form the very climax of many intoxicating particulars.
The Greeks seem not to have practised a very rigorous reserve, as to the concealment of the person. The Lacedemonians, indeed, studiously suppressed, by their institutions, whatever of sexual modesty was not absolutely necessary to virtue. Among the Romans, however, the national austerity of manners made every violation of delicacy in this matter a great offence. Their Satyrists (as Seneca, Juvenal, and others) abound in allusions to the license of dress, which grew up, along with the other corruptions of their original usages. The words of Seneca, indeed, might almost be taken for a picture of a modern belle, in her ball-room attire. He says, in his De Beneficiis, "Video Sericas vestes, si vestes vocandæ sint, in quibus nihil est, quo defendi aut corpus, aut denique pudor, possit: quibus sumtis, mulier parum liquido, nudam se non esse, jurabit. Hæc, ingenti summa, ab ignotis etiam ad commercium gentibus, accersuntur, ut matronæ nostræ ne adulteris quidem plus suis in cubiculo, quam in publico, ostendant." "I see, too, silken clothing—if clothing that can be called, which does not protect, nor even conceal the body—apparelled in which, a woman cannot very truly swear, that she is not naked. Such tissues are brought to us at enormous cost, from nations so remote that not even their names can reach us; and by the help of this vast expense, our matrons are able to exhibit, to their lovers and in their couches, nothing at which the whole public has not equally gazed."
Mythology.—Bryant and others have puzzled themselves not a little to give a rational explanation to the story of Ariadne; who, it will be remembered, was abandoned upon the isle of Naxos by her seducer, Theseus: but Bacchus chancing to come that way, fell upon the forlorn damsel, and presently made her his bride. All this may well puzzle a commentator, for the single reason, that it is perfectly plain and simple. The whole tale is nothing but a delicate and poetic way of stating the fact, that Mrs. Ariadne, being deserted by her lover, sought and found a very common consolation—that is to say, she took to drink.
Naples.—Its population of Lazzaroni appears, after all, to be but the legitimate inheritors of ancestral laziness. They were equally idle in Ovid's time: for he expressly calls that seat of indolence
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———"in otia natam Parthenopen." |
Exhibition of Grief.—There is a curious instance of the unbending austerity of Roman manners, in the trait by which Tacitus endeavors to paint the disorder with which the high-souled Agrippina received the news of the death of Germanicus. She was, at the moment, sewing in the midst of her maids; and so totally (says Tacitus) did the intelligence overthrow her self-command, that she broke off her work.
Snoring.—The following story of a death caused by it is entirely authentic. Erythræus relates that when Cardinal Bentivoglio—a scholar equally elegant and laborious—was called to sit in the Conclave, for the election of a successor to Urban VIII, the summons found him much exhausted by the literary vigils to which he was addicted. Immured in the sacred palace, (such is the custom while the Pope is not yet chosen,) his lodging was assigned him along side of a Cardinal, whose snoring was so incessant and so terrible, that poor Bentivoglio ceased to be able to obtain even the little sleep which his studies and his cares usually permitted him. After eleven nights of insomnolence thus produced, he was thrown into a violent fever. They removed him, and he slept—but waked no more.
Human Usefulness.—Wilkes has said, that of all the uses to which a man can be put, there is none so poor as hanging him. I hope that I may, without offence to any body's taste, add, that of all the purposes to which a soul can be put, I know of none less useful than damning it.
Sneezing.—It is the Catholics (see father Feyjoo for the fact) who trace the practice of bidding God bless a man when he sneezes, to a plague in the time of St. Gregory. He, they say, instituted the observance, in order to ward off the death of which this spasm had, till then, been the regular precursor, in the disease. If the story be true, such a plague had already happened, long before the day of St. Gregory. In the Odyssey, Penelope takes the sneezing of Telemachus for a good omen; and the army of Xenophon drew a favorable presage, as to one of his propositions, from a like accident: Aristotle speaks of the salutation of one sneezing as the common usage of his time. In Catullus's Acme and Sempronius, Cupid ratifies, by an approving sneeze, the mutual vows of the lovers. Pliny alludes to the practice, and Petronius in his Gyton. In Apuleius's Golden Ass, a husband hears the concealed gallant of his wife sneeze, and blesses her, taking the sternutation to be her own.
If there be a marvel or an absurdity, the Rabbins rarely fail to adorn the fiction or the folly with some trait of their own. Their account of the matter is, that in patriarchal days, men never died except by sneezing, which was then the only disease, and always mortal. Apparently then, the antiquity of the Scotch nation and of rappee cannot be carried back to the time of Jacob. Be this point of chronology as it may, however, it is certain that the same sort of observance, as to sneezing, was found in America at the first discovery.