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diff --git a/1360-h/1360-h.htm b/1360-h/1360-h.htm new file mode 100644 index 0000000..4a8ac20 --- /dev/null +++ b/1360-h/1360-h.htm @@ -0,0 +1,4517 @@ +<!DOCTYPE html + PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" + "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd"> +<html> +<head> +<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=US-ASCII" /> +<title>Historical Lectures and Essays</title> + <style type="text/css"> +/*<![CDATA[ XML blockout */ +<!-- + P { margin-top: .75em; + margin-bottom: .75em; + } + H1, H2 { + text-align: center; + margin-top: 2em; + margin-bottom: 2em; + } + H3, H4 { + text-align: left; + margin-top: 1em; + margin-bottom: 1em; + } + BODY{margin-left: 10%; + margin-right: 10%; + } + .blkquot {margin-left: 4em; margin-right: 4em;} /* block indent */ + // --> + /* XML end ]]>*/ + </style> +</head> +<body> +<h2> +<a href="#startoftext">Historical Lectures and Essays, by Charles Kingsley</a> +</h2> +<pre> +The Project Gutenberg eBook, Historical Lectures and Essays, by Charles +Kingsley + + +This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with +almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or +re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included +with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org + + + + + +Title: Historical Lectures and Essays + + +Author: Charles Kingsley + +Release Date: May 12, 2005 [eBook #1360] + +Language: English + +Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII) + + +***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HISTORICAL LECTURES AND ESSAYS*** +</pre> +<p><a name="startoftext"></a></p> +<p>Transcribed from the 1902 Macmillan and Co. edition by David Price, +email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk</p> +<h1>HISTORICAL LECTURES AND ESSAYS<br /> +by Charles Kingsley</h1> +<p>Contents:</p> +<p>The First Discovery of America<br /> +Cyrus, Servant of the Lord<br /> +Ancient Civilisation<br /> +Rondelet<br /> +Vesalius<br /> +Paracelsus<br /> +Buchanan</p> +<h2>THE FIRST DISCOVERY OF AMERICA</h2> +<p>Let me begin this lecture <a name="citation1"></a><a href="#footnote1">{1}</a> +with a scene in the North Atlantic 863 years since.</p> +<p>“Bjarne Grimolfson was blown with his ship into the Irish Ocean; +and there came worms and the ship began to sink under them. They +had a boat which they had payed with seals’ blubber, for that +the sea-worms will not hurt. But when they got into the boat they +saw that it would not hold them all. Then said Bjarne, ‘As +the boat will only hold the half of us, my advice is that we should +draw lots who shall go in her; for that will not be unworthy of our +manhood.’ This advice seemed so good that none gainsaid +it; and they drew lots. And the lot fell to Bjarne that he should +go in the boat with half his crew. But as he got into the boat, +there spake an Icelander who was in the ship and had followed Bjarne +from Iceland, ‘Art thou going to leave me here, Bjarne?’ +Quoth Bjarne, ‘So it must be.’ Then said the man, +‘Another thing didst thou promise my father, when I sailed with +thee from Iceland, than to desert me thus. For thou saidst that +we both should share the same lot.’ Bjarne said, ‘And +that we will not do. Get thou down into the boat, and I will get +up into the ship, now I see that thou art so greedy after life.’ +So Bjarne went up into the ship, and the man went down into the boat; +and the boat went on its voyage till they came to Dublin in Ireland. +Most men say that Bjarne and his comrades perished among the worms; +for they were never heard of after.”</p> +<p>This story may serve as a text for my whole lecture. Not only +does it smack of the sea-breeze and the salt water, like all the finest +old Norse sagas, but it gives a glimpse at least of the nobleness which +underlay the grim and often cruel nature of the Norseman. It belongs, +too, to the culminating epoch, to the beginning of that era when the +Scandinavian peoples had their great times; when the old fierceness +of the worshippers of Thor and Odin was tempered, without being effeminated, +by the Faith of the “White Christ,” till the very men who +had been the destroyers of Western Europe became its civilisers.</p> +<p>It should have, moreover, a special interest to Americans. +For—as American antiquaries are well aware—Bjarne was on +his voyage home from the coast of New England; possibly from that very +Mount Hope Bay which seems to have borne the same name in the time of +those old Norsemen, as afterwards in the days of King Philip, the last +sachem of the Wampanong Indians. He was going back to Greenland, +perhaps for reinforcements, finding, he and his fellow-captain, Thorfinn, +the Esquimaux who then dwelt in that land too strong for them. +For the Norsemen were then on the very edge of discovery, which might +have changed the history not only of this continent but of Europe likewise. +They had found and colonised Iceland and Greenland. They had found +Labrador, and called it Helluland, from its ice-polished rocks. +They had found Nova Scotia seemingly, and called it Markland, from its +woods. They had found New England, and called it Vinland the Good. +A fair land they found it, well wooded, with good pasturage; so that +they had already imported cows, and a bull whose lowings terrified the +Esquimaux. They had found self-sown corn too, probably maize. +The streams were full of salmon. But they had called the land +Vinland, by reason of its grapes. Quaint enough, and bearing in +its very quaintness the stamp of truth, is the story of the first finding +of the wild fox-grapes. How Leif the Fortunate, almost as soon +as he first landed, missed a little wizened old German servant of his +father’s, Tyrker by name, and was much vexed thereat, for he had +been brought up on the old man’s knee, and hurrying off to find +him met Tyrker coming back twisting his eyes about—a trick of +his—smacking his lips and talking German to himself in high excitement. +And when they get him to talk Norse again, he says: “I have not +been far, but I have news for you. I have found vines and grapes!” +“Is that true, foster-father?” says Leif. “True +it is,” says the old German, “for I was brought up where +there was never any lack of them.”</p> +<p>The saga—as given by Rafn—had a detailed description +of this quaint personage’s appearance; and it would not he amiss +if American wine-growers should employ an American sculptor—and +there are great American sculptors—to render that description +into marble, and set up little Tyrker in some public place, as the Silenus +of the New World.</p> +<p>Thus the first cargoes homeward from Vinland to Greenland had been +of timber and of raisins, and of vine-stocks, which were not like to +thrive.</p> +<p>And more. Beyond Vinland the Good there was said to be another +land, Whiteman’s Land—or Ireland the Mickle, as some called +it. For these Norse traders from Limerick had found Ari Marson, +and Ketla of Ruykjanes, supposed to have been long since drowned at +sea, and said that the people had made him and Ketla chiefs, and baptized +Ari. What is all this? and what is this, too, which the Esquimaux +children taken in Markland told the Northmen, of a land beyond them +where the folk wore white clothes, and carried flags on poles? +Are these all dreams? or was some part of that great civilisation, the +relics whereof your antiquarians find in so many parts of the United +States, still in existence some 900 years ago; and were these old Norse +cousins of ours upon the very edge of it? Be that as it may, how +nearly did these fierce Vikings, some of whom seemed to have sailed +far south along the shore, become aware that just beyond them lay a +land of fruits and spices, gold and gems? The adverse current +of the Gulf Stream, it may be, would have long prevented their getting +past the Bahamas into the Gulf of Mexico; but, sooner or later, some +storm must have carried a Greenland viking to San Domingo or to Cuba; +and then, as has been well said, some Scandinavian dynasty might have +sat upon the throne of Mexico.</p> +<p>These stories are well known to antiquarians. They may be found, +almost all of them, in Professor Rafn’s “Antiquitates Americanæ.” +The action in them stands out often so clear and dramatic, that the +internal evidence of historic truth is irresistible. Thorvald, +who, when he saw what seems to be, they say, the bluff head of Alderton +at the south-east end of Boston Bay, said, “Here should I like +to dwell,” and, shot by an Esquimaux arrow, bade bury him on that +place, with a cross at his head and a cross at his feet, and call the +place Cross Ness for evermore; Gudrida, the magnificent widow, who wins +hearts and sees strange deeds from Iceland to Greenland, and Greenland +to Vinland and back, and at last, worn out and sad, goes off on a pilgrimage +to Rome; Helgi and Finnbogi, the Norwegians, who, like our Arctic voyagers +in after times, devise all sorts of sports and games to keep the men +in humour during the long winter at Hope; and last, but not least, the +terrible Freydisa, who, when the Norse are seized with a sudden panic +at the Esquimaux and flee from them, as they had three weeks before +fled from Thorfinn’s bellowing bull, turns, when so weak that +she cannot escape, single-handed on the savages, and catching up a slain +man’s sword, puts them all to flight with her fierce visage and +fierce cries—Freydisa the Terrible, who, in another voyage, persuades +her husband to fall on Helgi and Finnbogi, when asleep, and murder them +and all their men; and then, when he will not murder the five women +too, takes up an axe and slays them all herself, and getting back to +Greenland, when the dark and unexplained tale comes out, lives unpunished, +but abhorred henceforth. All these folks, I say, are no phantoms, +but realities; at least, if I can judge of internal evidence.</p> +<p>But beyond them, and hovering on the verge of Mythus and Fairyland, +there is a ballad called “Finn the Fair,” and how</p> +<blockquote><p>An upland Earl had twa braw sons,<br /> + My story to begin;<br /> +The tane was Light Haldane the strong,<br /> + The tither was winsome Finn.</p> +</blockquote> +<p>and so forth; which was still sung, with other “rimur,” +or ballads, in the Faroes, at the end of the last century. Professor +Rafn has inserted it, because it talks of Vinland as a well-known place, +and because the brothers are sent by the princess to slay American kings; +but that Rime has another value. It is of a beauty so perfect, +and yet so like the old Scotch ballads in its heroic conception of love, +and in all its forms and its qualities, that it is one proof more, to +any student of early European poetry, that we and these old Norsemen +are men of the same blood.</p> +<p>If anything more important than is told by Professor Rafn and Mr. +Black <a name="citation2"></a><a href="#footnote2">{2}</a> be now known +to the antiquarians of Massachusetts, let me entreat them to pardon +my ignorance. But let me record my opinion that, though somewhat +too much may have been made in past years of certain rock-inscriptions, +and so forth, on this side of the Atlantic, there can be no reasonable +doubt that our own race landed and tried to settle on the shore of New +England six hundred years before their kinsmen, and, in many cases, +their actual descendants, the august Pilgrim Fathers of the seventeenth +century. And so, as I said, a Scandinavian dynasty might have +been seated now upon the throne of Mexico. And how was that strange +chance lost? First, of course, by the length and danger of the +coasting voyage. It was one thing to have, like Columbus and Vespucci, +Cortes and Pizarro, the Azores as a halfway port; another to have Greenland, +or even Iceland. It was one thing to run south-west upon Columbus’s +track, across the Mar de Damas, the Ladies’ Sea, which hardly +knows a storm, with the blazing blue above, the blazing blue below, +in an ever-warming climate, where every breath is life and joy; another +to struggle against the fogs and icebergs, the rocks and currents of +the dreary North Atlantic. No wonder, then, that the knowledge +of Markland, and Vinland, and Whiteman’s Land died away in a few +generations, and became but fireside sagas for the winter nights.</p> +<p>But there were other causes, more honourable to the dogged energy +of the Norse. They were in those very years conquering and settling +nearer home as no other people—unless, perhaps, the old Ionian +Greeks—conquered and settled.</p> +<p>Greenland, we have seen, they held—the western side at least—and +held it long and well enough to afford, it is said, 2,600 pounds of +walrus’ teeth as yearly tithe to the Pope, besides Peter’s +pence, and to build many a convent, and church, and cathedral, with +farms and homesteads round; for one saga speaks of Greenland as producing +wheat of the finest quality. All is ruined now, perhaps by gradual +change of climate.</p> +<p>But they had richer fields of enterprise than Greenland, Iceland, +and the Faroes. Their boldest outlaws at that very time—whether +from Norway, Sweden, Denmark, or Britain—were forming the imperial +life-guard of the Byzantine Emperor, as the once famous Varangers of +Constantinople; and that splendid epoch of their race was just dawning, +of which my lamented friend, the late Sir Edmund Head, says so well +in his preface to Viga Glum’s Icelandic Saga, “The Sagas, +of which this tale is one, were composed for the men who have left their +mark in every corner of Europe; and whose language and laws are at this +moment important elements in the speech and institutions of England, +America, and Australia. There is no page of modern history in +which the influence of the Norsemen and their conquests must not be +taken into account—Russia, Constantinople, Greece, Palestine, +Sicily, the coasts of Africa, Southern Italy, France, the Spanish Peninsula, +England, Scotland, Ireland, and every rock and island round them, have +been visited, and most of them at one time or the other ruled, by the +men of Scandinavia. The motto on the sword of Roger Guiscard was +a proud one:</p> +<blockquote><p>Appulus et Calaber, Siculus mihi servit et Afer.</p> +</blockquote> +<p>Every island, says Sir Edmund Head, and truly—for the name +of almost every island on the coast of England, Scotland, and Eastern +Ireland, ends in either <i>ey</i> or <i>ay</i> or <i>oe</i>, a Norse +appellative, as is the word “island” itself—is a mark +of its having been, at some time or other, visited by the Vikings of +Scandinavia.</p> +<p>Norway, meanwhile, was convulsed by war; and what perhaps was of +more immediate consequence, Svend Fork-beard, whom we Englishmen call +Sweyn—the renegade from that Christian Faith which had been forced +on him by his German conqueror, the Emperor Otto II.—with his +illustrious son Cnut, whom we call Canute, were just calling together +all the most daring spirits of the Baltic coasts for the subjugation +of England; and when that great feat was performed, the Scandinavian +emigration was paralysed, probably, for a time by the fearful wars at +home. While the king of Sweden, and St. Olaf Tryggvason, king +of Norway, were setting on Denmark during Cnut’s pilgrimage to +Rome, and Cnut, sailing with a mighty fleet to Norway, was driving St. +Olaf into Russia, to return and fall in the fratricidal battle of Stiklestead—during, +strangely enough, a total eclipse of the sun—Vinland was like +enough to remain still uncolonised. After Cnut’s short-lived +triumph—king as he was of Denmark, Norway, England, and half Scotland, +and what not of Wendish Folk inside the Baltic—the force of the +Norsemen seems to have been exhausted in their native lands. Once +more only, if I remember right, did “Lochlin,” really and +hopefully send forth her “mailed swarm” to conquer a foreign +land; and with a result unexpected alike by them and by their enemies. +Had it been otherwise, we might not have been here this day.</p> +<p>Let me sketch for you once more—though you have heard it, doubtless, +many a time—the tale of that tremendous fortnight which settled +the fate of Britain, and therefore of North America; which decided—just +in those great times when the decision was to be made—whether +we should be on a par with the other civilised nations of Europe, like +them the “heirs of all the ages,” with our share not only +of Roman Christianity and Roman centralisation—a member of the +great comity of European nations, held together in one Christian bond +by the Pope—but heirs also of Roman civilisation, Roman literature, +Roman Law; and therefore, in due time, of Greek philosophy and art. +No less a question than this, it seems to me, hung in the balance during +that fortnight of autumn, 1066.</p> +<p>Poor old Edward the Confessor, holy, weak, and sad, lay in his new +choir of Westminster—where the wicked ceased from troubling, and +the weary were at rest. The crowned ascetic had left no heir behind. +England seemed as a corpse, to which all the eagles might gather together; +and the South-English, in their utter need, had chosen for their king +the ablest, and it may be the justest, man in Britain—Earl Harold +Godwinsson: himself, like half the upper classes of England then, of +the all-dominant Norse blood; for his mother was a Danish princess. +Then out of Norway, with a mighty host, came Harold Hardraade, taller +than all men, the ideal Viking of his time. Half-brother of the +now dead St. Olaf, severely wounded when he was but fifteen, at Stiklestead, +when Olaf fell, he had warred and plundered on many a coast. He +had been away to Russia to King Jaroslaf; he had been in the Emperor’s +Varanger guard at Constantinople—and, it was whispered, had slain +a lion there with his bare hands; he had carved his name and his comrades’ +in Runic characters—if you go to Venice you may see them at this +day—on the loins of the great marble lion, which stood in his +time not in Venice but in Athens. And now, king of Norway and +conqueror, for the time, of Denmark, why should he not take England, +as Sweyn and Canute took it sixty years before, when the flower of the +English gentry perished at the fatal battle of Assingdune? If +he and his half-barbarous host had conquered, the civilisation of Britain +would have been thrown back, perhaps, for centuries. But it was +not to be.</p> +<p>England <i>was</i> to be conquered by the Norman; but by the civilised, +not the barbaric; by the Norse who had settled, but four generations +before, in the North East of France under Rou, Rollo, Rolf the Ganger—so-called, +they say, because his legs were so long that, when on horseback, he +touched the ground and seemed to gang, or walk. He and his Norsemen +had taken their share of France, and called it Normandy to this day; +and meanwhile, with that docility and adaptability which marks so often +truly great spirits, they had changed their creed, their language, their +habits, and had become, from heathen and murderous Berserkers, the most +truly civilised people of Europe, and—as was most natural then—the +most faithful allies and servants of the Pope of Rome. So greatly +had they changed, and so fast, that William Duke of Normandy, the great-great-grandson +of Rolf the wild Viking, was perhaps the finest gentleman, as well as +the most cultivated sovereign, and the greatest statesman and warrior +in all Europe.</p> +<p>So Harold of Norway came with all his Vikings to Stamford Bridge +by York; and took, by coming, only that which Harold of England promised +him, namely, “forasmuch as he was taller than any other man, seven +feet of English ground.”</p> +<p>The story of that great battle, told with a few inaccuracies, but +told as only great poets tell, you should read, if you have not read +it already, in the “Heimskringla” of Snorri Sturluson, the +Homer of the North:</p> +<blockquote><p>High feast that day held the birds of the air and the +beasts of the field,<br /> +White-tailed erne and sallow glede,<br /> +Dusky raven, with horny neb,<br /> +And the gray deer the wolf of the wood.</p> +</blockquote> +<p>The bones of the slain, men say, whitened the place for fifty years +to come.</p> +<p>And remember, that on the same day on which that fight befell—September +27, 1066—William, Duke of Normandy, with all his French-speaking +Norsemen, was sailing across the British Channel, under the protection +of a banner consecrated by the Pope, to conquer that England which the +Norse-speaking Normans could not conquer.</p> +<p>And now King Harold showed himself a man. He turned at once +from the North of England to the South. He raised the folk of +the Southern, as he had raised those of the Central and Northern shires; +and in sixteen days—after a march which in those times was a prodigious +feat—he was entrenched upon the fatal down which men called Heathfield +then, and Senlac, but Battle to this day—with William and his +French Normans opposite him on Telham hill.</p> +<p>Then came the battle of Hastings. You all know what befell +upon that day; and how the old weapon was matched against the new—the +English axe against the Norman lance—and beaten only because the +English broke their ranks. If you wish to refresh your memories, +read the tale once more in Mr. Freeman’s “History of England,” +or Professor Creasy’s “Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World,” +or even, best of all, the late Lord Lytton’s splendid romance +of “Harold.” And when you go to England, go, as some +of you may have gone already, to Battle; and there from off the Abbey +grounds, or from Mountjoye behind, look down off what was then “The +Heathy Field,” over the long slopes of green pasture and the rich +hop-gardens, where were no hop-gardens then, and the flat tide-marshes +winding between the wooded heights, towards the southern sea; and imagine +for yourselves the feelings of an Englishman as he contemplates that +broad green sloping lawn, on which was decided the destiny of his native +land. Here, right beneath, rode Taillefer up the slope before +them all, singing the song of Roland, tossing his lance in air and catching +it as it fell, with all the Norse berserker spirit of his ancestors +flashing out in him, at the thought of one fair fight, and then purgatory, +or Valhalla—Taillefer perhaps preferred the latter. Yonder +on the left, in that copse where the red-ochre gully runs, is Sanguelac, +the drain of blood, into which (as the Bayeux tapestry, woven by Matilda’s +maids, still shows) the Norman knights fell, horse and man, till the +gully was bridged with writhing bodies for those who rode after. +Here, where you stand—the crest of the hill marks where it must +have been—was the stockade on which depended the fate of England. +Yonder, perhaps, stalked out one English squire or house-carle after +another: tall men with long-handled battle-axes—one specially +terrible, with a wooden helmet which no sword could pierce—who +hewed and hewed down knight on knight, till they themselves were borne +to earth at last. And here, among the trees and ruins of the garden, +kept trim by those who know the treasure which they own, stood Harold’s +two standards of the fighting-man and the dragon of Wessex. And +here, close by (for here, for many a century, stood the high altar of +Battle Abbey, where monks sang masses for Harold’s soul), upon +this very spot the Swan-neck found her hero-lover’s corpse. +“Ah,” says many an Englishman—and who will blame him +for it—“how grand to have died beneath that standard on +that day!” Yes, and how right. And yet how right, +likewise, that the Norman’s cry of <i>Dexaie</i>!—“God +Help!”—and not the English hurrah, should have won that +day, till William rode up Mountjoye in the afternoon to see the English +army, terrible even in defeat, struggling through copse and marsh away +toward Brede, and, like retreating lions driven into their native woods, +slaying more in the pursuit than they slew even in the fight.</p> +<p>But so it was to be; for so it ought to have been. You, my +American friends, delight, as I have said already, in seeing the old +places of the old country. Go, I beg you, and look at that old +place, and if you be wise, you will carry back from it one lesson: That +God’s thoughts are not as our thoughts; nor His ways as our ways.</p> +<p>It was a fearful time which followed. I cannot but believe +that our forefathers had been, in some way or other, great sinners, +or two such conquests as Canute’s and William’s would not +have fallen on them within the short space of sixty years. They +did not want for courage, as Stamford Brigg and Hastings showed full +well. English swine, their Norman conquerors called them often +enough; but never English cowards. Their ruinous vice, if we are +to trust the records of the time, was what the old monks called accidia—ακηδια—and +ranked it as one of the seven deadly sins: a general careless, sleepy, +comfortable habit of mind, which lets all go its way for good or evil—a +habit of mind too often accompanied, as in the case of the Angle-Danes, +with self-indulgence, often coarse enough. Huge eaters and huger +drinkers, fuddled with ale, were the men who went down at Hastings—though +they went down like heroes—before the staid and sober Norman out +of France.</p> +<p>But those were fearful times. As long as William lived, ruthless +as he was to all rebels, he kept order and did justice with a strong +and steady hand; for he brought with him from Normandy the instincts +of a truly great statesman. And in his sons’ time matters +grew worse and worse. After that, in the troubles of Stephen’s +reign, anarchy let loose tyranny in its most fearful form, and things +were done which recall the cruelties of the old Spanish <i>conquistadores</i> +in America. Scott’s charming romance of “Ivanhoe” +must be taken, I fear, as a too true picture of English society in the +time of Richard I.</p> +<p>And what came of it all? What was the result of all this misery +and wrong?</p> +<p>This, paradoxical as it may seem: That the Norman conquest was the +making of the English people; of the Free Commons of England.</p> +<p>Paradoxical, but true. First, you must dismiss from your minds +the too common notion that there is now, in England, a governing Norman +aristocracy, or that there has been one, at least since the year 1215, +when Magna Charta was won from the Norman John by Normans and by English +alike. For the first victors at Hastings, like the first <i>conquistadores</i> +in America, perished, as the monk chronicles point out, rapidly by their +own crimes; and very few of our nobility can trace their names back +to the authentic Battle Abbey roll. The great majority of the +peers have sprung from, and all have intermarried with, the Commons; +and the peerage has been from the first, and has become more and more +as centuries have rolled on, the prize of success in life.</p> +<p>The cause is plain. The conquest of England by the Normans +was not one of those conquests of a savage by a civilised race, or of +a cowardly race by a brave race, which results in the slavery of the +conquered, and leaves the gulf of caste between two races—master +and slave. That was the case in France, and resulted, after centuries +of oppression, in the great and dreadful revolution of 1793, which convulsed +not only France but the whole civilised world. But caste, thank +God, has never existed in England, since at least the first generation +after the Norman conquest.</p> +<p>The vast majority, all but the whole population of England, have +been always free; and free, as they are not where caste exists to change +their occupations. They could intermarry, if they were able men, +into the ranks above them; as they could sink, if they were unable men, +into the ranks below them. Any man acquainted with the origin +of our English surnames may verify this fact for himself, by looking +at the names of a single parish or a single street of shops. There, +jumbled together, he will find names marking the noblest Saxon or Angle +blood—Kenward or Kenric, Osgood or Osborne, side by side with +Cordery or Banister—now names of farmers in my own parish—or +other Norman-French names which may be, like those two last, in Battle +Abbey roll—and side by side the almost ubiquitous Brown, whose +ancestor was probably some Danish or Norwegian house-carle, proud of +his name Biorn the Bear, and the ubiquitous Smith or Smythe, the Smiter, +whose forefather, whether he be now peasant or peer, assuredly handled +the tongs and hammer at his own forge. This holds true equally +in New England and in Old. When I search through (as I delight +to do) your New England surnames, I find the same jumble of names—West +Saxon, Angle, Danish, Norman, and French-Norman likewise, many of primæval +and heathen antiquity, many of high nobility, all worked together, as +at home, to form the Free Commoners of England.</p> +<p>If any should wish to know more on this curious and important subject, +let me recommend them to study Ferguson’s “Teutonic Name +System,” a book from which you will discover that some of our +quaintest, and seemingly most plebeian surnames—many surnames, +too, which are extinct in England, but remain in America—are really +corruptions of good old Teutonic names, which our ancestors may have +carried in the German Forest, before an Englishman set foot on British +soil; from which he will rise with the comfortable feeling that we English-speaking +men, from the highest to the lowest, are literally kinsmen. Nay, +so utterly made up now is the old blood-feud between Norseman and Englishman, +between the descendants of those who conquered and those who were conquered, +that in the children of our Prince of Wales, after 800 years, the blood +of William of Normandy is mingled with the blood of the very Harold +who fell at Hastings. And so, by the bitter woes which followed +the Norman conquest was the whole population, Dane, Angle, and Saxon, +earl and churl, freeman and slave, crushed and welded together into +one homogeneous mass, made just and merciful towards each other by the +most wholesome of all teachings, a community of suffering; and if they +had been, as I fear they were, a lazy and a sensual people, were taught</p> +<blockquote><p>That life is not as idle ore,<br /> +But heated hot with burning fears,<br /> +And bathed in baths of hissing tears,<br /> +And battered with the strokes of doom<br /> +To shape and use.</p> +</blockquote> +<p>But how did these wild Vikings become Christian men? It is +a long story. So stanch a race was sure to be converted only very +slowly. Noble missionaries as Ansgar, Rembert, and Poppo, had +worked for 150 years and more among the heathens of Denmark. But +the patriotism of the Norseman always recoiled, even though in secret, +from the fact that they were German monks, backed by the authority of +the German emperor; and many a man, like Svend Fork-beard, father of +the great Canute, though he had the Kaiser himself for godfather, turned +heathen once more the moment he was free, because his baptism was the +badge of foreign conquest, and neither pope nor kaiser should lord it +over him, body or soul. St. Olaf, indeed, forced Christianity +on the Norse at the sword’s point, often by horrid cruelties, +and perished in the attempt. But who forced it on the Norsemen +of Scotland, England, Ireland, Neustria, Russia, and all the Eastern +Baltic? It was absorbed and in most cases, I believe, gradually +and willingly, as a gospel and good news to hearts worn out with the +storm of their own passions. And whence came their Christianity? +Much of it, as in the case of the Danes, and still more of the French +Normans, came direct from Rome, the city which, let them defy its influence +as they would, was still the fount of all theology, as well as of all +civilisation. But I must believe that much of it came from that +mysterious ancient Western Church, the Church of St. Patric, St. Bridget, +St. Columba, which had covered with rude cells and chapels the rocky +islets of the North Atlantic, even to Iceland itself. Even to +Iceland; for when that island was first discovered, about A.D. 840, +the Norsemen found in an isle, on the east and west and elsewhere, Irish +books and bells and wooden crosses, and named that island Papey, the +isle of the popes—some little colony of monks, who lived by fishing, +and who are said to have left the land when the Norsemen settled in +it. Let us believe, for it is consonant with reason and experience, +that the sight of those poor monks, plundered and massacred again and +again by the “mailed swarms of Lochlin,” yet never exterminated, +but springing up again in the same place, ready for fresh massacre, +a sacred plant which God had planted, and which no rage of man could +trample out—let us believe, I say, that that sight taught at last +to the buccaneers of the old world that there was a purer manliness, +a loftier heroism, than the ferocious self-assertion of the Berserker, +even the heroism of humility, gentleness, self-restraint, self-sacrifice; +that there was a strength which was made perfect in weakness; a glory, +not of the sword but of the cross. We will believe that that was +the lesson which the Norsemen learnt, after many a wild and blood-stained +voyage, from the monks of Iona or of Derry, which caused the building +of such churches as that which Sightrys, king of Dublin, raised about +the year 1030, not in the Norse but in the Irish quarter of Dublin: +a sacred token of amity between the new settlers and the natives on +the ground of a common faith. Let us believe, too, that the influence +of woman was not wanting in the good work—that the story of St. +Margaret and Malcolm Canmore was repeated, though inversely, in the +case of many a heathen Scandinavian jarl, who, marrying the princely +daughter of some Scottish chieftain, found in her creed at last something +more precious than herself; while his brother or his cousin became, +at Dublin or Wexford or Waterford, the husband of some saffron-robed +Irish princess, “fair as an elf,” as the old saying was; +some “maiden of the three transcendent hues,” of whom the +old book of Linane says:</p> +<blockquote><p>Red as the blood which flowed from stricken deer,<br /> +White as the snow on which that blood ran down,<br /> +Black as the raven who drank up that blood;</p> +</blockquote> +<p>—and possibly, as in the case of Brian Boru’s mother, +had given his fair-haired sister in marriage to some Irish prince, and +could not resist the spell of their new creed, and the spell too, it +may be, of some sister of theirs who had long given up all thought of +earthly marriage to tend the undying fire of St. Bridget among the consecrated +virgins of Kildare.</p> +<p>I am not drawing from mere imagination. That such things must +have happened, and happened again and again, is certain to anyone who +knows, even superficially, the documents of that time. And I doubt +not that, in manners as well as in religion, the Norse were humanised +and civilised by their contact with the Celts, both in Scotland and +in Ireland. Both peoples had valour, intellect, imagination: but +the Celt had that which the burly angular Norse character, however deep +and stately, and however humorous, wanted; namely, music of nature, +tenderness, grace, rapidity, playfulness; just the qualities, combining +with the Scandinavian (and in Scotland with the Angle) elements of character +which have produced, in Ireland and in Scotland, two schools of lyric +poetry second to none in the world.</p> +<p>And so they were converted to what was then a dark and awful creed; +a creed of ascetic self-torture and purgatorial fires for those who +escape the still more dreadful, because endless, doom of the rest of +the human race. But, because it was a sad creed, it suited better, +men who had, when conscience re-awakened in them, but too good reason +to be sad; and the minsters and cloisters which sprang up over the whole +of Northern Europe, and even beyond it, along the dreary western shores +of Greenland itself, are the symbols of a splendid repentance for their +own sins and for the sins of their forefathers.</p> +<p>Gudruna herself, of whom I spoke just now, one of those old Norse +heroines who helped to discover America, though a historic personage, +is a symbolic one likewise, and the pattern of a whole class. +She too, after many journeys to Iceland, Greenland, and Winland, goes +on a pilgrimage to Rome, to get, I presume, absolution from the Pope +himself for all the sins of her strange, rich, stormy, wayward life.</p> +<p>Have you not read—many of you surely have—La Motte Fouqué’s +romance of “Sintram?” It embodies all that I would +say. It is the spiritual drama of that early Middle Age; very +sad, morbid if you will, but true to fact. The Lady Verena ought +not, perhaps, to desert her husband, and shut herself up in a cloister. +But so she would have done in those old days. And who shall judge +her harshly for so doing? When the brutality of the man seems +past all cure, who shall blame the woman if she glides away into some +atmosphere of peace and purity, to pray for him whom neither warnings +nor caresses will amend? It is a sad book, “Sintram.” +And yet not too sad. For they were a sad people, those old Norse +forefathers of ours. Their Christianity was sad; their minsters +sad; there are few sadder, though few grander, buildings than a Norman +church.</p> +<p>And yet, perhaps, their Christianity did not make them sad. +It was but the other and the healthier side of that sadness which they +had as heathens. Read which you will of the old sagas—heathen +or half-Christian—the Eyrbiggia, Viga Glum, Burnt Niall, Grettir +the Strong, and, above all, Snorri Sturluson’s “Heimskringla” +itself—and you will see at once how sad they are. There +is, in the old sagas, none of that enjoyment of life which shines out +everywhere in Greek poetry, even through its deepest tragedies. +Not in complacency with Nature’s beauty, but in the fierce struggle +with her wrath, does the Norseman feel pleasure. Nature to him +was not, as in Mr. Longfellow’s exquisite poem, <a name="citation3"></a><a href="#footnote3">{3}</a> +the kind old nurse, to take him on her knee and whisper to him, ever +anew, the story without an end. She was a weird witch-wife, mother +of storm demons and frost giants, who must be fought with steadily, +warily, wearily, over dreary heaths and snow-capped fells, and rugged +nesses and tossing sounds, and away into the boundless sea—or +who could live?—till he got hardened in the fight into ruthlessness +of need and greed. The poor strip of flat strath, ploughed and +re-ploughed again in the short summer days, would yield no more; or +wet harvests spoiled the crops, or heavy snows starved the cattle. +And so the Norseman launched his ships when the lands were sown in spring, +and went forth to pillage or to trade, as luck would have, to summerted, +as he himself called it; and came back, if he ever came, in autumn to +the women to help at harvest-time, with blood upon his hand. But +had he stayed at home, blood would have been there still. Three +out of four of them had been mixed up in some man-slaying, or had some +blood-feud to avenge among their own kin.</p> +<p>The whole of Scandinavia, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Orkney, and the +rest, remind me ever of that terrible picture of the great Norse painter, +Tiddeman, in which two splendid youths, lashed together, in true Norse +duel fashion by the waist, are hewing each other to death with the short +axe, about some hot words over their ale. The loss of life, and +that of the most gallant of the young, in those days must have been +enormous. If the vitality of the race had not been even more enormous, +they must have destroyed each other, as the Red Indians have done, off +the face of the earth. They lived these Norsemen, not to live—they +lived to die. For what cared they? Death—what was +death to them? what it was to the Jomsburger Viking, who, when led out +to execution, said to the headsman: “Die! with all pleasure. +We used to question in Jomsburg whether a man felt when his head was +off? Now I shall know; but if I do, take care, for I shall smite +thee with my knife. And meanwhile, spoil not this long hair of +mine; it is so beautiful.”</p> +<p>But, oh! what waste! What might not these men have done if +they had sought peace, not war; if they had learned a few centuries +sooner to do justly, and love mercy, and walk humbly with their God?</p> +<p>And yet one loves them, blood-stained as they are. Your own +poets, men brought up under circumstances, under ideas the most opposite +to theirs, love them, and cannot help it. And why? It is +not merely for their bold daring, it is not merely for their stern endurance; +nor again that they had in them that shift and thrift, those steady +and common-sense business habits, which made their noblest men not ashamed +to go on voyages of merchandise. Nor is it, again, that grim humour—humour +as of the modern Scotch—which so often flashes out into an actual +jest, but more usually underlies unspoken all their deeds. Is +it not rather that these men are our forefathers? that their blood runs +in the veins of perhaps three men out of four in any general assembly, +whether in America or in Britain? Startling as the assertion may +be, I believe it to be strictly true.</p> +<p>Be that as it may, I cannot read the stories of your western men, +the writings of Bret Harte, or Colonel John Hay, for instance, without +feeling at every turn that there are the old Norse alive again, beyond +the very ocean which they first crossed, 850 years ago.</p> +<p>Let me try to prove my point, and end with a story, as I began with +one.</p> +<p>It is just thirty years before the Norman conquest of England, the +evening of the battle of Sticklestead. St. Olaf’s corpse +is still lying unburied on the hillside. The reforming and Christian +king has fallen in the attempt to force Christianity and despotism on +the Conservative and half-heathen party—the free bonders or yeoman-farmers +of Norway. Thormod, his poet—the man, as his name means, +of thunder mood—who has been standing in the ranks, at last has +an arrow in his left side. He breaks off the shaft, and thus sore +wounded goes up, when all is lost, to a farm where is a great barn full +of wounded. One Kimbe comes, a man out of the opposite or bonder +part. “There is great howling and screaming in there,” +he says. “King Olaf’s men fought bravely enough: but +it is a shame brisk young lads cannot bear their wounds. On what +side wert thou in the fight?” “On the best side,” +says the beaten Thormod. Kimbe sees that Thormod has a good bracelet +on his arm. “Thou art surely a king’s man. Give +me thy gold ring and I will hide thee, ere the bonders kill thee.”</p> +<p>Thormod said, “Take it, if thou canst get it. I have +lost that which is worth more;” and he stretched out his left +hand, and Kimbe tried to take it. But Thormod, swinging his sword, +cut off his hand; and it is said Kimbe behaved no better over his wound +than those he had been blaming.</p> +<p>Then Thormod went into the barn; and after he had sung his song there +in praise of his dead king, he went into an inner room, where was a +fire, and water warming, and a handsome girl binding up men’s +wounds. And he sat down by the door; and one said to him, “Why +art thou so dead pale? Why dost thou not call for the leech?” +Then sung Thormod:</p> +<blockquote><p>“I am not blooming; and the fair<br /> +And slender maiden loves to care<br /> +For blooming youths. Few care for me,<br /> +With Fenri’s gold meal I can’t fee;”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>and so forth, improvising after the old Norse fashion. Then +Thormod got up and went to the fire, and stood and warmed himself. +And the nurse-girl said to him, “Go out, man, and bring some of +the split-firewood which lies outside the door.” He went +out and brought an armful of wood and threw it down. Then the +nurse-girl looked him in the face, and said, “Dreadful pale is +this man. Why art thou so?” Then sang Thormod:</p> +<blockquote><p>“Thou wonderest, sweet bloom, at me,<br /> +A man so hideous to see.<br /> +The arrow-drift o’ertook me, girl,<br /> +A fine-ground arrow in the whirl<br /> +Went through me, and I feel the dart<br /> +Sits, lovely lass, too near my heart.”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>The girl said, “Let me see thy wound.” Then Thormod +sat down, and the girl saw his wounds, and that which was in his side, +and saw that there was a piece of iron in it; but could not tell where +it had gone. In a stone pot she had leeks and other herbs, and +boiled them, and gave the wounded man of it to eat. But Thormod +said, “Take it away; I have no appetite now for my broth.” +Then she took a great pair of tongs and tried to pull out the iron; +but the wound was swelled, and there was too little to lay hold of. +Now said Thormod, “Cut in so deep that thou canst get at the iron, +and give me the tongs.” She did as he said. Then took +Thormod the gold bracelet off his hand and gave it the nurse-girl, and +bade her do with it what she liked.</p> +<p>“It is a good man’s gift,” said he. “King +Olaf gave me the ring this morning.”</p> +<p>Then Thormod took the tongs and pulled the iron out. But on +the iron was a barb, on which hung flesh from the heart, some red, some +white. When he saw that, he said, “The king has fed us well. +I am fat, even to the heart’s roots.” And so leant +back and was dead.</p> +<h2>CYRUS, THE SERVANT OF-THE LORD <a name="citation4"></a><a href="#footnote4">{4}</a></h2> +<p>I wish to speak to you to-night about one of those old despotic empires +which were in every case the earliest known form of civilisation. +Were I minded to play the cynic or the mountebank, I should choose some +corrupt and effete despotism, already grown weak and ridiculous by its +decay—as did at last the Roman and then the Byzantine Empire—and, +after raising a laugh at the expense of the old system say: See what +a superior people you are now—how impossible, under free and enlightened +institutions, is anything so base and so absurd as went on, even in +despotic France before the Revolution of 1793. Well, that would +be on the whole true, thank God; but what need is there to say it?</p> +<p>Let us keep our scorn for our own weaknesses, our blame for our own +sins, certain that we shall gain more instruction, though not more amusement, +by hunting out the good which is in anything than by hunting out its +evil. I have chosen, not the worst, but the best despotism which +I could find in history, founded and ruled by a truly heroic personage, +one whose name has become a proverb and a legend, that so I might lift +up your minds, even by the contemplation of an old Eastern empire, to +see that it, too, could be a work and ordinance of God, and its hero +the servant of the Lord. For we are almost bound to call Cyrus, +the founder of the Persian Empire, by this august title for two reasons—First, +because the Hebrew Scriptures call him so; the next, because he proved +himself to be such by his actions and their consequences—at least +in the eyes of those who believe, as I do, in a far-seeing and far-reaching +Providence, by which all human history is</p> +<blockquote><p>Bound by gold chains unto the throne of God.</p> +</blockquote> +<p>His work was very different from any that need be done, or can be +done, in these our days. But while we thank God that such work +is now as unnecessary as impossible; we may thank God likewise that, +when such work was necessary and possible, a man was raised up to do +it: and to do it, as all accounts assert, better, perhaps, than it had +ever been done before or since.</p> +<p>True, the old conquerors, who absorbed nation after nation, tribe +after tribe, and founded empires on their ruins, are now, I trust, about +to be replaced, throughout the world, as here and in Britain at home, +by free self-governed peoples:</p> +<blockquote><p>The old order changeth, giving place to the new;<br /> +And God fulfils Himself in many ways,<br /> +Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.</p> +</blockquote> +<p>And that custom of conquest and empire and transplantation did more +than once corrupt the world. And yet in it, too, God may have +more than once fulfilled His own designs, as He did, if Scripture is +to be believed, in Cyrus, well surnamed the Great, the founder of the +Persian Empire some 2400 years ago. For these empires, it must +be remembered, did at least that which the Roman Empire did among a +scattered number of savage tribes, or separate little races, hating +and murdering each other, speaking different tongues, and worshipping +different gods, and losing utterly the sense of a common humanity, till +they looked on the people who dwelt in the next valley as fiends, to +be sacrificed, if caught, to their own fiends at home. Among such +as these, empires did introduce order, law, common speech, common interest, +the notion of nationality and humanity. They, as it were, hammered +together the fragments of the human race till they had moulded them +into one. They did it cruelly, clumsily, ill: but was there ever +work done on earth, however noble, which was not—alas, alas!—done +somewhat ill?</p> +<p>Let me talk to you a little about the old hero. He and his +hardy Persians should be specially interesting to us. For in them +first does our race, the Aryan race, appear in authentic history. +In them first did our race give promise of being the conquering and +civilising race of the future world. And to the conquests of Cyrus—so +strangely are all great times and great movements of the human family +linked to each other—to his conquests, humanly speaking, is owing +the fact that you are here, and I am speaking to you at this moment.</p> +<p>It is an oft-told story: but so grand a one that I must sketch it +for you, however clumsily, once more.</p> +<p>In that mountain province called Farsistan, north-east of what we +now call Persia, the dwelling-place of the Persians, there dwelt, in +the sixth and seventh centuries before Christ, a hardy tribe, of the +purest blood of Iran, a branch of the same race as the Celtic, Teutonic, +Greek, and Hindoo, and speaking a tongue akin to theirs. They +had wandered thither, say their legends, out of the far north-east, +from off some lofty plateau of Central Asia, driven out by the increasing +cold, which left them but two mouths of summer to ten of winter.</p> +<p>They despised at first—would that they had despised always!—the +luxurious life of the dwellers in the plains, and the effeminate customs +of the Medes—a branch of their own race who had conquered and +intermarried with the Turanian, or Finnish tribes; and adopted much +of their creed, as well as of their morals, throughout their vast but +short-lived Median Empire. “Soft countries,” said +Cyrus himself—so runs the tale—“gave birth to small +men. No region produced at once delightful fruits and men of a +war-like spirit.” Letters were to them, probably, then unknown. +They borrowed them in after years, as they borrowed their art, from +Babylonians, Assyrians, and other Semitic nations whom they conquered. +From the age of five to that of twenty, their lads were instructed but +in two things—to speak the truth and to shoot with the bow. +To ride was the third necessary art, introduced, according to Xenophon, +after they had descended from their mountain fastnessess to conquer +the whole East.</p> +<p>Their creed was simple enough. Ahura Mazda—Ormuzd, as +he has been called since—was the one eternal Creator, the source +of all light and life and good. He spake his word, and it accomplished +the creation of heaven, before the water, before the earth, before the +cow, before the tree, before the fire, before man the truthful, before +the Devas and beasts of prey, before the whole existing universe; before +every good thing created by Ahura Mazda and springing from Truth.</p> +<p>He needed no sacrifices of blood. He was to be worshipped only +with prayers, with offerings of the inspiring juice of the now unknown +herb Homa, and by the preservation of the sacred fire, which, understand, +was not he, but the symbol—as was light and the sun—of the +good spirit—of Ahura Mazda. They had no images of the gods, +these old Persians; no temples, no altars, so says Herodotus, and considered +the use of them a sign of folly. They were, as has been well said +of them, the Puritans of the old world. When they descended from +their mountain fastnesses, they became the iconoclasts of the old world; +and the later Isaiah, out of the depths of national shame, captivity, +and exile, saw in them brother-spirits, the chosen of the Lord, whose +hero Cyrus, the Lord was holding by His right hand, till all the foul +superstitions and foul effeminacies of the rotten Semitic peoples of +the East, and even of Egypt itself, should be crushed, though, alas! +only for awhile, by men who felt that they had a commission from the +God of light and truth and purity, to sweep out all that with the besom +of destruction.</p> +<p>But that was a later inspiration. In earlier, and it may be +happier, times the duty of the good man was to strive against all evil, +disorder, uselessness, incompetence in their more simple forms. +“He therefore is a holy man,” says Ormuzd in the Zend-avesta, +“who has built a dwelling on the earth, in which he maintains +fire, cattle, his wife, his children, and flocks and herds; he who makes +the earth produce barley, he who cultivates the fruits of the soil, +cultivates purity; he advances the law of Ahura Mazda as much as if +he had offered a hundred sacrifices.”</p> +<p>To reclaim the waste, to till the land, to make a corner of the earth +better than they found it, was to these men to rescue a bit of Ormuzd’s +world out of the usurped dominion of Ahriman; to rescue it from the +spirit of evil and disorder for its rightful owner, the Spirit of Order +and of Good.</p> +<p>For they believed in an evil spirit, these old Persians. Evil +was not for them a lower form of good. With their intense sense +of the difference between right and wrong it could be nothing less than +hateful; to be attacked, exterminated, as a personal enemy, till it +became to them at last impersonate and a person.</p> +<p>Zarathustra, the mystery of evil, weighed heavily on them and on +their great prophet, Zoroaster—splendour of gold, as I am told +his name signifies—who lived, no man knows clearly when or clearly +where, but who lived and lives for ever, for his works follow him. +He, too, tried to solve for his people the mystery of evil; and if he +did not succeed, who has succeeded yet? Warring against Ormuzd, +Ahura Mazda, was Ahriman, Angra Mainyus, literally the being of an evil +mind, the ill-conditioned being. He was labouring perpetually +to spoil the good work of Ormuzd alike in nature and in man. He +was the cause of the fall of man, the tempter, the author of misery +and death; he was eternal and uncreate as Ormuzd was. But that, +perhaps, was a corruption of the purer and older Zoroastrian creed. +With it, if Ahriman were eternal in the past, he would not be eternal +in the future. Somehow, somewhen, somewhere, in the day when three +prophets—the increasing light, the increasing truth, and the existing +truth—should arise and give to mankind the last three books of +the Zend-avesta, and convert all mankind to the pure creed, then evil +should be conquered, the creation become pure again, and Ahriman vanish +for ever; and, meanwhile, every good man was to fight valiantly for +Ormuzd, his true lord, against Ahriman and all his works.</p> +<p>Men who held such a creed, and could speak truth and draw the bow, +what might they not do when the hour and the man arrived? They +were not a <i>big</i> nation. No; but they were a <i>great</i> +nation, even while they were eating barley-bread and paying tribute +to their conquerors the Medes, in the sterile valleys of Farsistan.</p> +<p>And at last the hour and the man came. The story is half legendary—differently +told by different authors. Herodotus has one tale, Xenophon another. +The first, at least, had ample means of information. Astyages +is the old shah of the Median Empire, then at the height of its seeming +might and splendour and effeminacy. He has married his daughter, +the Princess Mandane, to Cambyses, seemingly a vassal-king or prince +of the pure Persian blood. One night the old man is troubled with +a dream. He sees a vine spring from his daughter, which overshadows +all Asia. He sends for the Magi to interpret; and they tell him +that Mandane will have a son who will reign in his stead. Having +sons of his own, and fearing for the succession, he sends for Mandane, +and, when her child is born, gives it to Harpagus, one of his courtiers, +to be slain. The courtier relents, and hands it over to a herdsman, +to be exposed on the mountains. The herdsman relents in turn, +and bring the babe up as his own child.</p> +<p>When the boy, who goes by the name of Agradates, is grown, he is +at play with the other herdboys, and they choose him for a mimic king. +Some he makes his guards, some he bids build houses, some carry his +messages. The son of a Mede of rank refuses, and Agradates has +him seized by his guards and chastised with the whip. The ancestral +instincts of command and discipline are showing early in the lad.</p> +<p>The young gentleman complains to his father, the father to the old +king, who of course sends for the herdsman and his boy. The boy +answers in a tone so exactly like that in which Xenophon’s Cyrus +would have answered, that I must believe that both Xenophon’s +Cyrus and Herodotus’s Cyrus (like Xenophon’s Socrates and +Plato’s Socrates) are real pictures of a real character; and that +Herodotus’s story, though Xenophon says nothing of it, is true.</p> +<p>He has done nothing, the noble boy says, but what was just. +He had been chosen king in play, because the boys thought him most fit. +The boy whom he had chastised was one of those who chose him. +All the rest obeyed: but he would not, till at last he got his due reward. +“If I deserve punishment for that,” says the boy, “I +am ready to submit.”</p> +<p>The old king looks keenly and wonderingly at the young king, whose +features seem somewhat like his own. Likely enough in those days, +when an Iranian noble or prince would have a quite different cast of +complexion and of face from a Turanian herdsman. A suspicion crosses +him; and by threats of torture he gets the truth from the trembling +herdsman.</p> +<p>To the poor wretch’s rapture the old king lets him go unharmed. +He has a more exquisite revenge to take, and sends for Harpagus, who +likewise confessed the truth. The wily old tyrant has naught but +gentle words. It is best as it is. He has been very sorry +himself for the child, and Mandane’s reproaches had gone to his +heart. “Let Harpagus go home and send his son to be a companion +to the new-found prince. To-night there will be great sacrifices +in honour of the child’s safety, and Harpagus is to be a guest +at the banquet.”</p> +<p>Harpagus comes; and after eating his fill, is asked how he likes +the king’s meat? He gives the usual answer; and a covered +basket is put before him, out of which he is to take—in Median +fashion—what he likes. He finds in it the head and hands +and feet of his own son. Like a true Eastern he shows no signs +of horror. The king asks him if he knew what flesh he had been +eating. He answers that he knew perfectly. That whatever +the king did pleased him.</p> +<p>Like an Eastern courtier, he knew how to dissemble, but not to forgive, +and bided his time. The Magi, to their credit, told Astyages that +his dream had been fulfilled, that Cyrus—as we must now call the +foundling prince—had fulfilled it by becoming a king in play, +and the boy is let to go back to his father and his hardy Persian life. +But Harpagus does not leave him alone, nor perhaps, do his own thoughts. +He has wrongs to avenge on his grandfather. And it seems not altogether +impossible to the young mountaineer.</p> +<p>He has seen enough of Median luxury to despise it and those who indulge +in it. He has seen his own grandfather with his cheeks rouged, +his eyelids stained with antimony, living a womanlike life, shut up +from all his subjects in the recesses of a vast seraglio.</p> +<p>He calls together the mountain rulers; makes friends with Tigranes, +an Armenian prince, a vassal of the Mede, who has his wrongs likewise +to avenge. And the two little armies of foot-soldiers—the +Persians had no cavalry—defeat the innumerable horsemen of the +Mede, take the old king, keep him in honourable captivity, and so change, +one legend says, in a single battle, the fortunes of the whole East.</p> +<p>And then begins that series of conquests of which we know hardly +anything, save the fact that they were made. The young mountaineer +and his playmates, whom he makes his generals and satraps, sweep onward +towards the West, teaching their men the art of riding, till the Persian +cavalry becomes more famous than the Median had been. They gather +to them, as a snowball gathers in rolling, the picked youth of every +tribe whom they overcome. They knit these tribes to them in loyalty +and affection by that righteousness—that truthfulness and justice—for +which Isaiah in his grandest lyric strains has made them illustrious +to all time; which Xenophon has celebrated in like manner in that exquisite +book of his—the “Cyropædia.” The great +Lydian kingdom of Croesus—Asia Minor as we call it now—goes +down before them. Babylon itself goes down, after that world-famed +siege which ended in Belshazzar’s feast; and when Cyrus died—still +in the prime of life, the legends seem to say—he left a coherent +and well-organised empire, which stretched from the Mediterranean to +Hindostan.</p> +<p>So runs the tale, which to me, I confess, sounds probable and rational +enough. It may not do so to you; for it has not to many learned +men. They are inclined to “relegate it into the region of +myth;” in plain English, to call old Herodotus a liar, or at least +a dupe. What means those wise men can have at this distance of +more than 2000 years, of knowing more about the matter than Herodotus, +who lived within 100 years of Cyrus, I for myself cannot discover. +And I say this without the least wish to disparage these hypercritical +persons. For there are—and more there ought to be, as long +as lies and superstitions remain on this earth—a class of thinkers +who hold in just suspicion all stories which savour of the sensational, +the romantic, even the dramatic. They know the terrible uses to +which appeals to the fancy and the emotions have been applied, and are +still applied to enslave the intellects, the consciences, the very bodies +of men and women. They dread so much from experience the abuse +of that formula, that “a thing is so beautiful it must be true,” +that they are inclined to reply: “Rather let us say boldly, it +is so beautiful that it cannot be true. Let us mistrust, or even +refuse to believe <i>à priori</i>, and at first sight, all startling, +sensational, even poetic tales, and accept nothing as history, which +is not as dull as the ledger of a dry-goods’ store.” +But I think that experience, both in nature and in society, are against +that ditch-water philosophy. The weather, being governed by laws, +ought always to be equable and normal, and yet you have whirlwinds, +droughts, thunderstorms. The share-market, being governed by laws, +ought to be always equable and normal, and yet you have startling transactions, +startling panics, startling disclosures, and a whole sensational romance +of commercial crime and folly. Which of us has lived to be fifty +years old, without having witnessed in private life sensation tragedies, +alas! sometimes too fearful to be told, or at least sensational romances, +which we shall take care not to tell, because we shall not be believed? +Let the ditch-water philosophy say what it will, human life is not a +ditch, but a wild and roaring river, flooding its banks, and eating +out new channels with many a landslip. It is a strange world, +and man, a strange animal, guided, it is true, usually by most common-place +motives; but, for that reason, ready and glad at times to escape from +them and their dulness and baseness; to give vent, if but for a moment, +in wild freedom, to that demoniac element, which, as Goethe says, underlies +his nature and all nature; and to prefer for an hour, to the normal +and respectable ditch-water, a bottle of champagne or even a carouse +on fire-water, let the consequences be what they may.</p> +<p>How else shall we explain such a phenomenon as those old crusades? +Were they undertaken for any purpose, commercial or other? Certainly +not for lightening an overburdened population. Nay, is not the +history of your own Mormons, and their exodus into the far West, one +of the most startling instances which the world has seen for several +centuries, of the unexpected and incalculable forces which lie hid in +man? Believe me, man’s passions, heated to igniting point, +rather than his prudence cooled down to freezing point, are the normal +causes of all great human movement. And a truer law of social +science than any that political economists are wont to lay down, is +that old <i>Dov’ é la donna</i>? of the Italian judge, +who used to ask, as a preliminary to every case, civil or criminal, +which was brought before him, <i>Dov’ é la donna</i>? +“Where is the lady?” certain, like a wise old gentleman, +that a woman was most probably at the bottom of the matter.</p> +<p>Strangeness? Romance? Did any of you ever read—if +you have not you should read—Archbishop Whately’s “Historic +Doubts about the Emperor Napoleon the First”? Therein the +learned and witty Archbishop proved, as early as 1819, by fair use of +the criticism of Mr. Hume and the Sceptic School, that the whole history +of the great Napoleon ought to be treated by wise men as a myth and +a romance, that there is little or no evidence of his having existed +at all; and that the story of his strange successes and strange defeats +was probably invented by our Government in order to pander to the vanity +of the English nation.</p> +<p>I will say this, which Archbishop Whately, in a late edition, foreshadows, +wittily enough—that if one or two thousand years hence, when the +history of the late Emperor Napoleon the Third, his rise and fall, shall +come to be subjected to critical analysis by future Philistine historians +of New Zealand or Australia, it will be proved by them to be utterly +mythical, incredible, monstrous—and that all the more, the more +the actual facts remain to puzzle their unimaginative brains. +What will they make two thousand years hence, of the landing at Boulogne +with the tame eagle? Will not that, and stranger facts still, +but just as true, be relegated to the region of myth, with the dream +of Astyages, and the young and princely herdsman playing at king over +his fellow-slaves?</p> +<p>But enough of this. To me these bits of romance often seem +the truest, as well as the most important portions of history.</p> +<p>When old Herodotus tells me how, King Astyages having guarded the +frontier, Harpagus sent a hunter to young Cyrus with a fresh-killed +hare, telling him to open it in private; and how, sewn up in it was +the letter, telling him that the time to rebel was come, I am inclined +to say, That must be true. It is so beneath the dignity of history, +so quaint and unexpected, that it is all the more likely <i>not</i> +to have been invented.</p> +<p>So with that other story—How young Cyrus, giving out that his +grandfather had made him general of the Persians, summoned them all, +each man with a sickle in his hand, into a prairie full of thorns, and +bade them clear it in one day; and how when they, like loyal men, had +finished, he bade them bathe, and next day he took them into a great +meadow and feasted them with corn and wine, and all that his father’s +farm would yield, and asked them which day they liked best; and, when +they answered as was to be expected, how he opened his parable and told +them, “Choose, then, to work for the Persians like slaves, or +to be free with me.”</p> +<p>Such a tale sounds to me true. It has the very savour of the +parables of the Old Testament; as have, surely, the dreams of the old +Sultan, with which the tale begins. Do they not put us in mind +of the dreams of Nebuchadnezzar, in the Book of Daniel?</p> +<p>Such stories are actually so beautiful that they are very likely +to be true. Understand me, I only say likely; the ditch-water +view of history is not all wrong. Its advocates are right in saying +great historic changes are not produced simply by one great person, +by one remarkable event. They have been preparing, perhaps for +centuries. They are the result of numberless forces, acting according +to laws, which might have been foreseen, and will be foreseen, when +the science of History is more perfectly understood.</p> +<p>For instance, Cyrus could not have conquered the Median Empire at +a single blow, if first that empire had not been utterly rotten; and +next, if he and his handful of Persians had not been tempered and sharpened, +by long hardihood, to the finest cutting edge.</p> +<p>Yes, there were all the materials for the catastrophe—the cannon, +the powder, the shot. But to say that the Persians must have conquered +the Medes, even if Cyrus had never lived, is to say, as too many philosophers +seem to me to say, that, given cannon, powder, and shot, it will fire +itself off some day if we only leave it alone long enough.</p> +<p>It may be so. But our usual experience of Nature and Fact is, +that spontaneous combustion is a rare and exceptional phenomenon; that +if a cannon is to be fired, someone must arise and pull the trigger. +And I believe that in Society and Politics, when a great event is ready +to be done, someone must come and do it—do it, perhaps, half unwittingly, +by some single rash act—like that first fatal shot fired by an +electric spark.</p> +<p>But to return to Cyrus and his Persians.</p> +<p>I know not whether the “Cyropædia” is much read +in your schools and universities. But it is one of the books which +I should like to see, either in a translation or its own exquisite Greek, +in the hands of every young man. It is not all fact. It +is but a historic romance. But it is better than history. +It is an ideal book, like Sidney’s “Arcadia” or Spenser’s +“Fairy Queen”—the ideal self-education of an ideal +hero. And the moral of the book—ponder it well, all young +men who have the chance or the hope of exercising authority among your +follow-men—the noble and most Christian moral of that heathen +book is this: that the path to solid and beneficent influence over our +fellow-men lies, not through brute force, not through cupidity, but +through the highest morality; through justice, truthfulness, humanity, +self-denial, modesty, courtesy, and all which makes man or woman lovely +in the eyes of mortals or of God.</p> +<p>Yes, the “Cyropædia” is a noble book, about a noble +personage. But I cannot forget that there are nobler words by +far concerning that same noble personage, in the magnificent series +of Hebrew Lyrics, which begins “Comfort ye, comfort ye, my people, +saith the Lord”—in which the inspired poet, watching the +rise of Cyrus and his Puritans, and the fall of Babylon, and the idolatries +of the East, and the coming deliverance of his own countrymen, speaks +of the Persian hero in words so grand that they have been often enough +applied, and with all fitness, to one greater than Cyrus, and than all +men:</p> +<blockquote><p>Who raised up the righteous man from the East,<br /> +And called him to attend his steps?<br /> +Who subdued nations at his presence,<br /> +And gave him dominion over kings?<br /> +And made them like the dust before his sword,<br /> +And the driven stubble before his bow?<br /> +He pursueth them, he passeth in safety,<br /> +By a way never trodden before by his feet.<br /> +Who hath performed and made these things,<br /> +Calling the generations from the beginning?<br /> +I, Jehovah, the first and the last, I am the same.</p> +<p>Behold my servant, whom I will uphold;<br /> +My chosen, in whom my soul delighteth;<br /> +I will make my spirit rest upon him,<br /> +And he shall publish judgment to the nations.<br /> +He shall not cry aloud, nor clamour,<br /> +Nor cause his voice to be heard in the streets.<br /> +The bruised reed he shall not break,<br /> +And the smoking flax he shall not quench.<br /> +He shall publish justice, and establish it.<br /> +His force shall not be abated, nor broken,<br /> +Until he has firmly seated justice in the earth,<br /> +And the distant nations shall wait for his Law.<br /> +Thus saith the God, even Jehovah,<br /> +Who created the heavens, and stretched them out;<br /> +Who spread abroad the earth, and its produce:<br /> +I, Jehovah, have called thee for a righteous end,<br /> +And I will take hold of thy hand, and preserve thee,<br /> +And I will give thee for a covenant to the people,<br /> +And for a light to the nations;<br /> +To open the eyes of the blind,<br /> +To bring the captives out of prison,<br /> +And from the dungeon those who dwell in darkness.<br /> +I am Jehovah—that is my name;<br /> +And my glory will I not give to another,<br /> +Nor my praise to the graven idols.</p> +<p>Who saith to Cyrus—Thou art my shepherd,<br /> +And he shall fulfil all my pleasure:<br /> +Who saith to Jerusalem—Thou shalt be built;<br /> +And to the Temple—Thou shalt be founded.<br /> +Thus saith Jehovah to his anointed,<br /> +To Cyrus whom I hold fast by his right hand,<br /> +That I may subdue nations under him,<br /> +And loose the loins of kings;<br /> +That I may open before him the two-leaved doors,<br /> +And the gates shall not be shut;<br /> +I will go before thee<br /> +And bring the mountains low.<br /> +The gates of brass will I break in sunder,<br /> +And the bars of iron hew down.<br /> +And I will give thee the treasures of darkness,<br /> +And the hoards hid deep in secret places,<br /> +That thou mayest know that I am Jehovah.<br /> +I have surnamed thee, though thou knowest not me.<br /> +I am Jehovah, and none else;<br /> +Beside me there is no God.<br /> +I will gird thee, though thou hast not known me,<br /> +That they may know from the rising of the sun,<br /> +And from the west, that there is none beside me;<br /> +I am Jehovah, and none else;<br /> +Forming light and creating darkness;<br /> +Forming peace, and creating evil.<br /> +I, Jehovah, make all these.</p> +</blockquote> +<p>This is the Hebrew prophet’s conception of the great Puritan +of the Old World who went forth with such a commission as this, to destroy +the idols of the East, while</p> +<blockquote><p>The isles saw that, and feared,<br /> +And the ends of the earth were afraid;<br /> +They drew near, they came together;<br /> +Everyone helped his neighbour,<br /> +And said to his brother, Be of good courage.</p> +<p>The carver encouraged the smith,<br /> +He that smoothed with the hammer<br /> +Him that smote on the anvil;<br /> +Saying of the solder, It is good;<br /> +And fixing the idol with nails, lest it be moved;</p> +</blockquote> +<p>But all in vain; for as the poet goes on:</p> +<blockquote><p>Bel bowed down, and Nebo stooped;<br /> +Their idols were upon the cattle,<br /> +A burden to the weary beast.<br /> +They stoop, they bow down together;<br /> +They could not deliver their own charge;<br /> +Themselves are gone into captivity.</p> +</blockquote> +<p>And what, to return, what was the end of the great Cyrus and of his +empire?</p> +<p>Alas, alas! as with all human glory, the end was not as the beginning.</p> +<p>We are scarce bound to believe positively the story how Cyrus made +one war too many, and was cut off in the Scythian deserts, falling before +the arrows of mere savages; and how their queen, Tomyris, poured blood +down the throat of the dead corpse, with the words, “Glut thyself +with the gore for which thou hast thirsted.” But it may +be true—for Xenophon states it expressly, and with detail—that +Cyrus, from the very time of his triumph, became an Eastern despot, +a sultan or a shah, living apart from his people in mysterious splendour, +in the vast fortified palace which he built for himself; and imitating +and causing his nobles and satraps to imitate, in all but vice and effeminacy, +the very Medes whom he had conquered. And of this there is no +doubt—that his sons and their empire ran rapidly through that +same vicious circle of corruption to which all despotisms are doomed, +and became within 250 years, even as the Medes, the Chaldeans, the Lydians, +whom they had conquered, children no longer of Ahura Mazda, but of Ahriman, +of darkness and not of light, to be conquered by Alexander and his Greeks +even more rapidly and more shamefully than they had conquered the East.</p> +<p>This is the short epic of the Persian Empire, ending, alas! as all +human epics are wont to end, sadly, if not shamefully.</p> +<p>But let me ask you, Did I say too much, when I said, that to these +Persians we owe that we are here to-night?</p> +<p>I do not say that without them we should not have been here. +God, I presume, when He is minded to do anything, has more than one +way of doing it.</p> +<p>But that we are now the last link in a chain of causes and effects +which reaches as far back as the emigration of the Persians southward +from the plateau of Pamir, we cannot doubt.</p> +<p>For see. By the fall of Babylon and its empire the Jews were +freed from their captivity—large numbers of them at least—and +sent home to their own Jerusalem. What motives prompted Cyrus, +and Darius after him, to do that deed?</p> +<p>Those who like to impute the lowest motives may say, if they will, +that Daniel and the later Isaiah found it politic to worship the rising +sun, and flatter the Persian conquerors: and that Cyrus and Darius in +turn were glad to see Jerusalem rebuilt, as an impregnable frontier +fortress between them and Egypt. Be it so; I, who wish to talk +of things noble, pure, lovely, and of good report, would rather point +you once more to the magnificent poetry of the later Isaiah which commences +at the 40th chapter of the Book of Isaiah, and say—There, upon +the very face of the document, stands written the fact that the sympathy +between the faithful Persian and the faithful Jew—the two puritans +of the Old World, the two haters of lies, idolatries, superstitions, +was actually as intense as it ought to have been, as it must have been.</p> +<p>Be that as it may, the return of the Jews to Jerusalem preserved +for us the Old Testament, while it restored to them a national centre, +a sacred city, like that of Delphi to the Greeks, Rome to the Romans, +Mecca to the Muslim, loyalty to which prevented their being utterly +absorbed by the more civilised Eastern races among whom they had been +scattered abroad as colonies of captives.</p> +<p>Then another, and a seemingly needful link of cause and effect ensued: +Alexander of Macedon destroyed the Persian Empire, and the East became +Greek, and Alexandria, rather than Jerusalem, became the head-quarters +of Jewish learning. But for that very cause, the Scriptures were +not left inaccessible to the mass of mankind, like the old Pehlevi liturgies +of the Zend-avesta, or the old Sanscrit Vedas, in an obsolete and hieratic +tongue, but were translated into, and continued in, the then all but +world-wide Hellenic speech, which was to the ancient world what French +is to the modern.</p> +<p>Then the East became Roman, without losing its Greek speech. +And under the wide domination of that later Roman Empire—which +had subdued and organised the whole known world, save the Parthian descendants +of those old Persians, and our old Teutonic forefathers in their German +forests and on their Scandinavian shores—that Divine book was +carried far and wide, East and West, and South, from the heart of Abyssinia +to the mountains of Armenia, and to the isles of the ocean, beyond Britain +itself to Ireland and to the Hebrides.</p> +<p>And that book—so strangely coinciding with the old creed of +the earlier Persians—that book, long misunderstood, long overlain +by the dust, and overgrown by the parasitic fungi of centuries, that +book it was which sent to these trans-Atlantic shores the founders of +your great nation. That book gave them their instinct of Freedom, +tempered by reverence for Law. That book gave them their hatred +of idolatry; and made them not only say but act upon their own words, +with these old Persians and with the Jewish prophets alike, Sacrifice +and burnt offering thou wouldst not; Then said we, Lo, we come. +In the volume of the book it is written of us, that we come to do thy +will, O God. Yes, long and fantastic is the chain of causes and +effects, which links you here to the old heroes who came down from Central +Asia, because the land had grown so wondrous cold, that there were ten +months of winter to two of summer; and when simply after warmth and +life, and food for them and for their flocks, they wandered forth to +found and help to found a spiritual kingdom.</p> +<p>And even in their migration, far back in these dim and mystic ages, +have we found the earliest link of the long chain? Not so. +What if the legend of the change of climate be the dim recollection +of an enormous physical fact? What if it, and the gradual depopulation +of the whole north of Asia, be owing, as geologists now suspect, to +the slow and age-long uprise of the whole of Siberia, thrusting the +warm Arctic sea farther and farther to the northward, and placing between +it and the Highlands of Thibet an ever-increasing breadth of icy land, +destroying animals, and driving whole races southward, in search of +the summer and the sun?</p> +<p>What if the first link in the chain, as yet conceivable by man, should +be the cosmic changes in the distribution of land and water, which filled +the mouths of the Siberian rivers with frozen carcases of woolly mammoth +and rhinoceros; and those again, doubt it not, of other revolutions, +reaching back and back, and on and on, into the infinite unknown? +Why not? For so are all human destinies</p> +<blockquote><p>Bound with gold chains unto the throne of God.</p> +</blockquote> +<h2>ANCIENT CIVILISATION <a name="citation5"></a><a href="#footnote5">{5}</a> +<a name="citation6"></a><a href="#footnote6">{6}</a></h2> +<p>There is a theory abroad in the world just now about the origin of +the human race, which has so many patent and powerful physiological +facts to support it that we must not lightly say that it is absurd or +impossible; and that is, that man’s mortal body and brain were +derived from some animal and ape-like creature. Of that I am not +going to speak now. My subject is: How this creature called man, +from whatever source derived, became civilised, rational, and moral. +And I am sorry to say that there is tacked on by many to the first theory, +another which does not follow from it, and which has really nothing +to do with it, and it is this: That man, with all his wonderful and +mysterious aspirations, always unfulfilled yet always precious, at once +his torment and his joy, his very hope of everlasting life; that man, +I say, developed himself, unassisted, out of a state of primæval +brutishness, simply by calculations of pleasure and pain, by observing +what actions would pay in the long run and what would not; and so learnt +to conquer his selfishness by a more refined and extended selfishness, +and exchanged his brutality for worldliness, and then, in a few instances, +his worldliness for next-worldliness. I hope I need not say that +I do not believe this theory. If I did, I could not be a Christian, +I think, nor a philosopher either. At least, if I thought that +human civilisation had sprung from such a dunghill as that, I should, +in honour to my race, say nothing about it, here or elsewhere.</p> +<p>Why talk of the shame of our ancestors? I want to talk of their +honour and glory. I want to talk, if I talk at all, about great +times, about noble epochs, noble movements, noble deeds, and noble folk; +about times in which the human race—it may be through many mistakes, +alas! and sin, and sorrow, and blood-shed—struggled up one step +higher on those great stairs which, as we hope, lead upward towards +the far-off city of God; the perfect polity, the perfect civilisation, +the perfect religion, which is eternal in the heavens.</p> +<p>Of great men, then, and noble deeds I want to speak. I am bound +to do so first, in courtesy to my hearers. For in choosing such +a subject I took for granted a nobleness and greatness of mind in them +which can appreciate and enjoy the contemplation of that which is lofty +and heroic, and that which is useful indeed, though not to the purses +merely or the mouths of men, but to their intellects and spirits; that +highest philosophy which, though she can (as has been sneeringly said +of her) bake no bread, she—and she alone, can at least do this—make +men worthy to eat the bread which God has given them.</p> +<p>I am bound to speak on such subjects, because I have never yet met, +or read of, the human company who did not require, now and then at least, +being reminded of such times and such personages—of whatsoever +things are just, pure, true, lovely, and of good report, if there be +any manhood and any praise to think, as St. Paul bids us all, of such +things, that we may keep up in our minds as much as possible a lofty +standard, a pure ideal, instead of sinking to the mere selfish standard +which judges all things, even those of the world to come, by profit +and by loss, and into that sordid frame of mind in which a man grows +to believe that the world is constructed of bricks and timber, and kept +going by the price of stocks.</p> +<p>We are all tempted, and the easier and more prosperous we are, the +more we are tempted, to fall into that sordid and shallow frame of mind. +Sordid even when its projects are most daring, its outward luxuries +most refined; and shallow, even when most acute, when priding itself +most on its knowledge of human nature, and of the secret springs which, +so it dreams, move the actions and make the history of nations and of +men. All are tempted that way, even the noblest-hearted. +<i>Adhæsit pavimento venter</i>, says the old psalmist. +I am growing like the snake, crawling in the dust, and eating the dust +in which I crawl. I try to lift up my eyes to the heavens, to +the true, the beautiful, the good, the eternal nobleness which was before +all time, and shall be still when time has passed away. But to +lift up myself is what I cannot do. Who will help me? Who +will quicken me? as our old English tongue has it. Who will give +me life? The true, pure, lofty human life which I did <i>not</i> +inherit from the primæval ape, which the ape-nature in me is for +ever trying to stifle, and make me that which I know too well I could +so easily become—a cunninger and more dainty-featured brute? +Death itself, which seems at times so fair, is fair because even it +may raise me up and deliver me from the burden of this animal and mortal +body:</p> +<blockquote><p>’Tis life, not death for which I pant;<br /> +’Tis life, whereof my nerves are scant;<br /> +More life, and fuller, that I want.</p> +</blockquote> +<p>Man? I am a man not by reason of my bones and muscles, nerves +and brain, which I have in common with apes and dogs and horses. +I am a man—thou art a man or woman—not because we have a +flesh—God forbid! but because there is a spirit in us, a divine +spark and ray, which nature did not give, and which nature cannot take +away. And therefore, while I live on earth, I will live to the +spirit, not to the flesh, that I may be, indeed, a <i>man</i>; and this +same gross flesh, this animal ape-nature in me, shall be the very element +in me which I will renounce, defy, despise; at least, if I am minded +to be, not a merely higher savage, but a truly higher civilised man. +Civilisation with me shall mean, not more wealth, more finery, more +self-indulgence—even more æsthetic and artistic luxury; +but more virtue, more knowledge, more self-control, even though I earn +scanty bread by heavy toil; and when I compare the Cæsar of Rome +or the great king, whether of Egypt, Babylon, or Persia, with the hermit +of the Thebaid, starving in his frock of camel’s hair, with his +soul fixed on the ineffable glories of the unseen, and striving, however +wildly and fantastically, to become an angel and not an ape, I will +say the hermit, and not the Cæsar, is the civilised man.</p> +<p>There are plenty of histories of civilisation and theories of civilisation +abroad in the world just now, and which profess to show you how the +primeval savage has, or at least may have, become the civilised man. +For my part, with all due and careful consideration, I confess I attach +very little value to any of them: and for this simple reason that we +have no facts. The facts are lost.</p> +<p>Of course, if you assume a proposition as certainly true, it is easy +enough to prove that proposition to be true, at least to your own satisfaction. +If you assert with the old proverb, that you may make a silk purse out +of a sow’s ear, you will be stupider than I dare suppose anyone +here to be, if you cannot invent for yourselves all the intermediate +stages of the transformation, however startling. And, indeed, +if modern philosophers had stuck more closely to this old proverb, and +its defining verb “make,” and tried to show how some person +or persons—let them be who they may—men, angels, or gods—made +the sow’s ear into the silk purse, and the savage into the sage—they +might have pleaded that they were still trying to keep their feet upon +the firm ground of actual experience. But while their theory is, +that the sow’s ear grew into a silk purse of itself, and yet unconsciously +and without any intention of so bettering itself in life, why, I think +that those who have studied the history which lies behind them, and +the poor human nature which is struggling, and sinning, and sorrowing, +and failing around them, and which seems on the greater part of this +planet going downwards and not upwards, and by no means bettering itself, +save in the increase of opera-houses, liquor-bars, and gambling-tables, +and that which pertaineth thereto; then we, I think, may be excused +if we say with the old Stoics—επεχω—I +withhold my judgment. I know nothing about the matter yet; and +you, oh my imaginative though learned friends, know I suspect very little +either.</p> +<blockquote><p>Eldest of things, Divine Equality:</p> +</blockquote> +<p>so sang poor Shelley, and with a certain truth. For if, as +I believe, the human race sprang from a single pair, there must have +been among their individual descendants an equality far greater than +any which has been known on earth during historic times. But that +equality was at best the infantile innocence of the primary race, which +faded away in the race as quickly, alas! as it does in the individual +child. Divine—therefore it was one of the first blessings +which man lost; one of the last, I fear, to which he will return; that +to which civilisation, even at its best yet known, has not yet attained, +save here and there for short periods; but towards which it is striving +as an ideal goal, and, as I trust, not in vain.</p> +<p>The eldest of things which we see actually as history is not equality, +but an already developed hideous inequality, trying to perpetuate itself, +and yet by a most divine and gracious law, destroying itself by the +very means which it uses to keep itself alive.</p> +<p>“There were giants in the earth in those days. And Nimrod +began to be a mighty one in the earth”—</p> +<blockquote><p>A mighty hunter; and his game was man.</p> +</blockquote> +<p>No; it is not equality which we see through the dim mist of bygone +ages.</p> +<p>What we do see is—I know not whether you will think me superstitious +or old-fashioned, but so I hold—very much what the earlier books +of the Bible show us under symbolic laws. Greek histories, Roman +histories, Egyptian histories, Eastern histories, inscriptions, national +epics, legends, fragments of legends—in the New World as in the +Old—all tell the same story. Not the story without an end, +but the story without a beginning. As in the Hindoo cosmogony, +the world stands on an elephant, and the elephant on a tortoise, and +the tortoise on—what? No man knows. I do not know. +I only assert deliberately, waiting, as Napoleon says, till the world +come round to me, that the tortoise does not stand—as is held +by certain anthropologists, some honoured by me, some personally dear +to me—upon the savages who chipped flints and fed on mammoth and +reindeer in North-Western Europe, shortly after the age of ice, a few +hundred thousand years ago. These sturdy little fellows—the +kinsmen probably of the Esquimaux and Lapps—could have been but +the <i>avant-couriers</i>, or more probably the fugitives from the true +mass of mankind—spreading northward from the Tropics into climes +becoming, after the long catastrophe of the age of ice, once more genial +enough to support men who knew what decent comfort was, and were strong +enough to get the same, by all means fair or foul. No. The +tortoise of the human race does not stand on a savage. The savage +may stand on an ape-like creature. I do not say that he does not. +I do not say that he does. I do not know; and no man knows. +But at least I say that the civilised man and his world stand not upon +creatures like to any savage now known upon the earth. For first, +it seems to be most unlikely; and next, and more important to an inductive +philosopher, there is no proof of it. I see no savages becoming +really civilised men—that is, not merely men who will ape the +outside of our so-called civilisation, even absorb a few of our ideas; +not merely that; but truly civilised men who will think for themselves, +invent for themselves, act for themselves; and when the sacred lamp +of light and truth has been passed into their hands, carry it on unextinguished, +and transmit it to their successors without running back every moment +to get it relighted by those from whom they received it: and who are +bound—remember that—patiently and lovingly to relight it +for them; to give freely to all their fellow-men of that which God has +given to them and to their ancestors; and let God, not man, be judge +of how much the Red Indian or the Polynesian, the Caffre or the Chinese, +is capable of receiving and of using.</p> +<p>Moreover, in history there is no record, absolutely no record, as +far as I am aware, of any savage tribe civilising itself. It is +a bold saying. I stand by my assertion: most happy to find myself +confuted, even in a single instance; for my being wrong would give me, +what I can have no objection to possess, a higher opinion than I have +now, of the unassisted capabilities of my fellow-men.</p> +<p>But civilisation must have begun somewhen, somewhere, with some person, +or some family, or some nation; and how did it begin?</p> +<p>I have said already that I do not know. But I have had my dream—like +the philosopher—and as I have not been ashamed to tell it elsewhere, +I shall not be ashamed to tell it here. And it is this:</p> +<p>What if the beginnings of true civilisation in this unique, abnormal, +diseased, unsatisfied, incomprehensible, and truly miraculous and supernatural +race we call man, had been literally, and in actual fact, miraculous +and supernatural likewise? What if that be the true key to the +mystery of humanity and its origin? What if the few first chapters +of the most ancient and most sacred book should point, under whatever +symbols, to the actual and the only possible origin of civilisation, +the education of a man, or a family by beings of some higher race than +man? What if the old Puritan doctrine of Election should be even +of a deeper and wider application than divines have been wont to think? +What if individuals, if peoples, have been chosen out from time to time +for a special illumination, that they might be the lights of the earth, +and the salt of the world? What if they have, each in their turn, +abused that divine teaching to make themselves the tyrants, instead +of the ministers, of the less enlightened? To increase the inequalities +of nature by their own selfishness, instead of decreasing them, into +the equality of grace, by their own self-sacrifice? What if the +Bible after all was right, and even more right than we were taught to +think?</p> +<p>So runs my dream. If, after I have confessed to it, you think +me still worth listening to, in this enlightened nineteenth century, +I will go on.</p> +<p>At all events, what we see at the beginning of all known and half-known +history, is not savagery, but high civilisation, at least of an outward +and material kind. Do you demur? Then recollect, I pray +you, that the three oldest peoples known to history on this planet are +Egypt, China, Hindostan. The first glimpses of the world are always +like those which the book of Genesis gives us; like those which your +own continent gives us. As it was 400 years ago in America, so +it was in North Africa and in Asia 4000 years ago, or 40,000 for aught +I know. Nay, if anyone should ask—And why not 400,000 years +ago, on Miocene continents long sunk beneath the Tropic sea? I +for one have no rejoinder save—We have no proofs as yet.</p> +<p>There loom up, out of the darkness of legend, into the as yet dim +dawn of history, what the old Arabs call Races of pre-Adamite Sultans—colossal +monarchies, with fixed and often elaborate laws, customs, creeds; with +aristocracies, priesthoods—seemingly always of a superior and +conquering race; with a mass of common folk, whether free or half-free, +composed of older conquered races; of imported slaves too, and their +descendants.</p> +<p>But whence comes the royal race, the aristocracy, the priesthood? +You inquire, and you find that they usually know not themselves. +They are usually—I had almost dared to say, always—foreigners. +They have crossed the neighbouring mountains. The have come by +sea, like Dido to Carthage, like Manco Cassae and Mama Belle to America, +and they have sometimes forgotten when. At least they are wiser, +stronger, fairer, than the aborigines. They are to them—as +Jacques Cartier was to the Indians of Canada—as gods. They +are not sure that they are not descended from gods. They are the +Children of the Sun, or what not. The children of light, who ray +out such light as they have, upon the darkness of their subjects. +They are at first, probably, civilisers, not conquerors. For, +if tradition is worth anything—and we have nothing else to go +upon—they are at first few in number. They come as settlers, +or even as single sages. It is, in all tradition, not the many +who influence the few, but the few who influence the many.</p> +<p>So aristocracies, in the true sense, are formed.</p> +<p>But the higher calling is soon forgotten. The purer light is +soon darkened in pride and selfishness, luxury and lust; as in Genesis, +the sons of God see the daughters of men, that they are fair; and they +take them wives of all that they choose. And so a mixed race springs +up and increases, without detriment at first to the commonwealth. +For, by a well-known law of heredity, the cross between two races, probably +far apart, produces at first a progeny possessing the forces, and, alas! +probably the vices of both. And when the sons of God go in to +the daughters of men, there are giants in the earth in those days, men +of renown. The Roman Empire, remember, was never stronger than +when the old Patrician blood had mingled itself with that of every nation +round the Mediterranean.</p> +<p>But it does not last. Selfishness, luxury, ferocity, spread +from above, as well as from below. The just aristocracy of virtue +and wisdom becomes an unjust one of mere power and privilege; that again, +one of mere wealth corrupting and corrupt; and is destroyed, not by +the people from below, but by the monarch from above. The hereditary +bondsmen may know</p> +<blockquote><p> Who would be free,<br /> +Himself must strike the blow.</p> +</blockquote> +<p>But they dare not, know not how. The king must do it for them. +He must become the State. “Better one tyrant,” as +Voltaire said, “than many.” Better stand in fear of +one lion far away, than of many wolves, each in the nearest wood. +And so arise those truly monstrous Eastern despotisms, of which modern +Persia is, thank God, the only remaining specimen; for Turkey and Egypt +are too amenable of late years to the influence of the free nations +to be counted as despotisms pure and simple—despotisms in which +men, instead of worshipping a God-man, worship the hideous counterfeit, +a Man-god—a poor human being endowed by public opinion with the +powers of deity, while he is the slave of all the weaknesses of humanity. +But such, as an historic fact, has been the last stage of every civilisation—even +that of Rome, which ripened itself upon this earth the last in ancient +times, and, I had almost said, until this very day, except among the +men who speak Teutonic tongues, and who have preserved through all temptations, +and reasserted through all dangers, the free ideas which have been our +sacred heritage ever since Tacitus beheld us, with respect and awe, +among our German forests, and saw in us the future masters of the Roman +Empire.</p> +<p>Yes, it is very sad, the past history of mankind. But shall +we despise those who went before us, and on whose accumulated labours +we now stand?</p> +<p>Shall we not reverence our spiritual ancestors? Shall we not +show our reverence by copying them, at least whenever, as in those old +Persians, we see in them manliness and truthfulness, hatred of idolatries, +and devotion to the God of light and life and good? And shall +we not feel pity, instead of contempt, for their ruder forms of government, +their ignorances, excesses, failures—so excusable in men who, +with little or no previous teaching, were trying to solve for themselves +for the first time the deepest social and political problems of humanity.</p> +<p>Yes, those old despotisms we trust are dead, and never to revive. +But their corpses are the corpses, not of our enemies, but of our friends +and predecessors, slain in the world-old fight of Ormuzd against Ahriman—light +against darkness, order against disorder. Confusedly they fought, +and sometimes ill: but their corpses piled the breach and filled the +trench for us, and over their corpses we step on to what should be to +us an easy victory—what may be to us, yet, a shameful ruin.</p> +<p>For if we be, as we are wont to boast, the salt of the earth and +the light of the world, what if the salt should lose its savour? +What if the light which is in us should become darkness? For myself, +when I look upon the responsibilities of the free nations of modern +times, so far from boasting of that liberty in which I delight—and +to keep which I freely, too, could die—I rather say, in fear and +trembling, God help us on whom He has laid so heavy a burden as to make +us free; responsible, each individual of us, not only to ourselves, +but to Him and all mankind. For if we fall we shall fall I know +not whither, and I dare not think.</p> +<p>How those old despotisms, the mighty empires of old time, fell, we +know, and we can easily explain. Corrupt, luxurious, effeminate, +eaten out by universal selfishness and mutual fear, they had at last +no organic coherence. The moral anarchy within showed through, +at last burst through, the painted skin of prescriptive order which +held them together. Some braver and abler, and usually more virtuous +people, often some little, hardy, homely mountain tribe, saw that the +fruit was ripe for gathering; and, caring naught for superior numbers—and +saying with German Alaric when the Romans boasted of their numbers, +“The thicker the hay the easier it is mowed”—struck +one brave blow at the huge inflated wind-bag—as Cyrus and his +handful of Persians struck at the Medes; as Alexander and his handful +of Greeks struck afterwards at the Persians—and behold, it collapsed +upon the spot. And then the victors took the place of the conquered; +and became in their turn an aristocracy, and then a despotism; and in +their turn rotted down and perished. And so the vicious circle +repeated itself, age after age, from Egypt and Assyria to Mexico and +Peru.</p> +<p>And therefore, we, free peoples as we are, have need to watch, and +sternly watch, ourselves. Equality of some kind or other is, as +I said, our natural and seemingly inevitable goal. But which equality? +For there are two—a true one and a false; a noble and a base; +a healthful and a ruinous. There is the truly divine equality, +and there is the brute equality of sheep and oxen, and of flies and +worms. There is the equality which is founded on mutual envy. +The equality which respects others, and the equality which asserts itself. +The equality which longs to raise all alike, and the equality which +desires to pull down all alike. The equality which says: Thou +art as good as I, and it may be better too, in the sight of God. +And the equality which says: I am as good as thou, and will therefore +see if I cannot master thee.</p> +<p>Side by side, in the heart of every free man, and every free people, +are the two instincts struggling for the mastery, called by the same +name, but bearing the same relation to each other as Marsyas to Apollo, +the Satyr to the God. Marsyas and Apollo, the base and the noble, +are, as in the old Greek legend, contending for the prize. And +the prize is no less a one than all free people of this planet.</p> +<p>In proportion as that nobler idea conquers, and men unite in the +equality of mutual respect and mutual service, they move one step farther +towards realising on earth that Kingdom of God of which it is written: +“The despots of the nations exercise dominion over them, and they +that exercise authority over them are called benefactors. But +he that will be great among you let him be the servant of all.”</p> +<p>And in proportion as that base idea conquers, and selfishness, not +self-sacrifice, is the ruling spirit of a State, men move on, one step +forward, towards realising that kingdom of the devil upon earth, “Every +man for himself and the devil take the hindmost.” Only, +alas! in that evil equality of envy and hate, there is no hindmost, +and the devil takes them all alike.</p> +<p>And so is a period of discontent, revolution, internecine anarchy, +followed by a tyranny endured, as in old Rome, by men once free, because +tyranny will at least do for them what they were too lazy and greedy +and envious to do for themselves.</p> +<blockquote><p>And all because they have forgot<br /> +What ’tis to be a man—to curb and spurn.<br /> +The tyrant in us: the ignobler self<br /> +Which boasts, not loathes, its likeness to the brute;<br /> +And owns no good save ease, no ill save pain,<br /> +No purpose, save its share in that wild war<br /> +In which, through countless ages, living things<br /> +Compete in internecine greed. Ah, loving God,<br /> +Are we as creeping things, which have no lord?<br /> +That we are brutes, great God, we know too well;<br /> +Apes daintier-featured; silly birds, who flaunt<br /> +Their plumes, unheeding of the fowler’s step;<br /> +Spiders, who catch with paper, not with webs;<br /> +Tigers, who slay with cannon and sharp steel,<br /> +Instead of teeth and claws:—all these we are.<br /> +Are we no more than these, save in degree?<br /> +Mere fools of nature, puppets of strong lusts,<br /> +Taking the sword, to perish by the sword<br /> +Upon the universal battle-field,<br /> +Even as the things upon the moor outside?</p> +<p> The heath eats up green grass and delicate herbs;<br /> +The pines eat up the heath; the grub the pine;<br /> +The finch the grub; the hawk the silly finch;<br /> +And man, the mightiest of all beasts of prey,<br /> +Eats what he lists. The strong eat up the weak;<br /> +The many eat the few; great nations, small;<br /> +And he who cometh in the name of all<br /> +Shall, greediest, triumph by the greed of all,<br /> +And, armed by his own victims, eat up all.<br /> +While ever out of the eternal heavens<br /> +Looks patient down the great magnanimous God,<br /> +Who, Master of all worlds, did sacrifice<br /> +All to Himself? Nay: but Himself to all;<br /> +Who taught mankind, on that first Christmas Day,<br /> +What ’tis to be a man—to give, not take;<br /> +To serve, not rule; to nourish, not devour;<br /> +To lift, not crush; if need, to die, not live.</p> +</blockquote> +<p>“He that cometh in the name of all”—the popular +military despot—the “saviour of his country”—he +is our internecine enemy on both sides of the Atlantic, whenever he +rises—the inaugurator of that Imperialism, that Cæsarism +into which Rome sank, when not her liberties merely, but her virtues, +were decaying out of her—the sink into which all wicked States, +whether republics or monarchies, are sure to fall, simply because men +must eat and drink for to-morrow they die. The Military and Bureaucratic +Despotism which keeps the many quiet, as in old Rome, by <i>panem et +circenses</i>—bread and games—or, if need be, Pilgrimages; +that the few may make money, eat, drink, and be merry, as long as it +can last. That, let it ape as it may—as did the Cæsars +of old Rome at first—as another Emperor did even in our own days—the +forms of dead freedom, really upholds an artificial luxury by brute +force; and consecrates the basest of all aristocracies, the aristocracy +of the money-bag, by the divine sanction of the bayonet.</p> +<p>That at all risks, even at the price of precious blood, the free +peoples of the earth must ward off from them; for, makeshift and stop-gap +as it is, it does not even succeed in what it tries to do. It +does not last. Have we not seen that it does not, cannot last? +How can it last? This falsehood, like all falsehoods, must collapse +at one touch of Ithuriel’s spear of truth and fact. And—</p> +<p>“Then saw I the end of these men. Namely, how Thou dost +set them in slippery places, and casteth them down. Suddenly do +they perish, and come to a fearful end. Yea, like as a dream when +one awaketh, so shalt Thou make their image to vanish out of the city.”</p> +<p>Have we not seen that too, though, thank God, neither in England +nor in the United States?</p> +<p>And then? What then? None knows, and none can know.</p> +<p>The future of France and Spain, the future of the Tropical Republics +of Spanish America, is utterly blank and dark; not to be prophesied, +I hold, by mortal man, simply because we have no like cases in the history +of the past whereby to judge the tendencies of the present. Will +they revive? Under the genial influences of free institutions +will the good seed which is in them take root downwards, and bear fruit +upwards? and make them all what that fair France has been, in spite +of all her faults, so often in past years—a joy and an inspiration +to all the nations round? Shall it be thus? God grant it +may; but He, and He alone, can tell. We only stand by, watching, +if we be wise, with pity and with fear, the working out of a tremendous +new social problem, which must affect the future of the whole civilised +world.</p> +<p>For if the agonising old nations fail to regenerate themselves, what +can befall? What, when even Imperialism has been tried and failed, +as fail it must? What but that lower depth within the lowest deep?</p> +<blockquote><p> That last dread mood<br /> +Of sated lust, and dull decrepitude.<br /> +No law, no art, no faith, no hope, no God.<br /> +When round the freezing founts of life in peevish ring,<br /> +Crouched on the bare-worn sod,<br /> +Babbling about the unreturning spring,<br /> +And whining for dead creeds, which cannot save,<br /> +The toothless nations shiver to their grave.</p> +</blockquote> +<p>And we, who think we stand, let us take heed lest we fall. +Let us accept, in modesty and in awe, the responsibility of our freedom, +and remember that that freedom can be preserved only in one old-fashioned +way. Let us remember that the one condition of a true democracy +is the same as the one condition of a true aristocracy, namely, virtue. +Let us teach our children, as grand old Lilly taught our forefathers +300 years ago—“It is virtue, gentlemen, yea, virtue that +maketh gentlemen; that maketh the poor rich, the subject a king, the +lowborn noble, the deformed beautiful. These things neither the +whirling wheel of fortune can overturn, nor the deceitful cavillings +of worldlings separate, neither sickness abate, nor age abolish.”</p> +<p>Yes. Let us teach our children thus on both sides of the Atlantic. +For if they—which God forbid—should grow corrupt and weak +by their own sins, there is no hardier race now left on earth to conquer +our descendants and bring them back to reason, as those old Jews were +brought by bitter shame and woe. And all that is before them and +the whole civilised world, would be long centuries of anarchy such as +the world has not seen for ages—a true Ragnarok, a twilight of +the very gods, an age such as the wise woman foretold in the old Voluspà.</p> +<blockquote><p>When brethren shall be<br /> +Each other’s bane,<br /> +And sisters’ sons rend<br /> +The ties of kin.<br /> +Hard will be that age,<br /> +An age of bad women,<br /> +An axe-age, a sword-age,<br /> +Shields oft cleft in twain,<br /> +A storm-age, a wolf-age,<br /> +Ere earth meet its doom.</p> +</blockquote> +<p>So sang, 2000 years ago, perhaps, the great unnamed prophetess, of +our own race, of what might be, if we should fail mankind and our own +calling and election.</p> +<p>God grant that day may never come. But God grant, also, that +if that day does come, then may come true also what that wise Vala sang, +of the day when gods, and men, and earth should be burnt up with fire.</p> +<blockquote><p>When slaked Surtur’s flame is,<br /> +Still the man and the maiden,<br /> +Hight Valour and Life,<br /> +Shall keep themselves hid<br /> +In the wood of remembrance.<br /> +The dew of the dawning<br /> +For food it shall serve them:<br /> +From them spring new peoples.</p> +</blockquote> +<p>New peoples. For after all is said, the ideal form of human +society is democracy.</p> +<p>A nation—and, were it even possible, a whole world—of +free men, lifting free foreheads to God and Nature; calling no man master—for +one is their master, even God; knowing and obeying their duties towards +the Maker of the Universe, and therefore to each other, and that not +from fear, nor calculation of profit or loss, but because they loved +and liked it, and had seen the beauty of righteousness and trust and +peace; because the law of God was in their hearts, and needing at last, +it may be, neither king nor priest, for each man and each woman, in +their place, were kings and priests to God. Such a nation—such +a society—what nobler conception of mortal existence can we form? +Would not that be, indeed, the kingdom of God come on earth?</p> +<p>And tell me not that that is impossible—too fair a dream to +be ever realised. All that makes it impossible is the selfishness, +passions, weaknesses, of those who would be blest were they masters +of themselves, and therefore of circumstances; who are miserable because, +not being masters of themselves, they try to master circumstance, to +pull down iron walls with weak and clumsy hands, and forget that he +who would be free from tyrants must first be free from his worst tyrant, +self.</p> +<p>But tell me not that the dream is impossible. It is so beautiful +that it must be true. If not now, nor centuries hence, yet still +hereafter. God would never, as I hold, have inspired man with +that rich imagination had He not meant to translate, some day, that +imagination into fact.</p> +<p>The very greatness of the idea, beyond what a single mind or generation +can grasp, will ensure failure on failure—follies, fanaticisms, +disappointments, even crimes, bloodshed, hasty furies, as of children +baulked of their holiday.</p> +<p>But it will be at last fulfilled, filled full, and perfected; not +perhaps here, or among our peoples, or any people which now exist on +earth: but in some future civilisation—it may be in far lands +beyond the sea—when all that you and we have made and done shall +be as the forest-grown mounds of the old nameless civilisers of the +Mississippi valley.</p> +<h2>RONDELET, <a name="citation7"></a><a href="#footnote7">{7}</a> THE +HUGUENOT NATURALIST <a name="citation8"></a><a href="#footnote8">{8}</a></h2> +<p>“Apollo, god of medicine, exiled from the rest of the earth, +was straying once across the Narbonnaise in Gaul, seeking to fix his +abode there. Driven from Asia, from Africa, and from the rest +of Europe, he wandered through all the towns of the province in search +of a place propitious for him and for his disciples. At last he +perceived a new city, constructed from the ruins of Maguelonne, of Lattes, +and of Substantion. He contemplated long its site, its aspect, +its neighbourhood, and resolved to establish on this hill of Montpellier +a temple for himself and his priests. All smiled on his desires. +By the genius of the soil, by the character of the inhabitants, no town +is more fit for the culture of letters, and above all of medicine. +What site is more delicious and more lovely? A heaven pure and +smiling; a city built with magnificence; men born for all the labours +of the intellect. All around vast horizons and enchanting sites—meadows, +vines, olives, green champaigns; mountains and hills, rivers, brooks, +lagoons, and the sea. Everywhere a luxuriant vegetation—everywhere +the richest production of the land and the water. Hail to thee +sweet and dear city! Hail, happy abode of Apollo, who spreadest +afar the light of the glory of thy name!”</p> +<p>“This fine tirade,” says Dr. Maurice Raynaud—from +whose charming book on the “Doctors of the Time of Molière” +I quote—“is not, as one might think, the translation of +a piece of poetry. It is simply part of a public oration by François +Fanchon, one of the most illustrious chancellors of the faculty of medicine +of Montpellier in the seventeenth century.” “From +time immemorial,” he says, “‘the faculty’ of +Montpellier had made itself remarkable by a singular mixture of the +sacred and the profane. The theses which were sustained there +began by an invocation to God, the Blessed Virgin, and St. Luke, and +ended by these words: ‘This thesis will be sustained in the sacred +Temple of Apollo.’”</p> +<p>But however extravagant Chancellor Fanchon’s praises of his +native city may seem, they are really not exaggerated. The Narbonnaise, +or Languedoc, is perhaps the most charming district of charming France. +In the far north-east gleam the white Alps; in the far south-west the +white Pyrenees; and from the purple glens and yellow downs of the Cevennes +on the north-west, the Herault slopes gently down towards the “Etangs,” +or great salt-water lagoons, and the vast alluvial flats of the Camargue, +the field of Caius Marius, where still run herds of half-wild horses, +descended from some ancient Roman stock; while beyond all glitters the +blue Mediterranean. The great almond orchards, each one sheet +of rose-colour in spring; the mulberry orchards, the oliveyards, the +vineyards, cover every foot of available upland soil: save where the +rugged and arid downs are sweet with a thousand odoriferous plants, +from which the bees extract the famous white honey of Narbonne. +The native flowers and shrubs, of a beauty and richness rather Eastern +than European, have made the “Flora Montpeliensis,” and +with it the names of Rondelet and his disciples, famous among botanists; +and the strange fish and shells upon its shores afforded Rondelet materials +for his immortal work upon the “Animals of the Sea.” +The innumerable wild fowl of the Benches du Rhône; the innumerable +songsters and other birds of passage, many of them unknown in these +islands, and even in the north of France itself, which haunt every copse +of willow and aspen along the brook-sides; the gaudy and curious insects +which thrive beneath that clear, fierce, and yet bracing sunlight; all +these have made the district of Montpellier a home prepared by Nature +for those who study and revere her.</p> +<p>Neither was Chancellor Fanchon misled by patriotism, when he said +the pleasant people who inhabit that district are fit for all the labours +of the intellect. They are a very mixed race, and, like most mixed +races, quick-witted, and handsome also. There is probably much +Roman blood among them, especially in the towns; for Languedoc, or Gallia +Narbonnensis, as it was called of old, was said to be more Roman than +Rome itself. The Roman remains are more perfect and more interesting—so +the late Dr. Whewell used to say—than any to be seen now in Italy; +and the old capital, Narbonne itself, was a complete museum of Roman +antiquities ere Francis I. destroyed it, in order to fortify the city +upon a modern system against the invading armies of Charles V. +There must be much Visigothic blood likewise in Languedoc: for the Visigothic +Kings held their courts there from the fifth century, until the time +that they were crushed by the invading Moors. Spanish blood, likewise, +there may be; for much of Languedoc was held in the early Middle Age +by those descendants of Eudes of Aquitaine who established themselves +as kings of Majorca and Arragon; and Languedoc did not become entirely +French till 1349, when Philip le Bel bought Montpellier of those potentates. +The Moors, too, may have left some traces of their race behind. +They held the country from about A.D. 713 to 758, when they were finally +expelled by Charles Martel and Eudes. One sees to this day their +towers of meagre stonework, perched on the grand Roman masonry of those +old amphitheatres, which they turned into fortresses. One may +see, too—so tradition holds—upon those very amphitheatres +the stains of the fires with which Charles Martel smoked them out; and +one may see, too, or fancy that one sees, in the aquiline features, +the bright black eyes, the lithe and graceful gestures, which are so +common in Languedoc, some touch of the old Mahommedan race, which passed +like a flood over that Christian land.</p> +<p>Whether or not the Moors left behind any traces of their blood, they +left behind, at least, traces of their learning; for the university +of Montpellier claimed to have been founded by Moors at a date of altogether +abysmal antiquity. They looked upon the Arabian physicians of +the Middle Age, on Avicenna and Averrhoes, as modern innovators, and +derived their parentage from certain mythic doctors of Cordova, who, +when the Moors were expelled from Spain in the eighth century, fled +to Montpellier, bringing with them traditions of that primæval +science which had been revealed to Adam while still in Paradise; and +founded Montpellier, the mother of all the universities in Europe. +Nay, some went farther still, and told of Bengessaus and Ferragius, +the physicians of Charlemagne, and of Marilephus, chief physician of +King Chilperic, and even—if a letter of St. Bernard’s was +to be believed—of a certain bishop who went as early as the second +century to consult the doctors of Montpellier; and it would have been +in vain to reply to them that in those days, and long after them, Montpellier +was not yet built. The facts are said to be: that as early as +the beginning of the thirteenth century Montpellier had its schools +of law, medicine, and arts, which were erected into a university by +Pope Nicholas IV. in 1289.</p> +<p>The university of Montpellier, like—I believe—most foreign +ones, resembled more a Scotch than an English university. The +students lived, for the most part, not in colleges, but in private lodgings, +and constituted a republic of their own, ruled by an abbé of +the scholars, one of themselves, chosen by universal suffrage. +A terror they were often to the respectable burghers, for they had all +the right to carry arms; and a plague likewise, for, if they ran in +debt, their creditors were forbidden to seize their books, which, with +their swords, were generally all the property they possessed. +If, moreover, anyone set up a noisy or unpleasant trade near their lodgings, +the scholars could compel the town authorities to turn him out. +They were most of them, probably, mere boys of from twelve to twenty, +living poorly, working hard, and—those at least of them who were +in the colleges—cruelly beaten daily, after the fashion of those +times; but they seem to have comforted themselves under their troubles +by a good deal of wild life out of school, by rambling into the country +on the festivals of the saints, and now and then by acting plays; notably, +that famous one which Rabelais wrote for them in 1531: “The moral +comedy of the man who had a dumb wife;” which “joyous <i>patelinage</i>” +remains unto this day in the shape of a well-known comic song. +That comedy young Rondelet must have seen acted. The son of a +druggist, spicer, and grocer—the three trades were then combined—in +Montpellier, and born in 1507, he had been destined for the cloister, +being a sickly lad. His uncle, one of the canons of Maguelonne, +near by, had even given him the revenues of a small chapel—a job +of nepotism which was common enough in those days. But his heart +was in science and medicine. He set off, still a mere boy, to +Paris to study there; and returned to Montpellier, at the age of eighteen, +to study again.</p> +<p>The next year, 1530, while still a scholar himself, he was appointed +procurator of the scholars—a post which brought him in a small +fee on each matriculation—and that year he took a fee, among others, +from one of the most remarkable men of that or of any age, François +Rabelais himself.</p> +<p>And what shall I say of him?—who stands alone, like Shakespeare, +in his generation; possessed of colossal learning—of all science +which could be gathered in his days—of practical and statesmanlike +wisdom—of knowledge of languages, ancient and modern, beyond all +his compeers—of eloquence, which when he speaks of pure and noble +things becomes heroic, and, as it were, inspired—of scorn for +meanness, hypocrisy, ignorance—of esteem, genuine and earnest, +for the Holy Scriptures, and for the more moderate of the Reformers +who were spreading the Scriptures in Europe,—and all this great +light wilfully hidden, not under a bushel, but under a dunghill. +He is somewhat like Socrates in face, and in character likewise; in +him, as in Socrates, the demigod and the satyr, the man and the ape, +are struggling for the mastery. In Socrates, the true man conquers, +and comes forth high and pure; in Rabelais, alas! the victor is the +ape, while the man himself sinks down in cynicism, sensuality, practical +jokes, foul talk. He returns to Paris, to live an idle, luxurious +life; to die—says the legend—saying, “I go to seek +a great perhaps,” and to leave behind him little save a school +of Pantagruelists—careless young gentlemen, whose ideal was to +laugh at everything, to believe in nothing, and to gratify their five +senses like the brutes which perish. There are those who read +his books to make them laugh; the wise man, when he reads them, will +be far more inclined to weep. Let any young man who may see these +words remember, that in him, as in Rabelais, the ape and the man are +struggling for the mastery. Let him take warning by the fate of +one who was to him as a giant to a pigmy; and think of Tennyson’s +words—</p> +<blockquote><p> Arise, and fly<br /> +The reeling faun, the sensual feast;<br /> +Strive upwards, working out the beast,<br /> +And let the ape and tiger die.</p> +</blockquote> +<p>But to return. Down among them there at Montpellier, like a +brilliant meteor, flashed this wonderful Rabelais, in the year 1530. +He had fled, some say, for his life. Like Erasmus, he had no mind +to be a martyr, and he had been terrified at the execution of poor Louis +de Berquin, his friend, and the friend of Erasmus likewise. This +Louis de Berquin, a man well known in those days, was a gallant young +gentleman and scholar, holding a place in the court of Francis I., who +had translated into French the works of Erasmus, Luther, and Melancthon, +and had asserted that it was heretical to invoke the Virgin Mary instead +of the Holy Spirit, or to call her our Hope and our Life, which titles—Berquin +averred—belonged alone to God. Twice had the doctors of +the Sorbonne, with that terrible persecutor, Noel Beda, at their head, +seized poor Berquin, and tried to burn his books and him; twice had +that angel in human form, Marguerite d’Angoulême, sister +of Francis I., saved him from their clutches; but when Francis—taken +prisoner at the battle of Pavia—at last returned from his captivity +in Spain, the suppression of heresy and the burning of heretics seemed +to him and to his mother, Louise of Savoy, a thank-offering so acceptable +to God, that Louis Berquin—who would not, in spite of the entreaties +of Erasmus, purchase his life by silence—was burnt at last on +the Place de Grêve, being first strangled, because he was of gentle +blood.</p> +<p>Montpellier received its famous guest joyfully. Rabelais was +now forty-two years old, and a distinguished savant; so they excused +him his three years’ undergraduate’s career, and invested +him at once with the red gown of the bachelors. That red gown—or, +rather, the ragged phantom of it—is still shown at Montpellier, +and must be worn by each bachelor when he takes his degree. Unfortunately, +antiquarians assure us that the precious garment has been renewed again +and again—the students having clipped bits of it away for relics, +and clipped as earnestly from the new gowns as their predecessors had +done from the authentic original.</p> +<p>Doubtless, the coming of such a man among them to lecture on the +Aphorisms of Hippocrates, and the Ars Parva of Galen, not from the Latin +translations then in use, but from original Greek texts, with comments +and corrections of his own, must have had a great influence on the minds +of the Montpellier students; and still more influence—and that +not altogether a good one—must Rabelais’s lighter talk have +had, as he lounged—so the story goes—in his dressing-gown +upon the public place, picking up quaint stories from the cattle-drivers +off the Cevennes, and the villagers who came in to sell their olives +and their grapes, their vinegar and their vine-twig faggots, as they +do unto this day. To him may be owing much of the sound respect +for natural science, and much, too, of the contempt for the superstition +around them, which is notable in that group of great naturalists who +were boys in Montpellier at that day. Rabelais seems to have liked +Rondelet, and no wonder: he was a cheery, lovable, honest little fellow, +very fond of jokes, a great musician and player on the violin, and who, +when he grew rich, liked nothing so well as to bring into his house +any buffoon or strolling-player to make fun for him. Vivacious +he was, hot-tempered, forgiving, and with a power of learning and a +power of work which were prodigious, even in those hard-working days. +Rabelais chaffs Rondelet, under the name of Rondibilis; for, indeed, +Rondelet grew up into a very round, fat, little man; but Rabelais puts +excellent sense into his mouth, cynical enough, and too cynical, but +both learned and humorous; and, if he laughs at him for being shocked +at the offer of a fee, and taking it, nevertheless, kindly enough, Rondelet +is not the first doctor who has done that, neither will he be the last.</p> +<p>Rondelet, in his turn, put on the red robe of the bachelor, and received, +on taking his degree, his due share of fisticuffs from his dearest friends, +according to the ancient custom of the University of Montpellier. +He then went off to practise medicine in a village at the foot of the +Alps, and, half-starved, to teach little children. Then he found +he must learn Greek; went off to Paris a second time, and alleviated +his poverty there somewhat by becoming tutor to a son of the Viscomte +de Turenne. There he met Gonthier of Andernach, who had taught +anatomy at Louvain to the great Vesalius, and learned from him to dissect. +We next find him setting up as a medical man amid the wild volcanic +hills of the Auvergne, struggling still with poverty, like Erasmus, +like George Buchanan, like almost every great scholar in those days; +for students then had to wander from place to place, generally on foot, +in search of new teachers, in search of books, in search of the necessaries +of life; undergoing such an amount of bodily and mental toil as makes +it wonderful that all of them did not—as some of them doubtless +did—die under the hard training, or, at best, desert the penurious +Muses for the paternal shop or plough.</p> +<p>Rondelet got his doctorate in 1537, and next year fell in love with +and married a beautiful young girl called Jeanne Sandre, who seems to +have been as poor as he.</p> +<p>But he had gained, meanwhile, a powerful patron; and the patronage +of the great was then as necessary to men of letters as the patronage +of the public is now. Guillaume Pellicier, Bishop of Maguelonne—or +rather then of Montpellier itself, whither he had persuaded Paul II. +to transfer the ancient see—was a model of the literary gentleman +of the sixteenth century; a savant, a diplomat, a collector of books +and manuscripts, Greek, Hebrew, and Syriac, which formed the original +nucleus of the present library of the Louvre; a botanist, too, who loved +to wander with Rondelet collecting plants and flowers. He retired +from public life to peace and science at Montpellier, when to the evil +days of his master, Francis I., succeeded the still worse days of Henry +II., and Diana of Poitiers. That Jezebel of France could conceive +no more natural or easy way of atoning for her own sins than that of +hunting down heretics, and feasting her wicked eyes—so it is said—upon +their dying torments. Bishop Pellicier fell under suspicion of +heresy: very probably with some justice. He fell, too, under suspicion +of leading a life unworthy of a celibate churchman, a fault which—if +it really existed—was, in those days, pardonable enough in an +orthodox prelate, but not so in one whose orthodoxy was suspected. +And for awhile Pellicier was in prison. After his release he gave +himself up to science, with Rondelet and the school of disciples who +were growing up around him. They rediscovered together the Garum, +that classic sauce, whose praises had been sung of old by Horace, Martial, +and Ausonius; and so child-like, superstitious if you will, was the +reverence in the sixteenth century for classic antiquity, that when +Pellicier and Rondelet discovered that the Garum was made from the fish +called Picarel—called Garon by the fishers of Antibes, and Giroli +at Venice, both these last names corruptions of the Latin Gerres—then +did the two fashionable poets of France, Étienne Dolet and Clement +Marot, think it not unworthy of their muse to sing the praises of the +sauce which Horace had sung of old. A proud day, too, was it for +Pellicier and Rondelet, when wandering somewhere in the marshes of the +Camargue, a scent of garlic caught the nostrils of the gentle bishop, +and in the lovely pink flowers of the water-germander he recognised +the Scordium of the ancients. “The discovery,” says +Professor Planchon, “made almost as much noise as that of the +famous Garum; for at that moment of naïve fervour on behalf of +antiquity, to re-discover a plant of Dioscorides or of Pliny was a good +fortune and almost an event.”</p> +<p>I know not whether, after his death, the good bishop’s bones +reposed beneath some gorgeous tomb, bedizened with the incongruous half-Pagan +statues of the Renaissance; but this at least is certain, that Rondelet’s +disciples imagined for him a monument more enduring than of marble or +of brass, more graceful and more curiously wrought than all the sculptures +of Torrigiano or Cellini, Baccio Bandinelli or Michael Angelo himself. +For they named a lovely little lilac snapdragon, <i>Linaria Domini Pellicerii</i>—“Lord +Pellicier’s toad-flax;” and that name it will keep, we may +believe, as long as winter and summer shall endure.</p> +<p>But to return. To this good Patron—who was the Ambassador +at Venice—the newly-married Rondelet determined to apply for employment; +and to Venice he would have gone, leaving his bride behind, had he not +been stayed by one of those angels who sometimes walk the earth in women’s +shape. Jeanne Sandre had an elder sister, Catharine, who had brought +her up. She was married to a wealthy man, but she had no children +of her own. For four years she and her good husband had let the +Rondelets lodge with them, and now she was a widow, and to part with +them was more than she could bear. She carried Rondelet off from +the students who were seeing him safe out of the city, brought him back, +settled on him the same day half her fortune, and soon after settled +on him the whole, on the sole condition that she should live with him +and her sister. For years afterwards she watched over the pretty +young wife and her two girls and three boys—the three boys, alas! +all died young—and over Rondelet himself, who, immersed in books +and experiments, was utterly careless about money; and was to them all +a mother—advising, guiding, managing, and regarded by Rondelet +with genuine gratitude as his guardian angel.</p> +<p>Honour and good fortune, in a worldly sense, now poured in upon the +druggist’s son. Pellicier, his own bishop, stood godfather +to his first-born daughter. Montluc, Bishop of Valence, and that +wise and learned statesman, the Cardinal of Tournon, stood godfathers +a few years later to his twin boys; and what was of still more solid +worth to him, Cardinal Tournon took him to Antwerp, Bordeaux, Bayonne, +and more than once to Rome; and in these Italian journeys of his he +collected many facts for the great work of his life, that “History +of Fishes” which he dedicated, naturally enough, to the cardinal. +This book with its plates is, for the time, a masterpiece of accuracy. +Those who are best acquainted with the subject say, that it is up to +the present day a key to the whole ichthyology of the Mediterranean. +Two other men, Belon and Salviani, were then at work on the same subject, +and published their books almost at the same time; a circumstance which +caused, as was natural, a three-cornered duel between the supporters +of the three naturalists, each party accusing the other of plagiarism. +The simple fact seems to be that the almost simultaneous appearance +of the three books in 1554-55 is one of those coincidences inevitable +at moments when many minds are stirred in the same direction by the +same great thoughts—coincidences which have happened in our own +day on questions of geology, biology, and astronomy; and which, when +the facts have been carefully examined, and the first flush of natural +jealousy has cooled down, have proved only that there were more wise +men than one in the world at the same time.</p> +<p>And this sixteenth century was an age in which the minds of men were +suddenly and strangely turned to examine the wonders of nature with +an earnestness, with a reverence, and therefore with an accuracy, with +which they had never been investigated before. “Nature,” +says Professor Planchon, “long veiled in mysticism and scholasticism, +was opening up infinite vistas. A new superstition, the exaggerated +worship of the ancients, was nearly hindering this movement of thought +towards facts. Nevertheless, Learning did her work. She +rediscovered, reconstructed, purified, commented on the texts of ancient +authors. Then came in observation, which showed that more was +to be seen in one blade of grass than in any page of Pliny. Rondelet +was in the middle of this crisis a man of transition, while he was one +of progress. He reflected the past; he opened and prepared the +future. If he commented on Dioscorides, if he remained faithful +to the theories of Galen, he founded in his ‘History of Fishes’ +a monument which our century respects. He is above all an inspirer, +an initiator; and if he wants one mark of the leader of a school, the +foundation of certain scientific doctrines, there is in his speech what +is better than all systems, the communicative power which urges a generation +of disciples along the path of independent research, with Reason for +guide, and Faith for aim.”</p> +<p>Around Rondelet, in those years, sometimes indeed in his house—for +professors in those days took private pupils as lodgers—worked +the group of botanists whom Linnæus calls “the Fathers,” +the authors of the descriptive botany of the sixteenth century. +Their names, and those of their disciples and their disciples again, +are household words in the mouth of every gardener, immortalised, like +good Bishop Pellicier, in the plants that have been named after them. +The Lobelia commemorates Lobel, one of Rondelet’s most famous +pupils, who wrote those “Adversaria” which contain so many +curious sketches of Rondelet’s botanical expeditions, and who +inherited his botanical (as Joubert his biographer inherited his anatomical) +manuscripts. The Magnolia commemorates the Magnols; the Sarracenia, +Sarrasin of Lyons; the Bauhinia, Jean Bauhin; the Fuchsia, Bauhin’s +earlier German master, Leonard Fuchs; and the Clusia—the received +name of that terrible “Matapalo” or “Scotch attorney,” +of the West Indies, which kills the hugest tree, to become as huge a +tree itself—immortalises the great Clusius, Charles de l’Escluse, +citizen of Arras, who, after studying civil law at Louvain, philosophy +at Marburg, and theology at Wittemberg under Melancthon, came to Montpellier +in 1551, to live in Rondelet’s own house, and become the greatest +botanist of his age.</p> +<p>These were Rondelet’s palmy days. He had got a theatre +of anatomy built at Montpellier, where he himself dissected publicly. +He had, says tradition, a little botanic garden, such as were springing +up then in several universities, specially in Italy. He had a +villa outside the city, whose tower, near the modern railway station, +still bears the name of the “Mas de Rondelet.” There, +too, may be seen the remnants of the great tanks, fed with water brought +through earthen pipes from the Fountain of Albe, wherein he kept the +fish whose habits he observed. Professor Planchon thinks that +he had salt-water tanks likewise; and thus he may have been the father +of all “Aquariums.” He had a large and handsome house +in the city itself, a large practice as physician in the country round; +money flowed in fast to him, and flowed out fast likewise. He +spent much upon building, pulling down, rebuilding, and sent the bills +in seemingly to his wife and to his guardian angel Catharine. +He himself had never a penny in his purse: but earned the money, and +let his ladies spend it; an equitable and pleasant division of labour +which most married men would do well to imitate. A generous, affectionate, +careless little man, he gave away, says his pupil and biographer, Joubert, +his valuable specimens to any savant who begged for them, or left them +about to be stolen by visitors, who, like too many collectors in all +ages, possessed light fingers and lighter consciences. So pacific +was he meanwhile, and so brave withal that even in the fearful years +of “The Troubles,” he would never carry sword, nor even +tuck or dagger: but went about on the most lonesome journeys as one +who wore a charmed life, secure in God and in his calling, which was +to heal, and not to kill.</p> +<p>These were the golden years of Rondelet’s life; but trouble +was coming on him, and a stormy sunset after a brilliant day. +He lost his sister-in-law, to whom he owed all his fortunes, and who +had watched ever since over him and his wife like a mother; then he +lost his wife herself under most painful circumstances; then his best-beloved +daughter. Then he married again, and lost the son who was born +to him; and then came, as to many of the best in those days, even sorer +trials, trials of the conscience, trials of faith.</p> +<p>For in the meantime Rondelet had become a Protestant, like many of +the wisest men round him; like, so it would seem from the event, the +majority of the university and the burghers of Montpellier. It +is not to be wondered at. Montpellier was a sort of halfway resting-place +for Protestant preachers, whether fugitive or not, who were passing +from Basle, Geneva, or Lyons, to Marguerite of Navarre’s little +Protestant court at Pan or at Nerac, where all wise and good men, and +now and then some foolish and fanatical ones, found shelter and hospitality. +Thither Calvin himself had been, passing probably through Montpellier +and leaving—as such a man was sure to leave—the mark of +his foot behind him. At Lyons, no great distance up the Rhone, +Marguerite had helped to establish an organised Protestant community; +and when in 1536 she herself had passed through Montpellier, to visit +her brother at Valence, and Montmorency’s camp at Avignon, she +took with her doubtless Protestant chaplains of her own, who spoke wise +words—it may be that she spoke wise words herself—to the +ardent and inquiring students of Montpellier. Moreover, Rondelet +and his disciples had been for years past in constant communication +with the Protestant savants of Switzerland and Germany, among whom the +knowledge of nature was progressing as it never had progressed before. +For—it is a fact always to be remembered—it was only in +the free air of Protestant countries the natural sciences could grow +and thrive. They sprung up, indeed, in Italy after the restoration +of Greek literature in the fifteenth century; but they withered there +again only too soon under the blighting upas shade of superstition. +Transplanted to the free air of Switzerland, of Germany, of Britain, +and of Montpellier, then half Protestant, they developed rapidly and +surely, simply because the air was free; to be checked again in France +by the return of superstition with despotism super-added, until the +eve of the great French Revolution.</p> +<p>So Rondelet had been for some years Protestant. He had hidden +in his house for a long while a monk who had left his monastery. +He had himself written theological treatises: but when his Bishop Pellicier +was imprisoned on a charge of heresy, Rondelet burnt his manuscripts, +and kept his opinions to himself. Still he was a suspected heretic, +at last seemingly a notorious one; for only the year before his death, +going to visit patients at Perpignan, he was waylaid by the Spaniards, +and had to get home through bypasses of the Pyrenees, to avoid being +thrown into the Inquisition.</p> +<p>And those were times in which it was necessary for a man to be careful, +unless he had made up his mind to be burned. For more than thirty +years of Rondelet’s life the burning had gone on in his neighbourhood; +intermittently it is true: the spasms of superstitious fury being succeeded, +one may charitably hope, by pity and remorse; but still the burnings +had gone on. The Benedictine monk of St. Maur, who writes the +history of Languedoc, says, quite <i>en passant</i>, how someone was +burnt at Toulouse in 1553, luckily only in effigy, for he had escaped +to Geneva: but he adds, “next year they burned several heretics,” +it being not worth while to mention their names. In 1556 they +burned alive at Toulouse Jean Escalle, a poor Franciscan monk, who had +found his order intolerable; while one Pierre de Lavaur, who dared preach +Calvinism in the streets of Nismes, was hanged and burnt. So had +the score of judicial murders been increasing year by year, till it +had to be, as all evil scores have to be in this world, paid off with +interest, and paid off especially against the ignorant and fanatic monks +who for a whole generation, in every university and school in France, +had been howling down sound science, as well as sound religion; and +at Montpellier in 1560-61, their debt was paid them in a very ugly way. +News came down to the hot southerners of Languedoc of the so-called +conspiracy of Amboise.—How the Duc de Guise and the Cardinal de +Lorraine had butchered the best blood in France under the pretence of +a treasonable plot; how the King of Navarre and the Prince de Condé +had been arrested; then how Condé and Coligny were ready to take +up arms at the head of all the Huguenots of France, and try to stop +this life-long torturing, by sharp shot and cold steel; then how in +six months’ time the king would assemble a general council to +settle the question between Catholics and Huguenots. The Huguenots, +guessing how that would end, resolved to settle the question for themselves. +They rose in one city after another, sacked the churches, destroyed +the images, put down by main force superstitious processions and dances; +and did many things only to be excused by the exasperation caused by +thirty years of cruelty. At Montpellier there was hard fighting, +murders—so say the Catholic historians—of priests and monks, +sack of the new cathedral, destruction of the noble convents which lay +in a ring round Montpellier. The city and the university were +in the hands of the Huguenots, and Montpellier became Protestant on +the spot.</p> +<p>Next year came the counter-blow. There were heavy battles with +the Catholics all round the neighbourhood, destruction of the suburbs, +threatened siege and sack, and years of misery and poverty for Montpellier +and all who were therein.</p> +<p>Horrible was the state of France in those times of the wars of religion +which began in 1562; the times which are spoken of usually as “The +Troubles,” as if men did not wish to allude to them too openly. +Then, and afterwards in the wars of the League, deeds were done for +which language has no name. The population decreased. The +land lay untilled. The fair face of France was blackened with +burnt homesteads and ruined towns. Ghastly corpses dangled in +rows upon the trees, or floated down the blood-stained streams. +Law and order were at an end. Bands of robbers prowled in open +day, and bands of wolves likewise. But all through the horrors +of the troubles we catch sight of the little fat doctor riding all unarmed +to see his patients throughout Languedoc; going vast distances, his +biographers say, by means of regular relays of horses, till he too broke +down. Well, for him, perhaps, that he broke down when he did; +for capture and recapture, massacre and pestilence, were the fate of +Montpellier and the surrounding country, till the better times of Henry +IV. and the Edict of Nantes in 1598, when liberty of worship was given +to the Protestants for awhile.</p> +<p>In the burning summer of 1566, Rondelet went a long journey to Toulouse, +seemingly upon an errand of charity, to settle some law affairs for +his relations. The sanitary state of the southern cities is bad +enough still. It must have been horrible in those days of barbarism +and misrule. Dysentery was epidemic at Toulouse then, and Rondelet +took it. He knew from the first that he should die. He was +worn out, it is said, by over-exertion; by sorrow for the miseries of +the land; by fruitless struggles to keep the peace, and to strive for +moderation in days when men were all immoderate. But he rode away +a day’s journey—he took two days over it, so weak he was—in +the blazing July sun, to a friend’s sick wife at Realmont, and +there took to his bed, and died a good man’s death. The +details of his death and last illness were written and published by +his cousin Claude Formy; and well worth reading they are to any man +who wishes to know how to die. Rondelet would have no tidings +of his illness sent to Montpellier. He was happy, he said, in +dying away from the tears of his household, and “safe from insult.” +He dreaded, one may suppose, lest priests and friars should force their +way to his bedside, and try to extort some recantation from the great +savant, the honour and glory of their city. So they sent for no +priest to Realmont; but round his bed a knot of Calvinist gentlemen +and ministers read the Scriptures, and sang David’s psalms, and +prayed; and Rondelet prayed with them through long agonies, and so went +home to God.</p> +<p>The Benedictine monk-historian of Languedoc, in all his voluminous +folios, never mentions, as far as I can find, Rondelet’s existence. +Why should he? The man was only a druggist’s son and a heretic, +who healed diseases, and collected plants, and wrote a book on fish. +But the learned men of Montpellier, and of all Europe, had a very different +opinion of him. His body was buried at Realmont; but before the +schools of Toulouse they set up a white marble slab, and an inscription +thereon setting forth his learning and his virtues; and epitaphs on +him were composed by the learned throughout Europe, not only in French +and Latin, but in Greek, Hebrew, and even Chaldee.</p> +<p>So lived and so died a noble man; more noble, to my mind, than many +a victorious warrior, or successful statesman, or canonised saint. +To know facts, and to heal diseases, were the two objects of his life. +For them he toiled, as few men have toiled; and he died in harness, +at his work—the best death any man can die.</p> +<h2>VESALIUS THE ANATOMIST <a name="citation9"></a><a href="#footnote9">{9}</a></h2> +<p>I cannot begin a sketch of the life of this great man better than +by trying to describe a scene so picturesque, so tragic in the eyes +of those who are wont to mourn over human follies, so comic in the eyes +of those who prefer to laugh over them, that the reader will not be +likely to forget either it or the actors in it.</p> +<p>It is a darkened chamber in the College of Alcala, in the year 1562, +where lies, probably in a huge four-post bed, shrouded in stifling hangings, +the heir-apparent of the greatest empire in the then world, Don Carlos, +only son of Philip II. and heir-apparent of Spain, the Netherlands, +and all the Indies. A short sickly boy of sixteen, with a bull +head, a crooked shoulder, a short leg, and a brutal temper, he will +not be missed by the world if he should die. His profligate career +seems to have brought its own punishment. To the scandal of his +father, who tolerated no one’s vices save his own, as well as +to the scandal of the university authorities of Alcala, he has been +scouring the streets at the head of the most profligate students, insulting +women, even ladies of rank, and amenable only to his lovely young stepmother, +Elizabeth of Valois, Isabel de la Paz, as the Spaniards call her, the +daughter of Catherine do Medicis, and sister of the King of France. +Don Carlos should have married her, had not his worthy father found +it more advantageous for the crown of Spain, as well as more pleasant +for him, Philip, to marry her himself. Whence came heart-burnings, +rage, jealousies, romances, calumnies, of which two last—in as +far at least as they concern poor Elizabeth—no wise man now believes +a word.</p> +<p>Going on some errand on which he had no business—there are +two stories, neither of them creditable nor necessary to repeat—Don +Carlos has fallen downstairs and broken his head. He comes, by +his Portuguese mother’s side, of a house deeply tainted with insanity; +and such an injury may have serious consequences. However, for +nine days the wound goes on well, and Don Carlos, having had a wholesome +fright, is, according to Doctor Olivarez, the <i>medico de camara</i>, +a very good lad, and lives on chicken broth and dried plums. But +on the tenth day comes on numbness of the left side, acute pains in +the head, and then gradually shivering, high fever, erysipelas. +His head and neck swell to an enormous size; then comes raging delirium, +then stupefaction, and Don Carlos lies as one dead.</p> +<p>A modern surgeon would, probably, thanks to that training of which +Vesalius may be almost called the father, have had little difficulty +in finding out what was the matter with the luckless lad, and little +difficulty in removing the evil, if it had not gone too far. But +the Spanish physicians were then, as many of them are said to be still, +as far behind the world in surgery as in other things; and indeed surgery +itself was then in its infancy, because men, ever since the early Greek +schools of Alexandria had died out, had been for centuries feeding their +minds with anything rather than with facts. Therefore the learned +morosophs who were gathered round Don Carlos’s sick bed had become +according to their own confession, utterly confused, terrified, and +at their wits’ end.</p> +<p>It is the 7th of May, the eighteenth day after the accident according +to Olivarez’s story: he and Dr Vega have been bleeding the unhappy +prince, enlarging the wound twice, and torturing him seemingly on mere +guesses. “I believe,” says Olivarez, “that all +was done well: but as I have said, in wounds in the head there are strange +labyrinths.” So on the 7th they stand round the bed in despair. +Don Garcia de Toledo, the prince’s faithful governor, is sitting +by him, worn out with sleepless nights, and trying to supply to the +poor boy that mother’s tenderness which he has never known. +Alva, too, is there, stern, self-compressed, most terrible, and yet +most beautiful. He has a God on earth, and that is Philip his +master; and though he has borne much from Don Carlos already, and will +have to bear more, yet the wretched lad is to him as a son of God, a +second deity, who will by right divine succeed to the inheritance of +the first; and he watches this lesser deity struggling between life +and death with an intensity of which we, in these less loyal days, can +form no notion. One would be glad to have a glimpse of what passed +through that mind, so subtle and so ruthless, so disciplined and so +loyal withal: but Alva was a man who was not given to speak his mind, +but to act it.</p> +<p>One would wish, too, for a glimpse of what was passing through the +mind of another man, who has been daily in that sick chamber, according +to Olivarez’s statement, since the first of the month: but he +is one who has had, for some years past, even more reason than Alva +for not speaking his mind. What he looked like we know well, for +Titian has painted him from the life—a tall, bold, well-dressed +man, with a noble brain, square and yet lofty, short curling locks and +beard, an eye which looks as though it feared neither man nor fiend—and +it has had good reason to fear both—and features which would be +exceeding handsome, but for the defiant snub-nose. That is Andreas +Vesalius, of Brussels, dreaded and hated by the doctors of the old school—suspect, +moreover, it would seem to inquisitors and theologians, possibly to +Alva himself; for he has dared to dissect human bodies; he has insulted +the mediævalists at Paris, Padua, Bologna, Pisa, Venice, in open +theatre; he has turned the heads of all the young surgeons in Italy +and France; he has written a great book, with prints in it, designed, +some say, by Titian—they were actually done by another Netherlander, +John of Calcar, near Cleves—in which he has dared to prove that +Galen’s anatomy was at fault throughout, and that he had been +describing a monkey’s inside when he had pretended to be describing +a man’s; and thus, by impudence and quackery, he has wormed himself—this +Netherlander, a heretic at heart, as all Netherlanders are, to God as +well as to Galen—into the confidence of the late Emperor Charles +V., and gone campaigning with him as one of his physicians, anatomising +human bodies even on the battle-field, and defacing the likeness of +Deity; and worse than that, the most religious King Philip is deceived +by him likewise, and keeps him in Madrid in wealth and honour; and now, +in the prince’s extreme danger, the king has actually sent for +him, and bidden him try his skill—a man who knows nothing save +about bones and muscles and the outside of the body, and is unworthy +the name of a true physician.</p> +<p>One can conceive the rage of the old Spanish pedants at the Netherlander’s +appearance, and still more at what followed, if we are to believe Hugo +Bloet of Delft, his countryman and contemporary. <a name="citation10"></a><a href="#footnote10">{10}</a> +Vesalius, he says, saw that the surgeons had bound up the wound so tight +that an abscess had formed outside the skull, which could not break: +he asserted that the only hope lay in opening it; and did so, Philip +having given leave, “by two cross-cuts. Then the lad returned +to himself, as if awakened from a profound sleep, affirming that he +owed his restoration to life to the German doctor.”</p> +<p>Dionysius Daza, who was there with the other physicians and surgeons, +tells a different story: “The most learned, famous, and rare Baron +Vesalius,” he says, advised that the skull should be trepanned; +but his advice was not followed.</p> +<p>Olivarez’s account agrees with that of Daza. They had +opened the wounds, he says, down to the skull before Vesalius came. +Vesalius insisted that the injury lay inside the skull, and wished to +pierce it. Olivarez spends much labour in proving that Vesalius +had “no great foundation for his opinion:” but confesses +that he never changed that opinion to the last, though all the Spanish +doctors were against him. Then on the 6th, he says, the Bachelor +Torres came from Madrid, and advised that the skull should be laid bare +once more; and on the 7th, there being still doubt whether the skull +was not injured, the operation was performed—by whom it is not +said—but without any good result, or, according to Olivarez, any +discovery, save that Vesalius was wrong, and the skull uninjured.</p> +<p>Whether this second operation of the 7th of May was performed by +Vesalius, and whether it was that of which Bloet speaks, is an open +question. Olivarez’s whole relation is apologetic, written +to justify himself and his seven Spanish colleagues, and to prove Vesalius +in the wrong. Public opinion, he confesses, had been very fierce +against him. The credit of Spanish medicine was at stake: and +we are not bound to believe implicitly a paper drawn up under such circumstances +for Philip’s eye. This, at least, we gather: that Don Carlos +was never trepanned, as is commonly said; and this, also, that whichever +of the two stories is true, equally puts Vesalius into direct, and most +unpleasant, antagonism to the Spanish doctors. <a name="citation11"></a><a href="#footnote11">{11}</a></p> +<p>But Don Carlos still lay senseless; and yielding to popular clamour, +the doctors called in the aid of a certain Moorish doctor, from Valencia, +named Priotarete, whose unguents, it was reported, had achieved many +miraculous cures. The unguent, however, to the horror of the doctors, +burned the skull till the bone was as black as the colour of ink; and +Olivarez declares he believes it to have been a preparation of pure +caustic. On the morning of the 9th of May, the Moor and his unguents +were sent away, “and went to Madrid, to send to heaven Hernando +de Vega, while the prince went back to our method of cure.”</p> +<p>Considering what happened on the morning of the 10th of May, we should +now presume that the second opening of the abscess, whether by Vesalius +or someone else, relieved the pressure on the brain; that a critical +period of exhaustion followed, probably prolonged by the Moor’s +premature caustic, which stopped the suppuration: but that God’s +good handiwork, called nature, triumphed at last; and that therefore +it came to pass that the prince was out of danger within three days +of the operation. But he was taught, it seems, to attribute his +recovery to a very different source from that of a German knife. +For on the morning of the 9th, when the Moor was gone, and Don Carlos +lay seemingly lifeless, there descended into his chamber a <i>Deus e +machinâ</i>, or rather a whole pantheon of greater or lesser deities, +who were to effect that which medical skill seemed not to have effected. +Philip sent into the prince’s chamber several of the precious +relics which he usually carried about with him. The miraculous +image of the Virgin of Atocha, in embroidering garments for whom, Spanish +royalty, male and female, has spent so many an hour ere now, was brought +in solemn procession and placed on an altar at the foot of the prince’s +bed; and in the afternoon there entered, with a procession likewise, +a shrine containing the bones of a holy anchorite, one Fray Diego, “whose +life and miracles,” says Olivarez, “are so notorious:” +and the bones of St. Justus and St. Pastor, the tutelar saints of the +university of Alcala. Amid solemn litanies the relics of Fray +Diego were laid upon the prince’s pillow, and the sudarium, or +mortuary cloth, which had covered his face, was placed upon the prince’s +forehead.</p> +<p>Modern science might object that the presence of so many personages, +however pious or well intentioned, in a sick chamber on a hot Spanish +May day, especially as the bath had been, for some generations past, +held in religious horror throughout Spain, as a sign of Moorish and +Mussulman tendencies, might have somewhat interfered with the chances +of the poor boy’s recovery. Nevertheless the event seems +to have satisfied Philip’s highest hopes; for that same night +(so Don Carlos afterwards related) the holy monk Diego appeared to him +in a vision, wearing the habit of St. Francis, and bearing in his hand +a cross of reeds tied with a green band. The prince stated that +he first took the apparition to be that of the blessed St. Francis; +but not seeing the stigmata, he exclaimed, “How? Dost thou +not bear the marks of the wounds?” What he replied Don Carlos +did not recollect; save that he consoled him, and told him that he should +not die of that malady.</p> +<p>Philip had returned to Madrid, and shut himself up in grief in the +great Jeronymite monastery. Elizabeth was praying for her step-son +before the miraculous images of the same city. During the night +of the 9th of May prayers went up for Don Carlos in all the churches +of Toledo, Alcala, and Madrid. Alva stood all that night at the +bed’s foot. Don Garcia de Toledo sat in the arm-chair, where +he had now sat night and day for more than a fortnight. The good +preceptor, Honorato Juan, afterwards Bishop of Osma, wrestled in prayer +for the lad the whole night through. His prayer was answered: +probably it had been answered already, without his being aware of it. +Be that as it may, about dawn Don Carlos’s heavy breathing ceased; +he fell into a quiet sleep; and when he awoke all perceived at once +that he was saved.</p> +<p>He did not recover his sight, seemingly on account of the erysipelas, +for a week more. He then opened his eyes upon the miraculous image +of Atocha, and vowed that, if he recovered, he would give to the Virgin, +at four different shrines in Spain, gold plate of four times his weight; +and silver plate of seven times his weight, when he should rise from +his couch. So on the 6th of June he rose, and was weighed in a +fur coat and a robe of damask, and his weight was three arrobas and +one pound—seventy-six pounds in all. On the 14th of June +he went to visit his father at the episcopal palace; then to all the +churches and shrines in Alcala, and of course to that of Fray Diego, +whose body it is said he contemplated for some time with edifying devotion. +The next year saw Fray Diego canonised as a saint, at the intercession +of Philip and his son; and thus Don Carlos re-entered the world, to +be a terror and a torment to all around him, and to die—not by +Philip’s cruelty, as his enemies reported too hastily indeed, +yet excusably, for they knew him to be capable of any wickedness—but +simply of constitutional insanity.</p> +<p>And now let us go back to the history of “that most learned, +famous, and rare Baron Vesalius,” who had stood by and seen all +these things done; and try if we cannot, after we have learned the history +of his early life, guess at some of his probable meditations on this +celebrated clinical case; and guess also how those meditations may have +affected seriously the events of his afterlife.</p> +<p>Vesalius (as I said) was a Netherlander, born at Brussels in 1513 +or 1514. His father and grandfather had been medical men of the +highest standing in a profession which then, as now, was commonly hereditary. +His real name was Wittag, an ancient family of Wesel, on the Rhine, +from which town either he or his father adopted the name of Vesalius, +according to the classicising fashion of those days. Young Vesalius +was sent to college at Louvain, where he learned rapidly. At sixteen +or seventeen he knew not only Latin, but Greek enough to correct the +proofs of Galen, and Arabic enough to become acquainted with the works +of the Mussulman physicians. He was a physicist too, and a mathematician, +according to the knowledge of those times; but his passion—the +study to which he was destined to devote his life—was anatomy.</p> +<p>Little or nothing (it must be understood) had been done in anatomy +since the days of Galen of Pergamos, in the second century after Christ, +and very little even by him. Dissection was all but forbidden +among the ancients. The Egyptians, Herodotus tells us, used to +pursue with stones and curses the embalmers as soon as they had performed +their unpleasant office; and though Herophilus and Erasistratus are +said to have dissected many subjects under the protection of Ptolemy +Soter in Alexandria itself: yet the public feeling of the Greeks as +well as of the Romans continued the same as that of the ancient Egyptians; +and Galen was fain—as Vesalius proved—to supplement his +ignorance of the human frame by describing that of an ape. Dissection +was equally forbidden among the Mussulmans; and the great Arabic physicians +could do no more than comment on Galen. The same prejudice extended +through the Middle Age. Medical men were all clerks, <i>clerici</i>, +and as such forbidden to shed blood. The only dissection, as far +as I am aware, made during the Middle Age was one by Mundinus in 1306; +and his subsequent commentaries on Galen—for he dare allow his +own eyes to see no more than Galen had seen before him—constituted +the best anatomical manual in Europe till the middle of the fifteenth +century.</p> +<p>Then, in Italy at least, the classic Renaissance gave fresh life +to anatomy as to all other sciences. Especially did the improvements +in painting and sculpture stir men up to a closer study of the human +frame. Leonardo da Vinci wrote a treatise on muscular anatomy. +The artist and the sculptor often worked together, and realised that +sketch of Michael Angelo’s in which he himself is assisting Fallopius, +Vesalius’s famous pupil, to dissect. Vesalius soon found +that his thirst for facts could not be slaked by the theories of the +Middle Age; so in 1530 he went off to Montpellier, where Francis I. +had just founded a medical school, and where the ancient laws of the +city allowed the faculty each year the body of a criminal. From +thence, after becoming the fellow-pupil and the friend of Rondelet, +and probably also of Rabelais and those other luminaries of Montpellier, +of whom I spoke in my essay on Rondelet, he returned to Paris to study +under old Sylvius, whose real name was Jacques Dubois, alias Jock o’ +the Wood; and to learn less—as he complains himself—in an +anatomical theatre than a butcher might learn in his shop.</p> +<p>Were it not that the whole question of dissection is one over which +it is right to draw a reverent veil, as a thing painful, however necessary +and however innocent, it would be easy to raise ghastly laughter in +many a reader by the stories which Vesalius himself tells of his struggles +to learn anatomy. How old Sylvius tried to demonstrate the human +frame from a bit of a dog, fumbling in vain for muscles which he could +not find, or which ought to have been there, according to Galen, and +were not; while young Vesalius, as soon as the old pedant’s back +was turned, took his place, and, to the delight of the students, found +for him—provided it were there—what he could not find himself;—how +he went body-snatching and gibbet-robbing, often at the danger of his +life, as when he and his friend were nearly torn to pieces by the cannibal +dogs who haunted the Butte de Montfaucon, or place of public execution;—how +he acquired, by a long and dangerous process, the only perfect skeleton +then in the world, and the hideous story of the robber to whom it had +belonged—all these horrors those who list may read for themselves +elsewhere. I hasten past them with this remark—that to have +gone through the toils, dangers, and disgusts which Vesalius faced, +argued in a superstitious and cruel age like his, no common physical +and moral courage, and a deep conscience that he was doing right, and +must do it at all risks in the face of a generation which, peculiarly +reckless of human life and human agony, allowed that frame which it +called the image of God to be tortured, maimed, desecrated in every +way while alive; and yet—straining at the gnat after having swallowed +the camel—forbade it to be examined when dead, though for the +purpose of alleviating the miseries of mankind.</p> +<p>The breaking out of war between Francis I. and Charles V. drove Vesalius +back to his native country and Louvain; and in 1535 we hear of him as +a surgeon in Charles V.’s army. He saw, most probably, the +Emperor’s invasion of Provence, and the disastrous retreat from +before Montmorency’s fortified camp at Avignon, through a country +in which that crafty general had destroyed every article of human food, +except the half-ripe grapes. He saw, perhaps, the Spanish soldiers, +poisoned alike by the sour fruit and by the blazing sun, falling in +hundreds along the white roads which led back into Savoy, murdered by +the peasantry whose homesteads had been destroyed, stifled by the weight +of their own armour, or desperately putting themselves, with their own +hands, out of a world which had become intolerable. Half the army +perished. Two thousand corpses lay festering between Aix and Fréjus +alone. If young Vesalius needed “subjects,” the ambition +and the crime of man found enough for him in those blazing September +days.</p> +<p>He went to Italy, probably with the remnants of the army. Where +could he have rather wished to find himself? He was at last in +the country where the human mind seemed to be growing young once more; +the country of revived arts, revived sciences, learning, languages; +and—though, alas! only for awhile of revived free thought, such +as Europe had not seen since the palmy days of Greece. Here at +least he would be appreciated; here at least he would be allowed to +think and speak: and he was appreciated. The Italian cities, who +were then, like the Athenians of old, “spending their time in +nothing else save to hear or to tell something new,” welcomed +the brave young Fleming and his novelties. Within two years he +was professor of anatomy at Padua, then the first school in the world; +then at Bologna and at Pisa at the same time; last of all at Venice, +where Titian painted that portrait of him which remains unto this day.</p> +<p>These years were for him a continual triumph; everywhere, as he demonstrated +on the human body, students crowded his theatre, or hung round him as +he walked the streets; professors left their own chairs—their +scholars having deserted them already—to go and listen humbly +or enviously to the man who could give them what all brave souls throughout +half Europe were craving for, and craving in vain—facts. +And so, year after year, was realised that scene which stands engraved +in the frontispiece of his great book—where, in the little quaint +Cinquecento theatre, saucy scholars, reverend doctors, gay gentlemen, +and even cowled monks, are crowding the floor, peeping over each other’s +shoulders, hanging on the balustrades; while in the centre, over his +“subject”—which one of those same cowled monks knew +but too well—stands young Vesalius, upright, proud, almost defiant, +as one who knows himself safe in the impregnable citadel of fact; and +in his hand the little blade of steel, destined—because wielded +in obedience to the laws of nature, which are the laws of God—to +work more benefit for the human race than all the swords which were +drawn in those days, or perhaps in any other, at the bidding of most +Catholic Emperors and most Christian Kings.</p> +<p>Those were indeed days of triumph for Vesalius; of triumph deserved, +because earned by patient and accurate toil in a good cause: but Vesalius, +being but a mortal man, may have contracted in those same days a temper +of imperiousness and self-conceit, such as he showed afterwards when +his pupil Fallopius dared to add fresh discoveries to those of his master. +And yet, in spite of all Vesalius knew, how little he knew! How +humbling to his pride it would have been had he known then—perhaps +he does know now—that he had actually again and again walked, +as it were, round and round the true theory of the circulation of the +blood, and yet never seen it; that that discovery which, once made, +is intelligible, as far as any phenomenon is intelligible, to the merest +peasant, was reserved for another century, and for one of those Englishmen +on whom Vesalius would have looked as semi-barbarians.</p> +<p>To make a long story short: three years after the publication of +his famous book, “De Corporis Humani Fabrica,” he left Venice +to cure Charles V., at Regensburg, and became one of the great Emperor’s +physicians.</p> +<p>This was the crisis of Vesalius’s life. The medicine +with which he had worked the cure was China—Sarsaparilla, as we +call it now—brought home from the then newly-discovered banks +of the Paraguay and Uruguay, where its beds of tangled vine, they say, +tinge the clear waters a dark-brown like that of peat, and convert whole +streams into a healthful and pleasant tonic. On the virtues of +this China (then supposed to be a root) Vesalius wrote a famous little +book, into which he contrived to interweave his opinions on things in +general, as good Bishop Berkeley did afterwards into his essay on the +virtues of tar-water. Into this book, however, Vesalius introduced—as +Bishop Berkeley did not—much, and perhaps too much, about himself; +and much, though perhaps not too much, about poor old Galen, and his +substitution of an ape’s inside for that of a human being. +The storm which had been long gathering burst upon him. The old +school, trembling for their time-honoured reign, bespattered, with all +that pedantry, ignorance, and envy could suggest, the man who dared +not only to revolutionise surgery, but to interfere with the privileged +mysteries of medicine; and, over and above, to become a greater favourite +at the court of the greatest of monarchs. While such as Eustachius, +himself an able discoverer, could join in the cry, it is no wonder if +a lower soul, like that of Sylvius, led it open-mouthed. He was +a mean, covetous, bad man, as George Bachanan well knew; and, according +to his nature, he wrote a furious book—“Ad Vesani calumnias +depulsandas.” The punning change of Vesalius into Vesanus +(madman) was but a fair and gentle stroke for a polemic, in days in +which those who could not kill their enemies with steel or powder, held +themselves justified in doing so, if possible, by vituperation, calumny, +and every engine of moral torture. But a far more terrible weapon, +and one which made Vesalius rage, and it may be for once in his life +tremble, was the charge of impiety and heresy. The Inquisition +was a very ugly place. It was very easy to get into it, especially +for a Netherlander: but not so easy to get out. Indeed Vesalius +must have trembled, when he saw his master, Charles V., himself take +fright, and actually call on the theologians of Salamanca to decide +whether it was lawful to dissect a human body. The monks, to their +honour, used their common sense, and answered Yes. The deed was +so plainly useful that it must be lawful likewise. But Vesalius +did not feel that he had triumphed. He dreaded, possibly, lest +the storm should only have blown over for a time. He fell, possibly, +into hasty disgust at the folly of mankind, and despair of arousing +them to use their common sense, and acknowledge their true interest +and their true benefactors. At all events, he threw into the fire—so +it is said—all his unpublished manuscripts, the records of long +years of observation, and renounced science thenceforth.</p> +<p>We hear of him after this at Brussels, and at Basle likewise—in +which latter city, in the company of physicians, naturalists, and Grecians, +he must have breathed awhile a freer air. But he seems to have +returned thence to his old master Charles V., and to have finally settled +at Madrid as a court surgeon to Philip II., who sent him, but too late, +to extract the lance splinters from the eye of the dying Henry II.</p> +<p>He was now married to a lady of rank from Brussels, Anne van Hamme +by name; and their daughter married in time Philip II.’s grand +falconer, who was doubtless a personage of no small social rank. +Vesalius was well off in worldly things; somewhat fond, it is said, +of good living and of luxury; inclined, it may be, to say, “Let +us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die,” and to sink more and +more into the mere worldling, unless some shock should awake him from +his lethargy.</p> +<p>And the awakening shock did come. After eight years of court +life, he resolved, early in the year 1564, to go on a pilgrimage to +Jerusalem.</p> +<p>The reasons for so strange a determination are wrapped in mystery +and contradiction. The common story was that he had opened a corpse +to ascertain the cause of death, and that, to the horror of the bystanders, +the heart was still seen to beat; that his enemies accused him to the +Inquisition, and that he was condemned to death, a sentence which was +commuted to that of going on pilgrimage. But here, at the very +outset, accounts differ. One says that the victim was a nobleman, +name not given; another that it was a lady’s maid, name not given. +It is most improbable, if not impossible, that Vesalius, of all men, +should have mistaken a living body for a dead one; while it is most +probable, on the other hand, that his medical enemies would gladly raise +such a calumny against him, when he was no longer in Spain to contradict +it. Meanwhile Llorente, the historian of the Inquisition, makes +no mention of Vesalius having been brought before its tribunal, while +he does mention Vesalius’s residence at Madrid. Another +story is, that he went abroad to escape the bad temper of his wife; +another that he wanted to enrich himself. Another story—and +that not an unlikely one—is, that he was jealous of the rising +reputation of his pupil Fallopius, then professor of anatomy at Venice. +This distinguished surgeon, as I said before, had written a book, in +which he added to Vesalius’s discoveries, and corrected certain +of his errors. Vesalius had answered him hastily and angrily, +quoting his anatomy from memory; for, as he himself complained, he could +not in Spain obtain a subject for dissection; not even, he said, a single +skull. He had sent his book to Venice to be published, and had +heard, seemingly, nothing of it. He may have felt that he was +falling behind in the race of science, and that it was impossible for +him to carry on his studies in Madrid; and so, angry with his own laziness +and luxury, he may have felt the old sacred fire flash up in him, and +have determined to go to Italy and become a student and a worker once +more.</p> +<p>The very day that he set out, Clusius of Arras, then probably the +best botanist in the world, arrived at Madrid; and, asking the reason +of Vesalius’s departure, was told by their fellow-countryman, +Charles de Tisnacq, procurator for the affairs of the Netherlands, that +Vesalius had gone of his own free will, and with all facilities which +Philip could grant him, in performance of a vow which he had made during +a dangerous illness. Here, at least, we have a drop of information, +which seems taken from the stream sufficiently near to the fountain-head: +but it must be recollected that De Tisnacq lived in dangerous times, +and may have found it necessary to walk warily in them; that through +him had been sent, only the year before, that famous letter from William +of Orange, Horn, and Egmont, the fate whereof may be read in Mr. Motley’s +fourth chapter; that the crisis of the Netherlands which sprung out +of that letter was coming fast; and that, as De Tisnacq was on friendly +terms with Egmont, he may have felt his head at times somewhat loose +on his shoulders; especially if he had heard Alva say, as he wrote, +“that every time he saw the despatches of those three señors, +they moved his choler so, that if he did not take much care to temper +it, he would seem a frenzied man.” In such times, De Tisnacq +may have thought good to return a diplomatic answer to a fellow-countryman +concerning a third fellow-countryman, especially when that countryman, +as a former pupil of Melancthon at Wittemberg, might himself be under +suspicion of heresy, and therefore of possible treason.</p> +<p>Be this as it may, one cannot but suspect some strain of truth in +the story about the Inquisition; for, whether or not Vesalius operated +on Don Carlos, he had seen with his own eyes that miraculous Virgin +of Atocha at the bed’s foot of the prince. He had heard +his recovery attributed, not to the operation, but to the intercession +of Fray, now Saint Diego; <a name="citation12"></a><a href="#footnote12">{12}</a> +and he must have had his thoughts thereon, and may, in an unguarded +moment, have spoken them.</p> +<p>For he was, be it always remembered, a Netherlander. The crisis +of his country was just at hand. Rebellion was inevitable, and, +with rebellion, horrors unutterable; and, meanwhile, Don Carlos had +set his mad brain on having the command of the Netherlands. In +his rage, at not having it, as all the world knows, he nearly killed +Alva with his own hands, some two years after. If it be true that +Don Carlos felt a debt of gratitude to Vesalius, he may (after his wont) +have poured out to him some wild confidence about the Netherlands, to +have even heard which would be a crime in Philip’s eyes. +And if this be but a fancy, still Vesalius was, as I just said, a Netherlander, +and one of a brain and a spirit to which Philip’s doings, and +the air of the Spanish court, must have been growing ever more and more +intolerable. Hundreds of his country folk, perhaps men and women +whom he had known, were being racked, burnt alive, buried alive, at +the bidding of a jocular ruffian, Peter Titelmann, the chief inquisitor. +The “day of the <i>maubrulez</i>,” and the wholesale massacre +which followed it, had happened but two years before; and, by all the +signs of the times, these murders and miseries were certain to increase. +And why were all these poor wretches suffering the extremity of horror, +but because they would not believe in miraculous images, and bones of +dead friars, and the rest of that science of unreason and unfact, against +which Vesalius had been fighting all his life, consciously or not, by +using reason and observing fact? What wonder if, in some burst +of noble indignation and just contempt, he forgot a moment that he had +sold his soul, and his love of science likewise, to be a luxurious, +yet uneasy, hanger-on at the tyrant’s court; and spoke unadvisedly +some word worthy of a German man?</p> +<p>As to the story of his unhappy quarrels with his wife, there may +be a grain of truth in it likewise. Vesalius’s religion +must have sat very lightly on him. The man who had robbed churchyards +and gibbets from his youth was not likely to be much afraid of apparitions +and demons. He had handled too many human bones to care much for +those of saints. He was probably, like his friends of Basle, Montpellier, +and Paris, somewhat of a heretic at heart, probably somewhat of a pagan, +while his lady, Anne van Hamme, was probably a strict Catholic, as her +father, being a councillor and master of the exchequer at Brussels, +was bound to be; and freethinking in the husband, crossed by superstition +in the wife, may have caused in them that wretched <i>vie à part</i>, +that want of any true communion of soul, too common to this day in Catholic +countries.</p> +<p>Be these things as they may—and the exact truth of them will +now be never known—Vesalius set out to Jerusalem in the spring +of 1564. On his way he visited his old friends at Venice to see +about his book against Fallopius. The Venetian republic received +the great philosopher with open arms. Fallopius was just dead; +and the senate offered their guest the vacant chair of anatomy. +He accepted it: but went on to the East.</p> +<p>He never occupied that chair; wrecked upon the Isle of Zante, as +he was sailing back from Palestine, he died miserably of fever and want, +as thousands of pilgrims returning from the Holy Land had died before +him. A goldsmith recognised him; buried him in a chapel of the +Virgin; and put up over him a simple stone, which remained till late +years; and may remain, for aught I know, even now.</p> +<p>So perished, in the prime of life, “a martyr to his love of +science,” to quote the words of M. Burggraeve of Ghent, his able +biographer and commentator, “the prodigious man, who created a +science at an epoch when everything was still an obstacle to his progress; +a man whose whole life was a long struggle of knowledge against ignorance, +of truth against lies.”</p> +<p>Plaudite: Exeat: with Rondelet and Buchanan. And whensoever +this poor foolish world needs three such men, may God of His great mercy +send them.</p> +<h2>PARACELSUS <a name="citation13"></a><a href="#footnote13">{13}</a></h2> +<p>I told you of Vesalius and Rondelet as specimens of the men who three +hundred years ago were founding the physical science of the present +day, by patient investigation of facts. But such an age as this +would naturally produce men of a very different stamp, men who could +not imitate their patience and humility; who were trying for royal roads +to knowledge, and to the fame and wealth which might be got out of knowledge; +who meddled with vain dreams about the occult sciences, alchemy, astrology, +magic, the cabala, and so forth, who were reputed magicians, courted +and feared for awhile, and then, too often, died sad deaths.</p> +<p>Such had been, in the century before, the famous Dr. Faust—Faustus, +who was said to have made a compact with Satan—actually one of +the inventors of printing—immortalised in Goethe’s marvellous +poem.</p> +<p>Such, in the first half of the sixteenth century, was Cornelius Agrippa—a +doctor of divinity and a knight-at-arms; secret-service diplomatist +to the Emperor Maximilian in Austria; astrologer, though unwilling, +to his daughter Margaret, Regent of the Low Countries; writer on the +occult sciences and of the famous “De Vanitate Scientiarum,” +and what not? who died miserably at the age of forty-nine, accused of +magic by the Dominican monks from whom he had rescued a poor girl, who +they were torturing on a charge of witchcraft; and by them hunted to +death; nor to death only, for they spread the fable—such as you +may find in Delrio the Jesuit’s “Disquisitions on Magic” +<a name="citation14"></a><a href="#footnote14">{14}</a>—that his +little pet black dog was a familiar spirit, as Butler has it in “Hudibras”:</p> +<blockquote><p>Agrippa kept a Stygian pug<br /> +I’ the garb and habit of a dog—<br /> +That was his taste; and the cur<br /> +Read to th’ occult philosopher,<br /> +And taught him subtly to maintain<br /> +All other sciences are vain.</p> +</blockquote> +<p>Such also was Jerome Cardan, the Italian scholar and physician, the +father of algebraic science (you all recollect Cardan’s rule,) +believer in dreams, prognostics, astrology; who died, too, miserably +enough, in old age.</p> +<p>Cardan’s sad life, and that of Cornelius Agrippa, you can, +and ought to read for yourselves, in two admirable biographies, as amusing +as they are learned, by Professor Morley, of the London University. +I have not chosen either of them as a subject for this lecture, because +Mr. Morley has so exhausted what is to be known about them, that I could +tell you nothing which I had not stolen from him.</p> +<p>But what shall I say of the most famous of these men—Paracelsus? +whose name you surely know. He too has been immortalised in a +poem which you all ought to have read, one of Robert Browning’s +earliest and one of his best creations.</p> +<p>I think we must accept as true Mr. Browning’s interpretation +of Paracelsus’s character. We must believe that he was at +first an honest and high-minded, as he was certainly a most gifted, +man; that he went forth into the world, with an intense sense of the +worthlessness of the sham knowledge of the pedants and quacks of the +schools; an intense belief that some higher and truer science might +be discovered, by which diseases might be actually cured, and health, +long life, happiness, all but immortality, be conferred on man; an intense +belief that he, Paracelsus, was called and chosen by God to find out +that great mystery, and be a benefactor to all future ages. That +fixed idea might degenerate—did, alas! degenerate—into wild +self-conceit, rash contempt of the ancients, violent abuse of his opponents. +But there was more than this in Paracelsus. He had one idea to +which, if he had kept true, his life would have been a happier one—the +firm belief that all pure science was a revelation from God; that it +was not to be obtained at second or third hand, by blindly adhering +to the words of Galen or Hippocrates or Aristotle, and putting them +(as the scholastic philosophers round him did) in the place of God: +but by going straight to nature at first hand, and listening to what +Bacon calls “the voice of God revealed in facts.” +True and noble is the passage with which he begins his “Labyrinthus +Medicorum,” one of his attacks on the false science of his day,</p> +<p>“The first and highest book of all healing,” he says, +“is called wisdom, and without that book no man will carry out +anything good or useful . . . And that book is God Himself. For +in Him alone who hath created all things, the knowledge and principle +of all things dwells . . . without Him all is folly. As the sun +shines on us from above, so He must pour into us from above all arts +whatsoever. Therefore the root of all learning and cognition is, +that we should seek first the kingdom of God—the kingdom of God +in which all sciences are founded . . . If any man think that nature +is not founded on the kingdom of God, he knows nothing about it. +All gifts,” he repeats again and again, confused and clumsily +(as is his wont), but with a true earnestness, “are from God.”</p> +<p>The true man of science, with Paracelsus, is he who seeks first the +kingdom of God in facts, investigating nature reverently, patiently, +in faith believing that God, who understands His own work best, will +make him understand it likewise. The false man of science is he +who seeks the kingdom of this world, who cares nothing about the real +interpretation of facts: but is content with such an interpretation +as will earn him the good things of this world—the red hat and +gown, the ambling mule, the silk clothes, the partridges, capons, and +pheasants, the gold florins chinking in his palm. At such pretenders +Paracelsus sneered, at last only too fiercely, not only as men whose +knowledge consisted chiefly in wearing white gloves, but as rogues, +liars, villains, and every epithet which his very racy vocabulary, quickened +(it is to be feared) by wine and laudanum, could suggest. With +these he contrasts the true men of science. It is difficult for +us now to understand how a man setting out in life with such pure and +noble views should descend at last (if indeed he did descend) to be +a quack and a conjuror—and die under the imputation that</p> +<blockquote><p>Bombastes kept a devil’s bird<br /> +Hid in the pommel of his sword,</p> +</blockquote> +<p>and have, indeed, his very name, Bombast, used to this day as a synonym +of loud, violent, and empty talk. To understand it at all, we +must go back and think a little over these same occult sciences which +were believed in by thousands during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.</p> +<p>The reverence for classic antiquity, you must understand, which sprang +up at the renaissance in the fifteenth century, was as indiscriminating +as it was earnest. Men caught the trash as well as the jewels. +They put the dreams of the Neoplatonists, Iamblicus, Porphyry, or Plotinus, +or Proclus, on the same level as the sound dialectic philosophy of Plato +himself. And these Neoplatonists were all, more or less, believers +in magic—Theurgy, as it was called—in the power of charms +and spells, in the occult virtues of herbs and gems, in the power of +adepts to evoke and command spirits, in the significance of dreams, +in the influence of the stars upon men’s characters and destinies. +If the great and wise philosopher Iamblicus believed such things, why +might not the men of the sixteenth century?</p> +<p>And so grew up again in Europe a passion for what were called the +Occult sciences. It had always been haunting the European imagination. +Mediæval monks had long ago transformed the poet Virgil into a +great necromancer. And there were immense excuses for such a belief. +There was a mass of collateral evidence that the occult sciences were +true, which it was impossible then to resist. Races far more ancient, +learned, civilised, than any Frenchman, German, Englishman, or even +Italian, in the fifteenth century had believed in these things. +The Moors, the best physicians of the Middle Ages, had their heads full, +as the “Arabian Nights” prove, of enchanters, genii, peris, +and what not? The Jewish rabbis had their Cabala, which sprang +up in Alexandria, a system of philosophy founded on the mystic meaning +of the words and the actual letters of the text of Scripture, which +some said was given by the angel Ragiel to Adam in Paradise, by which +Adam talked with angels, the sun and moon, summoned spirits, interpreted +dreams, healed and destroyed; and by that book of Ragiel, as it was +called, Solomon became the great magician and master of all the spirits +and their hoarded treasures.</p> +<p>So strong, indeed, was the belief in the mysteries of the Cabala, +that Reuchlin, the restorer of Hebrew learning in Germany, and Pico +di Mirandola, the greatest of Italian savants, accepted them; and not +only Pope Leo X. himself, but even statesmen and warriors received with +delight Reuchlin’s cabalistic treatise, “De Verbo Mirifico,” +on the mystic word “Schemhamphorash”—that hidden name +of God, which whosoever can pronounce aright is, for the moment, lord +of nature and of all dæmons.</p> +<p>Amulets, too, and talismans; the faith in them was exceeding ancient. +Solomon had his seal, by which he commanded all dæmons; and there +is a whole literature of curious nonsense, which you may read if you +will, about the Abraxas and other talismans of the Gnostics in Syria; +and another, of the secret virtues which were supposed to reside in +gems: especially in the old Roman and Greek gems, carved into intaglios +with figures of heathen gods and goddesses. Lapidaria, or lists +of these gems and their magical virtues, were not uncommon in the Middle +Ages. You may read a great deal that is interesting about them +at the end of Mr. King’s book on gems.</p> +<p>Astrology too; though Pico di Mirandola might set himself against +the rest of the world, few were found daring enough to deny so ancient +a science. Luther and Melancthon merely followed the regular tradition +of public opinion when they admitted its truth. It sprang probably +from the worship of the Seven Planets by the old Chaldees. It +was brought back from Babylon by the Jews after the Captivity, and spread +over all Europe—perhaps all Asia likewise.</p> +<p>The rich and mighty of the earth must needs have their nativities +cast, and consult the stars; and Cornelius Agrippa gave mortal offence +to the Queen-Dowager of France (mother of Francis I.) because, when +she compelled him to consult the stars about Francis’s chance +of getting out of his captivity in Spain after the battle of Pavia, +he wrote and spoke his mind honestly about such nonsense.</p> +<p>Even Newton seems to have hankered after it when young. Among +his MSS. in Lord Portsmouth’s library at Hurstbourne are whole +folios of astrologic calculations. It went on till the end of +the seventeenth century, and died out only when men had begun to test +it, and all other occult sciences, by experience, and induction founded +thereon.</p> +<p>Countless students busied themselves over the transmutation of metals. +As for magic, necromancy, pyromancy, geomancy, coscinomancy, and all +the other mancies—there was then a whole literature about them. +And the witch-burning inquisitors like Sprenger, Bodin, Delrio, and +the rest, believed as firmly in the magic powers of the poor wretches +whom they tortured to death, as did, in many cases, the poor wretches +themselves.</p> +<p>Everyone, almost, believed in magic. Take two cases. +Read the story which Benvenuto Cellini, the sculptor, tells in his life +(everyone should read it) of the magician whom he consults in the Coliseum +at Rome, and the figure which he sees as he walks back with the magician, +jumping from roof to roof along the tiles of the houses.</p> +<p>And listen to this story, which Mr. Froude has dug up in his researches. +A Church commissioner at Oxford, at the beginning of the Reformation, +being unable to track an escaped heretic, “caused a figure to +be made by an expert in astronomy;” by which it was discovered +that the poor wretch had fled in a tawny coat and was making for the +sea. Conceive the respected head of your College—or whoever +he may be—in case you slept out all night without leave, going +to a witch to discover whether you had gone to London or to Huntingdon, +and then writing solemnly to inform the Bishop of Ely of his meritorious +exertions!</p> +<p>In such a mad world as this was Paracelsus born. The son of +a Swiss physician, but of noble blood, Philip Aureolus Theophrastus +was his Christian name, Bombast von Hohenheim his surname, which last +word he turned, after the fashion of the times, into Paracelsus. +Born in 1493 at Einsiedeln (the hermitage), in Schweiz, which is still +a famous place of pilgrimage, he was often called Eremita—the +hermit. Erasmus, in a letter still extant, but suspected not to +be genuine, addressed him by that name.</p> +<p>How he passed the first thirty-three years of his life it is hard +to say. He used to boast that he had wandered over all Europe, +been in Sweden, Italy, in Constantinople, and perhaps in the far East, +with barber-surgeons, alchemists, magicians, haunting mines, and forges +of Sweden and Bohemia, especially those which the rich merchants of +that day had in the Tyrol.</p> +<p>It was from that work, he said, that he learnt what he knew: from +the study of nature and of facts. He had heard all the learned +doctors and professors; he had read all their books, and they could +teach him nothing. Medicine was his monarch, and no one else. +He declared that there was more wisdom under his bald pate than in Aristotle +and Galen, Hippocrates and Rhasis. And fact seemed to be on his +side. He reappeared in Germany about 1525, and began working wondrous +cures. He had brought back with him from the East an arcanum, +a secret remedy, and laudanum was its name. He boasted, says one +of his enemies, that he could raise the dead to life with it; and so +the event all but proved. Basle was then the university where +free thought and free creeds found their safest home; and hither Œcolampadius +the reformer invited young Paracelsus to lecture on medicine and natural +science.</p> +<p>It would have been well for him, perhaps, had he never opened his +lips. He might have done good enough to his fellow-creatures by +his own undoubted powers of healing. He cured John Frobenius, +the printer, Erasmus’s friend, at Basle, when the doctors were +going to cut his leg off. His fame spread far and wide. +Round Basle and away into Alsace he was looked on, even an enemy says, +as a new Æsculapius.</p> +<p>But these were days in which in a university everyone was expected +to talk and teach, and so Paracelsus began lecturing; and then the weakness +which was mingled with his strength showed itself. He began by +burning openly the books of Galen and Avicenna, and declared that all +the old knowledge was useless. Doctors and students alike must +begin over again with him. The dons were horrified. To burn +Galen and Avicenna was as bad as burning the Bible. And more horrified +still were they when Paracelsus began lecturing, not in the time-honoured +dog-Latin, but in good racy German, which everyone could understand. +They shuddered under their red gowns and hats. If science was +to be taught in German, farewell to the Galenists’ formulas, and +their lucrative monopoly of learning. Paracelsus was bold enough +to say that he wished to break up their monopoly; to spread a popular +knowledge of medicine. “How much,” he wrote once, +“would I endure and suffer, to see every man his own shepherd—his +own healer.” He laughed to scorn their long prescriptions, +used the simplest drugs, and declared Nature, after all, to be the best +physician—as a dog, he says, licks his wound well again without +our help; or as the broken rib of the ox heals of its own accord.</p> +<p>Such a man was not to be endured. They hated him, he says, +for the same reason that they hated Luther, for the same reason that +the Pharisees hated Christ. He met their attacks with scorn, rage, +and language as coarse and violent as their own. The coarseness +and violence of those days seem incredible to us now; and, indeed, Paracelsus, +as he confessed himself, was, though of gentle blood, rough and unpolished; +and utterly, as one can see from his writings, unable to give and take, +to conciliate—perhaps to pardon. He looked impatiently on +these men who were (not unreasonably) opposing novelties which they +could not understand, as enemies of God, who were balking him in his +grand plan for regenerating science and alleviating the woes of humanity, +and he outraged their prejudices instead of soothing them.</p> +<p>Soon they had their revenge. Ugly stories were whispered about. +Oporinus, the printer, who had lived with him for two years, and who +left him, it is said, because he thought Paracelsus concealed from him +unfairly the secret of making laudanum, told how Paracelsus was neither +more nor less than a sot, who came drunk to his lectures, used to prime +himself with wine before going to his patients, and sat all night in +pothouses swilling with the boors.</p> +<p>Men looked coldly on him—longed to be rid of him. And +they soon found an opportunity. He took in hand some Canon of +the city from whom it was settled beforehand that he was to receive +a hundred florins. The priest found himself cured so suddenly +and easily that, by a strange logic, he refused to pay the money, and +went to the magistrates. They supported him, and compelled Paracelsus +to take six florins instead of the hundred. He spoke his mind +fiercely to them. I believe, according to one story, he drew his +long sword on the Canon. His best friends told him he must leave +the place; and within two years, seemingly, after his first triumph +at Basle, he fled from it a wanderer and a beggar.</p> +<p>The rest of his life is a blank. He is said to have recommenced +his old wanderings about Europe, studying the diseases of every country, +and writing his books, which were none of them published till after +his death. His enemies joyfully trampled on the fallen man. +He was a “dull rustic, a monster, an atheist, a quack, a maker +of gold, a magician.” When he was drunk, one Wetter, his +servant, told Erastus (one of his enemies) that he used to offer to +call up legions of devils to prove his skill, while Wetter, in abject +terror of his spells, entreated him to leave the fiends alone—that +he had sent his book by a fiend to the spirit of Galen in hell, and +challenged him to say which was the better system, his or Paracelsus’, +and what not?</p> +<p>His books were forbidden to be printed. He himself was refused +a hearing, and it was not till after ten years of wandering that he +found rest and protection in a little village of Carinthia.</p> +<p>Three years afterwards he died in the hospital of St. Sebastian at +Salzburg, in the Tyrol. His death was the signal for empirics +and visionaries to foist on the public book after book on occult philosophy, +written in his name—of which you may see ten folios—not +more than a quarter, I believe, genuine. And these foolish books, +as much as anything, have helped to keep up the popular prejudice against +one who, in spite of all his faults was a true pioneer of science. <a name="citation15"></a><a href="#footnote15">{15}</a> +I believe (with those moderns who have tried to do him justice) that +under all his verbiage and confusion there was a vein of sound scientific, +experimental common sense.</p> +<p>When he talks of astronomy as necessary to be known by a physician, +it seems to me that he laughs at astrology, properly so called; that +is, that the stars influence the character and destiny of man. +Mars, he says, did not make Nero cruel. There would have been +long-lived men in the world if Saturn had never ascended the skies; +and Helen would have been a wanton, though Venus had never been created. +But he does believe that the heavenly bodies, and the whole skies, have +a physical influence on climate, and on the health of men.</p> +<p>He talks of alchemy, but he means by it, I think, only that sound +science which we call chemistry, and at which he worked, wandering, +he says, among mines and forges, as a practical metallurgist.</p> +<p>He tells us—what sounds startling enough—that magic is +the only preceptor which can teach the art of healing; but he means, +it seems to me, only an understanding of the invisible processes of +nature, in which sense an electrician or a biologist, a Faraday or a +Darwin, would be a magician; and when he compares medical magic to the +Cabalistic science, of which I spoke just now (and in which he seems +to have believed), he only means, I think, that as the Cabala discovers +hidden meaning and virtues in the text of Scripture, so ought the man +of science to find them in the book of nature. But this kind of +talk, wrapt up too in the most confused style, or rather no style at +all, is quite enough to account for ignorant and envious people accusing +him of magic, saying that he had discovered the philosopher’s +stone, and the secret of Hermes Trismegistus; that he must make gold, +because, though he squandered all his money, he had always money in +hand; and that he kept a “devil’s-bird,” a familiar +spirit, in the pommel of that famous long sword of his, which he was +only too ready to lug out on provocation—the said spirit, Agoth +by name, being probably only the laudanum bottle with which he worked +so many wondrous cures, and of which, to judge from his writings, he +took only too freely himself.</p> +<p>But the charm of Paracelsus is in his humour, his mother-wit. +He was blamed for consorting with boors in pot-houses; blamed for writing +in racy German, instead of bad school-Latin: but you can hardly read +a chapter, either of his German or his dog-Latin, without finding many +a good thing—witty and weighty, though often not a little coarse. +He talks in parables. He draws illustrations, like Socrates of +old, from the commonest and the oddest matters to enforce the weightiest +truths. “Fortune and misfortune,” he says, for instance +nobly enough, “are not like snow and wind, they must be deduced +and known from the secrets of nature. Therefore misfortune is +ignorance, fortune is knowledge. The man who walks out in the +rain is not unfortunate if he gets a ducking.”</p> +<p>“Nature,” he says again, “makes the text, and the +medical man adds the gloss; but the two fit each other no better than +a dog does a bath;” and again, when he is arguing against the +doctors who hated chemistry—“Who hates a thing which has +hurt nobody? Will you complain of a dog for biting you, if you +lay hold of his tail? Does the emperor send the thief to the gallows, +or the thing which he has stolen? The thief, I think. Therefore +science should not be despised on account of some who know nothing about +it.” You will say the reasoning is not very clear, and indeed +the passage, like too many more, smacks strongly of wine and laudanum. +But such is his quaint racy style. As humorous a man, it seems +to me, as you shall meet with for many a day; and where there is humour +there is pretty sure to be imagination, tenderness, and depth of heart.</p> +<p>As for his notions of what a man of science should be, the servant +of God, and of Nature—which is the work of God—using his +powers not for money, not for ambition, but in love and charity, as +he says, for the good of his fellow-man—on that matter Paracelsus +is always noble. All that Mr. Browning has conceived on that point, +all the noble speeches which he has put into Paracelsus’s mouth, +are true to his writings. How can they be otherwise, if Mr. Browning +set them forth—a genius as accurate and penetrating as he is wise +and pure?</p> +<p>But was Paracelsus a drunkard after all?</p> +<p>Gentlemen, what concern is that of yours or mine? I have gone +into the question, as Mr. Browning did, cannot say, and don’t +care to say.</p> +<p>Oporinus, who slandered him so cruelly, recanted when Paracelsus +was dead, and sang his praises—too late. But I do not read +that he recanted the charge of drunkenness. His defenders allow +it, only saying that it was the fault not of him alone, but of all Germans. +But if so, why was he specially blamed for what certainly others did +likewise? I cannot but fear from his writings, as well as from +common report, that there was something wrong with the man. I +say only something. Against his purity there never was a breath +of suspicion. He was said to care nothing for women; and even +that was made the subject of brutal jests and lies. But it may +have been that, worn out with toil and poverty, he found comfort in +that laudanum which he believed to be the arcanum—the very elixir +of life; that he got more and more into the habit of exciting his imagination +with the narcotic, and then, it may be, when the fit of depression followed, +he strung his nerves up again by wine. It may have been so. +We have had, in the last generation, an exactly similar case in a philosopher, +now I trust in heaven, and to whose genius I owe too much to mention +his name here.</p> +<p>But that Paracelsus was a sot I cannot believe. That face of +his, as painted by the great Tintoretto, is not the face of a drunkard, +quack, bully, but of such a man as Browning has conceived. The +great globular brain, the sharp delicate chin, is not that of a sot. +Nor are those eyes, which gleam out from under the deep compressed brow, +wild, intense, hungry, homeless, defiant, and yet complaining, the eyes +of a sot—but rather the eyes of a man who struggles to tell a +great secret, and cannot find words for it, and yet wonders why men +cannot understand, will not believe what seems to him as clear as day—a +tragical face, as you well can see.</p> +<p>God keep us all from making our lives a tragedy by one great sin. +And now let us end this sad story with the last words which Mr. Browning +puts into the mouth of Paracelsus, dying in the hospital at Salzburg, +which have come literally true:</p> +<blockquote><p>Meanwhile, I have done well though not all well.<br /> +As yet men cannot do without contempt;<br /> +’Tis for their good; and therefore fit awhile<br /> +That they reject the weak and scorn the false,<br /> +Rather than praise the strong and true in me:<br /> +But after, they will know me. If I stoop<br /> +Into a dark tremendous sea of cloud,<br /> +It is but for a time. I press God’s lamp<br /> +Close to my breast; its splendour, soon or late,<br /> +Will pierce the gloom. I shall emerge one day.</p> +</blockquote> +<h2>GEORGE BUCHANAN, SCHOLAR</h2> +<p>The scholar, in the sixteenth century, was a far more important personage +than now. The supply of learned men was very small, the demand +for them very great. During the whole of the fifteenth, and a +great part of the sixteenth century, the human mind turned more and +more from the scholastic philosophy of the Middle Ages to that of the +Romans and the Greeks; and found more and more in old Pagan Art an element +which Monastic Art had not, and which was yet necessary for the full +satisfaction of their craving after the Beautiful. At such a crisis +of thought and taste, it was natural that the classical scholar, the +man who knew old Rome, and still more old Greece, should usurp the place +of the monk, as teacher of mankind; and that scholars should form, for +a while, a new and powerful aristocracy, limited and privileged, and +all the more redoubtable, because its power lay in intellect, and had +been won by intellect alone.</p> +<p>Those who, whether poor or rich, did not fear the monk and priest, +at least feared the “scholar,” who held, so the vulgar believed, +the keys of that magic lore by which the old necromancers had built +cities like Rome, and worked marvels of mechanical and chemical skill, +which the degenerate modern could never equal.</p> +<p>If the “scholar” stopped in a town, his hostess probably +begged of him a charm against toothache or rheumatism. The penniless +knight discoursed with him on alchemy, and the chances of retrieving +his fortune by the art of transmuting metals into gold. The queen +or bishop worried him in private about casting their nativities, and +finding their fates among the stars. But the statesman, who dealt +with more practical matters, hired him as an advocate and rhetorician, +who could fight his master’s enemies with the weapons of Demosthenes +and Cicero. Wherever the scholar’s steps were turned, he +might be master of others, as long as he was master of himself. +The complaints which he so often uttered concerning the cruelty of fortune, +the fickleness of princes and so forth, were probably no more just then +than such complaints are now. Then, as now, he got his deserts; +and the world bought him at his own price. If he chose to sell +himself to this patron and to that, he was used and thrown away: if +he chose to remain in honourable independence, he was courted and feared.</p> +<p>Among the successful scholars of the sixteenth century, none surely +is more notable than George Buchanan. The poor Scotch widow’s +son, by force of native wit, and, as I think, by force of native worth, +fights his way upward, through poverty and severest persecution, to +become the correspondent and friend of the greatest literary celebrities +of the Continent, comparable, in their opinion, to the best Latin poets +of antiquity; the preceptor of princes; the counsellor and spokesman +of Scotch statesmen in the most dangerous of times; and leaves behind +him political treatises, which have influenced not only the history +of his own country, but that of the civilised world.</p> +<p>Such a success could not be attained without making enemies, perhaps +without making mistakes. But the more we study George Buchanan’s +history, the less we shall be inclined to hunt out his failings, the +more inclined to admire his worth. A shrewd, sound-hearted, affectionate +man, with a strong love of right and scorn of wrong, and a humour withal +which saved him—except on really great occasions—from bitterness, +and helped him to laugh where narrower natures would have only snarled,—he +is, in many respects, a type of those Lowland Scots, who long preserved +his jokes, genuine or reputed, as a common household book. <a name="citation16"></a><a href="#footnote16">{16}</a> +A schoolmaster by profession, and struggling for long years amid the +temptations which, in those days, degraded his class into cruel and +sordid pedants, he rose from the mere pedagogue to be, in the best sense +of the word, a courtier: “One,” says Daniel Heinsius, “who +seemed not only born for a court, but born to amend it. He brought +to his queen that at which she could not wonder enough. For, by +affecting a certain liberty in censuring morals, he avoided all offence, +under the cloak of simplicity.” Of him and his compeers, +Turnebus, and Muretus, and their friend Andrea Govea, Ronsard, the French +court poet, said that they had nothing of the pedagogue about them but +the gown and cap. “Austere in face, and rustic in his looks,” +says David Buchanan, “but most polished in style and speech; and +continually, even in serious conversation, jesting most wittily.” +“Rough-hewn, slovenly, and rude,” says Peacham, in his “Compleat +Gentleman,” speaking of him, probably, as he appeared in old age, +“in his person, behaviour, and fashion; seldom caring for a better +outside than a rugge-gown girt close about him: yet his inside and conceipt +in poesie was most rich, and his sweetness and facilitie in verse most +excellent.” A typical Lowland Scot, as I said just now, +he seems to have absorbed all the best culture which France could afford +him, without losing the strength, honesty, and humour which he inherited +from his Stirlingshire kindred.</p> +<p>The story of his life is easily traced. When an old man, he +himself wrote down the main events of it, at the request of his friends; +and his sketch has been filled out by commentators, if not always favourable, +at least erudite. Born in 1506, at the Moss, in Killearn—where +an obelisk to his memory, so one reads, has been erected in this century—of +a family “rather ancient than rich,” his father dead in +the prime of manhood, his grandfather a spendthrift, he and his seven +brothers and sisters were brought up by a widowed mother, Agnes Heriot—of +whom one wishes to know more; for the rule that great sons have great +mothers probably holds good in her case. George gave signs, while +at the village school, of future scholarship; and when he was only fourteen, +his uncle James sent him to the University of Paris. Those were +hard times; and the youths, or rather boys, who meant to become scholars, +had a cruel life of it, cast desperately out on the wide world to beg +and starve, either into self-restraint and success, or into ruin of +body and soul. And a cruel life George had. Within two years +he was down in a severe illness, his uncle dead, his supplies stopped; +and the boy of sixteen got home, he does not tell how. Then he +tried soldiering; and was with Albany’s French Auxiliaries at +the ineffectual attack on Wark Castle. Marching back through deep +snow, he got a fresh illness, which kept him in bed all winter. +Then he and his brother were sent to St. Andrews, where he got his B.A. +at nineteen. The next summer he went to France once more; and +“fell,” he says, “into the flames of the Lutheran +sect, which was then spreading far and wide.” Two years +of penury followed; and then three years of school-mastering in the +College of St. Barbe, which he has immortalised—at least, for +the few who care to read modern Latin poetry—in his elegy on “The +Miseries of a Parisian Teacher of the Humanities.” The wretched +regent-master, pale and suffering, sits up all night preparing his lecture, +biting his nails and thumping his desk; and falls asleep for a few minutes, +to start up at the sound of the four-o’clock bell, and be in school +by five, his Virgil in one hand, and his rod in the other, trying to +do work on his own account at old manuscripts, and bawling all the while +at his wretched boys, who cheat him, and pay each other to answer to +truants’ names. The class is all wrong. “One +is barefoot, another’s shoe is burst, another cries, another writes +home. Then comes the rod, the sound of blows, and howls; and the +day passes in tears.” “Then mass, then another lesson, +then more blows; there is hardly time to eat.” I have no +space to finish the picture of the stupid misery which, Buchanan says, +was ruining his intellect, while it starved his body. However, +happier days came. Gilbert Kennedy, Earl of Cassilis, who seems +to have been a noble young gentleman, took him as his tutor for the +next five years; and with him he went back to Scotland.</p> +<p>But there his plain speaking got him, as it did more than once afterward, +into trouble. He took it into his head to write, in imitation +of Dunbar, a Latin poem, in which St. Francis asks him in a dream to +become a Gray Friar, and Buchanan answered in language which had the +unpleasant fault of being too clever, and—to judge from contemporary +evidence—only too true. The friars said nothing at first; +but when King James made Buchanan tutor to one of his natural sons, +they, “men professing meekness, took the matter somewhat more +angrily than befitted men so pious in the opinion of the people.” +So Buchanan himself puts it: but, to do the poor friars justice, they +must have been angels, not men, if they did not writhe somewhat under +the scourge which he had laid on them. To be told that there was +hardly a place in heaven for monks, was hard to hear and bear. +They accused him to the king of heresy; but not being then in favour +with James, they got no answer, and Buchanan was commanded to repeat +the castigation. Having found out that the friars were not to +be touched with impunity, he wrote, he says, a short and ambiguous poem. +But the king, who loved a joke, demanded something sharp and stinging, +and Buchanan obeyed by writing, but not publishing, “The Franciscans,” +a long satire, compared to which the “Somnium” was bland +and merciful. The storm rose. Cardinal Beaten, Buchanan +says, wanted to buy him of the king, and then, of course, burn him, +as he had just burnt five poor souls; so, knowing James’s avarice, +he fled to England, through freebooters and pestilence.</p> +<p>There he found, he says, “men of both factions being burned +on the same day and in the same fire”—a pardonable exaggeration—“by +Henry VIII., in his old age more intent on his own safety than on the +purity of religion.” So to his beloved France he went again, +to find his enemy Beaten ambassador at Paris. The capital was +too hot to hold him; and he fled south to Bordeaux, to Andrea Govea, +the Portuguese principal of the College of Guienne. As Professor +of Latin at Bordeaux, we find him presenting a Latin poem to Charles +V.; and indulging that fancy of his for Latin poetry which seems to +us nowadays a childish pedantry, which was then—when Latin was +the vernacular tongue of all scholars—a serious, if not altogether +a useful, pursuit. Of his tragedies, so famous in their day—the +“Baptist,” the “Medea,” the “Jephtha,” +and the “Alcestis”—there is neither space nor need +to speak here, save to notice the bold declamations in the “Baptist” +against tyranny and priestcraft; and to notice also that these tragedies +gained for the poor Scotsman, in the eyes of the best scholars of Europe, +a credit amounting almost to veneration. When he returned to Paris, +he found occupation at once; and, as his Scots biographers love to record, +“three of the most learned men in the world taught humanity in +the same college,” viz. Turnebus, Muretus, and Buchanan.</p> +<p>Then followed a strange episode in his life. A university had +been founded at Coimbra, in Portugal, and Andrea Govea had been invited +to bring thither what French savants he could collect. Buchanan +went to Portugal with his brother Patrick, two more Scotsmen, Dempster +and Ramsay, and a goodly company of French scholars, whose names and +histories may be read in the erudite pages of Dr. Irving, went likewise. +All prospered in the new Temple of the Muses for a year or so. +Then its high-priest, Govea, died; and, by a peripeteia too common in +those days and countries, Buchanan and two of his friends migrated unwillingly +from the Temple of the Muses for that of Moloch, and found themselves +in the Inquisition.</p> +<p>Buchanan, it seems, had said that St. Augustine was more of a Lutheran +than a Catholic on the question of the mass. He and his friends +had eaten flesh in Lent; which, he says, almost everyone in Spain did. +But he was suspected, and with reason, as a heretic; the Gray Friars +formed but one brotherhood throughout Europe; and news among them travelled +surely if not fast, so that the story of the satire written in Scotland +had reached Portugal. The culprits were imprisoned, examined, +bullied—but not tortured—for a year and a half. At +the end of that time, the proofs of heresy, it seems, were insufficient; +but lest, says Buchanan with honest pride, “they should get the +reputation of having vainly tormented a man not altogether unknown,” +they sent him for some months to a monastery, to be instructed by the +monks. “The men,” he says, “were neither inhuman +nor bad, but utterly ignorant of religion;” and Buchanan solaced +himself during the intervals of their instructions, by beginning his +Latin translation of the Psalms.</p> +<p>At last he got free, and begged leave to return to France; but in +vain. And so, wearied out, he got on board a Candian ship at Lisbon, +and escaped to England. But England, he says, during the anarchy +of Edward VI.’s reign, was not a land which suited him; and he +returned to France, to fulfil the hopes which he had expressed in his +charming “Desiderium Lutitiæ,” and the still more +charming, because more simple, “Adventus in Galliam,” in +which he bids farewell, in most melodious verse, to “the hungry +moors of wretched Portugal, and her clods fertile in naught but penury.”</p> +<p>Some seven years succeeded of schoolmastering and verse-writing: +the Latin paraphrase of the Psalms; another of the “Alcestis” +of Euripides; an Epithalamium on the marriage of poor Mary Stuart, noble +and sincere, however fantastic and pedantic, after the manner of the +times; “Pomps,” too, for her wedding, and for other public +ceremonies, in which all the heathen gods and goddesses figure; epigrams, +panegyrics, satires, much of which latter productions he would have +consigned to the dust-heap in his old age, had not his too fond friends +persuaded him to republish the follies and coarsenesses of his youth. +He was now one of the most famous scholars in Europe, and the intimate +friend of all the great literary men. Was he to go on to the end, +die, and no more? Was he to sink into the mere pedant; or, if +he could not do that, into the mere court versifier?</p> +<p>The wars of religion saved him, as they saved many another noble +soul, from that degradation. The events of 1560-62 forced Buchanan, +as they forced many a learned man besides, to choose whether he would +be a child of light or a child of darkness; whether he would be a dilettante +classicist, or a preacher—it might be a martyr—of the Gospel. +Buchanan may have left France in “The Troubles” merely to +enjoy in his own country elegant and learned repose. He may have +fancied that he had found it, when he saw himself, in spite of his public +profession of adherence to the Reformed Kirk, reading Livy every afternoon +with his exquisite young sovereign; master, by her favour, of the temporalities +of Crossraguel Abbey, and by the favour of Murray, Principal of St. +Leonard’s College in St. Andrew’s. Perhaps he fancied +at times that “to-morrow was to be as to-day, and much more abundant;” +that thenceforth he might read his folio, and write his epigram, and +joke his joke, as a lazy comfortable pluralist, taking his morning stroll +out to the corner where poor Wishart had been burned, above the blue +sea and the yellow sands, and looking up to the castle tower from whence +his enemy Beaton’s corpse had been hung out; with the comfortable +reflection that quieter times had come, and that whatever evil deeds +Archbishop Hamilton might dare, he would not dare to put the Principal +of St. Leonard’s into the “bottle dungeon.”</p> +<p>If such hopes ever crossed Geordie’s keen fancy, they were +disappointed suddenly and fearfully. The fire which had been kindled +in France was to reach to Scotland likewise. “Revolutions +are not made with rose-water;” and the time was at hand when all +good spirits in Scotland, and George Buchanan among them, had to choose, +once and for all, amid danger, confusion, terror, whether they would +serve God or Mammon; for to serve both would be soon impossible.</p> +<p>Which side, in that war of light and darkness, George Buchanan took, +is notorious. He saw then, as others have seen since, that the +two men in Scotland who were capable of being her captains in the strife +were Knox and Murray; and to them he gave in his allegiance heart and +soul.</p> +<p>This is the critical epoch in Buchanan’s life. By his +conduct to Queen Mary he must stand or fall. It is my belief that +he will stand. It is not my intention to enter into the details +of a matter so painful, so shocking, so prodigious; and now that that +question is finally set at rest, by the writings both of Mr. Froude +and Mr. Burton, there is no need to allude to it further, save where +Buchanan’s name is concerned. One may now have every sympathy +with Mary Stuart; one may regard with awe a figure so stately, so tragic, +in one sense so heroic,—for she reminds one rather of the heroine +of an old Greek tragedy, swept to her doom by some irresistible fate, +than of a being of our own flesh and blood, and of our modern and Christian +times. One may sympathise with the great womanhood which charmed +so many while she was alive; which has charmed, in later years, so many +noble spirits who have believed in her innocence, and have doubtless +been elevated and purified by their devotion to one who seemed to them +an ideal being. So far from regarding her as a hateful personage, +one may feel oneself forbidden to hate a woman whom God may have loved, +and may have pardoned, to judge from the punishment so swift, and yet +so enduring, which He inflicted. At least, he must so believe +who holds that punishment is a sign of mercy; that the most dreadful +of all dooms is impunity. Nay, more, those “Casket” +letters and sonnets may be a relief to the mind of one who believes +in her guilt on other grounds; a relief when one finds in them a tenderness, +a sweetness, a delicacy, a magnificent self-sacrifice, however hideously +misplaced, which shows what a womanly heart was there; a heart which, +joined to that queenly brain, might have made her a blessing and a glory +to Scotland, had not the whole character been warped and ruinate from +childhood, by an education so abominable, that anyone who knows what +words she must have heard, what scenes she must have beheld in France, +from her youth up, will wonder that she sinned so little: not that she +sinned so much. One may feel, in a word, that there is every excuse +for those who have asserted Mary’s innocence, because their own +high-mindedness shrank from believing her guilty: but yet Buchanan, +in his own place and time, may have felt as deeply that he could do +no otherwise than he did.</p> +<p>The charges against him, as all readers of Scotch literature know +well, may be reduced to two heads. 1st. The letters and +sonnets were forgeries. Maitland of Lethington may have forged +the letters; Buchanan, according to some, the sonnets. Whoever +forged them, Buchanan made use of them in his Detection, knowing them +to be forged. 2nd. Whether Mary was innocent or not, Buchanan +acted a base and ungrateful part in putting himself in the forefront +amongst her accusers. He had been her tutor, her pensioner. +She had heaped him with favours; and, after all, she was his queen, +and a defenceless woman: and yet he returned her kindness, in the hour +of her fall, by invectives fit only for a rancorous and reckless advocate, +determined to force a verdict by the basest arts of oratory.</p> +<p>Now as to the Casket letters. I should have thought they bore +in themselves the best evidence of being genuine. I can add nothing +to the arguments of Mr. Froude and Mr. Burton, save this: that no one +clever enough to be a forger would have put together documents so incoherent, +and so incomplete. For the evidence of guilt which they contain +is, after all, slight and indirect, and, moreover, superfluous altogether; +seeing that Mary’s guilt was open and palpable, before the supposed +discovery of the letters, to every person at home and abroad who had +any knowledge of the facts. As for the alleged inconsistency of +the letters with proven facts: the answer is, that whosoever wrote the +letters would be more likely to know facts which were taking place around +them than any critic could be one hundred or three hundred years afterwards. +But if these mistakes as to facts actually exist in them, they are only +a fresh argument for their authenticity. Mary, writing in agony +and confusion, might easily make a mistake: forgers would only take +too good care to make none.</p> +<p>But the strongest evidence in favour of the letters and sonnets, +in spite of the arguments of good Dr. Whittaker and other apologists +for Mary, is to be found in their tone. A forger in those coarse +days would have made Mary write in some Semiramis or Roxana vein, utterly +alien to the tenderness, the delicacy, the pitiful confusion of mind, +the conscious weakness, the imploring and most feminine trust which +makes the letters, to those who—as I do—believe in them, +more pathetic than any fictitious sorrows which poets could invent. +More than one touch, indeed, of utter self-abasement, in the second +letter, is so unexpected, so subtle, and yet so true to the heart of +woman, that—as has been well said—if it was invented there +must have existed in Scotland an earlier Shakespeare; who yet has died +without leaving any other sign, for good or evil, of his dramatic genius.</p> +<p>As for the theory (totally unsupported) that Buchanan forged the +poem usually called the “Sonnets;” it is paying old Geordie’s +genius, however versatile it may have been, too high a compliment to +believe that he could have written both them and the Detection; while +it is paying his shrewdness too low a compliment to believe that he +could have put into them, out of mere carelessness or stupidity, the +well-known line, which seems incompatible with the theory both of the +letters and of his own Detection; and which has ere now been brought +forward as a fresh proof of Mary’s innocence.</p> +<p>And, as with the letters, so with the sonnets: their delicacy, their +grace, their reticence, are so many arguments against their having been +forged by any Scot of the sixteenth century, and least of all by one +in whose character—whatever his other virtues may have been—delicacy +was by no means the strongest point.</p> +<p>As for the complaint that Buchanan was ungrateful to Mary, it must +be said: That even if she, and not Murray, had bestowed on him the temporalities +of Crossraguel Abbey four years before, it was merely fair pay for services +fairly rendered; and I am not aware that payment, or even favours, however +gracious, bind any man’s soul and conscience in questions of highest +morality and highest public importance. And the importance of +that question cannot be exaggerated. At a moment when Scotland +seemed struggling in death-throes of anarchy, civil and religious, and +was in danger of becoming a prey either to England or to France, if +there could not be formed out of the heart of her a people, steadfast, +trusty, united, strong politically because strong in the fear of God +and the desire of righteousness—at such a moment as this, a crime +had been committed, the like of which had not been heard in Europe since +the tragedy of Joan of Naples. All Europe stood aghast. +The honour of the Scottish nation was at stake. More than Mary +or Bothwell were known to be implicated in the deed; and—as Buchanan +puts it in the opening of his “De Jure Regni”—“The +fault of some few was charged upon all; and the common hatred of a particular +person did redound to the whole nation; so that even such as were remote +from any suspicion were inflamed by the infamy of men’s crimes.” +<a name="citation17"></a><a href="#footnote17">{17}</a></p> +<p>To vindicate the national honour, and to punish the guilty, as well +as to save themselves from utter anarchy, the great majority of the +Scotch nation had taken measures against Mary which required explicit +justification in the sight of Europe, as Buchanan frankly confesses +in the opening of his “De Jure Regni.” The chief authors +of those measures had been summoned, perhaps unwisely and unjustly, +to answer for their conduct to the Queen of England. Queen Elizabeth—a +fact which was notorious enough then, though it has been forgotten till +the last few years—was doing her utmost to shield Mary. +Buchanan was deputed, it seems, to speak out for the people of Scotland; +and certainly never people had an abler apologist. If he spoke +fiercely, savagely, it must be remembered that he spoke of a fierce +and savage matter; if he used—and it may be abused—all the +arts of oratory, it must be remembered that he was fighting for the +honour, and it may be for the national life, of his country, and striking—as +men in such cases have a right to strike—as hard as he could. +If he makes no secret of his indignation, and even contempt, it must +be remembered that indignation and contempt may well have been real +with him, while they were real with the soundest part of his countrymen; +with that reforming middle class, comparatively untainted by French +profligacy, comparatively undebauched by feudal subservience, which +has been the leaven which has leavened the whole Scottish people in +the last three centuries with the elements of their greatness. +If, finally, he heaps up against the unhappy Queen charges which Mr. +Burton thinks incredible, it must be remembered that, as he well says, +these charges give the popular feeling about Queen Mary; and it must +be remembered also, that that popular feeling need not have been altogether +unfounded. Stories which are incredible, thank God, in these milder +days, were credible enough then, because, alas! they were so often true. +Things more ugly than any related of poor Mary were possible enough—as +no one knew better than Buchanan—in that very French court in +which Mary had been brought up; things as ugly were possible in Scotland +then, and for at least a century later; and while we may hope that Buchanan +has overstated his case, we must not blame him too severely for yielding +to a temptation common to all men of genius when their creative power +is roused to its highest energy by a great cause and a great indignation.</p> +<p>And that the genius was there, no man can doubt; one cannot read +that “hideously eloquent” description of Kirk o’ Field, +which Mr. Burton has well chosen as a specimen of Buchanan’s style, +without seeing that we are face to face with a genius of a very lofty +order: not, indeed, of the loftiest—for there is always in Buchanan’s +work, it seems to me, a want of unconsciousness, and a want of tenderness—but +still a genius worthy to be placed beside those ancient writers from +whom he took his manner. Whether or not we agree with his contemporaries, +who say that he equalled Virgil in Latin poetry, we may place him fairly +as a prose writer by the side of Demosthenes, Cicero, or Tacitus. +And so I pass from this painful subject; only quoting—if I may +be permitted to quote—Mr. Burton’s wise and gentle verdict +on the whole. “Buchanan,” he says, “though a +zealous Protestant, had a good deal of the Catholic and sceptical spirit +of Erasmus, and an admiring eye for everything that was great and beautiful. +Like the rest of his countrymen, he bowed himself in presence of the +lustre that surrounded the early career of his mistress. More +than once he expressed his pride and reverence in the inspiration of +a genius deemed by his contemporaries to be worthy of the theme. +There is not, perhaps, to be found elsewhere in literature so solemn +a memorial of shipwrecked hopes, of a sunny opening and a stormy end, +as one finds in turning the leaves of the volume which contains the +beautiful epigram ‘Nympha Caledoniæ’ in one part, +the ‘Detectio Mariæ Reginæ’ in another; and +this contrast is, no doubt, a faithful parallel of the reaction in the +popular mind. This reaction seems to have been general, and not +limited to the Protestant party; for the conditions under which it became +almost a part of the creed of the Church of Rome to believe in her innocence +had not arisen.”</p> +<p>If Buchanan, as some of his detractors have thought, raised himself +by subserviency to the intrigues of the Regent Murray, the best heads +in Scotland seem to have been of a different opinion. The murder +of Murray did not involve Buchanan’s fall. He had avenged +it, as far as pen could do it, by that “Admonition Direct to the +Trew Lordis,” in which he showed himself as great a master of +Scottish, as he was of Latin prose. His satire of the “Chameleon,” +though its publication was stopped by Maitland, must have been read +in manuscript by many of those same “True Lords;” and though +there were nobler instincts in Maitland than any Buchanan gave him credit +for, the satire breathed an honest indignation against that wily turncoat’s +misgoings, which could not but recommend the author to all honest men. +Therefore it was, I presume, and not because he was a rogue, and a hired +literary spadassin, that to the best heads in Scotland he seemed so +useful, it may be so worthy, a man, that he be provided with continually +increasing employment. As tutor to James I.; as director, for +a short time, of the chancery; as keeper of the privy seal, and privy +councillor; as one of the commissioners for codifying the laws, and +again—for in the semi-anarchic state of Scotland, government had +to do everything in the way of organisation—in the committee for +promulgating a standard Latin grammar; in the committee for reforming +the University of St. Andrew’s: in all these Buchanan’s +talents were again and again called for; and always ready. The +value of his work, especially that for the reform of St. Andrew’s, +must be judged by Scotsmen, rather than by an Englishman; but all that +one knows of it justifies Melville’s sentence in the well-known +passage in his memoirs, wherein he describes the tutors and household +of the young king. “Mr. George was a Stoic philosopher, +who looked not far before him;” in plain words, a high-minded +and right-minded man, bent on doing the duty which lay nearest him. +The worst that can be said against him during these times is, that his +name appears with the sum of £100 against it, as one of those +“who were to be entertained in Scotland by pensions out of England;” +and Ruddiman, of course, comments on the fact by saying that Buchanan +“was at length to act under the threefold character of malcontent, +reformer, and pensioner:” but it gives no proof whatsoever that +Buchanan ever received any such bribe; and in the very month, seemingly, +in which that list was written—10th March, 1579—Buchanan +had given a proof to the world that he was not likely to be bribed or +bought, by publishing a book, as offensive probably to Queen Elizabeth +as it was to his own royal pupil; namely, his famous “De Jure +Regni apud Scotos,” the very primer, according to many great thinkers, +of constitutional liberty. He dedicates that book to King James, +“not only as his monitor, but also as an importunate and bold +exactor, which in these his tender and flexible years may conduct him +in safety past the rocks of flattery.” He has complimented +James already on his abhorrence of flattery, “his inclination +far above his years for undertaking all heroical and noble attempts, +his promptitude in obeying his instructors and governors, and all who +give him sound admonition, and his judgment and diligence in examining +affairs, so that no man’s authority can have much weight with +him unless it be confirmed by probable reasons.” Buchanan +may have thought that nine years of his stern rule had eradicated some +of James’s ill conditions; the petulance which made him kill the +Master of Mar’s sparrow, in trying to wrest it out of his hand; +the carelessness with which—if the story told by Chytræus, +on the authority of Buchanan’s nephew, be true—James signed +away his crown to Buchanan for fifteen days, and only discovered his +mistake by seeing Bachanan act in open court the character of King of +Scots. Buchanan had at last made him a scholar; he may have fancied +that he had made him likewise a manful man: yet he may have dreaded +that, as James grew up, the old inclinations would return in stronger +and uglier shapes, and that flattery might be, as it was after all, +the cause of James’s moral ruin. He at least will be no +flatterer. He opens the dialogue which he sends to the king, with +a calm but distinct assertion of his mother’s guilt, and a justification +of the conduct of men who were now most of them past helping Buchanan, +for they were laid in their graves; and then goes on to argue fairly, +but to lay down firmly, in a sort of Socratic dialogue, those very principles +by loyalty to which the House of Hanover has reigned, and will reign, +over these realms. So with his History of Scotland; later antiquarian +researches have destroyed the value of the earlier portions of it: but +they have surely increased the value of those later portions, in which +Buchanan inserted so much which he had already spoken out in his Detection +of Mary. In that book also <i>liberavit animam suam</i>; he spoke +his mind fearless of consequences, in the face of a king who he must +have known—for Buchanan was no dullard—regarded him with +deep dislike, who might in a few years be able to work his ruin.</p> +<p>But those few years were not given to Buchanan. He had all +but done his work, and he hastened to get it over before the night should +come wherein no man can work. One must be excused for telling—one +would not tell it in a book intended to be read only by Scotsmen, who +know or ought to know the tale already—how the two Melvilles and +Buchanan’s nephew Thomas went to see him in Edinburgh, in September, +1581, hearing that he was ill, and his History still in the press; and +how they found the old sage, true to his schoolmaster’s instincts, +teaching the Hornbook to his servant-lad; and how he told them that +doing that was “better than stealing sheep, or sitting idle, which +was as bad,” and showed them that dedication to James I., in which +he holds up to his imitation as a hero whose equal was hardly to be +found in history, that very King David whose liberality to the Romish +Church provoked James’s witticism that “David was a sair +saint for the crown.” Andrew Melville, so James Melville +says, found fault with the style. Buchanan replied that he could +do no more for thinking of another thing, which was to die. They +then went to Arbuthnot’s printing-house, and inspected the history, +as far as that terrible passage concerning Rizzio’s burial, where +Mary is represented as “laying the miscreant almost in the arms +of Maud de Valois, the late queen.” Alarmed, and not without +reason, at such plain speaking, they stopped the press, and went back +to Buchanan’s house. Buchanan was in bed. “He +was going,” he said, “the way of welfare.” They +asked him to soften the passage; the king might prohibit the whole work. +“Tell me, man,” said Buchanan, “if I have told the +truth.” They could not, or would not, deny it. “Then +I will abide his feud, and all his kin’s; pray, pray to God for +me, and let Him direct all.” “So,” says Melville, +“before the printing of his chronicle was ended, this most learned, +wise, and godly man ended his mortal life.”</p> +<p>Camden has a hearsay story—written, it must be remembered, +in James I.’s time—that Buchanan, on his death-bed, repented +of his harsh words against Queen Mary; and an old Lady Rosyth is said +to have said that when she was young a certain David Buchanan recollected +hearing some such words from George Buchanan’s own mouth. +Those who will, may read what Ruddiman and Love have said, and oversaid, +on both sides of the question: whatever conclusion they come to, it +will probably not be that to which George Chalmers comes in his life +of Ruddiman: that “Buchanan, like other liars, who, by the repetition +of falsehoods are induced to consider the fiction as truth, had so often +dwelt with complacency on the forgeries of his Detections, and the figments +of his History, that he at length regarded his fictions and his forgeries +as most authentic facts.”</p> +<p>At all events his fictions and his forgeries had not paid him in +that coin which base men generally consider the only coin worth having, +namely, the good things of this life. He left nothing behind him—if +at least Dr. Irving has rightly construed the “Testament Dative” +which he gives in his appendix—save arrears to the sum of £100 +of his Crossraguel pension. We may believe as we choose the story +in Mackenzie’s “Scotch Writers” that when he felt +himself dying, he asked his servant Young about the state of his funds, +and finding he had not enough to bury himself withal, ordered what he +had to be given to the poor, and said that if they did not choose to +bury him they might let him lie where he was, or cast him in a ditch, +the matter was very little to him. He was buried, it seems, at +the expense of the city of Edinburgh, in the Greyfriars’ Churchyard—one +says in a plain turf grave—among the marble monuments which covered +the bones of worse or meaner men; and whether or not the “Throughstone” +which, “sunk under the ground in the Greyfriars,” was raised +and cleaned by the Council of Edinburgh in 1701, was really George Buchanan’s, +the reigning powers troubled themselves little for several generations +where he lay.</p> +<p>For Buchanan’s politics were too advanced for his age. +Not only Catholic Scotsmen, like Blackwood, Winzet, and Ninian, but +Protestants, like Sir Thomas Craig and Sir John Wemyss, could not stomach +the “De Jure Regni.” They may have had some reason +on their side. In the then anarchic state of Scotland, organisation +and unity under a common head may have been more important than the +assertion of popular rights. Be that as it may, in 1584, only +two years after his death, the Scots Parliament condemned his Dialogue +and History as untrue, and commanded all possessors of copies to deliver +them up, that they might be purged of “the offensive and extraordinary +matters” which they contained. The “De Jure Regni” +was again prohibited in Scotland, in 1664, even in manuscript; and in +1683, the whole of Buchanan’s political works had the honour of +being burned by the University of Oxford, in company with those of Milton, +Languet, and others, as “pernicious books, and damnable doctrines, +destructive to the sacred persons of Princes, their state and government, +and of all human society.” And thus the seed which Buchanan +had sown, and Milton had watered—for the allegation that Milton +borrowed from Buchanan is probably true, and equally honourable to both—lay +trampled into the earth, and seemingly lifeless, till it tillered out, +and blossomed, and bore fruit to a good purpose, in the Revolution of +1688.</p> +<p>To Buchanan’s clear head and stout heart, Scotland owes, as +England owes likewise, much of her modern liberty. But Scotland’s +debt to him, it seems to me, is even greater on the count of morality, +public and private. What the morality of the Scotch upper classes +was like, in Buchanan’s early days, is too notorious; and there +remains proof enough—in the writings, for instance, of Sir David +Lindsay—that the morality of the populace, which looked up to +the nobles as its example and its guide, was not a whit better. +As anarchy increased, immorality was likely to increase likewise; and +Scotland was in serious danger of falling into such a state as that +into which Poland fell, to its ruin, within a hundred and fifty years +after; in which the savagery of feudalism, without its order or its +chivalry, would be varnished over by a thin coating of French “civilisation,” +and, as in the case of Bothwell, the vices of the court of Paris should +be added to those of the Northern freebooter. To deliver Scotland +from that ruin, it was needed that she should be united into one people, +strong, not in mere political, but in moral ideas; strong by the clear +sense of right and wrong, by the belief in the government and the judgments +of a living God. And the tone which Buchanan, like Knox, adopted +concerning the great crimes of their day, helped notably that national +salvation. It gathered together, organised, strengthened, the +scattered and wavering elements of public morality. It assured +the hearts of all men who loved the right and hated the wrong; and taught +a whole nation to call acts by their just names, whoever might be the +doers of them. It appealed to the common conscience of men. +It proclaimed a universal and God-given morality, a bar at which all, +from the lowest to the highest, must alike be judged.</p> +<p>The tone was stern: but there was need of sternness. Moral +life and death were in the balance. If the Scots people were to +be told that the crimes which roused their indignation were excusable, +or beyond punishment, or to be hushed up and slipped over in any way, +there was an end of morality among them. Every man, from the greatest +to the least, would go and do likewise, according to his powers of evil. +That method was being tried in France, and in Spain likewise, during +those very years. Notorious crimes were hushed up under pretence +of loyalty; excused as political necessities; smiled away as natural +and pardonable weaknesses. The result was the utter demoralisation, +both of France and Spain. Knox and Buchanan, the one from the +standpoint of an old Hebrew prophet, the other rather from that of a +Juvenal or a Tacitus, tried the other method, and called acts by their +just names, appealing alike to conscience and to God. The result +was virtue and piety, and that manly independence of soul which is thought +compatible with hearty loyalty, in a country labouring under heavy disadvantages, +long divided almost into two hostile camps, two rival races.</p> +<p>And the good influence was soon manifest, not only in those who sided +with Buchanan and his friends, but in those who most opposed them. +The Roman Catholic preachers, who at first asserted Mary’s right +to impurity while they allowed her guilt, grew silent for shame, and +set themselves to assert her entire innocence; while the Scots who have +followed their example have, to their honour, taken up the same ground. +They have fought Buchanan on the ground of fact, not on the ground of +morality: they have alleged—as they had a fair right to do—the +probability of intrigue and forgery in an age so profligate: the improbability +that a Queen so gifted by nature and by fortune, and confessedly for +a long while so strong and so spotless, should as it were by a sudden +insanity have proved so untrue to herself. Their noblest and purest +sympathies have been enlisted—and who can blame them?—in +loyalty to a Queen, chivalry to a woman, pity for the unfortunate and—as +they conceived—the innocent; but whether they have been right +or wrong in their view of facts, the Scotch partisans of Mary have always—as +far as I know—been right in their view of morals; they have never +deigned to admit Mary’s guilt, and then to palliate it by those +sentimental, or rather sensual, theories of human nature, too common +in a certain school of French literature, too common, alas! in a certain +school of modern English novels. They have not said, “She +did it; but after all, was the deed so very inexcusable?” +They have said, “The deed was inexcusable: but she did not do +it.” And so the Scotch admirers of Mary, who have numbered +among them many a pure and noble, as well as many a gifted spirit, have +kept at least themselves unstained; and have shown, whether consciously +or not, that they too share in that sturdy Scotch moral sense which +has been so much strengthened—as I believe by the plain speech +of good old George Buchanan.</p> +<h2>FOOTNOTES</h2> +<p><a name="footnote1"></a><a href="#citation1">{1}</a> This lecture +was delivered in America in 1874.</p> +<p><a name="footnote2"></a><a href="#citation2">{2}</a> Black, +translator of Mallett’s “Northern Antiquities,” Supplementary +Chapter I., and Rafn’s “Antiquitates Americanæ.”</p> +<p><a name="footnote3"></a><a href="#citation3">{3}</a> On the +Fiftieth Birthday of Agassiz.</p> +<p><a name="footnote4"></a><a href="#citation4">{4}</a> This lecture +was given in America in 1874.</p> +<p><a name="footnote5"></a><a href="#citation5">{5}</a> This lecture +was given in America in 1874.</p> +<p><a name="footnote6"></a><a href="#citation6">{6}</a> This lecture +and the two preceding ones, being published after the author’s +death, have not had the benefit of his corrections.</p> +<p><a name="footnote7"></a><a href="#citation7">{7}</a> A Life +of Rondelet, by his pupil Laurent Joubert, is to be found appended to +his works; and with an account of his illness and death, by his cousin, +Claude Formy, which is well worth the perusal of any man, wise or foolish. +Many interesting details beside, I owe to the courtesy of Professor +Planchon, of Montpellier, author of a discourse on “Rondelet et +vies Disciples,” which appeared, with a learned and curious Appendix, +in the “Montpellier Médical” for 1866.</p> +<p><a name="footnote8"></a><a href="#citation8">{8}</a> This lecture +was given at Cambridge in 1869.</p> +<p><a name="footnote9"></a><a href="#citation9">{9}</a> This lecture +was given at Cambridge in 1869.</p> +<p><a name="footnote10"></a><a href="#citation10">{10}</a> I owe +this account of Bloet’s—which appears to me the only one +trustworthy—to the courtesy and erudition of Professor Henry Morley, +who finds it quoted from Bloet’s “Acroama,” in the +“Observationum Medicarum Rariorum,” lib. vii., of John Theodore +Schenk. Those who wish to know several curious passages of Vesalius’s +life, which I have not inserted in this article, would do well to consult +one by Professor Morley, “Anatomy in Long Clothes,” in “Fraser’s +Magazine” for November, 1853. May I express a hope, which +I am sure will be shared by all who have read Professor Morley’s +biographies of Jerome Carden and of Cornelius Agrippa, that he will +find leisure to return to the study of Vesalius’s life; and will +do for him what he has done for the two just-mentioned writers?</p> +<p><a name="footnote11"></a><a href="#citation11">{11}</a> Olivarez’s +“Relacion” is to be found in the Granvelle State Papers. +For the general account of Don Carlos’s illness, and of the miraculous +agencies by which his cure was said to have been effected, the general +reader should consult Miss Frere’s “Biography of Elizabeth +of Valois,” vol. i. pp. 307-19.</p> +<p><a name="footnote12"></a><a href="#citation12">{12}</a> In +justice to poor Doctor Olivarez, it must be said that, while he allows +all force to the intercession of the Virgin and of Fray Diego, and of +“many just persons,” he cannot allow that there was any +“miracle properly so called,” because the prince was cured +according to “natural order,” and by “experimental +remedies” of the physicians.</p> +<p><a name="footnote13"></a><a href="#citation13">{13}</a> This +lecture was given at Cambridge in 1869, and has not had the benefit +of the author’s corrections for the press.</p> +<p><a name="footnote14"></a><a href="#citation14">{14}</a> Delrio’s +book, a famous one in its day, was published about 1612.</p> +<p><a name="footnote15"></a><a href="#citation15">{15}</a> For +a true estimate of Paracelsus you must read “Für Philippus +Aureolus Theophrarstus von Hohenheim,” by that great German physician +and savant, Professor Marx, of Göttiingen; also a valuable article +founded on Dr. Marx’s views in the “Nouveau Biographie Universelle;” +and also—which is within the reach of all—Professor Maurice’s +article on Paracelsus in Vol. II. of his history of “Moral +and Metaphysical Philosophy.” But the best key to Paracelsus +is to be found in his own works.</p> +<p><a name="footnote16"></a><a href="#citation16">{16}</a> So +says Dr. Irving, writing in 1817. I have, however, tried in vain +to get a sight of this book. I need not tell Scotch scholars how +much I am indebted throughout this article to Mr. David Irving’s +erudite second edition of Buchanan’s Life.</p> +<p><a name="footnote17"></a><a href="#citation17">{17}</a> From +the quaint old translation of 1721, by “A Person of Honour of +the Kingdom of Scotland.”</p> +<p>***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HISTORICAL LECTURES AND ESSAYS***</p> +<pre> + + +***** This file should be named 1360-h.htm or 1360-h.zip****** + + +This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: +https://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/1/3/6/1360 + + + +Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions +will be renamed. + +Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no +one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation +(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without +permission and without paying copyright royalties. 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