SIR THOMAS BROWSE, KNT. From a Portrait preserved in the Vestry of St. Peter's, Mancroft, Norwich. VARIA: READINGS FROM RARE BOOKS. 15 Y J . H A I N F R I S VV E L L , AI'THOR OF "THE GEXTLE HFE," ETC. LONDON : SAMPSON LOW, SON, AND MARSTON, .MILTON HOfSE, Ll'DGATE HILL. 1866. TO MY FBIBND G. W. W. FIRTH, ESQ. (OF NORWICH), THIS VOLTTME OF ESSAYS IS AFFECTIONATELY AND ADMIRINGLY DEDICATED. PREFACE. HE indulgent reader will be kind enough to take the sub-title of these Bibliographic Essays in a somewhat restricted sense. The celebrated books discussed in them are widely known by name, but with the majority of them it is by name only. And to the general reader not only would their rarity be a hindrance to perusal, but, should he by chance procure them, the task of wading through the thick folios might be found tiresome or distasteful. But here he may find something of great causes, men, and books, in a volume which he can carry to the chimney corner or read on a journey, some- thing which it is hoped may induce him to seek after the treasures which lie hidden in the dusty and often but dimly-remembered originals. Tiii PREFACE. The thanks of the author are due to the editors of the Saturday Review and the Spectator, in which these papers, which have had much added to them, first appeared, for permitting this reprint : to G. H. Lewes, Esq., Editor of the Fortnightly Review, for courteously withdrawing from his pages the title " Varia," which he had assumed long after the present work was advertised; and to Mr. Firth, who adorns the same profession as, and holds a like position to Sir Thomas Browne, and in the same city, for the photograph of a rare picture of that worthy knight, never before en- graved, a reproduction of which illustrates this volume. Few honest writers dismiss a book without sin- cerely wishing that it were worthier of the kind and judicious readers' time and study : an earnest expression of that wish shall close these few pre- liminary words. CONTENTS. Page | HE ANGELIC DOCTOR 1 NOSTRADAMUS 39 THOMAS A KEMPIS AND THE IMITATIO CHRISTI 59 DR. JOHN FAUSTCS 79 QUEVEDO 105 MADAME J. M. B. DE LA MOTHE GUION AND QUIETISM 137 AUREOLUS PHILIPPUS THEOPHRASTUS PARACELSUS, BOMBAST OF HOHENHEIM 163 HOWELL THE TRAVELLER 195 MICHAEL SCOT 217 LODOWICK MUGGLETON 237 SIR THOMAS BROWNE 251 GEORGE PSALMANAZAR 283 THE HIGHWAYMAN REAL AND IDEAL .... 309 THE SPIRIT WORLD AND ITS LITERATURE . 323 THE ANGELIC DOCTOR. BOOKS CONSULTED. Summa Theologica, Sancti Thomce Acquinatis Divina. Voluntatis inter- pretis; Sacri, Ordinis Pr&dicatorum. In qua ecclesia Cathdlicce doctrina universa et quicquid in veterum Patrum monumentis est dignwn observatu; quicquid etiam vel olim vocatum est, vel hodie vocatur ab luzreticis in controversiam ; in omne ut erudite solide, et dilucide ita pie atque fideliter explicatur ; in ires partes ab auctore suo distributee. Parisiis, M.D.C.XXXVHI. Suiter's Lives of the Saints. Dolman, 1854, 12 vols. 8vo. vol. iii. 7th March. Article: S. Thomas of Aquino, D.C. Penny Cyclopaedia. Vol. xiii. Article: Aquinas. An Historical and Critical Dictionary. By Monsieur Bayle. Vol. i. Article : Albertus Magnus ; other articles have been consulted. Mediaeval Philosophy; or, a Treatise on Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy from the oth to the 14th Centuries. By Frederick Denison Maurice, M.A. London and Glasgow, 1848. Nouvelle Biographie Generate. Article : St. Thomas D. Aqnin. Philnbiblon. By Richard de Bury, 1832. Notes to, on Aquinas. Miscellaneous Works of Pope. London, 1741. Memoirs of Mar- tinus Scriblerus, where a selection of theses is given in imitation of Aquinas's style. THE ANGELIC DOCTOR. ' A.D. 12271274. HEEE is a huge brown folio sometimes met with, nothing less than the celebrated " Summ " of Thomas Aquinas, which has been a perfect harbour of refuge for all Roman Catholic doubters ever since it was written, and which has had its effect on Protestant minds, and will yet do so, no doubt, for years to come. It contains somewhat more than eighteen hundred pages of closely-printed matter in double columns, and resolves, or affects to resolve really, to say the truth, it is for the most part a very manly, plain- spoken book all the doubts, ethical, philosophical, or re- ligious, that a reader, be he priest or layman, can possibly entertain. This great work Aquinas did not live to finish ; but, like the Cathedral of Cologne, or the Pyramid of Cheops, although unfinished, it is still a wonder. Mr. Maurice, in fact, believes that, if Aquinas had conceived and entertained only half the doubts that he has so boldly expressed, he would not have lived till he was thirty, much less till he 4 VAEIA. was nearly fifty. But these doubts never made a lodg- ment within his breast ; and hence he was called the . Angelic Doctor, as Bonaventura was named the Seraphic Doctor. He is full of calm consciousness of Faith. Those who rank him amongst the infidels, again to quote Mr. Maurice, can have but little acquaintance with his writings. Yet his book is a storehouse of infidel opinions. " The reasoner against almost any tenet of the Roman Catholic Church can be furnished on a short notice with any kind of weapon out of the armoury of the great Doctor." * To return to our book. Infidel or not infidel, the Church has always regarded St. Thomas as one of its great doctors and champions ; and the very copper-plate engraving which is inlaid in the title-page of my copy pictures what was at once almost a miracle and a conveyance to the Doctor of the applause and approval of his church. The Doctor is represented as kneeling in prayer, with his hands widely spread, and with a most humble expression of countenance; above him a little Cupid lifts from his studious brows his square doctor's cap, so that a nimbus, an aureole, a divine coronet of light, which, if we may believe artists, saints commonly wore, may have room to play, in a will-o'-the-wisp fashion, above his head. Before him, and in the midst of a large church of Palladian or Roman architecture, appears the Saviour, in clouds, in the midst of which clouds also are certain cherubic angels, mere heads and wings disporting. From the mouth of the * Maurice's " Mediaeval Philosophy." THE ANGELIC DOCTOR. 5 Saviour issues a label, on which are the words of approval : " Bene scripsisti de me, Thoraa ;" " Well hast thou written concerning me, O Thomas." Perhaps the force of approval could no further go. We shall have to refer to this legend in the life of the saint, and may therefore, without further parley, proceed to consider who this great writer was ; this great bull, this ox, the bellowing of whose learning has reached down the ages and affects us yet. O v The 7th of March is consecrated by the Roman Church to the memory of Saint Thomas of Aquino, doctor and confessor, by us known as Thomas Aquinas. Few men were more important in their day, and his reputation has not died out, but has been permanent and widely spread. The period to which he belonged was one of great mental activity ; of an activity, not to say restlessness, indeed, much greater than many of the modern school would be disposed to allow. The first dawn of the Eeformation had not yet, it is true, become manifest, but a spirit of inquiry was prevalent, which was the sure precursor of an intellec- tual revolution. To quote Lord Brougham, speaking of a totally distinct but somewhat similar period : " The soldier might be abroad, but there was another person abroad who would make himself heard; yes! the schoolmaster was abroad; and while he was busy, what cared we for soldiers ?" The ancient philosophers and poets had again taken root in the human mind ; Aristotle had been called the enemy of Christianity ; Plato had been read, cited, and loved ; the Bible itself had been, to the priests at least, if 6 VAEIA. not to the laity, unlocked. There was also a great latitude of speculation ; and, although not a learned age in the sense in which we now use the term, it is probable that there was much more originality of thought, if less of scholarship, than in the succeeding century. As before remarked, there was scarcely any formal opposition to the claims of the Roman Catholic Church. But the thirteenth century was not distinguished by any exaggerated spirit of submission. In England our own King John yielded reluctantly to the Papal claims a measure to which he was forced rather by his own extreme unpopularity than by any excess of sympathy on the part of his subjects with the spiritual power. In Germany the Swabian dynasty held the imperial crown for a long series of years, and the emperors of that family were engaged in constant strife with the court of Rome. Seldom had the person of the pontiff been viewed with less respect seldom had he been hated so completely as a secular prince. The ecclesiastical power gained ascendency at last; and the death of the young Conradin, and the accession of the house of Anjou to the throne of Naples, completed the ruin of a dynasty fruitful in men of a restless and aspiring genius. Thomas of Aquino had not, as Shiel once said, that bitter chill of poverty in early youth from which the heart so seldom recovers. He was by birth one of the counts of i Aquino, who ranked among the noblest families of Naples. "They were allied," says Alban Butler, with a pride which is perhaps pardonable, but certainly unchristian, " to THE ANGELIC DOCTOR. 7 the Kings of Sicily and Aragon, to St. Lewis of France, and many other sovereign houses of Europe. Our saint's grandfather having married the sister of the Emperor Frederick I, he was himself grand-nephew to that prince, and second cousin to the Emperor Henry VI, and in the third degree to Frederick II. His father, Landulph, was Count of Acquino, and Lord of Loretto and Belcastro : his mother, Theodora, was daughter to the Count of Theate. The saint was born towards the end of the year 1226, or at the beginning of the ensuing year ; for accounts differ. St. Austin observes that the most tender age is subject to various passions, as of impatience, choler, jealousy, and spite, and the like, which appear in children. No such thing was seen in Thomas."* With such a sweet disposition, it was perhaps impossible not to make a saint; with such a pedigree, so exalted a genealogy, it was very difficult to do so. The monastic life was the result of Thomas's own choice, but it was most vigorously opposed by all his family. The lustre of the long line of the Counts of Aquino was not, as they thought, to be dimmed by the dirty habits, the bare feet, and the serge gown of a priest. They little dreamed of the lustre that was to be shed upon it by the aureole of a saint. In early life the education of the child had been intrusted to the Benedictine monks of Monte Cassino. There is some dispute as to the share the Benedictines are * Alban Butler's " Lives of the Saints," vol. iii. pp. 43, 44. 8 VARIA. entitled to in having secured so brilliant and acute an in- tellect for the service of the Church; and, indeed, it would seem that he did not entirely determine to give up the world until he had resided some time at Naples ; when, after the lapse of a short time, he entered the order of Saint Dominic. This decisive step had been long opposed by the whole force of entreaty, persuasion, threat, trick, cajolery, and even force, of Aquinas's family. All manner of fond caresses, entreaties, and prayers were used by his mother to dissuade him from becoming a monk, and, says Butler, with a quaint sadness, " Nature made her eloquent and pathetic." His sisters, too, pleaded with her ; they omitted nothing that flesh and blood could inspire on such an occasion, and represented to him the danger of causing the death of his mother by grief. But nothing could move Thomas ; on the contrary, if we may credit his biographers, he rather moved his sisters than they him, for they both yielded to the force of his reasons for quit- ting the world, and by his persuasion devoted themselves to a sincere practice of piety. In sweet solitude, Thomas prepared himself for his future life in company with three books, a Bible, Aris- totle's Logics, and the works of the Master of the Sentences ; this quietude, however, enraged his brothers Landulph and Reynold, who were young and somewhat wild men, soldiers who had returned from the army of the emperor, and they sought to obtain that by force which the mother had failed to gain by entreaties ; they bore THE ANGELIC DOCTOR. 9 away the young novice, tore up his habit, and shut him xip in a solitary tower. Herein, like the philosopher of old, he was to undergo a strong temptation, and to succeed in overcoming it. But Alban Butler shall tell what this was : " The devil suggested to these young officers a new artifice to prevent him from pursuing his vocation. They secretly introduced into his chamber one of the most beautiful and most insinuating young strumpets of the country, promising her a considerable reward in case she could draw him into sin ; she employed all the arms of Satan to succeed in so detestable a design. The saint, alarmed and affrighted at the danger, profoundly humbled himself, and cried out to God most earnestly for his pro- tection ; then snatching up a firebrand struck her with it and drove her out of his chamber. After this victory, not moved with pride, but blushing with confusion at having been so basely assaulted, he fell on his knees and thanked God for his merciful preservation." The story would hardly be complete without a vision. Falling asleep, he dreamt that two angels tied him round the loins with a cord, or, if we like it better, two angels did really visit him, and girded him so tightly with a cord that they awakened him and made him cry out. His guards ran in, but he kept the secret to himself. One heroic victory of this kind, adds Butler, sometimes obtains of God a recompense and a triumph. As St. Paul was let down from the city walls in a basket, so was Thomas from his tower by his sister, who knew that his mother, the countess, no longer opposed his being a monk. He 10 VARIA. was received with joy by his brethren the Dominicans of Naples, and from that time he was suffered to pursue his desires in peace< Albertus Magnus was then teaching at Cologne, and the two orders of St. Francis and St. Dominic were as yet in the full vigour of youth. Almost every man of intellect was in that day a priest, although perhaps only a priest in name ; and one cannot wonder at the unremitting watch- fulness and care with which his future career was marked out by the chiefs of this powerful spiritual corporation. The Benedictines, however, are no doubt entitled to some credit in forming the mind of the youthful aspirant. His biographers are never weary of boasting how pious and how modest he was from the time of his earliest youth. His great talent and gentle disposition seem to have attracted considerable notice, and no pains were probably spared to secure such abilities for the service of the Church. Be this as it may, St. Thomas of Aquino has been always recognized as one of the glories of the Dominican order. Under the care of the general of this order, he was sent to Paris, and from Paris to Cologne ; there he first listened to Albert the Great, a man small in stature and weak in body, but great indeed in mind. He ranked amongst the most learned men of the age, and was en- dowed with a wonderful vivacity and quickness of intellect. Like most of the learned of his day, he attempted to reach the extreme limits of the knowable, and to him was at- tached, in the minds of the vulgar at least, the credit of being a magician. THE ANGELIC DOCTOR. 11 " I could easily believe," says Bayle, speaking of this charge, " that, as he understood mathematics, he had made a head the springs whereof might form some articulate sounds ; but what a folly to found an accusation of magic on this ! "* Polydore Vergil, Pope Sylvester, Eobert of Lincoln, and Friar Bacon had like heads. Naude tells us that Albertus Magnus was more ingenious than these people ; for he formed a whole man, having worked for thrice ten years with the greatest diligence to forge him under the divers constellations, which the credulous reader, if he look into Old Moore's or Zadkiel's almanacs of the present day, will find govern the various parts of the body. Some of the writers of the time say that this man was made of flesh,t but by art, and not by nature ; a fact "judged impossible by modern writers." It was called the Andro'is of Albertus Magnus ; and the tale is only introduced here because it is said, to his honour, that Thomas Aquinas broke it in pieces, he being, we are told, " irritated at its great tittle-tattle." If any such figure did exist, more probably he did so from a belief that such an image was wickedly imagined and made. Albertus was accused of turning winter into spring, of possessing magical books, of being the first man-midwife, and, by certain magical performances, of preserving his own body from corruption. In a note Bayle quotes Father Raynaud, who asserts that St. Thomas never said that he broke the * Bayle's Dictionary, article " Albertus Magnus." t Bayle quotes Henri de Assia and Bartholomew Sybilla. 12 VARIA. brazen head of Albertus, and that the assorted miracles are false exaggerations or wholly fictitious.* Aquinas was, if not the favourite, the most celebrated scholar of Albertus ; but, as Alban Butler tells us, his humility prevented him from showing how really advanced he was in learning. His fellow-scholars called him the Great Sicilian, the Dumb Ox. One day, however, the master observed, in the hearing of all, " We call him the great Sicilian ox. but that ox will make his lowings heard throughout Christendom." It is also said that one of his companions proposed, out of pity to his supposed inca- pacity, to go over his lessons and explain them to him. The saint submitted, through meekness, to this arrange- ment. It happened one day, however, that his friend found something which he was unable to understand, much less to explain. Thomas solved the difficulty in the most lucid manner, and his fellow-student hence- forward was content to learn from him. This story seems to accord with what we know of his character. Every allowance must be made for the tendency of ecclesiastical biographers to magnify the virtues of the spiritual hero whose character they are depicting. But, after making every possible deduction for party-spirit, enough remains to render it doubtful whether any of the doctors of the Reformed Church were actuated at any time by a more * Hyems in veris amcenitatem versa et caput seneum articulate loquens . . . sunt ableganda tanquam conficta et falso jac- tata de tanto viro ; libri autem magicii suut supposititii, &c. THE ANGELIC DOCTOR. 13 Christian spirit than that which inspired the Dominican monk, of whose life and works we are endeavouring to give some brief notice. His master, Albertus Magnus, was a man of very different character. He was less of a theologian, and more of a philosopher. Some hints were occasionally thrown out, even in his lifetime, that he was an ardent student of the occult sciences. Being associated with the Angelic Doctor, St. Thomas, for so many years, he doubtless exer- cised great influence in the development of his young friend's character, and this, perhaps, would account for many of the doubts expressed in Aquinas's great work. He survived his pupil seven years. A legend which was current concerning Albertus Magnus shows how widely he differed from the Angelic Doctor. Many years before his death he refrained from teaching. The reason for this was given in this wise : " When young, he had a difficulty even in mastering the most elementary studies necessary for the ecclesiastical profession. He was almost in despair, when the Holy Virgin appeared to him and asked him in which branch of learning he most wished to excel, in theology or in philosophy. Albert made choice of philosophy. His request was granted; but the Virgin added that, as a punishment for not choosing theology, before his death he would relapse into his former stupidity. This accord- ingly happened three years before his death. He sud- denly stopped short while he was delivering a lecture, and, being unable to collect his ideas, he at length under- 14 VARIA. stood that the time had arrived when the prediction should be fulfilled." This story is probahly fabulous ; we quote it to show that, in the opinion of his age, Albertus Magnus was less a theologian than a philosopher. It was perhaps fortunate for his pupil that such happened to be the case. Thomas Aquinas was of a devout disposition, and had even some tendency to mysticism. It is probable that his reasoning powers would scarcely have been so fully deve- loped as they were, if he had not had a preceptor rather more secular in his inclinations than himself. After a few years Albertus Magnus was summoned to Paris, and his disciple Thomas accompanied him. In 1248 the Dominican order resolved to establish theolo- gical seminaries in various parts of Europe. Four of these were, Cologne, Montpellier, Bologna, and Oxford. Albertus Magnus was appointed to a professorship at 1 Cologne, and Thomas Aquinas, being then twenty-two years of age, was also intrusted with the office of teacher. He now began to compose his first works, which con- sisted of commentaries on the Ethics, and other philoso- phical works, of Aristotle. About this time he appears to have been subject to fits of religious enthusiasm. In saying mass, according to Alban Butler, he seemed to be in raptures, and often quite dissolved in tears. It is therefore perhaps to this period of his life that we must assign the occasion of the miraculous vision which is illustrated, in the manner already described, on the title- THE ANGELIC DOCTOR. 15 page of the folio edition of the " Summa Thcologica." It should be premised, Tocco relates, according to Butler, that the vision took place somewhat later in the saint's life, when, indeed, he was at Naples, after having composed the first part of his " Summa Theologica" at Bologna; certain it is, however, that, during the rapt and visionary state into which fervent prayer frequently threw this good man, Dominick Caserte " beheld him, while in fervent prayer, raised from the ground, and heard a voice from the crucifix directed to him in these words, ' Bene scrip- sisti de me, Thoma : quam mercedem accipies?' 'Non aliam, nisi te, Domine.' ' Well hast thou written of me, O Thomas : what reward wilt thou accept ? ' ' No other than thyself, O Lord,' said the devoted priest." Taking the story at its lowest possible value, and believing that, like the Egyptian priests, which Alban Butler tells his readers addressed their devotees from hollow cells made secretly behind the images, the priests at Naples imposed upon their devout and learned dupe in order to encourage him in his wonderful undertaking, we still must admire the sweet devotion and meekness of the rapt answer. In 1257, being then thirty-one years old, Aquinas was admitted Doctor at Paris. It had in the meantime not gone well with his family. The two young soldiers who had played the saint so scurvy a trick had become sincere penitents, and had left the emperor's service, who, in revenge, burnt Aquino and put Reynold, the younger of the two, to death, in the year 1250. After Aquinas was admitted doctor, the professors of the University of Paris, 16 VARIA. then disputing about that for which their present successors would care very little, determined, in the year 1258, to consult Aquinas upon the ticklish point " of the accidents I remaining really, or only in appearance, in the Blessed Sacrament of the Altar." The young Doctor, not puffed up by such an honour, wrote the treatise still extant, and laid it on the altar. While the saint remained in prayer on this occasion, some of his brethren saw him lifted up from the ground."* It is probable that while at Paris the whole mind of Aquinas, not given to devotion, was concentrated on his great book, the " Summa Theologica." There is a good story told of the simplicity of the man, the absence of mind of the scholar, and the fervour of the saint. The King of France, St. Lewis, had so great an esteem for the young Doctor that he often invited him to his table, and moreover consulted him in his affairs of state. Butler is careful to tell us that the saint avoided the honour of dining with the king as often as he could, and that when obliged to be at court, " appeared there as recollected (col- lected?) as if in the convent." One day, dining with St. Lewis, the Doctor, with an energetic and triumphant movement, cried out, " Conclusum est contra Manichreos ;" " It is conclusively against the Manichees." The prior of the convent, astonished at these words, bade the priest be still, and remember where he was. The good king, however, fearful that the world might lose so valuable an * Alban Butler, " Lives of the Saints," vol. iii. p. 53. THE ANGELIC DOCTOR. 17 argument for the Manichees were not overthrown every day begged the saint to write it down, or, indeed, accord- ing to Tocco, caused his secretary to write it down for him. Rabelais, who in every story seized at once the point most open to ridicule, alludes to one regarding Aquinas, which Duchat supplies in the notes to the chapter (Pantagruel, book iii. chap. 2) where the allusion occurs. Pan urge delivers a lecture upon the wisdom of eating green cora; that is, of spending one's revenue before it is due. " I may very justly say of you, as Cato did of Albidius, who, after he had by a most extravagant expense wasted all his goods but one house, fairly set it on fire, that the better he might cry, Consummatum est! Even as since his time St. Thomas Aquinas did when he had eaten up the whole lamprey, although there was no neces- sity for it." This lamprey story arose from an incident at the table of St. Lewis. Thomas Aquinas was thereto invited. For the king there was served up a fine lamprey ; and, says Duchat, " Thomas, whom it seems no other time but that would serve to compose his hymn on the Holy Sacrament, had, at the profoundness of his meditation, eaten up the whole of the lamprey, which was designed for the king, and had made an end of this hymn and the fish both together. Thomas, overjoyed at having finished so elaborate a poem, cried out in an ecstasy, Consummatum est ! ' It is finished !' The company who had seen Thomas play a good knife, and lay about him to some tune, but knew nothing of his mental employment, fancied that these Latin words related to his gallant performance in demolish- c 18 VAUIA. ing the lamprey, and looked upon him as a very profane person for applying to a piece of unmannerly epicurism the words which each of them knew to be spoken by our Saviour when expiring on the cross."* There is yet another story equally good, and indeed, to a Protestant mind, more pregnant, which it is needless to say Alban Butler does not relate. One day, when the learned and saintly doctor was conversing with Pope Innocent IV, that Pontiff, on some money being brought in, probably some large sum which excited the Pope's pride, said, " You see that age of the Church is past, when she could say, ' Silver and gold have I none.' " " Yes, holy father," an- swered Aquinas ; " and the day is also past when she could say to the paralytic, ' Take up thy bed, and walk.' " Aquinas seems to have been the acknowledged chief of his party and age. Whatever he did, he did well. He wrote in verse as well as in prose ; and some of the hymns yet sung in the Romish Church are by him. His works were numerous. His commentary on the four books of Peter Lombard, commonly called the Master of Sentences, is well known. As the claim of Thomas a Kempis to the authorship of the "Imitatio Christi" is dis- puted, and indeed with great reason, so, perhaps with much less reason, is the claim of Aquinas to the authorship of the " Summa Theologica." But there is no doubt that the theological opinions of that work were his ; and perhaps the * Duchat, Notes to Rabelais' works. Translated by Sir Thomas Urquhart and Motteux. THE ANGELIC DOCTOR. 19 most important and most memorable of them is the saint's assertion of the supreme and irresistible efficacy of the Divine Grace. This doctrine, surely a biblical one, or, as our modern phraseology would have it, an evangelical one, was violently opposed by Duns Scotus ; and the followers of the two teachers disputed amongst themselves for ages, and do in fact dispute now, being ranked under the names of their respective leaders as Thomists and Scotists. In the year 1265 Pope Clement IV became head of the Church ; but this event produced no change in the regard shown by the Sovereign Pontiff for, or in the position of, Aquinas. The new Pope was a man distinguished by great conscientiousness, if we may judge from a letter written to one of his relations on his accession to the Papal chair ; and one of his first acts was to offer to Aquinas the Archbishopric of Naples. In 1269 Aquinas returned to Paris, but was soon per- suaded to revisit Italy, which he never again quitted. The Swabian dynasty had received its death-blow. The young Conradin had been executed on a public scaffold, in view of his own subjects and those of his family, and the for- tunes of the house of Aquino were in the ascendant. Charles of Anjou had little mildness or devotion in his character, and could have had but little sympathy with a student and a devotee. He made, however, urgent en- treaties that Aquinas should return to Italy, and he, pro- bably influenced by his family, took up his final abode at Naples. It was not, however, for long ; hard study and incessant 20 VARIA. labour, such as must have been undertaken to produce only one work out of many, the " Summa Theologica," had their natural effect upon the ascetic workman, which was probably hastened by devotional austerities. Not only was Aquinas a saint in his book and with his pen, but, not content with such work, with his voice and preaching he persuaded many. So earnest was he that the tears of the auditory flowed so abundantly that the preacher oftentimes was obliged to halt for awhile in his discourse. Nor did the wonders of the saint stop at mere oracular persuasion. William of Tocco, who relates that in his prayer Aquinas was lifted from earth, tells us that, as he one Sunday came from church, a woman touching merely the edge of his garment was cured. Two Rabbins were converted miraculously ; disputing with them one day, and agreeing to resume the argument on the morrow, Aquinas spent the night at the foot of the altar. The next morning his two most obstinate opponents came, not again to dispute, but to embrace the faith of which their interlocutor was so ardent a defender. In the year 1263, Aquinas had as- sisted at the fortieth general chapter of the Dominicans in London, and soon after had solicited and obtained his dis- missal from teaching, rejoicing inwardly to be once more a private religious man. From the sixth day of December, 1273, to that of his death, the seventh of March following, Aquinas acted as one with whom the world had passed away. He neither wrote nor dictated anything, but gave himself up entirely to private meditation. Pope Gregory X having called a THE ANGELIC DOCTOR. 21 general council, with the double purpose of extinguishing the Greek schism and raising succours to defend the Holy Land against the Saracens, a brief was directed to Aquinas ordering him to defend the faith against the Greek schismatics. But this was not to be. The council was appointed to meet on the 1st of May, 1274, at Lyons, and the ambassadors of Michael Palseologus, with the Greek prelates, were to be present. Aquinas, sick in body, set out on his journey, but was forced to stop at Fossa Nuova, a famous Cistercian abbey in the diocese of Terra- cina. Here, practising austerities which neither reason nor faith could demand in one over-pressed with fever, he prepared to die. As he was carried into the cloister whence he never went alive, he repeated part of the 131st Psalm, " This is my rest for ages without end ;" and he had continually on his lips a pious sentence from the Confessions of St. Augustine, wherein that saint professes his hunger for heaven and the Lord. The monks begged the Angelic Doctor to dictate an exposition of the Canticles in imitation of St. Bernard. " Give me," said he, " but St. Bernard's spirit, and I will obey." He commenced, however, wearied out by the importunities of the monks, an exposition of " that most mysterious of all the divine books," the Canticles, but halted after a few lines, too weak to proceed any further. After having received absolution most piously, he desired the viaticum, and, to receive it, begged to be taken off his bed and laid in ashes on the floor. Then, in tears, and with the most tender devotion, he received the sacraments 22 VARIA. and stammered out his belief. His last words, after thanks to the abbot and brethren, were in answer to the question " How one might always live faithful to God's grace." " Rest assured," said he, " that he who will always walk faithfully in His presence, always ready to give Him an account of his actions, shall never be separated from Him by consenting to sin." After this came upon him the change we must all undergo ; he died in his forty-eighth year. He is described as a tall, well-proportioned man, active and of great endurance. His literary labour was immense ; not only are his works full of much thought, but they are so vast that they extend to nineteen folio volumes compactly printed. The " Summa Theologica" alone is a work which is astounding to con- template. Aquinas, a learned theological chief justice, hears the pros and cons, and pronounces judgment upon everything. His book is the great court of conscience, into which everything is brought. It resembles in some fashion Jeremy Taylor's " Ductor Dubitantium," but is written with much more boldness and less doubt. Aquinas never shuns anything ; it is true that he always sums up favourably to religion, morality, and the Holy Roman Catholic Church : but there is no getting into holes and corners, and very little paltering with the truth. There is no doubt about the mind of the Angelic Doctor : what he says he means and believes ; and the chances are that he made those who read him believe with him. It seems somewhat curious that Bishop Taylor did not refer to the work of Aquinas, in the preface to his THE ANGELIC DOCTOR. 23 " Ductor Dubitantium," or the " Rule of Conscience in all her general measures, serving as a great instrument for the determination of cases of conscience" a work dedicated, by the way, to one to whom it should have been of use, Charles II. But, though the two works provoke a remem- brance of each other, they are, in reality, very different. " Some of the Lutherans," says Taylor, " have indeed done something of this kind, which is well ; Balduinus, Bidenbachius, Dedekanus, Konig, and the abbreviator of Gerard. But yet one needs remain, and we cannot be well supplied out of the Eoman storehouses ; for, though there the staple is, and very many excellent things exposed to view, yet we have found the merchants to be deceivers, and the wares too often falsified."* He then quotes from Emanuel Sa, and remarks that the Romanists do up " so many boxes of poyson in their repositories under the same paintings and specious titles, that few can distinguish ministeries of health from those of death for who can safely trust the guide that tells him 'that it is no deadly thing to steal,' i or privately to take a thing that is not great from one's father ? " But the Romanists had made a great advance in casuistry from the days of simple Thomas Aquinas, who for the most part palters not nor deceiveth. Nor is the golden- mouthed preacher, the sweet Shakespeare of divines, him- self free from too much casuistry. There is something * Preface to " Ductor Dubitantium," 3rd edition, 1665. f Emanuel Sa, Aphor. V. Furtum. 24 VARIA. about lying in his cases of conscience which might he ad- vantageous to a lawyer or to a careless witness, but would surely be condemned by the judge. Equivocation, which our copy-books have long told us " is the worst of lies," Taylor tells us "may be allowed for great charity," and is then " only a crime when it is against justice and charity" that is, he allows it. Certain it is, however, that we condone Taylor's offence when he tells us his stories ; how one man, a Greek, saved his brother by saying he lay ou rrj i/xj, " somewhere in the wood," when he had hid him under a wood-pile, and of another, Titius, father of Caius, who concealed his father in a tub, and told the cut- throats that patrem in doliolo lateri, the Latin for a little tub, meaning also a hill near Eome.* But if a man has a right to ask such questions, such as a magistrate, says our Ductor, we have no right to answer him ambigu- ously. Thus, if the magistrate asks if Titius be at home, we have no right to say Titius non est domi, the est leading to the inference Titius does not eat at home, using the word in a right sense, but in a sense less common. The bishop relates with great indignation also that story of a Spanish governor who promised a lady to give her her husband if she would submit to his desires. But, these ob- tained, the governor gives the husband indeed, but only his dead body newly slain. The lady complains, and tells her misfortune to Gonzaga, the Spanish general, who, finding it to be true, makes the governor marry the lady, that she * " Ductor Dubitautium," bk. iii. chap. 2, p. 500. THE ANGELIC DOCTOR. 25 might be recompensed by his estate, and then the same day causes the governor to lose his head, to pay, says the bishop, " for his dishonourable falsehood and bloudy lie. It was a justice worthy of a great prince ; and the reward was justly paid to such cruel equivocation."* Leaving this disquisition, for which the story cited by Taylor from worthy John Chokier it is hoped will make amends, it may be as well to give the reader a specimen of Aquinas's work. It is one memorable and valuable for having survived countless mutations, ecclesiastical as well as temporal, and which really deserves the honour in which so many ages and scholars of such varied shades of faith have held it in. The " Summa Theologica " was, according to the author's own statement, written chiefly for the in- struction of young students of theology. It was adopted by the Church of Rome as a text-book, and from the first considered to be a most masterly exposition of theology. How little the lapse of centuries has diminished its repu- tation the following statement will show. The " Summa" has never been a scarce book; in one form or another it can at any time be purchased for a mode- rate sum. The editions in one volume, folio, are perhaps the most common, but they are not we believe so old as those in five or six, large duodecimo. This form, however, is of little value in the eyes of the book-hunter. The first edition I of the entire works of Thomas Aquinas was published at Rome, in 19 folio volumes, in 1570-71. This contains the * "Ductor Dubitantium," bk. iii. chap. 2, p. 502. 26 VARIA. only complete collection of his works. Portions of the " Summa" had heen published long previously, but were usually sold at a high price. The best edition of the " Summa Theologica " is that published at Rome (1773). It is beautifully printed, and, besides other matter, contains the commentaries of the celebrated Thomas de Vio, Cardinal Cajetan. A very pretty edition of the work has been lately published at Parma. In 1851-4 a translation was brought out by the Abbe Drioux. It seems to be very well executed, and has the formal com- mendations of his ecclesiastical superiors. Another version is in progress. It is well also to observe that a work entitled, " Summa, Sancti Thomas hodiernis Academi- arum moribus accommodata sive Cursus Theologian juxta mentem Divi Thomse," has passed through several editions. I do not know what amount of circulation this work has enjoyed, or what amount of reputation it possesses. The fact of its having passed through several editions shows that it must possess some merit. Professor Maurice gives, in his " Medieval Philosophy," an elaborate analysis of the character rather than the con- tents of the " Summa," which latter really could not be well done in modern books, since it requires five elaborate in- dexes to direct the reader to the various questions ; but Professor Maurice's aim is so different from that of the present writer, that he cannot quote from his work with advantage, or he would rather avail himself of the words of so careful a scholar than of his own. Let us take, therefore, the first question St. Thomas treats of; it will show his boldness, and serve us as well as any other. THE ANGELIC DOCTOR. 27 " THE FIRST QUESTION. Of tJie holy doctrine ; what it is and how far- it extends : divided into ten articles. And as our intention is bounded within certain limits, it is first necessary to investigate the holy doctrine, what it is, and how far it does extend, about which there are these ten queries : *ff Primo, on the necessity of this doctrine. If Secundo, whether it be a science. If Tertio, whether it be one or many. IF Quarto, whether it be speculative or practical. *JF Quinto, its comparison with other sciences. 5f Sexto, whether it be wisdom. ^[ Septimo, whether God be its subject. 5f Octavo, whether it be argumentative. If Nono, whether it ought to be treated metaphorically or symbolically. If Whether the Holy Scriptures are to be expounded according to the many meanings (plures sensus) of this doctrine." Taking up this, which very fitly opens his book, but of which modern readers who take the Bible as their guide will not care to know much, Aquinas puts his case, ad primum, to the first I answer ; then in another paragraph he adds, prceterea, moreover there is such and such to be said ; next he puts the contrary, and very fairly too, sed contra est ; and finally he sums up under the title Con- clusio. Each sentence he commences with, Respondeodicen- dum, I answer that it must be held. In his third article, 28 VARIA. whether there be a God, Utrum Deus sit, he is very bold ; nor is he less so when he takes up the question whether there be a soul, An sit anlma. Indeed, this absorbing, wonderful question he chases up and down and into ah 1 sorts of holes and corners, proves that the soul is not of the body, triumphs over the Sadducees, and, in short, is in no way to be confounded with that scholar of our early dramatist,* who, after puzzling all night as to his soul's being, knew as little of it as his do aTavpip Iffpayia9r}." Renderings from the Polyglot edition of "Like unto Christ." Lyons, 1841. 68 VARIA. English. Of course the Latin word, which is admirable, has been a stumbling-block to all translators. The first, Mayster William, who puts forth his version, printed in London by Wynkyn de Worde and Richard Pinson, called it " The Imitation, or Following of Christ." Edward Hake,* of Gray's Inn, copied the title, and says that the original was first written by Thomas Kempise, a Dutchman, amended and polished by Sebastien Castalio, an Italian, and Englished by Edward H. Mr. Thomas Rogers in 1584, William Page in 1639, cited by Dr. Watt in the Encyclopedia Britannica as the translator, and Luke Milbourne, who, in 1697, turned the book into quaint and sometimes good rough verse, followed Mayster William in his long and periphrastic name. Dean Stanhope, who has his faults as a translator, since " il a mutile le texte ; tantot il 1'abrege, tantot il 1'etend outre mesure, et toujours il en denature la couleur," yet had sense enough to break away from the un-English Imitation, and called his ver- sion the " Christian's Pattern." And finally, in spite of the dictum of one of my reviewers, that my own version of the title is " impertinent," I have ventured to call it, in plain English, " Like unto Christ." In an age like the present, when we care more for the comfortable surroundings of life than for anything else, to study this book, which has mainly been written with re- ference to the former, is a bold experiment ; but, because it is bold, it will be interesting. It will be like walking * The Imitation, or Following of Christ. London, 156", in 8vo. THOMAS A KEMPIS. 69 in a cool room and a purer atmosphere after being heated with the scents, music, fine dresses, exercise, and the other warm accessories of the ball-room. To read in a gold- seeking and self-seeking age of a man who looked upon wealth as a curse, who considered place a trial, and who thought the very friendship and society of women dan- gerous in the extreme to read of such a one in an age which runs after the heels of the prettiest and most showy girl, which elevates her to a goddess and uses her as a toy, will at least be something novel ; for what must many of our ladies be when M. Dupin, at Paris, feels con- strained to publish a pamphlet " Sur le Luace effrene des Dames" on the unbridled luxury (of dress) of women ? when at Marseilles men band together not to marry till women grow less expensive ? when virtue is laughed at if poor, and success, even of the most shameful kind, is honoured, or at least tolerated ? " You see that man : that's old Johnson of our square. Well, he managed the estates of three young clients, and somehow they grew poor, and he grew rich : d'ye see ? He's worth knowing, he is." Or your friend points out Simkins. " You know Simkins. What ! don't know Simkins ? He made a lot of money in the Crimean war by selling putrid meat and bad hay ; not a bad dodge, eh ?" Such conversations as these are to be heard every day. In New York successful men are pointed out who have made money in like manner, " by fair dealing, if possible, but money by any means ;" and these are the new Democracy, abused by the Press, but envied by their fellow-citizens. In Paris a new 70 VARIA. aristocracy has sprung up, which depends upon speculation for its sudden fortunes, but which has in great measure supplanted the old titular and territorial nobility. It is an age of luxury and material wealth ; and nothing succeeds like success. The very name of asceticism has almost been forgot- ten. Our Quakers and Methodist religionists are losing their hold upon the world. Arts and manufactures have become luxurious, pleasing, and delightful. The new philosophy teaches us to enjoy the world ; to make the most of life, not to despise it ; to use the world, not to contemn it. Hence asceticism has grown out of fashion ; for the very spirit of asceticism demands us to control our passions, to throw away our luxury, to despise riches, place, and honours, and to exercise ourselves in hardness, want, endurance, and a noble poverty. Of all treatises on this religious art, dogma, or inten- tion, the work which passes under the name of " Thomas a 1 Kempis" is surely the best and most fascinating. It is one which Dr. Johnson said " the world had opened its arms to receive." It is as popular as "Robinson Crusoe" or the " Pilgrim's Progress." It has been translated into all tongues, and many times over into French and English. It is called the "Imitation of Christ," the original title being " De Imitatione Christ! ;" but, in a recent transla- tion, as has already been mentioned, in which there is a history of the work, and parallel Scripture passages proving the perfect Evangelical feeling therein, it is called " Like unto Christ," because its purport is to teach the reader to THOMAS A KEMPIS. 71 aim at being as nearly as possible truly like our Lord in life and deed. From the date of tbe first appearance of the " Imitatio" until now there have been, in all languages, perhaps three thousand editions ; and yet no one knows with certainty who was the author. In fact, the latest English editor presumes that the book had many authors ; that it is so good, that the spirit of many men, each chastened by sorrow and purified by faith, added word after word, and passage after passage to " the priceless sentences of Thomas & Kempis," as the Kev. Charles Kingsley has called them. Everybody has praised the book. It is one which Roman Catholics claim, for its author was an Augustine monk, or a chancellor of a monastery certainly a priest ; although it is as free from exclusiveness as the Bible itself. It was a favourite with Jean Jacques Rousseau, who wept over its pages ; and yet he was a man who detested Romanism nay, Christianity itself. A version of it was edited by John Wesley, and read by Whitefield, who abominated stage-players ; another version was put into verse by Racine, the celebrated French dramatic poet; and a copy was carried about by Corueille, the great comic dramatist. Fontenelle, who wrote the " Plurality of Worlds," and who was suspected of Materialism, said that it was " the most excellent book that ever proceeded out of the hands of man, the Gospel being of Divine original." Johnson loved the book. Vaughan, author of " Hours with the Mystics," says that it can be " appreciated with- out taste, and understood without learning," and that 72 VARIA. thousands upon thousands in castle and cloister have for- gotten their sorrows and dried their tears over its earnest pages. We have seen that, in the opinion of the Eev. C. Kingsley, the sentences are " priceless ;" in that of our greatest female writer, who assumes the name of George Eliot, they are inspired utterances, speaking to every soul and to every age. To come down to the very moment at which we write, the Literary Churchman, an organ of the High Church, calls it " this queen of all uninspired hooks ; this marvellous book, which can bow the hearts of men and women of every class and creed ;" and the Nonconformist newspaper speaks of it as the widest, most spread, and most excellent of all comforting works. And yet the spirit of this good book is ascetic, distinctly and openly so. We have seen that the simple meaning of asceticism is merely the exercising of the body and mind in devout things ; but at times it has included an obnoxious purpose that is, a separation of oneself from the world. Whether good or bad in its effect depends much on its use or abuse. Half the people in the world the poorer half are forced into a kind of asceticism ; their poverty exercises them against their will. Though the mills of God grind slowly, Yet He grinds exceeding small. Few poor men can go through the mills of trouble, trial, and misfortune without being brought very nearly to the dust. But this asceticism has its dangerous side ; and able men, nay, good men too, have hated it. It produces, as a natural consequence, the monk's cell and the nun's THOMAS A KEMPIS. 73 cloister. It makes people put on strange dresses and purchase beads and crosses, whether they be Hindus, Mohammedans, or Christians. It induces the monk to fast, and the nun to whip herself, and the Brahmin to clinch his hand for ever till the nails grow through the back of it, and his limbs are stiff and powerless. At Benares it makes men run iron hooks through their backs, and get others to whirl them round like cockchafers on a string. It forces some to abstain from meats or marriage, or any simple natural pleasures. It made St. Simeon Stylites live for thirty years on the top of a pillar, beseech- ing God daily, and nightly, and hourly, for pardon and grace, and to cry out that thrice ten years In hungers and in thirsts, fevers and colds, In coughs, aches, stitches, ulcerous throes, and cramps A sign betwixt the meadow and the cloud, Patient on this tall pillar, I have borne Rain, wind, frost, heat, hail, damp, and sleet, and snow, While my stiff spine can hold my weary head, Till all my limbs drop piecemeal from the stone. In the present day it causes people to believe that God delights in the discomfort of his creatures ; at any rate, that he pleasingly beholds them torment themselves ; it makes us punish little children with Bible lessons they cannot comprehend, and terrify them with stories of Og, King of Bashan, Korah, Dathan, and Abiram, and visions of hell-fire ; it makes Sunday, dies Dominica, the sweet Lord's day, a dreaded Sabbath ; it interdicts the Sunday walk ; it glosses over and blots out the mercies of God with the roaring thunders of his wrath. 74 VARIA. Hence asceticism, which in itself is beautiful and need- ful, has been so misrepresented that men hate it. Gibbon, a man of colossal intellect, much fairness, and great learning, wrote thus of it : " The Ascetics who obeyed and abused the rigid precepts of the Gospel were inspired with a rigid enthusiasm, which represents man as a criminal and God as a tyrant. They seriously renounced the business and pleasures of the age ; abjured the use of wine, of flesh, and of marriage ; chastised their body, mortified their affec- tions, and embraced a life of misery as the price of their eternal happiness." It is in the last clause of the above sentence that the mistake of asceticism lies. If we are fools enough to demand, as Stylites does, " the white robe and the palm " for the self-inflicted mortifications, we then are judge and jury on ourselves. And, unfortunately, man will play those parts. He is good and saintly, pure and charitable, but he gets filled with spiritual pride. Hence upon works of asceticism is built the damnable doctrine of works of supererogation. You have punished yourselves in this world ; reward yourselves in the next. You have said so many aves to-day, you need say none to-morrow. You fasted last week ; you can feast this. There is the carnival, the farewell to flesh ; and the dancing and junketings, when it may again be eaten. All this is flat against the words of the Apostles and Christ. The ascetics are upon the shifting sands of self-pleasing, even in the midst of their self-torments ; but happily we find little or nothing of this spirit in " Like unto Christ." THOMAS A KEMPIS. 75 This author resembles Bunyan in his treatment of the world. He looks upon it as vanity, as Solomon did ; as a huge Vanity Fair, as the Pilgrim did ; but he goes on his way, and eats and drinks, and acts like a reasonable crea- ture. All that he does is to lay down rules for our guidance under trial, and consolations for our sorrows under defeat. He tells a man not to harass nor to hamper himself, very much in the words of Marcus Antoninus or Seneca : " A pure, simple, steadfast mind is not distracted with many duties, because it does all things for the glory of God, and, in itself at ease, strives to be free from self-glory." He tells him, if he is young and sets to work to prepare him- self to be a man, to fight no baby's battle, no fool's fight. " Who has a harder battle than the man who tries to con- quer himself?" He reminds him that, after all, it does not much matter if he is not very clever or great, for " humble self-knowledge is a surer road to God than diving into the depths of science. Science, considered in itself, is not sinful ; nor is the knowledge of anything that is good ; it has been ordained of God : but the preference must be given to a good conscience and a holy life." And, in Wynkyn de Worde's translation, he asks what has become of all the learned men long dead : " Where be now all the royal poets, with their craftily conveyed poems ; and elegant orators, with their orations garnished with elegancy ; the philosophers, with their pregnant reasons and sentences ?" And the author finishes by assuring us, " Truly learned is he who does the will of God, subduing also his own desires." 76 VAEIA. The prudential maxims of the writer are very well worthy of being laid to our heart. A young man is not to open his heart to everybody ; to be " no fawner towards the wealthy, nor to be fond of being seen with great people ;" and he is to " exercise charity towards all, but intimacy with very few." To grow in spiritual progress, a man is especially warned not to interfere with other people's business, not to trouble himself with the sayings or doings of others, with what this one says, and that one thinks. Those matters do not concern us. " How is it possible," asks the author, " for a man to remain long at peace who intermeddles with other people's cares, who seeks occasions of dis- quietude abroad, and never examines himself at home?" How, indeed ? If we were " more intent upon self-im- provement, and less troubled about the outer world, then we might make some advance in wisdom." He tells us elsewhere that we should learn early to submit; trouble not ourselves who is on our side or who is against us ; that we should humble ourselves, and think ourselves chiefly in the wrong ; and that, unless we feel that we know worse of ourselves than of any others, we shall not be making much progress to the perfect life. If we want to play the peace-maker, we are to be at peace at home. The peace-maker is more useful than the learned ; for, " while the man of violence and passion turns even good to evil, he who follows peace turns evil to good ;" and so, there- fore, we are to be peaceful and gentle, and to avoid quar- rels, and to put up with slights and wrongs, and we shall be happy. THOMAS A KEMPIS. 77 We are advised not to meddle with others, not to he in- quisitive ; for " what is it to thee whether a man does such and such, or says so and so ? Thou art not required to answer for others, but for thyself." We are not to care nor to follow fame, nor the friendship of many, nor the regard of men, for these things generate distraction and great darkness of heart. To be thoughtful, watchful in prayer, and humble at all times, will alone make a man as he should be. Of self-esteem we are told very truly, as most men know who have thought much, that we cannot place too little confidence in ourselves, for we are often wanting in grace and sense. " The light we have is but small, and that we often lose through negligence. Often- times our mental blindness we do not perceive ; ofttimes we act badly, and then make matters worse by our neg- ligent excuses. We often think and weigh what we have to bear through others, but what they have to bear through us does not occur to us." As the author of this precious book lived before men thought much of the suggestion of Duns Scotus, which, little more than a dozen years ago, the present Pope ex- alted into a dogma, it is by no means a surprising thing that A Kempis is utterly free from Mariolatry. He relies, like the Articles of the Anglican Church, upon one Name only, and finds none other under heaven given to man save that of Christ. " The kingdom of God is within you," he quotes from St. Luke in the beginning of the second book ; " betake thyself then entirely to God : love Him with all thy heart, with all thy soul, and bid a 78 VAEIA. final adieu to this wretched world, and thou shalt find sweet content and comfort unspeakable. Learn to despise these outward vanities, and seek pure and spiritual satis- factions. Place all thy hopes, thy happiness, thy thoughts in them, and thou shalt find this kingdom grow up within thee, ' for the kingdom of God is peace and joy in the Holy Ghost.' Rom. xiv. 17." This is Stanhope's trans- lation. It is worthy of remark, also, that there is hardly a page in the "Imitatio" without its five or six references to or quotations from Holy Writ: a satisfactory proof that in the monastery, at least in those days, the Bible was diligently and devoutly studied. Such are a few of A Kempis's priceless sentences taken almost haphazard. We have said nothing, for our space will not allow us, upon the religious beauty and fer- vour of the work. Readers will find religion best preached in the pages of the book itself ; and it is scarcely our pro- vince to preach religion, although it may be our business to point the way to happiness and peace. The whole inten- tion of the author or authors is to awaken man to his true relation with God, the highest Intelligence, and to keep him from Materialism, the lowest Intelligence. Thus wrote a true poet : Our little lives are kept in equipoise By struggles of two opposite desires The struggle of the instinct that enjoys, And the more noble instinct that aspires. DK. JOHN FAUSTUS. BOOKS CONSULTED. The Historic of the damnable life and deserued death of Doctor John Faustus. Newly imprinted and in conuent places amended: ac- cording to the true copie printed at Franckfort, and translated into English by P. F. Gent. Seene and allowed. Imprinted at Lon- don by Thomas Orwin, and are to be solde by Edward White dwelling at the little North door of Paules, at the signe of the Gun. 1592. The Tragical historic of Dr. Faustus. By Christopher Marlowe. 4to. 1604. Histolre prodigieuse et lamentable de Jean Fauste, grand et horrible enchanteur, avec la morte eponventable. Derniere edition. AEoven, (-1 j/j chez Clement Malassis. M.DC.LXVII. Faustus : his Life, Death, and Descent into Hell. Translated from the German. By George Borrow (this is added in pencil). London. W. Simpkin and R. Marshal. 1825. Early English Prose Romances, with Bibliographical and Historical Illustrations. Edited by William J. Thorns, P.S.A. Vol. III. London. Nattali and Bond. 1858. Lives of Notorious Criminals, including that of Dr. Faustus. Chap- book. London, 1754. Die Geschichte vom Faust, in Jteimen, nach dem einzigen bekannten Exemplar von 1587, in der Koniglichen Bibliothek zu Koptnhagen: Die Deutschen Volksbucher von Faust und Wagner, -c. Von I. Scheible. Stuttgart, 1849. Festus, a Poem. By Philip James Bailey. Sixth Edition. Chap- man and Hall. 1860. ,Jj&^\^J<**^:, DR. JOHN FAUSTUS. HISTORY, or a legend, or a mixture of both, which has not only furnished a sub- ject for " Marlowe's mighty line," but has given to Goethe the plot of the greatest poem of the century, or, if we believe some, of all time, is worth our attention. When, moreover, this history has become the subject of as many volumes as would fill a goodly bookcase ; when our children delight over that which horrified and astonished our great-great-grand- fathers, one feels that there must be in it an element of popularity which is as enduring as it is perhaps difficult to account for. How many, too, are there who merely know the name and nothing else of the hero. If, at a competitive examination, the question, " Who was Faustus, and when did he flourish?" were proposed, how few would be able to answer it. It is not every one who can go to Mr. Thoms's capital book on early English prose romances, or to the People's Wonder-Book of Hcrr Scheible. The history of Faustus is involved so much in doubt, and at 82 VARIA. the same time has so many points of interest for us, that it is worth while spending a few minutes over it. " Truth is great, and will prevail," is a grand asser- tion, and one which has often consoled the dying mo- ments of the martyr ; but it will scarcely bear the calmer and closer investigation of the philosopher. Truth differs from truth, but not more than it essentially differs from itself; for, as the well-cut brilliant, when it comes from the hands of the lapidary, has its sixty-two facets thirty-three above the belt, and twenty-nine below it so each truth, after being handled by the historian, would seem to have at least sixty-two aspects, or, indeed, as many more, perhaps, as there may be people to look at it. As history is, according to some, a mere collection of biographies, biographical truth might be expected to be the simplest; but, not excepting that of Shakespeare, of whom we know little more than the date of his birth, mar- riage, and death, there is hardly a name in the " Biogra- phic Universelle " about whom writers have not wrangled so much as to make the earnest student repeat the question of him whom Bacon calls jesting Pilate, and turn away in disgust. The occupation of the writers of one age seems to be that of whitewashing the black sheep of a past one an employment in which both Mr. Carlyle and Mr. Froude have made themselves conspicuous ; and, as there was found, soon after his death, one hand at least which scat- tered flowers on the tomb of Nero, we may possibly soon meet with an eccentric historian who will prove that both that emperor and Caligula were men of the highest moral DR. JOHN FAUSTUS. 83 calibre, and with reference to whom it were, at any rate, as well to entertain historic doubts. When a character has been well blackened, however, it is exceedingly difficult thoroughly to cleanse it. Notwithstanding Horace Wai- pole's clever tract, and the more acute suggestions of his successors, we doubt whether Richard III. will not re- main to the end of all time the crook-backed tyrant of Shakespeare, and the politic scoundrel of our school his- tories. Many people are fascinated by the coloured and sparkling rays thus brightly thrown out by a polished and cut truth. A university professor, in his inaugural lecture some short time back, fairly owned that he rather pre- ferred his early and more popular ideas, and that, although some great writer might arise who would under- take to prove that Henry VIII. was a mild gentleman, exceedingly ill-used by ladies who deserved their fate, he would still rather cling to his old faith in the embodiment of an historic blustering and hectoring Blue Beard. No doubt many share a like feeling. One of those characters about whose various biogra- phies there is just the smallest scintillation of truth, and who has now fairly become the property of fiction, is Dr. Faust, known with us as Faustus, a German scholar who flourished in the beginning of the fifteenth century, and who has been constantly confused with Fust, the assist- ant, or, as some say, the patron of Gutenberg, who in- troduced into Germany moveablc types about the same period. John Fust, who was evidently the capitalist, joined with Gutenberg and Schoeffer, the inventor of the 84 VAEIA. letter-punches, and by a law-suit dispossessed Gutenberg of any benefit from his discovery. Perhaps, therefore, any ignominy which may attach to his name he richly deserves ; in fact, the theory of many is that the illumin- ators, missal and psalter writers, who were beaten out of the market by his machinery, invented the legends concerning him viz. that he was aided by a personal attendant, a friendly Devil, who, after serving him for a stated number of years, at length bore him quick to hell as a payment for his services. Now, although we have been expressly warned not to confound the two Fausts, we believe that they have already been inextricably confounded, and that what simply belongs to one has been asserted of the other. The Dr. Faustus was an astrologer and a chemist ; and it is certainly not unlikely that popular superstition may have gifted him with a " familiar," just as it did Polydore Vergil, Jerome Cardan, and Paracelsus ; of this latter brag- gadocio chemist it is said that he had one confined in the pummel of his sword. It is notable, also, that Faustus's Christian name, like that of Fust, was Johann. The sub- ject of our sketch was born at Knittlingen, in Suabia, of peasant parents. He studied at Wittenberg ; removed to Ingoldstadt, where he practised as a physician ; received a considerable inheritance ; was known to Melancthon, Tritheim, and other men of note of the period ; gave himself up to magic, and died of the plague, in 1466 or, as tradition will have it, was earned away, as per con- tract at a little village called Rimlich. For this latter, legendary occurrence, one or more villages, following the DR. JOHN FAUSTUS. 85 example of the seven towns which contest the honour of Homer's birthplace, put in a claim especially Breda, in Saxony, a small village on the Elbe, where the blood- besprinkled walls of the apartment may be seen, and where, to quote Jack Cade's friend, the " very bricks are alive to this day," to testify to the truth. " That this hero was no imaginary one," says Mr. Thorns, " is clearly proved by the testimony of contem- porary writers. Amongst the most important of these is the famous Trithemius, who, in a letter to Johann Wedunger, dated the 20th August, 1507, speaks of the subject of this notice as one ' qui se principem necromanticorum ausus est nominare, gyrovagus, battologus et circumcellio est,' and as having formed for himself this fitting title, ' Magis- ter Georgius Sabellicus, Faustus junior, Fons Necroman- ticorum, Astrologus, Magus secundus, Chiromanticus, Agromanticus, Pyromanticus, in hydra arte secundus.' In 1539 he is mentioned by Begardo, in his ' Index Sani- tatis.' Gastius also alludes to him in his ' Sermones Con- viviales ;' and he is also alluded to by Manilius in his ' Collectanea,' on the authority of Melancthon." Gones tells us that, though there is much conflicting evidence as to where he was born and when he lived and flourished, there is little doubt of his being an historical personage, " and one who had wit to take advantage of the times in which he lived," and whose quicker wit and boldness saw through the superstitious fears of his countrymen and laughed at them. This quickness of wit and boldness of conception, this 86 VAEIA. superiority to those around him, met with the not unusual reward of his being exalted into a wizard and of having dealings with the devil. Nay, like others, he, too, must have an attendant devil ; and Mephistopheles was called in early to serve him as a valet, and to transport him, for a due consideration, whither he chose, and as rapidly as possible. Thus he travels round the world in eight days, and sees all the glories, riches, and wonders thereof. So singular a story seems to have at once seized on the popular mind. It was quickly dramatized in Germany, and presented with the other monkish legends and plays ; and in thirty years from the time our own Marlowe had formed upon it a splendid work which had been acted with applause. Since that time, nearly fifty different poems and dramas have been built upon the story two of the best, excepting, of course, Goethe's, being by Klingemann and Koder. Lastly, Goethe elaborates it into the most re- markable fiction of modern times, and one which is the chief corner-stone of his fame. A writer would, one might suppose, as soon think of re-writing Hamlet as of rehabilitating " Faust ;" but, notwithstanding that we have thirty-three translations of Goethe's great work, a modern English poet, James Philip Bailey, has dared it in Festus, and has spasmodically succeeded ; and a modern play- wright has yet more recently put the subject on the boards of the Princess's Theatre as Faust and Marguerite. What we now propose is, to give the old legend, with some of its blunt English padding, referring now and then to " Marlowe's mighty line," to point out what people miss DE. JOHN FAUSTUS. 87 who neglect our elder dramatists. Marlowe had indeed a method of throwing ten syllables together in a way as for- cible and as original as any master of blank verse that ever lived. Dryden, a great writer, comes somewhat near him in force ; Webster and Dekker still more closely in rough and ponderous weight; Milton in majestic diction and splendid energy : but no one combines all so much as Marlowe himself in his best verses. But to return to our Doctor. The author of one of these little histories begins with a sage remark upon the difference between ignorance and knowledge ; and, after the good old manner of Pinnock in his histories, he dabs about ten lines of very bald verse on the top of his chapter, which he afterwards translates into prose, to the effect that we should not attempt to know too much, " as the events about to be recorded in this history will, in our opinion, unless we greatly err, fully evince." John Faustus, he continues, was born in a small hamlet, in the province of Wiemar: his father was a poor labouring man, but his uncle, who lived at Wittenberg, " took the young Faustus and adopted him, and made him heir to his property. Thus, instead of being doomed to follow at the plough tail, to work early and late, and to live upon the most homely fare, our hero was destined to bask in the sunshine of affluence, to tread the flowery meads of learning, to drink at the im- mortal fount, to climb Helicon's bank, and thereby to reach the temple of fame. Young Faustus, now become the favourite of his uncle, who had a good living in Ms gift, was sent to study divinity at Wittenberg, the same place at which 88 VA1UA. ' Hamlet, Prince of Denmark ' was educated, and which is rendered immortal by the pen of our unmatched Shakspeare." The " good living " originated of course from the hand of our English chap-book maker ; but all authorities agree that Faust went to Wittenberg. " Son oncle, qui demeura a Wittenberg," says a French author; and an old ballad in one of the four thick squat volumes of nearly 1300 pages each, which Scheible has published in Das Kloster, opens with the following verses Es 1st der Doctor Faustus nun Gewesen eines Bauren Sun : Zu Rodt ben Weinmar burtig her, Zu Wittemberg so hat auch er Ein Freuridschafft gross ; &c. &c. At this place " he prosecuted his studies until he had exhausted the stores of learning ; he regularly passed " all the various minor academical degrees with credit to him- self and honour to his tutors, and " was inducted into his uncle's living, and looked up to as a most impressive and orthodox preacher." But, alas ! The devil cunningly prepares, And for his victims spreads his snares ; Thus Faustus in a luckless hour Submitted was to Satan's power. The fact was, he " consorted with alchemists, a herd of im- postors, the disgrace of the age ;" and, determining to be the top of the tree, he consulted his oracles, wherein he " found it was requisite to undergo a probation of forty days, during which he must five times every day invoke the DR. JOHN FAUSTUS. 89 Prince of Darkness, trample on the Bible, seclude himself from society, and drink morning and evening, repeating his diabolical lessons, two spoonfuls of Devil's soup ; he drew a magical circle on the floor, then set with diligence getting together the materials of his infernal diet. . . . With no common degree of fortitude, he began to rummage the churchyards for bones of a particular description, in the hollows of which worms of a peculiar shape and colour had engendered ; he then procured newts of a month old, the eyes of dead brindled sows, eagles' eggs with five black spots on them, hoofs of cows that had died of the murrain, heads and legs of toads, spawn of frogs, genitals of scor- pions, tongues of crocodiles, livers of male black rats, toes of nightingales, brains of white boars above three years old, and spurs of game cocks ; the whole of this was boiled to a consistence with whale's sperm and snails, to which he added every morning seventy-three drops of his own blood, taken from his left arm by himself" ! Having concocted this devilish potion, which certainly by far exceeds the milder concoction in Middleton's Witch or Shakespeare's Macbeth, he in all things conformed himself to his " proba- tionary state, tearing Bibles to pieces, and treading the scattered leaves under his feet. He soon knew that he was rapidly advancing to his desired aim, and having covered his head with a woollen cap, on which was painted a skull and cross-bones, together with a figure of the devil, he began to invoke the devil in Low Dutch." The next few pages of this imaginative history are filled with a description which would very well suit the 90 VARIA. celebrated scene in Der Freisclmtz. Faustus is surrounded by all kinds of terrors. He drinks the soup, and dances on the leaves of the Bible ; he hears the very thunders of Hell, sees a frightful dragon with a " three-pronged pitch- fork," a hare chasing a lion, a hyena swallowing little children, and a little man with a cocked hat, who says, " Friend Faustus, roy master, Lucifer, has sent me here to ask what wantest thou ?" to whom Faustus truculently replies that "' he wants his master, and would see him, if he were buried in fifty hells deeper than he is." The messen- ger disappears, the hurly-burly recommences, and a great ball of fire runs round and round the circle with incredible velocity, from which a voice of thunder cries out, " Mortal, what wantest thou ? " The Doctor, nothing daunted, " recruited himself with a spoonful of soup," and challenged the Devil to come forth, upon which the ball of fire opens, and Beelzebub enters on the scene. The clever Doctor fancied that he had outwitted the Prince of Darkness, for, when the latter asked him to be his, " body and soul," for ever, Faustus said, " Xay, I will not ; I will have all I desire of thee, but will not be damned." Upon the Fiend putting this little matter in the right way, he receives the skin of a human body ; upon which he agrees to make out certain requisitions, and a conveyance of his body and soul to the Devil. He goes home to his study, and diligently draws out these articles, of which there are nine. The Devil is to be at his command, to do his bidding, to give him exhaustless wealth, to render him invisible, to convey him anywhere in one moment, to DR. JOHN FAUSTUS. 91 raise the dead or bring before him any living person, to show him the interior of hell, and, finally, " to lay aside his devilish propensity for lying, and when questioned tell me nothing but the truth. (Signed) JOHN FAUSTUS." The Devil soon, in an awful clap of thunder, sends up a series of replies, in which the chief requisitions are granted, but in which the last assertion is very positively denied : " I will answer all your questions truly : the world does me injustice to tax me with want of veracity ; let them ask their conscience if I ever deceived them, or made them believe a bad action was a good one ? " A shrewd question truly ! " Moreover" (the deed concludes) " I hereby promise to let my trusty servant, Mephistopheles, be ever at your call, and further, allow you twenty-four years to enjoy the privileges purchased at so dear a rate. " Signed, by order of Lucifer, Prince of the Hellish llegions ; by us, Judges of his Infernal Domain ; and in his name we say Amen, it shall be so. " KHADAMANTHUS. " MINOS. Here, again, is that mixture of Paganism with modern belief which seems so necessary for the poet. We should scarcely have dreamt of the Homeric and Virgilian judges serving under the Hebraic Satan. Que voulez-vous 1 there are none other witnesses at hand. The bonds being ex- 92 VARIA. changed, Mephistopheles is assigned to Faustus. He pre- sents his new master with one of the keys of Hell, say- ing : " Take this : its possession is a favour never before granted to mortal. Whenever you wish to see me, if you hold up this key above your head, and say, Glishmaramoih Teufel, I shall instantly appear in the shape you now see me ;" which was that of a dapper little man dressed in black, very much like a French abbe. Next we find related many of the doings of Faustus, scarcely worth repeating. He was, we are told, a man of some humour ; and he shows it much in the same manner as some of our fast young men would do. He set all the cocks in Wittenberg crowing for three hours without intermission, and once, "just as the parson had mounted the pulpit," got all the pigs within six miles to come to church such a grunting and squeaking being never before heard. Many of these tricks we must put down to the English fancy of the poor scribe who vamped up this book. One day he makes all the old maids of Wittenberg, " each with a penny pie and a tabby cat," walk on one side of the street, and the old bachelors on the other. At another time, " at a grand levee held by the Emperor of China," all the Mandarins and nobles began hissing at and thumping each other ; and when the Emperor blew his nose, he blew out not his brains, as the American story has it but nothing but butterflies and worms. Faustus sets the " Great Mogul " and all his court sneezing ; and at a sumptuous repast given to the Emperor of Persia lie causes all the wine to flow from decanter to glass con- tinually. He makes almanacs here we are reminded of DR. JOHN FAUSTUS. 93 the Doctor and is more successful than our own Professor Murphy ; for what he predicted, rain, hail, frost, or snow, invariably occurred. He wishes to marry, but a fiend with a fearful name, " Ghasthomio," gives him such a whipping with hot wires and scorpions that he repents. Marriage, the fiend says, is a holy state, but yet he may have his desire in another way. He asks where Hell is, and receives in the answer a curious melange of the Hebrew Gehenna and the classic Tartarus. It is probable that we never shall escape the bondage of these ideas : even the wonderful imagination of Dante is constrained to adopt them. But the splendid diction and the atmosphere of Protestant thought in which Marlowe lived saved him from this ; and to the same question Mephistopheles replies with a fine anticipation of that subjective view of Hell of which * we have a good deal at present : Hell hath no limits, nor is circumscribed In one self place ; but where we are is hell ; And where hell is there must we ever be. And, to be short, when all the world dissolves, And every creature shall be purified, All places shall be hell that are not heaven. " I think there be no such place as hell," says Faustus, superciliously ; and his attendant is glad that he thinks so till he is fully entrapped. Mr. George Borrow indeed makes the Devil turn the tables on man, and say, with some humour, as the concluding sentence of his ghastly book : " When men wish to represent anything abominable, they paint the Devil ; let us, therefore, in reve'nge, when 94 VAR1A. we wish to represent anything infamous, depict man ; and philosophers, popes, priests, conquerors, ministers, and authors (I) shall serve us as models." Hell is, however, not long a matter of doubt to the Doc- tor, for he visits it ; while, previously to this visit, Mephis- topheles had described it thus : " My Faustus, knowe that Hell is, as thou wouldest thinke with thy selfe, another world. in the which we have our being, under the earth, and above the earth, even to the heavens, within the circum- ference whereof are contained ten kiugdomes namely, 1. Lacus Mortis. 2. Stagnum Ignis. 3. Terra tenebrosa. 4. Tartarus. 5. Terra oblivionis. 6. Gehenna. 7. Herebus. 8. Barathrum. 9. Styx. 10. Acheron. The which kingdomes are governed by five kings that is, Lucifer in the Orient ; Belial in Meridie ; Astaroth in Occidente ; and Phlegeition in the middest of them all : whose rule and dominions have none end until the day of Dome. And thus farre, Faustus, hast thou heard of our rule and kingdomes." We do not, in the old legends, find many hints towards the wonderful scenes which Goethe has created. The tricks of Faustus are clumsy and countrified, and on a par with the stories related in the " Hundred Merry Tales of Shakespeare." Of the wonderful scene in the cellar, illustrated finely by Eetzsch, and our own painter, Theo- dore von Hoist, there is this mere skeleton : DR. JOHN FAUSTUS. 95 " How Faustus seruzd the dronken Clownes. " Dr. Faustus went into an Inne, wherein were many tables full of Clownes, the which were tippling kan after kan of excellent wine, and to bee short they were all dronken, and as they sate so they sung and hallowed, that one could not heare a man speake for them ; this angred Doctor Faustus ; wherefore he said to those that called him in, marke my masters I will shew you a merry jest. The clownes continuing still hallowing and singing, lie so conjured them, that theire mouthes stood as wide open as it was possible for them to holde them, and never a one of them was able to close his mouthe again : by and by the noyse was gone, the clownes not withstanding looked earnestly one upon another, and wist not what was happened ; wherefore one by one they went out, and so soon as they came without they were as well as ever they were ; but none of them desired to goe in any more." This scene our English dramatist has followed, making each clown close his sentence with a filthy double entendre, no doubt for the purpose of tickling the ears of the ground- lings. He also makes " Fayre Helena " of Greece the mistress of the Doctor ; " for," says K. P. Gent, " she was so beautifull and delightful a peece that Faustus could not bear to be one moment out of her sight." The Ger- man poem has a canto, the twenty-sixth, " Von der Helena aus Grichenland ; " and, indeed, so alluring a subject was not likely to be 96 VARIA. omitted by the book-makers. It is found in almost all the copies. Helen bears him a son, called Justus Faustus, but he, being a siwcubus, disappears with his phantom mother. Here is the picture of the fair Helena, showed by Faustus to the students : " This lady appeared before them in a most rich gown of purple velvet, costly embroi- dered ; her hair hanging down loose, as fair as the beaten gold, and of such length that it reached down to her hams ; having most amorous cole-black eyes ; a sweet and plea- sant round face, with lips as red as any cheiTy ; her cheeks of a rose colour, her mouth small, her neck white as a swan ; tall and slender of personage ; in sum, there was no imperfect place in her ; she looked round about her with a rolling hawk's eye, a smiling and wanton counte- nance, which near hand inflamed the hearts of all the students, but that they persuaded themselves she was a spirit, which made them lightly pass away such fancies." Very beautifully has Marlowe dramatised this scene of the legend. Helen is made one of the instruments of the fall of Faustus, and of his temptation by Mephistopheles ; and, indeed, the German doctor, upon the sight of this instrument of temptation, falls into a love ecstasy, and utters one of the most ardent and enthusiastic rhapsodies on beauty that was ever conceived. "Was this fair Helen whose admired worth Made Greece with ten years' war afflict poor Troy ?" asks the second scholar when he sees her ; but the Doctor speaks not so tamely. DR. JOHN FAUSTUS. 97 " Was this the face that launched a thousand ships, And burnt the topless towers of Ilium ? Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss. Her lips suck forth my soul ! see where it flies ; Come, Helen, come, give me my soul again. Here will I dwell, for heaven is in those lips, And all is dross that is not Helena. I will be Paris, and for love of thee, Instead of Troy shall Wittenberg be sack'd ; And I will combat with weak Meuelaus, And wear thy colours on my plumed crest. Yea, I will wound Achilles in the heel, And then return to Helen for a kiss. Oh, thou art fairer than the evening air, Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars ; Brighter art thou than flaming Jupiter, When he appear'd to hapless Semele ; More lovely than the monarch of the sky, In wanton Arethusa's azure arms ; And none but thou shall be my paramour !" It is worth our while here to glance at the following por- tions of a ballad, Eoxhurghe Collection (vol. Hi. p. 280), which Mr. Thorns supposes may be a modernized version of one of 1588, "A Ballad of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus, the great congerer," licensed to be printed by the learned Aylmer, Bishop of London, and which it has been pointed out is very little more than an English version of the German Metrical Volksbuch, put forward at Tubingen by Alexander Hock, in the same year. The English ballad, of which we have printed a few verses, was sung to the tune of Fortune my Foe, a very* popular one at the end of the sixteenth century. H 98 VARIA. The Just Judgment of God slieiv'd upon Dr. Faustus. AH Christian men give ear a while to me, How I am plung'd in pain but cannot see : I liv'd a life the like did none before, Forsaking Christ, and I am damn'd therefore. At Wertemburgh, a town in Germany, There was I born and bred of good degree, Of honest stock, which afterwards I sham'd, Accurst therefore, for Faustus was I nam'd. In learning high my uncle brought up me, And made me Doctor of Divinity : And when he dy'd he left me all his wealth, Which cursed gold did hinder my soul's health. Then did I shun the Holy Bible book, Nor on God's word would never after look ; But studied the accursed conjuration, Which was the cause of mv utter damnation. At last, when I had but one hour to come, I turn'd the glass for my last hour to run : , And called in learned men to comfort me, But Faith was gone, and none could succour me. Then presently they came unto the hall, Whereas my brains were cast against the wall ; Both arms and legs in pieces they did see, My bowels gone, there was an end of me. You conjurors and damned witches all, Example take by my unhappy fall : Give not your souls and bodies unto hell, See that the smallest hair you do not sell. DR. JOHN FAUSTUS. 99 But hope in Christ his kingdom you may gain, Where you shall never fear such mortal pain ; Forsake the Devil, and all his crafty ways, Embrace true Faith that never more decays. In the Faustus of George Borrow, which is a wild re- vengeful satire on Popes, Protestants, Kings, People, and Authors, we find that the Doctor visits England nay, in- deed, that he is more disgusted with our country than with any other. " Not all the charms of the blooming English- women could keep him any longer in this cursed isle, which he quitted with hatred and disgust, for neither in France nor in Germany had he seen crimes committed with so much coolness and impunity." As they leave the island, the Devil vents a prophecy and gives an opinion on us English which, seeing that it is well to be despised of the Devil, one may venture to extract : " These people will groan for a time beneath the yoke of despotism, they will then sacrifice one of their kings on the scaffold of freedom, in order that they may sell them- selves to his successor for gold and titles. In hell there is very little respect paid to these gloomy islanders, who would suck the marrow from all the putrid carcases in the universe if they thought they could find gold in the bones. They boast of their morality and despise all nations, yet if you were to place what you call virtue in one scale, and vice with twopence in the other, they would forget their morality and pocket the money. They talk of their honour and integrity, but never enter into a treaty without a firm resolution of breaking it, as soon as a farthing can 100 VARIA. be gained by so doing. After death they inhabit the most pestilential marsh in the kingdom of darkness, and their souls are scourged without mercy. None of the other damned will have anything to do with them. If the inhabitants of the continent could do without sugar and coffee, the sons of proud England would soon return to the state in which they were when Julius Caesar, Canute of Denmark, and William the Conqueror did them the honour to invade them." Faustus visits the planets, and in Venus amongst other curiosities meets with women who do not spoil their figures by bearing children, but depositing eggs in the sun so hatch them. The Doctor runs through the usual vicious, foolish course, but at last the twenty-four years expire, and Mephistopheles in a jovial humour thus accosts him : " Come, my Faustus, you have had your career, and a lewd and merry one it has been ; do not act the coward at the end." Which request is indeed of no more comfort than Jack Ketch offered to a highwayman. The Doctor, seeing no escape, gives a grand banquet, tells his friends his fate, and " As the clock struck twelve, the Devil and Gasthomio appeared;. Faustus made a stout resistance, uttering the most piercing cries, but the demons soon mastered him ; when the latter, taking him upon his pitchfork, flew away with him in a storm of thunder and lightning." After this very bare prose, the poetry of Marlowe must DR. JOHN FAUSTUS. 101 strike everyone. When about to die, the Faustus of this great play utters this fine soliloquy : Faustus ! Now hast thou but one bare hour to live, And then thou must be damned perpetually. Stand still, thou ever moving spheres of heaven, That time may cease and midnight never come ; Fair nature's eye rise, rise again and make Perpetual day ; or let this hour be but a year, A month, a week, a natural day, That Faustus may repent and save his soul. O lente lente currite noctis equi! The stars move still, time runs, the clock will strike, The Devil will come, and Faustus must be damned. Then follows a scene of wonderful horror, extracted in the " Dramatic Specimens" of Charles Lamb, who speaks of it with a delicate and sweet appreciation. The soul of Faustus is borne away ; and in the morning the scholars find in his study his mangled limbs, which they gather up for decent burial, and as they go out the solemn chorus pronounces his epitaph : Cut is the branch that might have grown full straight, And burned is Apollo's laurel bough That some time grew within this learned man. Faustus is gone ; regard his hellish fall Whose fiendful fortune may exhort the wise Only to wonder at unlawful things, Whose deepness doth entice such forward wits, To practise more than heavenly power permits. Such is the story of our English Faustus. The legend in Germany seems so suited to the Teutonic mind that it 102 VARIA. will never be forgotten. The amount of literature, critical, descriptive, or romantic, expended on the legend is in itself prodigious. It seems that, as an embodiment of the history of one who yielded to temptation and finally paid the penalty of his weakness and wickedness, the story is admirably suited for the purposes of the satirist or the moralist, while the variety of scenes and the vast scope given for the working of the machinery of the romance have been at once perceived by the inventive and poetic minds of every age. Hence, starting from almost fresh standpoints, Goethe and Bailey have, in Faust and Festus, produced poems each of which bears not only the impress of the author's mind, but also of the age in which he lived. " The intended theme of Goethe's Faust," says Coleridge, " is the consequences of a misology, or hatred and de- preciation of knowledge caused by an originally intense thirst for knowledge baffled. But a love of knowledge for itself, and pure ends would never produce such mis- ology, but only a love of it for base and unworthy pur- poses." Thus philosophically viewing the great cause, it is not to be wondered at, that before Coleridge had seen any part of Goethe's Faust,* though of course when I was familiar enough with Marlowe's, I conceived and drew up the plan of a drama which was to be, to my mind, what the Faust was to Goethe's. My Faust was old Michael * "The poem was first published in 1790, and forms the com- mencement of the seventh volume of Goethe's Schriften, Wien und Leipzig, bey 8. Stael wtd G. J. Goschen, 1790." Coleridge's Note. DR. JOHN FAUSTUS. 103 Scott ; a much better and more likely original than Faust." Coleridge then enters into a sketch of his plot, and the similarity between it and that of Goethe is remarkable. His hero does not love knowledge for itself for its own exceeding great reward, but in order to be powerful. " This poison speck infects his mind from the beginning." Alas, a poison speck infecting too many minds. Im- prisoned by the priests, and as he feels unjustly, for five years, he eventually escapes and begins his great revenge. He turns to witchcraft, and at last tries to raise the devil, and the devil comes at his call. " My devil," writes Cole- ridge, " was to be, like Goethe's, the universal humourist, who should make all things vain and nothing worth, by a perpetual collation of the great with the little in the pre- sence of the Infinite. I had many a trick for him to play, some better, I think, than any in Faust." In the mean- time Michael is miserable, power does not bring happiness, and he has to keep the devil perpetually employed by im- posing the most extravagant tasks, but one thing is to the devil as easy as another. " What next Michael ? is repeated every day with the most imperious servility." In the end Coleridge had made Michael Scott triumphant, and " poured peace into his soul in the conviction of salva- tion to sinners through God's grace." Many are the works projected or dreamt of by the fertile brains of English authors, the non-completion of which we have sadly to regret, and not the least to be deplored is this intended drama of Coleridge. One remark its study has won for us which is worth pondering ; his devil " makes 104 VARIA. all things vain and nothing worth by a perpetual collation of the great with the small in the presence of the Infinite." This is an old and yet ever new trick of the would-be philosophical sneerers, and no one could have better ex- posed the sophistry of those who use it than Coleridge. But it is by no means yet played out; indeed we may imagine that in succeeding centuries Dr. Johann Faustus will oft start up, a fine modern gentleman, with old-new sneers at the priesthood, at a belief in goodness, virtue, and God ; and that Mephistopheles, shaped according to the fashion of the times, will captivate the minds of poetic youth, by his bold wickedness, his hardihood towards the Almighty, and his contempt of the creature of whose damnation he is the agent. As we look in the British Museum at the beautiful type, ink, and printing of the Mazarine Bible, so difficult to an unpractised eye to be distinguished from a manuscript, which was the first production of Gutenberg and Johann Faust, we can understand why the puzzled scribes and illuminators put their heads together to slander the pro- ducer. Not comprehending his process, they must have believed that the Devil aided one who could produce one hundred bibles or psalters in less than half the time in which they could produce one. May we not, then, fairly suppose that, after all, the printer and not the Doctor was the nucleus around which the most enticing fable of mo- dern times has been gathered ? Two facts are certain both the Fausts lived about the same period, and both bore the same Christian name. QUEVEDO. BOOKS CONSULTED. Sismondfs Historical View of the Literature of the South of Europe. Translated by Thomas Roscoe. Bohn, 1846. Bouterwek's (Fred.) History of Spanish Literature. Bogue, 1847. Hallam's Introduction to the Literature of Europe in the 1 5th, 16fA, and 17th centuries. Fourth edition. John Murray, 1854. History of Spanish Literature, with Criticisms on particular Works, <:. By George Ticknor. Vol. II. New Edition. John Murray, 1855. The Visions of Dom Francisco de Quevedo VUlegas, Knight of the Order of St. James. Made English by Sir Roger L'Estrange, Knt. The llth edition corrected. London, printed by W. B. for Richard Saie, near Grays-Inn Gate in Holbourn, 1715. (5th edition, G. R. L., in 1673.) The Comical Works of Francis de Quevedo, containing the Night Adventurer, the Life of Paul tlie Spanish Sharper, Sfc. Translated from the Spanish by J. Stevens. London, 1707. The Controversy about Resistance and Non-resistance discussed in Moral and Political Reflections on Marcus Brutus, who slew Julius Caesar. Written in Spanish by D. F. de Q. V. Translated into English and published in defence of Dr. Henry Sacheverel, by order of a noble lord who voted in his behalf. London, 1710. Obras de D. Francisco Quevedo- VUlegas Coleccion completa, corri- geda ordenada illustrata par Don A. Fernandez Gueira y Orbe (Biblioteca de Autores Espanoles.) Tom, 22, &c. 1849. Obras Escogidas de D. F. de Quevedo y VUlegas, con notas y una noticia de su vida y escritos por Don Eugenia de Ochoa. Paris. Obras serias, obras jocosas, obras pot ticas. 1842. QUE VE D 0. A.D. 15801645. F all the weapons of the human intellect satire is perhaps the keenest and that which inspires the most dread. Of all, also, its effects have been the widest and the most beneficial. Happily for us, none but good men have been supremely gifted with this tremendous power. We do not say that Aristophanes, Horace, Terence, Persius, or Juvenal were the best of men ; or that, speaking of modern times, Rabelais, Cervantes, Quevedo, Swift, Pope, or Moliore were saints. Sancti, holy men, that sense of the word will not hold with them ; nay, even if judged by the highest possible standard of excellence, they were but frail and faulty men ; as weak as some of those whom they condemned : but we do think that they, like David, had continual impulses towards wisdom, goodness, and truth ; that they often embraced these impulses, and that they maintained a very high standard of honesty through poverty and persecution ; that they possessed a courage 108 VAEIA. which never gave way ; a spirit and a sense of their own dignity which kept them from being base ; an ever-re- curring love of truth and nature ; a belief in the beauty of humanity, and a wonderful boldness, which constantly urged them to speak out and smite dishonesty, impurity, and baseness, even in high places and in the breasts of the great and powerful of the world. "Without these feelings, which have of themselves something of the heroic, a true satirist cannot exist; for a satirist is not to be degraded to the rank of a scandal-monger, who retails the stories of a village, or the faux, pas of a court : but he is to be regarded as a large-souled well-wisher to humanity, who, speaking the truth with sharp severity, places it in that light which, if it pains the guilty, yet awakens him to the enormity of his villanies, and makes him hate the crime which he has hitherto loved. It has happened, however, by a natural consequence, that satire is the most dangerous of ah 1 weapons to him who uses it. It is a hiltless sword which, though it pierces the antagonist, cuts the hands of him who wields it. A turn for satire verse has ruined more poets than one. The truth itself does not please at all times, and it is certain that truth, sharply told, always wounds. If from the lips of Divinity it could only urge those who heard it to ensnare and slay the speaker, we may be sure that from the mouth of mortality its proximate effects must be the same. We find this in every case. Defoe imprisoned and driven half mad ; Swift in disgrace break- ing his proud heart ; Rabelais forced to conceal his ideas QUEVEDO. 109 amidst filth and zanyism ; Cervantes begging his bread ; Fielding without a friend, Quevedo in a dungeon. Well may Johnson break forth into strong melancholy verse in his imitation of Juvenal ; well may he enumerate nothing but miseries, as he cries out What various ills the scholars life assail, Toil, envy, want, the patron, and the jail. This incessant toil and thought beget little success ; then comes the pale envy and the biting cares; then the degra- dation of seeking a patron ; and lastly, the sad end the patron, and the jail. In the life which is before us we shall find these wayside marks precisely in the succession in which the noble verse of Johnson has placed them. The literature of the Spaniards is but imperfectly known to many Englishmen. A great name has overshadowed a host of inferior, but of excellent writers. Cervantes is popular and appreciated, but Calderon, Lope de Vega, Garcilasco, Ponce de Leon, and Quevedo, authors every one of them worthy of study, are known but by name. It is to the history and great work of the latter that we wish to direct attention. The era of Philip the Second of Spain resembled, in too many respects, our own. Catholicism and that shade worshipped by enthusiasts, monkish devotees, Catholic unity, were rampant. The question of the Immaculate Conception would, if then propounded, have been settled by a Bull. The Inquisition flourished in all its glory (?), and superstition and luxury went, as they always will and 110 VARIA. do, hand in hand. The latter vice bore, perhaps, the largest flower, for it had been sown in rich ground, and the trea- sures of the conquered Indies, the pearls and gold of Mexico, and the silver of Peru, were poured like liquid manure to nourish its root. The throne of Spain was, at that time, the richest in the world, its court or courts the most luxu- rious and debauched. We say courts advisedly. It had one at Peru, another at Mexico, a third in Sicily, a fourth at Naples, and each viceroy tried to outvie his fellows in show, pomp, and bravery. The manners and morals of these courts had corrupted the old institutions of the de- scendants of the Cid. There were too much ease and luxury, too much gold, too much grandeur ; the country presented all those signs of decadence which M. Ledru Rollin had seen in England, and which M. de Mont- alembert has endeavoured to explain away. The nobles presented little but vanity, idleness, intrigue, love of pre- cedent, ceremony, and contempt for the feelings of the people. Moral sense was all but extinguished : riches alone were worshipped. The throne was merely the altar of an empty idol, of a monarchy weakened and buried in superstition, and covered by the contempt of all who were noble, good, or free. Favourites reigned, and the basest dispensed favours from the polluted but still worshipped " Fountain of Honour." Abroad, in the country, the same signs presented them- selves. The artisan was poor and degraded, the peasant crushed and ignorant, the money-lender flourishing and rich ; gamblers and speculators in plenty, the intriguer QUEVEDO. Ill sure of his fortune, tax-gatherers and farmers-general fat- tening on the gains of iniquity, the exchequer of the state beggared, the middle classes and lower aristocracy poverty stricken, and ready to sell their daughters either through the Church or without her intervention to him, not who loved them most, but who had the strongest arm or the longest purse. It is the old history of downfalls. Kome presented the same signs, and farther back Egypt and Assyria could, did we know all, tell the same story. But these signs are not beheld with perfect placidity by all. However blind a government or a nation may be, there are those whose hearts are pure, and whose vision is keen ; those who would seek to stay her in her downward course. Unfortunately the mass is too blind and foolish, the people perish for lack of knowledge, the reins are in the hands of those who are desperate and wicked, and they who would check the mad career are mocked at like Lot, or deemed mad like Cassandra. Quevedo was one of these. The lives of men, such as he was, are often much more romantic than romance itself, so that the apothegm of Lord Byron, anent truth being strange, stranger than fiction, is completely verified. " If you wish for a ro- mance," cries a French editor of one of Quevedo's works, " you shall have one," a romance, indeed, dramatic enough, but sad, deep, and strange as a tragedy by ^Eschylus. Don Francisco Gomez de Quevedo of Villegas was born at Madrid in the year 1580. His family, which was, as 112 VARIA. every Spaniard's is, illustrious in its descent, had been attached to the court, and its members had held several appointments. Both the parents of the future satirist died whilst he was young ; but his relative and guardian, Don Jerome de Villanueva, placed him in the university of Alcala, where he made rapid progress, making himself to be regarded as a perfect prodigy of learning; knowing Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, Italian, and French. Nor were his studies ended here : he dipped for to have mastered all these thoroughly is beyond mortal power into the studies of theology, law, philosophy, the belles lettres, natural philosophy, and medicine. No wonder is it that his college was proud of him, and that the fondness of his admirers gifted him also with every accomplishment which could be possessed by the finest cavalier and gentle- man in the world. In history and biography, just as in the commencement of inartistic novels, we often find the writers earned away by an intense admiration of their heroes. The character of the admirable Crichton seems to suit every one. Thus our quaint little Quevedo, with a per- petually active brain, a malformation in his feet, which renders walking or any martial exercise painful to him, but with the pride of a high-born Spaniard, is not only represented as a learned philosopher, but as " an arbiter in disputed points of honour, preserving with the greatest delicacy the parties who consulted him from any compro- mise of character, highly accomplished in arms, and pos- sessing a courage and an address beyond that of the most skilful masters." Thus far M. de Sismondi, who does QUEVEDO. 113 not forget an editorial flourish about " the sanguinary ordeal," meaning, we presume, if he mean anything, that Quevedo was an accomplished duellist, and in addition to his other acquirements, knew the " punto reverse, the stocata," and all the practice and terms of an art which taught him to wield his long Spanish rapier, with its channelled blade, quite as skilfully as he did his pen. The reason for all this, which we cannot but regard as exaggeration, follows. The high souled little man, full of courage and chivalry, being a poet, and a Spaniard to boot, walking along the streets of Madrid, is attracted by the cries of a woman in distress. Bushing to the spot, he finds a lady struggling with a burly cavalier ; he rescues her, draws his sword, has a few hurried passes, probably with one who knew but ill how to defend himself, and leaves the lady free, but his adversary, by an unlucky lunge, dead in those midnight streets of Madrid. Que- vedo, sheathing his bloody rapier, and bending down over the body, turns the dying man to the moonlight, and recognizes the face of one of the most powerful nobles of Spain. One glance is enough for him. Henceforth, adieu the reputation of the scholar and the poet : welcome that of the duellist and brawler : he has killed his man, and must fly. "With a strange pang at his heart, a deep regret, relieved perhaps a little by the thought that this misfortune arose in his defence of a lady, who will, we may be sure, hereafter defend his reputation, Quevedo gets him gone, and flies to Messina ; the Duke d'Ossuna, 114 VARIA. whom he slightly knew, having been appointed Viceroy of Sicily, and holding grand court therein. To a man of wit, learning, and skill, this forced retire- ment was not so much a banishment as the beginning of his fortunes. The fame of Quevedo had preceded him ; and either at that court, remote from the capital, was preserved the ancient virtue of giving places to men who really could fill them, or the friendship of the Duke d'Ossuna prevailed, and Quevedo suddenly mounted into the seat of the secretary. The skill and wisdom of the man soon became apparent. He was, in a little space, the very right-hand of the Duke. He travelled from Genoa to Nice, from Nice to Venice, from Venice to Madrid, from Palermo to Home, carrying on important negotiations, charged with dozens of state secrets, and with affairs of state, all of which he skilfully executed. His life, as the life of such a man in such a time naturally would be, was filled with adventures. At Nice, being in possession of a state secret, he suddenly freighted a ship and saved the family of his host, who had been proscribed by the Prince Charles Emanuel. At Venice he became not only a witness, but an actor, in that pretended con- spiracy against the senate which furnished our poet Otway with the plot of his tragedy, " Venice Preserved." His- tory has hitherto believed in the actual existence of the plot, not of the tragedy, but of the Spaniards against Venice ; but M. Guerra y Orbe has proved, from au- thentic sources, that the conspiracy only existed in the cunning brains of the Venetian senators. The truth seems QUETEDO. 115 to be that the seignory, doubting and mistrusting the influence which Spain was acquiring in her state affairs, imagined a cabal, found ready dupes, spies, and denoun- cers ; imprisoned in oubliettes, or assassinated, or cast into the sea, all to whom their secrets were known, kept amongst themselves a most profound silence, and left, in the face of Europe, Spain and the Duke d'Ossuna guilty of an abortive and odious conspiracy, thus rendering free their state from further foreign influence, and finding through- out the whole of Europe a generous and simple credence, and in Fra Paolo a slavish and complaisant historian. Such is one of the curiosities of history which time and patient research bring to light ! But such is the power of genius over truth, that it is not more certain that Mac- beth will be judged from the pen of Shakespeare, and that Richard the Third will be ever regarded as a demi-devil rather than a skilful and humane governor, than that the sorrows of Belvidera and the woes of Jaffier and Pierre will draw innumerable tears from yet unborn audiences, and will, as heretofore, excite the hatred of the English against the pride and treachery of Spain. We may be assured that Quevedo, the chief secretary of the Duke d'Ossuna, shared in his disgrace. The secre- tary had to fly from Venice as a beggar. He reached Naples to find his master and friend, to aid, and at last to tire him with his good counsels, and to be dismissed. Not long afterwards d'Ossuna was disgraced himself, lost his vice-royalty, and died, perhaps, of pride and a broken heart. Olivarez succeeded him. 116 VARIA. The good fortune of Quevedo, not less than his skill and genius, made him many enemies. He was hesides more pleasing to the ladies of the court than he was hateful to the nobles. He somehow acquired the name of a man of gallantry. To be so in the sixteenth century, and in Spain, was to play a very dangerous game. The State of Venice paid many an assassin to track the clever secre- tary, and whether by land or by sea, the biographer of Quevedo assures us his life was in danger from the dagger of a bravo paid either by some jealous husband or some Italian lord : all these dangers the satirist escaped, survived the Duke d'Ossuna, and lived to refuse a proffered secretaryship from Olivarez. It is probable that these years, free from business and the intrigues of court, were the happiest which Quevedo boasted. He fell in love with a lady whose name was Esperanza, wrote poetry to her, playing gently and prettily on the signification of her name, was crowned with success, married, and, after a year of great happiness, lost, as he has told us, in admirable and affecting verses, his only " hope." This misfortune probably made him turn with more avidity than ever to that which had amused him in his prosperity. He published some of his poems, and wrote others. He must have done this largely and at leisure ; for his poetical works fill three large volumes, and contain, besides other specimens, upwards of one thousand sonnets, some of them of great power and beauty. One of them cited by Sismondi, and we believe translated (in Bohn's edition) by Wiffen, the translator of Tasso, will charm the reader by its sombre beauty. QUEVEDO. 117 A Roma sepultada en sus ruinas. Buscas en Roma a Roma 6 peregrino ! &c. Stranger, 'tis vain ! midst Rome thou seek'st for Rome In vain ; thy foot is on her throne her grave: Her walls are dust ; Time's conquering banners wave O'er all her hills ; hills which themselves entomb. Yea ! the proud Aventine is its own womb ; The royal Palatine is ruin's slave ; And medals, mouldering trophies of the brave, Mark but the triumphs of oblivious gloom. Tiber alone endures, whose ancient tide Worshipped the Queen of Cities on her throne, And now, as round her sepulchre, complains. Rome ! the steel fast grandeur of thy pride And beauty, all is fled ; and that alone Which seemed so fleet and fugitive remains t Few sonnets in any language, it seems to us, can sur- pass this in melancholy and reflective grandeur. Next to his sonnets the larger portion of poems which Quevedo has given us consists of what he calls "romances." They are, indeed, short stanzas, and resemble nothing in the English language, unless it be those biting verses of Swift on his own death, or the more playful melancholy and irony of Hood. He is very fond of subjecting his own fortune to the microscope, and he examines and turns it over with such quaint reflections, such good-humoured philosophy , that we cannot help at once loving and admiring the man. We shall shortly have to revert to one of these " romances :" at present, we must follow the history of the author. His pursuit of literature, which such was the nature 118 VARIA. of the man could not but with him be very earnest, brought him into contact with many of the pseudo-litter- ateurs of the day. It has always been the fate of men of satiric genius to make enemies amongst their own craft, and, as Quevedo did not hesitate to attack and blame those who were ridiculous and vicious in their style, he soon had a host of enemies amongst the poets. A school had been formed about this time, that is, from 1615 to 1621, the style of which was full of false sentiments, long words, and hyperbole. It seems to us to have been the prototype of that Delia Cruscan nonsense which Gifford in our fathers' days destroyed by his Baviad and Mseviad. Gongora and Marini were at the head of this regiment of false poets, and as in Spain when the Inquisition flourished it was no difficult thing to attack a man's faith, some ridiculous disputes about the patron saint of Spain were foisted into the quarrel ; and Quevedo, attacked on all sides, succumbed to his enemies. An old inquisitor, Aliaga, the poet and painter Pacheco, and a "Gongorist" Montalvan, joined their forces, and between them manu- factured a book full of bitterness and scandal, purposing to bring to light the secret life of Quevedo, wherein they dub him a " heretic, a thief, a robber, a liar without faith, honesty, or character; a debauchee spotted over with vices." Many of these qualities have been imputed to Quevedo by his biographers, but it does not appear by what authority, if we except that of this slanderous book. The " thief" and " heretic " was, at the very time of this slander, meditating a noble and bold deed. The king- QUEVEDO. 119 (lorn was exhausted, the treasury empty, national industry discouraged, the priests rampant, the king in a state of servitude, the favourites in full possession of every power they could wish, quietly pocketing the finances and fat- tening upon the falling state. Quevedo, with a simplicity which is naturally ever the concomitant of enthusiasm, believed in the king, and contrived to place under his plate at dinner a copy of verses, folded into the form of a petition, which revealed these crimes and suggested a remedy. These verses were without insolence or irony, perhaps without much polish or epigram, but earnest, truthful, and full of a biting simplicity. The style, the measure, the very boldness of the verses, proclaimed the author; but it was to a woman that Quevedo owed his betrayal. A certain lady of the court, a Donna Margarita " una astuta mujer y de las famosas de la corte " informed Olivarez of the secret, and one cold winter's night in 1639, the Alguazils of the court seized Quevedo, deprived him of his papers, and for a second time in his life he found himself a prisoner. In the years 1620-21- 22 he had, indeed, been confined to his estates, but this latter imprisonment was a thousand times more tyrannical and severe. He was declared to be the author of an atrocious libel against good morals and government ; was thrown into the dungeon of a convent, where a stream of water passed under his bed, producing a pernicious damp- ness and malaria. His estates were confiscated, and, during his imprisonment, he was reduced to subsist by common charity. 120 VAEIA. This was not all. Quevedo was old, nearly sixty years of age. The dampness and harsh treatment had the worst possible effect upon him. He fell dangerously ill ; but his enemies, wishing nothing so much as his death, denied him the " luxury " of a physician. His teeth rotted in his head ; his whole frame was full of aches and agues ; his flesh broke out into great sores : the imprisoned satirist cauterised these himself. When they whom he has offended get the better of a clever man, there is little or no question as to their treat- ment of him. He must expiate, before their dulness, the crime of his superior knowledge. He must work out his certain punishment. There is nothing so cruel as unmiti- gated stupidity when offended. It is not pleasant to dwell upon these things ; we must therefore leave Quevedo to his fate, and, whilst pitying the man, admire the constancy of the poet. True, poetic genius finds sermons in the stones and consolation in the walls of a jail. If, on account of its sensitive nature, it experiences more sorrow and trouble, and feels acutely trials which leave the callous man of the world scatheless, it also finds a precious jewel in adversity, and an ointment more healing than the balm of Gilead in the contemplation of its trials. The fable of the ancients has pourtrayed this very beautifully, and the laws of nature show us a poetic analogy. You may strike upon the stubborn oak, and the blow will produce no effect; nay, if you cut into its heart the wound only remains dry and ghastly ; but if you wound the poplar, the nature of the tree is such that it will weep and distil its innermost QUEVEDO. 121 juices, and by its own tears at once heal the wound and form a beautiful and precious gum. So it is with the satirist and humorous poet. Quevedo bemoans indeed his own hard fate, and Thomas Hood, whose manner sometimes reminds one of the Spaniard, comments upon his hard fortune, but both do it in such a merry brave style that their verses have become a consolation for thousands of others. In the 16th " Eomance " of the book Thalia we find Quevedo exhibiting this manliness and courage very remarkably, and so finely that we shall do a benefit to the reader by quoting them : . . . My' planet has looked on With such a dark and scowling eye My fortune, if my ark were gone, Might lend my pen as black a dye. No lucky or unlucky turn Did ever fortune seem to play, But, ere I'd time to laugh or mourn, 'Twas sure to turn another way. Ye childless great who want an heir, Leave all your vast domains to me, And Heaven will bless you with a fair, Alas, and numerous progeny. They bear my effigy about The village as a charm of power, If clothed, to bring the sunshine out, If naked, to bring down the shower. Should bravos chance to lie perdu To break some happy lover's head, / am their man, whilst he in view His beauty serenades in bed. 122 VAEIA. A loosened tile is sure to fall In contact with my head below Just as I doff my hat. 'Mong all The crowd a stone still lays me low. My doctor's remedies alone Ne'er reach the cause for which they're given, And if I ask my friends a loan, They wish the poet's soul in Heaven ! The poor man's eye amidst the crowd Still turns its asking looks on mine ; Jostled by all the rich and proud, No path is clear whate'er my line. Where'er I go I miss my way. I lose, still lose, at every game ; No friend I ever had would stay, No foe but still remained the same. I get no water out at sea, Nothing but water at my inn ; My pleasures, like my wine, must be Still mixed with that should NOT be in. This is the last specimen we shall give of Quevedo's numerous poems ; it is scarcely, indeed, as a poet that he is remembered : his sonnets are, as we have seen, some of them very noble, and are evidently the production of a noble soul. That of Quevedo had need to have been noble and constant too. He had smitten vice in high places ; his satire and the revelations of court life which he had given were not forgotten. He expiated that worst of crimes in a fallen age, the crime of wishing to make his country better, by an imprisonment of four years, QUEVEDO. 123 every day of which was a martyrdom. He underwent this punishment with a never-failing bravery and con- stancy ; he turned calmly to that consolation which is found above ; he wrote religious works, the " Life of the Apostle Paul," and an " Introduction to a Religious Life ;" so, let us hope that both he, as well as others, could say that . . . The path of sorrow, and that path alone, Leads to the world where sorrow is unknown. One of his religious treatises is curious. There is a trea- tise upon good and bad fortune by Seneca, ' De Remediis utriusque Fortuna?,' which abounds in consolatory and phi- losophic views of life, views so pure and elevated, that it is with difficulty that one can believe them the work of any but a Christian. Quevedo translated this, and added an additional chapter to each, wherein it is easy to see that he is speaking to, and consoling himself rather than the reader in his misfortunes. These works are evidently the work of an earnest Christian ; yet we shall find that, earnest as he was, he hated priestcraft with a royal hate. At last the King of Spain died, and Olivarez, his ra- pacious minister, fell from power. The few friends of Quevedo pressed for an examination : it was granted, and the imprisonment was declared to be a mistake. The real author of the verses, which were attributed to Quevedo, was found to be a monk ! That is the way the Govern- ment accounted for their spite and injustice : the poor poet, broken in health but not in spirit, was set free. 124 VARIA. Madrid was thenceforth hateful to him ; and, for peace and quietude for religious consolation and reflection, during the last few weeks of his life, Quevedo dragged himself to his little estate in the Sierra Morena, where his solitary dwelling, the tower of St. John the Abbot (Torre de Juan Abad), stood, grim, weather-worn, and half-ruined. The old walls were of red stone, the construction itself Moorish, the windows broken and dilapidated, the court-yards over- grown with aloes, the walls of the little castle clothed with shrubs and verdure. His poetry, the source of ah 1 his woe and all his joys, did not forsake him in this last retreat. He drew between himself and his old tower a touching and evident comparison. He wandered, when he could find strength, about its ancient walks ; he him- self was but a ruin. He had been worsted in the struggle with his enemies, he was weak and paralysed, he had lost his left eye through the miasma of his prison, and he was nearly blinded. Dark ruined tower, my sad and last retreat, Where daily I mine own wrecked shadow greet ; Around me silence, in my heart the grave, No longer through my heart old passions rave ; Desire, love, regret, ambition cease Their constant babblings now. leave but peace. Peace lights my soul and makes my heart serene, ' When thinking what I've felt and what I've seen. A poet once, I rivalled the gay birds ; But, oh ! I've shed more tears than uttered words ! These are said to be his last verses. He died a few days after writing them in his lonely tower of the Sierra QUEVEDO. 125 Morena, on the 8th of September, 1645. " Apres tout," cries his French biographer, " cette vie est complete ; on serait fache quelle se fut ecoulee autrement." Complete, indeed, but complete as the lives of too many men of genius have been. Complete in suffering, in sorrow, in joy, in tears, in smiles. They run through the whole circle of thought, they experience the whole world of feeling, before they are permitted to purify themselves by trial, and to come, humbly, penitently, and quietly, to the throne of that great power, who has told us long, long ago, how futile and empty this world is, and has bidden us, too often without effect, to wean ourselves from it. The translation which we have in English of a few of the visions of Quevedo is the only acquaintance, we believe, that the unlettered Englishman has with him, and that is scanty and incorrect. An incident in one of these visions is noticed by Cowper in the following lines : Quevedo, as he tells his sober tale, Asked, when in hell, to see the royal jail ; Approved the method in all other things, " But where, good sir, do you confine your kings?" " There," said the guide, " the group is full in view." " Indeed," replied the sage, " there are but few." The sooty janitor the charge disdained. " Few, fellow ! There are all that ever reigned." Sir Roger L'Estrange, a man of very quick and vivid genius himself, and the first of that now illustrious body, " the gentlemen of the press," making literature his pro- 126 VARIA. fession, was too anxious to get money from the booksellers to be very careful about his translation. Nevertheless, there is a free, nervous feeling, and perfect appreciation about his rendering which makes it capital reading. In the year 1715 it had passed through eleven editions, and was a popular work ; but, in reading it, you would scarcely know it to be a translation, for Sir Roger hath not only turned the words, but where he can, the ideas and places ; thus the Prado at Madrid becomes Pall Mall, the Spanish place of execution Tyburn, je. London, 1656. Philosophy Reformed and Improved, in four profound tractates. Mad e English for the increase of learning and true knowledge. London, printed for Lodowick Lloyd at the Castle in Cornhill, 1657. Three Books of Philosophy written to the Athenians by that famous, most excellent, and approved Philosopher and Phisitian Aureal. Philip. Theop. Bombast of Hohenheim, commonly called Paracelsus. Done into English for the increase of the knowledge and the fear of God. By a young seeker of truth and holines. London, 1657. Secretum omnium Secretorum, das ist, von der Heimlichkeit aller Heimlichkeiten (attributed to Paracelsus). 1676. Paracelsus. By Robert Browning (A Poem). London, Effingham Wilson, 1835. AUEEOLUS PHILIPPUS THEOPHEASTUS PARACELSUS, BOMBAST OF HOHENHEIM. [HERE is one reason why we may wish spiritualism to be true, that thereby we might claim acquaintance with the dead. For a man shall not have lived long before he shall have passed the grand meridian, and may num- ber more acquaintance with the dead than the living. More than this, if he be a reading man, there will be many with whom he would like to converse : he might wish to hob-a-nob with Robert Herrick ; to drink deep draughts with Ben Jonson ; to have really " a nicht wi' Burns." There be surely more of the dead than of the living whom we should care to know ; for, in spite of the gruff Doctor's assertion, that a reasonable man of the world would rather dine with a great lord than with the greatest genius, we would rather have a quiet meal with Shakespeare than feast with twenty lords, and would delight to take our bread and cresses with Plato, St. John, and Bunyan. Such " an hour with the mystics," Spenser 166 VAEIA. and Heine dropping in, with Goethe in the company, such would outbid even a lord-mayor's supper, followed by a nightmare into the bargain. But of all men more especially as they live in their own works, and we can enjoy them en famille without the intervention of the new light those with whom one would choose chiefly to gossip would be Sir Thomas Browne, Peter Bayle, Montaigne, Hazlitt, and Coleridge, forming a select circle of " Friends in Council." An evening, these being with us, might well be given to Nostradamus, Michael Scot, and Paracelsus. The last has had a singular fate. Unknown to many, his fame with some transcends that of any votary of science of his day, and, clothed in a nebulous mystery, looms largely in the far distant middle ages, ages receding rapidly from us, more rapidly every day. His portrait it would be difficult to portray fully. His boldness, loud boasting, and his dark history have made a great im- pression 'on the mind of one of our greatest, perhaps our greatest poet, who, from a poor original, has produced an ideal enchanter, a devotee of true science whom the world will not willingly let die. Pictured by himself, or by what remains of him, the physician is one who would in the garden of Paradise have plucked not one apple only, but a whole branch of the tree of knowledge, and would have greedily eaten the fruit thereof. But, after all, his is a face behind a veil, seen but faintly ; " clothed in white samite, mystic, wonderful," and never to be fully portrayed, or to be hawked about in one-and-sixpenny slides PARACELSUS. 167 for the world's stereoscopes. But others have loved him as well as I. A poet, whom the world rates not yet as he will be rated, hath written of him, painted him in the ideal, a knowledge-seeker, " one who desired to know," and did not care in what way he attained his end. " That profound Philosopher and Phisytion Aureol 8 Philippus Theophrastus Paracelsus Bombast of Hohen- heim, who was poysned y e 47th yeare of his age," we quote from the imprint of his lively Portraicture prefixed to a little Dryasdustian brown book, was born of a noble father, noble extra ihorum, Wilhelm Bombast von Hohen- heim, about the year 1493. He added sometimes to his long name that of Eremus, and some dozen of other sounding titles, finishing all up with the words utriusque Medicince Doctor. Paracelsus was educated as a phy- sician ; what that education was it is not easy now to say. He had to grope his way amongst uncertainties, to swallow what we now know to be the veriest nonsense of old wives' tales, to plunge into the mysteries of the cabala, to walk in darkness, to depend upon monkish tradition, and to mutter charms. Mystery and mysticism were his daily food in those dark ages ; but he went for- ward boldly, and as boldly affirms that he had penetrated all secrets, had gone through the whole curriculum of philosophy, and had arrived at the knowledge of the secret things of life and the hidden virtues of nature. It is only by placing ourselves in his situation, before the birth of inductive philosophy, that we can arrive at any kind of stock-taking of our present knowledge. Little enough, 168 VARIA. in good faith, do we ourselves know ; weak, blind, and foolish is humanity now : but then, then, when all the vulgar errors Sir Thomas Browne has so well discoursed of were each texts and theorems, then the darkness of ignorance must have been dense indeed ! Far afield went our " physition " to arrive even at the dawn. He travelled for ten years, between 1513 and 1523-4, visiting every celebrated college in Europe, and, like Plato and Pythagoras, wending eastward and looking to Egypt for his lore. He penetrated into Arabia, and conversed with sages and magicians ; he tells us, in his own rich and gorgeous style, that he " turned over the leaves of Europe, Asia, Africa, and in so doing suffered much hardship ; he fell into captivity, and bore arms as a soldier." More particularly did he traverse Spain, Ger- many, Italy, Denmark, Hungary, Muscovy, and then Asia. He spent some time in Persia, was taken prisoner by the Tartars, and carried before the Cham, by whom he was sent on a mission to Constantinople. He studied the works of Raymond Lullius, of Villanova, and other adepts. Great was he upon transmutation of metals ; he had found the aurum potabile, and talked with Jews, quacks, wizards and witches, boatmen, bathmen, and beggars. He boasts, as well he might, that he learnt more from strollers and gipsies than from the learned doctors of the schools. He gave and took ; and, in return for knowledge thus acquired, cured hopeless maladies and desperate diseases gout, dropsy, leprosy, and fevers of all kinds. He was received everywhere as the learned PARACELSUS. 169 doctor ; and, vagabond and true Bohemian as he was, had acquired a fame which far outran him and reached his native country before its owner. But he was still poor, until a lucky chance led him to Basil, where Jacob Fro- ben, a learned printer, lay suffering from an acute pain in his right foot, which no present leech could cure. This torture Froben had endured so long that he could neither eat nor sleep. Paracelsus was called in, attended to and bathed the patient's foot, and then exhibited his grand specific, which, as we may gather, was laudanum ; three little black balls ires pillulas nigras did Froben swal- low with, to him, immense service. He slept, his faith in physic was restored, and in a short time he was a sound man. He died, however, some months after of apoplexy. " He could not be persuaded to follow the advice of his judicious physician. The man, in fact, was old and apoplectic, and he died, careless of consequences." So says Erasmus, who believed in very little ; but, to the glory of Paracelsus, he believed in him, and in his magis- trate arcanum, his grand specific. The cure of this apoplectic printer raised Paracelsus to a pinnacle of glory. He was elected to the chair of medicine of Basil, and in this position gave vent to some of that grandiloquent spirit which seems to have inflated the old alchemists, as it did that magnificent creation of Ben Jonson, Sir Epicure Mammon. To the strange weird teaching of Paracelsus to that apotheosis of mundane knowledge and intellect, when the lay mind of the age, for a moment freed from the priests, seemed about to 170 VARIA. arise in its strength, and snatch new triumphs from the sky, to this teaching flocked the youth of Germany, of France, and Italy. The minstrel and the poet, the free- lance and jongleur, the sucking physician and the lawyer, the unfrocked monk and the layman, in quest of more than the priestly schools could teach them, were alike ready to listen, to admire, to applaud. There is in the museum at Antwerp a strange painting of the period of which we are writing, representing the procession to the crucifixion of our Lord. There, too, all the trades of the world are seen types of all the people who aided in the cruel work flocking forwards to the sight. There come the pedlars and tinkers, musician, artist, and handicrafts- man ; there, too, the scholar and priest, joking, thickly pressed together, pushing each other, chaffing, laughing, full of life, eager to watch for the Death, there they are, the very images of the townsmen and countrymen of the painter, who has taken care surely not in ignorance, but with some meaning* to picture the ruffians of the Jewish mob in the costume of his own age. What kind of import and signification would such a crucifixion have painted in the costumes of our day : with our high or low church curate, our dean and doctor, sleek tradesman, smug bishop, and ladies with ample crinoline ? Would it not bring the reality home to men's business and bosoms ? * Thus, in Bernard Zan's piece of Abraham about to sacrifice his son Isaac with a horse-pistol, the anachronism is at once great and exceedingly droll, but surely intended. PARACELSUS. 171 Such a mob, as portrayed by the, to me, unknown painter, listened to the orations of Paracelsus. He discarded the learned tongue, and lectured in German. He sent a new thrill through the untaught bosoms of the people. He was not one to hide his light under a bushel ; but, as he poured forth his words, told his audience freely that he knew more than all the old school put together. Shouting aloud in the plenitude of his self-love, he took, in the sight of his audience, a brazen vase, from which flames darted, and in which he placed nitre and sulphur; and when the lurid flame blazed up, he cast in the works of Galen, Avicenna, and the Arab doctors, shouting out at the same time, " Thus, doctors, shall ye burn in ever-* lasting fire ! Behind me !" he continued ; " get thee behind me, arriere-moi, Grec, Latin, Arab ! Ye have told hitherto but old wives' tales. The secret of all nature belongs to me." It is not alone Paracelsus who has railed at his brothers in the healing art, not he alone has called their shops col- luvies jusculorum slop- receptacles ; but whoever has done so has, we may well know, braved the hatred of all the rest of the pulse-feeling tribe. The possibility of a doc- tor making the sick man worse is no novelty in our own day ; nor was it in his. We can trace it down through ages. Martial has a good epigram, one out of nearly thirty, against the tribe : I slightly ailed ; a hundred doctors come (With finger icy-tipp'd and gelid thumb), Prescribe their nostrums vile, to purge or bleed : At first I ailed ; but now I'm sick indeed. 172 VAEIA. And we may remember that Sir Godfrey offered to take anything of Dr. Radcliffe save his physic ; and Garrick would accept any present of Sir John Hill save his pro- fessional advice, which he contemned. But, notwithstand- ing these quips and cranks, it is a bold thing to raise one's voice against the killing and draughting tribe ; and Pa- racelsus raised a host of enemies by his outcry against established favourites. He was like Ishmael; but he laid about him fiercely, and had salt in him. A recent writer on the subject has noticed the obvious fact that, " In the time of Paracelsus patients were even more unfortunate than in our days. Materia medica, or the arsenal from which the physicians drew their weapons, contained a mass of heterogeneous substances, the selec- tion of which the most grotesque fancy, rather than the wisdom of the sage, appeared to have regulated. Thera- peutics resembled one of those armouries in which toma- hawks and arms from Patagonia are laid by the side of the more effective weapons used in modern warfare. If the human body is a chemical laboratory, it was then in- trusted with transmutations which modern science has rejected as impossible. The old pharmaceutical cata- logues present horrors far surpassing those of Bluebeard's forbidden chamber ; for in those lists are seen scattered about, not the limbs of poets, not the headless trunks of lovely women, but the different parts of apes, lions, bats, serpents, toads of almost all known European beasts, and of many exotic animals besides, changed ' from their ordi- nance to monstrous quality ' to remedies given, not on PARACELSUS. 173 account of any empirically beneficial effect of theirs, but solely because of the mystical correspondence supposed to exist between them and the diseases they were made to combat. In affections of the liver, for instance, a dried wolf's liver was prescribed, or a donkey's liver, pounded in honey. Scorpions and spiders were ingurgitated whole. Zwelfer extolled the virtues of the toad against the plague. Moles on the face could be cured by being touched with a dead man's hand, which was to be kept on the face till it became warm. Van Helmont, having almost been stared to death by a toad, recovered by the use of treacle and the powder of vipers. The medicine of those days, half su- perstitious, half scientific, resembles those illustrations in old medical books, which display a strange mixture of stern and sentimental occurrences, which represent a sur- geon boring a patient's head with a gouge, while surround- ing ladies are wringing their hands, crying, or praying ; while, by a touch of satirical symbolism, a cat is portrayed devouring a mouse in a corner. What would a modern patient say, if, having succeeded in deciphering his doc- tor's prescription, he read, ' mus combustus ' ? He would probably like to be allowed eggs for breakfast, but scarcely ' eggs of frog or lizard.' A lady in hysterics might not perceive the efficacy of ' deer's tears, dried ' ! Consump- tive persons might object to ' pulmones jpreparati,' pre- pared lungs of fox. Pale persons would scarcely relish an infusion of the blood of 'bat,' 'rhinoceros,' 'rat,' being in the signe ty>, and in the same hour, to wit in the hour of , engrave the signes and letters which you will see written in the following figure. After- wards in the hour of f^ make a copper lamen of the same quantity and form as the leaden one ; when > is in the signe vj 3 ? the characters which you will see in the figure are to be engraven thereon, &c. These are to be en- closed in wax, so that they receive no moisture, sewn in a piece of silk, and hung about the neck of a patient in the day and hour of ." This, Paracelsus assures us, is the best remedy to recover the sight of the eyes and to pre- serve the eyes from pain and disease. " It preserveth the sight in old age as perfect as it was in youth." One lamen in the engraving is about the size of a penny piece of George III ; the smaller about the circumference of one of the godless florins of Victoria. While venting such stuff as this, in which it is hard to believe that he himself could have had any faith, Paracel- bus does not forget to attack his opponents ; and, after treat- ing of the spider, "a hateful creature," he says, "Having done with these hateful and poysonous creatures, now I 176 VARIA. will speak concerning other common and contemptible small creatures ; and I hope I shall not be blamed for this, nor shall these things I speak be esteemed as famed tales, as false physicians do who will not use any common medicines, such as may be gotten cheaply and easily, not remembering this, that God hath created nothing in vain, but that even the least and most contemptible things have their peculiar virtues according to His divine pleasure." No doubt this severe recital served our physician well ; he pretended by lowly study to have penetrated the secrets of Nature and to be able to instruct mankind. That the present generation may not miss his great gift, it will be as well to transcribe firstly a cure for warts, which our schoolboy readers can easily try ; and secondly, an infal- lible cure for any wound, which will serve both our sol- diers, our volunteers, and but too often our civilians. " To cure warts. Take oyl of juniper berries one ounce, th oyl of spike two drams, oleum laterinum, or buck oyl, seven drams ; mix them, and with this anoint the warts." " A potion which being drunk will cure any wound ! Take of adder's tongue three handfuls, of periwinkle the lesser one handful, of honeysuckle one handful and a half, of rheubarbe one ounce, of rhaponticke three ounces : put them into two gallons of water, boyl it to six quarts, or put them into new ale or new beer four or five days, then let the patient drink of it." We may laugh at Paracelsus now ; but in skill he was ahead of his rivals. He cured a judge, saved the life of a canon residentiary with three black pellets, ires murini PARACELSUS. 177 stercoris pillulas, some say compounded of his secret medicine, opium, which, we presume, he got from the East. "When the canon was cured, he would not pay the fee : the dose was so small, the charge so large. Paraeelsus sum- moned his patient before the judges. They, stupid fellows ! only ordered the ordinary fee ; and our magical doctor, in a torrent of indignant eloquence, ahused the judges. Few can help siding with him now. Nor, indeed, was our phy- sician to blame. Bayle has remarked that in the middle ages the fees of physicians were enormous. In his article on Petrus Aponensis he tells us that that clever man, who, like Paracelsus, was suspected of magic, would not go out of town to visit the sick under 150 francs a day ; a large sum, since the money was Avorth at least fifteen times as much as it is now. Being sent for by the Pope Honorius IV, Aporius, or Aponensis, demanded four hundred ducats a day. Vander Linden relates the same thing, but without naming the patient. Bayle quotes another physician mentioned by Lancelot de Perouse as claiming 100 crowns a day, and as returning from the Pope richer by 10,000 crowns. The same story, with some varia- tion, is told of Paul Freher, professor of medicine at Bo- logna, that he was sent for from all parts of Italy, but never left his town under fifty crowns a day, and that for curing Honorius he received 1000 crowns. Variations enough, says Bayle, truly ; Honorius must have paid his physicians highly, and Paracelsus may plead precedents. What evil has been done by weak and incompetent pur- veyors of the law from Pontius Pilatus downwards ! Marry, 178 VAEIA. is this the law? No wonder that Paracelsus devoted his judges to that place wherein he had already deposited the doctors. No wonder also, when the officers looked for him the next day, that he, dreading the ire of the mag- nates, had fled. He left at Basil his chemicals, tests, and laboratory, in charge of Oporinus, his scholar and friend, who filled to- wards him the place which Wagner does to Faustus in Marlowe's play ; and it is from this Oporinus, an ungrate- ful apostate, and afterwards therefore perhaps, O world ! a rich and highly-respected citizen of Basil, that we learn something of the inner life of Paracelsus. With Oporinus, then a young and hungry scholar, the great master also left his magistrate arcanum, laudanum, which some time afterwards saved his life. It is possible, we hope probable, for the sake of the physician, that the relation of Oporinus is greatly exaggerated. " Adeo erat totis diebus et noctibus, dum ego familiariter per biennium fere con- vixi, ebrietati et crapula3 deditus," gentlemen of good family were not averse to trade in that age ; and, although the dramatists and courtiers satirized the citizens, still the sons of knights and noble- men sought employment of the merchants and chief traders for their sons. James Howell was appointed steward of a London glass factory, and in 1619 went abroad in that capacity to perfect his knowledge and engage " gentle- men workmen." He travelled till 1621, corresponding in the meantime with high dignitaries and noblemen (one of his brothers was Bishop of Bristol), and on his return still followed his stewardship. This connection of business with literature, which undoubtedly did him good, lasted for some time. Upon its cessation he became a travelling companion ; then a Government agent to Spain where he was witness to " Babie's " and " Steenie's " romantic 200 VARIA. attempt at a Spanish marriage. Next he became Secre- tary to Lord Scrope as President of the North ; was then elected member for Richmond, in which post he remained nearly four years ; and afterwards went to Copenhagen as Secretary to the British Ambassador. In 1640 he ' was made Clerk of the Council by Charles I, and three years afterwards was, by the Parliament, imprisoned in the Fleet, where he maintained himself by translating and working for the booksellers. After the King's death he was released, and at the Restoration was made our first , "historiographer royal," in which position he continued using his pen till the year of the great fire, 1666, when he died. From so busy a life we should expect much ; and we are not disappointed. HowelPs thick volume of upwards of five hundred pages is full of observation, and is as amusing as the essays of Montaigne. His letters are addressed to all sorts of people to the King, Lord Herbert of Cher- bury, Lady Digby, Secretary Conway, Sir Robert Mansell, Sir Sacvil Trevor, Captain Francis Bacon, Mr. Ben Jonson, Mr. Ed. Noy, and others. We are inclined to think that, with the method of a tradesman, he kept copies of all his letters ; for, although some assert that he compiled them from memory when in the Fleet, they are often too full of amusing trivialities, of local touch and colouring, the most evanescent of qualities in short, have too great an air of freshness to have originated in any other manner. They are, as we have before hinted, supposed to be the earliest specimens of epistolary literature in our language. Howell's HO WELL THE TRAVELLER. 201 style seems to have been based upon the precept contained in his motto : Ut clavis portam, sic pandit Epistola pectus ; Claudetur haec cera, claudetur ilia sera, As keys do open chests, So Letters open breasts. He dedicates his letters to the King in a " Poem Koyal," dated Cctlendis Januurii, 1641, which contains some strong and excellent lines. He brings, he says : No medals or rich stuff of Tyrian dye, No costly bowls of frosted argentry, No Roman perfumes, buffs, or cordovans Made drunk with amber by Moreno's hands. . . but something I will bring To handsel the new year to CHARLES, my KING, And usher in bifronted Janus, in a word, his book of letters. In his very first page he defines what' an epistle should be, in one written to Sir J. S. (John Smith) at Leeds Castle : " It was a quaint difference the ancients did put 'twixt a letter and an oration that the one should be attir'd like a woman, the other like a man ; the latter of the two is allowed large side-robes, as long periods, parentheses, similes, .examples, and other parts of rhetorical flourishes ; but a letter or epistle should be short-coated and closely- couch'd ; a hungerlin [a short scanty coat] becomes a letter more handsomely than a gown. Indeed, we should write as we speak ; and that's a true familiar letter which expres- seth one's mind, as if he were discoursing with the party 202 VARIA. to whom he writes in short and succinct terms. The tongue and the pen are both interpreters of the mind ; but I hold the pen to be the more faithful of the two. The tongue, in udo posita, being seated in a moist slippery place, may fail and falter in her sudden extemporal ex- pressions ; but the pen, having the greater advantage of premeditation, is not so subject to error. Now, letters, though they be capable of any subject, are commonly either narratory, objurgatory, monitory, or congratula- tory. There are some who, in lieu of letters, write Ho- melies ; they preach when they should epistolize. There are others that turn them into tedious tractats ; and others that must go fraighted with meer Bartholomew ware, with trite and trivial phrases only, lifted with pedantic shreds of schoolboy verses." Really, Mr. Howell must have been reading, by pro- phetic vision, some of the vacation and lady-tourists' letters which are now-a-days issued. He is equally se- vere on the elder Balzac and the letter-writers of our " transmarine " neighbours : " Loose flesh without sinews, simpering lank hectic expressions, a bombast of words made up of finical and affected compliments, I cannot away with such sleazy stuff;" and luckily he has backbone enough to prevent his committing the faults which he so ardently condemns. In an early epistle to his father he tells us that, had he remained steward of the glass-house in Broad Street, he should " have melted away to nothing amidst those hot Venetians." Captain Francis Bacon succeeded him in Broad Street, whilst Howell was taken into the HO WELL THE TRAVELLER. 203 employment of Sir Robert Mansell, who, with " my Lord of Pembrook and divers others of the Prime Lords of the Court, had got a sole patent for the making of glass from pitrcoal, only to save the huge loads of wood formerly used in the furnaces." Here is the first hint of the improve- ment in the blast of our furnaces ; but it would seem that the patent did not succeed. In the same letter he tells us something of the rise of the haughty Buckingham : " The new favorit Sir George Villiers tapers up a pace, and grows strong at Court. His predecessor, the Earl of Somerset, has got a lease of ninety years for his life, and so hath his Articulate lady ; so called, because she articu- lated against the frigidity and impotence of her former lord. [This was the notorious Countess of Somerset cele- brated in our State Trials.] She was afraid that Coke, the Lord Chief Justice, who had used extraordinary art and industry in discovering all the circumstances in the poysoning of Overbury, would have made white broth of them ; but the Prerogative kept them from the pot. Yet the subservient instruments, the lesser flies, could not break thorow ; amongst others, Mistriss Turner, the in- ventress of yellow starcJi, was executed in a cobweb lawn ruff of that colour at Tyburn, and with her, I believe, will- disappear that yellow starch, which so much disfigured our nation and rendered them so ridiculous and fantastic." In the same letter Howell tells us of the execution of Sir Gervas El way, Lieutenant of the Tower, who, on being hanged on Tower Hill as an accessory to the murder of . Overbury, declared that the reason he suffered was through 204 VARIA. a rash vow, for when in the Low Countries he swore an oath that he would not play above a certain sum. If he did, might lie be hanged ! and hanged he was, surely enough. In chronicling a crime let us, when we can, append a virtue to it that, for instance, of Lord William Pembrook, to whom the King gave all Sir Gervas Elway's estate (above a thousand per annum), and who at once bestowed it on the widow and her children. In a letter to Sir James Crofts, Howell tells us of the probable fate of Sir Walter Raleigh, who had just returned from " his myne in Guiana, which at first promised to be a hopeful boon voyage " (it is worth while remarking that we now use the last adjective with only one noun, i.e., companion), " but," adds the writer, " it seems that that golden myne is proved a meer chymcera, an imaginary airy myne ; indeed, His Majesty had never any other conceit of it." Howell wonders why Sir Walter ever came back to the clutches of his enemy, and tells an a propos story of a king and his jester. Gondomar, the Spanish ambassador, is introduced in a wonderfully characteristic huffling, braggadocio way : " Count Gondamar desired audience with His Majesty he had but one word to tell him. His Majesty won- dering what might be delivered in one word, when he came before him, he said only Pyrats, Pyrats, Pyrats, and so departed." This Gondomar seems, like the Count von Bismarck, to have been a man of some humour. There is in Kirby Street, Hatton Garden, a public-house which retains the name of the " Hole in the Wall ; " and to antiquaries the HO WELL THE TRAVELLER. 205 memory of Lady Hatton is preserved in the street called Hatton Garden, close by. This proud lady, the wife of Sir Edward Coke, had thereat a wicket gate, which led from the garden into the fields beyond, leading to the village of Clerkenwell, its green and may-pole. Count Goudomar, who lived next door to Lady Hatton at Ely House, begged for a key to this private door, which the lady refused. " She," says Howell, " put him off with a compliment ; " whereupon Gondomar, in a private audience with the King, exposed the whole affair, and more than hinted at the tyranny exercised by Lady Hatton on her cringing husband. " Lady Hatton," says he, " is a strange lady, for she will not suffer her husband, Sir Edward Coke, to come into her house at her front door, nor him, Gon- domar, to go out in the fields at her back door ; and so related the whole business." The smoke and dinginess of London, and the sickly glare of the sun therein as compared to Spain, are well hit off in a sentence by the witty Spaniard : " He was despatching a Post lately to Spain, and the Post having received his packet, and kiss'd his hands, he call'd him back and told him he had forgot one thing, which was, that when he came to Spain, he should com- mend him to the sun, for he had not seen him a great while, and in Spain he should be sure to find him" Travelling to the Hague, Amsterdam, and Paris, Howell draws a picture of the latter which shows how little removed it was from a city of the middle ages. Ita streets were close, mean, and dirty, except some few 206 VAEIA. new houses built of stone, and the Louvre, with its great gallery, wherein " the king might place 3,000 men in the very heart of this great mutinous city." The streets stank like those of Cologne, in Coleridge's epigram, and were so narrow that two coaches or carts passing would create a block. The mud was so black and greasy (filled with oyl, says Howell) that no washing could cleanse it from some colours ; so that an ill name, he says, is like the crot of Paris, indelible. The stench of Paris might be perceived with the wind in one's face many miles off. At night-time the city was full of thieves ; by which the lives of night travellers were constantly endangered : " Coming late to our lodgings (near the Bastille) a crew of Filous or night rogues surpriz'd and drew on us, and we exchanged some blows. It pleased God that the Cheva- lier du Guet (a night patrol) came by and so rescued us ; but Jack White was hurt, and I had two thrusts in my cloake. There's never a night passes by but some rob- bery or murder is committed in this town." In a subsequent letter Howell relates the assassination of King Henry IV. by Kavaillac, and the horrid tortures to which that wretch was put. It is Henry, says Howell, who amassed a heap of gold as high as a lance, and who levied a huge army of 40,000 men, " whence comes the saying, the King of France with forty thousand men" Of course, Howell did not see the murder of the king, but he relates it circumstan- tially and minutely, as from the lips of an eye-witness, a French friend of his. HO WELL THE TRAVELLER. 207 " Going to the Hostile to see his treasure and ammu- nition, his coach stopped suddenly, by reason of some col- liers and other carts that were in that street ; whereupon one Ravillac, a lay Jesuit (who had a whole twelvemonth watched an opportunity to do the act), put his foot boldly upon one of the wheels of the coach, and with a long knife stretched himself over their shoulders who were in the boot of the coach, and reached the king at the end, and stabb'd him right in the left side to the heart, and, pulling out the fatal steel, he doubl'd his thrust. The king, with a ruthful voice, cri'd 'Je suis blesse ' (I am hurt), and suddenly the Blood issued out of his mouth : the Regicide villain was apprehended, and command given that no violence should be offered him, that he might be reserved for the Law and some exquisite Torture. The Queen grew half distracted here upon, who had been crown'd Queen of France the day before in great triumph ; but a few days after she had something to countervail, if not overmatch, her sorrow ; for, according to St. Lewis's law, she was made Queen Regent of France during the king's minority, who was then but about ten years of age. Many consultations were held how to punish Ravillac, and there were some Italian physicians that undertook to prescribe a torment that should last a constant torment for three days ; but he 'scaped only with this. His body was pull'd between four horses, that one might hear his bones crack, and after dislocation they were set again, and so he was carried in a cart half naked, with a torch in that hand which had committed the murder, and in the place where 208 VABIA. the act was done it was cut off, and a Gauntlet of hot Oyl was clapped on the place to staunch the blood, whereat he gave a doleful shriek ; then was he brought upon a stage, when a new pair of boots was provided for him, half filled with bojling Oyl, then his Body was pincered, and hot Oyl poured into the holes. In all the extremity of this torture he scarce shewed any sense of pain but when the gauntlet was clap'd upon his arm to staunch the flux, at which time of reaking blood he gave a shrike only. He bore up against all these Torments for about three hours before he died. All the confession that could be drawn from him was, That Tie thought to have done God good Service, to take away that Icing which would have em- broiled all Chrestendom in an endless War." Arrived at Venice, he found there " the best gentlemen workmen that ever blew crystal," and was aided, in his attempt to get some of these gentlemen workmen to England, by Sir Henry Wotton, the English ambas- sador and the author of two famous mots. The first was a retort to a Venetian nobleman, who had asked him " where the Protestant religion was before the Refor- mation." " Signer," said he, " where was your face this morning before it was washed ?" The second is the celebrated definition of an ambassador " A gentleman sent to lie abroad for the good of his country." Howell praises Venice glass exceedingly. The makers thereof were gentlemen ipso facto, and, after their work, dressed in silks and buckled on their swords like the gallants painted by Vandyke ; but the lasses and glasses of Venice, HO WELL THE TRAVELLER. 209 Howell says, were alike brittle. Venice, he adds, was so clean that it might be walked " in a Silk Stokin and Sat- tin Slippers ;" and with these and other of his observa- tions he mingles story, history, and philosophical remark in a very charming way. Howell, when in London, appears to have lived very close to Ben Jonson, in Westminster, near Tothill Fields ; for, from the pleasant gardens there, we find him in July, 1629, sending to Sir Arthur Ingram " a hamper of me- lons, the best that I could anywhere find of Tothill Fields gardens." Sir Arthur had asked Howell to stay some time with him at his noble new house at Temple Newsam. In thanking him for this courteous invitation our familiar- letter writer anticipates Joe Miller in one of his very sound old jests, which he sets down to a Norfolk country- man who had a "sute" before Sir Edward Coke, who, asking him how he called a certain river, answered, " My lord, I need not call her, for she is forward enough to come of herself." " So I may say that you need not call me to any house of yours, for I am forward enough to come without calling." In the next extract, a letter which we give whole to show fully Howell's style, we learn that Ben Jonson narrowly escaped being burnt out of house and home. In it he addresses rare Ben, as did many of his contemporaries, as his poetical sire. " To my Father Mr. Ben Jonson. " Father Ben, Nullum sit magnum ingenium sine mixtura dementice, there's no great wit without some mix- p 210 VARIA. ture of madness, so saith the philosopher ; nor was he a fool that answered, nee parvum sine mixtura stultitice, nor small wit without some allay of foolishness. Touching the first, it is verified in you, for I find that you have bin often mad when you writ your Fox, and madder when you writ your Alchemist; you were mad when you writ your Catilin, and stark mad when you writ Sejanus ; but when you writ your Epigrams and the Manetick Lady you were not so mad : insomuch that I perceive there are degrees of madness in you. Excuse me that I am so free with you. The madness I mean is that divine Fury, that heating and heightening spirit which Ovid speaks of. " Est deus in nobis, agitante calesscimus illo : that true enthusiasm which transports and elevates the souls of poets above the middle region of vulgar conceptions, and makes them soar up to heaven and touch the stars with their laurelled heads, to walk in the Zodiac with Apollo himself, and command Mercury upon their errand. " I cannot yet light upon Dr. Davies his Welsh Gram- mar ; before Christmas I am promised one. So, desiring you to look better hereafter to your charcoal fire and chimney, which I am glad to be one that preserved it from burning, this being the second time that Vulcan has threatened you it may be because you have spoken ill of his wife, and been too busy with his horns I rest, Tour son and contiguous neighbour, J. H. "Westminster, 27 June, 1629." We have little space left ; but it is hard to part with a pudding from which so many plums may be picked. HO WELL THE TRAVELLER. 211 Howell has always plenty to say. He will tell you a facetious tale of a " Porter," or an anecdote about the " Election of Pope," or will discourse on the " Chemistry of Glass," " The Excise," " Prayer and Praise," " Auto- logy," " Of a hideous serpent lately found in a young gentleman's heart in Holborn," " Of Wiving," " Of Peter Van Heyn's mighty Plate Prize," " Of what befel Wai- stein [Wallenstein] in Germany last year :" " All sorts of Stories." He writes of William Lily, the astrologer, of the death of Mr. Attorney-General Noy, of that of Lord Bacon, and several times to his poetic or mental father, Ben Jonson, " dear father Ben," who was of a rugged but fine nature, and too often At the Sun, The Dogge or triple Tun as full of drink as of the poetic afflatus. We cannot pass without extracting Howell's epitaph on Jonson, and part of his letter to the Lord Bishop of Chichester, Dr. Duppa, on Ben's death. " My Lord," he writes, " It is well becoming and very worthy that you are about not to suffer Mr. Sen Jonson to go so silently to his grave or rot so suddenly. Being newly come to town, and understanding that your Johnsonus Virbius was in the press, upon the solicitation of Sir Thomas Hawkins, I suddenly fell upon the insuing Decastich, which, if your Lordship please, may have room among the rest. Upon my honoured Friend and F., Mr. Ben Jonson. A ND is thy glass ran out, is that oyl spent Which light to such strong sinewy labours lent? 212 VARIA. Well, Ben, I now perceive that all the Nine, Though they their utmost forces should combine, Cannot prevail 'gainst Night's three daughters, but One still must Spin, one Wind, the other Cut. Yet, in despight of distaffe, clue and knife, Thou in thy strenuous lines hast got a life, Which like thy Bays shall flourish ev'ry age, While Soc or Buskin shall attend the stage. Sic Vaticinatur Hoellus." He writes a long letter on the death of the King, and tells us that the city was much "annoyed at the Court huying the mourning all in white cloth, and having it dyed black." This was a shrewd stroke of business, owing, we should guess, to the citizens having, on the proximate death of the Sovereign, bought up all the black cloth, so as to monopolize it, and charge their own price. Howell always writes well, and perhaps never better than when he gives an account of his daily life. In his index he calls this narration the " Self-travel of one of the Wayes that lead us to Heaven." " Though there be rules and rubrics in our Liturgy suf- ficient to guide us in the performance of all holy duties, yet I beh'eve every one hath some mode, or model, or formulary of his own especially for his private or cubicular devotions ; for myself, on Saturday evening I fast, on which I have fasted ever since I was a youth, for being delivered from a very great danger. On Sunday morning I rise earlier, to prepare myself for the sanctifying of it ; nor do I use barber, taylor, shoe-maker, or any other mechanic that morning. Whatever lets may hinder me HOWELL THE TRAVELLER. 213 the week before, I never miss, but in case of sickness, to repair to God's house that day before prayers begin, and to prepare myself by previous meditation to take the whole service with me. I prostrate myself in the humblest and decentest way of genuflexion I can imagine ; nor do I be- lieve there can be any excess of exterior humility in that place, therefore I do not like unseemly squatting, bold postures on one's tail, or muffling one's face with one's hat, but with bended knee I fix my eyes on the East part of the church and on Heaven. ... I endeavour to apply every tittle of the service to myself, to the service of my own conscience ; and I believe the want of this, with the huddling and careless reading of some ministers, make many undervalue and take a surfeit (i. e. at the length) of our public service. For the reading and singing of Psalms, whereas most of them are either petitions or Eucharistical ejaculations, I listen to them more attentively and make them my own : when I stand at the Creed, I think upon the custom they have in Poland, and else- where, for gentlemen to draw their swords all the while, intimating thereby they will defend it with their lives and blood : and for the Decalogue, where others rise, I even kneel in the humblest and trembling'st posture of all, craving remission for the breaches of God's holy com- mandments. I love a holy and devout sermon, that first checks and then chears the conscience, that begins with the law and ends with the Gospel, but I never prejudicate or judge any preacher, taking him as I find him. "And now that we are not only adulted but ancient 214 VAEIA. Christians, I believe the most acceptable sacrifice we can send up to Heaven is Prayer and Praise, and that Ser- mons are not so essential as either of them to the true practice of devotion. The rest of the holy sabbath, I sequester my body and my mind as much as I can from worldly affairs. "Upon Monday morn I have a particular prayer of thanks ; and every day I knock thrice at Heaven's gate, besides prayers at meals, and other occasional ejaculations, as upon the putting on of a clean shirt, ivashing my hands, and lighting the candles. Upon Wednesday night I fast and perform some extraordinary acts of devotion, as also upon Friday night, and on Saturday morn when, as soon as my senses are unlocked, I am up. And in the summer time I am often up abroad, in some private field, there to attend the rising of the sun ; and as I pray thrice a day, so I fast thrice a week. Before I go to bed I make a scrutiny of what peccant humours have reigned in me that day, and strike a tally in Heaven's Exchequer for my quietus est, ere I close my eyes, and so leave no burden on my conscience. I use not to rush madly into prayer Difference in opinion may work a disaf- fection in me, not a detestation. I rather pity than hate a Turk or an Infidel, for they are of the same metal, and bear the same stamp as I do, though the inscriptions differ. If I hate any, it is those schismatics that puzzle the sweet peace of our Church. I thank God that I have this fruit of my foreign travels, that I can pray unto him every day in the week in a several language, and upon HO WELL THE TRAVELLER. 215 Sunday in seven, which in orisons of my own I punctu- ally perform in my private Pomeridian devotions : Et sic aeternam contendo attingere vitam." Few men will quarrel with such a method of doing God service, which is surely a peaceful and Christian one. Serious and calm writing like this strongly reminds us of the best passages in Sir Thomas Browne's " Religio Medici." The letter just quoted is dated July, 1635. It re- sembles Sir Thomas Browne's style so much that one may doubt whether Howell had not seen the MS. of the " Religio Medici," which in that year was written, or, it may be, was written before and circulated in manuscript. It was not given to the world until 1642. Dr. Johnson says, " About the year 1634, he (Sir Thomas Browne) is supposed to have returned to London, and the next year to have written his celebrated treatise called ' Religio Medici,' the religion of a physician, which he declares himself never to have intended for the press. Dr. Kippis, says Simon Wilkin in a note on this passage, seems to have proved that ' Religio Medici ' was written in 1 635. In Wilkin's additional memoir of Browne we are told that he returned to England after having obtained his degree of M.D. at Leyden, in 1633. He then returned at once to England, and settled as a physician at Shepden Hall, near Halifax, where he had enforced leisure enough to meditate upon his past life and to write the ' Religio Me- 216 VARIA. dici,' one of the fairest monuments of the English mind." If this were so, and in 1634 the MS. was in circulation amongst literary people, it is possible Howell, the friend of Ben Jonson, looked at it and, intentionally or uninten- tionally, reproduced its style. MICHAEL SCOT. BOOKS CONSULTED. Debrio. Disquisitiones Magica, Probquium. Moguntiae, 1612. Bayle. Dictionnaire historique et critique, revu par Prosp. Marchand. Rotterdam, 1720. Scot, Michael. Liber physiognomies. Opuscula. Lyons, 1531. Scott, Sir Walter. Lay of the Last Minstrel (Notes to). Dante. Tutte le Opere di Dante, con varie annot. e copiosi rami, i$"e. dal Contf. Don Christ. Zapata de Cisneros. In Venetia, 1757. Dante. Translated by Henry Gary. MICHAEL SCOT. MONGST those who have obtained a very great fame upon an unsolid foundation," says a modern writer, " Michael Scot holds a very distinguished place." Hatlam, who appears to have read everything, and to have neglected nothing, has very little about him, and that little is un- satisfactory, to his friends at least. It is contained in a note in Hallam's first volume, and here it is : " Michael Scot, ' the Wizard of dreaded fame,' pretended to translate Aristotle, but is charged with having appropriated the labours of one Andrew, a Jew, as his own." Scot's fame was, therefore, purchased at little expense, for his singular learning in Greek, or rather the reputation of it, imposed upon many people. We have seen, in the article on Faustus, that Coleridge had intended to write a drama upon Michael Scot after the manner of " Faust." It is well that he did not carry out his determination with so knavish a hero, for even biographers of his own country can scarcely keep their 220 VARIA. hands from belabouring him, and, groping in the dark- ness of mediaeval literature, are evidently enraged to find that the heroic figure described by Sir Walter, the great magician and learned man to whom even Lord Eldon was proud to trace his ancestry,* is a mere windbag, a charla- tan, a fellow of vast pretensions, possessed of the slenderest basis of support, the smallest nucleus of reality, round which is wound the biggest possible ball of hypothesis, conjecture, and fable. The celebrated and poetical character who grew up to be regarded as A wizard of such dreaded fame, That when in Salamanca's cave Him listed his magic wand to wave, The bells would ring in N6tre-Dame, was born in an era particularly well adapted for the growth * " When the late Lord Eldon was elevated to the peerage, the arms of the Scots of Balwearie were added to his own ; and we are told that the Lord Chancellor felt a pride in his descent from the renowned Scottish magician. As nothing but modern evidence is produced in support of this connection of Michael with any family now in existence, we may be allowed to withhold belief from this story. The members of ancient families are always willing to con- nect their pedigree with some man of intelligence in past times. . . If Michael had been a poor philosopher living in Lord Eldon's own day, the prudent Chancellor would have taken particularly good care not to have given him a sixpence to buy bread with ; but the son of the Newcastle coal merchant was willing enough to attest the antiquity of his pwn extraction by counting kin with a cele- brated man of the thirteenth century." Lives of Eminent Men of rife. MICHAEL SCOT. 221 of an empiric fame. Michael the Scotsman, Scotus, is certainly claimed as a Scotsman, and is inserted amongst the celebrated men of Fife by Mr. James Bruce, who does not seem very well pleased with him for being a Scotsman at all. But he is also claimed as an English- man. Leland asserts that he was English, and Ball and Pitts, who both quote Leland, and cannot therefore be taken as authorities, assert the same thing. They also, says Mr. Bruce, indignantly claim " Duns Scotus as an Englishman ;" and, indeed, there is better authority for Anglicising Duns than Michael. We take it, however, that the primary and very heavy proof that Duns and Michael were both Scots is that they were called so. When Leland quotes a passage from an unpublished trea- tise of Bacon, wherein the names of " Gerardus Cremo- nensis, Michael Scotins, Aluredus Anglicanus, Herman- nus Alemannus " occur, we feel that there is no reason to disturb the distinctive titles given to each. Let Hermann be a German and Michael a Scotsman by all means, even though Leland does say that the magician was born and educated in the county of Durham. What does it matter ? At Balwearie, in the close neighbourhood of Kaith, now in the parish of Abboteshall, Michael was born in 1214 so many authorities tell us ; but as, in 1230, Koger Bacon says that certain portions of Aristotle's writings (librorum Aristotelis partes aliquas de naturalibus et mathematicis) had become known through the translation of Michael Scot, it seems evident that his birth should 222 VARIA. be placed earlier, perhaps as far back as 1200 or 1190. He flourished as the astrologer to the Emperor Frederic II. in 1233, and was contemporary with our Henry III, Louis VIII. of France, and Alexander II. of Scotland, and it is firstly to his (?) translation of Aristotle and the fame acquired thereby that he owed his elevation to the service of Frederic, and secondly to his astrological predic- tions that he owes his present fame and enduring celebrity. Of a roving and curious disposition, the son of a poor Scottish knight, Scot crossed the border and resided for some time at Oxford, to perfect himself in the learning of the day. He went to Paris and studied there, and after some time made his appearance at Padua, where he lec- tured on astrology. He seems to have been born a favourite of literary men, and to have been accepted in that learned city, not as a mere pupil in, but as a master of, the art of magic. Boccaccio introduced his name to his thousands of readers, and calls him a great master of necromancy ; and when once thus placed, it is evident that his fame was made. In the eighth day, and the ninth novel of the "Decameron," there is an amusing story of two painters, Messires Bruno and Buffalmacco, who, under the pretext of introducing one Master Simon, a physician, into a gay society, throw him into a cesspool, where they leave him to get out as he best can. It is in speaking to Master Simon of the society which they fre- quent, of course a fictitious one, that the painters introduce the name Michael. " After having sworn the physician to secrecy, ' You must know/ continued Bruno, ' that twelve MICHAEL SCOT. 223 or thirteen years ago there arrived in this town a famous necromancer called Michael Scot, because he was from Scotland, (the French translator prints it Michael Lescot).* He was received with very great honours and distinction by the best known gentlemen of Florence, who now are almost all dead. And when he left this place, he left also at their solicitation two of his disciples, whom he com- manded to render to those gentlemen, who had so well received him, all those services which depended upon them and their art. These two necromancers served the said nobles, not only in their affairs of gallantry, but also in other things, and became so accustomed to the climate, that they determined to fix their residence here. They bound themselves by ties of friendship to several persons of character and personal merit, without inquiring whether they were noble or roturiers, poor or rich, and these out of regard for their two friends, formed a little society, of about five and twenty men, who assemble together twice a month in a place they themselves have previously named." 'f One needs not to say, since the story is by Boccaccio, that the Society meets for the most immoral purpose. Courtesans of the greatest beauty and of the highest rank are there to enjoy these gay feasts with them ; indeed the * " Egli non ha ancora guari, che in questa citta fu un gran maestro in negromanzia, fl quale ebbe nome Michele Scotto, percio che di Scozia era." BOCCACCIO, Dec. Giorn. viii. Nov. IX. t BOCCACCIO, Decameron, Giorn. Ottuva, Novella IX. 224 VABIA. magic of the necromancers summoned these from the most distant parts of the earth. If the persons were two thou- sand leagues off, the potent magic taught by Michael Scot could compel them to come in two minutes. Bruno gives to these grand ladies some grand names. " There is," he tells the simple physician, who is in the end rightly punished for his wicked desires, " the Lady of Barbanico, the Queen of Basque, the wife of the Sultan, the Empress of Osbeck, the Schinchimurro of Prester-Johu, the Chian- Chianfere of Norway, the Semistance of Berlinson, and the Scalpedre of Narsia." But Bruno was highly favoured as well as his friend, the favourite mistress of the first being the Queen of England, while Buffalmacco pos- sessed the favours of the Queen of France. It will be useless to follow this tale to its catastrophe, which is in the usual style of Boccaccio. The story was written about one hundred years after our hero had been in Florence, and shows that his fame as a magician sur- vived. Scot was, however, the hero not only of the jovial tale but the mystic romance, so much so, that Dante thought fit to introduce him in the Inferno, canto xx. Quell' altro che ne' fianchi e cosi poco Michele Scotto fu, che veramente Delle magiche frodo seppe il giucco. This portrait of him, very vividly rendered by Gary, is extremely Dantesque. We see the man, thin and girt round the loins, broad in his shoulders for his size, but weird and wild looking and small in his flanks. There is, it is said, a portrait of him, on vellum, amongst the Ca- MICHAEL SCOT. 225 nonici MSS. in the Bodleian, and this agrees with Dante's vigorous lines. The poet has placed the necromancer in the eighth circle with others because they had presumed to practise divination and astrology. Upon Dante in- quiring who the spirits were, they are thus introduced by his guide : That spirit, from whose cheek The beard sweeps o'er his shoulders brown, what time Grsecia was emptied of her males, that scarce The cradles were supplied, the seer was he In Aulis, who, with Calchas, gave the sign When first to cut the cable. Him they named Eurypilus : so sings my magic strain, In which majestic measure well thou knowest, Who know'st it all. That other round the loins So slender of his shape, was Michael Scot, Practised in every sleight of magic will. Slender, short, dark-haired, and weird in look, Michael might well pass for a wizard. We are told, in certain Macaronic verses, published in 1519, that he was won- derfully clever in philtres and sorceries that could secure the love of women. He could also " call devils from the vasty deep," ride on an enchanted horse, wrap his small figure round in an invisible cloak, sail in a ship without rudder, sails, or other motive power but that with which he supplied it, and walk about, like Peter Schlimmel, without the inconvenience or convenience of a shadow. " He has been placed," says Bayle, in his article Scotus, " in the catalogue of magicians, and we are told that he frequently invited several people to dine with him without providing anything for them ; but when his Q 226 VARIA. guests sat down to table he forced the spirits to bring him meat from all parts; and when it was come he told the company, ' Gentlemen, this comes from the kitchen of the King of France, and this from the kitchen of the King of Spain ; this comes from England,' &c. The poet Dante adopted the common error." Here Bayle quotes the lines I have given, and adds that " John Bacon, an English Carmelite and the Prince of the Averroists, is more to be credited ; he quotes Michael Scotus as a great divine. Pitseus, who commends him very much, is also a more credible author. This Pitseus is the' Pitts who claims Scot as an Englishman, and who says, that, though Michael was accounted a magician by the mob and the ignorant people, wise men passed another judg- ment on him.* " However," concludes Bayle, in his very short notice, " 'tis said that this pretended magician fore- saw that he should die, and foretold the place where the Emperor Frederic should lose his life." But it was, after all, not by magic but by astrology that Michael foretold the death of his patron. Probably, in reference to this circumstance, and certainly to the seience of astrology, our good Martin Luther once gave the fol- lowing opinion, which is so sound and wise that modern science can add nothing to it, and which should, at least with all Lutherans, have set at rest any belief in as- trology. In the year 1538, the Seigneur Von Minckwitz made * Prudentum tamen et cordatorum hominum longe aliud fait judicium. MICHAEL SCOT. 227 a public oration in honour of astrology, wherein he sought to prove that the sentence in Jeremiah, chap, x, " Be not dismayed at the signs of heaven," applied not to astrology, but to the images of the Gentiles. Luther said hereupon, " These passages may be quibbled with, but not overthrown. Jeremiah speaks, as Moses did, of all the signs of heaven, earth, and sea ; the heathen were not so silly as to be afraid of the sun or moon, but they feared and adored prodigies and miraculous signs. As- trology is no art; it has no principle, no demonstration whereupon we may take sure footing ; 'tis all haphazard work. Philip Melancthon, against his will, admits unto me, that though, as he says, the art is extant, there are none that understand it rightly. They set forth, in their almanacs, that we shall have no snow in summer time, no thunder in winter ; and this the country clowns know as well as the astrologers. " Philip Melancthon says : ' That such people as are born in ascendente Libra, in the ascension of Liber, towards the south, are unfortunate people.' Whereupon I said, * The astrologers are silly creatures, to dream that their crosses and mishaps proceed not from God, but from the stars ; 'tis hence they are not patient in their troubles and adversities.' " Astrology is uncertain, and as the predicamenta are feigned words in dialectica, even so astronomy has feigned astrology ; as the ancient and true divines knew nothing of the fantasies and divinity of the school- teachers, so the ancient astronomers knew nothing of 228 VARIA. astrology. The nativities of Cicero and of others were shown me. I said, ' I hold nothing thereof, nor attri- bute anything unto them. I would gladly have the astrologers answer me this : Esau and Jacob were born together, of one father and one mother, at one time, and under equal planets, yet they were wholly of contrary natures, kinds, and minds.' " What is done by God ought not to be ascribed to the stars. The upright and true Christian religion opposes and confutes all such fables. The way of casting na- tivities is like the proceedings in Popedom, whose outward ceremonies and pompous ordinances are pleasing to hu- man wit and wisdom, as the consecrated water, torches, organs, cymbals, singing, ringing, but withal there's no certain knowledge. " An astrologer or horoscope-monger is like one that sells dice and balls. ' Behold, here I have dice that always come up to 12.' If once or twice their conjectures tell, they cannot sufficiently extol the art ; but as to the infinite cases where they fail, they are altogether silent. " Astronomy, on the contrary, I like; it pleases me by reason of her (sic) manifold benefits. " General prophecies and declarations which declare generally what in future shall happen, accord not upon individuals and particular things. " When, at one time, many are slain in battle, no man can affirm that they are born under one planet, yet they die altogether in one hour, yea in one moment."* * Luther, Colloquia Mensalia. MICHAEL SCOT. 229 These two points, of the many slain in battle, and of the birth of Esau and Jacob, would, no doubt, be easily met by modern astrologers, let us say Lieutenant Morri- son, but they are, in fact, irrefragable. However, in Scot's time there were many who believed in the false science, if he himself did not. The story of his feasting his friends from the tables of the various kings of Europe may have been the foundation of the more wonderful story of producing queens and beautiful ladies from the same places, as Boccaccio tells us, for the position of England and France are in both stories about the same. But Scot certainly gave vent to various prophecies which came true, or, like those of Nostradamus, were twisted into something like their realization. Thus Villain tells us that "Master Michael Scot" said of Padua, a long time before it happened, " Paduce magiwtum plorabunt filii necem diram et horrendam, datam catuloque Vero- nam." " The sons of Padua will weep the dire and horrid slaughter of her nobles, and Verona will be given to the dog," which was, of course, fulfilled when El Can Grande, the great dog, entered Verona. With the pretended prediction of the death of his patron Frederic, a man as it is more than probable Michael was himself given to licentious pleasures, the list of the wizard's prophecies may be closed. It will be noticed by the reader that all these pretended prophetic utterances are of the same family, capable of the widest interpretation, and, if they do not prove true at one time, are warranted to keep fresh for a few years ; or if the 230 VARIA. place be mentioned whereat a death is to take place, we find names are suddenly changed to suit the occurrence. Thus Michael Scot is said to have predicted that his patron should die at the iron gates in Florence, whereon the Emperor resolved to enter that town. But according to Francisco Pepino the prophecy came true in this way. " In the last day, therefore, of his life, when he was sick at Samnio, in a town the name of which was Florentinum, a hed was made for him in a chamber beside the walls of the tower, which the head of the bed touched. The gate of the town in the wall was built up, but the iron posts remained within. The Emperor caused the tower to be examined to see what it was like inside. It was told him that in that part of the wall where he lay there was a gate with iron posts shut up. Hearing this, he began to meditate and said, ' This is the place of my decease already foretold to me. Here shall I die. God's will be done.'"* The story, according to Muratori, has the appearance of a lie, told probably of Frederic because he never did enter Florence. The prediction is after all one made by a pal- tering fiend, taking it at its best, and allowing both it and its fulfilment to be true. A prophecy which is twisted into a true solution in that manner is worth very little to any one. It is curious that a similar story is told of one of our kings, Henry IV, and that it has been used with admirable * Chron. F. Francisci Pipini,. cap. xl ; apud Muratori, quoted also by Mr. James Bruce. MICHAEL SCOT. 231 effect by Shakespeare. King Henry, historians tell us, was praying before the shrine of Edward the Confessor in Westminster Abbey, when he was seized with a fit. His attendants carried him to the apartments of the abbot, and he lay down to die in the Jerusalem chamber, the name of which is said to have recalled an old prophecy, with the notion that he had once entertained that he should make an attempt for the recovery of the holy city. It is prob- able that the visit of Michael Paleologus to France and England, to beg aid of the western monarchs against Bajazet and the Turks, may have suggested to the vigorous king the notion of resuscitating the almost for- gotten crusades, and that the prophecy was vented to hin- der him from the undertaking. Shakespeare, who omits the praying at the shrine, makes Henry swoon when, at his council, after a time he asks : KINO. Doth any name particular belong Unto the lodging where I first did swoon ? WAR. "Tis called Jerusalem, my noble Lord. KING. Laud be to Heaven ! even there my life must end. It hath been prophesied to me many years, I should not die but in Jerusalem ; Which vainly I suppos'd the Holy Land : But bear me to that chamber, there I'll lie ; In that Jerusalem shall Harry die."* He did in effect die in the Jerusalem chamber at West- minster Abbey on the 20th March, 1413, in the forty- seventh year of his reign. * King Henry IV, Part II, Act iv, Scene iv. 232 VARIA. To return to Michael Scot. According to traditional history he left the court of the Emperor Frederic before the end of that monarch's reign, and, arriving in England, was hospitably received by Edward I. But chronology would make this twenty years after the death of Frederic, as Edward was crowned in 1271. He then went to Scotland, and was sent to Norway in 1290 to bring over, as one of the ambassadors, the Princess Margaret. On his return to Scotland he took up his residence there, the scenes of his magic feats being partly in Ettrick and in Roxburghshire. One version of the manner of his death is that it took place while he was engaged in devotional exercises; but Sir Walter tells a different story, and one that might have suggested to Tennyson his very beautiful and exquisitely pictured scene between Vivien and Merlin. " His wife or concubine elicited from him a secret, that his art could warn off any danger except the poisonous qualities of broth made of the flesh of a breme sow. Such a mess was accord- ingly administered to the wizard, who died in consequence of eating it; surviving, however, long enough to put to death his treacherous confidante." He was buried, some people say, at Melrose, where it suits Sir "Walter to place his grave, others assert that the wizard rests at Home Coltrame, in Cumberland. The be- lief in his magic continued long ; so late as the year 1614, when George Sempill, minister of Killelau, was tried before the Presbytery of Glasgow, for practising magic, it was brought forward as evidence against the unhappy man, and deposed to by one John Huchesoun, one of the bail- MICHAEL SCOT. 233 lies of Paisley, that he had seen George Sempill buy an Albertus Magnus, and that he had in his possession and frequently read a book of unlawful arts by Michael Scot. It may be, indeed, that this book was the cause of SempilTs prosecution. Besides the fame recently acquired by Michael in con- sequence of Sir Walter Scott's " Lay of the Last Minstrel," the wizard was again called into prominent notice by a romance by Allan Cunninghame, bearing his name, " Michael Scot ;" the romance is, however, now forgot- ten. Coleridge, as we have seen in the article on Faustus, contemplated a drama, of which Scot was to be the hero, and numberless chap-books and children's story-books have spread the name and fame of the wizard far and wide. The fame of this man, if taken for what it is worth, is worth but little. His name alone survives; of his learning, the means whereby to determine his position in letters and science, we have little left. Roger Bacon thought very meanly of him ; but Leland, Pitts, Dempster, and David Buchanan have, according to Mr. Bruce, " endowed him, as they do every other man of whom they write, with all the accomplishments in the world. ' He ascended/ says Leland, ' to the very summits of theology.' According to David Buchanan, he was particularly eminent as a physi- cian." Mr. Brace's rebuke of the writers he names applies to many biographers ; and it would seem that David Buchanan, simply because Michael was a Scotsman, not only endowed his hero with the skill of curing leprosy, gout, dropsy, and other incurable diseases, but has " heaped 234 VARIA. upon Michael the knowledge of Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, and Chaldee," while his real acquirement's were not merely little Latin and less Greek, but Latin only, with a very im- perfect acquaintance with Arabic. Equally with his con- temporaries he could know little of Greek. What he did know was " through the unfaithful medium of the Arabians." " The writers," continues Mr. Bruce, " whom he quotes in his principal work are Hippocrates, Galen, and Pamphilus, amongst the ancients, and Constantinus Afer among the moderns. There is not an allusion to a Roman classic in the whole work." Michael Scot's reputation seems to us a splendid in- stance of the omne ignotum pro magnifico. If we try to read any of his works we soon grow tired with the bold assertions, the groundless surmises, and the nonsense of them. He is great on sneezing, and tells us why a certain number of sneezes made on entering on business is lucky; and that one from any member of the family during the night is good, while two is bad. In rising in the morning one is good, but two bad,