Was one I chiefly marked among the fry;
He had a roguish twinkle in his eye
And shone all glittering with ungodly dew,
If a tight damsel chanced to trippen by;
Which when observed he shrunk into his mew,
And straight would recollect his piety anew.’
One day at a remote confessional of the church he declared an unholy and forbidden passion to a young and beautiful married lady, whom he had long ‘followed with his eyes,’ and begged permission to visit her at her residence. Struck with surprise at this new revelation of his character, she evaded reply, being secretly minded to inform her husband, when she returned home, which she did, word for word. He told his wife to contrive to let the friar come, alone and in secret, the next evening, which chanced to be that of Saturday, and the night before the Sunday of Saint Lazarus, on which occasion the friar was to preach. The appointment was made; the friar came, true to the late hour which had been designated; was received at the door, and shown into the lady’s bed-room by a servant, who informed him that she had desired him to request the good man to retire to rest, and to say that ‘she would be with him straight.’ The friar prepared to comply with the direction, and was about stepping into bed, when the door opened suddenly, and the lady entered in great apparent trepidation, exclaiming: ‘My husband is knocking at the door! For heaven’s sake slip into that chest,’ showing him a double one in the apartment, ‘and lie there until I see what may be done! Meanwhile I will hide your clothes somewhere or other, as well as I am able. Heaven knows I fear more for your holy person than I do for my own life!’ The unfortunate wretch, seeing himself reduced to such a pass, did as the worthy lady desired; while the husband, presently coming in, retired to rest with his wife, who had first locked the friar safe in the chest. The poor prisoner uttered sundry involuntary noises in the course of the night, and was in the direst terror at the inquiries which they awakened on the part of the husband. Daylight at length came, and the church-bells began to ring for prayers, which greatly annoyed the captive, who was to preach at the cathedral. The husband having risen, ordered two servants to carry the chest to the church and place it in the middle, saying they were ordered to do so by the preacher; and that unlocking the chest without raising the lid, they should leave it there; all which the fellows did very neatly. Every body stared, and wondered what all this could mean; some said one thing and some another. At last the bell having ceased to ring, and no one appearing in the pulpit, or any other part of the church, a young man rose and said: ‘Really, the good friar makes us wait quite too long; pray let us see what he has ordered to be brought in this chest.’ Having said this much, he before all the congregation lifted up the lid, and looking in, beheld the friar in his shirt, pale, almost frightened to death, and certainly appearing more dead than alive, and as if buried in the chest. Finding himself discovered, however, he collected his mind as well as he could, and stood upright, to the great astonishment of all present; and having taken his text from the Sunday of Lazarus, he thus addressed his congregation: ‘My dear brethren: I am not at all astonished at your surprise in seeing me brought before you in this chest, or rather at my ordering myself to be brought thus: ye know that this is the way in which our holy church commemorates the wonderful miracle our Lord performed on the person of Lazarus, in raising him from the dead who had been buried four days. I was desirous in your favor to present myself to you as it were in the form of Lazarus, in order that seeing me in this chest, which is no other than an emblem of the sepulchre wherein he had been buried, you might be moved more effectually to the consideration of what perishable things we are; and that seeing me stripped of all worldly decorations, thus in my shirt, you may be convinced of the vanity of the things of this world, the which, if only duly considered, may tend greatly to the amending of our lives. Will you believe that since yesterday night I have been a thousand times dead, and revived as Lazarus was; and considering my dreadful situation, remember (as it were with the memory of a similar penance in your hearts) that we must all die, and trust to Him who can bestow upon us life eternal: but first ye must die to sin, to avarice, to rapine, to lust, and all those sinful deeds to which our nature prompts us.’ In such language, and in such manner, did the friar continue his sermon. The husband, astonished at the extraordinary presence of mind which he displayed, laughed heartily at his success; and in consideration of the adroitness of the culprit, did not attempt any farther revenge; ‘but,’ it is added, ‘he took very good care to shut his door in future against all such double-faced hypocrites.’ ••• Reader, what are you thinking of at this moment? ‘Nothing.’ Indeed! and so were we, and of how much a clever man once said upon the subject; observe: ‘Philosophers have declared they knew nothing, and it is common for us to talk about doing nothing; for from ten to twenty we go to school to be taught what from twenty to thirty we are very apt to forget; from thirty to forty we begin to settle; from forty to fifty, we think away as fast as we can; from fifty to sixty, we are very careful in our accounts; and from sixty to seventy, we cast up what all our thinking comes to; and then, what between our losses and our gains, our enjoyments and our inquietudes, even with the addition of old age, we can but strike a balance of ciphers.’ Happy are they who amidst the variations of nothing have nothing to fear; if they have nothing to lose, they have nothing to lament; and if they have done nothing to be ashamed of, they have every thing to hope for. ••• Sententiousness, let us inform ‘S.’ of Cambridge, and antitheses, do not consist of short sentences and inversion of words merely; and even the most felicitous examples in each case often sacrifice the sound to the sense. Here is an instance which is unobjectionable: ‘I knew the old miser well. He amassed a fortune by raising hemp; and if he had had his deserts, would have died as he lived by it.’ ••• Just as the sheets of this department were passing to the press, we received the announcement of a public exhibition of two collections of pictures, which we have seen, and to which we cannot resist the impulse of directing the public attention. At the rooms of the National Academy, corner of Broadway and Leonard-street, may be seen Mr. Cole’s allegorical pictures of ‘The Voyage of Life,’ heretofore noticed at length in these pages; ‘Mount Ætna, from Taormina, Sicily,’ one of the most noble paintings that ever came from this eminent artist’s pencil; ‘Angels ministering to Christ in the Wilderness;’ ‘The Past and the Present;’ ‘A View of Ruined Aqueducts in the Campagna di Roma,’ and other pictures; altogether, an exceedingly fine collection. Indeed, the superb view of Ætna alone, with its vast and sublime accessories, is of itself an exhibition worth twice the price of admission. At the rooms of the Apollo Association, nearly opposite the Hospital, in Broadway, Mr. Harvey’s series of Forty Historic or Atmospheric American Landscape Scenes are to be seen for a short time. It needed not the high patronage of Queen Victoria, the praises of English royalty and nobility, nor the warm encomiums of Allston, Sully, Moore, and others, to secure attention to these graphic sketches from nature. They are their own best recommendation. Trust our verdict, reader, and go and see if they are not. ••• ‘Terpsichore’ is the title of a very spirited satirical poem read at the annual dinner of the Phi Beta Kappa Society of Cambridge University in August last, by Oliver Wendell Holmes, and copied in ‘Graham’s Magazine’ for January. We subjoin a passage which although abundantly poetical contains yet more truth than poetry. It ‘bases’ upon the Dickens dinner:
He for whose sake the glittering show appears
Has sown the world with laughter and with tears,
And they whose welcome wets the bumper’s brim