Chapter II: Part 2

‘Silence!’ shouted the father. ‘Where is David, I tell ye? Is he lost? David, lad, where ar ta?’

All listened, but there was no answer but the renewed crying of the two girls.

‘Where is the lad, then?’ thundered forth the father with a terrible oath.

The two terrified children cried, ‘Oh, down there! down there!’

‘Down where? Oh God!’ exclaimed one of the young men; ‘why it’s a precipice! Down there?’

At this dreadful intelligence the mother gave a wild shriek, and fell senseless on the ground. The young men caught her, and dragged her back from the edge of the precipice. The father in the same moment, furious at what he heard, seized the younger child that happened to be near him, and shaking it violently, swore he would fling it down after the lad.

He was angry with the poor children, as if they had caused the destruction of his boy. The young men seized him, and bade him think what he was about; but the man believing his boy had fallen down the precipice, was like a madman. He kicked at his wife as she lay on the ground, as if she were guilty of this calamity by leaving the children at home. He was furious against the poor girls, as if they had led their brother into danger. In his violent rage he was a perfect maniac, and the young men pushing him away, cried shame on him. In a while, the desperate man torn by a hurricane of passion, sate himself down on a crag, and burst into a tempest of tears, and struck his head violently with his clenched fists, and cursed himself and everybody. It was a dreadful scene.

Meantime, some of the young men had gone down below the precipice on which the children had stood, and, feeling amongst the loose stones, had found the body of poor little David. He was truly dead!

When he had heard the shout of his father, or of the young men, he had given one loud shout in answer, and saying ‘Come on! never fear now!’ sprang forward, and was over the precipice in the dark, and flew down and was dashed to pieces. His sisters heard a rush, a faint shriek, and suddenly stopping, escaped the destruction that poor David had found.

NEW LIFE AND OLD LEARNING.

There is not, in the whole of Bacon’s writings, a remark more profoundly characteristic of the man and his philosophy, than is embodied in his epigram that Antiquity is the Youth of the World. If men could only have had the courage to act upon this truth as soon as it was pointed out,—if they could but have seen, that, in their mode of reckoning antiquity, they made always the mistake of beginning the calculations from the wrong end, and that, in everything relating to the progress of knowledge, and the advancement of the species, the Present, not the Past, should be deemed of superior authority,—how many miseries society would have spared itself, and how much earlier it would have profited by the greatest of its teachers, Experience!

‘For antiquity,’ says Lord Bacon, ‘the opinion which men cherish concerning it is altogether negligent, and scarcely congruous even to the name. For the old age and grandevity of the world are to be truly counted as antiquity; which are properly to be ascribed to our times, not to the younger age of the world, such as it was with the ancients. Since that age, in respect to us indeed, is ancient and greater; but in respect to the world itself, was new and lesser. And in reality, as we look for a greater acquaintance with human affairs, and a more mature judgment, from an old than from a young man, on account of his experience, and the variety and abundance of the things which he has seen, and heard, and considered, just so it is fit also that much greater things be expected from our age (if it knew its strength, and would endeavour and apply) than from the old times; as being a more advanced age of the world, and enlarged and accumulate with numberless experiences and observations.’

Have these pregnant sentences lost their meaning in the two centuries and a half that have since rolled away? Let us take the wealthiest and most distinguished seminary of learning now existing in England, and judge.

At the commencement of the present century, when the Novum Organum had been written nearly two hundred years, the examinations at the University of Oxford, so far as they were scientific at all, and not restricted to learned languages, turned entirely on the scholastic logic which the Novum Organum had shown to be a foul obstruction to knowledge. The new and true logic, as explained by Bacon, was never mentioned in the venerable place; and the new discoveries of the laws of nature to which it had led, formed no part of the general course of study, or of the subjects of public examination. It was quite possible for an Oxford man to have brought away a distinguished degree in the sciences, without knowing the truths of universal gravitation, or of the celestial motions, or of the planetary forces, or of any one of the provisions made by nature for the stability of the system we inhabit; and the very highest Oxford degree in the non-scientific departments, did not imply, any more than it does even yet, the remotest knowledge of modern languages or literature, of modern history or philosophy, of whether it might not have been Cromwell who discovered America, or Columbus who fought at Marston Moor. For any interest that the students at Oxford University were required to take in such matters, the past three hundred years might never have existed, or have been utterly annihilated, and all their wondrous burden of experiences melted into air.

It was not till after the nineteenth century had begun, that some sense of what had been going on in the world outside crept into the cloisters at Oxford. Statutes were then passed to recognise the Newtonian improvements in philosophy, and recommending, though not necessitating, their adoption into the course for honours. Honours nevertheless continued to be taken without them; and it is notorious that the soil has been ungenial to their growth, and that they never have flourished in it. Oxford, in effect, continued up to this day no other than it was four centuries ago. Apart from the doubtful discipline of life and manners attainable within its walls, it is still no more than a huge theological school, where the lay youth of England are admitted to participate in such meagre allowance of intellectual training as the clergy think safe for themselves; where Manchester and Birmingham are ignored; where the Greek and Latin authors continue in the same esteem as when they actually contained whatever existed of learning left upon the earth, and no education could proceed without them; and from which there issue into the world yearly reinforcements of the upper classes of society, less able to cope with the wants and duties that surround them, and less acquainted with the laws and operations by which the present is to be guided into the future, than any self-taught merchant’s clerk at Liverpool, or any sharp engineer’s lad at the railway in Euston Square.

Now, what has been the answer from Oxford when reproaches of this kind have been addressed to it? What was its answer when ridiculed, forty years ago, for teaching what rational men had been laughing at for more than a century? It amounted to this—that so intimately had the original statutes of the University interwoven the Aristotelian methods with the whole course of its studies and exercises, and so sacredly were its officers bound to see to the enforcement of those statutes, that the last stronghold from which any such learning could be dislodged was the University, to which its mere forms and practices unhappily continued to be essential, even long after every vestige of reality had vanished out of them. In other words it was confessed that Oxford had been so constructed as a place of study, that the rules and statutes which should have been framed for the reception of truth, in whatever quarter it might appear, had turned out to be only available for the retention and perpetuation of error; and that Education, whose express province everywhere else was to absorb and make profit of every new acquisition, was miserably bound, on this spot only, to reject them all. Precisely the same arguments have very lately been repeated. When the great ‘whip’ of the country parsons brought up a majority against the Modern History statute twelve months ago, this was the plea on which bigotry rallied her forces; and when more recently the statute was again proposed, the same plea would have secured it the same reception, if the old flock of reverend Thwack-’ums had not meanwhile tired of the expense and trouble of being dragged in a drove from their parsonages to the Senate House, to bleat forth ignorant _non placets_.

As it was, the History statute was passed with its notable limitation against the events of the last sixty years. The Oxford scholar may now sail down the stream of modern story as long as the water is smooth, or the storm seen only in the distance; but as he nears the explosive point of 1789, of which the vast and terrible wrecks are still tumbling around us, a huge board warns him of ‘danger,’ and his frail little cock-boat of history is driven forcibly all the way back again. Such is the point of advance to which the present year of our Lord has brought the University of Oxford. Such is the provision made at the wealthiest place of education in the world, in the middle of the nineteenth century, for that true and subtle understanding of modern life and institutions on which the peaceful development of the twentieth century will mainly depend! But Oxford was founded by a Church, which, amid all ludicrous surrounding evidences of her failures and her follies, still claims to be infallible; and the worst peculiarities of the founder cleave to the foundation. The next fifty years will have to show, however, whether an institution shall be allowed to continue in the annual disposal of some half million or more of money for a purpose she so manifestly mistakes, that even the learning she prefers to every other is less taught to her scholars for the wisdom to be found in it, than for mere constructive skill in the language by which that wisdom is conveyed.

Sydney Smith has remarked it as one of the great advantages of the classical education in which we are trained in this country, that it sets before us so many examples of sublimity in action, and of sublimity in thought. ‘It is impossible for us,’ he exclaims, in one of those noble lectures on moral philosophy of which the fragments have recently been published, ‘in the first and most ardent years of life, to read the great actions of the two greatest nations in the world, so beautifully related, without catching, _ourselves_, some taste for greatness, and a love for that glory which is gained by doing greater and better things than other men. And though the state of order and discipline into which the world is brought, does not enable a man frequently to do such things, as every day produced in the fierce and eventful democraties of Greece and Rome, yet, to love that which is great, is the best security for hating that which is little; the best cure for envy; the safest antidote for revenge; the surest pledge for the abhorrence of malice; the noblest incitement to love truth and manly independence and honourable labour, to glory in spotless innocence, and build up the system of life upon the rock of integrity.’

But is the opportunity fairly afforded for this? Is not the attention which ought to be fixed upon Things, to secure any part of the gain thus eloquently set before us, for the most part distracted and occupied by Words, in the system which commonly prevails? Has not the labour to be undergone in obtaining the ready verbal skill exacted in College examinations, a direct tendency to weaken our pleasure in the history, philosophy, or poetry on which we grind and sharpen that verbal skill? We apprehend that this is really the case; and that the old learning which Oxford persists in thinking all-sufficient for the wants of our new and busy life, is taught upon a method which strips it of its noblest lessons, and withers its choicest fruit.

The question is a most serious one for those whom it most immediately concerns, and whom it should warn of the danger of too manifestly lagging behind the time. At this moment power is changing hands, as certainly as in the days of those subtle and eager men who seated the ancient learning on its throne; and who would as surely depose it now, if founding new universities amongst us, and give it but its due and proper place in the expanding circles of knowledge, as, four hundred years ago, they admitted its just predominance, and established its solitary sway. When periods of such vicissitude arrive, it is for those who have been powerful heretofore, to look to their tenures of authority. Upon nothing can they hope to rest, if not upon complete accordance with the spirit of the age, and a thorough aptitude to its necessities and wants. If the education of children is to continue imperfect and bad, as Dean Swift tells us he had found it always in his experience, in exact proportion to the wealth and grandeur of the parents, the next generation of parents will have to look to the continued security of their wealth and grandeur. The Earth is in incessant motion. The time when it was supposed to be permanently fixed in the centre of the universe has passed away for ever, and modes of study only suited to that time will have to share the fate that has befallen it.

THE RAILWAY STATION.

They judge not well, who deem that once among us
A spirit moved that now from earth has fled;
Who say that at the busy sounds which throng us,
Its shining wings for ever more have sped.

Not all the turmoil of the Age of Iron
Can scare that Spirit hence; like some sweet bird
That loud harsh voices in its cage environ,
It sings above them all, and will be heard!

Not, for the noise of axes or of hammers,
Will that sweet bird forsake her chosen nest;
Her warblings pierce through all those deafening clamours
But surer to their echoes in the breast.

And not the Past alone, with all its guerdon
Of twilight sounds and shadows, bids them rise;
But soft, above the noontide heat and burden
Of the stern present, float those melodies.

Not with the baron bold, the minstrel tender,
Not with the ringing sound of shield and lance,
Not with the Field of Gold in all its splendour,
Died out the generous flame of old Romance.

Still, on a nobler strife than tilt or tourney,
Rides forth the errant knight, with brow elate;
Still patient pilgrims take, in hope, their journey;
Still meek and cloistered spirits ‘stand and wait.’

Still hath the living, moving, world around us,
Its legends, fair with honour, bright with truth;
Still, as in tales that in our childhood bound us,
Love holds the fond traditions of its youth.

We need not linger o’er the fading traces
Of lost divinities; or seek to hold
Their serious converse ’mid Earth’s green waste-places,
Or by her lonely fountains, as of old:

For, far remote from Nature’s fair creations,
Within the busy mart, the crowded street,
With sudden, sweet, unlooked-for revelations
Of a bright presence we may chance to meet;

E’en _now_, beside a restless tide’s commotion,
I stand and hear, in broken music swell,
Above the ebb and flow of Life’s great ocean,
An under-song of greeting and farewell.

For here are meetings: moments that inherit
The hopes and wishes, that through months and years
Have held such anxious converse with the spirit,
That now its joy can only speak in tears;

And here are partings: hands that soon must sever,
Yet clasp the firmer; heart, that unto heart,
Was ne’er so closely bound before, nor ever
So near the other as when now they part;

And here Time holds his steady pace unbroken,
For all that crowds within his narrow scope;
For all the language, uttered and unspoken,
That will return when Memory comforts Hope!

One short and hurried moment, and for ever
Flies, like a dream, its sweetness and its pain;
And, for the hearts that love, the hands that sever,
Who knows what meetings are in store again?

They who are left, unto their homes returning,
With musing step, trace o’er each by-gone scene;
And they upon their journey—doth no yearning,
No backward glance, revert to what hath been?

Yes! for awhile, perchance, a tear-drop starting,
Dims the bright scenes that greet the eye and mind;
But here—as ever in life’s cup of parting—
Theirs is the bitterness who stay behind!

So in life’s sternest, last farewell, may waken
A yearning thought, a backward glance be thrown
By them who leave: but oh! how blest the token,
To those who stay behind when THEY are gone!

THE BROWN HAT.

‘My son,’ said the wisest of modern men—whose name, of course, it were malicious to mention, and foolish also, the object being to promulgate charity, not to excite rancour—‘My son, if you would go through life easily, I can give you no better rule of conduct than this: _Never wear a brown hat in Friesland_.’

Now, though this piece of counsel may sound as hieroglyphical and mysterious as the well known precept by _Mr. Malaprop_ administered to his offspring, when the latter was about to quit home, ‘Evil communication is worth two in the bush,’ it is nevertheless susceptible of the clearest and most explicit interpretation. Though the fruits of particular and personal experience, it may be applied to every man who wears a hat under the sun, the moon, the seven stars, or the Seven Dials! let alone the Seven United Provinces!

The Brown Hat whence this saying sprung, was merely a hat of common quality and uncommon comfort; soft to the head, not stiff; a screen for eyes from the sun; a thing taking no place among the traveller’s luggage—claiming no package of its own, and thus offering no wrangling-stock to those most tiresome of Jacks among all Jacks-in-office—to wit, Custom-house officers. It was a hat which the _Hatto_ of hats must have accredited as the very perfection of a quiet, middle-aged traveller’s _vade mecum_; something dull-looking, it is true, for those whose thoughts are ‘wide-awake;’ something vulgar, for any one troubled by aristocratic fancies as to his covering, and who loves not to be confounded with his butterman; but withal a hat to be defended by every man of sense, to be clung to by every creature capable of headaches; a hat one could be bumped about in during a day of sixteen hours, in carriage, cart, or third-class railway vehicle; a hat one could lie in bed in for nightcap, or sit upon for cushion; a kindly, comforting, unobtrusive hat—brown, because it was of the felt’s natural colour, pliant as a piece of silk, submissive to wind, impervious to rain. What can we say more? A castor, as the Pilgrim’s _Pollux_ put it, ‘fit to be buried in.’

Yet such was the hat, and none other, which—save your nerves be of granite, your cheeks of brass, and your patience the patience of a beaver—you are hereby solemnly warned not to wear in Friesland. In London, when you please and where you please, but not in Meppel, and not in Zwolle, and not in Sneek, and, most of all, not in the market-place at Leenwarden. As wisely might you have tried to walk down a village-street, in Lancashire, on Lifting-Monday (thirty years ago), thinking to escape from the obliging maids and jolly wives, who lurked behind their doors, bent on tossing every passing male in a kitchen chair, as have hoped for ten seconds of peace,—supposing that in Friesland (two autumns since) you took your walks abroad wearing a Brown Hat!

It will be, peradventure, imagined by those who are not strong in their geography, or who have not studied the Book of Dresses, or who entertain little curiosity concerning one of the most noticeable and original districts in Europe,—that these touchy Friesland folk themselves don or doff nothing worth an Englishman turning his head to admire; carry aloft what all the well-bred world carries,—and therefore cannot afford to let any one thrive, save under the shadow of the ‘regulation beaver,’ to which all polite Europe subscribes. Yet the case happens to be, that if there be a land in which perpetual wonderment could make the traveller wry-necked, that land is North Holland. Hong-Kong can hardly be stranger, either in its composition or its maintenance. _So Sci_ herself (in Mr. Sealy’s capital Chinese tale) did not boast a head-tire more ‘express and surprising,’ than the gentlewomen of all ages, through whose active decision and passive contempt the Brown Hat had to run the gauntlet.

Let us see if we can sketch this—though by no means catholically sure, that some stratum of use or ornament, may not have been overlooked in our specification. First, it is conceived that the hair upon the head of the Frieslander, must be cut as close as though subject to the pumpkin-shell barbarity of the pilgrim-fathers, when their scissors were intent on shearing off love-locks. Upon this closely cropped poll, comes first a knitted cap (Mrs. Loudon, perhaps, can tell whether there be an aristocratic or established stitch formula for its knitting), over that a silk scull cap. These tightly put on, the serious business of the head-gear begins. The victim is next hooped, bound, lined, circled and otherwise clasped up within gilt metal—various in its cut, provided it only fits close, ‘as some one said,’ for headaches, to throb against. The mistress of _Keetje_, the maid, is fond of having her kettle-cap made of gilt silver, sometimes—if she be of old family—of pure gold; and you will see her in the market-place, wearing, in addition to this precious piece of trepanning, a metal tiara, such as Grecian Queens wear upon the stage, stuck over with coarse jewels; nay, more, dangling at the sides of her face, a pair of inconceivable gilt pendants, at a distance looking like bunches of queer keys, or that minikin household furniture our English ladies now choose to suspend from their girdles. But this is not all. At the extreme angles of her forehead, _Keetje’s_ mistress—if a person of high fashion—must stick in two little square plots or tufts of frizzled silk, to pass for curls. This done, she may put on her cap of the finest lace, with its deep border or flap behind, fashioned like the brim of the dustman’s hat, but from the costly daintiness of its material, and the creamy whiteness of the throat it lies against, somewhat more picturesque. Finally, if _Keetje’s_ mistress be a Friesland _Miss Flamborough_ of ‘first water’—a lady who knows the world, and has a spirit superior to old-fashioned prejudices—she must have by way of crown, all to her four caps (one of precious metals), a straw bonnet, a huge, heavy, coal-scuttle, festooned with loops and streamers of gaudy ribbon, and thriftily guarded at the edge with a hem or barrier of stout and gaudy printed chintz. Thus canopied are the comely wives and widows (maidens, possibly dispensing with the bonnet), who shrieked, clapped their hands, and, with every other possible demonstration of offence, pursued the wearer of the Brown Hat in Friesland.

On the habiliments of the male moiety of society, tediousness forbids that we should expatiate; the less, as something will thus be left to be treated on a future day, when the grave question of apparel may be more solemnly entered upon. Enough for the moment, to say that it suits the singularities of this critical land: a land in which a Swimming Lion is the ensign, and of which His Majesty Topsy-Turvy might be sovereign; a land in which there is hardly a crooked horizontal line to be found, save among the sand-hills; a land in which, with all its neatness’ care, scarce a building, be it church or market-house, palace or exchange, can be prevailed upon to stand perpendicular; a land in which for air you breathe extract of juniper, turf, tobacco, and stagnant waters, mixed; a land in which people eat cheese with their tea, and where a child that plucks a nest runs great danger of being whipped as an enemy to Church and State—guilty of trying to let in the republican ocean; a land where full-grown babies set up clockwork gentlemen and _papier mâche_ swans, by way of animating their garden, and the weedy ponds in the same; a land where full-grown men undertake and complete some of the most magnificent enterprises which science can contrive for industry to carry out; a land of teeming plenty and of high prices; a land of bad digestions and beautiful complexions. No, the men of this land—the shippers of Dordrecht, the potters of Delft, the gardeners of Broet, and the dairy farmers of Harlingen, decked out for fair or frolic—must be to-day left with all their uncouth and indescribable finery, undescribable, it may be, for some future parable.

But as if in the above there had not been indicated enough of what yet new and strange for Pilgrim to observe and to tolerate, and to smile at, with English supercilious civility in this country, the very names of places, even (as a descendant of Dr. Dilworth inadequately remarked), ‘are neither Christian nor becoming.’ One might bring one’s mind to bear to be jeered at or stared at, in a land resounding with pompous and euphonious words—by the Wissihiccon, for instance, or on the Mississippi, or at Canandaigna, or among the Inscoraras, or when bound for Passamaquoddy. Even the prize-scold at Billingsgate was silenced and rendered meek by being called a _Chrononhotonthologos_.—There’s much in four syllables! But in Friesland the traveller is handed over from Workum to Higtum, and from Higtum to Midlum; thence perhaps to Boxum, and from Boxum to Hallum, Dokkum, Kollum, &c., &c., &c.; going through the whole alphabet of these ‘make-believe’ names, the very study of which on the map is enough to make properly-brought-up persons disdainful and critical! Yet, so far from feeling any proper sense of their own position; so far from the slightest shame or shrinking; so far from one single deprecatory ‘_Pray don’t make game of us! We are decent folk after all, and well to do in the world, though some of us do come from Sueek!_’—these are the people, so lost to every sense of the ridiculous at home, as to tumble, towzle, and in every other conceivable and contemptuous mode maltreat the useful, comfortable, authentic, and in every respect unobtrusively defensible Brown Hat aforesaid! Did its wearer stop before a shop-window to look wistfully at one of those stupendous jars of pickles, which with a dozen of hard eggs for each guest, form so prominent a feature of the Dutchman’s merry-making suppers; his coat-tails were sure to be pulled by some grinning child, broader than long, and in facture closely resembling Mr. Staunton’s broadly-based new chessman. Did he lean over a gate to admire some magnificent bird, the brilliant cleanlinesss of which on the green carpet, gives us a new idea of the beauty of ox or cow, a head would be picked up from the dyke-side; with a liberal emission of casual slang, and as likely as not, a stone would have been thrown—did Holland contain a single stone for a _David’s_ sling to utter. Did he adventure along the Wall of Zwolle on a glowing autumn evening, or meekly take the second best place on the _treckschuit_ which was to waft him down the canal from Groningen to Delfzel (a water-path in its way, as peculiar and contradictory of all received principles as any railroad ever carried over house-tops at the Minories, or through the great pleasure-gardens and greenhouses of a _Sir Timothy Dod_), it was always one and the same story—one and the same contempt—one and the same experience. Simple laughed with a most disconcerting and noisy sincerity; and Gentle stuffed their handkerchiefs into their mouths—held both their own sides and poked their neighbours. ‘Driving Cloud’ or other of the Ojibbeway Indians if let loose in Clare-Market, would hardly have been made to feel his conspicuousness more signally than our traveller. There was neither privacy, place, nor pity, for the Brown Hat in Friesland.

Therefore, the wisest of these in advising his son, may have meant to say to him, ‘Never throw your oddity in the teeth of other men’s oddities.’ You cannot expect immunity for your own whims, if you force them upon other people’s whims. Never expect that your ‘_ism_’ will find quarter among their ‘_isms_;’ or (to put the adage otherwise) he may have desired to recommend a reading backwards of the old maxim—worn threadbare, rather by trampling upon, than by carrying about, to wit—‘Live, and let live.’

If then you would live a quiet life in Friesland, NEVER WEAR A BROWN HAT!

ALCHEMY AND GUNPOWDER.

The day-dream of mankind has ever been the Unattainable. To sigh for what is beyond our reach is from infancy to age, a fixed condition of our nature. To it we owe all the improvement that distinguishes civilised from savage life,—to it we are indebted for all the great discoveries which, at long intervals, have rewarded thought.

Though the motives which stimulated the earliest inquiries were frequently undefined, and, if curiously examined, would be found to be sometimes questionable, it has rarely happened that the world has not benefited by them in the end. Thus Astrology, which ascribed to the stars an influence over the actions and destinies of man; Magic, which attempted to reverse the laws of nature, and Alchemy, which aimed at securing unlimited powers of self-reward; all tended to the final establishment of useful science.

Of none of the sciences whose laws are fully understood, is this description truer than of that now called Chemistry, which once was Alchemy. That ‘knowledge of the substance or composition of bodies,’ which the Arabic root of both words implies, establishes a fact in place of a chimera. Experimental philosophy has made Alchemy an impossible belief, but the faith in it was natural in an age when reason was seldom appealed to. The credulity which accepted witchcraft for a truth, was not likely to reject the theory of the transmutation of metals, nor strain at the dogma of perpetual youth and health;—the concomitants of the Philosopher’s Stone.

The Alchemists claim for their science the remotest antiquity possible, but it was not until three or four centuries after the Christian era that the doctrine of transmutation began to spread. It was amongst the Arabian physicians that it took root. Those learned men, through whom was transmitted so much that was useful in astronomy, in mathematics, and in medicine, were deeply tinctured with the belief in an universal elixir, whose properties gave the power of multiplying gold, of prolonging life indefinitely, and of making youth perpetual. The discoveries which they made of the successful application of mercury in many diseases, led them to suppose that this agent contained within itself the germ of all curative influences, and was the basis of all other metals. An Eastern imagination, ever prone to heighten the effects of nature, was not slow to ascribe a preternatural force to this medicine, but not finding it in its simple state, the practitioners of the new science had recourse to combination, in the hope, by that means, of attaining their object. To fix mercury became their first endeavour, and this fixation they described as ‘catching the flying bird of Hermes.’ Once embarked in the illusory experiment, it is easy to perceive how far the Alchemists might be led; nor need it excite any wonder that in pursuit of the ideal, they accidentally hit upon a good deal that was real. The labours, therefore, of the Arabian physicians were not thrown away, though they entangled the feet of science in mazes, from which escape was only effected, after the lapse of centuries of misdirected efforts.

From the period we have last spoken of, until the commencement of the eleventh century, the only Alchemist of note is the Arabian Geber, who, though he wrote on the perfections of metals, of the new found art of making gold, in a word, on the philosopher’s stone, has only descended to our times as the founder of that jargon, which passes under the name of ‘gibberish.’ He was, however, a great authority in the middle ages, and allusions to ‘Geber’s cooks,’ and ‘Geber’s kitchen,’ are frequent amongst those who at length saw the error of their ways after wasting their substance in the vain search for the elixir.

A longer interval might have elapsed but for the voice of Peter the Hermit, whose fanatical scheme for the recovery of the Holy Sepulchre was the cause of that gradual absorption, by the nations of the West, of the learning which had so long been buried in the East. The Crusaders, or those, rather, who visited the shores of Syria under their protection—the men whose skill in medicine and letters rendered them useful to the invading armies—acquired a knowledge of the Arabian languages, and of the sciences cultivated by Arabian philosophers, and this knowledge they disseminated through Europe. Some part of it, it is true, was derived from the Moors in Spain, but it was all conveyed in a common tongue which began now to be understood. To this era belong the names of Alfonso the Wise, King of Castile; of Isaac Beimiram, the son of Solomon the physician; of Hali Abbas, the scholar of Abimeher Moyses, the son of Sejar; of Aben Sina, better known as Avicenna, and sometimes called Abohali; of Averroes of Cordova, surnamed the Commentator; of Rasis, who is also called Almanzor and Albumasar; and of John of Damascus, whose name has been latinised into Johannes Damascenus. All these, physicians by profession, were more or less professors of alchemy; and besides these were such as Artephius, who wrote alchemical tracts about the year 1130, but who deserves rather to be remembered for the cool assertion which he makes in his ‘Wisdom of Secrets’ that, at the time he wrote he had reached the patriarchal—or fabulous—age of one thousand and twenty-five years!

The thirteenth century came, and with it came two men who stand first, as they then stood alone, in literary and scientific knowledge. One was a German, the other an Englishman; the first was Albertus Magnus, the last Roger Bacon.

Of the former, many wonderful stories are told:—such, for instance, as his having given a banquet to the King of the Romans, in the gardens of his cloister at Cologne, when he converted the intensity of winter into a season of summer, full of flowers and fruits, which disappeared when the banquet was over; and his having constructed a marvellous automaton, called ‘Androïs,’ which, like the invention of his contemporary, Roger Bacon, was said to be capable of auguring all questions, past, present, and to come.

To know more than the rest of the world in any respect, but particularly in natural philosophy, was a certain method by which to earn the name of necromancer in the middle ages, and there are few whose occult fame has stood higher than that of Roger Bacon. He was afraid, therefore, to speak plainly—indeed, it was the custom of the early philosophers to couch their knowledge in what Bacon himself calls the ‘tricks of obscurity;’ and in his celebrated ‘_Epistola de Secretis_,’ he adverts to the possibility of his being obliged to do the same thing, through ‘_the greatness of the secrets_ which he shall handle.’ With regard to the invention of his greatest secret, we shall give the words in which he speaks of the properties of gunpowder, and afterwards show in what terms he concealed his knowledge. ‘_Noyses_,’ he says, ‘_may be made in the aire like thunders_, yea, with greater horror than those that come of nature; _for a little matter fitted to the quantity of a thimble, maketh a horrible noise and wonderful lightning_. And this is done after sundry fashions, _whereby any citie or armie may be destroyed_.’ A more accurate description of the explosion of gunpowder could scarcely be given, and it is not to be supposed that Bacon simply confined himself to the theory of his art, when he knew so well the consequences arising from a practical application of it. On this head there is a legend extant, which has not, to our knowledge, been printed before, from which we may clearly see why he contented himself with the cabalistic form in which he conveyed his knowledge of what he deemed a fatal secret.

Attached to Roger Bacon’s laboratory, and a zealous assistant in the manifold occupations with which the learned Franciscan occupied himself, was a youthful student, whose name is stated to have been Hubert de Dreux. He was a Norman, and many of the attributes of that people were conspicuous in his character. He was of a quick intelligence and hasty courage, fertile in invention, and prompt in action, eloquent of discourse, and ready of hand; all excellent qualities, to which was superadded an insatiable curiosity. Docile to receive instruction, and apt to profit by it, Hubert became a great favourite with the philosopher, and to him Bacon expounded many of the secrets—or supposed secrets—of the art which he strove to bring to perfection. He instructed him also in the composition of certain medicines, which Bacon himself believed might be the means of prolonging life, though not to the indefinite extent dreamt of by those who put their whole faith in the Great Elixir.

But there never yet was an adept in any art or science who freely communicated to his pupil the full amount of his own knowledge; something for experience to gather, or for ingenuity to discover, is always kept in reserve, and the instructions of Roger Bacon stopped short at one point. He was himself engaged in the prosecution of that chemical secret which he rightly judged to be a dangerous one, and, while he experimented with the compound of sulphur, saltpetre and charcoal, he kept himself apart from his general laboratory and wrought in a separate cell, to which not even Hubert had access. To know that the Friar had a mysterious occupation, which, more than the making of gold or the universal medicine, engrossed him, was enough of itself to rouse the young man’s curiosity; but when to this was added the fact, that, from time to time, strange and mysterious noises were heard, accompanied by bright corruscations and a new and singular odour, penetrating through the chinks close to which his eyes were stealthily rivetted, Hubert’s eagerness to know all that his master concealed had no limit. He resolved to discover the secret, even though he should perish in the attempt; he feared that there was good reason for the accusation of dealing in the Black Art, which, more than all others the monks of Bacon’s own convent countenanced; but this apprehension only stimulated him the more. For some time Hubert waited without an opportunity occurring for gratifying the secret longing of his heart; at last it presented itself.

To afford medical assistance to the sick, was, perhaps, the most useful practice of conventual life, and the monks had always amongst them practitioners of the healing art, more or less skilful. Of this number, Roger Bacon was the most eminent, not only in the monastery to which he belonged, but in all Oxford.

It was about the hour of noon on a gloomy day towards the end of November, in the year 1282, while the Friar and his pupil were severally employed, the former in his secret cell, and the latter in the general laboratory, that there arrived at the gate of the Franciscan convent a messenger on horseback, the bearer of news from Abingdon that Walter de Losely, the sheriff of Berkshire, had that morning met with a serious accident by a hurt from a lance, and was then lying dangerously wounded at the hostelry of the Chequers in Abingdon, whither he had been hastily conveyed. The messenger added that the leech who had been called in was most anxious for the assistance of the skilful Friar Roger Bacon, and urgently prayed that he would lose no time in coming to the aid of the wounded knight.

Great excitement prevailed amongst the monks on the receipt of this intelligence, for Walter de Losely was not only a man of power and influence, but moreover, a great benefactor to their order. Friar Bacon was immediately sought and speedily made his appearance, the urgency of the message admitting of no delay. He hastily enjoined Hubert to continue the preparation of an amalgam which he was desirous of getting into a forward state, and taking with him his case of instruments with the bandages and salves which he thought needful, was soon mounted on an easy, ambling palfrey on his way towards Abingdon, the impatient messenger riding before him to announce his approach.

When he was gone, quiet again reigned in the convent, and Hubert de Dreux resumed his occupation. But it did not attract him long. Suddenly he raised his head from the work and his eyes were lit up with a gleam in which joy and fear seemed equally blended. For the first time, for months, he was quite alone. What if he could obtain access to his master’s cell and penetrate the mystery in which his labours had been so long enveloped! He cautiously stole to the door of the laboratory, and peeped out into a long passage, at the further extremity of which a door opened into a small court where, detached from the main edifice and screened from all observation, was a small building which the Friar had recently caused to be constructed. He looked about him timorously, fearing lest he might be observed; but there was no cause for apprehension, scarcely any inducement could have prevailed with the superstitious Franciscans to turn their steps willingly in the direction of Roger Bacon’s solitary cell.

Reassured by the silence, Hubert stole noiselessly onward, and tremblingly approached the forbidden spot. His quick eye saw at a glance that the key was not in the door, and his countenance fell. The Friar’s treasure was locked up! He might see something, however, if he could not enter the chamber. He knelt down, therefore, at the door, and peered through the keyhole. As he pressed against the door, in doing so, it yielded to his touch. In the haste with which Friar Bacon had closed the entrance, the bolt had not been shot. Hubert rose hastily to his feet, and the next moment he was in the cell, looking eagerly round upon the crucibles and alembics, which bore witness to his master’s labours. But beyond a general impression of work in hand, there was nothing to be gleaned from this survey. An open parchment volume, in which the Friar had recently been writing, next caught his attention. If the secret should be there in any known language. Hubert knew something of the Hebrew, but nothing yet of Arabic. He was reassured; the characters were familiar to him; the language Latin. He seized the volume, and read the few lines which the Friar had just traced on the last page.

They ran thus:—

‘Videas tamen utrum loquar in ænigmate vel secundum veritatem.’ And, further (which we translate): ‘He that would see these things shall have the key that openeth and no man shutteth, and when he shall shut no man is able to open again.’

‘But the secret—the secret!’ cried Hubert, impatiently, ‘let me know what “these things” are!’

He hastily turned the leaf back and read again. The passage was that one in the ‘_Epistola de Secretis_’ which spoke of the artificial thunder and lightning, and beneath it was the full and precise recipe for its composition. This at once explained the strange noises and the flashes of light which he had so anxiously noticed. Surprising and gratifying as this discovery might be, there was, Hubert thought, something beyond. Roger Bacon, he reasoned, was not one to practise an experiment like this for mere amusement. It was, he felt certain, a new form of invocation, more potent, doubtless, over the beings of another world, than any charm yet recorded. Be it as it might, he would try whether, from the materials around him, it were not in his power to produce the same result.

‘Here are all the necessary ingredients,’ he exclaimed; ‘this yellowish powder is the well known sulphur, in which I daily bathe the argent-vive; this bitter, glistening substance is the salt of the rock, the _salis petræ_; and this black calcination, the third agent—But the proportions are given, and here stands a glass cucurbit in which they should be mingled. It is of the form my master mostly uses—round, with a small neck and a narrow mouth, to be luted closely, without doubt. He has often told me that the sole regenerating power of the universe is heat; yonder furnace shall supply it, and then Hubert de Dreux is his master’s equal!’

* * * * *

The short November day was drawing to a close, when, after carefully tending the wounded sheriff, and leaving such instructions with the Abingdon leech as he judged sufficient for his patient’s well-doing, Roger Bacon again mounted his palfrey, and turned its head in the direction of Oxford. He was unwilling to be a loiterer after dark, and his beast was equally desirous to be once more comfortably housed, so that his homeward journey was accomplished even more rapidly than his morning excursion; and barely an hour had elapsed when the Friar drew the rein at the foot of the last gentle eminence, close to which lay the walls of the cloistered city. To give the animal breathing-space, he rode quietly up the ascent, and then paused for a few moments before he proceeded, his mind intent on subjects foreign to the speculations of all his daily associations.

Suddenly, as he mused on his latest discovery, and calculated to what principal object it might be devoted, a stream of fiery light shot rapidly athwart the dark, drear sky, and before he had space to think what the meteor might portend, a roar as of thunder shook the air, and simultaneous with it, a shrill, piercing scream, mingled with the fearful sound; then burst forth a volume of flame, and on the wind came floating a sulphurous vapour which, to him alone, revealed the nature of the explosion he had just witnessed.

‘Gracious God!’ he exclaimed, while the cold sweat poured like rain-drops down his forehead, ‘the fire has caught the fulminating powder! But what meant that dreadful cry? Surely nothing of human life has suffered! The boy Hubert,—but, no,—he was at work at the further extremity of the building. But this is no time for vain conjecture,—let me learn the worst at once!’

And with these words he urged his affrighted steed to its best pace, and rode rapidly into the city.

All was consternation there: the tremendous noise had roused every inhabitant, and people were hurrying to and fro, some hastening towards the place from whence the sound had proceeded, others rushing wildly from it. It was but too evident that a dreadful catastrophe, worse even than Bacon dreaded, had happened. It was with difficulty he made his way through the crowd, and came upon the ruin which still blazed fiercely, appalling the stoutest of heart. There was a tumult of voices, but above the outcries of the affrighted monks, and of the scared multitude, rose the loud voice of the Friar, calling upon them to extinguish the flames. This appeal turned all eyes towards him, and then associating him with an evil, the cause of which they were unable to comprehend, the maledictions of the monks broke forth.

‘Seize the accursed magician,’ they shouted; ‘he has made a fiery compact with the demon! Already one victim is sacrificed,—our turn will come next! See, here are the mangled limbs of his pupil, Hubert de Dreux! The fiend has claimed his reward, and borne away his soul. Seize on the wicked sorcerer, and take him to a dungeon!’

Roger Bacon sate stupified by the unexpected blow; he had no power, if he had possessed the will, to offer the slightest resistance to the fury of the enraged Franciscans, who, in the true spirit of ignorance, had ever hated him for his acquirements. With a deep sigh for the fate of the young man, whose imprudence he now saw had been the cause of this dreadful event, he yielded himself up to his enemies; they tore him from his palfrey, and with many a curse, and many a buffet, dragged him to the castle, and lodged him in one of its deepest dungeons.

The flames from the ruined cell died out of themselves; but those which the envy and dread of Bacon’s genius had kindled, were never extinguished, but with his life.

In the long years of imprisonment which followed—the doom of the stake being averted only by powerful intercession with the Pope—Bacon had leisure to meditate on the value of all he had done to enlarge the understanding and extend the knowledge of his species. ‘The prelates and friars,’ he wrote in a letter which still remains, ‘have kept me starving in close prison, nor will they suffer anyone to come to me, fearing lest my writings should come to any other than the Pope and themselves.’

He reflected that of all living men he stood well nigh alone in the consciousness that in the greatest of his inventions he had produced a discovery of incalculable value, but one for which on every account the time was not ripe.

‘I will not die,’ he said, ‘without leaving to the world the evidence that the secret was known to me whose marvellous power future ages shall acknowledge. But not yet shall it be revealed. Generations must pass away and the minds of men become better able to endure the light of science, before they can profit by my discovery. Let him who already possesses knowledge, guess the truth these words convey.’

And in place of the directions by which Hubert de Dreux had been guided, he altered the sentence as follows:—

‘Sed tamen salis petræ,
LURU MONE CAP UBRE
et sulphuris.’

The learned have found that these mystical words conceal the anagram of _Carbonum pulvere_, the third ingredient in the composition of Gunpowder.

“A GOOD PLAIN COOK.”

‘WANTED, a good plain Cook,’ is hungrily echoed from the columns of the _Times_, by half the husbands and bachelors of Great Britain. According to the true meaning of the words ‘A good plain Cook’—to judge from the unskilful manner in which domestic cookery is carried on throughout the length and breadth of the land—is a very great rarity. But the conventional and the true meaning of the expression widely differ.

‘What is commonly self-called a plain cook,’ says a writer in the _Examiner_, ‘is a cook who spoils food for low wages. She is a cook, not because she knows anything about cookery, but because she prefers the kitchen-fire to scrubbing floors, polishing grates, or making beds. A cook who can boil a potato and dress a mutton-chop is one in a thousand.’

Such very plain cooks will always exist for dyspeptic purposes, while those who are in authority over them remain ignorant of an art which, however much it may be slighted, exercises a crowning influence over health and happiness. Eat we must; and it is literally a subject of vital importance whether what we eat be properly adapted for healthful digestion or not.