The first Monday after new year’s day is called Handsel Monday in some parts of Scotland, and is observed by merry-making. In sir J. Sinclair’s “Statistical Account,” it is related of one William Hunter, a collier, that he was cured in the year 1758 of an inveterate rheumatism or gout, by drinking freely of new ale, full of barm or yeast. “The poor man had been confined to his bed for a year and a half, having almost entirely lost the use of his limbs. On the evening of Handsel Monday, as it is called, some of his neighbours came to make merry with him. Though he could not rise, yet he always took his share of the ale, as it passed round the company; and, in the end, became much intoxicated. The consequence was, that he had the use of his limbs the next morning, and was able to walk about. He lived more than twenty years after this, and never had the smallest return of his old complaint.” This is a fact worth remembering, as connected with chronical complaints.
Chronology.
On the 2d of January, A. D. 17, Ovid the celebrated Roman poet died; he was born at Sulmo on the 20th of March, forty-three years before the Christian era. His father designed him for the bar, and he became eminently eloquent, but every thing he wrote was expressed in poetical numbers; and though reminded by his father, that even Homer lived and died in poverty, he preferred the pleasures of imagination to forensic disputation. He gained great admiration from the learned. Virgil, Horace, Tibullus, and Propertius, were his friends, and Augustus became his liberal patron, till he banished him for some unknown cause. In his exile he was cowardly, and prostituted his pen to flatter baseness; and though he desired the death of the emperor, he fawned upon him in his writings to meanness. He died at Tomos on the Euxine sea, the place of his banishment, under the reign of Tiberius, who had succeeded Augustus, and was deaf to the poet’s entreaties for permission to return to Rome. Whatever subject Ovid wrote on, he exhausted; he painted nature with a masterly hand, and his genius imparted elegance to vulgarity; but he defiled the sweetness of his numbers by impurity, and though he ranks among the splendid ornaments of ancient literature, he sullied his fame by the grossest immorality in some of his finest productions.
Livy, the Roman historian, died at Padua on the same day and in the same year with Ovid. His history of the Roman Empire was in one hundred and forty books, of which only thirty-five are extant. Five of these were discovered at Worms in 1431, and some fragments are said to have been lately discovered at Herculanæum. Few particulars of his life are known, but his fame was great even while he lived, and his history has rendered him immortal. He wrote some philosophical treatises and dialogues, with a letter to his son on the merit of authors, which Dr. Lempriere says, ought to be read by young men.
In the Literary Pocket Book there are some seasonable facts which may be transplanted with advantage to the reader, and, it is hoped, without disadvantage to the writer of the articles. He says that a man is infinitely mistaken, who thinks there is nothing worth seeing in winter-time out of doors, because the sun is not warm, and the streets are muddy. “Let him get, by dint of good exercise, out of the streets, and he shall find enough. In the warm neighbourhood of towns he may still watch the field-fares, thrushes, and blackbirds; the titmouse seeking its food through the straw-thatch; the red-wings, field-fares, sky-larks, and tit-larks, upon the same errand, over wet meadows; the sparrows and yellow-hammers, and chaffinches, still beautiful though mute, gleaning from the straw and chaff in farmyards; and the ring-dove, always poetical, coming for her meal to the ivy-berries. About rapid streams he may see the various habits and movements of herons, wood-cocks, wild-ducks, and other water-fowl, who are obliged to quit the frozen marshes to seek their food there. The red-breast comes to the windows, and often into the house itself, to be rewarded for its song, and for its far-famed ‘painful’ obsequies to the Children in the Wood.”