Chapter II: Part 2

"Whoever would aim directly at a cure of a public evil," says Montaigne, "and would consider of it before he began, would be very willing to withdraw his hands from meddling in it. Pacuvius Calavius, according to Livy, corrected the vice of this proceeding by a notable example. His fellow-citizens were in mutiny against their magistrates; he, being a man of great authority in the city of Capua, found means one day to shut up the senators in the palace, and calling the people together in the market-place, he told them that the day was now come wherein, at full liberty, they might revenge themselves on the tyrants by whom they had been so long oppressed, and whom he had now, all alone and unarmed, at his mercy; and advised that they should call them out one by one by lot, and should particularly determine of every one, causing whatever should be decreed to be immediately executed; with this caution, that they should at the same time depute some honest man in the place of him that was condemned, to the end that there might be no vacancy in the senate. They had no sooner heard the name of one senator, but a great cry of universal dislike was raised up against him. 'I see,' said Pacuvius, 'we must get rid of him; he is a wicked fellow; let us look out a good one in his room.' Immediately there was a profound silence, every one being at a stand who to choose. But one, more impudent than the rest, having named his man, there arose yet a greater consent of voices against him, a hundred imperfections being laid to his charge, and as many just reasons being presently given why he should not stand. These contradictory humors growing hot, it fared worse with the second senator and the third, there being as much disagreement in the election of the new, as consent in the putting out of the old. In the end, growing weary of this bustle to no purpose, they began, some one way and some another, to steal out of the assembly; every one carrying back this resolution in his mind, that the oldest and best known evil was ever more supportable than one that was new and untried."

"Among all animals man is the only one who tries to pass for more than he is, and so involves himself in the condemnation of seeming less." "The negro king desired to be portrayed as white. But do not laugh at the poor African," pleads Heine, "for every man is but another negro king, and would like to appear in a color different from that with which Fate has bedaubed him."

It is even harder, when he is most barbarous and besotted in his ignorance, to disturb his complacency and self-conceit. "It was most ludicrous," says Darwin, "to watch through a glass the Indians, as often as the shot struck the water, take up stones, and, as a bold defiance, throw them toward the ship, though about a mile and a half distant! A boat was then sent with orders to fire a few musket-shots wide of them. The Fuegians hid themselves behind the trees, and for every discharge of the muskets they fired their arrows; all, however, fell short of the boat, and the officer as he pointed at them laughed. This made the Fuegians frantic with passion, and they shook their mantles in vain rage. At last, seeing the balls cut and strike the trees, they ran away, and we were left in peace and quietness."

Mungo Park, while traveling in Africa, once entered a region until that time unexplored by civilized man. His escort of Guinea negroes carried him to witness a gala-day jollification. The sable chief was sitting on a stump in the centre of a cleared half-acre, his face tattooed, trinkets dangling from his nose, ears, chin, etc., and his subjects were dancing around him. Having sold negroes, captured in war, to the slave-traders on the coast, the chief had learned to speak a little outlandish English. When the visitor approached His Majesty,--the dance suspended,--he exclaimed: "English?" "Yes," said Park, "I am an Englishman." "Way over yonder?" said the chief, pointing westward. "Yes," answered Park; "three thousand miles off." "What folks say 'bout me dar?" was the eager inquiry of his African Majesty.

The half-naked barbarians of Abyssinia claim descent from King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, and boast that all other kings are but upstarts and pretenders compared to theirs. Reminding the reader of the "most mighty emperor of Lilliput" (six inches in height), described in the famous state paper as the "delight and terror of the universe, whose dominions extend (about twelve miles in circumference) to the extremities of the globe; monarch of all monarchs, taller than the sons of men; whose feet press down to the centre, and whose head strikes against the sun; at whose nod the princes of the earth shake their knees; pleasant as the spring, comfortable as the summer, fruitful as autumn, dreadful as winter."

You remember the famous contest of an eminent wit, in Billingsgate. He was passing through the market, as the story goes, when he was rudely jostled and profanely addressed by a monstrous fish-woman. "See how I will bring her down without degrading myself," whispered he to his companion. Looking straight at the creature, he said to her, deliberately and emphatically, "You are a triangle!" which made her swear louder than ever. He then called her "a rectangle! a parallelogram!" That made her eloquent; but the great man with a big voice again broke through her volubility, screaming fiercely, "You are a miserable, wicked hypothenuse!" That dumfounded the brute. She had never heard swearing like that.

Curran used to tell of a like ludicrous encounter between himself and a fish-woman on the quay at Cork. This lady, whose tongue would have put Billingsgate to the blush, was urged one day to assail him, which she did with very little reluctance. "I thought myself a match for her," said he, "and valorously took up the gauntlet. But such a virago never skinned an eel. My whole vocabulary made not the least impression. On the contrary, she was manifestly becoming more vigorous every moment, and I had nothing for it but to beat a retreat. This, however, was to be done with dignity; so, drawing myself up disdainfully, I said, 'Madam, I scorn all further discourse with such an individual!' She did not understand the word, and thought it, no doubt, the very hyperbole of opprobrium. 'Individual, you wagabone!' she screamed, 'what do you mean by that? I'm no more an individual than your mother was?' Never was victory more complete. The whole sisterhood did homage to me, and I left the quay of Cork covered with glory."

The discomfiture of Miss Pinkerton, who attempted once to scold Becky Sharp in public, is familiar to every reader of Thackeray. Rebecca hit upon the plan of answering her in French, which quite routed the old woman.

A wise man, who lived a long life of virtue, study, travel, society, and reflection; who read the best books and conversed with the greatest and best men; the companion of philosophers and scientists; familiar with all important discoveries and experiments; after he was three-score and ten, wrote, "It is remarkable that the more there is known, the more it is perceived there is to be known. And the infinity of knowledge to be acquired runs parallel with the infinite faculty of knowing, and its development. Sometimes I feel reconciled to my extreme ignorance, by thinking, If I know nothing, the most learned know next to nothing." "Had I earlier known," said Goethe, "how many excellent things have been in existence, for hundreds and thousands of years, I should have written no line; I should have had enough else to do." Cardinal Farnese one day found Michel Angelo, when an old man, walking alone in the Coliseum, and expressed his surprise at finding him solitary amidst the ruins; to which he replied, "I go yet to school, that I may continue to learn." In his last days, he made a design of himself as a child in a go-cart, with this motto under it, "I am yet learning." Rubens complained, that just as he was beginning to understand his profession he was forced to quit it. Mozart declared on his death-bed, that he began to see what may be done in music. Buffon told a friend that, after passing fifty years at his desk, he was every day learning to write. Macaulay, the year before his death, after spending some hours over his own writings, wrote in his diary: "Alas! how short life and how long art! I feel as if I had just begun to understand how to write; and the probability is that I have very nearly done writing." Theophrastus, one hundred and seven years old, St. Jerome assures us, lamented that he was obliged to quit life at a time when he just began to be wise. Mrs. Jameson once asked Mrs. Siddons which of her great characters she preferred to play? She replied, after a moment's consideration, "Lady Macbeth is the character I have most studied." She afterward said that she had played the character during thirty years, and scarcely acted it once without carefully reading over the part, and generally the whole play, in the morning; and that she never read over the play without finding something new in it; "something," she said, "which had not struck me so much as it ought to have struck me." Dugald Stewart said of Bacon's Essays that in reading them for the twentieth time he observed something which had escaped his attention in the nineteenth. "I do not know," said Newton, "what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, while the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me." Said Bossuet, "The term of my existence will be eighty years at most, but let us allow it an hundred. What ages have rolled before I had my being! How many will flow after I am gone! And what a small space do I occupy in this grand succession of years! I am as a blank; this diminutive interval is not sufficient to distinguish me from that nothing to which I must inevitably return. I seem only to have made my appearance for the purpose of increasing the number; and I am even useless--for the play would have been just as well performed, had I remained behind the scenes." Wrote Voltaire, "I am ignorant how I was formed, and how I was born. I was perfectly ignorant, for a quarter of my life, of the reasons of all that I saw, heard, and felt, and was a mere parrot, talking by rote in imitation of other parrots. When I looked about me and within me, I conceived that something existed from all eternity. Since there are beings actually existing, I concluded that there is some being necessary and necessarily eternal. Thus the first step which I took to extricate myself from my ignorance overpassed the limits of all ages--the boundaries of time. But when I was desirous of proceeding in this infinite career, I could neither perceive a single path, nor clearly distinguish a single object; and from the flight which I took to contemplate eternity, I have fallen back into the abyss of my original ignorance." "Heads of capacity, and such as are not full with a handful, or easy measure of knowledge, think they know nothing till they know all; which being impossible, they fall," said Sir Thomas Browne, "upon the opinion of Socrates, and only know they know not anything." Hiero, tyrant of Sicily, asked old Simonides to tell him what God is. The poet answered him that it was not a question that could be immediately answered, and that he wanted a whole day to think upon it. When that term was over, Hiero asked the answer; but Simonides desired two days more to consider of it. This was not the last delay he asked; he was often called on to give an answer, and every time he desired double the time he had last demanded. The tyrant, wondering at it, desired to know the reason of it. I do so, answered Simonides, because the more I examine the matter, the more obscure it appears to me. "After reading all that has been written," says the poet Poe, "and all that can be thought, on the topics of God and the soul, the man who has a right to say that he thinks at all, will find himself face to face with the conclusion that, on these topics, the most profound thought is that which can be the least easily distinguished from the most superficial sentiment." "I am a fragment, and this is a fragment of me," says Emerson.... "I am very content with knowing, if only I could know.... To know a little, would be worth the expense of this world." "You read of but one wise man," says Congreve, "and all that he knew was--that he knew nothing." "The curiosity of knowing things has been given to man for a scourge." "If God," said Lessing, "held all truth shut in his right hand, and in his left nothing but the restless instinct for truth, though with the condition of forever and ever erring, and should say to me, Choose! I would bow reverently to his left hand, and say, Father, give! Pure truth is for Thee alone!"

II.

EXTREMES.

In man, it has been said, there will be a layer of fierce hyena, or of timid deer, running through the nature in the most uncertain and tortuous manner. Nero is sensitive to poetry and music, but not to human suffering: Marcus Aurelius is tolerant and good to all men but Christians. The Tlascalans of Mexico loved, and even worshiped, flowers; but they were cruel to excess, and sacrificed human victims with savage delight. The body of the sacrificed captive, we are told by Prescott, was delivered to the warrior who had taken him in battle, and by him, after being dressed, was served up in an entertainment to his friends. This was not the coarse repast of famished cannibals, but a banquet teeming with delicious beverages and delicate viands, prepared with art, and attended by both sexes, who conducted themselves with all the decorum of civilized life. The Aztec priests were more wild and ferocious than the soldiery, their hair was long and matted, and their garments were stained with human blood. The good and the evil lie close together; the virtues and the vices alternate; so is human power accumulated; alternately the metals and the rags; a terrible Voltaic pile. In the well-bred animal the claw is nicely cushioned; the old Adam is presentable. Overhear a beautiful young woman swear, and meet her an hour afterward, all smiles and loveliness, in the drawing-room. Speak with unreserved kindness of one lady to another,--both of them very lovely creatures, so far as you know,--and receive in reply, "Don't! She, of all persons I know, is the only one I hate to hear praised." Lady Mary Wortley Montagu said of the Duchess of Marlborough, "We continue to see one another like two persons who are resolved to hate with civility." "It goes far to reconcile me to being a woman," she said on another occasion, "when I reflect that I am thus in no danger of ever marrying one." Madame de Maintenon and Madame de Montespan met in public, talked with vivacity, and, to those who judged only by appearances, seemed excellent friends. Once when they had to make a journey in the same carriage, Madame de Montespan said, "Let us talk as if there were no difference between us, but on condition that we resume our disputes when we return." Pietro Della Valle says that when the Ecce Homo was exposed during the sermon in the Jesuit church at Goa, the women used to beat their servants, if they did not cry enough to please them. Saint-Simon relates of the Marechale de la Ferte and her sister, both beautiful women, but very dissolute, that upon one occasion they heard a sermon on penitence which terrified them. "My sister," one said on their return, "it was all true; we must do penance or we are lost. But, my sister, what shall we do?" After having well turned it over, "My sister," replied the other, "This is what we must do--we must make our servants fast." When Moore's Life of Byron first appeared, it was in two large, quarto volumes, and the first came out alone. Murray told Leslie that a lady said to him, "I hear it is dull;" and he told her the scandal was all to be in the second volume. "And is the second volume to be had separately?" asked the lady. I was once, says a writer, passing through Moorfields, with a young girl, aged about nine or ten years, born and educated in Portugal, but in the Protestant faith; and, observing a large concourse of people assembled around a pile of fagots on fire, I expressed a curiosity to know the cause. She very composedly answered, "I suppose that it is nothing more than that they are going to burn a Jew." Isabella the Catholic was wont to rejoice and give thanks at the sight of a gallows with a man hanging therefrom. Charlotte Cushman related an incident that occurred at a theatre. A man in the gallery made such a disturbance that the play could not proceed. Cries of "Throw him over," arose from all parts of the house, and the noise became furious. All was tumultuous chaos until a sweet and gentle female voice was heard in the pit, exclaiming, "No! I pray you don't throw him over! I beg of you, dear friends, don't throw him over, but--kill him where he is." It is recorded that after the massacre of St. Bartholomew the ladies of the court of Paris went out to examine the long row of the bodies of the Huguenot cavaliers who had been slain during the tumult, and curiously turning them over, when half-stripped of their garments, said to each other, "This must have been a charming lover; that was not worth looking at;" and when a fanatic assassin was brought out in the square of the Louvre to undergo during four hours the most frightful tortures which human ingenuity or malignity could devise, or the human frame endure, all the ladies of the court assembled to witness the spectacle, and paid high prices for seats nearest the scene of agony. In the Conciergerie, during the Reign of Terror, a corridor was common in the day-time to both sexes, and here, it is stated, there was as much dressing, talking, flirting, and love-making as in the salons of Paris. Most of the women contrived to change their dress three times a day, though in the interval they had often to wash or mend the garment they were about to put on. The tone of conversation was gay and animated, and the people seemed bent on proving that though the Reign of Terror might imprison and kill them, it could not make them dull or disagreeable.

It is related that Della Valle, the distinguished Italian traveler, had such an absorbing fondness for his wife that, when she died, on the shore of the Persian Gulf, he embalmed her body, and spent one whole year conveying it back through India to Rome, where he celebrated her obsequies by pronouncing a funeral oration, during the delivery of which his emotions became so violent as to choke his utterance. Not long after, in a fit of anger, he killed his coachman, in the area before St. Peter's, while the pope was pronouncing a benediction. "I remember," says Patmore, in his personal recollections of Hazlitt, "having occasionally played at whist with a person who, on any occurrence of extraordinary ill-luck, used to lay his cards down deliberately, and bite a piece out of the back of his hand! This person was, under ordinary circumstances, the very ideal of a 'gentleman'--bland, polished, courteous, forbearing, kind, and self-possessed to an extraordinary degree; and his personal appearance in every respect corresponded with his manners and bearing. Hazlitt's passions sometimes produced similar results. I have seen him more than once, at the Fives Court in St. Martin Street, on making a bad stroke or missing his ball at some critical point of the game, fling his racket to the other end of the court, walk deliberately to the centre, with uplifted hands imprecate the most fearful curses on his head, for his stupidity, and then rush to the side wall and literally dash his head against it!" Shortly before the Chinese Emperor's death, a gigantic image, the goddess of small-pox, was paraded round the city of Pekin in solemn procession, and then taken into the bedroom of the dying youth, where it was worshiped and honored with many propitiatory offerings. As, however, the goddess continued obdurate, she was subjected to a severe flogging, and finally burned.

In the early history of New England the law compelled the people to attend church, the services commencing at nine o'clock and continuing six to eight hours. Near the church edifice stood the stocks and the whipping-post, and a large wooden cage, in which to confine offenders against the laws. The congregation had places assigned them upon the rude benches, at the annual town-meeting, according to their age and social position. A person was fined who occupied a seat assigned to another. The boys were ordered to sit upon the gallery-stairs, and three constables were employed to keep them in order. Prominent before the assembly, some wretched male or female offender sat with a scarlet letter on the breast, to denote some crime against the stern code. Fleeing the mother-country for peace and freedom, the descendants of the Puritans persecuted the Quakers, and burnt the incorrigible eccentrics of society for witches.

John Howe's method of conducting public fasts was as follows: "He began at nine o'clock with a prayer of a quarter of an hour, read and expounded Scripture for about three quarters of an hour, prayed an hour, preached another hour, then prayed half an hour; the people then sang for about a quarter of an hour, during which he retired and took a little refreshment; he then went into the pulpit again, prayed an hour more, preached another hour, and then, with a prayer of half an hour, concluded the services."

The clergy, too, were sometimes victims. An instance: "The rector of Fittleworth, in Sussex, was dispossessed of his living for Sabbath-breaking; the fact proved against him being, that as he was stepping over a stile one Sunday, the button of his breeches came off, and he got a tailor in the neighborhood presently to sew it on again."

We are told that at the time Ireland was called the Isle of Saints, "when a child was immersed at baptism, it was customary not to dip the right arm, to the intent that he might strike a more deadly and ungracious blow therewith; and under an opinion, no doubt, that the rest of the body would not be responsible at the resurrection for anything which had been committed by the unbaptized hand. Thus, too, at the baptism, the father took the wolves for his gossips, and thought by this profanation he was forming an alliance, both for himself and the boy, with the fiercest beasts of the woods. The son of a chief was baptized in milk; water was not thought good enough, and whisky had not then been invented. They used to rob in the beginning of the year as a point of devotion, for the purpose of laying up a good stock of plunder against Easter; and he whose spoils enabled him to furnish the best entertainment at that time was looked upon as the best Christian; so they robbed in emulation of each other; and reconciling their habits to their conscience, they persuaded themselves that if robbery, murder, and rape had been sins, Providence would never put such temptations in their way: nay, that the sin would be, if they were so ungrateful as not to take advantage of a good opportunity when it was offered them."

In North Wales, it is stated, when a person supposes himself highly injured, it is not uncommon for him to go to some church dedicated to a celebrated saint, as Llan Elian in Anglesea, and Clynog in Carnarvonshire, and there to offer his enemy. He kneels down on his bare knees in the church, and offering a piece of money to the saint, calls down curses and misfortunes upon the offender and his family for generations to come, in the most firm belief that the imprecations will be fulfilled. Sometimes they repair to a sacred well instead of a church.

Mrs. Gaskell, in her biography of Charlotte Bronte, tells of a squire of distinguished family and large property, who died at his house, not far from Haworth, not many years ago. His great amusement and occupation had been cock-fighting. When he was confined to his chamber with what he knew would be his last illness, he had his cocks brought up there, and watched the bloody battle from his bed. As his mortal disease increased and it became impossible for him to turn so as to follow the combat, he had looking-glasses arranged in such a manner around and above him, as he lay, that he could still see the cocks fighting. And in this manner he died.

"Qualities," says Helps, "are often inserted in a character in the most curious and inharmonious way; and the end is that you have a man who is the strangest mixture of generosity and meanness, of kindness and severity, even of dishonesty and nobleness. Then the passions enter. Sometimes these just fit in, unfortunately, with good points of character,--so that one man may be ruined by a passion which another and a worse man would have escaped unhurt from. Then there are the circumstances to which a character is exposed, and which vary so much that it hardly seems that people are living in the same world, so different are to them the outward things they have to contend with. Altogether, the human being becomes such a complicated creature, that though at last you may know something about some one specimen,--what it will say and what it will do on a given occasion,--you never know enough about the creature to condemn it." "Neither the vices nor the virtues of man," says Taine, "are his nature; to praise or to blame him is not to know him; approbation or disapprobation does not define him; the names of good or bad tell us nothing of what he is. Put the robber Cartouche in an Italian court of the fifteenth century; he would be a great statesman. Transport this nobleman, stingy and narrow-minded, into a shop; he will be an exemplary tradesman. This public man, of inflexible probity, is in his drawing-room an intolerable coxcomb. This father of a family, so humane, is an idiotic politician. Change a virtue in its circumstances, and it becomes a vice; change a vice in its circumstances, and it becomes a virtue. Regard the same quality from two sides; on one it is a fault, on the other a merit. The essential of a man is found concealed far below these moral badges. A character is a force, like gravity, weight, or steam, capable, as it may happen, of pernicious or profitable effects, and which must be defined otherwise than by the amount of weight it can lift or the havoc it can cause. It is therefore to ignore man, to reduce him to an aggregate of virtues and vices; it is to lose sight in him of all but the exterior and social side; it is to neglect the inner and natural element."

"The character of the French nation," says De Tocqueville, "is so peculiar that the study of human nature in general does not embrace it; those even who have most studied it are continually taken by surprise; for our nation is gifted beyond any other with capacity to appreciate great things, and even to do them; it is equal to any single effort, however extraordinary, but unable to remain strung up to a high pitch for any length of time; because we act upon impulse, not on principle, and our instincts are better than our moral qualities; we are the most civilized people in the world, and yet, in certain respects, we have retained more of the savage than any other nation; for the great characteristic of the savage is, to be influenced by the sudden impressions of the present, without recollection of the past or thought of the future."

"Recollect that village of the Limousin," said a member of the National Convention during the Reign of Terror, "from the top of whose steeple the tri-color flag suddenly disappeared. A violent disturbance was instantly raised; search was made for the daring offender, who could not be found, and in consequence a dozen persons were instantly arrested on suspicion. At length the fragments of the flag were discovered suspended from the branches of a tree, and it was found that a magpie had made its nest with the remains of the national color. Oh! the tyrannical bird! they seized it, cut off its head, and transmitted the evidence of the act to the Convention. We received it without bursting into laughter; had any one ventured to indulge himself in that way, he would have run the risk of perishing on the public scaffold."

"In all the courts of ancient philosophy this is to be found," says Montaigne, "that the same lecturer there publishes the rules of temperance, and at the same time discourses of love and wantonness." "I know not," said the courtesan Lais, "what they talk of books, wisdom, and philosophy; but these men knock as often at my door as any others." Says Bayle, in his Critical Dictionary, "It was reported that Pericles turned out his wife, and lodged with the famous Aspasia, and plunged himself into lewdness, and spent a great part of his estate upon her. She was a woman of so great parts that Socrates went to see her, and carried his friends with him; and, to speak more clearly, she taught him rhetoric and politics. That which is most strange is, that those who frequented her carried their wives to her house, that they might hear her discourses and lectures, though she kept several courtesans at home. Pericles went to see Aspasia twice a day, and kissed her when he went in and when he came out; which was before he married her. She was accused of two crimes by the comedian Hermippus. He made himself a party against her in due form, and accused her before the judges of impiety, and of drawing women into her house to satisfy the lust of Pericles. During the trial of Aspasia, Pericles used so many entreaties with the judges, and shed so many tears, according to AEschines, that he obtained her absolution. The Athenians said that Phidias, the most excellent sculptor in the world, and surveyor-general of all the works which Pericles ordered to be made for the ornament of the city, drew in the ladies under pretense of showing them the works of the greatest masters; but in truth to debauch and deliver them to Pericles." The golden statue of Minerva, it should be remembered, was the workmanship of Phidias, and his name was inscribed upon the pedestal. Through the friendship of Pericles he had the direction of everything, and all the artists received his orders. For this, said Plutarch, the one was envied, and the other slandered.

"Good and bad men are each less so than they seem."

"When man's first incense rose above the plain,
Of earth's two altars, one was built by Cain."

"As there is," said Coleridge, "much beast and some devil in man, so is there some angel and some God in man. The beast and the devil may be conquered, but in this life never destroyed." "I have ever delighted," said Boswell, "in that intellectual chemistry which can separate good qualities from evil in the same person."

"The first lesson of history," says Emerson, "is the good of evil. Good is a good doctor, but Bad is sometimes a better. 'Tis the oppressions of William the Norman, savage forest-laws, and crushing despotism, that made possible the inspirations of Magna Charta under John. Edward I. wanted money, armies, castles, and as much as he could get. It was necessary to call the people together by shorter, swifter ways,--and the House of Commons arose. To obtain subsidies, he paid in privileges. In the twenty-fourth year of his reign he decreed, 'that no tax should be levied without consent of Lords and Commons;' which is the basis of the English Constitution. Plutarch affirms that the cruel wars which followed the march of Alexander, introduced the civility, language, and arts of Greece into the savage East; introduced marriage; built seventy cities; and united hostile nations under one government. The barbarians who broke up the Roman empire did not arrive a day too soon. Schiller says, the Thirty Years' War made Germany a nation. Rough, selfish despots serve man immensely, as Henry VIII. in the contest with the pope; as the infatuations no less than the wisdom of Cromwell; as the ferocity of the Russian czars; as the fanaticism of the French regicides of 1789. The frost which kills the harvest of a year, saves the harvests of a century, by destroying the weevil or the locust. Wars, fires, plagues, break up immovable routine, clear the ground of rotten races, and dens of distemper, and open a fair field to new men. There is a tendency in things to right themselves, and the war or revolution or bankruptcy that shatters a rotten system, allows things to take a new and natural order." "Steam was, till the other day, the devil which we dreaded. Every pot made by any human potter or brazier had a hole in its cover, to let off the enemy, lest he should lift pot and roof, and carry the house away. But the Marquis of Worcester, Watt, and Fulton bethought themselves, that, where was power, was not devil, but was God; that it must be availed of, and not by any means let off and wasted. Could he lift pots and roofs so handily? he was the workman they were in search of."

It is related of Hart, a Baptist minister, that he was so good a preacher and so bad a liver that it was said to him once, "Mr. Hart, when I hear you in the pulpit, I wish you were never out of it; when I see you out of it, I wish you were never in it." One Mr. Nicholls, a Yorkshire clergyman in the days immediately succeeding the Reformation, who was "much addicted to drinking and company-keeping," used to say to his companions, "You must not heed me but when I am got three feet above the earth," that was, into the pulpit. "I have heard of a witty parson," says Dr. Beattie, "who having been dismissed for irregularities, used afterward, in conversation, to say, that he thanked God he was not cashiered for ignorance and insufficiency, but only for vice and immorality." Foster, in a note to one of his Essays, refers to a Spanish story of a village where the devil, having made the people excessively wicked, was punished by being compelled to assume the appearance and habit of a friar, and to preach so eloquently, in spite of his internal repugnance and rage, that the inhabitants were completely reformed.

Cotton Mather has preserved a choice specimen of invective against Dr. Owen, by one of the primitive Quakers, whose name was Fisher. It was, says Southey, a species of rhetoric in which they indulged freely, and exceeded all other sectarians. Fisher addressed him thus: "Thou fiery fighter and green-headed trumpeter; thou hedgehog and grinning dog; thou bastard, that tumbled out of the mouth of the Babylonish bawd; thou mole; thou tinker; thou lizard; thou bell of no metal, but the tone of a kettle; thou wheelbarrow; thou whirlpool; thou whirligig; oh, thou firebrand; thou adder and scorpion; thou louse; thou cow-dung; thou moon-calf; thou ragged tatterdemalion; thou Judas: thou livest in philosophy and logic, which are of the devil." Mather in turn was alike severe upon the Quakers. He applied to them such language as "upstart sect;" "sink of all heresies;" "the grossest collection of blasphemies and confusions that ever was heard of;" "dangerous villains;" "choke-weed of Christianity;" "the quaking which distinguished these poor creatures was a symptom of diabolical possession;" "devil-driven creatures;" "for pride, and hypocrisy, and hellish reviling against the painful ministers of Christ, I know no people can match them." "He was a wise and a good counsellor in Plymouth-colony, who propounded 'that a law might be made for the Quakers to have their heads shaved.' I confess," he said, "the punishment was in some sort capital; but it would have been the best remedy for them; it would have both sham'd and cur'd them." He quotes some choice language of Penn--"Thou gormandizing Priest, one of the abominable tribe; thou bane of reason; thou pest, to be spared of mankind; thou mountebank Priest"--and says, "these are the very words (I wrong them not!) which they vomit out against the best men in the English nation, that have been so hardy as to touch their 'light within:' but let the quills of these porcupines fly as fast as they will, I shall not feel them." The good Luther was a violent saint sometimes. Hear him express himself on the Catholic divines: "The papists are all asses, and will always remain asses. Put them in whatever sauce you choose, boiled, roasted, baked, fried, skinned, beat, hashed, they are always the same asses." Hear him salute the pope: "The pope was born out of the devil's posteriors. He is full of devils, lies, blasphemies, and idolatries; he is Antichrist; the robber of churches; the ravisher of virgins; the greatest of pimps; the governor of Sodom, etc. If the Turks lay hold of us, then we shall be in the hands of the devil; but if we remain with the pope, we shall be in hell. What a pleasing sight would it be to see the pope and the cardinals hanging on one gallows, in exact order, like the seals which dangle from the bulls of the pope! What an excellent council would they hold under the gallows!" And hear him upon Henry VIII.: "It is hard to say if folly can be more foolish, or stupidity more stupid, than is the head of Henry. He has not attacked me with the heart of a king, but with the impudence of a knave. This rotten worm of the earth, having blasphemed the majesty of my King, I have a just right to bespatter his English majesty with his own dirt and ordure. This Henry has lied." The good Calvin was alike violent. He hated Catholic and Lutheran. "His adversaries are never others than knaves, lunatics, drunkards, and assassins. Sometimes they are characterized by the familiar appellatives of bulls, asses, cats, and hogs." Beza, the disciple of Calvin, imitated his master. Upon a Lutheran minister, Tilleman, he bestowed these titles of honor: "Polyphemus; an ape; a great ass who is distinguished from other asses by wearing a hat; an ass on two feet; a monster composed of part of an ape and wild ass; a villain who merits hanging on the first tree we find." As to the Catholics, there is no end to the anathemas and curses of the Fathers.

One of the old bishops called anger "the sinews of the soul." It helped to fortify the rugged reformer in his conflicts, and illuminated the perilous way he trod. "We oft by lightning read in darkest nights." It is said the finest wine is pressed from vintages which grow on fields once inundated with lava. "I never work better," said Luther, "than when I am inspired by anger; when I am angry I can write, pray, and preach well; for then my whole temperament is quickened, my understanding sharpened, and all mundane vexations and temptations depart." "No one can suppose," said Bulwer, "that Calvin did not deem that the angels smiled approbation when he burned Servetus. No one can suppose that when Torquemada devised the Inquisition, he did not conscientiously believe that the greatest happiness of the greatest number could be best secured by selecting a few for a roast." Burke said, "a vigorous mind is as necessarily accompanied with violent passions as a great fire with great heat." "It is the strong passions," said Helvetius, "which, rescuing us from sloth, can alone impart to us that continuous and earnest attention necessary to great intellectual efforts." "No revolution (in public sentiment), civil or religious," said Sir Gilbert Elliot, "can be accomplished without that degree of ardor and passion which, in a later age, will be matter of ridicule to men who do not feel the occasion, and enter into the spirit of the times." "The man who succeeds," said a British reviewer, "is generally the narrow man, the man of one idea, who works at nothing but that; sees everything only through the light of that; sacrifices everything to that; the fanatic, in short. By fanatics, whether military, commercial, or religious, and not by 'liberal-minded men' at all, has the world's work been done in all ages." "Our passions," said John Norris, "were given us to perfect and accomplish our natures, though by accidental misapplications to unworthy objects they may turn to our degradation and dishonor. We may, indeed, be debased as well as ennobled by them; but then the fault is not in the large sails, but in the ill conduct of the pilot, if our vessel miss the haven." When one commended a certain king of Sparta for a gentle, a good, and a meek prince, his colleague said, "How can he be good who is not an enemy even to vicious persons?" Erasmus said of Luther that there were two natures in him: sometimes he wrote like an apostle, sometimes like a raving ribald. "When he was angry, invectives rushed from him like bowlder rocks down a mountain torrent in flood." "The same man," said Heine, of Luther, "who could scold like a fish-wife could be as gentle as a tender maiden. At times he was as fierce as the storm that uproots oaks; and then again he was as mild as the zephyr caressing the violets.... The refinement of Erasmus, the mildness of Melancthon, could never have brought us so far as the godlike brutality of Brother Martin." But there was no trace of vanity about him. "Do not call yourselves Lutherans," he said; "call yourselves Christians. Who and what is Luther? Has Luther been crucified for the world?"

"The Latin tongue," says Montaigne, "is, as it were, natural to me; I understand it better than French, but I have not used to speak it, nor hardly to write it, these forty years; and yet, upon an extreme and sudden emotion, which I have fallen into twice or thrice in my life, and once on seeing my father in perfect health, fall upon me in a swoon, I have always uttered my first outcries and ejaculations in Latin; nature starting up and forcibly expressing itself, in spite of so long a discontinuation." "Nature," says Bacon, "will be buried a great time, and yet revive upon the occasion or temptation; like as it was with AEsop's damsel, turned from a cat to a woman, who sat very demurely at the board's end till a mouse ran before her." "A frog," said Publius Syrus, "would leap from a throne of gold into a puddle." In Froissart's Chronicles there is an account of a reverend monk who had been a robber in the early part of his life, and who, when he grew old, used feelingly to lament that he had ever changed his profession. He said "it was a goodly sight to sally out from his castle, and to see a troop of jolly friars coming riding that way, with their mules well laden with viands and rich stores, to advance toward them, to attack and overthrow them, returning to the castle with a noble booty." Layard relates an incident of the party of Arabs which for some time had been employed to assist him in excavating amongst the ruins of Nineveh. One evening, after their day's work, he observed them following a flock of sheep belonging to the people of the village, shouting their war-cry, flourishing their swords, and indulging in the most extravagant gesticulations. He asked one of the most active of the party to explain to him the cause of such violent proceedings. "O Bey!" they exclaimed almost together, "God be praised, we have eaten butter and wheaten bread under your shadow, and are content; but an Arab is an Arab. It is not for a man to carry about dirt in baskets, and to use a spade all his life; he should be with his sword and his mare in the desert. We are sad as we think of the days when we plundered the Anayza, and we must have excitement or our hearts must break. Let us then believe that these are the sheep we have taken from the enemy, and that we are driving them to our tents." And off they ran, raising their wild cry, and flourishing their swords, to the no small alarm of the shepherd, who saw his sheep scampering in all directions. Hazlitt related an Indian legend of a Brahman, who was so devoted to abstract meditation, that in the pursuit of philosophy he quite forgot his moral duties, and neglected ablution. For this he was degraded from the rank of humanity, and transformed into a monkey. But even when a monkey he retained his original propensities, for he kept apart from other monkeys, and had no other delight than that of eating cocoanuts and studying metaphysics. "Perhaps few narratives in history or mythology," says Carlyle, "are more significant than that Moslem one of Moses and the Dwellers by the Dead Sea. A tribe of men dwelt on the shores of that same asphaltic lake; and having forgotten, as we are all too prone to do, the inner facts of Nature, and taken up with the falsities and other semblances of it, were fallen into sad conditions,--verging, indeed, toward a certain far deeper lake. Whereupon it pleased kind Heaven to send them the prophet Moses, with an instructive word of warning out of which might have sprung 'remedial measures' not a few. But no: the men of the Dead Sea discovered, as the valet species always does in heroes or prophets, no comeliness in Moses; listened with real tedium to Moses, with light grinning, or splenetic sniffs and sneers, affecting even to yawn; and signified, in short, that they found him a humbug, and even a bore. Such was the candid theory these men of the asphalt lake formed to themselves of Moses, that probably he was a humbug, that certainly he was a bore. Moses withdrew; but Nature and her rigorous veracities did not withdraw. The men of the Dead Sea, when we next went to visit them, were all changed into apes, sitting on the trees there, grinning now in the most unaffected manner; gibbering and chattering very genuine nonsense; finding the whole universe now a most indisputable humbug! The universe has become a humbug to those apes who thought it one. There they sit and chatter, to this hour: only, I believe, every Sabbath, there returns to them a bewildered half-consciousness, half-reminiscence; and they sit with their wizened, smoke-dried visages, and such an air of supreme tragicality as apes may, looking out through those blinking, smoke-bleared eyes of theirs, into the wonderfulest universal smoky twilight and undecipherable disordered dusk of things; wholly an uncertainty, unintelligibility, they and it, and for commentary thereon, here and there an unmusical chatter or mew,--truest, tragicalest humbug conceivable by the mind of man or ape! They made no use of their souls; and so have lost them. Their worship on the Sabbath now is to roost there, with unmusical screeches, and half-remember that they had souls." The shark is said to have been the god the Sandwich Islanders, in their savage state, chiefly worshiped, or sought to propitiate. In their present semi-civilized, semi-Christianized condition, it is stated, they pray, and sing, and moralize, in fair weather; but when they get into trouble they are apt to call upon the shark-god of their fathers for help or deliverance.

Sir Walter Scott used to tell a story of a placid minister, near Dundee, who, in preaching on Jonah, said, "Ken ye, brethren, what fish it was that swallowed him? Aiblins ye may think it was a shark; nae, nae, my brethren, it was nae shark; or aiblins ye may think it was a sammon; nae, nae, my brethren, it was nae sammon; or aiblins ye may think it was a dolphin; nae, nae, my brethren, it was nae dolphin." Here an old woman, thinking to help her master out of a dead lift, cried out, "Aiblins, sir, it was a dunter" (the vulgar name of a species of whale common to the Scotch coast). "Aiblins, madam, ye're an auld witch for taking the word of God out of my mouth," was the reply of the disappointed rhetorician. As Dr. Johnson was riding in a carriage through London on a rainy day, he overtook a poor woman carrying a baby, without any protection from the weather. Making the driver stop the coach, he invited the poor woman to get in with her child, which she did. After she had seated herself, the doctor said to her, "My good woman, I think it most likely that the motion of the coach will wake your child in a little while, and I wish you to understand that if you talk any baby-talk to it, you will have to get out of the coach." As the doctor had anticipated, the child soon awoke, and the forgetful mother exclaimed to it: "Oh! the little dear, is he going to open his eyesy-pysy?" "Stop the coach, driver!" shouted Johnson; and the woman had to get out and finish her journey on foot. Frederick William, of Prussia, father of the great Frederick, had a way of addressing, familiarly, the people he met in the streets of Berlin, utterly indifferent, we are told, to his own dignity and to the feelings of others; if he could devise something that was not quite agreeable, it was sure to be said. The fear of such encounters sometimes made nervous people indiscreetly evade the royal presence. One Jew having fairly taken to his heels, he was pursued by the king in hot haste. "Why did you run away from me?" said the king, when he came up with him in breathless dudgeon. "From fear," answered the Jew, in the most ingenuous manner; but the rejoinder of the king was a hearty thwack with his cane, who roared out that he wished himself to be loved and not to be feared!

A writer upon Holland--its Martyrs and Heroes, gives an account of Richard Willemson, a worthy burgess of Aspern, and an Anabaptist, who was chased by an officer of justice. It was a winter day, and he fled across the ice. The frozen surface, however, was so thin that the fugitive had the utmost difficulty in crossing, and his pursuer fell through. Perceiving his danger, Willemson returned and at the risk of his own life saved his enemy. Touched with such generosity, the officer would gladly have let his prisoner go; but the burgomaster, who witnessed the occurrence, called out, "Fulfil your oath," and the good Christian was led away to a fiery martyrdom.