Chapter XX: Part 20

Our children pass through the same public education, while they are receiving little or none for their individual dispositions, should they have sufficient strength of character to indicate any. The great secret of education is to develope the faculties of the individual; for it may happen that his real talent may lie hidden and buried under his education. A profession is usually adventitious, made by chance views, or by family arrangements. Should a choice be submitted to the youth himself, he will often mistake slight and transient tastes for permanent dispositions. A decided character, however, we may often observe, is repugnant to a particular pursuit, delighting in another; talents, languid and vacillating in one profession, we might find vigorous and settled in another; an indifferent lawyer might become an admirable architect! At present all our human bullion is sent to be melted down in an university, to come out, as if thrown into a burning mould, a bright physician, a bright lawyer, a bright divine--in other words, to adapt themselves for a profession preconcerted by their parents. By this means we may secure a titular profession for our son, but the true genius of the avocation in the _bent of the mind_, as a man of great original powers called it, is too often absent! Instead of finding fit offices for fit men, we are perpetually discovering, on the stage of society, actors out of character! Our most popular writer has happily described this error.

"A laughing philosopher, the Democritus of our day, once compared human life to a table pierced with a number of holes, each of which has a pin made exactly to fit it, but which pins being stuck in hastily, and without selection, chance leads inevitably to the most awkward mistakes. For how often do we see," the orator pathetically concluded,--"how often, I say, do we see the round man stuck into the three-cornered hole!"

In looking over a manuscript life of Tobie Matthews, Archbishop of York in James the First's reign, I found a curious anecdote of his grace's disappointment in the dispositions of his sons. The cause, indeed, is not uncommon, as was confirmed by another great man, to whom the archbishop confessed it. The old Lord Thomas Fairfax one day finding the archbishop very melancholy, inquired the reason of his grace's pensiveness: "My lord," said the archbishop, "I have great reason of sorrow with respect of my sons; one of whom has wit and no grace, another grace but no wit, and the third neither grace nor wit." "Your case," replied Lord Fairfax, "is not singular. I am also sadly disappointed in my sons: one I sent into the Netherlands to train him up a soldier, and he makes a tolerable country justice, but a mere coward at fighting; my next I sent to Cambridge, and he proves a good lawyer, but a mere dunce at divinity; and my youngest I sent to the inns of court, and he is good at divinity, but nobody at the law." The relater of this anecdote adds, "This I have often heard from the descendant of that honourable family, who yet seems to mince the matter, because so immediately related." The eldest son was the Lord Ferdinando Fairfax--and the gunsmith to Thomas Lord Fairfax, the son of this Lord Ferdinando, heard the old Lord Thomas call aloud to his grandson, "Tom! Tom! mind thou the battle! Thy father's a good man, but a mere coward! All the good I expect is from thee!" It is evident that the old Lord Thomas Fairfax was a military character, and in his earnest desire of continuing a line of heroes, had preconcerted to make his eldest son a military man, who we discover turned out to be admirably fitted for a worshipful justice of the quorum. This is a lesson for the parent who consults his own inclinations and not those of natural disposition. In the present case the same lord, though disappointed, appears still to have persisted in the same wish of having a great military character in his family: having missed one in his elder son, and settled his other sons in different avocations, the grandfather persevered, and fixed his hopes, and bestowed his encouragements, on his grandson, Sir Thomas Fairfax, who makes so distinguished a figure in the civil wars.

The difficulty of discerning the aptitude of a youth for any particular destination in life will, perhaps, even for the most skilful parent, be always hazardous. Many will be inclined, in despair of anything better, to throw dice with fortune; or adopt the determination of the father who settled his sons by a whimsical analogy which he appears to have formed of their dispositions or aptness for different pursuits. The boys were standing under a hedge in the rain, and a neighbour reported to the father the conversation he had overheard. John wished it would rain books, for he wished to be a preacher; Bezaleel, wool, to be a clothier like his father; Samuel, money, to be a merchant; and Edmund plums, to be a grocer. The father took these wishes as a hint, and we are told in the life of John Angier, the elder son, a puritan minister, that he chose for them these different callings, in which it appears that they settled successfully. "Whatever a young man at first applies himself to is commonly his delight afterwards." This is an important principle discovered by Hartley, but it will not supply the parent with any determinate regulation how to distinguish a transient from a permanent disposition; or how to get at what we may call the connatural qualities of the mind. A particular opportunity afforded me some close observation on the characters and habits of two youths, brothers in blood and affection, and partners in all things, who even to their very dress shared alike; who were never separated from each other; who were taught by the same masters, lived under the same roof, and were accustomed to the same uninterrupted habits; yet had nature created them totally distinct in the qualities of their minds; and similar as their lives had been, their abilities were adapted for very opposite pursuits; either of them could not have been the other. And I observed how the "predisposition" of the parties was distinctly marked from childhood: the one slow, penetrating, and correct; the other quick, irritable, and fanciful: the one persevering in examination; the other rapid in results: the one exhausted by labour; the other impatient of whatever did not relate to his own pursuit: the one logical, historical, and critical; the other, having acquired nothing, decided on all things by his own sensations. We would confidently consult in the one a great legal character, and in the other an artist of genius. If nature had not secretly placed a bias in their distinct minds, how could two similar beings have been so dissimilar?

A story recorded of Cecco d'Ascoli and of Dante, on the subject of natural and acquired genius, may illustrate the present topic. Cecco maintained that nature was more potent than art, while Dante asserted the contrary. To prove his principle, the great Italian bard referred to his cat, which, by repeated practice, he had taught to hold a candle in its paw while he supped or read. Cecco desired to witness the experiment, and came not unprepared for his purpose; when Dante's cat was performing its part, Cecco, lifting up the lid of a pot which he had filled with mice, the creature of art instantly showed the weakness of a talent merely acquired, and dropping the candle, flew on the mice with all its instinctive propensity. Dante was himself disconcerted; and it was adjudged that the advocate for the occult principle of native faculties had gained his cause.

To tell stories, however, is not to lay down principles, yet principles may sometimes be concealed in stories.[298]

MEDICINE AND MORALS.

A stroke of personal ridicule is levelled at Dryden, when Bayes informs us of his preparations for a course of study by a course of medicine! "When I have a grand design," says he, "I ever take physic and let blood; for when you would have pure swiftness of thought, and fiery flights of fancy, you must have a care of the pensive part; in fine, you must purge the belly!" Such was really the practice of the poet, as Le Motte, who was a physician, informs us, and in his medical character did not perceive that ridicule in the subject which the wits and most readers unquestionably have enjoyed. The wits here were as cruel against truth as against Dryden; for we must still consider this practice, to use their own words, as "an excellent recipe for writing." Among other philosophers, one of the most famous disputants of antiquity, Carneades, was accustomed to take copious doses of white hellebore, a great aperient, as a preparation to refute the dogmas of the stoics. "The thing that gives me the highest spirits (it seems absurd, but true) is a dose of salts; but one can't take them like champagne," said Lord Byron. Dryden's practice was neither whimsical nor peculiar to the poet; he was of a full habit, and, no doubt, had often found by experience the beneficial effects without being aware of the cause, which is nothing less than the reciprocal influence of mind and body.

This simple fact is, indeed, connected with one of the most important inquiries in the history of man--the laws which regulate the invisible union of the soul with the body: in a word, the inscrutable mystery of our being!--a secret, but an undoubted intercourse, which probably must ever elude our perceptions. The combination of metaphysics with physics has only been productive of the wildest fairy tales among philosophers: with one party the soul seems to pass away in its last puff of air, while man seems to perish in "dust to dust;" the other as successfully gets rid of our bodies altogether, by denying the existence of matter. We are not certain that mind and matter are distinct existences, since the one may be only a modification of the other; however this great mystery be imagined, we shall find with Dr. Gregory, in his lectures "on the duties and qualifications of a physician," that it forms an equally necessary inquiry in the sciences of _morals_ and of _medicine_.

Whether we consider the vulgar distinction of mind and body as an union, or as a modified existence, no philosopher denies that a reciprocal action takes place between our moral and physical condition. Of these sympathies, like many other mysteries of nature, the cause remains occult, while the effects are obvious. This close, yet inscrutable association, this concealed correspondence of parts seemingly unconnected, in a word, this reciprocal influence of the mind and the body, has long fixed the attention of medical and metaphysical inquirers; the one having the care of our exterior organization, the other that of the interior. Can we conceive the mysterious inhabitant as forming a part of its own habitation? The tenant and the house are so inseparable, that in striking at any part of the dwelling, you inevitably reach the dweller. If the mind be disordered, we may often look for its seat in some corporeal derangement. Often are our thoughts disturbed by a strange irritability, which we do not even pretend to account for. This state of the body, called the _fidgets_, is a disorder to which the ladies are particularly liable. A physician of my acquaintance was earnestly entreated by a female patient to give a name to her unknown complaints; this he found no difficulty to do, as he is a sturdy asserter of the materiality of our nature; he declared that her disorder was atmospherical. It was the disorder of her frame under damp weather, which was reacting on her mind; and physical means, by operating on her body, might be applied to restore her to her half-lost senses. Our imagination is higher when our stomach is not overloaded; in spring than in winter; in solitude than amidst company; and in an obscured light than in the blaze and heat of the noon. In all these cases the body is evidently acted on, and re-acts on the mind. Sometimes our dreams present us with images of our restlessness, till we recollect that the seat of our brain may perhaps lie in our stomach, rather than on the pineal gland of Descartes; and that the most artificial logic to make us somewhat reasonable, may be swallowed with "the blue pill." Our domestic happiness often depends on the state of our biliary and digestive organs, and the little disturbances of conjugal life may be more efficaciously cured by the physician than by the moralist; for a sermon misapplied will never act so directly as a sharp medicine. The learned Gaubius, an eminent professor of medicine at Leyden, who called himself "professor of the passions," gives the case of a lady of too inflammable a constitution, whom her husband, unknown to herself, had gradually reduced to a model of decorum, by phlebotomy. Her complexion, indeed, lost the roses, which some, perhaps, had too wantonly admired for the repose of her conjugal physician.

The art of curing moral disorders by corporeal means has not yet been brought into general practice, although it is probable that some quiet sages of medicine have made use of it on some occasions. The Leyden professor we have just alluded to, delivered at the university a discourse "on the management and cure of the disorders of the mind by application to the body." Descartes conjectured, that as the mind seems so dependent on the disposition of the bodily organs, if any means can be found to render men wiser and more ingenious than they have been hitherto, such a method might be sought from the assistance of _medicine_. The sciences of Morals and of Medicine will therefore be found to have a more intimate connexion than has been suspected. Plato thought that a man must have natural dispositions towards virtue to become virtuous; that it cannot be educated--you cannot make a bad man a good man; which he ascribes to the evil dispositions of the _body_, as well as to a bad education.

There are, unquestionably, constitutional moral disorders; some good-tempered but passionate persons have acknowledged, that they cannot avoid those temporary fits to which they are liable, and which, they say, they always suffered "from a child." If they arise from too great a fulness of blood, is it not cruel to upbraid rather than to cure them, which might easily be done by taking away their redundant humours, and thus quieting the most passionate man alive? A moral patient, who allows his brain to be disordered by the fumes of liquor, instead of being suffered to be a ridiculous being, might have opiates prescribed; for in laying him asleep as soon as possible, you remove the cause of his sudden madness. There are crimes for which men are hanged, but of which they might easily have been cured by physical means. Persons out of their senses with love, by throwing themselves into a river, and being dragged out nearly lifeless, have recovered their senses, and lost their bewildering passion. Submersion is discovered to be a cure for some mental disorders, by altering the state of the body, as Van Helmont notices, "was happily practised in England." With the circumstance to which this sage of chemistry alludes, I am unacquainted; but this extraordinary practice was certainly known to the Italians; for in one of the tales of the Poggio we find a mad doctor of Milan, who was celebrated for curing lunatics and demoniacs in a certain time. His practice consisted in placing them in a great high-walled court-yard, in the midst of which there was a deep well full of water, cold as ice. When a demoniac was brought to this physician, he had the patient bound to a pillar in the well, till the water ascended to the knees, or higher, and even to the neck, as he deemed their malady required. In their bodily pain they appear to have forgot their melancholy; thus by the terrors of the repetition of cold water, a man appears to have been frightened into his senses! A physician has informed me of a remarkable case; a lady with a disordered mind, resolved on death, and swallowed much more than half a pint of laudanum; she closed her curtains in the evening, took a farewell of her attendants, and flattered herself she should never awaken from her sleep. In the morning, however, notwithstanding this incredible dose, she awoke in the agonies of death. By the usual means she was enabled to get rid of the poison she had so largely taken, and not only recovered her life, but, what is more extraordinary, her perfect senses! The physician conjectures that it was the influence of her disordered mind over her body which prevented this vast quantity of laudanum from its usual action by terminating in death.[299]

Moral vices or infirmities, which originate in the state of the body, may be cured by topical applications. Precepts and ethics in such cases, if they seem to produce a momentary cure, have only moved the weeds, whose roots lie in the soil. It is only by changing the soil itself that we can eradicate these evils. The senses are five porches for the physician to enter into the mind, to keep it in repair. By altering the state of the body, we are changing that of the mind, whenever the defects of the mind depend on those of the organization. The mind, or soul, however distinct its being from the body, is disturbed or excited, independent of its volition, by the mechanical impulses of the body. A man becomes stupified when the circulation of the blood is impeded in the _viscera_; he acts more from instinct than reflection; the nervous fibres are too relaxed or too tense, and he finds a difficulty in moving them; if you heighten his sensations, you awaken new ideas in this stupid being; and as we cure the stupid by increasing his sensibility, we may believe that a more vivacious fancy may be promised to those who possess one, when the mind and the body play together in one harmonious accord. Prescribe the bath, frictions, and fomentations, and though it seems a round-about way, you get at the brains by his feet. A literary man, from long sedentary habits, could not overcome his fits of melancholy, till his physician doubled his daily quantity of wine; and the learned Henry Stephens, after a severe ague, had such a disgust of books, the most beloved objects of his whole life, that the very thought of them excited terror for a considerable time. It is evident that the state of the body often indicates that of the mind. Insanity itself often results from some disorder in the human machine. "What is this MIND, of which men appear so vain?" exclaims Flechier. "If considered according to its nature it is a fire which sickness and an accident most sensibly puts out; it is a delicate temperament, which soon grows disordered; a happy conformation of organs, which wear out; a combination and a certain motion of the spirits, which exhaust themselves; it is the most lively and the most subtile part of the soul, which seems to grow old with the BODY."

It is not wonderful that some have attributed such virtues to their system of _diet_, if it has been found productive of certain effects on the human body. Cornaro perhaps imagined more than he experienced; but Apollonius Tyaneus, when he had the credit of holding an intercourse with the devil, by his presumed gift of prophecy, defended himself from the accusation by attributing his clear and prescient views of things to the light aliments he lived on, never indulging in a variety of food. "This mode of life has produced such a perspicuity in my ideas, that I see as in a glass things past and future." We may, therefore, agree with Bayes, that "for a sonnet to Amanda, and the like, stewed prunes only" might be sufficient; but for "a grand design," nothing less than a more formal and formidable dose.

Camus, a French physician, who combined literature with science, the author of "Abdeker, or the Art of Cosmetics," which he discovered in exercise and temperance, produced another fanciful work, written in 1753, "La Médecine de l'Esprit." His conjectural cases are at least as numerous as his more positive facts; for he is not wanting in imagination. He assures us, that having reflected on the physical causes, which, by differently modifying the body, varied also the dispositions of the mind, he was convinced that by employing these different causes, or by imitating their powers by art, we might, by means purely mechanical, affect the human mind, and correct the infirmities of the understanding and the will. He considered this principle only as the aurora of a brighter day. The great difficulty to overcome was to find out a method to root out the defects, or the diseases of the soul, in the same manner as physicians cure a fluxion from the lungs, a dysentery, a dropsy, and all other infirmities, which seem only to attack the body. This indeed, he says, is enlarging the domain of medicine, by showing how the functions of intellect and the springs of volition are mechanical. The movements and passions of the soul, formerly restricted to abstract reasonings, are by this system reduced to simple ideas. Insisting that material causes force the soul and body to act together, the defects of the intellectual operations depend on those of the organisation, which may be altered or destroyed by physical causes; and he properly adds, that we are to consider that the soul is material, while existing in matter, because it is operated on by matter. Such is the theory of "La Médecine de l'Esprit," which, though physicians will never quote, may perhaps contain some facts worth their attention.

Camus's two little volumes seem to have been preceded by a medical discourse delivered in the academy of Dijon in 1748, where the moralist compares the infirmities and vices of the mind to parallel diseases of the body. We may safely consider some infirmities and passions of the mind as diseases, and could they be treated as we do the bodily ones, to which they bear an affinity, this would be the great triumph of "morals and medicine." The passion of avarice resembles the thirst of dropsical patients; that of envy is a slow wasting fever; love is often frenzy, and capricious and sudden restlessness, epileptic fits. There are moral disorders which at times spread like epidemical maladies through towns, and countries, and even nations. There are hereditary vices and infirmities transmitted from the parent's mind, as there are unquestionably such diseases of the body: the son of a father of a hot and irritable temperament inherits the same quickness and warmth; a daughter is often the counterpart of her mother. Morality, could it be treated medicinally, would require its prescriptions, as all diseases have their specific remedies; the great secret is perhaps discovered by Camus--that of _operating on the mind by means of the body_.

A recent writer seems to have been struck by these curious analogies. Mr. Haslam, in his work on "Sound Mind," says p. 90, "There seems to be a considerable similarity between the morbid state of the instruments of voluntary motion (that is, the _body_), and certain affections of the mental powers (that is, the _mind_). Thus, _paralysis_ has its counterpart in _the defects of recollection_, where the utmost endeavour to remember is ineffectually exerted. _Tremor_ may be compared with _incapability of fixing the attention_, and this _involuntary state of muscles_ ordinarily subjected to the will, also finds a parallel where the mind loses its influence in the train of thought, and becomes subject to spontaneous intrusions; as may be exemplified in _reveries_, _dreaming_, and some species of _madness_."

Thus one philosopher discovers the analogies of the mind with the body, and another of the body with the mind. Can we now hesitate to believe that such analogies exist--and, advancing one step farther, trace in this reciprocal influence that a part of the soul is the body, as the body becomes a part of the soul? The most important truth remains undivulged, and ever will in this mental pharmacy; but none is more clear than that which led to the view of this subject, that in this mutual intercourse of body and mind the superior is often governed by the inferior; others think the mind is more wilfully outrageous than the body. Plutarch, in his essays, has a familiar illustration, which he borrows from some philosopher more ancient than himself:--"Should the body sue the mind before a court of judicature for damages, it would be found that the mind would prove to have been a ruinous tenant to its landlord." The sage of Cheronæa did not foresee the hint of Descartes and the discovery of Camus, that by medicine we may alleviate or remove the diseases of the mind; a practice which indeed has not yet been pursued by physicians, though the moralists have been often struck by the close analogies of the MIND with the BODY! A work by the learned Dom Pernetty, _La connoissance de l'homme moral par celle de l'homme physique_, we are told is more fortunate in its title than its execution; probably it is one of the many attempts to develope this imperfect and obscured truth, which hereafter may become more obvious, and be universally comprehended.

PSALM-SINGING.

The history of Psalm-singing is a portion of the history of the Reformation,--of that great religious revolution which separated for ever, into two unequal divisions, the establishment of Christianity. It has not, perhaps, been remarked that psalm-singing, or metrical psalms, degenerated into those scandalous compositions which, under the abused title of _hymns_, are now used by some sects.[300] These are evidently the last disorders of that system of psalm-singing which made some religious persons early oppose its practice. Even Sternhold and Hopkins, our first psalm-inditers, says honest Fuller, "found their work afterwards met with some frowns in the faces of great clergymen." To this day these opinions are not adjusted. Archbishop Secker observes, that though the first Christians (from this passage in James v. 13, "Is any merry? let him sing psalms!") made singing a constant part of their worship, and the whole congregation joined in it; yet afterwards the singers by profession, who had been _prudently appointed to lead and direct them_, by degrees USURPED the whole performance. But at the Reformation _the people were restored to their_ RIGHTS! This revolutionary style is singular: one might infer by the expression of _the people being restored to their rights_, that a mixed assembly roaring out confused tunes, nasal, guttural, and sibilant, was a more orderly government of psalmody than when the executive power was consigned to the voices of those whom the archbishop had justly described as having been first _prudently appointed to lead and direct them_; and who, by their subsequent proceedings, evidently discovered, what they might have safely conjectured, that such an universal suffrage, where every man was to have a voice, must necessarily end in clatter and chaos.[301]

Thomas Warton, however, regards the metrical psalms of Sternhold as a puritanic invention, and asserts, that notwithstanding it is said in their title-page that they are "set forth and _allowed_ to be sung in all churches," they were never admitted by lawful authority. They were first introduced by the Puritans, from the Calvinists of Geneva, and afterwards continued by connivance. As a true poetical antiquary, Thomas Warton condemns any _modernisation_ of the venerable text of the old Sternhold and Hopkins, which, by changing obsolete for familiar words, destroys the texture of the original style; and many stanzas, already too naked and weak, like a plain old Gothic edifice stripped of its few signatures of antiquity, have lost that little and almost only strength and support which they derived from ancient phrases. "Such alterations, even if executed with prudence and judgment, only corrupt what they endeavour to explain; and exhibit a motley performance, belonging to no character of writing, and which contains more improprieties than those which it professes to remove." This forcible criticism is worthy of our poetical antiquary; the same feeling was experienced by Pasquier, when Marot, in his _Rifacciamento_ of the Roman de la Rose, left some of the obsolete phrases, while he got rid of others; _cette bigarrure de langage vieux et moderne_, was with him writing no language at all. The same circumstance occurred abroad, when they resolved to retouch and modernise the old French metrical version of the Psalms, which we are about to notice. It produced the same controversy and the same dissatisfaction. The church of Geneva adopted an _improved_ version, but the charm of the old one was wanting.

To trace the history of modern metrical psalmody, we must have recourse to Bayle, who, as a mere literary historian, has accidentally preserved it. The inventor was a celebrated French poet; and the invention, though perhaps in its very origin inclining towards the abuse to which it was afterwards carried, was unexpectedly adopted by the austere Calvin, and introduced into the Geneva discipline. It is indeed strange, that while he was stripping religion not merely of its pageantry, but even of its decent ceremonies, this levelling reformer should have introduced this taste for _singing_ psalms in opposition to _reading_ psalms. "On a parallel principle," says Thomas Warton, "and if any artificial aids to devotion were to be allowed, he might at least have retained the use of pictures in the church." But it was decreed that statues should be mutilated of "their fair proportions," and painted glass be dashed into pieces, while the congregation were to sing! Calvin sought for proselytes among "the rabble of a republic, who can have no relish for the more elegant externals." But to have made men sing in concert, in the streets, or at their work, and, merry or sad, on all occasions to tickle the ear with rhymes and touch the heart with emotion, was betraying no deficient knowledge of human nature.

It seems, however, that this project was adopted accidentally, and was certainly promoted by the fine natural genius of Clement Marot, the favoured bard of Francis the First, that "prince of poets and that poet of princes," as he was quaintly but expressively dignified by his contemporaries. Marot is still an inimitable and true poet, for he has written in a manner of his own with such marked felicity, that he has left his name to a style of poetry called _Marotique_. The original La Fontaine is his imitator. Marot delighted in the very forms of poetry, as well as its subjects and its manner. His life, indeed, took more shapes, and indulged in more poetical licences, than even his poetry. Licentious in morals,--often in prison, or at court, or in the army, or a fugitive, he has left in his numerous little poems many a curious record of his variegated existence. He was indeed very far from being devout, when his friend, the learned Vatable, the Hebrew professor, probably to reclaim a perpetual sinner from profane rhymes, as Marot was suspected of heresy (confession and meagre days being his abhorrence), suggested the new project of translating the Psalms into _French verse_, and no doubt assisted the bard; for they are said to be "traduitz en rithme Français selon la verité Hébraique." The famous Theodore Beza was also his friend and prompter, and afterwards his continuator. Marot published fifty-two Psalms, written in a variety of measures, with the same style he had done his ballads and rondeaux. He dedicated his work to the King of France, comparing him with the royal Hebrew, and with a French compliment!

Dieu le _donna_ aux peuples Hébraïques;
Dieu te _devoit_, ce pensé-je, aux Galliques.

He insinuates that in his version he had received assistance

---- par les divins esprits
Qui ont sous toy Hebrieu langage apris,
Nous sont jettés les Pseaumes en lumière
Clairs, et au sens de la forme première.

This royal dedication is more solemn than usual; yet Marot, who was never grave but in prison, soon recovered from this dedication to the king, for on turning the leaf we find another, "Aux Dames de France!" Warton says of Marot, that "He seems anxious to deprecate the raillery which the new tone of his versification was likely to incur, and is embarrassed to find an apology for turning saint." His embarrassments, however, terminate in a highly poetical fancy. When will the golden age be restored? exclaims this lady's psalmist,

Quand n'aurons plus de cours ni lieu
Les chansons de ce petit Dieu
A qui les peintres font des aisles?
O vous dames et demoiselles
Que Dieu fait pour estre son temple
Et faites, sous mauvais exemple
Retentir et chambres et sales,
De chansons mondaines ou salles, &c.

Knowing, continues the poet, that songs that are silent about love can never please you, here are some composed by love itself; all here is love, but more than mortal! Sing these at all times.

Et les convertir et muer
Faisant vos lèvres rémuer,
Et vos doigts sur les espinettes
Pour dire saintes chansonettes.

Marot then breaks forth with that enthusiasm, which perhaps at first conveyed to the sullen fancy of the austere Calvin the project he so successfully adopted, and whose influence we are still witnessing.

O bien heureux qui voir pourra
Fleurir le temps, que l'on orra
Le laboureur à sa charrue
Le charretier parmy la rue,
Et l'artisan en sa boutique
Avecques un PSEAUME ou cantique,
En son labeur se soulager;
Heureux qui orra le berger
Et la bergère en bois estans
Faire que rochers et estangs
Après eux chantent la hauteur
Du saint nom de leurs Createur.
Commencez, dames, commencez
Le siecle doré! avancez!
En chantant d'un cueur debonnaire,
Dedans ce saint cancionnaire.

Thrice happy they, who shall behold,
And listen in that age of gold!
As by the plough the labourer strays,
And carman mid the public ways,
And tradesman in his shop shall swell
Their voice in Psalm or Canticle,
Sing to solace toil; again,
From woods shall come a sweeter strain
Shepherd and shepherdess shall vie
In many a tender Psalmody;
And the Creator's name prolong
As rock and stream return their song!
Begin then, ladies fair! begin
The age renew'd that knows no sin!
And with light heart, that wants no wing,
Sing! from this holy song-book, sing![302]

This "holy song-book" for the harpsichord or the voice, was a gay novelty, and no book was ever more eagerly received by all classes than Marot's "Psalms." In the fervour of that day, they sold faster than the printers could take them off their presses; but as they were understood to be _songs_, and yet were not accompanied by music, every one set them to favourite tunes, commonly those of popular ballads. Each of the royal family, and every nobleman, chose a psalm or a song which expressed his own personal feelings, adapted to his own tune. The Dauphin, afterwards Henry the Second, a great hunter, when he went to the chase, was singing _Ainsi qu'on vit le cerf bruyre_. "Like as the hart desireth the water-brooks." There is a curious portrait of the mistress of Henry, the famous Diane de Poictiers, recently published, on which is inscribed this _verse of the Psalm_. On a portrait which exhibits Diane in an attitude rather unsuitable to so solemn an application, no reason could be found to account for this discordance; perhaps the painter, or the lady herself, chose to adopt the favourite psalm of her royal lover, proudly to designate the object of her love, besides its double allusion to her name. Diane, however, in the first stage of their mutual attachment, took _Du fond de ma pensée_, or, "From the depth of my heart." The queen's favourite was

_Ne veuilles pas, o sire,
Me reprendre en ton ire;_

that is, "Rebuke me not in thy indignation," which she sung to a fashionable jig. Antony, king of Navarre, sung _Revenge moy prens la querelle_, or "Stand up, O Lord, to revenge my quarrel," to the air of a dance of Poitou. We may conceive the ardour with which this novelty was received, for Francis sent to Charles the Fifth Marot's collection, who both by promises and presents encouraged the French bard to proceed with his version, and entreating Marot to send him as soon as possible _Confitemini Domino quoniam bonus_, because it was his favourite psalm. And the Spanish as well as French composers hastened to set the Psalms of Marot to music. The fashion lasted, for Henry the Second set one to an air of his own composing. Catharine de' Medici had her psalm, and it seems that every one at court adopted some particular psalm for themselves, which they often played on lutes and guitars, &c. Singing psalms in verse was then one of the chief ingredients in the happiness of social life.

The universal reception of Marot's Psalms induced Theodore Beza to conclude the collection, and ten thousand copies were immediately dispersed. But these had the advantage of being set to music, for we are told they were "admirably fitted to the violin and other musical instruments." And who was the man who had thus adroitly taken hold of the public feeling to give it this strong direction? It was the solitary Thaumaturgus, the ascetic Calvin, who from the depths of his closet at Geneva had engaged the finest musical composers, who were, no doubt, warmed by the zeal of propagating his faith to form these simple and beautiful airs to assist the psalm-singers. At first this was not discovered, and Catholics as well as Huguenots were solacing themselves on all occasions with this new music. But when Calvin appointed these psalms, as set to music, to be sung at his meetings, and Marot's formed an appendix to the Catechism of Geneva, this put an end to all psalm-singing for the poor Catholics! Marot himself was forced to fly to Geneva from the fulminations of the Sorbonne, and psalm-singing became an open declaration of what the French called "Lutheranisme," when it became with the reformed a regular part of their religious discipline. The Cardinal of Lorraine succeeded in persuading the lovely patroness of the "holy song-book," Diane de Poictiers, who at first was a psalm-singer and an heretical reader of the Bible, to discountenance this new fashion. He began by finding fault with the Psalms of David, and revived the amatory elegances of Horace: at that moment even the reading of the Bible was symptomatic of Lutheranism; Diane, who had given way to these novelties, would have a French Bible, because the queen, Catharine de' Medici, had one, and the Cardinal finding a Bible on her table, immediately crossed himself, beat his breast, and otherwise so well acted his part, that "having thrown the Bible down and condemned it, he remonstrated with the fair penitent, that it was a kind of reading not adapted for her sex, containing dangerous matters: if she was uneasy in her mind she should hear two masses instead of one, and rest contented with her Paternosters and her Primer, which were not only devotional but ornamented with a variety of elegant forms, from the most exquisite pencils of France." Such is the story drawn from a curious letter, written by a Huguenot, and a former friend of Catharine de' Medici, and by which we may infer that the reformed religion was making considerable progress in the French Court,--had the Cardinal of Lorraine not interfered by persuading the mistress, and she the king, and the king his queen, at once to give up psalm-singing and reading the Bible!

"This infectious frenzy of psalm-singing," as Warton describes it, "under the Calvinistic preachers, had rapidly propagated itself through Germany as well as France. It was admirably calculated to kindle the flame of fanaticism, and frequently served as the trumpet to rebellion. These energetic hymns of Geneva excited and supported a variety of popular insurrections in the most flourishing cities of the Low Countries, and what our poetical antiquary could never forgive, "fomented the fury which defaced many of the most beautiful and venerable churches of Flanders."

At length it reached our island at that critical moment when it had first embraced the Reformation; and here its domestic history was parallel with its foreign, except, perhaps, in the splendour of its success. Sternhold, an enthusiast for the Reformation, was much offended, says Warton, at the lascivious ballads which prevailed among the courtiers, and, with a laudable design to check these indecencies, he undertook to be our Marot--without his genius: "thinking thereby," says our cynical literary historian, Antony Wood, "that the courtiers would sing them instead of their sonnets, _but did not_, only some few excepted." They were practised by the Puritans in the reign of Elizabeth; for Shakspeare notices the Puritan of his day "singing psalms to hornpipes,"[303] and more particularly during the protectorate of Cromwell, on the same plan of accommodating them to popular tunes and jigs, which one of them said "were too good for the devil." Psalms were now sang at Lord Mayors' dinners and city feasts; soldiers sung them on their march and at parade; and few houses, which had windows fronting the streets, but had their evening psalms; for a story has come down to us, to record that the hypocritical brotherhood did not always care to sing unless they were heard![304]

ON THE RIDICULOUS TITLES ASSUMED BY ITALIAN ACADEMIES.

The Italians are a fanciful people, who have often mixed a grain or two of pleasantry and even of folly with their wisdom. This fanciful character betrays itself in their architecture, in their poetry, in their extemporary comedy, and their _Improvisatori_; but an instance not yet accounted for of this national levity, appears in those denominations of exquisite absurdity given by themselves to their Academies! I have in vain inquired for any assignable reason why the most ingenious men, and grave and illustrious personages, cardinals, and princes, as well as poets, scholars, and artists, in every literary city, should voluntarily choose to burlesque themselves and their serious occupations, by affecting mysterious or ludicrous titles, as if it were carnival-time, and they had to support masquerade characters, and accepting such titles as we find in the cant style of our own vulgar clubs, the Society of "Odd Fellows," and of "Eccentrics!" A principle so whimsical but systematic must surely have originated in some circumstance not hitherto detected.

A literary friend, recently in an Italian city exhausted by the _sirocco_, entered a house whose open door and circular seats appeared to offer to passengers a refreshing _sorbetto_; he discovered, however, that he had got into "the Academy of the Cameleons," where they met to delight their brothers, and any "spirito gentil" they could nail to a recitation. An invitation to join the academicians alarmed him, for with some impatient prejudice against these little creatures, vocal with _prose e rime_, and usually with odes and sonnets begged for, or purloined for the occasion, he waived all further curiosity and courtesy, and has returned home without any information how these "Cameleons" looked, when changing their colours in an "_accademia_."

Such literary institutions, prevalent in Italy, are the spurious remains of those numerous academies which simultaneously started up in that country about the sixteenth century. They assumed the most ridiculous denominations, and a great number is registered by Quadrio and Tiraboschi. Whatever was their design, one cannot fairly reproach them, as Mencken, in his "Charlatanaria Eruditorum," seems to have thought, for pompous quackery; neither can we attribute to their modesty their choice of senseless titles, for to have degraded their own exalted pursuits was but folly! Literary history affords no parallel to this national absurdity of the refined Italians. Who could have suspected that the most eminent scholars, and men of genius, were associates of the _Oziosi_, the _Fantastici_, the _Insensati_? Why should Genoa boast of her "Sleepy," Yiterbo of her "Obstinates," Sienna of her "Insipids," her "Blockheads," and her "Thunderstruck;" and Naples of her "Furiosi:" while Macerata exults in her "Madmen chained?" Both Quadrio and Tiraboschi cannot deny that these fantastical titles have occasioned these Italian academies to appear very ridiculous to the _oltramontani_; but these valuable historians are no philosophical thinkers. They apologise for this bad taste, by describing the ardour which was kindled throughout Italy at the restoration of letters and the fine arts, so that every one, and even every man of genius, were eager to enrol their names in these academies, and prided themselves in bearing their emblems, that is, the distinctive arms each academy had chosen. But why did they mystify themselves?

Folly, once become national, is a vigorous plant, which sheds abundant seed. The consequence of having adopted ridiculous titles for these academies suggested to them many other characteristic fopperies. At Florence every brother of the "Umidi" assumed the name of something aquatic, or any quality pertaining to humidity. One was called "the Frozen," another "the Damp;" one was "the Pike," another "the Swan:" and Grazzini, the celebrated novelist, is known better by the cognomen of _La Lasca_, "the Roach," by which he whimsically designates himself among the "Humids." I find among the _Insensati_, one man of learning taking the name of STORDIDO _Insensato_, another TENEBROSO _Insensato_. The famous Florentine academy of _La Crusca_, amidst their grave labours to sift and purify their language, threw themselves headlong into this vortex of folly. Their title, the academy of "Bran," was a conceit to indicate their art of sifting; but it required an Italian prodigality of conceit to have induced these grave scholars to exhibit themselves in the burlesque scenery of a pantomimical academy, for their furniture consists of a mill and a bakehouse; a pulpit for the orator is a hopper, while the learned director sits on a mill-stone; the other seats have the forms of a miller's dossers, or great panniers, and the backs consist of the long shovels used in ovens. The table is a baker's kneading-trough, and the academician who reads has half his body thrust out of a great bolting sack, with I know not what else for their inkstands and portfolios. But the most celebrated of these academies is that "degli Arcadi," at Rome, who are still carrying on their pretensions much higher. Whoever aspires to be aggregated to these Arcadian shepherds receives a personal name and a title, but not the deeds, of a farm, picked out of a map of the ancient Arcadia or its environs; for Arcadia itself soon became too small a possession for these partitioners of moon-shine. Their laws, modelled by the twelve tables of the ancient Romans; their language in the venerable majesty of their renowned ancestors; and this erudite democracy dating by the Grecian Olympiads, which Crescembini, their first _custode_, or guardian, most painfully adjusted to the vulgar era, were designed that the sacred erudition of antiquity might for ever be present among these shepherds.[305] Goldoni, in his Memoirs, has given an amusing account of these honours. He says "He was presented with two diplomas; the one was my charter of aggregation to the _Arcadi_ of Rome, under the name of _Polisseno_, the other gave me the investiture of the _Phlegræan_ fields. I was on this saluted by the whole assembly in chorus, under the name of _Polisseno Phlegræio,_ and embraced by them as a fellow-shepherd and brother. The _Arcadians_ are very rich, as you may perceive, my dear reader: we possess estates in Greece; we water them with our labours for the sake of reaping laurels, and the Turks sow them with grain, and plant them with vines, and laugh at both our titles and our songs." When Fontenelle became an Arcadian, they baptized the new _Pastor_ by their graceful diminutive--_Fontanella_--allusive to the charm, of his style; and further they magnificently presented him with the entire Isle of Delos! The late Joseph Walker, an enthusiast for Italian literature, dedicated his "Memoir on Italian Tragedy" to the Countess Spencer; not inscribing it with his Christian but his heathen name, and the title of his Arcadian estate, _Eubante Tirinzio_! Plain Joseph Walker, in his masquerade dress, with his Arcadian signet of Pan's reeds dangling in his title-page, was performing a character to which, however well adapted, not being understood, he got stared at for his affectation! We have lately heard of some licentious revellings of these Arcadians, in receiving a man of genius from our own country, who, himself composing Italian _Rime_, had "conceit" enough to become a shepherd![306] Yet let us inquire before we criticise.

Even this ridiculous society of the Arcadians became a memorable literary institution; and Tiraboschi has shown how it successfully arrested the bad taste which was then prevailing throughout Italy, recalling its muses to purer sources; while the lives of many of its shepherds have furnished an interesting volume of literary history under the title of "The illustrious Arcadians." Crescembini, and its founders, had formed the most elevated conceptions of the society at its origin; but poetical vaticinators are prophets only while we read their verses--we must not look for that dry matter of fact--the event predicted!

Il vostro seme eterno
Occuperà la terra, ed i confini
D'Arcadia oltrapassando,
Di non più visti gloriosi germi
L'aureo feconderà lito del Gange
E de' Cimmeri l'infeconde arene.

Mr. Mathias has recently with warmth defended the original _Arcadia_; and the assumed character of its members, which has been condemned as betraying their affectation, he attributes to their modesty. "Before the critics of the Arcadia (the _pastori_, as they modestly styled themselves) with Crescembini for their conductor, and with the _Adorato Albano_ for their patron (Clement XI.), all that was depraved in language and in sentiment fled and disappeared."

The strange taste for giving fantastical denominations to literary institutions grew into a custom, though, probably, no one knew how. The founders were always persons of rank or learning, yet still accident or caprice created the mystifying title, and invented those appropriate emblems, which still added to the folly. The Arcadian society derived its title from a spontaneous conceit. This assembly first held its meetings, on summer evenings, in a meadow on the banks of the Tiber; for the fine climate of Italy promotes such assemblies in the open air. In the recital of an eclogue, an enthusiast, amidst all he was hearing and all he was seeing, exclaimed, "I seem at this moment to be in the Arcadia of ancient Greece, listening to the pure and simple strains of its shepherds." Enthusiasm is contagious amidst susceptible Italians, and this name, by inspiration and by acclamation, was conferred on the society! Even more recently, at Florence, the _accademia_ called the _Colombaria_, or the "Pigeon-house," proves with what levity the Italians name a literary society. The founder was the Cavallero Pazzi, a gentleman, who, like Morose, abhorring noise, chose for his study a garret in his palazzo; it was, indeed, one of the old turrets which had not yet fallen in: there he fixed his library, and there he assembled the most ingenious Florentines to discuss obscure points, and to reveal their own contributions in this secret retreat of silence and philosophy. To get to this cabinet it was necessary to climb a very steep and very narrow staircase, which occasioned some facetious wit to observe, that these literati were so many pigeons who flew every evening to their dovecot. The Cavallero Pazzi, to indulge this humour, invited them to a dinner entirely composed of their little brothers, in all the varieties of cookery; the members, after a hearty laugh, assumed the title of the _Colombaria_, invented a device consisting of the top of a turret, with several pigeons flying about it, bearing an epigraph from Dante, _Quanto veder si può_, by which they expressed their design not to apply themselves to any single object. Such facts sufficiently prove that some of the absurd or facetious denominations of these literary societies originated in accidental circumstances or in mere pleasantry; but this will not account for the origin of those mystifying titles we have noticed; for when grave men call themselves dolts or lunatics, unless they are really so, they must have some reason for laughing at themselves.