intact.
At a time when laws were badly administered, and the country often torn by internal contentions, and always subject to the violence of marauders, it was absolutely necessary that there should be some asylum for those thoughtful, retiring spirits who, unable or unwilling to take part in the turmoil of the times, were exposed to all its dangerous vicissitudes. In an age, too, when the country possessed no literature, the contemplative and the learned had no other means of existence than by retiring to the cloister, safe out of the reach of the jealous superstition of ignorance and the wanton barbarity of uncouth violence. The monastery then was the natural home of these beings—the deserted, the oppressed, the meek spirit who had been beaten in the world's conflict, the untimely born son of genius, the scholar, the devotee, all found a safe shelter and a genial abode behind the friendly walls of these cities of refuge. There, too, lay garnered up, as a priceless hoarding for future ages, the sacred oracles of Christianity, and the rescued treasures of ancient lore; there science labored at her mystic problems; and there poetry, painting, and music were developed and perpetuated; in fine, all that the world holds as most excellent, all that goes toward the foundation and adornment of modern society, treasured up in the monastery as in an ark, rode in safety over the dark flood of that mediaeval deluge until the waters subsided, and a new world appearing from its depths, violent hands were laid upon those costly treasures, which were torn from their hiding-places and freely scattered abroad, whilst the representatives of those men who, in silence and with prayer, had amassed and cherished them, were branded as useless idlers, their homes broken up, and themselves dispersed, with no mercy for their errors and no gratitude for their labors, to seek the scanty charities of a hostile world. Beside being the cradle of art and science, the monastery was a great and most efficient engine for the dispensation of public charity. At its refectory kitchen the poor were always cheerfully welcomed, generously treated, and periodically relieved; in fine, the care of the poor was not only regarded as a solemn duty, but was undertaken with the most cheerful devotion and the most unremitting zeal. They were not treated like an unsightly social disease, which was to be cured if possible, but at any rate kept out of sight; they were not handed over to the tender sympathies of paid relieving officers, nor dealt with by the merciless laws of statistics, but they were treated gently and kindly in the spirit of the Great Master, who when on earth bestowed upon them the larger share of his sympathy, who, in the tenderness of his pity, dignified poverty and sanctified charity when he declared that "inasmuch as ye have done it unto the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me." Whatever may have been the vices of the monastic system or the errors of its ritual, its untiring charity was its great redeeming virtue.
It will not perhaps be an unfitting introduction to our investigation into the rise and influence of this system upon our national life if we resuscitate from the grave of the past one of these great monasteries, the oldest and most powerful which sprang up in our country, and which, compared with others at the time when they fell before the great religious convulsion of the sixteenth century, had, in the midst of general corruption, maintained its purity, and suffered less from its own vices than from the degeneracy of the system to which it belonged, and of which it was the most distinguished ornament. We shall endeavor to portray the monastery as it was in all its glory, to pass through its portals, to enter reverently [{664}] into its magnificent church, to listen to its gorgeous music, to watch its processions, to wander through its cloisters, to visit its domestic domains, to penetrate into the mysteries of its refectory, the ascetic simplicity of its dormitory, the industry of its schoolhouse and fratery, the stores of its treasury, the still richer stores of its library, the immortal labors of its Scriptorium, where they worked for so many centuries, uncheered and unrewarded, for a thankless posterity, who shrink even now from doing them justice; we shall visit the gloomy splendors of its crypt, wander through its grounds, and marvel at its strange magnificence. After having thus gazed, as it were, upon the machine itself in motion, we shall perhaps be the better enabled subsequently to comprehend the nature and value of its work.
In the early part of the sixteenth century the ancient abbey of Glastonbury was in the plenitude of its magnificence and power. It had been the cynosure for the devotees of all nations, who, for nearly eleven centuries, flocked in crowds to its fane—to worship at its altars, to venerate its relics, to drink in health at its sacred well, and to gaze in rapt wonder at its holy thorn. And even now, in these later days, though time has wasted it, though fierce fanaticism has played its cannon upon it, though ruthless vandalism in blind ignorance has despoiled many of its beauties, it still stands proud in its ruined grandeur, defiant alike of the ravages of decay, the devastation of the iconoclast, and the wantonness of the ignorant. Although not a single picture, but only an inventorial description, is extant of this largest abbey in the kingdom, yet, standing amidst its silent ruins, the imagination can form some faint idea of what it must have been when its aisles were vocal with the chant of its many-voiced choir, when gorgeous processions moved grandly through its cloisters, and when its altars, its chapels, its windows, its pillars, were all decorated with the myriad splendors of monastic art. Passing in at the great western entrance, through a lodge kept by a grave lay-brother, we find ourselves in a little world, shut up by a high wall which swept round its domains, inclosing an area of more than sixty acres. The eye is arrested at once by a majestic pile of building, stretching itself out in the shape of an immense cross, from the centre of whose transept there rises a high tower. The exterior of this building is profusely decorated with all the weird embellishments of medieval art. There, in sculptured niche, stands the devout monarch, sceptred and crowned; the templar knight, who had fallen under an oriental sun fighting for the cross; the mitred abbot, with his crosier; the saint with his emblem; the martyr with his palm; scenes from Sacred Writ; the apostles, the evangelists; petrified allegories and sculptured story; and then, clustering around and intertwining itself with all these scenes and representations of the world of man, were ornamental devices culled from the world of nature. A splendid monument of the genius of those mediaeval times whose mighty cathedrals stand before us now like massive poems or graven history, where men may read, as it were from a sculptured page, the chivalrous doings of departed heroes, the long tale of the history of the Church—of her woes, her triumphs, her martyrs, and her saints—a deathless picture of actual existence, as though some heaven-sent spirit had come upon the earth, and with a magic stroke petrified into the graphic stillness of stone a whole world of life and living things. The length of the nave of this church, beginning from St. Joseph's chapel (which we shall presently notice, and which was an additional building) up to the cross, was 220 feet, the great tower was 40 feet in breadth, and the transepts on either side of it each 45 feet in length, the choir was 150 feet; its entire length from east to west was [{665}] 420 feet; and if we add the appended St. Joseph's chapel, we have a range of building 530 feet in length.