Chapter II: Front Matter (2)

The men are a handsome race, and the greatest dandies imaginable, completely modelled on the Andalusian Majo, and displaying the finest linen, the most embroidered pantaloons, and the most glittering jackets in the western world. Of course, it cannot be expected of any Spaniards that they should do much, and beaux so fine cannot be expected to do any thing. Accordingly, his day is spent in riding from house to house, on a horse as fine as himself, a living machine of trappings, and the nights in dancing, billiard-playing, and flirting.

In all countries where serious things are habitually turned into trifles, trifles become serious things. "The balls, in fact, seem more like a matter of business than any thing else that is done in California. For whole days beforehand, sweetmeats are laboriously prepared in the greatest variety, and from beginning to end of the festivities, which have been known to last several successive nights, so as to make the performers, after wearing out their pumps, trip it in sea-boots, both men and women displaying as much gravity as if attending the funeral of their friends."

A still more humanising portion of their tastes is their passion for music. The guitar is heard in every house. Father, mother, and child are all playing and singing; and, to the praise of their taste be it spoken, playing nothing but the fandangoes, seguidillas, and ballads of Spain; the truest, purest, and most touching of all music; well worth all the _hammered_ harmonies of the German school, and all the long-winded and laborious bravuras of the Italian. The Spanish music is the most refined, and yet the most natural, in the world.

We are glad to see this experienced judge of men and things speaking of the Californians as "a happy people possessing the means of physical pleasure to the full," even though he qualifies the opinion by their "knowing no higher kind of enjoyment."

It is true, that the Englishman, who knows what _intellectual_ enjoyment is, will not abandon that highest, though most toilsome, of all gratifications, for inferior indulgences; but it would be a fortunate hour for the Englishman when he could get rid of some portion of the toil that wears away his life, in exchange for the lighthearted pleasures and simple occupations of foreign existence. Nor is there any man who less prefers the dogged round of his cheerless exertions, or who is more genuinely susceptible of essential enjoyment. We even think that the cultivated Englishman has a finer relish for enjoyment than the man of any other country. The caperings of the Frenchman, or the grimaces of the Italian, have but little connexion with the mind. All foreigners seem wretched when they have no physical excitement. There is not a more miserable object on earth, than a Frenchman wandering through the streets of London on a Sunday, when he can neither see the print shops in the day, nor go to the play at night. The German is heart-broken for the same reason, and shrouds himself and his sorrow in double clouds of smoke. The Italian would worship Diana of Ephesus, or the Great African Snake, if its pageantry, or puppet-show, would enable him to get through the day of closed shops and _no_ opera! Yet, contemptible as this restless hunting after nothings is, it would be fortunate for us if we could qualify the severity and constancy of our national toil by some mixture of the lighter pursuits of the Continent.

The fertility of California is boundless; it produces every thing that human appetite can desire. In the Mission-garden of San Gabriel were produced grapes, oranges, lemons, olives, figs, bananas, plums, peaches, apples, pears, pomegranates, raspberries, strawberries, &c. &c., while in the adjoining Mission were found in addition, tobacco, the plantain, the cocoa-nut, the indigo plant, and the sugar cane.

But Nature is nothing, in this country, without a miracle; and the history of every village probably furnishes its legend. The Missions, however, may be presumed to be the peculiar favourites of Heaven.

"When Padre Pedro Cambon, and Padre Somera, were selecting a site for the Mission, escorted by ten soldiers, a multitude of Indians, armed, presented themselves, and setting up horrid yells, seemed determined to oppose its establishment. The fathers, fearing that war would ensue, took out a piece of cloth with the image of our Lady upon it, and held it up in view of the barbarians. This was no sooner done, than the whole were quiet, being subdued by the sight of this most precious image; and throwing on the ground their bows and arrows, their two captains came running to lay the beads, which they had round their necks, at the feet of the Sovereign Queen, in proof of their tender regard." We recommend the trial of this holy Cloth on General Taylor.

But there is no limit to the richness of this region. The valley of the Zulares, in the neighbourhood, would support millions of people. Its lakes and rivers all abound in fish, its forests have all kinds of trees, some of them growing to a size which, but for the force of testimony, would be incredible. One of these is stated by Humboldt as of one hundred and eighteen feet in girth. "But this is a walking-stick compared with another at Bodega, as described to Sir George by Governor Etholine, of Sitka." It is thirty-six Russian fathoms (seven feet each) in span, and seventy-five in height; so that, if tapered into a perfect cone, it would contain nearly twenty-two thousand tons of bark and timber. In addition, the valley contains immense herds of wild horses, in troops of several thousands each. What a country will this be, when it shall fall into the hands of an intelligent people!

The last of the five posts, San Diego, is, next to San Francisco, the best harbour in the province. Thus, Upper California contains, at its opposite extremities, two of the best harbours on the Pacific Ocean; each of them being enhanced in value by the distance of any others worthy of the name, San Francisco being nearly one thousand miles from Port Discovery in the north, and San Diego six hundred miles from the Bay of Magdalena in the south.

That in the hands of any vigorous possessors this country would form a most powerful kingdom, is beyond all question; and Sir George Simpson evidently thinks that it might easily be acquired, and with a legitimate claim too, by England. But the still higher question is the policy of a perpetual increase of territory. England already has in America a larger extent of territory than she can people for five hundred years to come. But the possession of California, and perhaps of the whole extent of the Mexican provinces, is on the eve of decision; the American invasion has found no resistance that can deserve the name. The Mexicans fly in every quarter, and a few discharges of cannon put them to flight by thousands. At this moment the whole Mexican Republic, equal in size to half a dozen European States, appears to be crumbling into fragments. The rambling expeditions of the Americans are ravaging it in all directions with impunity, and armies which might have been long since annihilated by a mere guerilla war, have been suffered to march from city to city, with scarcely more resistance than a cattle-stealing skirmish. By the last intelligence, San Juan d' Ulloa has fallen, and Vera Cruz has capitulated after a siege of only three days and a half. The castle is the strongest fortification in the Western World--and, as Napoleon said of Malta, "It is lucky that it had somebody inside to open the gates for us:" the garrison of this fortress seems to have been placed there merely for the purpose of surrendering it. But, whatever may be the fate of men who had such a fortress to defend, and yet whose defence actually cost the assailants but _seventeen_ killed! there can be but one feeling of commiseration for the unhappy inhabitants of Vera Cruz, on whom was rained, day and night, a shower of shot and shell amounting to more than seven thousand of those tremendous missiles. It is computed that the slaughter, and that slaughter chiefly of women and children, amounts to thousands. These are terrible things, even where they may be supposed the _necessities_ of war. But here we can discover no necessity--Vera Cruz was _no_ fortification, it was nearly an open town. We recollect no similar instance of a bombardment. In Europe, it has long been a rule of military morals, that no open city shall ever be bombarded. We believe it to be the boast of the first living soldier in the world--and we could have no more honourable one--that he never suffered a city to be bombarded; from the obvious fact, that the chief victims were the helpless inhabitants, while the soldiery are sheltered by the casemates and bomb-proofs.

At all events, we must regard the contest as decided. The Government has exhibited nothing more than a sullen resolution; and the people little more than the apathy of their own cattle; the troops have exhibited no evidence of discipline, and the only resource of the Finance has been in the wild projects of an empty Exchequer. Whether the United States will be the more prosperous for this conquest, is a question of time alone. Whether the facility of the conquest may not make the multitude frantic for general aggression,--whether the military men of the States may not obtain a popularity and assume a power which has been hitherto confined to civil life,--whether the attractions of military career may not turn the rising generation from the pursuits of trade and tillage, to the idle, or the ferocious life of the American campaigner,--and whether the pressure of public debt, the necessity for maintaining their half-savage conquests by an army, and the passion for territorial aggrandisement, may not urge them to a colonial war with England,--are only parts of the great problem which the next five-and-twenty years will compel the American Republic to solve.

At the same time, we cannot avoid looking upon the invasion of Mexico as a portion of that extraordinary and mysterious agency which is now shaking all the great stagnant districts of the world; which has already awaked Turkey in Europe and in Asia Minor; which has brought Egypt into civilised action; which has broken down the barbarism of the Algerines, and planted the French standard in place of the furies and profligacies of African Mahometanism. Deeply deprecating the guilt of those aggressions, and condemning the crimes by which they have been sustained, we cannot but regard changes so unexpected, so powerful, and so simultaneous, as the operation of a higher power than man's, with objects altogether superior to the shortsightedness of man, and amply bearing the character of working good out of evil, which belongs to the history of Divine Providence in all the ages of the world.

There is one peculiarity in these volumes which we cannot sufficiently applaud, and that is, the thoroughly English spirit in which they are written. Without weak partiality, for the reasons are every where assigned; without narrow prejudice, for the facts are in all instances stated; and without derogating from the merits of other nations, the work is calculated to give a just conception of the value of England to the world.

On his return from the Sandwich Isles--an interesting portion of his travels, to which we have not now time to advert in detail--and preparing to start from the Russian post of New Archangel by a five months' journey through the Russian empire, he gives a glance at what he has done.

"I have," says he, "threaded my way round nearly half the globe, traversing about 220 degrees of longitude, and upwards of 100 of latitude, barely one fourth of this by the ocean. Notwithstanding all this, I have uniformly felt more at home, with the exception of my first sojourn at Sitka, than I should have felt in Calais. I have every where seen our race, under a great variety of circumstances, either actually or virtually invested with the attributes of sovereignty."

After a few words on the vigour of the English blood, as exhibited in the commerce, intelligence, and activity of the United States, he returns to the immediate possessions and prowess of England. "I have seen the English posts which stud the wilderness from the Canadian lakes to the Pacific Ocean. I have seen English adventurers with that innate power which makes every individual, whether Briton or American, a real representative of his country, monopolising the trade, and influencing the destinies of California. And lastly, I have seen the English merchants of a barbarian Archipelago, which promises, under their guidance, to become the centre of the traffic of the east and the west, of the new world and the old. In saying all this, I have seen less than half the grandeur of the English race. How insignificant in comparison are all the other nations of the earth, one nation alone excepted. Russia and Great Britain literally gird the globe where either continent has the greatest breadth, a fact which, taken in connexion with their early annals, can scarcely fail to be regarded as the work of a special Providence. After the fall of the Roman empire, a scanty and obscure people suddenly burst on the west and east, as the dominant race of the times; one swarm of the Normans making its way to England, while another was establishing its supremacy over the Sclavonians of the Borysthenes, the two being to meet in opposite directions at the end of a thousand years."

He regards the gigantic power of Russia as in an unconscious co-partnership with England in the grand cause of commerce and civilisation. He also makes the curious and true remark that, notwithstanding the astonishing successes of the Normans in Europe, they were never numerous enough to establish their language in any of the conquered countries. Their unparalleled successes, therefore, seem to express the idea that those feeble bands of warriors were strengthened every where to accomplish the purposes of Providence.

We now come to the overland journey to Siberia. On the 23d of July, they reached the port of Ochotsk, where, however, they were met by masses of floating ice. Here Sir George had the first intelligence from England, which brought to his English heart the glad tidings of the birth of a Prince of Wales. They found this settlement a collection of huts on a shingly beach. The population is about 800 souls. A more dreary scene can scarcely be conceived than the surrounding country. Not a tree, and even scarcely a green blade is to be seen within miles of the town. The climate is on a par with the soil. The summer consists of three months of damp and chilly weather, during great part of which the snow still covers the hills, and the ice chokes the harbour, and this is succeeded by nine months of dreary winter. But when men find fault with such a climate as this, the fact is, that the fault is their own. Those climates were never intended for the residence of man; they were intended for the white bear, the seal, the whale, and the fur-bearing animals. To those inhabitants, they are perfectly adapted. If the rage of conquest, or the eagerness for gain, fixes human beings in the very empire of winter, they are intruders, and must suffer for their unsuitable choice of a locale.

The principal food of the inhabitants is fish. On fish they feed themselves; their dogs--which are equivalent to their carriage horses--their cattle, and their poultry, are also chiefly fed on fish. All other provisions are ruinously dear. Flour costs twenty-eight rubles the pood,--(a ruble is worth about a franc, the pood is thirty-six English pounds.) Beef is so dear as to be regarded as a treat, and wines and groceries have to pay a land carriage of seven thousand miles.

Here, too, the people drink tea in the style in which it was introduced in more primitive days into Europe. It is of the kind known as brick tea, being made up in cakes, and is consumed in great quantities by the lower orders in Siberia, being made into a thick soup, with the addition of butter and salt.

On the 27th of the month, they began their journey across Siberia. After leaving the shore, and boating the river Ochota, to an encampment where they were to meet their horses, hired at the rate of forty-five rubles a horse, on an agreement to be conveyed to Yakutsh in eighteen days, they struck into the country, which exhibited forests of pine, their progress being about four or five miles an hour. The Yakuti appear to be very industrious; young and old, male and female, being always occupied in some useful employment. When not engaged in travelling or farming, men and boys make saddles, harness, &c.; while the women and girls keep house, dress skins, prepare clothing, and attend to the dairy. They are also remarkably kind to strangers, for milk and cream, the best things they had to give, were freely offered in every village. This was the 10th of July, yet the snow was still partially lying on the ground. From day to day they met caravans of horses; and one day they were startled by the shouts of a party at the head of them. Their next sight was a herd of cattle running wildly in all directions, and the cause was seen in a huge she-bear and her cub moving off at a round trot. On this route, the bears are both fierce and numerous. The country had now become more fertile; there was no want of flowering plants, and the forests were enlivened by the warbling of birds, which, contrasted as it was with the deathlike silence of the American woods, was peculiarly grateful to the ear. In the course of the day, the vexatious incident occurred of meeting the courier, with the letters from England, which had been looked for so anxiously on the arrival of the travellers in Siberia; but the bags of course could not be opened on the road.

The presence of the Cossack, who attended the party, was of great importance in quickening the movements of the natives; but they seemed kind and good-natured, full of civility to the strangers, and not without some degree of education. The Yakuti have a singular mode of estimating distances. In Germany, a common measure of distance is the time that it takes to smoke a pipe. In this part of Siberia, they take as their unit the time necessary for boiling a kettle of a particular sort of food. They tell you, that such and such a place is so many kettles off, or half a kettle, or, as the case may be, only part of a kettle.

At last they arrive at the Lena. This is described as one of the grandest rivers in the world. At a distance of thirteen hundred versts from the sea, (three versts are equal to two miles,) it is from five to six miles wide. Its entire length is not less than four thousand versts. The word Lena implies lazy--a name justified by the circuitous flowing of its stream. At Yakutsk, the seat of the Governor, they were received with great civility in this capital of the province, latitude sixty-two north, and longitude one hundred and thirty east. The extreme temperature of summer and winter is almost beyond belief, the thermometer having, risen in the shade to 106 deg. of Fahrenheit, and in winter having fallen to 83 deg. below zero--making a difference of 189 deg. In this district are the enormous deposits of mammoth bones. Spring after spring, the alluvial banks of the lakes and rivers crumbling under the thaw have given up their dead; and the islands opposite to the mouth of the Yana, and, as there was reason for believing, even the bed of the ocean itself, teems with those mysterious memorials of antiquity. The question is, how do those bones come there? Sir George, after giving the opinions of some of the professors of geology, conceives the most natural account of the phenomenon to be, that those animals or their bones were swept from the great Tartarian pasturages of Cobi, by the waters of the Deluge, towards the ocean. We must acknowledge that this has long been our own opinion. It must be remembered that the Scriptural account states the rising of the Deluge to have been gradual. The rain fell forty days and nights. All living things would of course make their way to the heights to escape the rising inundation of the valleys. The cattle thus grouped together in immense herds, (the buffalos in the prairies at the present day sometimes exceed five thousand in one pasturage,) thus gathered into one mass, would be finally submerged, and swept away in whatever irresistible current rushed over the spot on which they stood. The frost of the region, which penetrates the earth to the depth apparently of some hundred feet, would thenceforth preserve them from decay. The tusks form an article of considerable trade, the ivory selling from a shilling to one and ninepence a pound, according to the perfection of the tusks.

One of the travellers' especial wishes was, to have visited the town of Kiachta, the place of commerce between the Russians and the Chinese. But a note from the Governor mentioned that the Chinese had suddenly stopped all communication. But a few words may be given to a commerce so peculiar. By the treaty of Nertshinsk, a reciprocal liberty of traffic was stipulated; and accordingly caravans on the part of the Russian government, and individual traders, used to visit Pekin. But the Muscovites exhibited so much of the native habits in "drinking and roystering," that, after exhausting the patience of the Celestials during three-and-thirty years, they were wholly excluded. But a cessation of five years having taken place, the Russians in 1728 obtained a treaty, by which individuals were permitted to trade on the frontier; and Kiachta was built. But public caravans were permitted to go on to Pekin. At length, in 1762, Catherine fixed the grand emporium at Kiachta.

This town, standing on a beach of the same name, is within about half a furlong of the Chinese village of Maimatschin, (about the fiftieth parallel of latitude,) being one thousand miles from Pekin, and four thousand from Moscow. Such are the enormous distances through which the eagerness for money-making drives the children of men.

The materials of the Russian traffic are furs, woollens, cottons, linen, &c., with articles in tin, copper, iron, &c.--the whole amounting to about nineteen millions of rubles. The Chinese products are tea, silks, sugar-candy, &c.--nominally to the amount of seven millions of rubles, but probably rising to thrice the value. The chief time of the market is the winter. To the chief Russian merchants this is a species of monopoly, and a most thriving one, some of them being _millionnaires_, and living in the most sumptuous manner, the "merchant princes" of the wilderness!

We had some curiosity to know the condition of the exiles to Siberia from this intelligent eye-witness. But he gives little more than a glance to a subject on which the public mind of England is at present so much engaged. In Russia corporal punishment is much in use; but criminals are seldom put to death. They are marched off to Siberia for every kind of offence, from the highest political crime to petty larceny. The most heinous offenders are sent to the mines; those guilty of minor delinquencies are settled in villages, or on farms; and those guilty of having opinions different from those of the government--statesmen, authors, and soldiers--are generally suffered to establish themselves in little knots, where they spread refinement through the country. The consequence is, that "all grades of society are decidedly more intelligent than the corresponding grades in any other part of the empire, and perhaps more so than in most parts of Europe."

Many of the exiles are now men of large income.--"The dwelling in which we breakfasted to-day," says the traveller, "was that of a person who had been sent to Siberia _against his will_. Finding that there was but one way of bettering his condition, he worked hard, and behaved well. He had now a comfortably furnished house and a well-cultivated farm, while a stout wife, and plenty of servants, bustled about the premises. His son had just arrived from St Petersburg, to visit his exiled father, and had the pleasure of seeing him amid all the comforts of life, reaping an abundant harvest, and with _one hundred and forty persons_ in his pay!"

He adds, "In fact, for the _reforming_ of the criminal, in addition to the punishment of the crime, Siberia is undoubtedly the best _penitentiary_ in the world. When not bad enough for the mines, each exile is provided with an allotment of ground, a house, a horse, two cows, agricultural implements, and, for the first year, with provisions. For three years he pays no taxes whatever, and for the next ten, only half the full amount. To bring fear as well as hope to operate in his favour, he clearly understands, that his very first slip will send him from his home and family, to toil in the mines. Thus does the government bestow an almost paternal care on the less atrocious criminals."

Yet with this knowledge before the British Government,--for we must presume that they had not overlooked the condition of the Russian exiles; and with the still more impressive knowledge of the growth of our Australian colonies, and the improvement of the convicts; the new-fangled and most costly plan is now to be adopted of reforming our criminals by keeping them at home! Thus we are to save the national expenditure by building huge penitentiaries, which will cost millions of money, and to secure society from depredation, by annually pouring out from those prisons, as the time of their sentences expires, the whole crowd of villany to live on villany once more;--making the very streets a place of danger, and filling the country with hungry crime.

The only argument on the opposite side is, that the free settlers are offended by finding themselves in a population of convicts. But to this the obvious answer is, that the colonisation of Australia was originally intended as a school of reform--that the convicts have been to a great extent reformed, which they never would have been at home--that the convicts were in the colony first, and that the settlers going there, with their eyes open, have no reason to complain.

We then have a Notice on another subject, which is at present engrossing the speculations of all Europe, namely, the gold-country on the Yenissei. Krasnoyayk, the capital, stands in a plain in the centre of the district, where the mania of gold-washing broke out about fifteen years ago. Some individuals have been singularly lucky in their search. One person, after having laboured in vain for three years, and expending a million and a half of rubles, suddenly, in this very year, had hit upon a depot which gave him a hundred and fifty poods of gold--worth thirty-five thousand rubles each, or five millions and a half of rubles. Gold here measures every thing: a lady's charms are by weight, "a pood is a good girl, and two or three poods are twice or thrice as good as a wife." _This_ province alone has, in this year, yielded five hundred poods of gold.

Ekaterineburg is the centre of the mining district of the Uralian mountains. The population amounts to about fourteen thousand, who are all connected with the mines. The town has an iron foundery, a mint for copper and silver coin, and various establishments for cutting marble, porphyry, and polishing precious stones. The neighbouring mountains appear to be nature's richest repository of minerals, yielding, in great abundance, diamonds, amethysts, topazes, &c.; gold, silver, iron, and platina. These inexhaustible treasures chiefly belong to Count Demidoff and M. Yakovleff. The Count is said to receive half a million sterling a-year from this princely property.

Hurrying now towards England, with the anxiety which every one feels to reach home as the end of a long journey seems to be nigh, the traveller passed through Kazan, second in national honour to Moscow, but found it in ashes from a late fire. He then hurried on to Nishney-Novgorod, the place of the greatest fair in the world, where the traffic brings traders from the ends of the earth, and where the trade amounts to nineteen millions sterling a-year. He then traversed the property of General Sheremetieff, an estate of _two days' journey_, with a hundred thousand serfs--a comfortable race when under a good master, each head of a family having a farm, and paying its rent, part in produce and part in work. The people appear to be a gay race--singing every where; singing on the roads, singing at work, and singing at cutting up their cabbages for the national luxury of _saurkraut_.

At length was seen looming in the west, with all its steeples and domes, the queen of the wilderness, Moscow the Magnificent--the most frequently-burned of all cities, and, as Sir George observes, the most _retaliatory_ on the burners--it having been burned to embers _four_ times, and each time having seen the incendiary nation ruined. It must be admitted, however, that the revenge, however sure, was slow, for it seldom occurred in less than a couple of centuries!--Napoleon's fate being the only instance of promptitude on this point.

From Moscow to St Petersburg, a macadamised road of seven hundred versts conveyed the traveller to the northern city of the Czar, where, on the 8th of October, he terminated a journey from Ochotsk, of about seven thousand miles. In eight days from St Petersburg he reached Hamburg, and in five days more arrived in London, having rounded the globe in a period of nineteen months and twenty-six days!

We have given an abstract of this work with the more satisfaction, that it not merely supplies a certain knowledge of vast regions of which the European world knows little; but that it gives a favourable view of the condition, the habits, and the temper, of the multitudes of our fellow men, spread over those immense spaces of the globe. Personally, of course, a man of the official rank and individual intelligence of the writer, might expect the hospitality of the Russian employes. But he seems to have been met with general kindness--to have experienced no injury, no obstacle, and no extortion; and, on the whole, having exhibited the good sense which disregards the _inevitable_ annoyances of all journeys in distant countries, to have escaped all the severer ones which an ill-tempered traveller naturally brings upon himself. But the feature of his volumes on which we place the still higher value, is the honesty of his English spirit. He knows the value of his country; he does justice to her principles; he gives the true view of her power; he vindicates her intentions; and without depreciating the merits of foreign nations, he pays a manly tribute to the truth, by doing deserved honour to his own.

FOOTNOTES:

[A] _Narrative of an Overland Journey Round the World._ By Sir George Simpson, Governor-in-Chief of the Hudson's Bay Company's Territories in North America.

LETTERS ON THE TRUTHS CONTAINED IN POPULAR SUPERSTITIONS.

VI.--RELIGIOUS DELUSIONS: THE POSSESSED: WITCHCRAFT.

Dear Archy,--The subjects about which I propose writing to you to-day are, delusions of a religious nature;--the idea of being possessed,--the grounds of the belief in witchcraft. With so much before me, I have no room to waste. So, of the first, first.

The powerful hold which the feeling of religion takes on our nature, at once attests the truth of the sentiment, and warns us to be on our guard against fanatical excesses. No subject can safely be permitted to have exclusive possession of our thoughts, least of all the most absorbing and exciting of any.

"So--it will make us mad."

It is evident that, with the majority, Providence has designed that worldly cares should largely and wholesomely employ the mind, and prevent inordinate craving after an indulgence in spiritual stimulation; while minds of the highest order are diverted, by the active duties of philanthropy, from any perilous excess of religious contemplation.

Under the influence of constant and concentrated religious thought, not only is the reason liable to give way--which is not our theme--but, alternatively, the nervous system is apt to fall into many a form of trance, the phenomena of which are mistaken by the ignorant for Divine visitation. The weakest frame sinks into an insensibility profound as death, in which he has visions of heaven and the angels. Another lies, in half-waking trance, rapt in celestial contemplation and beatitude; others are suddenly fixed in cataleptic rigidity; others, again, are dashed upon the ground in convulsions. The impressive effect of these seizures is heightened by their supervention in the midst of religious exercises, and by the contagious and sympathetic influence through which their spread is accelerated among the more excitable temperaments and weaker members of large congregations. What chance have ignorant people witnessing such attacks, or being themselves the subjects of them, of escaping the persuasion that they mark the immediate agency of the Holy Spirit? Or, to take ordinarily informed and sober-minded people,--what would they think at seeing mixed up with this hysteric disturbance, distinct proofs of extraordinary perceptive and anticipatory powers, such as occasionally manifest themselves as parts of trance, to the rational explanation of which they might not have the key?

In the preceding letter, I have already exemplified, by the case of Henry Engelbrecht, the occurrence of visions of hell and heaven during the deepest state of trance. No doubt the poor ascetic implicitly believed his whole life the reality of the scenes to which his imagination had transported him.

In a letter from the Earl of Shrewsbury to Ambrose Mark Phillips, Esq., published in 1841, a very interesting account is given of two young women who had lain for months or years in a state of religious beatitude. Their condition, when they were exhibited, appears to have been that of half-waking in trance; or, perhaps, a shade nearer the lightest form of trance-sleep. To increase the force of the scene, they appear to have exhibited some degree of trance-perceptive power. But, without this, the mere aspect of such persons is wonderfully imposing. If the pure spirit of Christianity finds a bright comment and illustration in the Madonnas and Cherubim of Raffaelle, it seems to shine out in still more truthful vividness from the brow of a young person rapt in religious ecstasy. The hands clasped in prayer,--the upturned eyes,--the expression of humble confidence and seraphic hope, (displayed, let me suggest, on a beautiful face,) constitute a picture of which, having witnessed it, I can never forget the force. Yet I knew it was only a trance. So one knows that village churches are built by common mechanics. Yet when we look over an extensive country, and see the spire from its clump of trees rising over each hamlet, or over the distant city its minster tower,--the images find an approving harmony in our feelings, and seem to aid in establishing the genuineness and the truth of the sentiment and the faith which have reared such expressive symbols.

In the two cases mentioned in Lord Shrewsbury's pamphlet, it is, however, painful to observe that trick and artifice had been used to bend them to the service of Catholicism. The poor women bore on their hands and feet wounds, the supposed _spontaneous_ eruption of delineations of the bleeding wounds of the crucifix, and, on the forehead, the bloody marks of the crown of thorns. To convict the imposture, the blood-stains from the wounds in the feet ran _upwards_ towards the toes, to complete a _facsimile_ of the original, though the poor girls were lying on their backs. The wounds, it is to be hoped, are inflicted and kept fresh and active by means employed when the victims are in the insensibility to pain, which commonly goes with trance.

To comprehend the effects of religious excitement operating on masses, we may inspect three pictures,--the revivals of modern times--the fanatical delusions of the Cevennes--the behaviour of the Convulsionnaires at the grave of the Abbe Paris.

"I have seen," says M. Le Roi Sunderland, himself a preacher, [_Zion's Watchman_, New York, Oct. 2, 1842,] "persons often 'lose their strength,' as it is called, at camp-meetings, and other places of great religious excitement; and not pious people alone, but those also who were not professors of religion. In the spring of 1824, while performing pastoral labour in Dennis, Massachusetts, I saw more than twenty people affected in this way. Two young men, of the name of Crowell, came one day to a prayer meeting. They were quite indifferent. I conversed with them freely, but they showed no signs of penitence. From the meeting they went to their shop, (they were shoemakers,) to finish some work before going to the meeting in the evening. On seating themselves they were both struck perfectly stiff. I was immediately sent for, and found them sitting paralysed [he means cataleptic] on their benches, with their work in their hands, unable to get up, or to move at all. I have seen scores of persons affected the same way. I have seen persons lie in this state forty-eight hours. At such times they are unable to converse, and are sometimes unconscious of what is passing round them. At the same time they say they are in a happy state of mind."

These persons, it is evident, were thrown in to one of the forms of trance through their minds being powerfully worked upon; with which cause the influence of mutual sympathy with what they saw around them, and perhaps some physical agency, co-operated.

The following extract from the same journal portrays another kind of nervous seizure, allied to the former, and produced by the same cause, as it was manifested at the great revival, some forty years ago, at Kentucky and Tennessee.

"The convulsions were commonly called 'the jerks.' A writer, (M'Neman,) quoted by Mr Power, (Essay on the Influence of the Imagination over the Nervous System,) gives this account of their course and progress:--

"'At first appearance these meetings, exhibited nothing to the spectator but a scene of confusion, that could scarcely be put into language. They were generally opened with a sermon, near the close of which there would be an unusual outcry, some bursting out into loud ejaculations of prayer, &c.

"'The rolling exercise consisted in being cast down in a violent manner, doubled with the head and feet together, or stretched in a prostrate, manner, turning swiftly over like a dog. Nothing in nature could better represent the jerks, than for one to goad another alternately on every side with a piece of red-hot iron. The exercise commonly began in the head, which would fly backwards and forwards, and from side to side, with a quick jolt, which the person would naturally labour to suppress, but in vain. He must necessarily go on as he was stimulated, whether with a violent dash on the ground, and bounce from place to place, like a foot-ball; or hopping round with head, limbs, and trunk, twitching and jolting in every direction, as if they must inevitably fly asunder,' &c."

The following sketch is from _Dow's Journal_. "In the year 1805 he preached at Knoxville, Tennessee, before the governor, when some hundred and fifty persons, among whom were a number of Quakers, had the jerks."

"I have seen all denominations of religions exercised by the jerks, gentleman and lady, black and white, young and old, without exception. I passed a meeting-house, where I observed the undergrowth had been cut away for camp meetings, and from fifty to a hundred saplings were left, breast high, on purpose for the people who were jerked to hold by. I observed where they had held on, they had kicked up the earth, as a horse stamping flies."

Every one has heard of the extraordinary scenes which took place in the Cevennes at the close of the seventeenth century.

It was towards the end of the year 1688 a report was first heard, of a gift of prophecy which had shown itself among the persecuted followers of the Reformation, who, in the south of France, had betaken themselves to the mountains. The first instance was said to have occurred in the family of a glass-dealer, of the name of Du Serre, well known as the most zealous Calvinist of the neighbourhood, which was a solitary spot in Dauphine, near Mount Peyra. In the enlarging circle of enthusiasts, Gabriel Astier and Isabella Vincent made themselves first conspicuous. Isabella, a girl of sixteen years of age, from Dauphine, who was in the service of a peasant, and tended sheep, began in her sleep to preach and prophesy, and the Reformers came from far and near to hear her. An advocate, of the name of Gerlan, describes the following scene which he had witnessed. At his request she had admitted him, and a good many others, after nightfall, to a meeting at a chateau in the neighbourhood. She there disposed herself upon a bed, shut her eyes, and went to sleep; in her sleep she chanted in a low tone the Commandments and a psalm; after a short respite she began to preach in a louder voice, not in her own dialect, but in good French, which hitherto she had not used. The theme was an exhortation to obey God rather than man. Sometimes she spoke so quickly as to be hardly intelligible. At certain of her pauses, she stopped to collect herself. She accompanied her words with gesticulations. Gerlan found her pulse quiet, her arm not rigid, but relaxed, as natural. After an interval, her countenance put on a mocking expression, and she began anew her exhortation, which was now mixed with ironical reflections upon the Church of Rome. She then suddenly stopped, continuing asleep. It was in vain they stirred her. When her arms were lifted and let go, they dropped unconsciously. As several now went away, whom her silence rendered impatient, she said in a low tone, but just as if she was awake, "Why do you go away? Why do not you wait till I am ready?" And then she delivered another ironical discourse against the Catholic Church, which she closed with a prayer.

When Boucha, the intendant of the district, heard of the performances of Isabella Vincent, he had her brought before him. She replied to his interrogatories, that people had often told her that she preached in her sleep, but that she did not herself believe a word of it. As the slightness of her person made her appear younger than she really was, the intendant merely sent her to an hospital at Grenoble, where, notwithstanding that she was visited by persons of the Reformed persuasion, there was an end of her preaching,--she became a Catholic!

Gabriel Astier, who had been a young labourer, likewise from Dauphine, went in the capacity of a preacher and prophet into the valley of Bressac, in the Vivarais. He had infected his family: his father, mother, elder brother, and sweetheart, followed his example, and took to prophesying. Gabriel, before he preached, used to fall into a kind of stupor in which he lay rigid. After delivering his sermon, he would dismiss his auditors with a kiss, and the words: "My brother, or my sister, I impart to you the Holy Ghost." Many believed that they had thus received the Holy Ghost from Astier, being taken with the same seizure. During the period of the discourse, first one, then another, would fall down; some described themselves afterwards as having felt first a weakness and trembling through the whole frame, and an impulse to yawn and stretch their arms, then they fell convulsed and foaming at the mouth. Others carried the contagion home with them, and first experienced its effects, days, weeks, months afterwards. They believed--nor is it wonderful they did so--that they had received the Holy Ghost.

Not less curious were the seizures of the Convulsionnaires at the grave of the Abbe Paris, in the year 1727. These Jansenist visionaries used to collect in the church-yard of St Medard, round the grave of the deposed and deceased Deacon, and before long the reputation of the place for working miracles getting about, they fell in troops into convulsions.

Their state had more analogy to that of the Jerkers already described. But it was different. They required, to gratify an internal impulse or feeling, that the most violent blows should be inflicted upon them at the pit of the stomach. Carre de Montgeron mentions, that being himself an enthusiast in the matter, he had inflicted the blows required with an iron instrument, weighing from twenty to thirty pounds, with a round head. And as a convulsionary lady complained that he struck too lightly to relieve the feeling of depression at her stomach, he gave her sixty blows with all his force. It would not do, and she begged to have the instrument used by a tall, strong man, who stood by in the crowd. The spasmodic tension of her muscles must have been enormous; for she received one hundred blows, delivered with such force that the wall shook behind her. She thanked the man for his benevolent aid, and contemptuously censured De Montgeron for his weakness, or want of faith and timidity. It was, indeed, time for issuing the mandate, which, as wit read it, ran:

"De par le roi--Defense a Dieu,
De faire miracle en ce lieu."

Turn we now to another subject:--the possessed in the middle ages,--What was their physiological condition? What was really meant then by being possessed? I mean, what were the symptoms of the affection, and how are they properly to be explained? The inquiry will throw further light upon the true relations of other phenomena we have already looked at.

We have seen that Schwedenborg thought that he was in constant communication with the spiritual world; but felt convinced, and avowed, that though he saw his visitants without and around him, they reached him first inwardly, and communicated with his understanding; and thence consciously, and outwardly, with his senses. But it would be a misapplication of the term to say that he was possessed by these spirits.

We remember that Socrates had his demon; and it should be mentioned as a prominent feature in visions generally, that their subject soon identifies one particular imaginary being as his guide and informant, to whom he applies for what knowledge he wishes. In the most exalted states of trance-waking, the guide or demon is continually referred to with profound respect by the entranced person. Now, was Socrates, and are patients of the class I have alluded to, possessed? No! the meaning of the term is evidently not yet hit.

Then there are persons who permanently fancy themselves other beings than they are, and act as such.

In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, there prevailed in parts of Europe a seizure, which was called the wolf-sickness. Those affected with it held themselves to be wild beasts, and betook themselves to the forests. One of these, who was brought before De Lancre, at Bordeaux, in the beginning of the sixteenth century, was a young man of Besancon. He avowed himself to be huntsman of the forest lord, his invisible master. He believed, that through the power of his master, he had been transformed into a wolf; that he hunted in the forest as such, and that he was often accompanied by a bigger wolf, whom he suspected to be the master he served--with more details of the same kind. The persons thus affected were called Wehrwolves. They enjoyed in those days the alternative of being exorcised or executed.

Arnold relates in his history of church and of heresy, how there was a young man in Koenigsberg, well educated, the natural son of a priest, who had the impression, that he was met near a crucifix in the wayside by seven angels, who revealed to him that he was to represent God the Father on earth, to drive all evil out of the world, &c. The poor fellow, after pondering upon this impression a long time, issued a circular commencing thus,--

"We, John Albrecht, Adelgreif, Syrdos, Amata, Kanemata, Kilkis, Mataldis, Schmalkilimundis, Sabrundis, Elioris, Overarch High-priest, and Emperor, Prince of Peace of the whole world, Overarch King of the Holy Kingdom of Heaven, Judge of the living and of the dead, God and Father, in whose divinity Christ will come on the last day to judge the world, Lord of all Lords, King of all Kings," &c.

He was thereupon thrown into prison at Koenigsberg, regarded as a most frightful heretic, and every means were used by the clergy to reclaim him. To all their entreaties, however, he listened only with a smile of pity, "that they should think of reclaiming God the Father." He was then put to the torture; and as what he endured made no alteration in his convictions, he was condemned to have his tongue torn out with red-hot tongs, to be cut in four quarters, and then burned under the gallows. He wept bitterly, not at his own fate, but that they should pronounce such a sentence on the Deity. The executioner was touched with pity, and entreated him to make a final recantation. But he persisted that he was God the Father, whether they pulled his tongue out by the roots or not; and so he was executed!

The Wehrwolves, and this poor creature, in what state were they? they were merely insane. Then we must look further.

Gmelin, in the first volume of his Contributions to Anthropology, narrates, that in the year 1789, a German lady, under his observation, had daily paroxysms, in which she believed herself to be, and acted the part of a French emigrant. She had been in distress of mind through the absence of a person she was attached to, and he was somehow implicated in the scenes of the French revolution. After an attack of fever and delirium, the complaint regulated itself, and took the form of a daily fit of trance-waking. When the time for the fit approached, she stopped in her conversation, and ceased to answer when spoken to; she then remained a few minutes sitting perfectly still, her eyes fixed on the carpet before her. Then, in evident uneasiness, she began to move her head backwards and forwards, to sigh, and to pass her fingers across her eye-brows. This lasted a minute, then she raised her eyes, looked once or twice around with timidity and embarrassment, then began to talk in French; when she would describe all the particulars of her escape from France, and, assuming the manner of a French woman, talk purer and better accented French than she had been known to be capable of talking before, correct her friends when they spoke incorrectly, but delicately and with a comment on the German rudeness of laughing at the bad pronunciation of strangers; and if led herself to speak or read German, she used a French accent, and spoke it ill; and the like.

Now, suppose this lady, instead of thus acting, when the paroxysms supervened, had cast herself on the ground, had uttered bad language and blasphemy, and had worn a sarcastic and malignant expression of countenance,--in striking contrast with her ordinary character and behaviour, and _alternating with it_,--and you have the picture and the reality of a person "possessed."

A person, "possessed," is one affected with the form of trance-waking called double consciousness, with the addition of being deranged when in the paroxysm, and then, out of the suggestions of her own fancy, or catching at the interpretation put on her conduct by others, believing herself tenanted by the fiend.

We may quite allowably heighten the above picture by supposing that the person in her trance, in addition to being mad, might have displayed some of the perceptive powers occasionally developed in trance; and so have evinced, in addition to her demoniacal ferocity, an "uncanny" knowledge of things and persons. To be candid, Archy, time was, when I should myself have had my doubts in such a case.

We have by this time had intercourse enough with spirits and demons to prepare us for the final subject of witchcraft.