Library Notes Part 7

VIII.

MUTATIONS.

Swift left some thoughts on various subjects--acute and profound--which it would appear were jotted down at different periods of life, and in different humors. In his most prosperous days, when he dreamed of becoming a bishop, he might have written hopefully, "No wise man ever wished to be younger." At a much later time in life he might have written, sagely and sadly, "Every man desireth to live long, but no man would be old." We can imagine that he wrote the former just after he received the deanery of St. Patrick, and the latter just after he returned from the walk in the neighborhood of Dublin, referred to by the author of Night Thoughts. "Perceiving he did not follow us," says Young, "I went back, and found him fixed as a statue, and earnestly gazing upward at a n.o.ble elm, which in its uppermost branches was much decayed.

Pointing at it, he said, 'I shall be like that tree; I shall die at the top.'"

Bolingbroke, writing to Swift, says, "It is now six in the morning; I recall the time--and am glad it is over--when about this hour I used to be going to bed surfeited with pleasure, or jaded with business; my head often full of schemes, and my heart as often full of anxiety. Is it a misfortune, think you, that I rise at this hour refreshed, serene, and calm: that the past and even the present affairs of life stand like objects at a distance from me, where I can keep off the disagreeable, so as not to be strongly affected by them, and from whence I can draw the others nearer to me?"

De Foe moralizes in memorable language: "I know too much of the world to expect good in it, and have learned to value it too little to be concerned at the evil. I have gone through a life of wonders, and am the subject of a vast variety of providences. I have been fed more by miracles than Elijah when the ravens were his purveyors. I have some time ago summed up the scenes of my life in this distich:--

'No man has tasted differing fortunes more; And thirteen times I have been rich and poor.'

In the school of affliction I have learnt more philosophy than at the academy, and more divinity than from the pulpit. In prison I have learnt that liberty does not consist in open doors and the egress and regress of locomotion. I have seen the rough side of the world as well as the smooth; and have in less than half a year tasted the difference between the closet of a king and the dungeon of Newgate. I have suffered deeply for cleaving to principles, of which integrity I have lived to say, none but those I suffered for ever reproached me with."

We are told by Middleton that "before Cicero left Sicily, at the end of his term as quaestor, he made the tour of the island, to see everything in it that was curious, and especially the city of Syracuse, which had always made the princ.i.p.al figure in its history. Here his first request to the magistrates, who were showing him the curiosities of the place, was to let him see the tomb of Archimedes, whose name had done so much honor to it; but to his surprise, he perceived that they knew nothing at all of the matter, and even denied that there was any such tomb remaining; yet as he was a.s.sured of it beyond all doubt, by the concurrent testimony of writers, and remembered the verses inscribed, and that there was a sphere with a cylinder engraved on some part of it, he would not be dissuaded from the pains of searching it out. When they had carried him, therefore, to the gate where the greatest number of their old sepulchres stood, he observed, in a spot overgrown with shrubs and briers, a small column, whose head just appeared above the bushes, 'with the figure of a sphere and a cylinder upon it; this, he presently told the company, was the thing they were looking for; and sending in some men to clear the ground of the brambles and rubbish, he found the inscription also which he expected, though the latter part of all the verses was effaced. Thus,' says he, 'one of the n.o.blest cities of Greece, and once likewise the most learned, had known nothing of the monument of its most deserving and ingenious citizen, if it had not been discovered to them by a native of Arpinum.'"

Anaxagoras knew the short memory of the people, and chose a happy way to lengthen it, and at the same time to perpetuate himself. When the chief persons of the city paid him a visit, and asked him whether he had any commands for them, he answered that he only desired that children might be permitted to play every year during the month in which he died. His request was respected, and the custom continued for ages.

"Ruins," in the impressive language of Alger, "symbolize the wishes and fate of man; the weakness of his works, the fleetingness of his existence. Who can visit Thebes, in whose crowded crypts, as he enters, a flight of bats chokes him with the dust of disintegrating priests and kings; see the sheep nibbling herbage between the fallen cromlechs of Stonehenge; or confront a dilapidated stronghold of the Middle Ages, where the fox looks out of the window and the thistle nods on the wall, without thinking of these things? They feelingly persuade him what he is.... Tyre was situated of old at the entry of the sea, the beautiful mistress of the earth, haughty in her purple garments, the tiara of commerce on her brow. Now the dust has been sc.r.a.ped from her till she has become a blistered rock, whereon the solitary fisher spreads his nets. A few tattered huts stand among shapeless ma.s.ses of masonry where glorious Carthage stood; the homes of a few husbandmen where voluptuous Corinth once lifted her splendid array of marble palaces and golden towers. Many a nation, proud and populous in the elder days of history, like Elephanta, or Memphis, is now merely a tomb and a shadowy name.

Pompeii and Herculaneum are empty sepulchres, which that fatal flight before the storm of ashes and lava cheated of their occupants; the traveler sees poppies blooming in the streets where chariots once flashed.... Tigers foray in the palace yards of Persepolis, and camels browse in Babylon on the site of Belshazzar's throne; at Baalbec, lizards overrun the altars of the Temple of the Sun, and in the sculptured friezes, here the nests of obscene birds, there the webs of spiders."

"The Roman Emperor Hadrian," philosophizes Hillard, "after many years of care and conquest, with a marked taste for architecture, and the resources of the whole civilized world at his command, resolved to surround his declining life with reproductions of all the striking objects which he had seen in the course of his world-wide wanderings. He selected for the site of this gigantic enterprise a spot singularly favorable to his objects. It was a range of gently undulating hills, of about three miles in extent, with a natural boundary, formed in part by a winding valley, and partly by walls of rock. On the east, it was overlooked by the wooded heights of the Sabine Mountains; and, on the west, it commanded a view of the Campagna and the Eternal City, whose temples and obelisks, relieved against the golden sky of sunset, must have soothed the mind of its imperial master with thoughts of duties performed and of repose, earned by toil. The natural inequalities and undulations of the site, which furnished heights, plains, valleys, and glens, aided and lightened the tasks of the architect and the landscape gardener. The emperor is said to have inclosed a s.p.a.ce of eight or ten miles in circuit, so that, if the statement were true, the villa and its appurtenances occupied an area greater than that of Pompeii. Here he set to work with armies of laborers and mountains of gold, and, in an incredibly short s.p.a.ce of time, the ground was covered with an amazing number of costly and extensive structures, which had risen like exhalations from the soil. Besides the imperial palace, there was a library, an academy, a lyceum, numerous temples, one or more theatres, a covered walk or portico, and s.p.a.cious barracks for the accommodation of the Praetorian guards. Besides these, a glen through which a stream flowed was made into a miniature likeness of the vale of Tempe; a flowery plain was called by the name of the Elysian Fields; and an immense cavern, filled with sunless waters, recalled the gloom of Tartarus.... The ruins, at the present time, seen hastily and without the interpretation of an intelligent guide, are a confused ma.s.s of decay, revealing very little of their former destination or structure.... A considerable portion of the s.p.a.ce formerly occupied by the villa is now under cultivation, and nature, aided by a soft sky and a productive soil, has been busy in healing the gaping wounds of time, and covering unsightly ruin with a mantle of bloom and beauty.... The whole scene is now a broad page on which is stamped an impressive lesson of the vanity of human wishes. The great emperor, even while his last workmen were gathering up their tools to depart, was attacked by a mortal disease; and, seventy years after his death, Caracalla began the work of spoliation by carrying off its most costly marbles to decorate the baths whose ruins are in turn monuments to his name in Rome. A recent French traveler states that a species of syringa, which Hadrian brought from the East and planted here, still sheds its fragrance over these ruins; this delicate and fragile flower, a part of the perennial life of Nature, remaining faithful to the emperor's memory, while stone, marble, and bronze have long since betrayed their trust."

"Neither the troubles, Zen.o.bia," mused La Bruyere, "which disturb your empire, nor the war which since the death of the king, your husband, you have so heroically maintained against a powerful nation, diminish anything of your magnificence. You have preferred the banks of the Euphrates to any other country, and resolved to raise a stately fabric there. The air is healthful and temperate; the situation charming; that sacred wood makes an awful shade on the west; the Syrian G.o.ds, who sometimes dwell on earth, could not choose a finer abode. The plain about it is peopled with men who are constantly employed in shaping and cutting, going and coming, transporting the timber of Lebanon, bra.s.s, and porphyry. Their tools and engines are heard in the air; and the travelers who pa.s.s that way to Arabia expect on their return home to see it finished with all the splendor you design to bestow on it, ere you or the princes your children make it your dwelling. Spare nothing, great queen, nor gold, nor the labor of the most excellent artists; let the Phidiases and Zeuxises of your age show the utmost of their art on your walls and ceilings. Mark out vast and delicious gardens, whose beauty shall appear to be all enchantment, and not the workmanship of man.

Exhaust your treasures, and tire your industry on this incomparable edifice, and after you have given it the last perfection, some grazier or other, who lives on the neighboring sands of Palmyra, enriched by taking toll on your rivers, shall buy with ready money this royal mansion, to adorn it, and make it worthy of him and his fortune."

Gibbon thus concludes his review of the entire series of Byzantine emperors: "In a composition of some days, in a perusal of some hours, six hundred years have rolled away, and the duration of a life or reign is contracted to a fleeting moment; the grave is ever beside the throne: the success of a criminal is almost instantly followed by the loss of his prize; and our immortal reason survives and disdains the sixty phantoms of kings who have pa.s.sed before our eyes, and faintly dwell on our remembrance."

"I went to-day," said Cobbett, "to see the house I formerly occupied.

How small! It is always thus: the words large and small are carried about with us in our minds, and we forget real dimensions. The idea, such as it was received, remains during our absence from the object.

When I returned to England in 1800, after an absence from the country parts of it for sixteen years, the trees, the hedges, even the parks and woods, seemed so small! It made me laugh to hear little gutters, that I could jump over, called rivers! The Thames was but a 'creek!' But when, in about a month after my arrival in London, I went to Farnham, the place of my birth, what was my surprise! Everything was become so pitifully small!... There is a hill not far from the town called Crooksbury Hill, which rises up out of a flat in the form of a cone, and is planted with Scotch fir-trees. Here I used to take the eggs and young ones of crows and magpies. This hill was a famous object in the neighborhood. It served as the superlative degree of height. 'As high as Crooksbury Hill' meant, with us, the utmost degree of height. Therefore the first object that my eyes sought was this hill. I could not believe my eyes! Literally speaking, I for a moment thought the famous hill removed, and a little heap put in its stead; for I had seen in New Brunswick a single rock, or hill of solid rock, ten times as big, and four or five times as high.... What a change! What scenes I had gone through! How altered my state! I had dined the day before at a secretary of state's, in company with Mr. Pitt, and had been waited upon by men in gaudy liveries! I had had n.o.body to a.s.sist me in the world. No teachers of any sort. n.o.body to shelter me from the consequences of bad, and no one to counsel me to good behavior. I felt proud. The distinctions of rank, birth, and wealth, all became nothing in my eyes; and from that moment--less than a month from my arrival in England--I resolved never to bend before them."

"We read in the Memoirs of Moore," says a writer on M. Guizot, in the London Quarterly, 1854, "that in 1820 he was present at a performance in Paris, of Tarare, an opera of Beaumarchais, which was written in 1787, at a period when the promulgation of liberal ideas, with a certain infusion of science, was the fashion in Paris. Accordingly, while Nature and the Genius of Heat are trilling in a duet the laws of gravitation, Tarare (a virtuous soldier) defends his wife from the a.s.saults of the monarch of Ormuz, who, being finally defeated, kills himself, and Tarare is proclaimed king in his place. Only three years afterward Louis XVI., having become a const.i.tutional sovereign, and Bailly (who had shortly to pay with his head for his patriotic illusions) being Maire of Paris, Tarare was not allowed to be acted in its original form. Beaumarchais fitted it to the altered circ.u.mstances, and in its remodeled shape, Tarare becomes a const.i.tutional king. Under the Republic, Tarare was not allowed to be a monarch at all; and when the opera was performed in 1795, the victorious soldier indignantly refuses the crown. Under Bonaparte, Tarare was again recast to bring it into harmony with the delusion of the hour; and lastly, when in 1820 the performance was witnessed by Moore, Tarare, become more monarchal than ever, displays his loyalty by defending the king of Ormuz from a popular insurrection, and ultimately falls with emotion at the feet of the tyrant, who has the magnanimity to restore his wife to him."

St. Austin, with his mother Monica, was led one day by a Roman praetor to see the tomb of Caesar. Himself thus describes the corpse: "It looked of a blue mould, the bone of the nose laid bare, the flesh of the nether lip quite fallen off, his mouth full of worms, and in his eye-pit a hungry toad, feasting upon the remnant portion of flesh and moisture: and so he dwelt in his house of darkness."

A traveler in Ceylon, who visited the ruins of ancient Mahagam, says that one of the ruined buildings had apparently rested upon seventy-two pillars. These were still erect, standing in six lines of twelve columns. This building must have formed an oblong of three hundred feet by two hundred and fifty. The stone causeway which pa.s.sed through the ruins was about two miles in length, being for the most part overgrown with low jungle and p.r.i.c.kly cactus. The first we hear of this city is 286 B. C.; but we have no account of the era or cause of its destruction. The records of Ceylon give no satisfactory account of it.

The wild elephants come out of the jungles and rub their backs against the columns of this forgotten temple, as the naked Indians gamble with forked sticks on the desolate ruins of Central America.

But a few years sometimes change the whole face of a country. Sir Woodbine Parish informed Darwin that during the three years' drought in Buenos Ayres, beginning in 1827, the ground being so long dry, such quant.i.ties of dust were blown about that in the open country the landmarks became obliterated, and people could not tell the limits of their estates.

But what shall we say of the instability of human greatness? The career and end of Pompey furnish a striking example. "He who a few days before commanded kings and consuls, and all the n.o.blest of Rome, was sentenced to die by a council of slaves; murdered by a base deserter; cast out naked and headless on the Egyptian strand; and when the whole earth, as Velleius says, had scarce been sufficient for his victories, could not find a spot upon it at last for a grave. His body was burnt on the sh.o.r.e by one of his freedmen, with the planks of an old fishing-boat; and his ashes, being conveyed to Rome, were deposited privately by his wife Cornelia in a vault of his Alban villa."

Aristotle, that prince of all true thinkers, loaded with immortal glory, was compelled to flee suddenly and by stealth to Chalcis, in order to save his life, and spare, as he said, the Athenians a new crime against philosophy. There, it is believed, the great man, in his old age, wearied with persecutions, poisoned himself.

The venerable Hildebrand, the greatest of all the popes, after the herculean labors of his self-devoted and mighty career, crushed by an acc.u.mulation of hardships, said, "I have loved justice and hated iniquity; therefore I die in exile."

"The ceremony of Galileo's abjuration," says Sir David Brewster, in his biography of that great man, "was one of exciting interest and of awful formality. Clothed in the sackcloth of a repentant criminal, the venerable sage fell upon his knees before the a.s.sembled cardinals; and, laying his hands upon the Holy Evangelists, he invoked the divine aid in abjuring and detesting, and vowing never again to teach, the doctrine of the earth's motion and of the sun's stability. He pledged himself that he would never again, either in words or in writing, propagate such heresies; and he swore that he would fulfill and observe the penances which had been inflicted upon him. At the conclusion of this ceremony, in which he recited his abjuration word for word, and then signed it, he was conveyed, in conformity with his sentence, to the prison of the Inquisition." All because it had been said that the "sun runneth about from one end of heaven to the other," and that "the foundations of the earth are so firmly fixed that they cannot be moved."

Think of this in connection with the fact that "in five years Charles II. touched twenty-three thousand six hundred and one of his subjects for the evil; that the bishops invented a sort of heathen service for the occasion; that the unchristianlike, superst.i.tious ceremony was performed in public; and that, as soon as prayers were ended, the Duke of Buckingham brought a towel, and the Earl of Pembroke a basin and ewer, who, after they had made obeisance to his majesty, kneeled down till his majesty had washed." Dr. Wiseman, an eminent surgeon of that period, in writing on scrofula, says, "However, I must needs profess that his majesty (Charles II.) cureth more in any one year than all the chirurgeons of London have done in an age."

And think at the same time of the trial of a mother and her daughter, eleven years old, before "the great and good Sir Matthew Hale," then Lord Chief Baron, for witchcraft; and their conviction and execution at Bury St. Edmunds, princ.i.p.ally on the evidence of Sir Thomas Browne, one of the first physicians and scholars of his day.

In Fuller's Church History there is a curious fact, showing the power of superst.i.tion over even such a man as Wolsey. The great cardinal "in his life-time was informed by some fortune-tellers that he should have his end at Kingston. This his credulity interpreted of Kingston-on-Thames; which made him always avoid the riding through that town, though the nearest way from his house to the court. Afterward, understanding that he was to be committed by the king's express orders to the charge of Sir Anthony Kingston, it struck to his heart; too late perceiving himself deceived by that father of lies in his h.o.m.onymous prediction."

But credulity seems to have had a foundation place in the characters of some of the world's greatest men. There, for instance, is Hooker, author of that great work, Ecclesiastical Polity,--according to Hallam "the finest as well as the most philosophical writer of the Elizabethan period;" according to Lecky "the most majestic of English writers."

Being appointed to preach a sermon at St. Paul's Cross, London, he lodged at the Shunamite's house, a dwelling appropriated to preachers, and was skillfully persuaded by the landlady "that it was best for him to have a wife that might prove a nurse to him, such an one as might prolong his life, and make it more comfortable, and such an one as she could and would provide for him if he thought fit to marry." The unsuspecting young divine agreed to abide by her choice, which fell upon her own daughter, who proved to be not only "a silly, clownish woman,"

but a very Xantippe. Izaak Walton, in his biography of Hooker, thus philosophizes upon this remarkable marriage: "This choice of Mr. H. (if it were his choice) may be wondered at; but let us consider that the prophet Ezekiel says, 'There is a wheel within a wheel;' a secret, sacred wheel of Providence (not visible in marriages), guided by his hand, that 'allows not the race to the swift,' nor 'bread to the wise,'

nor good wives to good men; and He that can bring good out of evil (for mortals are blind to this reason) only knows why this blessing was denied to patient Job, to meek Moses, and to our as meek and patient Mr.

Hooker." Farther on, by way of explanation and apology, old Izaak quaintly says, "G.o.d and nature blessed him with so blessed a bashfulness, that as in his younger days his pupils might easily look him out of countenance, so neither then, nor in his age, did he ever willingly look any man in the face: and was of so mild and humble a nature, that his poor parish clerk and he did never talk but with both their hats on or both off at the same time: and to this may be added, that though he was not purblind, yet he was short or weak sighted; and where he fixed his eyes at the beginning of his sermon, there they continued till it was ended: and the reader has a liberty to believe, that his modesty and dim sight were some of the reasons why he trusted Mrs. Churchman to choose his wife." His anger is said to have been like a vial of clear water, which, when shook, beads at the top, but instantly subsides, without any soil or sediment of uncharitableness.

n.o.body knows, to say truth, how much the great, modest Hooker was benefited by what appeared to his friends his calamitous marriage.

"There is no great evil," said Publius Syrus, "which does not bring with it some advantage." Calamities, we know, have often proved blessings.

There are cases where blows on the head have benefited the brain, and produced extraordinary changes for the better. Mabillon was almost an idiot at the age of twenty-six. He fell down a stone staircase, fractured his skull, and was trepanned. From that moment he became a genius. Dr. Prichard mentioned a case of three brothers, who were all nearly idiots. One of them was injured on the head, and from that time he brightened up, and became a successful barrister. Wallenstein, too, they say, was a mere fool, till he fell out of a window, and awoke with enlarged capabilities. Here is an instance noted by Robinson in his Diary: "After dinner called on the Flaxmans. Mrs. Flaxman--wife of the sculptor--admitted me to her room. She had about a fortnight before broken her leg, and sprained it besides, by falling down-stairs. This misfortune, however, instead of occasioning a repet.i.tion of the paralytic stroke which she had a year ago, seemed to have improved her health. She had actually recovered the use of her hand in some degree, and her friends expect that she will be benefited by the accident."

There is Cowper. But for his mental malady the world would have had much less of good poetry and fewer perfect letters. The thought of a clerkship in the House of Lords made him insane! "Innocent, pious, and confiding, he lived in perpetual dread of everlasting punishment: he could only see between him and heaven a high wall which he despaired of ever being able to scale; yet his intellectual vigor was not subdued by affliction. What he wrote for amus.e.m.e.nt or relief in the midst of 'supreme distress,' surpa.s.ses the elaborate efforts of others made under the most favorable circ.u.mstances; and in the very winter of his days, his fancy was as fresh and blooming as in the spring and morning of his existence." The Diverting History of John Gilpin, the production of a single night, was, curious to say, written by a man who lived in perpetual dread of eternal punishment; and while it was being read by Henderson, the actor, to large audiences in London, "all through Lent, at high prices," its author was raving mad. The ballad, which had become the town talk, was reprinted from the newspaper, wherein it had lain three years dormant. Gilpin, pa.s.sing at full stretch by the Bell at Edmonton, was to be seen at all print-shops. One print-seller sold six thousand. What had succeeded so well in London was repeated with inferior ability, but with equal success, on provincial stages, and the ballad became in the highest degree popular before the author's name became known. The last reading to which Cowper listened appears to have been that of his own works. Beginning with the first volume, Mr. Johnson went through them, and he listened to them in silence till he came to John Gilpin, which he begged not to hear. It reminded him of cheerful days, and of those of whom he could not bear to think. "The grinners at John Gilpin," he said, "little dream what the author sometimes suffers.

How I hated myself yesterday for having ever wrote it!" On his death-bed, when the clergyman told him to confide in the love of the Redeemer, who desired to save all men, Cowper gave a pa.s.sionate cry, begging him not to give him such consolations. To our ignorant eyes it looks strange that the author of our best and most popular hymns should have thought his sins unpardonable; should have believed himself already d.a.m.ned.

One of Cowper's visitors and pensioners at Olney was a poor school-master (Teedon) who thought himself specially favored by Providence, and to whom Cowper communicated his waking dreams, and consulted, as a person whom the Lord was pleased to answer in prayer.

This recalls a similar fact of the ill.u.s.trious Tycho Brahe. When he lived in Uraniberg he maintained an idiot of the name of Lep, who lay at his feet whenever he sat down to dinner, and whom he fed with his own hand. Persuaded that his mind, when moved, was capable of fore-telling future events, Tycho carefully marked everything he said. (Striking instances, it may be observed, of the tribute which intelligence and science unconsciously pay to faith.)

It is pathetic to think, says Alger, how many great men have, like Homer and Milton, had the windows of their souls closed. Galileo, in his seventy-third year, wrote to one of his correspondents, "Alas! your dear friend has become irreparably blind. These heavens, this earth, this universe, which by wonderful observation I had enlarged a thousand times past the belief of past ages, are henceforth shrunk into the narrow s.p.a.ce which I myself occupy. So it pleases G.o.d; it shall, therefore, please me also." Handel pa.s.sed the last seven years of his life in total blindness, in the gloom of the porch of death. How he and the spectators must have felt when the great composer, in 1753, stood pale and tremulous, with his sightless eyeb.a.l.l.s turned toward a tearful concourse of people, while his sad song from Samson, "Total eclipse, no sun, no moon," was delivered! Leigh Hunt said of Handel: He was the grandest composer that is known to have existed, wielding, as it were, the choirs of heaven and earth together. Mozart said of him, that he struck you, whenever he pleased, with a thunderbolt. His hallelujahs open the heavens. He utters the word "wonderful," as if all their trumpets spoke together.

Beethoven was afflicted with "dense and incurable deafness" long before he had composed his greatest works. He said, "I was nigh taking my life with my own hands. But art held me back. I could not leave the world until I had revealed what lay within me." He occupied for a long time a room in a remote house on a hill, and was called the Solitary of the Mountain, where he heard, no doubt, more distinctly "the voices," than if he had been blest with the best of ears. "When he produced his mighty opera, Fidelio, it failed. In vain he again modeled and remodeled it. He went himself into the orchestra and attempted to lead it; and the pitiless public of Vienna laughed." His work so far surpa.s.sed the appreciation of many of his contemporaries as to be condemned as the vagaries of a madman. Haydn and Mozart, as was said, had perfected instrumental music in form; it remained for deaf Beethoven to touch it, so that it became a living soul.

It does seem that G.o.d in his mystery has sometimes put out the eyes of poets and stopped the ears of musicians to admit them to glimpses of his own glories and whisper to them his own harmonies. Homer and Milton had inward poetic visions which light and sight alone never gave to man.

Beethoven, unable from defective hearing to conduct an orchestra, produced celestial harmonies out of the silence of divine meditation.

The philanthropy of John Howard was so prodigious that it rendered him incapable of ordinary enjoyments. His faculties were so absorbed by his great humanity that he was voted a bore by the liveliest and cleverest of his contemporaries. "But the mere men of taste," says John Foster, "ought to be silent respecting such a man as Howard; he is above their sphere of judgment. The invisible spirits, who fulfill their commissions of philanthropy among mortals, do not care about pictures, statues, and public buildings; and no more did he, when the time in which he must have inspected and admired them would have been taken from the work to which he had consecrated his life. The curiosity which he might feel was reduced to wait till the hour should arrive when its gratification should be presented by conscience, which kept a scrupulous charge of all his time, as the most sacred duty of that hour. If he was still at every hour, when it came, fated to feel the attractions of the fine arts but the second claim, they might be sure of their revenge; for no other man will ever visit Rome under such a despotic consciousness of duty as to refuse himself time for surveying the magnificence of its ruins. Such a sin against taste is far beyond the reach of common saintship to commit. It implied an inconceivable severity of conviction, that he had one thing to do, and that he who would do some great thing in this short life must apply himself to the work with such a concentration of his forces as to idle spectators, who live only to amuse themselves, looks like insanity." Look a little over his wonderful life, by the aid of a few facts set down by the encyclopedist: At about the age of twenty-five he experienced a severe attack of illness, and upon his recovery testified his grat.i.tude to the woman who had nursed him, and who was nearly thirty years his senior, by marrying her. Moved by the accounts of the horrors of the earthquake at Lisbon, he embarked for that place with a view of doing something to alleviate the calamity.

On the voyage he was taken prisoner by a French privateer and carried into Brest, where he became a witness of the inhuman treatment to which prisoners of war were subjected. Designing to visit the new lazaretto of Ma.r.s.eilles, he endeavored in vain to procure a pa.s.sport from the French government, which was incensed against him for having published a translation of a suppressed French account of the interior of the Bastile. He therefore traveled through the country in various disguises, and after a series of romantic adventures and several narrow escapes from the police, who were constantly on his track, succeeded in his purpose. He proceeded thence to Malta, Zante, Smyrna, and Constantinople, visiting prisons, pest-houses, and hospitals, and in the two latter cities gratuitously dispensing his medical services, often with great benefit to the poor. The freedom with which he exposed his person in infected places, whither his attendants refused to follow him, was characteristic of his fearless and self-sacrificing character; but as if by a miracle he escaped all contagion. His most daring act, however, has yet to be recorded. Feeling that he could not speak with authority on the subject of pest-houses until he had experienced the discipline of one, he went to Smyrna, sought out a foul ship, and sailed in her for Venice. After a voyage of sixty days, during which by his energy and bravery he a.s.sisted the crew in beating off an attack of pirates, he arrived at his destination, and was subjected to a rigorous confinement in the Venetian lazaretto, under which his health suffered severely. In the preface to one of his numerous works, he announced his intention to pursue his work, observing, "Should it please G.o.d to cut off my life in the prosecution of this design, let not my conduct be imputed to rashness or enthusiasm, but to a serious conviction that I am pursuing the path of duty." He died of camp-fever, which he contracted from a patient at Kherson, Russia, on the Black Sea, having expended nearly the whole of his large fortune in various benefactions. In a speech to the electors of Bristol, Edmund Burke thus eloquently sums up the public services of Howard: "He has visited all Europe, not to survey the sumptuousness of palaces, or the stateliness of temples; not to make accurate measurement of the remains of ancient grandeur, nor to form a scale of the curiosity of modern art; not to collect medals or collect ma.n.u.scripts; but to dive into the depths of dungeons; to plunge into the infections of hospitals; to survey the mansions of sorrow and pain; to take the gauge and dimensions of misery, depression, and contempt; to remember the forgotten, to attend to the neglected, to visit the forsaken, and to compare and collate the distresses of all men in all countries."

In persons of genius, defects sometimes appear to take the place of merits, and weaknesses to act the part of auxiliaries. The "plastic nature of the versatile faculty" is such that common laws do not govern it, nor common standards judge it. "Men of genius," says an acute historian and critic of literature and literary men, "have often resisted the indulgence of one talent to exercise another with equal power; some, who have solely composed sermons, could have touched on the foibles of society with the spirit of Horace or Juvenal; Blackstone and Sir William Jones directed that genius to the austere studies of law and philology which might have excelled in the poetical and historical character. So versatile is this faculty of genius, that its possessors are sometimes uncertain of the manner in which they shall treat their subject, whether to be grave or ludicrous. When Brebeuf, the French translator of the Pharsalia of Lucan, had completed the first book as it now appears, he at the same time composed a burlesque version, and sent both to the great arbiter of taste in that day, to decide which the poet should continue. The decision proved to be difficult." Hence it is that men of genius and their productions are often enigmas to the world. "The hero," says Carlyle, "can be poet, prophet, king, priest, or what you will, according to the kind of world he finds himself born into. I confess I have no notion of a truly great man that could not be all sorts of men. The poet who could merely sit on a chair, and compose stanzas, would never make a stanza worth much. He could not sing the heroic warrior, unless he himself were at least a heroic warrior too. I fancy there is in him the politician, the thinker, legislator, philosopher; in one or the other degree, he could have been, he is, all these.... Shakespeare,--one knows not what he could not have made in the supreme degree."

"It is notorious," says Macaulay, "that Niccolo Machiavelli, out of whose surname they have coined an epithet for a knave, and out of his Christian name a synonym for the devil, was through life a zealous republican. In the same year in which he composed his manual of kingcraft, he suffered imprisonment and torture in the cause of public liberty. It seems inconceivable that the martyr of freedom should have designedly acted as the apostle of tyranny." The real object and meaning of his celebrated book, The Prince, have been subjects of dispute for centuries. One old critic says, "Machiavel is a strenuous defender of democracy; he was born, educated, and respected under that form of government, and was a great enemy to tyranny. Hence it is that he does not favor a tyrant: it is not his design to instruct a tyrant, but to detect his secret attempts, and expose him naked and conspicuous to the poor people. Do we not know there have been many princes such as he describes? Why are such princes angry at being immortalized by his means? This excellent author's design was, under the show of instructing the prince, to inform the people." Another says, "I must say that Machiavel, who pa.s.sed everywhere for a teacher of tyranny, detested it more than any man of his time; as may easily appear by the tenth chapter of the first book of his Discourses, in which he expresses himself very strongly against tyrants." Nardi, his contemporary, calls his works "panegyrics upon liberty." Bayle says, "The Jesuit Porsevin, who had not read The Prince, was nevertheless the cause of its being condemned by the Inquisition. He charges Machiavel with such things as are not in The Prince. His charges were made upon pa.s.sages from a work, published anonymously, ent.i.tled Anti-Machiavel, and not from The Prince. The Prince was published about the year 1515, and dedicated to Lorenzo de'

Medici, nephew to Leo X. It did not prejudice the author with this pope, who nevertheless was the first who threatened those with excommunication that read a prohibited book!"

A critic says of La Rochefoucauld: "The author of the Maxims was apparently the least selfish public man of his land and age. Saith one of his biographers, not untruly, 'He gave the example of all the virtues of which he would appear to contest the existence.' He ridicules bravery as a madness; and as Madame de Maintenon, who could have had no predilection for his system, curtly observes, 'he was, however, very brave.' The proofs of his bravery do not rest on Madame de Maintenon's a.s.sertion. A scorn of danger, preeminently French, as it became the inheritor of so great a French name to exhibit, was sufficiently shown at the siege of Bordeaux and the battle of St. Antoine. Madame de Sevigne speaks of La Rochefoucauld with an admiration which she rarely bestows except on her daughter; and says that in his last agonizing illness he thought more of his neighbor than himself. Cardinal de Retz, in the portrait he has left of the brilliant duke,--a portrait certainly not flattered,--tells us that this philosopher, who reduced all human motives to self-interest, did not feel the little interests which were never his weak point, and did not understand the great interests which were never his strong point; and, finally, this acute critic of contemporaneous celebrities, after a.s.suring us that La Rochefoucauld 'had never been a good party-man,' tells us that in the relations of common life La Rochefoucauld was the honestest man of the age."

Sir John Denham, according to Count Grammont, was "one of the brightest geniuses England ever produced for wit and humor, and for brilliancy of composition; satirical and free in his poems, he spared neither frigid writers nor jealous husbands, nor even their wives; every part abounded with the most poignant wit, and the most entertaining stories; but his most delicate and spirited raillery turned generally against matrimony; and as if he wished to confirm, by his own example, the truth of what he had written in his youth," he married, at the age of seventy-nine, Miss Brook, aged eighteen, a favorite of King Charles II., and mistress of his brother, the Duke of York, afterward King James II. "As no person entertained any doubt of his having poisoned her (on account of jealousy), the populace of his neighborhood had a design of tearing him in pieces as soon as he should come abroad; but he shut himself up to bewail her death, until their fury was appeased by a magnificent funeral, at which he distributed four times more burnt wine than had ever been drank at any burial in England."

(You remember the plea Denham urged in behalf of old George Wither, the Puritan poet, when he was taken prisoner by the Cavaliers, and a general disposition was displayed to hang him at once. Sir John saved his life by saying to Charles, "I hope your majesty will not hang poor George Wither, for as long as he lives it can't be said that I am the worst poet in England.")

Literature is full of such facts as at first blush appear incredible.

Consider, that "although the soil of Sweden is not rich in either plants or insects, and many of its feathered tribes are but temporary visitants, leaving it at stated periods in quest of milder climes, nevertheless it was amidst this physical barrenness that the taste of Linnaeus for his favorite pursuit broke out almost from his earliest infancy, and found the means, not only of its gratification, but of laying a basis of a system which soon spread its dominion over the whole world of science. Almost within the Arctic circle, this enthusiast of nature felt all those inspirations which are generally supposed to be the peculiar offspring of warmer regions. He traveled over the greater part of Lapland, skirting the boundaries of Norway, and returning to Upsala by the Gulf of Bothnia, having pa.s.sed over an extent of about four thousand miles. Nothing but the enthusiasm of genius would have made him, night and day, wade the cold creeks and treacherous bogs, and climb the bleak mountains of Lapland--eating little but fish, unsalted, and crawling with vermin. He considered his labor amply remunerated by the information he had gained, and the discovery of new plants in the higher mountains, with the payment of his expenses, amounting to about ten pounds!"