The cover image was created by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain.

THINGS

TO BE REMEMBERED

IN DAILY LIFE.

LONDON:

PRINTED BY ROBSON, LEVEY, AND FRANKLYN,

Great New Street and Fetter Lane.

TO THE READER.

Time and Human Life are the staple subjects of the following pages. These are great matters for so small a book, and may remind you of the philosophical scheme of compressing the world into a nutshell. Now, although we have as yet no means of determining exactly what relation this latter idea has to truth,—it is certain that the rapid multiplication of books incessantly presses upon us, that “condensation is the result of time and experience, which reject what is no longer essential.” Such is the treatment adopted in the present volume, in which, by focusing great truths from the Living and the Dead, is sought to be exemplified the moral couplet:

Honour and shame from no condition rise;

Act well your part—there all the honour lies.

As a companion volume to Things not Generally Known, it is hoped that Things to be Remembered may be as popularly received as its predecessor. To render the present work more directly of practical application, the sketches of character which it contains have been drawn in great measure from our own time, so as to give the book a current interest. Meanwhile, historic gossip has not been eschewed; but its piquancy has been sparingly used.

The present is, in many respects, a more reflective volume than its predecessor: for it is scarcely possible to illustrate the Ages of Man without

Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.

This is one of the byways of the book: its highway lies through the crowded city, and upon “the full tide of human affairs;” and the Experiences here set down are, in common parlance, original, and have been chiefly garnered throughout a long life, in which truthful observation has been the cardinal aim.

With these few words of introduction, I commend to your indulgence this volume of Things to be Remembered in Daily Life, in the hope that its contents may be considered worthy of the reminiscence.

London, March 1863.

ERRATUM.

Page 20. The Terrace, New Palace-yard, Westminster, was taken down in the spring of 1863; the Sun-dial had previously been removed.

CONTENTS.

Time.

Life, and Length of Days.

The School of Life.

Business-Life.

Home Traits.

The Spirit of the Age.

World-Knowledge.

Conclusion.

THINGS TO BE REMEMBERED.

Time.

The conventional personification of Time, with which every one is familiar, is the figure of Saturn, god of Time, represented as an old man, holding a scythe in his hand, and a serpent with its tail in its mouth, emblematical of the revolutions of the year: sometimes he carries an hour-glass, occasionally winged; to him is attributed the invention of the scythe. He is bald, except a lock on the forehead; hence Swift says: “Time is painted with a lock before, and bald behind, signifying thereby that we must take him (as we say) by the forelock; for when it is once passed, there is no recalling it.”

The scythe occurs in Shirley’s lines, written early in the seventeenth century:

The glories of our blood and state

Are shadows, not substantial things;

There is no armour against fate;

Death lays his icy hand on kings.

Sceptre and crown

Must tumble down,

And in the dust be equal made

With the poor crooked scythe and spade.

Shakspeare prefers the scythe:

Time doth transfix the flourish set on youth,

And delves the parallels in beauty’s brow,

Feeds on the rarities of nature’s truth,

And nothing stands but for his scythe to mow.

The stealthiness of his flight is also told by Shakspeare:

Let’s take the instant by the forward top;

For we are old, and our quick’st decrees

The inaudible and noiseless foot of Time

Steals ere we can effect them.

Mayne thus quaintly describes his flight:

Time is the feather’d thing,

And whilst I praise

The sparklings of thy locks, and call them rays,

Takes wing—

Leaving behind him, as he flies,

An unperceived dimness in thine eyes.

Gascoigne also thus paints the flight:

The heavens on high perpetually do move;

By minutes’ meal the hour doth steal away,

By hours the days, by days the months remove,

And then by months the years as fast decay;

Yea, Virgil’s verse and Tully’s truth do say,

That Time flieth, and never clasps her wings;

But rides on clouds, and forward still she flings.

Shakspeare pictures him as the fell destroyer:

Misshapen time, copesmate of ugly night;

Swift subtle post, carrier of grisly care;

Eater of youth, false slave to false delight,

Base watch of woes, sin’s pack-horse, virtue’s snare:

Thou nursest all, and murderest all that are.

And Spenser brands him as

Wicked Time, that all good thoughts doth waste,

And workes of noblest wits to naught outweare.

The present section partakes much of the aphoristic character, which has its recommendatory advantages.—Bacon says: “Aphorisms representing a knowledge broken do invite men to inquire further; whereas methods, carrying the show of a total, do secure men as if they were at farthest.” Again: “Nor do apophthegms only serve for ornament and delight, but also for action and civil use, as being the edge-tools of speech, which cut and penetrate the knots of business and affairs.”

Coleridge is of opinion that, exclusively of the Abstract Sciences, the largest and worthiest portion of our knowledge consists of Aphorisms; and the greatest and best of men is but an Aphorism.

“Truths, of all others the most awful and interesting, are too often considered as so true, that they lose all the power of truth, and lie bedridden in the dormitory of the soul, side by side with the most despised and exploded errors.

“There is one way of giving freshness and importance to the most commonplace maxims,—that of reflecting on them in direct reference to our own state and conduct, to our own past and future being.”

Mature and sedate wisdom has been fond of summing up the results of its experience in weighty sentences. Solomon did so; the wise men of India and Greece did so; Bacon did so; Goethe in his old age took delight in doing so.

Lucretius has his philosophical view of Time, which Creech has thus Englished:

Time of itself is nothing, but from Thought

Receives its rise, by lab’ring fancy wrought

From things consider’d, while we think on some

As present, some as past, or yet to come.

No thought can think on Time,

But thinks on things in motion or at rest.

Ovid has some illustrations, which Dryden has thus translated:

Nature knows

No steadfast motion, but or ebbs or flows.

Ever in motion, she destroys her old,

And casts new figures in another mould.

Even times are in perpetual flux, and run,

Like rivers from their fountains rolling on.

For Time, no more than streams, is at a stay,—

The flying hour is ever on her way;

And as the fountain still supplies her store,

The wave behind impels the wave before;

Thus in successive course the minutes run,

And urge their predecessor minutes on,

Still moving, ever anew; for former things

Are set aside, like abdicated kings;

And every moment alters what is done,

And innovates some act till then unknown.

* * * *

Time is th’ effect of motion, born a twin,

And with the worlds did equally begin:

Time, like a stream that hastens from the shore,

Flies to an ocean where ’tis known no more:

All must be swallow’d in this endless deep,

And motion rest in everlasting sleep.

* * * *

Time glides along with undiscover’d haste,

The future but a length behind the past,

So swift are years.

* * * *

Thy teeth, devouring Time! thine, envious Age!

On things below still exercise your rage;

With venom’d grinders you corrupt your meat,

And then, at ling’ring meals, the morsels eat.

The comparison to a river is more amply developed by a modern poet:

The lapse of time and rivers is the same:

Both speed their journey with a restless stream;

The silent pace with which they steal away,

No wealth can bribe, no prayers persuade to stay:

Alike irrevocable both when past,

And a wide ocean swallows both at last.

Though each resembles each in every part,

A difference strikes, at length, the musing heart:

Streams never flow in vain; where streams abound,

How laughs the land with various plenty crown’d!

But time, that should enrich the nobler mind,

Neglected, leaves a dreary waste behind.

An old playwright makes him a fisher by the stream:

Nay, dally not with time, the wise man’s treasure,

Though fools are lavish on’t—the fatal fisher

Hooks souls, while we waste moments.

Horace has some lines, thus paraphrased by Oldham:

Alas! dear friend, alas! time hastes away,

Nor is it in your power to bribe its stay;

The rolling years with constant motion run,

Lo! while I speak, the present minute’s gone,

And following hours still urge the foregoing on.

’Tis not thy wealth, ’tis not thy power,

’Tis not thy piety can thee secure;

They’re all too feeble to withstand

Gray hairs, approaching age, and thy avoidless end.

When once thy glass is run,

When once thy utmost thread is spun,

‘Twill then be fruitless to expect reprieve;

Could’st thou ten thousand kingdoms give

In purchase for each hour of longer life,

They would not buy one gasp of breath,

Nor move one jot inexorable death.

Perhaps there is no illustration in our language more impressive than Young’s noble apostrophe, commencing:

The bell strikes one. We take no note of time

But from its loss: to give it, then, a tongue

Is wise in man. As if an angel spoke,

I feel the solemn sound. If heard aright,

It is the knell of my departed hours.

Where are they? With the years beyond the flood.

* * * *

O time! than gold more sacred; more a load

Than lead to fools, and fools reputed wise.

What moment granted man without account?

What years are squandered, wisdom’s debt unpaid!

Our wealth in days all due to that discharge.

* * * *

Youth, is not rich in time; it may be poor;

Part with it as with money, sparing; pay

No moment, but in purchase of its worth;

And what’s it worth, ask death-beds; they can tell.

Part with it as with life, reluctant; big

With holy hope of nobler time to come.

* * * *

But why on time so lavish is my song?

On this great theme kind Nature keeps a school

To teach her sons herself. Each night we die—

Each morn are born anew; each day a life;

And shall we kill each day? If trifling kills,

Sure vice must butcher. Oh, what heaps of slain

Cry out for vengeance on us; time destroyed

Is suicide, where more than blood is spilt.

Throw years away!

Throw empires, and be blameless: moments seize;

Heaven’s on their wing: a moment we may wish,

When worlds want wealth to buy. Bid day stand still,

Bid him drive back his car, and re-impart

The period past, regive the given hour.

O for yesterdays to come!

How exquisite is this beguiling of time in Paradise Lost.

With thee conversing I forget all time;

All seasons, and their change, all please alike.

How beautifully has Burns alluded to these influences, in his “Lines to Mary in Heaven:”

Time but the impression deeper makes,

As streams their channels deeper wear.

The Hon. W. R. H. Spencer has something akin to this in his “Lines to Lady A. Hamilton:”

Too late I stay’d; forgive the crime;

Unheeded flew the hours;

How noiseless falls the foot of Time

That only treads on flow’rs!

Edward Moore, in one of his pleasing Songs, thus points to these charming influences:

Time still, as he flies, adds increase to her truth,

And gives to her mind what he steals from her youth.

The best lessons of life are to be learnt in his school:

Taught by time, my heart has learn’d to glow

For others’ good, and melt at others’ woe.

How well has Shakspeare expressed this work of the great reconciler:

Time’s glory is to calm contending kings,

To unmask falsehood, and bring truth to light,

To stamp its seal on aged things,

To wake the morn, and sentinel the night,

To wrong the wronger, till he render right.

Elsewhere Shakspeare paints him as the universal balm:

Cease to lament for that thou can’st not help,

And study help for that which thou lament’st.

Time is the nurse and breeder of all good.

It is notorious to philosophers, that joy and grief can hasten and delay time. Locke is of opinion that a man in great misery may so far lose his measure, as to think a minute an hour; or in joy make an hour a minute. Shakspeare’s “divers paces” of Time is too familiar for quotation here.

Time’s Garland is one of the beauties of Drayton’s “Elysium of the Muses:”

The garland long ago was worn

As Time pleased to bestow it:

The Laurel only to adorn

The conqueror and the poet.

The Palm his due who, uncontroll’d,

On danger looking gravely,

When fate had done the worst it could,

Who bore his fortunes bravely.

Most worthy of the Oaken wreath

The ancients him esteemed,

Who in a battle had from death

Some man of worth redeemed.

About his temples grave they tie,

Himself that so behaved,

In some strong siege by th’ enemy,

A city that hath saved.

A wreath of Vervains heralds wear,

Amongst our garlands named,

Being sent that dreadful news to bear,

Offensive war proclaimed.

The sign of peace who first displays,

The Olive wreath possesses;

The lover with the Myrtle sprays

Adorns his crisped tresses.

In love the sad forsaken wight

The Willow garland weareth;

The funeral man, befitting night,

The baleful Cypress beareth.

To Pan we dedicate the Pine,

Whose slips the shepherd graceth;

Again the Ivy and the Vine

On his front Bacchus placeth.

They who so stanchly oppose innovations, should remember Bacon’s words: “Every medicine is an innovation, and he that will not apply new remedies must expect new evils; for time is the greatest innovator; and if time of course alter things to the worse, and wisdom and counsel shall not alter them to the better, what shall be the end?”

How much time has to do with our successes is thus solemnly told by the Preacher: “The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.”—Ecclesiastes ix. 11.

How truthfully has Dr. Johnson said: “So little do we accustom ourselves to consider the effects of time, that things necessary and certain often surprise us like unexpected contingencies. We leave the beauty in her bloom, and, after an absence of twenty years, wonder, at our return, to find her faded. We meet those whom we left children, and can scarcely persuade ourselves to treat them as men. The traveller visits in age those countries through which he rambled in his youth, and hopes for merriment in the old place. The man of business, wearied with unsatisfactory prosperity, retires to the town of his nativity, and expects to play away the last years with the companions of his childhood, and recover youth in the fields where he once was young.”

Dr. Armstrong, the friend of Thomson, has left this solemn apostrophe on the Wrecks and Mutations of Time:

What does not fade? the tower that long had stood

The crush of thunder and the warring winds,

Shook by the slow but sure destroyer Time,

Now hangs in doubtful ruins o’er its base,

And flinty pyramids and walls of brass

Descend. The Babylonian spires are sunk;

Achaia, Rome, and Egypt moulder down.

Time shakes the stable tyranny of thrones,

And tottering empires rush by their own weight.

This huge rotundity we tread grows old,

And all these worlds that roll around the sun;

The sun himself shall die, and ancient night

Again involve the desolate abyss,

Till the Great Father, through the lifeless gloom,

Extend his arm to light another world,

And bid new planets roll by other laws.

We remember a piece of stage sentiment, beginning

“Time! Time! Time! why ponder o’er thy glass,

And count the dull sands as they pass?” &c.

It was touchingly sung, but had too much of gloom and despondency for the theatre: possibly it may have reminded some of its hearers of their own delinquency.

With what solemnity has our great Dramatic Bard foreshadowed Time’s waning:

To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,

To the last syllable of recorded time;

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools

The way to dusty death.

His departure is again sketched in Troilus and Cressida:

Time is like a fashionable host,

That slightly shakes his parting guest by th’ hand,

But with his arms outstretch’d, as he would fly,

Grasps the incomer.

Sir Walter Scott thus paints Time’s evanescence:

Time rolls his ceaseless course.—The race of yore,

Who danced our infancy upon their knee,

And told our marvelling boyhood legends store

Of their strange ’ventures happ’d by land or sea,

How are they blotted from the things that be!

Cowley has this significant couplet:

To things immortal Time can do no wrong,

And that which never is to die for ever must be young.

Yet, what a treasure is this:

My inheritance! how wide and fair!

Time is my estate; to Time I’m heir.

Wilhelm Meister: Carlyle.

“Time is almost a human word, and change entirely a human idea: in the system of nature we should rather say progress than change. The sun appears to sink in the ocean in darkness, but rises in another hemisphere; the ruins of a city fall, but they are often used to form more magnificent structures, as at Rome; but even when they are destroyed, so as to produce only dust, nature asserts her empire over them, and the vegetable world rises in constant youth, and in a period of annual successions, by the labours of man, providing food, vitality, and beauty upon the wreck of monuments which were once raised for purposes of glory, but which are now applied to objects of utility.”

As this beautiful passage was written by Sir Humphry Davy nearly three-and-thirty years since, the above use of the word progress had nothing to do with the semi-political sense in which it is now commonly employed. Nevertheless, there occur in the writings of our great chemical philosopher occasional views of the advancement of the world in knowledge, and its real authors, with which the progressists of the present day fraternise.

At the above distance, Davy wrote in the following vein: “In the common history of the world, as compiled by authors in general, almost all the great changes of nations are confounded with changes in their dynasties; and events are usually referred either to sovereigns, chiefs, heroes, or their armies, which do, in fact, originate entirely from different causes, either of an intellectual or moral nature. Governments depend far more than is generally supposed upon the opinion of the people and the spirit of the age and nation. It sometimes happens that a gigantic mind possesses supreme power, and rises superior to the age in which he is born: such was Alfred in England, and Peter in Russia. Such instances are, however, very rare; and in general it is neither amongst sovereigns nor the higher classes of society that the great improvers and benefactors of mankind are to be found.”—Consolations in Travel, pp. 34, 35.

Brilliant as was Davy’s own career, it had its life-struggles: his last days were embittered with sufferings, mental as well as physical; and in these moments he may have written these somewhat querulous remarks.

TIME: PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE.

Harris, in his Hermes, in his disquisition on Time, gives the distinction between the grammatical or conventional phrase, “Present Time,” and the more philosophical and abstract “Now,” or “Instant.” Quoting Nicephorus Blemmides, Harris would define the former as follows: “Present Time is that which adjoins to the Real Now, or Instant, on either side being a limited time made up of Past and Future; and from its vicinity to that Real Now, said to be Now also itself.” Whilst upon the latter term he remarks: “As every Now or Instant always exists in Time, and without being Time is Time’s bound; the Bound of Completion to the Past, and the Bound of Commencement to the Future; and from hence we may conceive its nature or end, which is to be the medium of continuity between the Past and the Future, so as to render Time, through all its parts, one Intire and Perfect Whole.”

Thus, logically, “Time Present” must be regarded as a mathematical point, having no parts or magnitude, being simply the end of the Past, and the beginning of the Future. Thus, perishing in action and eluding the grasp of thought, it is a nonentity, of which, at best, an intangible and shadowy existence can be predicated:

Dum loquimur fugerit invida

Ætas. Hor.

And we may ask of it, with its carpe diem, its manifold attributes, and imputed influences, as the poet Young does of the King of Terrors:

Why start at Death? Where is he? Death arrived

Is past; not come, or gone, he’s never here.

Night Thoughts, iv.

It is, however, in the more conventional sense that the phrase “Present Time” is generally made use of in writing and conversation. So Johnson, in his well-known passage: “Whatever withdraws us from the power of our senses, whatever makes the past, the distant, or the future, predominate over the present, advances us in the dignity of thinking beings,” &c. Here we have “the Present” invested with the dignity of individual existence, and compared with the Past and the Future, as having duration or extension with these; as if we should speak of a series of numbers, ascending on each side of nothing to infinity, as being divisible into negative, zero, and positive.

Among coincident forms of expression, on the part of writers who have spoken of the “Present Time” in its more precise and philosophical sense, is the following by Cowley, in a note to one of his “Pindarique Odes:” “There are two sorts of Eternity; from the Present backwards to Eternity, and from the present forwards, called by the Schoolmen Æternitas à parte ante, and Æternitas à parte post. These two make up the whole circle of Eternity, which Present Time cuts like a Diameter.”

Carlyle, in his Essays (“Signs of the Times”), has this knowledgeful passage: “We admit that the present is an important time; as all present time necessarily is. The poorest day that passes over us is the conflux of two Eternities, and is made up of currents that issue from the remotest Past, and flow onwards into the remotest Future. We were wise, indeed, could we discover truly the signs of our own times; and, by knowledge of its wants and advantages, wisely adjust our own position in it. Let us, then, instead of gazing idly into the obscure distance, look calmly around us for a little on the perplexed scene where we stand. Perhaps, on a more serious inspection, something of its perplexity may disappear, some of its distinctive characters and deeper tendencies more clearly reveal themselves; whereby our own relations to it, our own true aims and endeavours in it, may also become clearer.”[^[1]]

Lord Strangford has left these pathetic stanzas:

Time was—when all was fresh, and fair, and bright,

My heart was bounding with delight,

It knew no pain, it felt no aching:

But o’er it all its airy woes

As lightly passed, or briefly staid,

Like the fleet summer-cloud which throws

On sunny lands a moment’s shade,

A momentary darkness making.

Time is—when all is drear, and dim, and wild,

And that gay sunny scene which smiled

With darkest clouds is gloomed and saddened;

When tempest-toss’d on passion’s tide

Reason’s frail bark is madly driven,

Nor gleams one ray its course to guide

From yon o’ercast and frowning heaven,

Till peace is wreck’d and reason maddened.

Time come—but will it e’er restore

The peace my bosom felt before,

And soothe again my aching, tortured breast?

It will, for there is One above

Who bends on all a Father’s eye;

Who hears with all a Father’s love

The broken heart’s repentant sigh,

Calms the vexed heart, and bids the spirit rest.

[1]. Abridged from an excellent Communication, by William Bates, to Notes and Queries, 2d series, vol. x. p. 245.

MEASUREMENT OF TIME.

Sir Thomas Browne, treating of Errors regarding Numbers, observes: “True it is that God made all things in number, weight, and measure; yet nothing by them, or through the efficacy of either. Indeed, our days, actions, and motions being measured by time (which is but motion measured), whatever is observable in any, falls under the account of some number; which, notwithstanding, cannot be denominated the cause of these events. So do we unjustly assign the power of action even unto time itself; nor do they speak properly who say that time consumeth all things; for time is not effective, nor are bodies destroyed by it, but from the action and passion of their elements in it; whose account it only affordeth, and, measuring out their motion, informs us in the periods and terms of their duration, rather than effecteth or physically produceth the same.”[^[2]]

Time can only be measured by motion: were all things inanimate or fixed, time could not be measured. A body cannot be in two places at the same instant; and if the motion of any body from one point to another were regular and equal, the divisions and subdivisions of the space thus marked over would mark portions of time.

The sun and the moon have served to divide portions of time in all ages. The rising and setting of the sun, the shortening and lengthening of the shadows of trees, and even the shadow of man himself, have marked the flight of time. The phases of the moon were used to indicate greater portions; and a certain number of full moons supplied us with the means of giving historical dates.

Fifteen geographical miles, east or west, make one minute of time. The earth turning on its axis produces the alternate succession of day and night, and in this revolution marks the smallest division of time by distances on its surface.

If each of the 360 degrees into which the circumference of the earth is divided, be subdivided into twenty-four hours, it will be found that 15 degrees pass under the sun during each hour, which proves that 15 degrees of longitude mark one hour of time: thus, as Berlin is nearly 15 degrees east of London, it is almost one o’clock when it is twelve at London.

Time, like bodies, is divisible nearly ad infinitum. A second (a mere pulsation) is divided into four or five parts, marked by the vibrations of a watch-balance; and each of these divisions is frequently required to be lessened an exact 2880th part of its momentary duration. It is, however, impossible to see this; for Mr. Babbage, speaking of a piece of mechanism which indicated the 300th part of a second, tells us that both himself and friend endeavoured to stop it twenty times successively at the same point, but could not be confident of even the 20th part of a second.

It has been said that many simple operations would astonish us, did we but know enough to be so; and this remark may not be inapplicable to those who, having a watch losing half a minute per day, wish it corrected, though they may not reflect that as half a minute is the 2880th part of 24 hours, each vibration of the balance, which is only the fifth part of a second, must be accelerated the 2880th part of its instantaneous duration; while to make a watch, losing one minute per week, go correctly, each vibration must be accelerated the 1008th part of its duration, or the 50,400th part of a second.[^[3]]

Among the early methods of measuring Time, we must not omit to notice Alfred’s “Time-Candles,” as they have been called. His reputed biographer, Asser, tells us that Alfred caused six tapers to be made for his daily use: each taper, containing twelve pennyweights of wax, was twelve inches long, and of proportionate breadth. The whole length was divided into twelve parts, or inches, of which three would burn for one hour, so that each taper would be consumed in four hours; and the six tapers, being lighted one after the other, lasted twenty-four hours. But the wind blowing through the windows and doors and chinks of the walls of the chapel, or through the cloth of his tent, in which they were burning, wasted these tapers, and consequently they burnt with no regularity; he therefore designed a lantern made of ox or cow horn, cut into thin plates, in which he enclosed the tapers; and thus protecting them from the wind, the period of their burning became a matter of certainty. But the genuineness of Asser’s work is doubted,—so the story is discredited. Nevertheless, there is nothing very questionable in Alfred’s reputed method; and it is curious to see that an “improvement” was patented so recently as 1859, which consists in graduating the exterior of candles, either by indentation or colouring at intervals, and equal distances apart, according to the size of the candles. The marks are to consist of hours, half-hours, and, if necessary, quarter-hours; the distance to be determined by the kind of candle used.

Bishop Wilkins, in his Mathematical Magic, in the chapter relating to “such engines as did receive a regular and lasting motion from something belonging to their own frame, whether weights or springs, &c.,” quotes Pancirollus, “taken from that experiment in the multiplication of wheels mentioned in Vitruvius, where he speaks of an instrument whereby a man may know how many miles or paces he doth go in any space of time, whether or no he pass by water in a boat or ship, or by land in a chariot or coach. They have been contrived also into little pocket instruments, by which, after a man hath walked a whole day together, he may easily know how many steps he hath taken.” More curious is “the alarum, mentioned by Walchius, which, though it were but two or three inches big, yet would both wake a man and of itself light a candle for him at any set hour of the night. And those great springs, which are of so great force as to turn a mill (as some have contrived), may be easily applied to more various and difficult labours.”

Occasionally, in these old curiosities, we trace anticipations of some of the scientific marvels of the present day. Thus, when the Grand Duke of Tuscany, in 1669, visited the Royal Society at Arundel House, he was shown “a clock, whose movements are derived from the vicinity of a loadstone; and it is so adjusted as to discover the distance of countries, at sea, by the longitude.” The analogy between this clock and the electrical clock of the present day is not a little remarkable. The Journal-book of the Society for 1669 contains many allusions to “Hook’s magnetic watch going slower or faster according to the greater or less distance of the loadstone, and so moving regularly in every posture.” On the occasion of the visit of illustrious strangers, this clock and Hook’s magnetic watches were always exhibited as great curiosities.[^[4]]

[2]. Vulgar and Common Errors, book iv. chap. xii.

[3]. Time and Timekeepers. By Adam Thomson, 1842.

[4]. See Weld’s History of the Royal Society, vol. i. pp. 220, 221.

PERIODS OF REST.

The terrestrial day, and consequently the length of the cycle of light and darkness, being what it is, we find various parts of the constitution both of animals and vegetables which have a periodical character in their functions, corresponding to the diurnal succession of external conditions; and we find that the length of the period, as it exists in their constitution, coincides with the length of the natural day.

Man, in all nations and ages, takes his principal rest once in twenty-four hours; and the regularity of this practice seems most suitable to his health, though the duration of the time allotted to repose is extremely different in different cases. So far as we can judge, this period is of a length beneficial to the human frame, independently of the effect of external agents. In the voyages made into high northern latitudes, where the sun did not rise for three months, the crews of the ships were made to adhere, with the utmost punctuality, to the habit of retiring to rest at nine, and rising a quarter before six; and they enjoyed, under circumstances apparently the most trying, a state of salubrity quite remarkable. This shows that, according to the common constitution of such men, the cycle of twenty-fours is very commodious, though not imposed on them by external circumstances.

The succession of exertion and repose in the muscular system, of excited and dormant sensibility in the nervous, appears to be fundamentally connected with the muscular and nervous powers, whatever the nature of these may be. The necessity of these alternations is one of the measures of the intensity of these vital energies; and it would seem that we cannot, without assuming the human powers to be altered, suppose the intervals of tranquillity which they require to be much changed. This view agrees with the opinion of the most eminent physiologists. Thus, Cabanis notices the periodical and isochronous character of the desire of sleep, as well as of other appetites. He states that sleep is more easy and more salutary, in proportion as we go to rest and rise every day at the same hours; and observes that this periodicity seems to have a reference to the motions of the solar system.

Now, how should such a reference be at first established in the constitution of man, animals, and plants, and transmitted from one generation of them to another? If we suppose a wise and benevolent Creator, by whom all the parts of nature were fitted to their uses and to each other, this is what we might expect and understand. On any other supposition, such a fact appears altogether incredible and inconceivable.[^[5]]

[5]. Abridged from Whewell’s Bridgwater Treatise.

RECKONING DISTANCE BY TIME.

In Oriental countries, it has been the custom from the earliest ages to reckon distances by time, rather than by any direct reference to a standard of measure, as is commonly reckoned in the present day. In the Scriptures we find distances described by “a day’s journey,” “three days’ journey,” and other similar expressions. A day’s journey is supposed to have been equal to about thirty-three British statute miles, and denoted the distance that could be performed without any extraordinary fatigue by a foot-passenger; “a Sabbath day’s journey” was peculiar to the Jews, being equal to rather less than one statute mile. It may not be in exact accordance with our habits of thought, and usual forms of expression, thus to describe distances by time; yet it seems to possess some advantages. A man knowing nothing of the linear standards of measure employed in foreign countries, would receive no satisfactory information on being told that a particular city, or town, was distant from another a certain number of miles[^[6]] or leagues,[^[7]] as the case might happen to be. But if he were told that such city or town was distant from another a certain number of hours or days, there would be something in the account that would commend itself to his understanding. A sea-voyage is oftener described by reference to time than to distance. We frequently hear persons inquire how many weeks or months it will occupy to proceed to distant parts of the world, but they rarely manifest any great anxiety about the number of miles. This mode of computation seems especially applicable to steam navigation: a voyage by a steam-packet, under ordinary circumstances, being performed with such surprising regularity, that it might, with greater propriety, be described by minutes, or hours, or days, than by miles.

[6]. In Holland a mile is nearly equal to three and three-quarters; in Germany it is rather more than four and a half; and in Switzerland it is about equal to five and three-quarters British miles.

[7]. A league in France is equal to two and three-quarters; in Spain to four; in Denmark to four and three-quarters; in Switzerland to five and a half; and in Sweden to six and three-quarters British miles.

SUN-DIALS.

Sun-dials are little regarded but as curiosities in these days; although the science of constructing Sun-dials, under the name of Gnomonics, was, up to a comparatively recent period, part of a mathematical course. As long as watches were scarce, and clocks not very common, the dial was an actual time-keeper. Of the mathematical works of the seventeenth century which are found on book-stalls, none are so common as those on Dialling.

Each of the old dials usually had its monitory inscription; and although the former have mostly disappeared, the mottoes have been preserved, so that all their good is not lost.

The stately city of Oxford, which Waagen declared it was worth a special journey from Germany to see, has, upon its churches and colleges, and in their lovely gardens, several dials. Christopher Wren, when a boy of fifteen at Wadham College, designed on the ceiling of a room a reflecting dial, embellished with various devices and two figures, Astronomy and Geometry, with accessories, tastefully drawn with a pen, and bearing a Latin inscription; but his more elaborate work is the large and costly dial which he erected at All Souls’ College, of which he was a Fellow.

The Rev. W. Lisle Bowles was a sincere respecter of dials. In the garden of his parsonage at Bremhill he placed a Sun-dial—a small antique twisted column, gray with age, and believed to have been the dial of the abbot of Malmesbury, and counted his hours at the adjoining lodge; for it was taken from the garden of the farmhouse, which had originally been the summer retirement of this mitred lord: it is of monastic character, but a more ornate capital has been added, which bears the date of 1688; it has the following inscription by the venerable Canon:

To count the brief and unreturning hours,

This Sun-dial was placed among the flowers,

Which came forth in their beauty—smiled and died,

Blooming and withering round its ancient side.

Mortal, thy day is passing—see that Flower,

And think upon the Shadow and the Hour.

From beneath a venerable yew, which has seen the persecution of the loyal English clergy, you look into the adjoining churchyard of Bremhill, on an old Sun-dial, once a cross. Bowles tells us: “The cross was found broken at its foot, probably by the country iconoclasts of the day. I have brought the interesting fragment again into light, and placed it conspicuously opposite to an old Scotch fir in the churchyard, which I think it not unlikely was planted by Townson on his restoration. The accumulation of the soil of centuries had covered an ascent of four steps at the bottom of this record of silent hours. These steps have been worn in places, from the act of frequent prostration or kneeling by the forefathers of the hamlet, perhaps before the church existed.” Upon this old dial Bowles wrote one of his most touching poems, of which these are the opening verses:

So passes silent o’er the dead thy shade,

Brief Time! and hour by hour, and day by day,

The pleasing pictures of the present fade,

And like a summer-vapour steal away.

And have not they, who here forgotten lie

(Say, hoary chronicler of ages past),

Once more the shadow with delighted eye,

Nor thought it fled,—how certain and how fast?

Since thou hast stood, and thus thy vigil kept,

Noting each hour, o’er mould’ring stones beneath,

The Pastor and his flock alike have slept,

And “dust to dust” proclaim’d the stride of death.

Any thing that reminds us of the lapse of time should remind us also of the right employment of time in doing whatever business is required to be done.

A similar lesson is solemnly conveyed in the Scripture motto to a Sun-dial: “The night cometh, when no man can work.” Another solemn injunction is conveyed in the motto to a Sun-dial erected by Bishop Copleston in a village near which he resided: “Let not the sun go down upon your wrath” (Ephesians iv. 26).

A more subtle motto is, “Septem sine horis;” signifying that there are in the longest day seven hours (and a trifle over) during which the Sun-dial is useless.

Upon the public buildings and in the pleasure-grounds of Old London the Sun-dial was placed as a silent monitor to those who were sailing on the busy stream of time through its crowded haunts and thoroughfares, or seeking meditation in quiet nooks and plaisances of its river mansions and garden-houses. Upon churches the dial commonly preceded the clock: Wren especially introduced the dial in his churches.

Sovereigns and statesmen may have reflected beside the palace-dials upon the fleetingness of life, and thus have learned to take better note of time. Whitehall was famous for its Sun-dials. In Privy Garden was a dial set up by Edward Gunter, professor of astronomy at Gresham College (and of which he published a description), by command of James I., in 1624. A large stone pedestal bore four dials at the four corners, and “the great horizontal concave” in the centre; besides east, west, north, and south dials at the sides. In the reign of Charles II. this dial was defaced by an intoxicated nobleman of the Court; upon which Marvell wrote:

This place for a dial was too unsecure,

Since a guard and a garden could not defend;

For so near to the Court they will never endure

Any witness to show how their time they misspend.

In the court-yard facing the Banqueting-house was another curious dial, set up in 1669 by order of Charles II. It was invented by one Francis Hall, alias Lyne, a Jesuit, and professor of mathematics at Liège. This dial consisted of five stages rising in a pyramidal form, and bearing several vertical and reclining dials, globes cut into planes, and glass bowls; showing, “besides the houres of all kinds,” “many things also belonging to geography, astrology, and astronomy, by the sun’s shadow made visible to the eye.” Among the pictures were portraits of the king, the two queens, the Duke of York, and Prince Rupert. Father Lyne published a description of this dial, which consists of seventy-three parts: it is illustrated with seventeen plates: the details are condensed in No. 400 of the Mirror. About 1710, William Allingham, a mathematician in Canon-row, asked 500l. to repair this dial: it was last seen by Vertue, the artist and antiquary, at Buckingham House.

The bricky towers of St. James’s palace had their Sun-dials; and in the gardens of Kensington palace and Hampton Court palace are to this day superb dials.

Upon a house-front in the Terrace, New Palace Yard, Westminster, is a Sun-dial, having the motto from Virgil, “Discite justitiam, moniti,” which had probably been inscribed upon the old clock-tower of the palace, in reference to its having been built with a fine that had been levied on the Chief Justice of the King’s Bench for altering a record.

The Inns of Court, where time runs its golden sand, have retained a few of their Sun-dials. In Lincoln’s Inn, on two of the old gables, are: 1. A southern dial, restored in 1840, which shows the hours by its gnomon, from 6 A.M. to 4 P.M., and is inscribed, “Ex hoc monumento pendet æternitas.” 2. A western dial, restored in 1794 and 1848, from the different situation of its plane, only shows the hours from noon till night: inscription, “Quam redit nescitis horam.” And in Serle’s-court (now New-square), on the west side, was a dial inscribed, “Publica privatis secernite, sacra prophanis.”

Gray’s Inn has lost its Sun-dials: but in the gardens was a dial, opposite Verulam Buildings, not far from Bacon’s summer-house; and the turret of the great Hall had formerly a southern declining dial, with this motto, “Lux diei, lex Dei.”

Furnival’s Inn had its garden and dial, which disappeared when the old Inn buildings were taken down in 1818, and the Inn rebuilt.

Staple Inn had upon its Hall a well-kept dial, above a luxuriant fig-tree.

Clement’s Inn had, in its small garden, a kneeling figure supporting a dial,—one of the leaden garden embellishments common in the last century. In New Inn, adjoining, the Hall has a large vertical Sun-dial, motto: “Time and Tide tarry for no man.”

Lyon’s Inn, which had been an Inn “since 1420, or sooner,” had, in 1828, an old Sun-dial, which had lost its gnomon and most of its figures.

The Temple garden, Inner and Middle, has each a large pillar Sun-dial; the latter very handsome. There are vertical dials in various courts; but the old dial of Inner Temple terrace, with its “Begone about your business,”—in reality the reply of a testy bencher to the painter who teased him for an inscription,—disappeared in the year 1828. There remain three dials with mottoes: Temple-lane, “Pereunt et imputantur;” Essex-court, “Vestigia nulla retrorsum;” Brick-court, “Time and tide tarry for no man;” and in Pump-court and Garden-court are two dials without mottoes. Charles Lamb has this charmingly reflective passage, suggested by the Temple dials:

What an antique air had the now almost effaced sun-dials, with their moral inscriptions, seeming coevals with that Time which they measured, and to take their revelations of its flight immediately from heaven, holding correspondence with the fountain of light! How could the dark line steal imperceptibly on, watched by the eye of childhood, eager to detect its movement, never catched, nice as an evanescent cloud, or the first arrests of sleep!

And yet doth beauty like a dial-hand

Steal from his figure, and no pace perceived!

What a dead thing is a clock, with its ponderous embowelments of lead and brass, its pert or solemn dulness of communication, compared with the simple altar-like structure and silent heart-language of the old dial! It stood as the garden god of Christian gardens. Why is it almost every where vanished? If its business be superseded by more elaborate inventions, its moral uses, its beauty, might have pleaded for its continuance. It spoke of moderate labours, of pleasures not protracted after sunset, of temperance and good hours. It was the primitive clock, the horologe of the first world. Adam could scarce have missed it in Paradise. It was the measure appropriate for sweet plants and flowers to spring by, for the birds to apportion their silver warblings by, for flocks to pasture and be led to fold by. The shepherd ‘carved it out quaintly in the sun,’ and, turning philosopher by the very occupation, provided it with mottoes more touching than tombstones. It was a pretty device of the gardener, recorded by Marvell, who, in the days of artificial gardening, made a dial out of herbs and flowers:

How well the skilful gardener drew,

Of herbs and flowers, this dial new!

Where from above, the milder sun

Does through a fragrant zodiac run:

And, as it works, the industrious bee

Computes its time as well as we.

How could such sweet and wholesome hours

Be reckon’d, but with herbs and flowers?

From “The Garden.”

Another noted dial gave name to a locality of the metropolis, which has known many mutations, viz. Seven Dials, built in the time of Charles II. for wealthy tenants. Evelyn notes, 1694: “I went to see the building near St. Giles’s, where Seven Dials make a star from a Doric pillar placed in the middle of a circular area, said to be by Mr. Neale (the introducer of the late lotteries), in imitation of Venice, now set up here for himself twice, and once for the state.”

Where famed St. Giles’s ancient limits spread,

An in-rail’d column rears its lofty head:

Here to seven streets seven dials count their day,

And from each other catch the circling ray:

Here oft the peasant, with inquiring face,

Bewilder’d trudges on from place to place;

He dwells on every sign with stupid gaze,

Enters the narrow alleys’ doubtful maze,

Tries every winding court and street in vain,

And doubles o’er his weary steps again.

Gay’s Trivia, book ii.

The seven streets were Great and Little Earl, Great and Little White Lion, Great and Little St. Andrew’s, and Queen; though the dial-stone had but six faces, two of the streets opening into one angle. The column and dials were removed in June 1773, to search for a treasure said to be concealed beneath the base. They were never replaced; but in 1822 were purchased of a stone-mason, and the column was surmounted with a ducal coronet, and set up on Weybridge Green as a memorial to the late Duchess of York, who died at Oatlands in 1820. The dial-stone is now a stepping-stone at the adjoining Ship inn.[^[8]]

The Sun-dial was also formerly used with a compass. The Hon. Robert Boyle relates, “that a Boatman one day took out of his pocket a little Sun-dial, furnished with an excited needle to direct how to set it, such dials being used among mariners, not only to show them the hour of the day, but to inform them from what quarter the wind blows.”

A Cape Town Correspondent of Notes and Queries describes a Sun-dial and compass in his possession, made by “Johann Willebrand, in Augsburg, 1848:” it has a curious perpetual calendar attached, and is of highly finished work in silver, parcel-gilt. Another Sun-dial and compass is mentioned as made by Butterfield, at Paris: it is small, of silver, and horizontal; upon its face are engraved dials for several latitudes, and at the back a table of principal cities; it is set by a compass, and the gnomon adjusted by a divided arc. The N. point of the compass-box is fixed in a position to allow for variation, probably at Paris; and, judging from this, it would appear to have been made about 1716.[^[9]]

We should also notice the pocket ring-dial, such as that which gave occasion to the Fool in the Forest of Arden to “moral on the time:”

And then he drew a dial from his poke,

And, looking on it with lack-lustre eye,

Says, very wisely, “It is ten o’clock.”

This is a ring of brass, much like a miniature dog-collar, and has, moving in a groove in its circumference, a narrower ring with a boss, pierced by a small hole to admit a ray of light. The latter ring is made movable, to allow for the varying declination of the sun in the several months of the year, and the initials of these are marked in the ascending and descending scale on the larger ring, which bears also the motto:

Set me right, and use me well,

And I y^e time to you will tell.

The hours are lined and numbered on the opposite concavity. When the boss of the sliding ring is set, and the ring is suspended by the ring directly towards the sun, a ray of light passing through the hole in the boss impinges on the concave surface, and the hour is told with fair accuracy. Mr. Thomas Q. Couch, of Bodmin, thus describes this Dial in Notes and Queries, 3d series, No. 36. Mr. Charles Knight, in his Pictorial Shakspeare, has engraved a dial of this kind, as an illustration of As you like it.

Mr. Redmond, of Liverpool, describes the old pocket ring-dial as common in the county of Wexford some twenty-five years ago: there was hardly a farm-house where one could not be had. The same Correspondent of Notes and Queries, 3d series, No. 39, describes a door-sill marked with the hour for every day in the year: the sill had a full southern aspect, so that when the sun shone, the time could be read as correctly as by any watch.

Another Correspondent of Notes and Queries, 2d series, No. 38, has an ingenious pocket-dial, sold by one T. Clarke: it is merely a card, with a small plummet hanging by a thread, and a gnomon, which lies flat on the card, but, when lifted up, casts the shadow to indicate the hour of the day, and also the hours of sunrise and sunset.

In the United Service Museum, Whitehall, is a Sun-dial, with a burning-glass arranged to fire a small gun at noon; also a large Universal Dial, with a circle showing minutes; and another large Universal Dial, with horizontal plate and spirit-level.

Suppose we collect a few of the monitory inscriptions on dials in various places. Hazlitt, in a graceful paper “On a Sun-dial,” tells us that

Horas non numero nisi serenas

is the motto of a Sun-dial near Venice; and the same line is painted in huge letters over the Sun-dial in front of an old farmhouse near Farnworth, in Lancashire.

At Hebden Bridge, in Yorkshire, is this quaint motto:

Quod petis, umbra est.

Canon Bowles, in his love of the solemn subject, prescribed the following, with paraphrastic translations:

Morning Sun.—Tempus volat.

Oh! early passenger, look up—be wise,

And think how, night and day, time onward flies.

Noon.—Dum tempus habemus, operemur bonum.

Life steals away—this hour, oh! man, is lent thee.

Patient to work the work of Him who sent thee.

Setting Sun.—Redibo, tu nunquam.

Haste, traveller, the sun is sinking now:

He shall return again, but never thou.

Over the Sun-dial on an old house in Rye:

Tempus edax rerum.[^[10]]

Underneath it:

That solar shadow,

As it measures life, it life resembles too.

In Brading churchyard, Isle of Wight, on a Sun-dial fixed to what appears originally to have been part of a churchyard cross, is the motto:

Hora pars vitæ.

Near the porch of Milton church, Berks, is:

Our Life’s a flying Shadow; God’s the Pole,

Death, the Horizon, where our sun is set;

The Index, pointing at him, is our Soul,

Which will, through Christ, a Resurrection get.

Butler has this couplet:

True as the dial to the sun,

Although it be not shin’d upon.

Hudibras, part iii. canto 2.

Upon this Dr. Nash notes: “As the dial is invariable, and always open to the sun whenever its rays can show the time of day, though the weather is often cloudy, and obscures its lustre: so true loyalty is always ready to serve its king and country, though it often suffers great afflictions and distresses.”

There cannot be a more faithful indicator, according to Barton Booth’s song:

True as the needle to the pole,

Or as the dial to the sun.

After all, the sun-dial is but an occasional timekeeper; a defect which the pious Bishop Hall ingeniously illustrates in the following beautiful Meditation “On the Sight of a Dial:” “If the sun did not shine upon this dial, nobody would look at it: in a cloudy day it stands like an useless post, unheeded, unregarded; but, when once those beams break forth, every passenger runs to it, and gazes on it.

“O God, while thou hidest thy countenance from me, methinks all thy creatures pass by me with a willing neglect. Indeed, what am I without thee? And if thou have drawn in me some lines and notes of able endowments; yet, if I be not actuated by thy grace, all is, in respect of use, no better than nothing; but when thou renewest the light of thy loving countenance upon me, I find a sensible and happy change of condition: methinks all things look upon me with such cheer and observance, as if they meant to make good that word of thine, Those that honour me, I will honour: now, every line and figure, which it hath pleased thee to work in me, serve for useful and profitable direction. O Lord, all the glory is thine. Give thou me light: I will give others information: both of us shall give thee praise.”

The Pyramids of Egypt, the most ancient and the most colossal structures on the earth,—the purpose and appropriation of which has been much controverted by antiquaries and men of science,—have been considered by some to have served as Sun-dials. Sir Gardner Wilkinson does not pretend to explain the real object for which these stupendous monuments were constructed, but feels persuaded that they have served for tombs, and have also been intended for astronomical purposes. “The form of the exterior might lead to many useful calculations. They stand exactly due north and south; and while the direction of the faces to the east and west might serve to fix the return of a certain period of the year, the shadow cast by the sun, or the time of its coinciding with their slope, might be observed for a similar purpose.”

There is an interesting association of the Great Pyramid with the ambitious dream of one of the world’s celebrities, which may be noticed here. When Napoleon I. was in Egypt, in 1799, he rode on a camel to the Great Pyramid and the Sphinx, that relic of mystic grandeur. Karl Girardet has painted this impressive visit; and the picture has been engraved by Gautier, and inscribed, “Forty Centuries look down upon him.”

Charles Mackay has written a graceful poem as a pendent to this print; in which the poet makes the young Napoleon thus invoke the colossal monuments:

Ye haughty Pyramids!

Thou Sphinx, whose eyeless lids

On my presumptuous youth seem bent in scorn!

What though thou’st stood

Coeval with the flood,

Of all earth’s monuments the earliest born,

And I so mean and small,

With armies at my call,

Am recent in thy sight as grass of yestermorn!

Yet in this soul of mine

Is strength as great as thine,

O dull-eyed Sphinx that wouldst despise me now;

Is grandeur like thine own,

O melancholy stone,

With forty centuries furrow’d on thy brow;

Deep in my heart I feel

What time shall yet reveal,

That I shall tower o’er men, as o’er these deserts thou.

The dreamer of empire proceeds, bespeaking:

Nations yet to be,

Surging from Time’s deep sea,

Shall teach their babes the name of great Napoleon.

But hear the reply of the decaying oracle:

Over the mighty chief

There came a shadow of grief.

The lips gigantic seemed to move and say,

“Know’st thou his name that bid

Arise yon Pyramid?

Know’st thou who placed me where I stand to-day?

Thy deeds are but as sand

Strewn on the heedless land:

Think, little mortal, think, and pass upon thy way!

Pass, little mortal, pass!

Grow like the vernal grass—

The autumn sickle shall destroy thy prime.

But nations shout the word

Which ne’er before they heard,

The name of glory, fearful yet sublime.

The Pharaohs are forgot,

Their works confess them not:

Pass, hero! pass,—poor straw upon the gulf of Time!”

It will be remembered how Napoleon’s disastrous Egyptian campaign ended; and how he secretly embarked for France, and read during his passage both the Bible and the Koran with great assiduity.

Among the interesting memorials of Mary Queen of Scots at Holyrood Palace, Edinburgh, there remains the Sun-dial placed in the centre of the palace-garden, and usually denominated “Queen Mary’s Dial.”

It is the apex of a richly-ornamented pedestal, which rests upon a hexagonal base, consisting of three steps. The form of the ‘horologe’ is multangular; for though its principal sections are pentagonal, yet from their terminating in pyramidal points, and being diametrically opposed to each other, again connected by triangular interspaces, it presents no fewer than twenty sides, on which are placed twenty-two dials, inserted into circular, semicircular, and triangular cavities. Between the dials are the royal arms of Scotland, with the initials M. R., St. Andrew, St. George, fleurs-de-lis, and other emblems. This memorial carries us back nearly three centuries, when Holyrood was a palace

Where “Mary of Scotland” kept her court.

[8]. The Town and Country Magazine, edited by Albert Smith.

[9]. N. T. Heineken; Notes and Queries, 3d series.

[10]. We remember this motto for many years beneath a large figure of Time, executed in Coade and Seeley’s composition, and placed at the corner of the lane leading from Westminster Bridge Road to Pedlar’s Acre.

THE HOUR-GLASS.

The use of the Hour-glass can be traced to ancient Greece. In Christie’s Greek Vases, one is engraved from a scarabæus of sardonyx, in the Towneley collection: it is exactly like the modern hour-glass. The first mention of it occurs in a Greek tragedian named Bato. On a bas-relief of the Mattei Palace, of the marriage of Thetis and Peleus, Morpheus holds an hour-glass; and from Athenæus it appears that persons, when going out, carried it about with them, as we do a watch. In a woodcut in Hawkins’s History of Music, the frame is more solid, and the glass probably slipped in and out. There is another cut of one in Boissard, held by Death, precisely of the modern form.

The hour or sand-glass is liable to the objection, that it requires a horary attendant, as is intimated in the glee:

Five times by the taper’s light

The hour-glass we have turned to-night.

But the Hour-glass is a better measurer of time than is generally imagined. The flow of the sand from one bulb to another is perfectly equable, whatever may be the quantity of sand above the aperture. The stream flows no faster when the upper bulb is almost full than when it is almost empty; the lower heap not being influenced by the pressure of the heap above.[^[11]] Bloomfield, in one of his rural tales, “The Widow to her Hour-glass,” sings:

I’ve often watched thy streaming sand,

And seen the growing mountain rise,

And often found life’s hope to stand

On props as weak in wisdom’s eyes:

Its conic crown

Still sliding down,

Again heaped up, then down again:

The sand above more hollow grew,

Like days and years still filtering through,

And mingling joy and pain.

Ford, contemporary with Massinger, has this impressive picture of the primitive time-keeper:

Minutes are number’d by the fall of sands,

As, by an hour-glass, the span of time

Doth waste us to our graves; and we look on it.

An age of pleasures, revell’d out, comes home

At last, and ends in sorrow: but the life,

Weary of riot, numbers every sand,

Wailing in sighs, until the last drop down;

So to conclude calamity in rest: numbering wasted life.

How cleverly the old dramatist, Shirley, illustrates this philosopher in glass:

Let princes gather

My dust into a glass, and learn to spend

Their hour of state, that’s all they have; for when

That’s out, Time never turns the glass again.

The Hour-glass has almost entirely given place to the more useful, because to a greater extent self-acting, instrument; and it is now seldom seen except upon the table of the lecturer or private teacher, in the study of the philosopher, in the cottage of the peasant, or in the hand of the old emblematic figure of Time.[^[12]] We still sometimes see it in the workshop of the cork-cutter. The half-minute glass is still employed on board ship; and the two and a half or three minute glass for boiling an egg with exactness.

Preaching by the Hour-glass was formerly common; and public speakers are timed, in the present day, by the same means. In the church-wardens’ books of St. Helen’s, Abingdon, date 1599, is a charge of fourpence for an hour-glass for the pulpit; in 1564, we find in the books of St. Katherine’s, Christ Church, Aldgate, “paid for an hour-glass that hangeth by the pulpit when the preacher doth make a sermon, that he may know how the hour passeth away—one shilling;” and in the books of St. Mary’s, Lambeth, 1579 and 1615, are similar entries. Butler, in Hudibras, alludes to pulpit hour-glasses having been used by the Puritans: the preacher having named the text, turned up the glass; and if the sermon did not last till the sand was out, it was said by the congregation that the preacher was lazy; but if, on the other hand, he continued much longer, they would yawn and stretch till the discourse was finished. At the old church of St. Dunstan-in-the-West, Fleet-street, was a large hour-glass in a silver frame, of which latter, when the instrument was taken down, in 1723, two heads were made for the parish staves. Hogarth, in his “Sleepy Congregation,” has introduced an hour-glass on the west side of the pulpit. A very perfect hour-glass is preserved in the church of St. Alban, Wood-street, Cheapside; it is placed on the right of the reading-desk within a frame of twisted columns and arches, supported on a spiral column: the four sides have angels sounding trumpets; and each end has a line of crosses patées and fleurs-de-lis, somewhat resembling the imperial crown.

[11]. Le Jeune has painted two children watching with wonder the sand flowing in the hour-glass.

[12]. The Hour-glass is the sign of Calvert’s Brewery, in Upper Thames-street.

CLOCKS AND WATCHES.

The clock was also the horologe of our old poets, from the Latin horologium:

He’ll watch the horologe a double set,

If drink rock not his cradle.—Othello, act ii. sc. 3.

Drayton calls the cock the country horologe.

Rabelais thus capriciously ridicules the use of the clock: “The greatest loss of time that I know, is to count the hours. What good comes of it? Nor can there be any greater dotage in the world, than for one to guide and direct his course by the sound of a bell, and not by his own judgment and discretion.” In similar exuberance has this gay satirist said: “There is only one quarter of an hour in human life passed ill, and that is between the calling for the reckoning and paying it.”

With more serious purpose has Sir Walter Scott, in his “Lay of the Imprisoned Huntsman,” thus anathematised the clock and the dial:

I hate to learn the ebb of time

From yon dull steeple’s drowsy chime,

Or mark it as the sunbeams crawl

Inch after inch along the wall.

Richard II., in the dungeon of Pomfret Castle, soliloquises more solemnly:

Now hath Time made me his numb’ring clock:

My thoughts are minutes, and with sighs they jade

Their watches on to mine eyes, the outward watch

Whereto my finger, like a dial’s point,

Is pointing still, in cleansing them from tears.

Now, sir, the sound that tells what hour it is,

Are clamorous groans, that strike upon my heart,

Which is the bell: so sighs, and tears, and groans

Show minutes, times, and hours.

Lucian, who died A.D. 180, refers to an instrument, mechanically constructed with water, which reported the hours by a bell. “Before the time of Jerome” (born A.D. 332), says Browne, “there were horologies that measured the hours, not only by drops of water in glasses, called clepsydra, but also by sand in glasses, called clepsummia.” It was the clepsydra to which Lucian alludes. When the water, which was constantly dripping out of the vessel, reached a certain level, it drew away, by means of a rope connected with the piston in the water-vessel, the ledge on which a weight rested; and the falling of this weight, which was attached to a bell, caused it to strike. This, perhaps, was the earliest kind of striking clock.

A public striking clock may well be termed the regulator of society: it reminds us of our engagements, and announces the hours for exertion or repose; and in the silence of night it tells us of the hours that are past, and how many remain before day.

The earliest public clock set up in England was that with three bells, which was placed in the clochard or bell-tower of the Palace at Westminster, built by Edward III. in 1365-6: the palace was then the most frequent residence of the king and his family; and the three bells were “usually rung at Coronations, Triumphs, Funeralls of Princes, and their Obits.”[^[13]] This bell-tower stood very near to the site of the great clock-tower of the new palace; the gilding of the exterior of which cost no less than 1500l.

A public clock is a public monitor; and the dimensions of its dial, and works, and striking-bell add much to the solemnity of its proclaiming the march of time. The great clocks in the International Exhibition of 1862 were among its colossal marvels.

The clocks of St. Paul’s Cathedral, Westminster Palace, and the Royal Exchange, are three of the largest clocks in London. The St. Paul’s hour-hands are the height of a tall man; the hour struck by this clock has been heard at midnight on the terrace of Windsor Castle; and from the telegraph station on Putney-heath the hour has been read by the St. Paul’s clock-face without the aid of a telescope: the hour-numerals are 2 feet 2½ inches in height. This clock once struck thirteen, which being heard by a sentinel, accused of being asleep at his post at that hour, was the means of saving his life; this striking thirteen was caused by the lifting-piece holding on too long.

The former church of St. Paul, Covent Garden, built by Inigo Jones, contained within the pediment a pendulum-clock, made by Richard Harris in 1641, and stated by an inscription in the vestry to be the first pendulum-clock made.[^[14]]

The Horse Guards Clock is properly described by Mr. Denison as “a superstitiously venerated and bad clock;” it is minutely described by Mr. B. L. Vulliamy in the Curiosities of London, pp. 378-380.

St. James’s Palace Clock, made by Clay, clockmaker to George II., strikes the hours and quarters upon three bells; it requires to be wound up every day, and originally had but one hand. We were told by the late Mr. B. L. Vulliamy, that when the gatehouse was repaired in 1831, the clock was removed, and not put up again, on account of the roof being reported unsafe to carry the weight. The inhabitants of the neighbourhood then memorialised William IV. for the replacement of the timekeeper: the King, having ascertained its weight, shrewdly inquired how, if the tower-roof was not strong enough to carry the clock, it was safe for the number of persons occasionally seen upon it to witness processions, &c. The clock was forthwith replaced, and a minute-hand was added, with new dials: the original dials were of wainscot, in a great number of very small pieces curiously dovetailed together.

Trinity College, Cambridge, has a double-striking clock, put up by the famous Dr. Bentley; striking, as it used to be said, once for Trinity and once for his former college, St. John’s, which had no clock.

The clock of St. Clement’s Danes, in the Strand, strikes twice; the hour being first struck on a larger bell, and then repeated on a smaller one; so that if the first has been miscounted, the second may be more correctly observed.

Wren has introduced the gilt projecting dial in several of the City churches: that at St. Magnus, London Bridge, was the gift of Sir Charles Duncomb, who, it is related, when a poor boy, had once to wait upon London Bridge a considerable time for his master, whom he missed through not knowing the hour; he then vowed that if ever he became successful in the world, he would give to St. Magnus a public clock, that passengers might see the time; and this dial proves the fulfilment of his vow. It was originally ornamented with several richly gilded figures: upon a small metal shield inside the clock are engraven the donor’s arms, with this inscription: “The gift of Sir Charles Duncomb, Knight, Lord Major, and Alderman of this ward; Langley Bradley fecit, 1709.”

The former church of St. Dunstan-in-the-West, Fleet-street, within memory possessed one of London’s wonders: it had a large gilt dial overhanging the street, and above it two figures of savages, life-size, carved in wood, and standing beneath a pediment, each having in his right hand a club, with which he struck the quarters upon a suspended bell, moving his head at the same time. To see the men strike was considered very attractive; and opposite St. Dunstan’s was a famous field for pickpockets, who took advantage of the gaping crowd. So it had long been; for Ned Ward, in his London Spy, says: “We added to the number of fools, and stood a little, making our ears do penance to please our eyes, with the conceited notion of their (the puppets’) heads and hands, which moved to and fro with as much deliberate stiffness as the two wooden horologists at St. Dunstan’s when they strike the quarters.” Cowper thus describes them in his Table-Talk:

When labour and when dulness, club in hand,

Like the two figures at St. Dunstan’s, stand,

Beating alternately, in measur’d time,

The clockwork tintinnabulum of rhyme,

Exact and regular the sounds will be,

But such mere quarter-strokes are not for me.

These figures and the clock were put up in 1671. Among those who were struck by their oddity was the third Marquis of Hertford, born in 1777: “When a child, and a good child, his nurse, to reward him, would take him to see the giants at St. Dunstan’s; and he used to say that when he grew to be a man he would buy those giants” (Cunningham’s Handbook of London). Many a child of rich parents may have used the same words; but in the present case the Marquis kept his word. When the old church of St. Dunstan was taken down, in 1830, Lord Hertford attended the second auction-sale of the materials, and purchased the clock, bells, and figures for 200l.; he had them placed at the entrance to the grounds of his villa in the Regent’s Park, thence called St. Dunstan’s Villa; and here the figures do duty to the present day.

These automata remind us of the Minute-Jacks in Shakspeare’s Timon of Athens, generally interpreted as Jacks of the Clock-house:

You fools of fortune, trencher friends, time’s flies,

Cap and knee slaves, vapours, and minute-jacks.

Still, the Minute-Jacks only struck hours and quarters; and the term is rather thought to mean “fellows that watch their minutes to make their advantage, time-servers.” There is no doubt that by the “Jack that keeps the stroke,” in Richard III., is meant the Jack of the Clock-house.[^[15]]

A much more noteworthy sight than the Fleet-street clock-figures is possessed by the Londoners of the present day in the Time-ball Signal upon the roof of the Electric Telegraph Office, No. 448 West Strand.

The signal consists of a zinc ball, 6 feet in diameter, supported by a rod, which passes down the centre of a column, and carries at the base a piston, which, in its descent, plunges into a cast-iron air-cylinder; the escape of the air being regulated so as at pleasure to check the momentum of the ball, and prevent concussion. The raising of the ball, half-mast high, takes place daily at 10 minutes to 1 o’clock; at 5 minutes to 1 it is raised to the full height; and at 1 precisely, and simultaneously with the fall of the Time-ball at Greenwich Observatory (by which navigators correct their chronometers), it is liberated by the galvanic current sent from the Observatory, through a wire laid for that purpose. The same galvanic current which liberates the Ball in the Strand moves a needle upon the transit-clock of the Observatory, the time occupied by the transition being about 1-3000th part of a second; and by the unloosing of the machinery which supports the ball, less than one-fifth part of a second. The true moment of one o’clock is therefore indicated by the first appearance of the line of light between the dark cross over the ball and the body of the ball itself. There is a similar Time-ball upon the roof of a clockmaker’s in Cornhill.

At Edinburgh, also, is a Time-ball connected with a Time-gun signal, consisting of a large iron cannon, in the Half-moon Battery, at the Castle; which cannon, having been duly loaded and primed some time between twelve and one o’clock, is fired off precisely at the latter hour by an electric influence from the corrected Mean-time of the Royal Observatory, at a distance of three-quarters of a mile; which, however, first passes to another clock close to the gun, and thus affords a short fraction of a second before one o’clock for the train of processes; so that the actual final flash of the exploding gun in the Castle occurs absolutely coincidently with the tick of the sixtieth second of the corrected mean-time clock in the Royal Observatory. The whole is well described by Professor Piazzi Smith, Astronomer-Royal for Scotland, in Good Words, 1862, part iv.

We now return to the details of the great London Clocks. Mr. Dent undertook the construction of the Royal Exchange Clock in 1843: it was required to be superior to any public clock in England, and to satisfy certain conditions proposed for the first time by the Astronomer-Royal, and such as could not be satisfied by any clock of the common construction. Mr. Dent had then no factory of his own for making large clocks, and he could not get the clock made for him; “but with the energy and genius by which that remarkable man raised himself from a tallow-chandler’s apprentice to the position of the first horologist in the world, he set up a factory for himself at a great expense, and made the clock there; and of this, the first turret-clock he had ever made, the Astronomer-Royal certified, in 1845, that it not only satisfied his conditions, but that Mr. Dent had made some judicious improvements upon his suggestions, and that he had no doubt it was the best public clock in the world.”[^[16]] It is true to a second of time, and has a compensation-pendulum.

The Westminster Palace Clock, designed by Mr. Denison, has four dials, each 22½ feet wide: they are not the largest in the world, being considerably less than the dial at Mechlin; but there is no other clock in the world which has to work four dials of such great width, especially a clock going 8½ days. St. Paul’s Clock has only two 17-feet dials, and is wound up every day, which makes a vast difference in the power and strength required. Each pair of hands weighs above 2 cwt.: they are made of gun-metal, instead of sheet-iron or copper. The hour-sockets are iron tubes, 5 inches in diameter; the dials are of cast-iron framework, filled with opal glass, and stand out 5 feet from the main walls.

The size of public dials is often very inadequate to their height, and the distance at which they are intended to be seen. They ought to be at least one foot in diameter for every ten feet of height above the ground, and in many cases more, whenever the dial will be seen far off. Now, the clock-dials of St. Pancras, Euston-square, are but 6½ feet in diameter, though at the height of 100 feet, and therefore are much too small.

The Clock, of silver-gilt, presented by Henry VIII. to Anne Boleyn on the morning of their marriage, is one of the earliest chamber-clocks in the kingdom: the case is richly chased and engraved, and on the weights are the initial letters of Henry and Anne, with true-lovers’ knots. This clock was purchased at the Strawberry Hill sale in the year 1842, for 110l., and is now in the collection of Queen Victoria.

We may here mention that the late Duke of Sussex possessed, at Kensington Palace, an invaluable collection of the early as well as the most perfect specimens of Time-keepers, among which was “Harrison’s first Clock, the forerunner of that invaluable machine, without which the compass itself would be but an imperfect guide to the mariner.”[^[17]]

John Harrison received for his improved chronometers, in 1749, the Copley Medal; and, thus encouraged by the Royal Society, and by the hope of sharing the reward of 20,000l. offered by Parliament for the discovery of the longitude, Harrison produced in 1758 a time-keeper, which was sent for trial on a voyage to Jamaica. After 161 days, the error of the instrument was only one minute five seconds, and the maker received from the nation 5000l. For other chronometers, subjected, with perfect success, to a trial in a voyage to Barbadoes, Harrison received 10,000l. more. Dr. Stukeley writes of this ingenious man: “I passed by Mr. Harrison’s house at Barrow, that excellent genius of clock-making, who bids fair for the golden prize for the discovery of the longitude. I saw his famous clock last winter at Mr. George Graham’s: the sweetness of its motion, the contrivances to take off friction, to defeat the lengthening and shortening of the pendulum through heat and cold, and to prevent the disturbance of motion by that of the ship, cannot be sufficiently admired.”—Ms. Journal.[^[18]]

An exact measure of time is of the utmost importance to many of the sciences. Horology is indispensable to astronomy, in which the variation even of two or three seconds is of the greatest consequence. By means of a clock the Danish astronomer, Roemer, was enabled to discover that the eclipses of Jupiter’s satellites took place a few seconds later than he had calculated, when the earth was in that part of its orbit the farthest from Jupiter. Speculating on the cause of this phenomenon, he calculated that light was not propagated instantaneously, but took time to reach us; and, from calculations founded on this theory, light has been discovered to dart through space with a velocity of about 192,000 miles in a second: thus, the light of the sun takes eight minutes to reach the earth.

Horology has also enabled us to discover that when the wind passes one mile per hour, it is scarcely perceptible; while at the rate of one hundred miles per hour it acquires sufficient force to tear up trees, and destroy the produce of the earth. And, without the aid of a seconds-clock, it would have been scarcely possible to ascertain that a cannon-ball flies at the rate of 600 feet in a second.

The use of Chronometers in geography and navigation is well known; since it is only necessary to ascertain the exact difference in time between two places, to determine their distance east or west of each other.

Graham applied the motion of a Clock showing sidereal time to make a telescope point in the direction of any particular star, even when before the horizon.

Alexander Cummins made a Clock for George III. which registered the height of the barometer during every day throughout the year. This was effected by a circular card, of about 2 feet in diameter, being made to turn round once in a year. The card was divided by radii lines into 365 divisions, the months and days of the month being marked round the edge, while the usual range of the barometer was indicated in inches and tenths by circular lines described from the centre. A pencil with a fine point pressed on the card by a spring, and, held by an upright rod floating on the mercury, faithfully marked the state of the barometer; the card, being carried forward by the clock, brought each day to the pencil. Wren proposed to have a clock constructed on a similar principle, to register the position and force of the wind; which idea has been adopted.

In the Armoury of George IV. was a model of a small cannon, with a clock attached to the lock in such a manner that the trigger could be discharged at any desired time by setting the clock as an alarum.

Breguet contrived a Clock to set a Watch to time. This clock is of the size of a chamber-clock, and has a fork and support on a top to carry the watch. When the clock strikes twelve, a piece of steel like a needle rises, and entering a hole in the rim of the watch-case, comes in contact with a piece which carries the minute-hand, and by pressure makes the hand of the watch correspond with that of the clock, provided the difference be not more than twenty minutes.

The same artist constructed for George IV. a Chronometer which had two pendulums, one making the machine show mean time, the other to make it act as a metronome by beating the time for music. This pendulum was merely a small ball attached to a slight chain carried round a pulley, on the centre of which was an index, which, when brought to any of the musical measures engraved on the scale, shortened or lengthened the chain, so as to cause the pendulum to perform its oscillations in the time required, and a hammer struck on a bell the beats contained in each bar; these would be silently struck by placing a piece of wood between the hammer and the bell; the musical time was also indicated by the seconds-hand of the clock.

A certain dynamical theory of chemistry has been propounded, founded upon precipitations and decompositions taking place in a definite space. Time forms, too, the very key by which alone we can be admitted to a proper view of the archives of the ancient world. Want of time for the due development of the geological periods, for a long season, hindered men’s conceptions upon this subject from taking a sharp, clear cast of thought. Linnæus constructed a Clock of Flora—a dial of flowers, each opening and shutting at an appointed time.[^[19]]

By a series of comparisons with Pendulums placed at the surface and the interior of the earth, the Astronomer-Royal has ascertained the variation of gravity in descending to the bottom of a deep mine, as the Harton coal-pit, near South Shields. By calculations from these experiments, he has found the mean density of the earth to be 6·566, the specific gravity of water being represented by unity. In other words, it has been ascertained by these experiments that if the earth’s mass possessed every where its average density, it would weigh, bulk for bulk, 6·566 times as much as water. The immediate result of the computations of the Astronomer-Royal is: supposing a clock adjusted to go true time at the top of the mine, it would gain 2¼ seconds per day at the bottom. Or it may be stated thus: that gravity is greater at the bottom of a mine than at the top by 1/19190th part.[^[20]]

The Electric Clock is an invention of our own time. An ordinary clock consists essentially of a series of wheels acting on each other, and carrying round, as they revolve, the hands which mark the seconds, minutes, and hours. The wheels are moved by the falling of a weight, or the unwinding of a spring; and the rate at which they revolve is determined by the length of a pendulum made to oscillate by the wheels. In electric or (as they should rather be called) electro-magnetic clocks, there are neither weights nor springs; so that they never run down, and never require to be wound up. To produce motion, electricity is employed alternately to make and remake an electro-magnet, or alternately to reverse the poles of a permanent magnet, which, by lifting up and letting fall, or attracting and repelling a lever, moves the wheels.

M. Bouilly endeavoured to show that character was much influenced by Time-keepers. He describes two young persons who were allowed to select Watches for themselves: one chose a plain watch, being told that its performance could be depended on; the other, attracted by the elegance of a case, decided upon one of inferior construction. The possessor of the good Watch became remarkable for punctuality; while the other, although always in a hurry, was never in time, and discovered that, next to being too late, there is nothing worse than being too early.

The choice of a good Watch is, however, a difficult matter: none but a good workman is capable of forming a correct opinion; and a Watch must be bad indeed for an inexperienced eye to detect the errors either of the principle or its construction; even a trial of a year or two is no proof, for wear seldom takes place within that time; and while a good Watch can but go well, a bad one, by chance, may occasionally do so.

A Watch must not only be well constructed, and on a good principle, but the brass must be hard, and the steel properly tempered. The several parts must be in exact proportion, and well finished, so as to continue in motion with the least possible wear. It must also be so made that, when taken to pieces, all its parts may be replaced as firmly as before.

A bad Watch is one in which no more attention has been paid to the proportion of the parts, or durability of the material, than was necessary to make it perform for a time: it is either the production of inefficient workmen, or of those who, being limited in price, are unable to give sufficient time to perfect the work. In some instances these Watches will go well for a time; but as they wear, from friction, they require frequent repair, which cannot be effectually done.

The most useful lesson is, that low price is not exactly another word for cheapness. If you wish to possess a good Watch, apply to a maker of known honesty and ability in the art he professes, and who, therefore, should be implicitly trusted.

It has been said, that “no man ever made a true circle, or a straight line, except by chance;” and the same may be said of any machine which measured time exactly; indeed, positive accuracy can never be attained until an unchangeable material is discovered, of which the works may be constructed. These practical instructions are by Mr. Adam Thomson.

How beautifully has Lord Herbert of Cherbury sung “to his Watch when he could not sleep:”

Uncessant minutes, whilst you move you tell

The time that tells our life, which though it run

Never so fast or far, your new begun

Short steps shall overtake: for though life well

May ’scape his own account, it shall not yours.

You are Death’s auditors, that both divide

And sum whate’er that life inspir’d endures,

Past a beginning; and through you we bide

The doom of fate, whose unrecall’d decree

You date, bring, execute; making what’s new,

Ill, and good, old; for as we die in you,

You die in time, time in eternity.

[13]. Archæologia, vol. xxxvii.

[14]. Cunningham’s Handbook, 2d edit. p. 386. If this inscription be correct, it negatives the claim of Huyghens to having first applied the pendulum to the clock, about 1657; although Justus Bergen, mechanician to the Emperor Rodolphus, who reigned from 1576 to 1612, is said to have attached one to a clock used by Tycho Brahe. Inigo Jones, the architect of St. Paul’s, having been in Italy during the time of Galileo, it is probable that he communicated what he heard of the pendulum to Harris. Huyghens, however, violently contested for the priority; while others claimed it for the younger Galileo, who, they asserted, had, at his father’s suggestion, applied the pendulum to a clock in Venice which was finished in 1649.—Adam Thomson’s Time and Timekeepers, pp. 67, 68.

[15]. Nares’s Glossary.

[16]. Denison on Clocks.

[17]. Adam Thomson.

[18]. There is an odd traditionary story told of a Watch at Somerset House. A little above the entrance-door to the Stamps and Taxes is a white watch-face,—of which it is told, that when the wall was being built, a workman had the misfortune to fall from the scaffolding, and was only saved from destruction by the ribbon of his watch, which caught in a piece of projecting work. In thankful remembrance of his wonderful preservation, he is said to have inserted his watch into the face of the wall. Such is the popular belief, and hundreds of persons go to Somerset House to see this fancied memento, and hear the above tale. But the watch-face was placed in its present position many years ago by the Royal Society, as a meridian mark for a portable transit instrument in one of the windows of the anteroom. Captain Smyth assisted in mounting the instrument, and perfectly recollects the watch-face placed against the opposite wall.

[19]. The Relations of Science, by J. M. Ashley.

[20]. Letter to James Mather, Esq., South Shields. See also Professor Airy’s Lecture, 1854. Baily approximately weighed the earth by another contrivance, described and illustrated in Things not generally Known, First Series, which see.

EARLY RISING.

Get up, sweet slug-a-bed, and see

The dew-bespangling herb and tree;

Each flower has wept and bowed towards th’ east

Above an hour since, yet you are not drest;

Nay, not so much as out of bed,

When all the birds have matins said,

And sung their thankful hymns.—Herrick.

“Up with the sun” implies, in common parlance, very early habits, of difficult attainment. But, “we rise with the sun at Christmas: it were but continuing to do so till the middle of April, and without any perceptible change we should find ourselves then rising at five o’clock; at which hour we might continue till September, and then accommodate ourselves again to the change of season, regulating always the time of retiring in the same proportion. They who require eight hours sleep would, upon such a system, go to bed at nine during four months.”

Thus wrote Southey, in his loved sojourn upon the Derwent, of which he says:

Hither I came in manhood’s active prime,

And here my head hath felt the touch of time.

In our great Public Schools, Early Rising appears to have been practised from very remote periods. A manuscript document, showing the system at Eton College about the year 1560, records that the boys rose at five to the loud call of “Surgite;” they repeated a prayer in alternate verses as they dressed themselves, and then made their beds, and each swept the part of the chamber close to his bed. They then went in a row to wash, and then to the school, where the under-master read prayers at six; then the præpositor noted absentees, and one examined the students’ faces and hands, and reported any boys that came unwashed.

The great Lord Burghley, when at St. John’s College, Cambridge, was distinguished by the regularity of his conduct, and the intensity of his application: that he might early devote several hours to study, without any hazard of interruption, he was called up by the bell-ringer every morning at four o’clock. Such was the educational basis upon which Cecil laid the foundation of his brilliant but sound reputation; and by which means, conjoined with the strong natural gift of sagacity, and a mind tinctured with piety, he acquired the esteem and confidence successively of three sovereigns, and held the situation of prime minister of England for upwards of half a century.

Of Sir Edward Coke’s laborious course of study at the Inner Temple, we have some interesting records. Every morning at three, in the winter season lighting his own fire, he read Bracton, Littleton, the Year Books, and the folio Abridgments of the Law, till the courts met at eight. He then went by water to Westminster, and heard cases argued till twelve, when pleas ceased for dinner. After a short repast in the Inner Temple Hall, he attended “readings” or lectures in the afternoon, and then resumed his private studies till five, or supper-time. This meal being ended, the moots took place, when difficult questions of law were proposed and discussed,—if the weather was fine, in the garden by the river-side; if it rained, in the covered walks near the Temple Church. Finally, he shut himself up in his chamber, and worked at his common-place book, in which he inserted, under the proper heads, all the legal information he had collected during the day. When nine o’clock struck, he retired to bed, that he might have an equal portion of sleep before and after midnight.[^[21]]

Bishop Ken, when a scholar at William of Wykeham’s College at Winchester, in the words of his fellow Wykehamist, the Rev. W. Lisle Bowles, on the glimmering and cold wintry mornings, would perhaps repeat to himself—watching the slow morning through the grated window—one of the beautiful ancient hymns composed for the scholars on the foundation:

Jam lucis ordo sydere

Deum precemur supplices,

Ut in diurnis actibus

Nos servet a nocentibus.

Now the star of morning light

Rises on the rear of night;

Suppliant to our God we pray,

From ills to guard us through this day.

Rising before the others, he had little to do except apply a candle to a large fagot, in winter, which had been already laid.

Ken composed a devotional Manual for the use of the Winchester scholars; but his most interesting compositions are those affecting and beautiful hymns which were sung by himself, and written to be sung in the chambers of the boys, before chapel in the morning, and before they lay down on their small boarded beds at night. Of Ken’s own custom of singing his hymn to the Creator at the earliest dawn, Hawkins, his biographer, relates, “that neither his (Ken’s) study might be the aggressor on his hours of instruction, nor what he judged duty prevent his improvement, he strictly accustomed himself to but one hour’s sleep, which obliged him to rise at one or two o’clock in the morning, or sometimes earlier; and he seemed to go to rest with no other purpose than the refreshing and enabling him with more vigour and cheerfulness to sing his Morning Hymn, as he used to do, to his lute, before he put on his clothes.” When he composed those delicious hymns, he was in the fresh morn of life; and who does not feel his heart in unison with that delightful season, when such a strain as this is heard?

Awake, my soul, and with the sun

Thy daily stage of duty run;

Shake off dull sloth, and early rise

To pay thy morning sacrifice.

* * * *

Lord, I my vows to thee renew;

Disperse my sins as morning dew.

May we not also say that when the evening hymn is heard, like the sounds that bid farewell to evening’s parting plaint, it fills the silent heart with devotion and repose?

All praise to thee, my God, this night

For all the blessings of the light;

Keep me, oh, keep me, King of kings,

Under thine own almighty wings.

Forgive me, Lord, for thy dear Son,

The ills that I this day have done;

That with the world, myself, and thee,

I, ere I sleep, at peace may be.

Ken died, Bishop of Bath and Wells, in 1711, in his 74th year, and was carried to his grave, in Frome churchyard, by six of the poorest men of the parish, and buried under the eastern window of the church, at sunrise, in reference to the words of his Morning Hymn:

Awake, my soul, and with the sun.

The same words are sung, to the same tune, every Sunday, by the parish children, in the church of Frome, and over the grave of him who composed the words, and sung them himself, to the same air, nearly two centuries since.

Rubens, the consummate painter, enlightened scholar, skilful diplomatist, and accomplished man of the world, was in the habit of rising very early,—in summer at four o’clock; and he made it a law of his life to begin the day by prayer. After this he went to work, and before his first meal made those beautiful sketches known by the name of breakfast sketches. While painting, he habitually employed a person to read to him from one of the classical authors (his favourites being Livy, Plutarch, Cicero, Seneca), or from some eminent poet. This was the time when he generally received his visitors, with whom he entered willingly into conversation on a variety of topics in the most animated and agreeable manner. An hour before dinner was always devoted to recreation; which consisted either in allowing his thoughts to dwell, as they listed, on subjects connected with science or politics,—which latter interested him deeply,—or in contemplating his treasures of art. As work was his great happiness, he indulged but sparingly in the pleasures of the table, and drank but little wine. After working again till the evening, he usually mounted a spirited Andalusian horse, and rode for an hour or two. On his return home, he customarily received a few friends, principally men of learning, or artists, to partake of a frugal supper, and passed the evening in conversation. This active and regular mode of life could alone have enabled Rubens to satisfy all the demands which were made upon him as an artist; for, including copies, the engravings from works of Rubens amount to more than 1500; and the astonishing number of his works, the genuineness of which is beyond all doubt, can only be accounted for by his union of extraordinary diligence with the acknowledged fertility of his productive powers.

John Wesley, at an early age, was sent to the Charter-house, where he suffered under the tyranny which the elder boys were permitted to exercise. The boys of the higher forms were then in the practice of taking their portion of meat from the younger ones, by the law of the strongest; and during great part of the time that Wesley remained there, a small daily portion of bread was his only food. He strictly performed an injunction of his father’s, that he should run round the Charter-house playing-green, of three acres, three times every morning; and to this early practice he attributed his great length of days.

Wesley satisfied himself of the expediency of rising early by experiment, which he describes thus:

I waked every night about twelve or one, and lay awake for some time. I readily concluded that this arose from my being longer in bed than nature required. To be satisfied, I procured an alarum, which waked me the next morning at seven (near an hour earlier than I rose the day before), yet I lay awake again at night. The second morning I rose at six; notwithstanding this I lay awake the second night. The third morning I rose at five; nevertheless I lay awake the third night. The fourth morning I rose at four, as I have done ever since; and I lay awake no more. And I do not now lie awake, taking the year round, a quarter of an hour together in a month. By the same experiment, rising earlier and earlier every morning, may one find out how much sleep he really wants.

But Wesley’s moderation in sleep, and his rigid constancy in rising early, admit of explanation. Mr. Bradburn, who travelled with him almost constantly for years, said that Wesley generally slept several hours in the course of the day; that he had himself seen him sleep three hours together often enough. This was chiefly in his carriage, in which he accustomed himself to sleep on his journeys as regularly, as easily, and as soundly, as if he had gone to bed.

When at Oxford, he formed for himself a scheme of studies: Mondays and Tuesdays were allotted for the Classics; Wednesdays to logic and ethics; Thursdays to Hebrew and Arabic; Fridays to metaphysics and natural philosophy; Saturdays to oratory and poetry, but chiefly to composition in those arts; and the Sabbath to divinity. It appears by his diary, also, that he gave great attention to mathematics. Full of business as he now was, he found time for writing by rising an hour earlier in the morning, and going into company an hour later in the evening: he had generally from ten to twelve hours in the day which he could devote to study: and thus he became alike familiar with the literature of his day, as well as with that of past ages.

Dr. Philip Doddridge attributes the production of his various writings to his rising early; adding, “the difference between rising at five and seven o’clock in the morning for the space of forty years, supposing a man to go to bed at the same hour at night, is nearly equivalent to the addition of ten years to his life.”

Through life, Gibbon the historian was a very early riser. Before the first volume of his Decline and Fall had given him celebrity, six o’clock was his usual hour of rising: fashionable parties and the House of Commons brought him down to eight.

The day of the profound German philosopher, Immanuel Kant, was begun early. Precisely at five minutes before five o’clock, winter or summer, Lampe, Kant’s servant, who had formerly served in the army, marched into his master’s room with the air of a sentinel on duty, and cried aloud in a military tone, “Mr. Professor, the time is come.” This summons Kant invariably obeyed without one moment’s delay, as a soldier does the word of command—never, under any circumstances, allowing himself a respite, not even under the rare accident of having passed a sleepless night. As the clock struck five, Kant was seated at the breakfast-table, where he drank what he called one cup of tea, and no doubt he thought it such; but the fact was, that, in part from his habit of reverie, and in part also for the purpose of refreshing its warmth, he filled up his cup so often, that in general he is supposed to have drunk two, three, or some unknown number. Immediately after, he smoked a pipe of tobacco; during which operation he thought over his arrangements for the day, as he had done the evening before during the twilight.

Thomson, who has advocated early rising more eloquently than any other writer, was himself an indolent man; he usually lay in bed till noon, and his principal time for composition was midnight. One of his early pictures is:

When from the opening chambers of the east,

The morning springs, in thousand liveries drest,

The early larks their morning tribute pay,

And in shrill notes salute the blooming day.

* * * *

The crowing cock and chattering hen awakes

Dull sleepy clowns, who know the morning breaks.

In his Golden Age of Innocence—

The first fresh dawn then waked the gladdened race

Of uncorrupted man, nor blushed to see

The sluggard sleep beneath its sacred beam,

Then, his charming Summer morn:

Falsely luxurious, will not man awake,

And, springing from the bed of sloth, enjoy

The cool, the fragrant, and the silent hour,

To meditation due, and sacred song?

For is there aught in sleep can charm the wise?

To lie in dead oblivion, losing half

The fleeting moments of too short a life,—

Total extinction of the enlightened soul!

Or else to feverish vanity alive,

Wildered, and tossing through distempered dreams!

Who would in such a gloomy state remain

Longer than Nature craves; when every muse

And every blooming pleasure wait without,

To bless the wildly devious morning walk?

Lord Chatham, writing to his nephew, January 12, 1754, says: Vitanda est improba Syren, Desidia, I desire may be affixed to the curtains of your bedchamber. If you do not rise early, you can never make any progress worth mentioning. If you do not set apart your hours of reading, if you suffer yourself or any one else to break in upon them, your days will slip through your hands unprofitably and frivolously, unpraised by all you wish to please, and really unenjoyed by yourself.

Harford relates of Dr. Burgess, Bishop of Salisbury:

Of his literary labours and self-denying life, writes a clergyman, “few can have any conception. I was frequently admitted to see him on business, even as early as six in the morning, when, rather than detain me, he has seen me in his dressing-room. Often he kindly remarked, ‘Your time is not your own, and is as precious to you as mine; scruple not to send to me when you really want to see me.’ On one of my early morning visits, about eight o’clock, in the winter, I found him seated in his greatcoat and hat, writing at a table, in a room without a carpet, the floor covered with old folios, and his candles only just extinguished. ‘I have been writing and reading,’ he said, ’since five o’clock.’ At another time I breakfasted with him one morning, by appointment, at his hotel in town; and found him at eight o’clock, about Christmas, writing by candlelight; the whole room being strewed with old books, collected from various places in the metropolis. The untiring perseverance with which he prosecuted his researches for evidence on any particular subject is inconceivable.”

Sir Astley Cooper, in one of his Lectures to his pupils, used to say: “The means by which I preserve my own health are: temperance, early rising, and sponging my body every morning with cold water,—a practice I have pursued for thirty years; and though I go from this heated theatre into the squares of the Hospital in the severest winter-nights, with merely silk stockings on my legs, yet I scarcely ever have a cold. An old Scotch physician, for whom I had a great respect, and whom I frequently met professionally in the City, used to say, as we were entering the patient’s room, ‘Weel, Mister Cooper, we ha’ only twa things to keep in meend, and they’ll sarve us for here and herea’ter: one is always to have the fear of the Laird before our ees, that ’ill do for herea’ter; and the t’other is to keep your booels open, and that will do for here.’”

William Cobbett, who had great contempt for conventionalities, was an early riser from his boyhood,—when his first occupation was driving the small birds from the turnip-seed and the rooks from the peas; when he trudged with his wooden bottle and his satchel, and was hardly able to climb the gates and stiles; when he weeded wheat, and had a single horse at harrowing barley; drove the team, or held the plough—which employments he apostrophises as “Honest pride, and happy days!” He tells us that to the husbanding well of his time he owed his extraordinary promotion in the army. He says: “I was always ready: if I had to mount guard at ten, I was ready at nine; never did any man or any thing wait one moment for me. Being at an age under twenty years, raised from Corporal to Sergeant-Major at once, over the heads of thirty Sergeants, I naturally should have been an object of envy and hatred; but the habit of early rising really subdued these passions; because every one felt that what I did he had never done, and never could do. Before my promotion, a clerk was wanted to make out the morning report of the regiment. I rendered the clerk unnecessary; and long before any other man was dressed for the parade, my work for the morning was all done, and I myself was on the parade, walking, in fine weather, for an hour perhaps. My custom was this: to get up in summer at daylight, and in winter at four o’clock; shave, dress, and even to the putting of the sword-belt over my shoulder, and having the sword lying on the table before me, ready to hang by my side. Then I ate a bit of cheese, or pork, and bread. Then I prepared my report, which was filled up as fast as the companies brought me in the materials. After this I had an hour or two to read, before the time came for my duty out of doors, unless when the regiment, or part of it, went out to exercise in the morning. When this was the case, and the matter was left to me, I always had it on the ground in such time as that the bayonets glistened in the rising sun; a sight which gave me delight, of which I often think, but which I should in vain endeavour to describe. When I was commander, the men had a long day of leisure before them: they could ramble into the town or into the woods; go to get raspberries, to catch birds, to catch fish, or to pursue any other recreation; and such of them as chose and were qualified, to work at their trades. So that here, arising solely from the early habits of one very young man, were pleasant and happy days given to hundreds.”

Elsewhere Cobbett addresses this advice “to a lover:” “Early rising is a mark of industry; and though, in the higher situations of life, it may be of no importance in a mere pecuniary point of view, it is, even there, of importance in other respects: for it is, I should imagine, pretty difficult to keep love alive towards a woman who never sees the dew, never beholds the rising sun, and who constantly comes directly from a reeking bed to the breakfast-table, and there chews about without appetite the choicest morsels of human food. A man might, perhaps, endure this for a month or two without being disgusted; but that is ample allowance of time. And as to people in the middle rank of life, where a living and a provision for children is to be sought by labour of some sort or other, late rising in the wife is certain ruin; and never was there yet an early-rising wife who had been a late-rising girl. If brought up to late rising, she will like it; it will be her habit; she will, when married, never want excuses for indulging in the habit: at first she will be indulged without bounds; to make change afterwards will be difficult; it will be deemed a wrong done to her; she will ascribe it to diminished affection; a quarrel must ensue, or the husband must submit to be ruined, or, at the very least, to see half the fruit of his labour snored and lounged away. And is this being rigid? is it being harsh? is it being hard upon women? Is it the offspring of the frigid severity of the age? It is none of these: it arises from an ardent desire to promote the happiness, and to add to the natural, legitimate, and salutary influence of the female sex. The tendency of this advice is to promote the preservation of their health; to prolong the duration of their beauty; to cause them to be beloved to the last day of their lives; and to give them, during the whole of their lives, weight and consequence, of which laziness would render them wholly unworthy.”

When Cobbett had become a public writer, he constantly inveighed against those who

O’er books consumed the midnight oil.

In country or in town, at Barn Elms, in Bolt-court, or at Kensington, he wrote his Registers early in the morning: these, it must be admitted, had force enough; for he said truly, “Though I never attempt to put forth that sort of stuff which the intense people on the other side of the Channel call eloquence, I bring out strings of very interesting facts; I use pretty powerful arguments; and I hammer them down so closely upon the mind, that they seldom fail to produce a lasting impression.” This he owed, doubtless, to his industry, early rising, and methodical habits.

Daniel Webster, the famous American statesman, unlike most men of his day, usually went to bed by nine o’clock, and rose very early in the morning. General Lynian had heard Webster say, that while in Washington, there were periods when he shaved and dressed himself for six months together by candlelight. The morning was his time for study, writing, thinking, and all kinds of mental labour: from the moment when the first streak of dawn was seen in the east, till nine or ten o’clock in the forenoon, scarcely a moment was lost; and it was then that his work was principally done. Persons who occasionally called upon him as early as ten in the morning, and found him ready to converse with them, wondered when he did his work; for they knew that he did work, yet they rarely, if ever, found him, like other men of business, engaged. The truth was, that when their day’s work began, his ended; and while they were indulging in their morning dreams, Webster was up, looking “quite through the deeds of men.” This habit, followed from his youth, enabled him to make those remarkable acquisitions of knowledge on all subjects, and afforded him so much leisure to devote to his friends.

The college-life of Albert, Prince Consort of Queen Victoria, presents us with some of the beneficial results of the habit of early rising. The people of England were not a little surprised, at first, to hear that the Queen and the royal Consort were seen walking together at a very early hour on the morning of the very day after their marriage. But, while at Bonn, Prince Albert was particularly distinguished from the other students of the same rank for the salutary habit of getting up early, one which he had uniformly persevered in from his boyhood: therefore, it is very natural that he should have adhered to it after he had come of age, whether in England or in any other country, and be likely to do so all the days of his life. At Bonn, the prince generally rose about half-past five o’clock in the morning, and never prolonged his repose after six. From that hour up to seven in the evening, he assiduously devoted his whole time to his studies, with the exception of an interval of three hours, which he allowed himself for dinner and recreation. At seven he usually went out, and paid visits to those individuals or families who were honoured with his acquaintance.[^[22]]

To these instances of the remarkable labours which have been accomplished by rising early, it can scarcely be considered necessary to add any thing to enforce the benefits to be derived from the practice. Nevertheless, something has been said on the other side. An able essayist has urged that most people who get up unusually early find that there is nothing to do when they are dressed. There are comparatively few mornings in the year when it is pleasant to take an hour’s walk before breakfast in the country. Then, if the early riser stays within doors, the sitting-rooms are not ready for his reception. Among the physical inconveniences, this writer shows that the early riser, if not tormented with a consequent headache, is often troubled with a feeling of sleepiness and heaviness through the latter part of the day; and, as far as time goes, he is apt to lose afterwards much more, while he in some way or other compensates himself for his activity, than he gained by the extra hour we are supposing him to have had early in the morning. Then, the moral effect on the early riser, it is said, is to cause in him an exuberant feeling of conscious goodness: he has performed a feat which raises him, by his moral self-approval, above ordinary people, who merely come down to breakfast. There is some truth in all this, which, however, we think to be the exception rather than the rule; for if early rising be the general practice in a house, these minor inconveniences will soon disappear. The above writer is inclined to allow that the objections to early rising may too exclusively rest on exceptional cases. He admits, with great fairness, in favour of the practice, that “if the spare hour can be turned to serious profit, so much the better. Coming at the beginning of the day, it finds the mind tranquil, sanguine, and fresh. The time it gives is likely to be free from interruptions; and the good effect of the study will tell more powerfully than when it has, as it were, the whole day in its grasp, than if it were merely slipt in among the other thoughts and occupations of busier hours. Health, too, is said to profit by early rising; and so many people have stated this as a fact, that it may perhaps be taken for granted.”[^[23]]

[21]. See School-days of Eminent Men, by the Author of the present volume. Second edition, 1862.

[22]. History of the University of Bonn.

[23]. Saturday Review, March 26, 1859.

THE ART OF EMPLOYING TIME.

The Aristotelian philosopher has well expressed its value by saying, “Nothing is more precious than time; and those who misspend it are the greatest of all prodigals.”

Again:

The time of life is short:

To spend that shortness basely, were too long

If life did ride upon a dial’s point,

Still ending at the arrival of an hour.

Fuller has this quaint instruction upon our present topic: “Lay down such rules to thyself, of observing stated hours for study and business, as no man shall be able to persuade thee to recede from. For when thy resolutions are once known, as no man of ingenuity will disturb thee, so thou wilt find this method will become not only more practicable, but of singular benefit in abundance of things.

“He that loseth his morning studies, gives an ill precedent to the afternoon, and makes such a hole in the beginning of the day, that all the winged hours will be in danger of flying out thereat: think how much work is behind; how slow thou hast wrought in thy time that is past; and what a reckoning thou shouldst make, if thy Master should call thee this day to thine account.

“There is no man so miserable as he that is at a loss how to spend his time. He is restless in his thoughts, unsteady in his counsels, dissatisfied with the present, solicitous for the future.

“Be always employed; thou wilt never be better pleased than when thou hast something to do. For business, by its motion, brings heat and life to the spirits; but idleness corrupts them like standing water.

“Make use of time, if thou valuest eternity. Yesterday cannot be recalled; to-morrow cannot be assured; to-day only is thine, which if thou procrastinatest, thou losest; which loss is lost for ever.”

Dr. South, in one of his nervous Discourses, speaking of the uncertainty of the present, says: “The sun shines in his full brightness but the very moment before he passes under a cloud. Who knows what a day, what an hour may bring forth? He who builds upon the present, builds upon the narrow compass of a point; and where the foundation is so narrow, the superstructure cannot be high and strong too.”

Sir William Jones, the profound scholar, of whom it was said that if he were left naked and friendless on Salisbury-plain he would nevertheless find the road to fame and riches, left among his manuscripts the following lines on the management of his time, which he had written in India, on a small piece of paper:

Sir Edward Coke:

Six hours in sleep, in law’s great study six;

Four spend in prayer—the rest on nature fix.

Rather:

Seven hours to law, to soothing slumbers seven;

Ten to the world allot, and all to heaven.

Dr. Johnson has moralised on Money and Time as “the heaviest burdens of life;” adding, “the unhappiest of mortals are those who have more of either than they know how to use. To set himself free from these incumbrances, one hurries to Newmarket; another travels over Europe; one pulls down his house, and calls architects about him; another buys a seat in the country, and follows his hounds over hedges and through rivers; one makes collections of shells; and another searches the world for tulips and carnations.”

Elsewhere Johnson has these pertinent remarks: “Among those who have contributed to the advancement of learning, many have risen to eminence in opposition to all the obstacles which external circumstances could place in their way,—amidst the tumults of business, the distresses of poverty, or the dissipation of a wandering and unsettled state. A great part of the life of Erasmus was one continued peregrination: ill supplied with the gifts of fortune, and led from city to city and from kingdom to kingdom by the hopes of patrons and preferment, hopes which always flattered and always deceived him, he yet found means, by unshaken constancy and a vigilant improvement of those hours which in the midst of the most restless activity will remain unengaged, to write more than another in the same condition could have hoped to read. Compelled by want to attendance and solicitation, and so much versed in common life that he has transmitted to us the most perfect delineation of the manners of his age, he joined to his knowledge of the world such application to books, that he will stand for ever in the first rank of literary heroes. Now, this proficiency he sufficiently discovers, by informing us that the Praise of Folly, one of his most celebrated performances, was composed by him on the road to Italy, lest the hours which he was obliged to spend on horseback should be tattled away, without regard to literature.”

These are two memorable instances of the employment of minute portions of time. We are told of Queen Elizabeth, that, except when engaged by public or domestic affairs, and the exercises necessary for the preservation of her health and spirits, she was always employed in either reading or writing, in translating from other authors, or in compositions of her own; and that, notwithstanding she spent much of her time in reading the best writings of her own and former ages, yet she by no means neglected that best of books, the Bible; for proof of which, take the Queen’s own words: “I walk many times in the pleasant fields of the Holy Scriptures, where I pluck up the godlisome herbs of sentences by pruning, eat them by reading, digest them by musing, and lay them up at length in the high seat of memory by gathering them together; that so, having tasted their sweetness, I may the less perceive the bitterness of life.” Her piety and great good sense were undeniable.

The Chancellor of France, D’Aguesseau, finding that his wife always kept him waiting a quarter of an hour after the dinner-bell had rung, resolved to devote the time to writing a book on jurisprudence; and putting the subject in execution, in course of time produced a work in four quarto volumes. His literary tastes greatly distinguished him from the mass of mere lawyers.

He whose mind the world wholly occupies imagines that no time can be spared for divine duties. But many circumstances in the lives of good men inform him that he is mistaken. The wise statesman, the sound lawyer, the eminent merchant, the skilful physician, the most profound mathematician, astronomer, or general student, will rise up in judgment against the man who endeavours to excuse the observance of his religious duties under the plea of learned or professional employment. Addison, Hale, Thornton, Boerhaave, Bacon, Boyle, Newton, Locke, and many others, prove that while the most important of worldly studies and occupations employed their outward attention, God rested at their hearts. The Ethiopian treasurer read Isaiah in his chariot, and Isaac meditated in the fields. The friends of the good Hooker, when they went to visit him at his parsonage, found him with a book in his hand, tending his own sheep. In short, the true Christian will neither want place nor opportunity for devotion, nor for the cultivation of those useful and general talents which may contribute to the benefit or happiness of man.

Lord Woodhouselee, in his Life of Lord Kames, has well remarked, that the professional occupations of the best-employed lawyer or the most distinguished judge cannot fill up every interval of his time. The useful respite of vacation, the hours of sickness, the surcease of employment from the infirmities of age,—all necessarily induce seasons of languor, against which a wise man would do well to provide a store in reserve, and an antidote and cordial to cheer and support his spirits. In this light the pursuits of science and literature afford an unbounded field and endless variety of useful occupations; and even in the latest hours of life the reflection on the time thus spent, and the anticipation of an honourable memorial in after ages, are sources of consolation of which every ingenuous mind must fully feel the value. How melancholy was the reflection uttered on his deathbed by one of the ablest lawyers and judges of the last age, but whose mental stores were wholly limited to the ideas connected with his profession, “My life has been a chaos of nothing!”

Sir Matthew Hale, one of the most upright judges that ever sat upon the English bench, was of a benevolent and devout, as well as righteous disposition; and in addition to his great legal works, found time to write several volumes on natural philosophy and divinity. His Contemplations Moral and Divine, written two centuries since, retain their popularity to this day. Bishop Burnet, his biographer, tells us that “his whole life was nothing else but a continual course of labour and industry; and when he could borrow any time from the public service, it was wholly employed either in philosophical or divine meditation.” ... “He that considers the active part of his life, and with what unwearied diligence and application of mind he despatched all men’s business that came under his care, will wonder how he could find time for contemplation; he that considers, again, the various studies he passed through, and the many collections and observations he made, may as justly wonder how he could find any time for action. But no man can wonder at the exemplary piety and innocence of such a life so spent as this was, wherein, as he was careful to avoid every evil word, so it is manifest he never spent an idle day.”

At every turn we are defeated through want of due regard to this preciousness of time. “In early life we lay long plans of conduct. After a considerable interval, we find most of our plans unexecuted; we then begin to reflect that if they are to be accomplished, a far smaller portion of our time than we had originally allotted to them can be employed in their execution, and, what is perhaps more fatal to our schemes, that portion is uncertain. An awful thought for those who have in their possession many of the chief blessings of life, and are approaching, by a rapid progress, that mortal bourn from whence no traveller returns.”[^[24]]

How much of our time would be saved by the cultivation of the habit of being content to be ignorant of certain subjects! Nothing can be more beneficial to the mind than this habit; since it has thereby a more free and open access to matters of the highest importance.

How much of our time is wasted in paying visits of insincerity! Boileau being one day visited by an indolent person of rank, who reproached him with not having returned his former call; “You and I,” replied the satirist, “are upon unequal terms: I lose my time when I pay you a visit; you only get rid of yours when you pay me one.”

One of the most familiar methods of taking note of time is by what are usually termed family parties. When these are given on public holidays, the effect is doubtless beneficial. Southey has well remarked: “Festivals, when duly observed, attach men to the civil and religious institutions of their country: it is an evil, therefore, when they fall into disuse.” They do more,—in reminding us of the fewer anniversaries we have to witness.

Boyle has these wholesome reflections upon profuse talkers: he tells us “that easiness of admitting all Kind of Company, provided men have boldness enough to intrude into ours, is one of the uneasiest Hardships (not to say Martyrdoms) to which Custom has expos’d us, and does really do more Mischief than most Men take notice of; since it does not only keep impertinent Fools in countenance, but encourages them to be very troublesome to Wise Men. The World is pester’d with a certain sort of Praters, who make up in Loudness what their Discourses want in Sense; and because Men are so easie natur’d as to allow the hearing to their Impertinencies, they presently presume that the things they speak are none; and most Men are so little able to discern in Discourse betwixt Confidence and Wit, that to any that will but talk loud enough they will be sure to afford answers. And (which is worse) this readiness to hazard our Patience, and certainly lose our Time, and thereby incourage others to multiply idle words, of which the Scripture seems to speak threateningly, is made by Custom an Expression, if not a Duty, of Civility; and so even a Virtue is made accessory to a Fault.

“For my part, though I think these Talkative people worse publick Grievances than many of those for whose prevention or redress Parliaments are wont to be assembled and Laws to be enacted; and though I think their Robbing us of our time a much worse Mischief than those petty Thefts for which Judges condemn Men, as a little Money is a less valuable good than that precious Time, which no sum of it can either purchase or redeem; yet I confess I think that our great Lords and Ladies, that can admit this sort of Company, deserve it: For if such Persons have but minds in any measure suited to their Qualities, they may safely, by their Discountenance, banish such pitiful Creatures, and secure their Quiet, not only without injuring the Reputation of their Civility, but by advancing that of their Judgment.”

Sir John Harrington, the epigrammatic poet in the reign of Elizabeth, and a dangler at her court, appears, by the following confession, from his Breefe Notes and Remembrances, to have been a disappointed man: “I have spente my time, my fortune, and almost my honestie, to buy false hope, false friends, and shallow praise;—and be it remembered, that he who casteth up this reckoning of a courtlie minnion, will sette his summe like a foole at the ende, for not being a knave at the beginninge. Oh, that I could boaste, with chaunter David, In te speravi Domine!”

Many ill-regulated persons thoughtlessly waste their own time simultaneously with that of others. Lord Sandwich, when he presided at the Board of Admiralty, paid no attention to any memorial that extended beyond a single page. “If any man,” he said, “will draw up his case, and will put his name to the bottom of the first page, I will give him an immediate reply: where he compels me to turn over the page, he must wait my pleasure.”

George III., though always willing and ready for business, disliked (as who does not?) long speeches out of season; and grievously lamented the well-informed but verbose and ill-timed eloquence of his minister, Grenville. “When,” such were the King’s own words to Lord Bute, “he has wearied me for two hours, he looks at his watch to see if he may not tire me for one hour more.”

Paley had an ingenious mode of economising his time, and keeping off these time-wasters. The Earl of Ellenborough is in possession of the only original portrait of the Doctor, which was painted for the earl’s father by Romney. Paley was painted with the fishing-rod, by his own particular desire; not because he cared much about fishing, but because while he was so occupied he could keep intruders at a distance, and give his mind to uninterrupted thought. He kept people away, not because they disturbed the fish, but because they disturbed him. He composed his works while he seemed to fish.[^[25]]

Sterne, in one of his fascinating Letters, writes: “Time wastes too fast: every letter I trace tells me with what rapidity life follows my pen: the days and hours of it more precious, my dear Jenny, than the rubies about thy neck, are flying over our heads like light clouds of a windy day, never to return more. Every thing presses on; whilst thou art twisting that lock,—see, it grows gray; and every time I kiss thy hand to bid adieu, and every absence which follows it, are preludes to that eternal separation which we are shortly to make.”

Thomson’s habit of composition while he lay in bed has been mentioned. We knew a reverend vicar who usually composed his sermon in bed, and committed it to paper next morning. Dr. Wallis, who nearly two centuries ago was professor of geometry at Oxford, attained the power of making arithmetical calculations “without the assistance of pen and ink, or aught equivalent thereunto,” to such an extent, that he extracted the square root of three down to twenty places of decimals. We must indeed suppose him to have had originally some peculiar aptitude for such calculations; but he describes himself to have acquired it by practising at night and in the dark, when there was nothing to be seen, and nothing to be heard, that would disturb his attention. It is in such uninterrupted intervals that we best learn to think; and Sir Benjamin Brodie[^[26]] acknowledges that in these ways he had not unfrequently derived ample compensation for the wearisome hours of a sleepless night.

Division of time is the grand secret of successful industry. Lockhart, in his Life of Scott, shows how effectually the illustrious subject of his memoir found opportunity for unequalled literary labour, even while enjoying all the amusements of a man of leisure. “Sir Walter rose by five o’clock, lit his own fire when the season required one, and shaved and dressed with great deliberation; for,” says his biographer, “he was a very martinet as to all but the mere coxcombries of the toilet, not abhorring effeminate dandyism itself so cordially as the slightest approach to personal slovenliness, or even those ‘bed-gown and slipper tricks,’ as he called them, in which literary men are so apt to indulge. Arrayed in his shooting-jacket, or whatever dress he meant to use till dinner-time, he was seated at his desk by six o’clock, all his papers arranged before him in the most accurate order, and his books of reference marshalled around him on the floor, while at least one favourite dog lay watching his eye just beyond the line of circumvallation. Thus, by the time the family assembled for breakfast, between nine and ten, he had done enough (in his own language) ‘to break the neck of the day’s work.’ After breakfast a couple of hours more were given to his solitary tasks, and by noon he was, as he used to say, ‘his own man.’ When the weather was bad, he would labour incessantly all the morning; but the general rule was to be out and on horseback by one o’clock at the latest; while, if any more distant excursion had been proposed overnight, he was ready to start on it by ten; his occasional rainy days of unintermitted study forming, as he said, a fund in his favour, out of which he was entitled to draw for accommodation whenever the sun shone with special brightness.”

Sir Walter Scott, writing to a friend who had obtained a situation, gave him this excellent practical advice: “You must be aware of stumbling over a propensity, which easily besets you from the habit of not having your time fully employed; I mean what the women very expressively call dawdling. Your motto must be Hoc age. Do instantly whatever is to be done, and take the hours of recreation after business, and never before it. When a regiment is under march, the rear is often thrown into confusion because the front does not move steadily and without interruption. It is the same thing with business. If that which is first in hand is not instantly, steadily, and readily despatched, other things accumulate behind, till affairs begin to press all at once, and no human brain can stand the confusion. Pray mind this: this is a habit of mind which is very apt to beset men of intellect and talent, especially when their time is not regularly filled up, and left at their own arrangement. But it is like the ivy round the oak, and ends by limiting, if it does not destroy, the power of manly and necessary exertion. I must love a man so well, to whom I offer such a word of advice, that I will not apologise for it, but expect to hear you are become as regular as a Dutch clock,—hours, quarters, minutes, all marked and appropriated. This is a great cast in life, and must be played with all skill and caution.”

Coleridge observes: “It would, indeed, be superfluous to attempt a proof of the importance of Method in the business and economy of active or domestic life. From the cotter’s hearth, or the workshop of the artisan, to the palace or the arsenal, the first merit, that which admits neither substitute nor equivalent, is, that every thing is in its place. Where this charm is wanting, every other merit loses its name, or becomes an additional ground of accusation and regret. Of one by whom it is eminently possessed, we say proverbially, he is like clockwork. The resemblance extends beyond the point of regularity, and yet falls short of the truth. Both do, indeed, at once divide and announce the silent and otherwise undistinguishable lapse of time. But the man of methodical industry and honourable pursuits does more: he realises its ideal divisions, and gives a character and individuality to its moments. If the idle are described as killing time, he may be justly said to call it into life and moral being, while he makes it the distinct object not only of the consciousness, but of the conscience. He organises the hours, and gives them a soul; and that the very essence of which is to fleet away, and ever more to have been, he takes up into his own permanence, and communicates to it the imperishableness of a spiritual nature. Of the good and faithful servant, whose energies, thus directed, are thus methodised, it is less truly affirmed, that he lives in time, and that time lives in him. His days, months, and years, as the stops and punctual marks in the records of duties performed, will survive the wreck of worlds, and remain extant when time itself shall be no more.”[^[27]] This is admirable reasoning.

A great deal has been said against routine and red tape, or rather the abuse of the latter; but its proper use has much to do with success. Curran, when Master of the Rolls, once said to Grattan, “You would be the greatest man of your age, Grattan, if you would buy a few yards of red tape, and tie up your bills and papers;” though another version of the anecdote has, “tie up your thoughts.” This was the fault and misfortune of Sir James Mackintosh: he never knew the use of red tape, and was utterly unfit for the common business of life. That a guinea represented a quantity of shillings, and that it would barter for a quantity of cloth, he was well aware; but the accurate number of the baser coin, or the just measurement of the manufactured articles to which he was entitled for his gold, he could never learn, and it was impossible to teach him. Hence his life was often an example of the ancient and melancholy struggle of genius with the difficulties of existence.

The tying-up thoughts corresponds with Fuller’s aphorism, “Marshall thy thoughts into a handsome method. One will carry twice more weight trussed and perched up in bundles, than when it lies untoward, flapping and hanging about his shoulders. Things orderly fardled up under heads are most portable.” This is the plan adopted by lawyers upon their tables. The Duke of Wellington had a table upon which his papers were thus arranged; and, during his absence for any length of time, a sort of lid was placed upon the table and locked, so as to secure the papers without disturbing their arrangement.

The Duke of Wellington is also known to have been an early riser; the advantages of which were illustrated throughout his long life. His service of the Sovereigns and the public of this country for more than half a century,—in diplomatic situations and in councils, as well as in the army,—has scarcely a parallel in British history. His Despatches are the best evidence of his well-regulated mind in education. No letters could ever be more temperately or more perspicuously expressed than those famous documents. They show what immense results in the aggregate were obtained by the Duke, solely in virtue of habits which he had sedulously cultivated from his boyhood—early rising, strict attention to details, taking nothing ascertainable for granted, unflagging industry, and silence, except when speech was necessary, or certainly harmless. His early habit of punctuality is pleasingly illustrated in the following anecdote: “I will take care to be punctual at five to-morrow morning,” said the engineer of New London Bridge, in acceptance of the Duke’s request that he would meet him at that hour the following morning. “Say a quarter before five,” replied the Duke, with a quiet smile; “I owe all I have achieved to being ready a quarter of an hour before it was deemed necessary to be so; and I learned that lesson when a boy.”

Whoever has seen “the Duke’s bedroom” at Apsley-house, and its plain appointments, will not regard it as a chamber of indolence. It was, a few years since, narrow, shapeless, and ill-lighted; the bedstead small, provided only with a mattress and bolster, and scantily curtained with green silk; the only ornaments of the walls were an unfinished sketch, two cheap prints of military men, and a small portrait in oil: yet here slept the Great Duke, whose “eightieth year was by.” In the grounds and shrubbery he took daily walking exercise, where with the garden-engine he was wont to enjoy exertion; reminding one of General Bonaparte at St. Helena, “amusing himself with the pipe of the fire-engine, spouting water on the trees and flowers in his favourite garden.”

[24]. Brewster’s Meditations for the Aged.

[25]. Communication to Notes and Queries, 3d series, No. 47.

[26]. Psychological Inquiries, part ii. 1862. The Author died in the autumn of 1862, at his beautiful retreat, Broome Park (formerly Tranquil Dale), at the foot of the fine range of the Betchworth Hills, in Surrey. In the Inquiries are some interesting traces of the work having been written in the tranquillity of Broome, and its picturesque characteristics of noble cedars, elms, and chestnuts, stream and sheet of water, and mineral spring. In the opening pages, “the fresh air and quiet of his residence in the country” evidently refers to Broome; and throughout the volume are occasional references to the geniality of the place for the group of philosophers who keep up the mode of dialogue. Sir Benjamin Brodie was some time President of the Royal Society; and it may be worthy of notice, that his two volumes of “Inquiries,” in their thoughtful tone and reflective colour, bear some resemblance to the two volumes produced in the retirement of his illustrious predecessor in the Chair of the Royal Society—Sir Humphry Davy; but with this difference,—that Sir Benjamin Brodie’s Researches are of more practical application than the speculative Dialogues of our great chemical philosopher, Davy.

[27]. Coleridge, however, was a better preacher than practitioner of what he so urgently recommends. When in his younger days he was offered a share in the London Journal, by which he could have made two thousand pounds a year, provided he would devote his time seriously to the interest of the work, he declined,—making the reply, so often praised for its disinterestedness, “I will not give up the country, and the lazy reading of old folios, for two thousand times two thousand pounds; in short, beyond three hundred and fifty pounds a year, I consider money a real evil.” The “lazy reading of old folios” led to laziness, the indolent gratification of mind and sense. Degenerating into an opium-eater, and a mere purposeless theoriser, Coleridge wasted time, talents, and health; came to depend, in old age, on the charity of others; and died at last, with every one regretting, even his friends, that he had done nothing worthy of his genius. The world is full of men having Coleridge’s faults, without Coleridge’s abilities; men who cannot, or will not, see beyond the present; who are too lazy to work for more than a temporary subsistence, and who squander, in pleasure or idleness, energy and health, which ought to lay up a capital for old age.

TIME AND ETERNITY.

Sir Thomas More, when a youth, painted for his father’s house in London a hanging with nine pageants, with verses over each. There were Childhood, Manhood, Venus and Cupid, Age, Death, and Fame. In the sixth pageant was painted the image of Time, and under his feet was lying the picture of Fame that was in the sixth pageant. And over this seventh pageant was (spelling modernised):

Time.

I whom thou seest with horologe in hand

Am named Time, the lord of every hour:

I shall in space destroy both sea and land.

O simple Fame, how darest thou man honour,

Promising of his name an endless flower!

Who may in the world have a name eternal,

When I shall in process destroy the world and all?

In the eighth pageant was pictured the image of Lady Eternity, sitting in a chair under a sumptuous cloth of state, crowned with an imperial crown. And under her feet lay the picture of Time that was in the seventh pageant. And above this eighth pageant was written as follows:

Eternity.

Me needeth not to boast: I am Eternity,

The very name signifieth well

That mine empire infinite shall be.

Thou mortal Time, every man can tell,

Art nothing else but the mobility

Of sun and moon changing in every degree;

When they shall leave their course, thou shalt be brought,

For all thy pride and boasting, unto naught.

Life, and Length of Days.

LIFE—A RIVER.

Pliny has compared a River to Human Life; and Sir Humphry Davy was a hundred times struck with the analogy, particularly among mountain scenery. A full and clear River is the most poetical object in nature; and contemplating this, Davy wrote: “The river, small and clear in its origin, gushes forth from rocks, falls into deep glens, and wantons and meanders through a wild and picturesque country, nourishing only the uncultivated tree or flower by its dew or spray. In this, its state of infancy and youth, it may be compared to the human mind, in which fancy and strength of imagination are predominant; it is more beautiful than useful. When the different rills or torrents join, and descend into the plain, it becomes slow and stately in its motions; it is applied to move machinery, to irrigate meadows, and to bear upon its bosom the stately barge;—in this mature state, it is deep, strong, and useful. As it flows on towards the sea, it loses its force and its motion; and at last, as it were, becomes lost and mingled with the mighty abyss of waters.”

Again, Life is often compared to a River, because one year follows another, and vanishes like the ripples on its surface. A flood, without ebb, bears us onward; “we can never cast anchor in the river of life,” as Bernardin de St. Pierre finely and profoundly observes.

But the comparison can be still further developed. “It is taking a false idea of life,” says Cuvier, “to consider it as a single link, which binds the elements of the living body together, since, on the contrary, it is a power which moves and sustains them unceasingly. These elements,” he adds, “do not for an instant preserve the same relations and connexions; or, in other words, the living body does not for an instant keep the same state and composition.”

But this is only the new enunciation of a very old idea in science. Long before Cuvier, Leibnitz said, “Our body is in a perpetual flux, like a river; particles enter and leave it continually.” And long before Leibnitz, physiologists had compared the human body to the famous ship of Theseus, which was always the same ship, although, from having been so often repaired, it had not a single piece with which it was originally constructed. The truth is, that the idea of the continued renovation of our organs[^[28]] has always existed in science; but it is also true that it has always been disputed.

M. Flourens has proved by direct experiment that the mechanism of the development of the bones consists essentially in a continual irritation of all the parts composing them. But it is the change of material; for its form changes very little. Cuvier has further developed this fine idea:

In living bodies no molecule remains in its place; all enter and leave it successively: life is a continued whirlpool, the direction of which, complicated as it is, remains always constant, as well as the species of molecules which are drawn into it, but not the individual molecules themselves; on the contrary, the actual material of the living body will soon be no longer in it; and yet it is the depository of the force which will constrain the future material in the same direction as itself. So that the form of these bodies is more essential to them than the material, since this latter changes unceasingly, while the other is maintained.

[28]. One may well say of a given individual, that he lives and is the same, and is spoken of as an identical being from his earliest infancy to old age, without reflecting that he does not contain the same particles, which are produced and renewed unceasingly, and die also in the old state, in the hair and in the flesh, in the bone and in the blood,—in a word, in the whole body.—Plato; The Banquet.

THE SPRING-TIME OF LIFE.

The Spring-time of Life,—the meeting-point of the child and the man,—the brief interval which separates restraint from liberty,—has a warmth of life, which Dr. Temple thus pictures with glowing eloquence. “To almost all men this period is a bright spot to which the memory ever afterwards loves to recur; and even those who can remember nothing but folly,—folly, of which they have repented, and relinquished,—yet find a nameless charm in recalling such folly as that. For indeed even folly at that age is sometimes the cup out of which men quaff the richest blessings of our nature,—simplicity, generosity, affection. This is the seed-time of the soul’s harvest, and contains the promise of the year. It is the time for love and marriage, the time for forming life-long friendships. The after-life may be more contented, but can rarely be so glad and joyous. Two things we need to crown its blessings,—one is, that the friends whom we then learn to love, and the opinions which we then learn to cherish, may stand the test of time, and deserve the esteem and approval of calmer thoughts and wider experience; the other, that our hearts may have depth enough to drink largely of that which God is holding to our lips, and never again to lose the fire and spirit of the draught. There is nothing more beautiful than a manhood surrounded by the friends, upholding the principles, and filled with the energy of the spring-time of life. But even if these highest blessings be denied, if we have been compelled to change opinions and to give up friends, and the cold experience of the world has extinguished the heat of youth, still the heart will instinctively recur to that happy time, to explain to itself what is meant by love and what by happiness.”[^[29]]

[29]. Education of the World.

THE FIRST TWENTY YEARS OF LIFE.

It is a saying of Southey’s, “that, live as long as you may, the first twenty years are the longest half of your life. They appear so while they are passing; they seem to have been so when we look back to them; and they take up more room in our memory than all the years that succeed them.”

But in how strong a light has this been placed by the American teacher, Jacob Abbott, whose writings have obtained so wide a circulation in England. “Life,” he says, “if you understand by it the season of preparation for eternity, is more than half gone; life, so far as it presents opportunities and facilities for penitence and pardon,—so far as it bears on the formation of character, and is to be considered as a period of probation,—is unquestionably more than half gone to those who are between fifteen and twenty. In a vast number of cases it is more than half gone even in duration; and if we consider the thousand influences which crowd around the years of childhood and youth, winning us to religion, and making a surrender of ourselves to Jehovah easy and pleasant,—and, on the other hand, look forward beyond the years of maturity, and see these influences losing all their power, and the heart becoming harder and harder under the deadening effects of continuance in sin,—we shall not doubt a moment that the years of immaturity make a far more important part of our time of probation than all those that follow.”

That pious man, who, while he lived, was the Honourable Charles How, and might properly now be called the honoured, says, that “twenty years might be deducted for education from the threescore and ten, which are the allotted sum of human life; this portion,” he adds, “is a time of discipline and restraint, and young people are never easy till they are got over it.”

There is indeed during those years much of restraint, of weariness, of hope, and of impatience; all which feelings lengthen the apparent duration of time. Sufferings are not included here; but with a large portion of the human race, in all Christian countries (to our shame be it spoken), it makes a large item in the account; there is no other stage of life in which so much gratuitous suffering is endured,—so much that might have been spared,—so much that is a mere wanton, wicked addition to the sum of human misery, arising solely and directly from want of feeling in others, their obduracy, their caprice, their stupidity, their malignity, their cupidity, and their cruelty.[^[30]]

[30]. The Doctor.

PASSING GENERATIONS.

“The deaths of some, and the marriages of others,” says Cowper, “make a new world of it every thirty years. Within that space of time the majority are displaced, and a new generation has succeeded. Here and there one is permitted to stay longer, that there may not be wanting a few grave dons like myself to make the observation.”

Man is a self-survivor every year;

Man, like a stream, is in perpetual flow.

Death’s a destroyer of quotidian prey:

My youth, my noontide his, my yesterday;

The bold invader shares the present hour,

Each moment on the former shuts the grave.

While man is growing, life is in decrease,

And cradles rock us nearer to the tomb.

Our birth is nothing but our death begun,

As tapers waste that instant they take fire.—Young.

Yet, infinitely short as the term of human life is when compared with time to come, it is not so in relation to time past. A hundred and forty of our own generations carry us back to the Deluge, and nine more of antediluvian measure to the Creation,—which to us is the beginning of time; “for time itself is but a novelty, a late and upstart thing in respect of the ancient of days.”[^[31]] They who remember their grandfather, and see their grandchildren, have seen persons belonging to five out of that number; and he who attains the age of threescore, has seen two generations pass away. “The created world,” says Sir Thomas Browne, “is but a small parenthesis in eternity, and a short interposition, for a time, between such a state of duration as was before it, and may be after it.” There is no time of life, after we become capable of reflection, in which the world to come must not to any considerate mind appear of more importance to us than this; no time in which we have not a greater stake there. When we reach the threshold of old age, all objects of our early affections have gone before us, and in the common course of mortality a great proportion of the later. Not without reason did the wise compilers of our admirable Liturgy place next in order after the form of Matrimony, the services for the Visitation and Communion of the Sick, and for the Burial of the Dead.[^[32]]

A home-tourist, halting in the quiet churchyard of Mortlake, in Surrey, about half a century since, fell into the following reflective train of calculation of generations:

“I reflected that, as it is now more than four hundred years since this ground became the depository of the dead, some of its earliest occupants might, without an hyperbole, have been ancestors of the whole contemporary English nation. If we suppose that a man was buried in this churchyard 420 years ago, who left six children, each of whom had three children, who again had, on an average, the same number in every generation of thirty years; then, in 420 years, or fourteen generations, his descendants might be multiplied as under:

That is to say, nine millions and a half of persons; or, as nearly as possible, the exact population might at this day be descended in a direct line from any individual buried in this or any other churchyard in the year 1395, who left six children, each of whose descendants have had on the average three children! And, by the same law, every individual who has six children may be the root of as many descendants within 420 years, provided they increase on the low average of only three in every branch. His descendants would represent an inverted triangle, of which he would constitute the lower angle.

“To place the same position in another point of view, I calculated also that every individual now living must have had for his ancestor every parent in Britain living in the year 1125, the age of Henry I., taking the population of that period at 8,000,000. Thus, as every individual must have had a father and mother, or two progenitors, each of whom had a father and mother, or four progenitors, each generation would double its progenitors every thirty years. Every person living may, therefore, be considered as the apex of a triangle, of which the base would represent the whole population of a remote age.

That is to say, if there have been a regular co-mixture of marriages, every individual of the living race must of necessity be descended from parents who lived in Britain in 1125. Some districts or clans may require a longer period for the co-mixture, and different circumstances may cut off some families, and expand others; but, in general, the lines of families would cross each other, and become interwoven, like the lines of lattice-work. A single intermixture, however remote, would unite all the subsequent branches in common ancestry, rendering the contemporaries of every nation members of one expanded family, after the lapse of an ascertainable number of generations.”[^[33]]

[31]. Dr. Johnson.

[32]. The Doctor.

[33]. Sir Richard Phillips’s Morning’s Walk from London to Kew.

AVERAGE DURATION OF LIFE.

The Assurance of Lives has often been regarded, by weak-minded persons, as an interference with the ways of Providence, which is highly reprehensible. But it can be shown that calculation of lives can be averaged with certainty. Mr. Babbage, in his work on the Assurance of Lives, observes: “Nothing is more proverbially uncertain than the duration of human life, where the maxim is applied to an individual; yet there are few things less subject to fluctuation than the average duration of a multitude of individuals. The number of deaths happening amongst persons of our own acquaintance is frequently very different in different years; and it is not an uncommon event that this number shall be double, treble, or even many times larger in one year than in the next succeeding. If we consider larger societies of individuals, as the inhabitants of a village or small town, the number of deaths is more uniform; and in still larger bodies, as among the inhabitants of a kingdom, the uniformity is such, that the excess of deaths in any year above the average number seldom exceeds a small fractional part of the whole. In the two periods, each of fifteen years, beginning at 1780, the number of deaths occurring in England and Wales in any year did not fall short of, or exceed, the average number one-thirteenth part of the whole; nor did the number dying in any year differ from the number of those dying in the next by a tenth part.”

In a paper on Life Assurance, in the Edinburgh Review, the Average Mortality of Europe is thus stated: “In England 1 person dies annually in every 45; in France, 1 in every 42; in Prussia, 1 in every 38; in Austria, 1 in every 33; in Russia, 1 in every 28. Thus England exhibits the lowest mortality; and the state of the public health is so improved, that the present duration of existence may be regarded (in contrast to what it was a hundred years ago) as, in round numbers, four to three.”

The Registrar-General gives the following statistical results: “The average age of life is 33⅓ years. One-fourth of the born die before they reach the age of seven years, and the half before the seventeenth year. Out of 100 persons, only six reach the age of 60 years and upwards, while only 1 in 1000 reaches the age of 100 years. Out of 500, only 1 attains 80 years. Out of the thousand million living persons, 330,000,000 die annually, 91,000 daily, 3730 every hour, 60 every minute, consequently 1 every second. The loss is, however, balanced by the gain in new births. Tall men are supposed to live longer than short ones. Women are generally stronger than men until their fiftieth year, afterwards less so. Marriages are in proportion to single life (bachelors and spinsters) as 100:75. Both births and deaths are more frequent in the night than in the day.”

PASTIMES OF CHILDHOOD RECREATIVE TO MAN.

Paley regarded the pleasure which the amusements of childhood afford as a striking instance of the beneficence of the Deity. We have several instances of great men descending from the more austere pursuits to these simple but innocent pastimes. The Persian ambassadors found Agesilaus, the Lacedæmonian monarch, riding on a stick. The ambassadors found Henry the Fourth playing on the carpet with his children; and it is said that Domitian, after he had possessed himself of the Roman empire, amused himself by catching flies. Socrates, if tradition speaks truly, was partial to the recreation of riding on a wooden horse; for which, as Valerius Maximus tells us, his pupil Alcibiades laughed at him. (Is not this the origin of our rocking-horse?) Did not Archytas,

He who could scan the earth and ocean’s bound,

And tell the countless sands that strew the shore,

as Horace says, invent the children’s rattle? Toys have served to unbend the wise, to occupy the idle, to exercise the sedentary, and to instruct the ignorant. To come to our own times: we have heard of a Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland, a man of grave years and thoughts, being surprised playing at leap-frog with his young nephews.

The same desire to unstring the bow, as old Æsop taught, impels sturdy workmen, let loose from their toil, to seek diversion in the amusements of boyhood. Often have we seen scores of men break forth from a factory or printing-office for their dinner-hour, and in great measure disport themselves like schoolboys in a playground.

PLEASURES OF THE IMAGINATION LATE IN LIFE.

Dugald Stewart, in his Essay on the Cultivation of Intellectual Habits, predicates, in persons of mature age, what may be termed the enjoyment of a second season of enjoyments far more refined than the first. Thus he says: “Instances have frequently occurred of individuals in whom the power of imagination has, at an advanced period of life, been found susceptible of culture to a wonderful degree. In such men, what an accession is gained to their most refined pleasures! What enchantments are added to their most ordinary perceptions! The mind, awakening, as if from a trance, to a new existence, becomes habituated to the most interesting aspects of life and of nature; the intellectual eye is ‘purged of its film;’ and things the most familiar and unnoticed disclose charms invisible before. The same objects and events which were lately beheld with indifference occupy now all the powers and capacities of the soul, the contrast between the present and the past serving only to enhance and to endear so unlooked-for an acquisition. What Gray has so finely said of the pleasures of vicissitude conveys but a faint image of what is experienced by the man who, after having lost in vulgar occupations and vulgar amusements his earliest and most precious years, is thus introduced at last to a new heaven and a new earth:

The meanest floweret of the vale,

The simplest note that swells the gale,

The common sun, the air, the skies,

To him are op’ning Paradise.

Nothing can be more deplorable than a man who has outlived the likings, and perchance the innocence, of his early life; which is by no means rare, if they have not grown out of the study and love of nature, for this clings to the heart in all the vicissitudes of life,—in adversity as well as in prosperity; in sickness as well as in health; even to extreme old age, when almost every other worldly source of pleasure is dried up. Hear the testimony of Hannah More, at the age of eighty-two: “The only one of my youthful fond attachments,” says she, “which exists still in full force, is a passion for scenery, raising flowers, and landscape gardening.” Well indeed will it be for the young if they follow the example of this venerable woman, and early acquire a passion for scenery and flowers. For as they pass through life, they will find the world often frowning upon them, but the flowers will always smile. And it is sweet, in the day of adversity, to be met with a smile.

We remember a touching instance of the love of flowers lighting up the last hours of a botanist who had wooed nature in the picturesque vale of Mickleham, in Surrey. A few short hours before his death, he turned to his niece and said: “Mary, it is a fine morning; go and see if Scilla verna is come in flower.”

WHAT IS MEMORY?

Man possesses a nervous system pervaded by a nervous force, the modification of which manifests itself to our consciousness in the varied phenomena of what we call Sensation. From Sensation, the next step is to Perception. Sensation, we know, as such, dies away from the consciousness, or rather is obliterated by fresh impressions upon the sensorium. We cannot retain a feeling in perpetuity. But when a definite sensation has been excited, or a distinct experience has been acquired, something remains behind; and upon these residua, left in the structure of the nerves, or the cerebral tissues, or the animating soul, and on the permanence of these residua, rests the whole possibility of reminiscence. Upon this blending and organisation round the centre of mind-life follows the faculty of Memory, or that power which the mind possesses of making a peculiar representation of an object for itself, of creating a special idea of it by giving greater prominence to some features, and letting others sink away unthought of, till there remains an image, the product of its own free activity, which it can mentally connect with other trains of ideas, and thus multiply, as it were, the bridges by which it can return to it at any period.[^[34]]

Byron has beautifully personified this paramount image:

She was a form of life and light,

That seen became a part of sight;

And rose, where’er I turned mine eye,

The Morning-star of Memory!

“Mere abstraction, or what is called absence of mind, is often attributed, very unphilosophically, to a want of memory. La Fontaine, in a dreaming mood, forgot his own child, and, after warmly commending him, observed how proud he should be to have such a son. In this kind of abstraction external things are either only dimly seen, or are utterly overlooked; but the memory is not necessarily asleep. In fact, its too intense activity is frequently the cause of the abstraction. This faculty is usually the strongest when the other faculties are in their prime, and fades in old age, when there is a general decay of mind and body. Old men, indeed, are proverbially narrative; and from this circumstance it sometimes appears as if the memory preserves a certain portion of its early acquisitions to the last, though in the general failure of the intellect it loses its active energy. It receives no new impressions, but old ones are confirmed. The brain seems to grow harder. Old images become fixtures. It is recorded of Pascal, that, till the decay of his health had impaired his memory, he forgot nothing of what he had done, read, or thought in any part of his rational age. The Admirable Crichton could repeat backwards any speech he had made. Magliabecchi, the Florentine librarian, could recollect whole volumes; and once supplied an author from memory with a copy of his own work, of which the original was lost. Pope has observed that Bolingbroke had so great a memory, that if he was alone and without books he could refer to a particular subject in them, and write as fully on it as another man would with all his books about him. Woodfall’s extraordinary power of reporting the debates in the House of Commons without the aid of written memoranda is well known. During a debate he used to close his eyes and lean with both hands upon his stick, resolutely excluding all extraneous associations. The accuracy and precision of his reports brought his newspaper into great repute. He would retain a full recollection of a particular debate a fortnight after it had occurred, and during the intervention of other debates. He used to say that it was put by in a corner of his mind for future reference.”[^[35]]

[34]. See an admirable paper on Dr. Morell’s Introduction to Mental Philosophy, in Saturday Review; also Mysteries of Life, Death, and Futurity, for the following articles: “What is Memory?” “How the Function of Memory takes place;” “Persistence of Impressions;” “Value of Memory;” “Registration;” and “Decay of Memory;” pp. 69-75.

[35]. Literary Leaves, by D. L. Richardson.

CONSOLATION IN GROWING OLD.

Montaigne said of Cicero On Old Age, “It gives one an appetite for old age.” Its persuasive eloquence is the inspiration of an elevated philosophy. Flourens has cleverly said, “The moral aspect of old age is its best side. We cannot grow old without losing our physique, nor also without our morale gaining by it. This is a noble compensation.”

M. Reveillé-Parise says: “In a green old age, when from fifty-five to seventy-five years, and sometimes more, the life of the mind has a scope, a consistence, and remarkable solidity, man having then truly attained to the height of his faculties.”

Patience is the privilege of age. A great advantage to the man who has lived is, that he knows how to wait. Again, experience is an old man’s memory.

Buffon was seventy years of age (this was young for Buffon, he lived to eighty-one) when he wrote The Epochs of Nature, in which he calls old age a prejudice. Without our arithmetic we should not, according to Buffon, know that we were old. “Animals,” he says, “do not know it; it is only by our arithmetic that we judge otherwise.”

Buffon having settled on his estate at Montbard, in Burgundy, there pursued his studies with such regularity that the history of one day seems to have been that of all the others through a period of fifty years. After he was dressed, he dictated letters, and regulated his domestic affairs; and at six o’clock he retired to his studies in a pavilion in his garden, about a furlong from the house. This pavilion was only furnished with a large wooden secretary and an arm-chair; and within it was another cabinet, ornamented with drawings of birds and beasts. Prince Henry of Prussia called it the cradle of natural history; and Rousseau, before he entered it, used to fall on his knees, and kiss the threshold. Here Buffon composed the greater number of his works. At nine o’clock he usually took an hour’s rest; and his breakfast, a piece of bread and two glasses of wine, was brought to him. When he had written two hours after breakfast, he returned to the house. At dinner he enjoyed the gaieties and trifles of the table. After dinner he slept an hour in his room; took a solitary walk; and during the rest of the evening he either conversed with his family or guests, or examined his papers at his desk. At nine o’clock he went to bed, to prepare himself for the same routine of judgment and pleasure. He had a most fervid imagination; and his anxious solicitude for a literary immortality, “that last infirmity of noble minds,” continually betrayed him to be a vain man.

“Every day that I rise in good health,” said Buffon to a conceited young man, “have I not the enjoyment of this day as fully as you? If I conform my actions, my appetites, my desires, to the strict impulses of wise nature, am I not as wise and happy as you are? And the view of the past, which causes so much regret to old fools, does it not afford me, on the contrary, the pleasures of memory, agreeable pictures of precious images, which are equal to your objects of pleasure? For these images are sweet; they are pure; they leave upon the mind only pleasing remembrances; the uneasiness, the disappointments, the sorrowful troop which accompanies your youthful pleasures, disappear from the picture which presents them to me. Regrets must disappear also; they are the last sparks of that foolish vanity that never grows old.

“Some one asked Fontenelle, when ninety-five years old, which were the twenty years of his life he most regretted. He replied that he had little to regret; but the age at which he had been most happy was that from forty-five to seventy-five. He made this avowal in sincerity, and he proved what he said by natural and consoling truths. At forty-five, fortune is established; reputation made; consideration obtained; the condition of life established; dreams vanished or fulfilled; projects miscarried or matured; most of the passions calmed, or at least cooled; the career in the work that every man owes to society nearly completed; enemies, or rather the enemies, are fewer, because the counterpoise of merit is known by the public voice,” &c.

Galen, speaking of Hippocrates, and wishing to represent in one word the man who, in his eyes, constitutes the most perfect type of slowly matured wisdom and profound experience, simply calls him the old man.

The first rule of the Art of Preserving Life is to know how to be old. “Few men know how to be old,” said La Rochefoucauld. Voltaire has—

Qui n’a pas l’esprit de son âge,

De son âge a tous les malheurs.

The first rule is more philosophic than medical, but is perhaps none the less valuable.

The second rule is to know yourself well; which is also a philosophical precept applied to medicine.

The third rule is properly to conform to regular habits. Old men, who spend one day like another, with the same moderation, the same appetites, live always. “My miracle is existence,” said Voltaire; and if that foolish vanity which never grows old had not induced him, when eighty-four years of age, to make a ridiculous journey to Paris, his miracle would have continued a century, as was the case with Fontenelle.

“Few would believe,” said M. Reveillé-Parise, “how far a little health, well managed, may be made to go.” And Cicero said: “To use what we have, and to act in every thing according to our strength,—such is the rule of the sage.”

Most men die of disease, very few die of mere age. Man has made for himself a sort of artificial life, in which the moral is often worse than the physical; and the physical itself often worse than it would be with habits more serene and calm, more regularly and judiciously exercised.

Haller, the physiologist, says: “Man should be placed among the animals that live the longest: how very unjust, then, are our complaints of the brevity of life!” He then inquires what can be the extreme limit of the life of man; and he gives it as his opinion that man might live not less than two centuries. M. Flourens,[^[36]] however, decides on a century of ordinary life; and at least half a century of extraordinary life is the prospect science holds out to man. Still, as these inferences are drawn from the exceptions of Jenkins and Parr, the opinions must be received accordingly.

Haller, who has collected a great number of examples of Longevity, says that he has found more than

and one who reached the astonishing age of 169 years.

[36]. Human Longevity and the Amount of Life upon the Globe. By P. Flourens, Perpetual Secretary to the Academy of Sciences, Paris, 1855.

LENGTH OF DAYS.

There are few records so generally interesting as those of human existence being protracted beyond “threescore years and ten,” and the Psalmist’s limit of “fourscore years.” It is natural to expect every man, woman, and child to take a kindred interest in such matters: the girl or boy reads with wonder the dates upon the tombstones of very aged persons; and old men and women approach these memorials with awe, in proportion to their fancied distance from the same earthly bourn. All cannot alike read the story of the pictured urn, or the mysteries of the inverted torch or the winged mundus; but the uneducated young and old are sensible of the solemnity of the line, “Aged 102 years;” whilst the more pretentious “Hic jacet” only teaches the comparatively few that

The paths of glory lead but to the grave.

We are not, therefore, surprised at the implicit belief in such records in times gone by, when no populous village in England was without a man or woman of fourscore years old. It has, however, become of late a matter of some moment to inquire into the authority on which statements of extreme old age have usually rested; and the result has been to shake the testimony of many recorded cases of great longevity.

Lord Bacon, in his History of Life and Death, quotes as a fact unquestioned, that a few years before he wrote, a morris-dance was performed in Herefordshire, at the May-games, by eight men, whose ages in the aggregate amounted to eight hundred years! In the seventeenth century, some time after Bacon wrote, two Englishmen are reported to have died at ages greater than almost any of those which have been attained in other nations. According to statements which are printed in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, as well as his epitaph in Westminster Abbey, Thomas Parr lived 152 years and 9 months; Henry Jenkins, 169 years. The testimony in these extraordinary instances is, however, considered by the Registrar-General by no means conclusive, as it evidently rests on uncertain tradition, and on the very fallible memories of illiterate old men; for there is no mention of documentary evidence in Parr’s case, and the births date back to a period (1538) before the parish registers were instituted by Cromwell.

Yet parish registers are sometimes astounding; for in that of Evercreech, in Somersetshire, occurs this entry: “1588, 20th Dec., Jane Britton, of Evercriche, a Maidden, as she afirmed, of the age of 200 years, was buried.”

Here is a difficulty of belief cleared up. In the register of the parish of St. Leonard, Shoreditch, is entered, among the “Burialles, Thomas Cam, y^e 22d inst. of January 1588 (curiously enough the date of the Somersetshire entry), Aged 207 years, Holywell-street. George Garrow, parish clerk.” In a newspaper paragraph of 1848, this entry is stated to add: “he was born in the year 1381, in the reign of King Richard II., and lived in the reigns of twelve kings and queens.” These words are not, however, in the register; and it is evident that some mischievous person has altered the figure 1 into 2. Sir Henry Ellis, in his History of Shoreditch, gives the entry correctly as follows: “Thomas Cam, aged 107, 28 January 1588.”

Another instance, less known, but better authenticated, is that of Sir Ralph Vernon, of Shipbrooke, who was born some time in the thirteenth century, died at the great age of 150; and is said to have been succeeded by his descendant in the sixth generation; he was called “Old Sir Ralph,” or Sir R. “the long-liver.” A deed of settlement by him was the cause of long litigation; and it is said that the papers respecting this law-suit still exist, to prove the fact of the old knight’s patriarchal age.[^[37]]

In Conway churchyard is the tombstone of Lowry Owens, stated to have died “May the 1st, 1766, aged 192;” but the inscription has evidently been recut, and, it is presumed, with a difference, especially as the round of the “9” is above the date-line.

In the church of Abbey Dore, Herefordshire, is a slab to the memory of Elizabeth Lewis, who died “aged 141 years,” which is stated to be confirmed by the parish register.

In the churchyard of Cheve Prior, Worcestershire, is a record of a man who died at the age of 309; doubtless meant for 39, the blundering stonecutter having put the 30 first and 9 afterwards.

In these and similar cases our belief should be in proportion to the trustworthiness of the record, allowance being made for the imperfect state of documents of times when writing was a comparatively rare accomplishment. It is curious to contrast this state of things with the chronicle of our times, when, occasionally, one day’s newspaper records several instances of longevity:

In the Morning Post, January 30th, 1858, out of thirty-five deaths recorded, with the ages, there were five upwards of 60 and under 70; 70 and under 80, seven; in 80th year and upwards, nine; one female, 95; and Mrs. E. Miles, of Bishop Lidyard, near Taunton, 112.

In the obituary of the Times, February 20th, 1862, were recorded the deaths of persons who had attained the following ages: one of 103, one of 94, two of 90, one of 85, one of 84, one of 82, and eight of 70 years and upwards. And, on April 20th of the same year, were recorded the deaths of ten persons, whose united ages amount to 828 years, or an average of nearly 83. They comprise one of 100 and one of 99.

[37]. See Burke’s Peerage and Baronetage, ed. 1848.

HISTORIC TRADITIONS THROUGH FEW LINKS.

Of late years considerable interest has been added to the attraction of records of Longevity, by showing through how few individuals may be traced the evidence of far-distant events and incidents in our history.

Mr. Sidney Gibson, F.S.A., relates some curious instances of this class. A person living in 1847, then aged about 61, was frequently assured by his father that, in 1786, he repeatedly saw one Peter Garden, who died in that year at the age of 127 years; and who, when a boy, heard Henry Jenkins give evidence in a court of justice at York, to the effect that, when a boy, he was employed in carrying arrows up the hill before the battle of Flodden Field.

So that a person living in 1786 conversed with a man that fought at Flodden Field.

Mr. Gibson then passes on to some remarkable instances of longevity from the Scrope and Grosvenor Roll, the record of the celebrated cause in the reign of Richard II., when, among the noble and knightly deponents who gave evidence in the following year, 1386, were:

Sir John Sully, Knight of the Garter and a distinguished soldier of the cross, who had served for eighty years, was then, by his own account, 105 years of age, and who is supposed to have died in his 108th year.

But, more remarkable, John Thirlwall, an esquire of an ancient Northumbrian house, deposes to what he heard from his father, who died forty-four years before, at the age of 145.

Not far from Thirlwall Castle, at Irthington, Mr. B. Gibson has seen the register of the burial of Robert Bowman, one of the most remarkable of the long-lived yeomen of that parish, who died in the year 1823, at the age of 118.

Mr. John Bruce, F.S.A., has also illustrated our subject by the following curious evidence. Lettice, Countess of Leicester, was born in 1539 or ’40, and was consequently 7 years old at the death of Henry VIII. She may very well have had a recollection of the bluff monarch, who cut off the head of her great-aunt, Anne Boleyn. She was thrice married, and had seen six English sovereigns, or seven if Philip be counted; her faculties were unimpaired at 85; and until a year or two of her death, on Christmas-day 1634, at the age of 94, she “could yet walk a mile of a morning.” Lettice was one of a long-lived race: her father lived till 1596; two of her brothers attained the ages of 86 and 99.

There is nothing (says Mr. Bruce) incredible, or even very extraordinary, in Lettice’s age; but even her years will produce curious results if applied to the subject of possible transmission of knowledge through few links. I will give one example: “Dr. Johnson, who was born in 1709, might have known a person who had seen the Countess Lettice. If there are not now (1857), there were amongst us within the last three or four years, persons who knew Dr. Johnson. There might, therefore, be only two links between ourselves and the Countess Lettice, who saw Henry VIII.”[^[38]]

Mr. John Pavin Philips writes from Haverfordwest: “A friend of mine, now (1857) in his 80th year, knew an old woman resident in his parish who remembered her grandmother, who saw Cromwell when he was in Pembrokeshire, in 1648. I myself, when a student in Edinburgh in 1837, knew a centenarian lady, named Butler, who well recollected being taken by her mother to witness the public entry of Prince Charles Edward into the city in 1745.” And in Haverfordwest might be seen daily walking, in 1857, in perfect health, a man who was born four years previous to the death of George II.[^[39]]

Mary Yates, of Shiffnal, Salop, who died 1776, aged 128, well remembered walking to view the ruins of the Great Fire of London, 1666.

In the News Letter of June 1st, 1724, Bodl. Mss., Rawl. C., it is related, that on the King’s birthday, as the nobility and others of distinction passed through Pall Mall to Court at St. James’s, there sat in the street one Elinor Stuart, being 124 years old. She had kept a linen-shop at Kendal, and had nine children living at the time King Charles I. was beheaded, and was undone by adhering to the royal cause. “She is reckoned,” says the account (Jane Skrimshaw, who was now dead, being 128), “the oldest woman in London.”[^[40]]

Margaret Mapps, of Eaton, near Leominster, who died in 1800, aged 109, had so retentive a memory, that to her last hours she could relate many incidents which she had witnessed in the reign of Queen Anne.

In 1858 died Mrs. Milward, of Blackheath, at the age of 102. She was, consequently, born four years previous to the accession of George III.; she saw the separation of the American colonies from the mother country; the three French revolutions, and the great war with France; she well remembered the London riots of 1780, and was placed in some jeopardy in Hyde-park in one of the incidents.

Jane Forrester, of Cumberland, is stated in the Public Advertiser, March 9th, 1766, as then living in her 138th year: she remembered Cromwell’s siege of Carlisle, in 1646; and in 1762 she gave evidence in a Chancery-suit of an estate having been enjoyed by the ancestors of the then heir 101 years.