HEALTH AND EDUCATION

BY THEREV. CHARLES KINGSLEY, F. L. S. , F. G. S. CANON OF WESTMINSTER

W. ISBISTER & CO. 56, LUDGATE HILL, LONDON1874

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THE SCIENCE OF HEALTH

Whether the British race is improving or degenerating? What, if it seemprobably degenerating, are the causes of so great an evil? How they canbe, if not destroyed, at least arrested?--These are questions worthy theattention, not of statesmen only and medical men, but of every father andmother in these isles. I shall say somewhat about them in this Essay;and say it in a form which ought to be intelligible to fathers andmothers of every class, from the highest to the lowest, in hopes ofconvincing some of them at least that the science of health, now soutterly neglected in our curriculum of so-called education, ought to betaught--the rudiments of it at least--in every school, college, anduniversity. 

We talk of our hardy forefathers; and rightly. But they were hardy, justas the savage is usually hardy, because none but the hardy lived. Theymay have been able to say of themselves--as they do in a state paper of1515, now well known through the pages of Mr. Froude--"What comyn folk ofall the world may compare with the comyns of England, in riches, freedom, liberty, welfare, and all prosperity? What comyn folk is so mighty, andso strong in the felde, as the comyns of England?" They may have beenfed on "great shins of beef, " till they became, as Benvenuto Cellinicalls them, "the English wild beasts. " But they increased in numbersslowly, if at all, for centuries. Those terrible laws of naturalselection, which issue in "the survival of the fittest, " cleared off theless fit, in every generation, principally by infantile disease, often bywholesale famine and pestilence; and left, on the whole, only those ofthe strongest constitutions to perpetuate a hardy, valiant, andenterprising race. 

At last came a sudden and unprecedented change. In the first years ofthe century, steam and commerce produced an enormous increase in thepopulation. Millions of fresh human beings found employment, married, brought up children who found employment in their turn, and learnt tolive more or less civilised lives. An event, doubtless, for which God isto be thanked. A quite new phase of humanity, bringing with it new vicesand new dangers: but bringing, also, not merely new comforts, but newnoblenesses, new generosities, new conceptions of duty, and of how thatduty should be done. It is childish to regret the old times, when oursoot-grimed manufacturing districts were green with lonely farms. Tomurmur at the transformation would be, I believe, to murmur at the willof Him without whom not a sparrow falls to the ground. 

 "The old order changeth, yielding place to the new, And God fulfils himself in many ways, Lest one good custom should corrupt the world. "

Our duty is, instead of longing for the good old custom, to take care ofthe good new custom, lest it should corrupt the world in like wise. Andit may do so thus:--

The rapid increase of population during the first half of this centurybegan at a moment when the British stock was specially exhausted; namely, about the end of the long French war. There may have been periods ofexhaustion, at least in England, before that. There may have been onehere, as there seems to have been on the Continent, after the Crusades;and another after the Wars of the Roses. There was certainly a period ofsevere exhaustion at the end of Elizabeth's reign, due both to the longSpanish and Irish wars and to the terrible endemics introduced fromabroad; an exhaustion which may have caused, in part, the nationalweakness which hung upon us during the reign of the Stuarts. But afternone of these did the survival of the less fit suddenly become more easy;or the discovery of steam power, and the acquisition of a colonialempire, create at once a fresh demand for human beings and a fresh supplyof food for them. Britain, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, was in an altogether new social situation. 

At the beginning of the great French war; and, indeed, ever since thebeginning of the war with Spain in 1739--often snubbed as the "war aboutJenkins's ear"--but which was, as I hold, one of the most just, as it wasone of the most popular, of all our wars; after, too, the once famous"forty fine harvests" of the eighteenth century, the British people, fromthe gentleman who led to the soldier or sailor who followed, were one ofthe mightiest and most capable races which the world has ever seen, comparable best to the old Roman, at his mightiest and most capableperiod. That, at least, their works testify. They created--as far asman can be said to create anything--the British Empire. They won for usour colonies, our commerce, the mastery of the seas of all the world. Butat what a cost--

 "Their bones are scattered far and wide, By mount, and stream, and sea. "

Year after year, till the final triumph of Waterloo, not battle only, butworse destroyers than shot and shell--fatigue and disease--had beencarrying off our stoutest, ablest, healthiest young men, each of whomrepresented, alas! a maiden left unmarried at home, or married, indefault, to a less able man. The strongest went to the war; each whofell left a weaklier man to continue the race; while of those who did notfall, too many returned with tainted and weakened constitutions, toinjure, it may be, generations yet unborn. The middle classes, beingmostly engaged in peaceful pursuits, suffered less of this decimation oftheir finest young men; and to that fact I attribute much of theirincreasing preponderance, social, political, and intellectual, to thisvery day. One cannot walk the streets of any of our great commercialcities without seeing plenty of men, young and middle-aged, whose wholebearing and stature shows that the manly vigour of our middle class isanything but exhausted. In Liverpool, especially, I have been muchstruck not only with the vigorous countenance, but with the bodily sizeof the mercantile men on 'Change. But it must be remembered always, first, that these men are the very elite of their class; the cleverestmen; the men capable of doing most work; and next, that they are, almostall of them, from the great merchant who has his villa out of town, andperhaps his moor in the Highlands, down to the sturdy young volunteer whoserves in the haberdasher's shop, country-bred men; and that the questionis, not what they are like now, but what their children andgrand-children, especially the fine young volunteer's, will be like? Anda very serious question I hold that to be; and for this reason:

War is, without doubt, the most hideous physical curse which fallen maninflicts upon himself; and for this simple reason, that it reverses thevery laws of nature, and is more cruel even than pestilence. For insteadof issuing in the survival of the fittest, it issues in the survival ofthe less fit: and therefore, if protracted, must deteriorate generationsyet unborn. And yet a peace such as we now enjoy, prosperous, civilised, humane, is fraught, though to a less degree, with the very same illeffect. 

In the first place, tens of thousands--Who knows it not?--lead sedentaryand unwholesome lives, stooping, asphyxiated, employing as small afraction of their bodies as of their minds. And all this in dwellings, workshops, what not?--the influences, the very atmosphere of which tendnot to health, but to unhealth, and to drunkenness as a solace under thefeeling of unhealth and depression. And that such a life must tell upontheir offspring, and if their offspring grow up under similarcircumstances, upon their offspring's offspring, till a whole populationmay become permanently degraded, who does not know? For who that walksthrough the by-streets of any great city does not see? Moreover, andthis is one of the most fearful problems with which modern civilisationhas to deal--we interfere with natural selection by our conscientiouscare of life, as surely as does war itself. If war kills the most fit tolive, we save alive those who--looking at them from a merely physicalpoint of view--are most fit to die. Everything which makes it more easyto live; every sanatory reform, prevention of pestilence, medicaldiscovery, amelioration of climate, drainage of soil, improvement indwelling-houses, workhouses, gaols; every reformatory school, everyhospital, every cure of drunkenness, every influence, in short, whichhas--so I am told--increased the average length of life in these islands, by nearly one-third, since the first establishment of life insurances, one hundred and fifty years ago; every influence of this kind, I say, saves persons alive who would otherwise have died; and the great majorityof these will be, even in surgical and zymotic cases, those of leastresisting power; who are thus preserved to produce in time a still lesspowerful progeny. 

Do I say that we ought not to save these people, if we can? God forbid. The weakly, the diseased, whether infant or adult, is here on earth; aBritish citizen; no more responsible for his own weakness than for hisown existence. Society, that is, in plain English, we and our ancestors, are responsible for both; and we must fulfil the duty, and keep him inlife; and, if we can, heal, strengthen, develop him to the utmost; andmake the best of that which "fate and our own deservings" have given usto deal with. I do not speak of higher motives still; motives which toevery minister of religion must be paramount and awful. I speak merelyof physical and social motives, such as appeal to the conscience of everyman--the instinct which bids every human-hearted man or woman to savelife, alleviate pain, like Him who causes His sun to shine on the eviland on the good, and His rain to fall on the just and on the unjust. 

But it is palpable, that in so doing we must, year by year, preserve alarge percentage of weakly persons, who, marrying freely in their ownclass, must produce weaklier children, and they weaklier children still. Must, did I say? There are those who are of opinion--and I, afterwatching and comparing the histories of many families, indeed, of everyone with whom I have come in contact for now five-and-thirty years, intown and country, can only fear that their opinion is but too wellfounded on fact--that in the great majority of cases, in all classeswhatsoever, the children are not equal to their parents, nor they, again, to their grandparents of the beginning of the century; and that thisdegrading process goes on most surely, and most rapidly, in our largetowns, and in proportion to the antiquity of those towns, and thereforein proportion to the number of generations during which the degradinginfluences have been at work. 

This and cognate dangers have been felt more and more deeply, as theyears have rolled on, by students of human society. To ward them off, theory after theory has been put on paper, especially in France, whichdeserve high praise for their ingenuity, less for their morality, and, Ifear, still less for their common-sense. For the theorist in his closetis certain to ignore, as inconvenient to the construction of his Utopia, certain of those broad facts of human nature which every active parishpriest, medical man, or poor-law guardian has to face every day of hislife. 

Society and British human nature are what they have become by theindirect influences of long ages, and we can no more reconstruct the onethan we can change the other. We can no more mend men by theories thanwe can by coercion--to which, by the by, almost all these theorists looklongingly as their final hope and mainstay. We must teach men to mendtheir own matters, of their own reason, and their own free-will. We mustteach them that they are the arbiters of their own destinies; and, to afearfully great degree, of their children's destinies after them. Wemust teach them not merely that they ought to be free, but that they arefree, whether they know it or not, for good and for evil. And we must dothat in this case, by teaching them sound practical science; the scienceof physiology, as applied to health. So, and so only, can we check--I donot say stop entirely--though I believe even that to be ideally possible;but at least check the process of degradation which I believe to besurely going on, not merely in these islands, but in every civilisedcountry in the world, in proportion to its civilisation. 

It is still a question whether science has fully discovered those laws ofhereditary health, the disregard of which causes so many marriagesdisastrous to generations yet unborn. But much valuable light has beenthrown on this most mysterious and most important subject during the lastfew years. That light--and I thank God for it--is widening and deepeningrapidly. And I doubt not that, in a generation or two more, enough willbe known to be thrown into the shape of practical and proveable rules;and that, if not a public opinion, yet at least, what is more useful far, a wide-spread private opinion, will grow up, especially among educatedwomen, which will prevent many a tragedy and save many a life. 

But, as to the laws of personal health: enough, and more than enough, isknown already, to be applied safely and easily by any adults, howeverunlearned, to the preservation not only of their own health, but of thatof their children. 

The value of healthy habitations, of personal cleanliness, of pure airand pure water, of various kinds of food, according as each tends to makebone, fat, or muscle, provided only--provided only--that the food beunadulterated; the value of various kinds of clothing, and physicalexercise, of a free and equal development of the brain-power, withoutundue overstrain in any one direction; in one word, the method ofproducing, as far as possible, the mentem sanam in corpore sano, and thewonderful and blessed effects of such obedience to those laws of nature, which are nothing but the good will of God expressed in facts--theirwonderful and blessed tendency, I say, to eliminate the germs ofhereditary disease, and to actually regenerate the human system--all thisis known; known as fully and clearly as any human knowledge need beknown; it is written in dozens of popular books and pamphlets. And whyshould this divine voice, which cries to man, tending to sink intoeffeminate barbarism through his own hasty and partial civilisation, --"Itis not too late. For your bodies, as for your spirits, there is anupward, as well as a downward path. You, or if not you, at least thechildren whom you have brought into the world, for whom you toil, forwhom you hoard, for whom you pray, for whom you would give yourlives, --they still may be healthy, strong, it may be beautiful, and haveall the intellectual and social, as well as the physical advantages, which health, strength, and beauty give. "--Ah, why is this divine voicenow, as of old, Wisdom crying in the streets, and no man regarding her? Iappeal to women, who are initiated, as we men can never be, into thestern mysteries of pain, and sorrow, and self-sacrifice;--they who bringforth children, weep over children, slave for children, and, if they havenone of their own, then slave, with the holy instinct of the sexless bee, for the children of others--Let them say, shall this thing be?

Let my readers pardon me if I seem to write too earnestly. That I speakneither more nor less than the truth, every medical man knows full well. Not only as a very humble student of physiology, but as a parish priestof thirty years' standing, I have seen so much unnecessary misery; and Ihave in other cases seen similar misery so simply avoided; that the senseof the vastness of the evil is intensified by my sense of the easiness ofthe cure. 

Why, then--to come to practical suggestions--should there not be openedin every great town in these realms a public school of health? It mightconnect itself with--I hold that it should form an integral part of--someexisting educational institute. But it should at least give practicallectures, for fees small enough to put them within the reach of anyrespectable man or woman, however poor. I cannot but hope that suchschools of health, if opened in the great manufacturing towns of Englandand Scotland, and, indeed, in such an Irish town as Belfast, would obtainpupils in plenty, and pupils who would thoroughly profit by what theyhear. The people of these towns are, most of them, specially accustomedby their own trades to the application of scientific laws. To them, therefore, the application of any fresh physical laws to a fresh set offacts, would have nothing strange in it. They have already something ofthat inductive habit of mind which is the groundwork of all rationalunderstanding or action. They would not turn the deaf and contemptuousear with which the savage and the superstitious receive the revelation ofnature's mysteries. Why should not, with so hopeful an audience, theexperiment be tried far and wide, of giving lectures on health, assupplementary to those lectures on animal physiology which are, I amhappy to say, becoming more and more common? Why should not people betaught--they are already being taught at Birmingham--something about thetissues of the body, their structure and uses, the circulation of theblood, respiration, chemical changes in the air respired, amountbreathed, digestion, nature of food, absorption, secretion, structure ofthe nervous system, --in fact, be taught something of how their own bodiesare made and how they work? Teaching of this kind ought to, and will, insome more civilised age and country, be held a necessary element in theschool-course of every child, just as necessary as reading, writing, andarithmetic; for it is after all the most necessary branch of that"technical education" of which we hear so much just now, namely, thetechnic, or art, of keeping oneself alive and well. 

But we can hardly stop there. After we have taught the condition ofhealth, we must teach also the condition of disease; of those diseasesspecially which tend to lessen wholesale the health of townsfolk, exposedto an artificial mode of life. Surely young men and women should betaught something of the causes of zymotic disease, and of scrofula, consumption, rickets, dipsomania, cerebral derangement, and such like. They should be shown the practical value of pure air, pure water, unadulterated food, sweet and dry dwellings. Is there one of them, manor woman, who would not be the safer and happier, and the more useful tohis or her neighbours, if they had acquired some sound notions aboutthose questions of drainage on which their own lives and the lives oftheir children may every day depend? I say--women as well as men. Ishould have said women rather than men. For it is the women who have theordering of the household, the bringing up of the children; the women whobide at home, while the men are away, it may be at the other end of theearth. 

And if any say, as they have a right to say--"But these are subjectswhich can hardly be taught to young women in public lectures;" Irejoin, --Of course not, unless they are taught by women, --by women, ofcourse, duly educated and legally qualified. Let such teach to women, what every woman ought to know, and what her parents will very properlyobject to her hearing from almost any man. This is one of the mainreasons why I have, for twenty years past, advocated the training ofwomen for the medical profession; and one which countervails, in my mind, all possible objections to such a movement. And now, thank God, I amseeing the common sense of Great Britain, and indeed of every civilisednation, gradually coming round to that which seemed to me, when I firstconceived of it, a dream too chimerical to be cherished save insecret--the restoring woman to her natural share in that sacred office ofhealer, which she held in the Middle Ages, and from which she was thrustout during the sixteenth century. 

I am most happy to see, for instance, that the National Health Society, {15} which I earnestly recommend to the attention of my readers, announces a "Course of Lectures for Ladies on Elementary Physiology andHygiene, by Miss Chessar, " to which I am also most happy to see, governesses are admitted at half-fees. Alas! how much misery, disease, and even death, might have been prevented, had governesses been taughtsuch matters thirty years ago, I, for one, know too well. May the daysoon come when there will be educated women enough to give such lecturesthroughout these realms, to rich as well as poor, --for the rich, strangeto say, need them often as much as the poor do, --and that we may live tosee, in every great town, health classes for women as well as for men, sending forth year by year more young women and young men taught, notonly to take care of themselves and of their families, but to exercisemoral influence over their fellow-citizens, as champions in the battleagainst dirt and drunkenness, disease and death. 

There may be those who would answer--or rather, there would certainlyhave been those who would have so answered thirty years ago, before theso-called materialism of advanced science had taught us some practicalwisdom about education, and reminded people that they have bodies as wellas minds and souls--"You say, we are likely to grow weaklier, unhealthier. And if it were so, what matter? Mind makes the man, notbody. We do not want our children to be stupid giants and bravos; butclever, able, highly educated, however weakly Providence or the laws ofnature may have chosen to make them. Let them overstrain their brains alittle; let them contract their chests, and injure their digestion andtheir eyesight, by sitting at desks, poring over books. Intellect iswhat we want. Intellect makes money. Intellect makes the world. Wewould rather see our son a genius than an athlete. " Well: and so wouldI. But what if intellect alone does not even make money, save as Messrs. Dodson & Fogg, Sampson Brass, and Montagu Tigg were wont to make it, unless backed by an able, enduring, healthy physique, such as I haveseen, almost without exception, in those successful men of business whomI have had the honour and the pleasure of knowing? What if intellect, orwhat is now called intellect, did not make the world, or the smallestwheel or cog of it? What if, for want of obeying the laws of nature, parents bred up neither a genius nor an athlete, but only an incapableunhappy personage, with a huge upright forehead, like that of a ByzantineGreek, filled with some sort of pap instead of brains, and temptedalternately to fanaticism and strong drink? We must, in the greatmajority of cases have the corpus sanem if we want the mentem sanem; andhealthy bodies are the only trustworthy organs for healthy minds. Whichis cause and which is effect, I shall not stay to debate here. Butwherever we find a population generally weakly, stunted, scrofulous, wefind in them a corresponding type of brain, which cannot be trusted to dogood work; which is capable more or less of madness, whether solitary orepidemic. It may be very active; it may be very quick at catching at newand grand ideas--all the more quick, perhaps, on account of its ownsecret _malaise_ and self-discontent: but it will be irritable, spasmodic, hysterical. It will be apt to mistake capacity of talk forcapacity of action, excitement for earnestness, virulence for force, and, too often, cruelty for justice. It will lose manful independence, individuality, originality; and when men act, they will act, from theconsciousness of personal weakness, like sheep rushing over a hedge, leaning against each other, exhorting each other to be brave, and swayingabout in mobs and masses. These were the intellectual weaknesses which, as I read history, followed on physical degradation in Imperial Rome, inAlexandria, in Byzantium. Have we not seen them reappear, under fearfulforms, in Paris but the other day?

I do not blame; I do not judge. My theory, which I hold, and shall hold, to be fairly founded on a wide induction, forbids me to blame and tojudge: because it tells me that these defects are mainly physical; thatthose who exhibit them are mainly to be pitied, as victims of the sins orignorance of their forefathers. But it tells me too, that those who, professing to be educated men, and therefore bound to know better, treatthese physical phenomena as spiritual, healthy, and praiseworthy; whoeven exasperate them, that they may make capital out of the weaknesses offallen man, are the most contemptible and yet the most dangerous ofpublic enemies, let them cloak their quackery under whatsoever patriotic, or scientific, or even sacred words. 

There are those again honest, kindly, sensible, practical men, many ofthem; men whom I have no wish to offend; whom I had rather ask to teachme some of their own experience and common sense, which has learned todiscern, like good statesmen, not only what ought to be done, but whatcan be done--there are those, I say, who would sooner see this wholequestion let alone. Their feeling, as far as I can analyse it, seems tobe, that the evils of which I have been complaining, are on the wholeinevitable: or, if not, that we can mend so very little of them, that itis wisest to leave them alone altogether, lest, like certain sewers, "themore you stir them, the more they smell. " They fear lest we shouldunsettle the minds of the many for whom these evils will never be mended;lest we make them discontented; discontented with their houses, theiroccupations, their food, their whole social arrangements; and all invain. 

I should answer, in all courtesy and humility--for I sympathise deeplywith such men and women, and respect them deeply likewise--But are notpeople discontented already, from the lowest to the highest? And ought aman, in such a piecemeal, foolish, greedy, sinful world as this is, andalways has been, to be anything but discontented? If he thinks thatthings are going all right, must he not have a most beggarly conceptionof what going right means? And if things are not going right, can it beanything but good for him to see that they are not going right? Cantruth and fact harm any human being? I shall not believe so, as long asI have a Bible wherein to believe. For my part, I should like to makeevery man, woman, and child whom I meet discontented with themselves, even as I am discontented with myself. I should like to awaken in them, about their physical, their intellectual, their moral condition, thatdivine discontent which is the parent, first of upward aspiration andthen of self-control, thought, effort to fulfil that aspiration even inpart. For to be discontented with the divine discontent, and to beashamed with the noble shame, is the very germ and first upgrowth of allvirtue. Men begin at first, as boys begin when they grumble at theirschool and their schoolmasters, to lay the blame on others; to bediscontented with their circumstances--the things which stand aroundthem; and to cry, "Oh that I had this!" "Oh that I had that!" But thatway no deliverance lies. That discontent only ends in revolt andrebellion, social or political; and that, again, still in the sameworship of circumstances--but this time desperate--which ends, let itdisguise itself under what fine names it will, in what the old Greekscalled a tyranny; in which--as in the Spanish republics of America, andin France more than once--all have become the voluntary slaves of oneman, because each man fancies that the one man can improve hiscircumstances for him. 

But the wise man will learn, like Epictetus the heroic slave, the slaveof Epaphroditus, Nero's minion--and in what baser and ugliercircumstances could human being find himself?--to find out the secret ofbeing truly free; namely, to be discontented with no man and no thingsave himself. To say not--"Oh that I had this and that!" but "Oh that Iwere this and that!" Then, by God's help--and that heroic slave, heathenthough he was, believed and trusted in God's help--"I will make myselfthat which God has shown me that I ought to be and can be. "

Ten thousand a-year, or ten million a-year, as Epictetus saw full well, cannot mend that vulgar discontent with circumstances, which he hadfelt--and who with more right?--and conquered, and despised. For that isthe discontent of children, wanting always more holidays and more sweets. But I wish my readers to have, and to cherish, the discontent of men andwomen. 

Therefore I would make men and women discontented, with the divine andwholesome discontent, at their own physical frame, and at that of theirchildren. I would accustom their eyes to those precious heirlooms of thehuman race, the statues of the old Greeks; to their tender grandeur, their chaste healthfulness, their unconscious, because perfect, might:and say--There; these are tokens to you, and to all generations yetunborn, of what man could be once; of what he can be again if he willobey those laws of nature which are the voice of God. I would make themdiscontented with the ugliness and closeness of their dwellings; I wouldmake the men discontented with the fashion of their garments, and stillmore just now the women, of all ranks, with the fashion of theirs; andwith everything around them which they have the power of improving, if itbe at all ungraceful, superfluous, tawdry, ridiculous, unwholesome. Iwould make them discontented with what they call their education, and sayto them--You call the three Royal R's education? They are not education:no more is the knowledge which would enable you to take the highestprizes given by the Society of Arts, or any other body. They are noteducation: they are only instruction; a necessary groundwork, in an agelike this, for making practical use of your education: but not theeducation itself. 

And if they asked me, What then education meant? I should point them, first, I think, to noble old Lilly's noble old 'Euphues, ' of threehundred years ago, and ask them to consider what it says about education, and especially this passage concerning that mere knowledge which is now-a-days strangely miscalled education. "There are two principal andpeculiar gifts in the nature of man, knowledge and reason. The one"--thatis reason--"commandeth, and the other"--that is knowledge--"obeyeth. These things neither the whirling wheel of fortune can change, nor thedeceitful cavillings of worldlings separate, neither sickness abate, norage abolish. " And next I should point them to those pages in Mr. Gladstone's 'Juventus Mundi, ' where he describes the ideal training of aGreek youth in Homer's days; and say, --There: that is an education fitfor a really civilised man, even though he never saw a book in his life;the full, proportionate, harmonious educing--that is, bringing out anddeveloping--of all the faculties of his body, mind, and heart, till hebecomes at once a reverent yet a self-assured, a graceful and yet avaliant, an able and yet an eloquent personage. 

And if any should say to me--"But what has this to do with science?Homer's Greeks knew no science;" I should rejoin--But they had, pre-eminently above all ancient races which we know, the scientificinstinct; the teachableness and modesty; the clear eye and quick ear; thehearty reverence for fact and nature, and for the human body, and mind, and spirit; for human nature, in a word, in its completeness, as thehighest fact upon this earth. Therefore they became in after years, notonly the great colonisers and the great civilisers of the old world--themost practical people, I hold, which the world ever saw; but the parentsof all sound physics as well as of all sound metaphysics. Their veryreligion, in spite of its imperfections, helped forward their education, not in spite of, but by means of, that anthropomorphism which wesometimes too hastily decry. As Mr. Gladstone says in a passage which Imust quote at length--"As regarded all other functions of our nature, outside the domain of the life to Godward--all those functions which aresummed up in what St. Paul calls the flesh and the mind, the psychic andbodily life, the tendency of the system was to exalt the human element, by proposing a model of beauty, strength, and wisdom, in all theircombinations, so elevated that the effort to attain them required acontinual upward strain. It made divinity attainable; and thus iteffectually directed the thought and aim of man

 'Along the line of limitless desires. '

Such a scheme of religion, though failing grossly in the government ofthe passions, and in upholding the standard of moral duties, tendedpowerfully to produce a lofty self-respect, and a large, free, and variedconception of humanity. It incorporated itself in schemes of notablediscipline for mind and body, indeed of a lifelong education; and thesehabits of mind and action had their marked results (to omit many othergreatnesses) in a philosophy, literature, and art, which remain to thisday unrivalled or unsurpassed. "

So much those old Greeks did for their own education, without science andwithout Christianity. We who have both: what might we not do, if wewould be true to our advantages, and to ourselves?

THE TWO BREATHS. A LECTURE DELIVERED AT WINCHESTER, MAY 31, 1869. 

Ladies, --I have been honoured by a second invitation to address you here, from the lady to whose public spirit the establishment of these lecturesis due. I dare not refuse it: because it gives me an opportunity ofspeaking on a matter, knowledge and ignorance about which may seriouslyaffect your health and happiness, and that of the children with whom youmay have to do. I must apologize if I say many things which are wellknown to many persons in this room: they ought to be well known to all;and it is generally best to assume total ignorance in one's hearers, andto begin from the beginning. 

I shall try to be as simple as possible; to trouble you as little aspossible with scientific terms; to be practical; and at the same time, ifpossible, interesting. 

I should wish to call this lecture "The Two Breaths:" not merely "TheBreath;" and for this reason: every time you breathe, you breathe twodifferent breaths; you take in one, you give out another. Thecomposition of those two breaths is different. Their effects aredifferent. The breath which has been breathed out must not be breathedin again. To tell you why it must not would lead me into anatomicaldetails, not quite in place here as yet: though the day will come, Itrust, when every woman entrusted with the care of children will beexpected to know something about them. But this I may say--Those whohabitually take in fresh breath will probably grow up large, strong, ruddy, cheerful, active, clear-headed, fit for their work. Those whohabitually take in the breath which has been breathed out by themselves, or any other living creature, will certainly grow up, if they grow up atall, small, weak, pale, nervous, depressed, unfit for work, and temptedcontinually to resort to stimulants, and become drunkards. 

If you want to see how different the breath breathed out is from thebreath taken in, you have only to try a somewhat cruel experiment, butone which people too often try upon themselves, their children, and theirwork-people. If you take any small animal with lungs like your own--amouse, for instance--and force it to breathe no air but what you havebreathed already; if you put it in a close box, and while you take inbreath from the outer air, send out your breath through a tube, into thatbox, the animal will soon faint; if you go on long with this process, itwill die. 

Take a second instance, which I beg to press most seriously on the noticeof mothers, governesses, and nurses: If you allow a child to get into thehabit of sleeping with its head under the bed-clothes, and therebybreathing its own breath over and over again, that child will assuredlygrow pale, weak, and ill. Medical men have cases on record of scrofulaappearing in children previously healthy, which could only be accountedfor from this habit, and which ceased when the habit stopped. Let meagain entreat your attention to this undoubted fact. 

Take another instance, which is only too common: If you are in a crowdedroom, with plenty of fire and lights and company, doors and windows allshut tight, how often you feel faint--so faint, that you may requiresmelling-salts or some other stimulant. The cause of your faintness isjust the same as that of the mouse's fainting in the box: you and yourfriends, and, as I shall show you presently, the fire and the candleslikewise, having been all breathing each other's breaths, over and overagain, till the air has become unfit to support life. You are doing yourbest to enact over again the Highland tragedy, of which Sir James Simpsontells in his lectures to the working-classes of Edinburgh, when at aChristmas meeting thirty-six persons danced all night in a small roomwith a low ceiling, keeping the doors and windows shut. The atmosphereof the room was noxious beyond description; and the effect was, thatseven of the party were soon after seized with typhus fever, of which twodied. You are inflicting on yourselves the torments of the poor dog, whois kept at the Grotto del Cane, near Naples, to be stupified, for theamusement of visitors, by the carbonic acid gas of the Grotto, andbrought to life again by being dragged into the fresh air; nay, you areinflicting upon yourselves the torments of the famous Black Hole ofCalcutta; and, if there was no chimney in the room, by which some freshair could enter, the candles would soon burn blue--as they do, you know, when ghosts appear; your brains become disturbed; and you yourselves runthe risk of becoming ghosts, and the candles of actually going out. 

Of this last fact there is no doubt; for if, instead of putting a mouseinto the box, you will put a lighted candle, and breathe into the tube, as before, however gently, you will in a short time put the candle out. 

Now, how is this? First, what is the difference between the breath youtake in and the breath you give out? And next, why has it a similareffect on animal life and a lighted candle?

The difference is this. The breath which you take in is, or ought to be, pure air, composed, on the whole, of oxygen and nitrogen, with a minuteportion of carbonic acid. 

The breath which you give out is an impure air, to which has been added, among other matters which will not support life, an excess of carbonicacid. 

That this is the fact you can prove for yourselves by a simpleexperiment. Get a little lime water at the chemist's, and breathe intoit through a glass tube; your breath will at once make the lime-watermilky. The carbonic acid of your breath has laid hold of the lime, andmade it visible as white carbonate of lime--in plain English, as commonchalk. 

Now, I do not wish, as I said, to load your memories with scientificterms: but I beseech you to remember at least these two--oxygen gas andcarbonic acid gas; and to remember that, as surely as oxygen feeds thefire of life, so surely does carbonic acid put it out. 

I say, "the fire of life. " In that expression lies the answer to oursecond question: Why does our breath produce a similar effect upon themouse and the lighted candle? Every one of us is, as it were, a livingfire. Were we not, how could we be always warmer than the air outsideus? There is a process going on perpetually in each of us, similar tothat by which coals are burnt in the fire, oil in a lamp, wax in acandle, and the earth itself in a volcano. To keep each of those firesalight, oxygen is needed; and the products of combustion, as they arecalled, are more or less the same in each case--carbonic acid and steam. 

These facts justify the expression I just made use of--which may haveseemed to some of you fantastical--that the fire and the candles in thecrowded room were breathing the same breath as you were. It is but tootrue. An average fire in the grate requires, to keep it burning, as muchoxygen as several human beings do; each candle or lamp must have itsshare of oxygen likewise, and that a very considerable one; and anaverage gas-burner--pray attend to this, you who live in rooms lightedwith gas--consumes as much oxygen as several candles. All alike aremaking carbonic acid. The carbonic acid of the fire happily escapes upthe chimney in the smoke: but the carbonic acid from the human beings andthe candles remains to poison the room, unless it be ventilated. 

Now, I think you may understand one of the simplest, and yet mostterrible, cases of want of ventilation--death by the fumes of charcoal. Ahuman being shut up in a room, of which every crack is closed, with a panof burning charcoal, falls asleep, never to wake again. His inward fireis competing with the fire of the charcoal for the oxygen of the room;both are making carbonic acid out of it: but the charcoal, being thestronger of the two, gets all the oxygen to itself, and leaves the humanbeing nothing to inhale but the carbonic acid which it has made. Thehuman being, being the weaker, dies first: but the charcoal dies also. When it has exhausted all the oxygen of the room, it cools, goes out, andis found in the morning half-consumed beside its victim. If you put agiant or an elephant, I should conceive, into that room, instead of ahuman being, the case would be reversed for a time: the elephant wouldput out the burning charcoal by the carbonic acid from his mighty lungs;and then, when he had exhausted all the air in the room, die likewise ofhis own carbonic acid. 

* * * * *

Now, I think, we may see what ventilation means, and why it is needed. 

Ventilation means simply letting out the foul air, and letting in thefresh air; letting out the air which has been breathed by men or bycandles, and letting in the air which has not. To understand how to dothat, we must remember a most simple chemical law, that a gas as it iswarmed expands, and therefore becomes lighter; as it cools, it contracts, and becomes heavier. 

Now the carbonic acid in the breath which comes out of our mouth is warm, lighter than the air, and rises to the ceiling; and therefore in anyunventilated room full of people, there is a layer of foul air along theceiling. You might soon test that for yourselves, if you could mount aladder and put your heads there aloft. You do test it for yourselveswhen you sit in the galleries of churches and theatres, where the air ispalpably more foul, and therefore more injurious, than down below. 

Where, again, work-people are employed in a crowded house of manystoreys, the health of those who work on the upper floors always suffersmost. 

In the old monkey-house of the Zoological Gardens, when the cages were onthe old plan, tier upon tier, the poor little fellows in the uppermosttier--so I have been told--always died first of the monkey'sconstitutional complaint, consumption, simply from breathing the warmbreath of their friends below. But since the cages have been altered, and made to range side by side from top to bottom, consumption--Iunderstand--has vastly diminished among them. 

The first question in ventilation, therefore, is to get this carbonicacid safe out of the room, while it is warm and light and close to theceiling; for if you do not, this happens--The carbonic acid gas cools andbecomes heavier; for carbonic acid, at the same temperature as commonair, is so much heavier than common air, that you may actually--if youare handy enough--turn it from one vessel to another, and pour out foryour enemy a glass of invisible poison. So down to the floor this heavycarbonic acid comes, and lies along it, just as it lies often in thebottom of old wells, or old brewers' vats, as a stratum of poison, killing occasionally the men who descend into it. Hence, as foolish apractice as I know is that of sleeping on the floor; for towards thesmall hours, when the room gets cold, the sleeper on the floor isbreathing carbonic acid. 

And here one word to those ladies who interest themselves with the poor. The poor are too apt in times of distress to pawn their bedsteads andkeep their beds. Never, if you have influence, let that happen. Keepthe bedstead, whatever else may go, to save the sleeper from the carbonicacid on the floor. 

How, then, shall we get rid of the foul air at the top of the room? Afterall that has been written and tried on ventilation, I know no simplermethod than putting into the chimney one of Arnott's ventilators, whichmay be bought and fixed for a few shillings; always remembering that itmust be fixed into the chimney as near the ceiling as possible. I canspeak of these ventilators from twenty-five years' experience. Living ina house with low ceilings, liable to become overcharged with carbonicacid, which produces sleepiness in the evening, I have found that theseventilators keep the air fresh and pure; and I consider the presence ofone of these ventilators in a room more valuable than three or four feetadditional height of ceiling. I have found, too, that their workingproves how necessary they are, from this simple fact:--You would supposethat, as the ventilator opens freely into the chimney, the smoke would beblown down through it in high winds, and blacken the ceiling: but this isjust what does not happen. If the ventilator be at all properly poised, so as to shut with a violent gust of wind, it will at all other momentskeep itself permanently open; proving thereby that there is an up-draughtof heated air continually escaping from the ceiling up the chimney. Another very simple method of ventilation is employed in those excellentcottages which Her Majesty has built for her labourers round Windsor. Over each door a sheet of perforated zinc, some 18 inches square, isfixed; allowing the foul air to escape into the passage; and in theceiling of the passage a similar sheet of zinc, allowing it to escapeinto the roof. Fresh air, meanwhile, should be obtained from outside, bypiercing the windows, or otherwise. And here let me give one hint to allbuilders of houses. If possible, let bedroom windows open at the top aswell as at the bottom. 

Let me impress the necessity of using some such contrivances, not only onparents and educators, but on those who employ work-people, and above allon those who employ young women in shops or in work-rooms. What theircondition may be in this city I know not; but most painful it has been tome in other places, when passing through warehouses or work-rooms, to seethe pale, sodden, and, as the French would say "etiolated" countenancesof the girls who were passing the greater part of the day in them; andpainful, also, to breathe an atmosphere of which habit had, alas! madethem unconscious, but which to one coming out of the open air wasaltogether noxious, and shocking also; for it was fostering the seeds ofdeath, not only in the present but in future generations. 

Why should this be? Every one will agree that good ventilation isnecessary in a hospital, because people cannot get well without freshair. Do they not see that by the same reasoning good ventilation isnecessary everywhere, because people cannot remain well without freshair? Let me entreat those who employ women in work-rooms, if they haveno time to read through such books as Dr. Andrew Combe's 'Physiologyapplied to Health and Education, ' and Madame de Wahl's 'Practical Hintson the Moral, Mental, and Physical Training of Girls, ' to procure certaintracts published by Messrs. Jarrold, Paternoster Row, for the Ladies'Sanitary Association; especially one which bears on this subject, 'TheBlack-Hole in our own Bedrooms;' Dr. Lankester's 'School Manual ofHealth;' or a manual on ventilation, published by the MetropolitanWorking Classes Association for the Improvement of Public Health. 

I look forward--I say it openly--to some period of higher civilisation, when the Acts of Parliament for the ventilation of factories andworkshops shall be largely extended, and made far more stringent; whenofficers of public health shall be empowered to enforce the ventilationof every room in which persons are employed for hire; and empowered alsoto demand a proper system of ventilation for every new house, whether incountry or in town. To that, I believe, we must come: but I had soonerfar see these improvements carried out, as befits the citizens of a freecountry, in the spirit of the Gospel rather than in that of the Law;carried out, not compulsorily and from fear of fines, but voluntarily, from a sense of duty, honour, and humanity. I appeal, therefore, to thegood feeling of all whom it may concern, whether the health of those whomthey employ, and therefore the supply of fresh air which they absolutelyneed, are not matters for which they are not, more or less, responsibleto their country and their God. 

And if any excellent person of the old school should answer me--"Why makeall this fuss about ventilation? Our forefathers got on very wellwithout it"--I must answer that, begging their pardons, our ancestors didnothing of the kind. Our ancestors got on usually very ill in thesematters: and when they got on well, it was because they had goodventilation in spite of themselves. 

First. They got on very ill. To quote a few remarkable instances oflongevity, or to tell me that men were larger and stronger on the averagein old times, is to yield to the old fallacy of fancying that savageswere peculiarly healthy, because those who were seen were active andstrong. The simple answer is, that the strong alone survived, while themajority died from the severity of the training. Savages do not increasein number; and our ancestors increased but very slowly for manycenturies. I am not going to disgust my audience with statistics ofdisease: but knowing something, as I happen to do, of the social stateand of the health of the Middle and Elizabethan Ages, I have nohesitation in saying that the average of disease and death was fargreater then than it is now. Epidemics of many kinds, typhus, ague, plague--all diseases which were caused more or less by bad air--devastatedthis land and Europe in those days with a horrible intensity, to whicheven the choleras of our times are mild. The back streets, thehospitals, the gaols, the barracks, the camps--every place in which anylarge number of persons congregated, were so many nests of pestilence, engendered by uncleanliness, which denied alike the water which was drunkand the air which was breathed; and as a single fact, of which the tablesof insurance companies assure us, the average of human life in Englandhas increased twenty-five per cent. Since the reign of George I. , owingsimply to our more rational and cleanly habits of life. 

But secondly, I said that when our ancestors got on well, they did sobecause they got ventilation in spite of themselves. Luckily for them, their houses were ill-built; their doors and windows would not shut. Theyhad lattice-windowed houses, too; to live in one of which, as I cantestify from long experience, is as thoroughly ventilating as living in alantern with the horn broken out. It was because their houses were fullof draughts, and still more, in the early middle age, because they had noglass, and stopped out the air only by a shutter at night, that theysought for shelter rather than for fresh air, of which they sometimes hadtoo much; and, to escape the wind, built their houses in holes, such asthat in which the old city of Winchester stands. Shelter, I believe, asmuch as the desire to be near fish in Lent, and to occupy the richalluvium of the valleys, made the monks of Old England choose the river-banks for the sites of their abbeys. They made a mistake therein, which, like most mistakes, did not go unpunished. These low situations, especially while the forests were yet thick on the hills around, were theperennial haunts of fever and ague, produced by subtle vegetable poisons, carried in the carbonic acid given off by rotting vegetation. So there, again, they fell in with man's old enemy--bad air. 

Still, as long as the doors and windows did not shut, some freecirculation of air remained. But now, our doors and windows shut onlytoo tight. We have plate-glass instead of lattices; and we have replacedthe draughty and smoky, but really wholesome open chimney, with its widecorners and settles, by narrow registers, and even by stoves. We havedone all we can, in fact, to seal ourselves up hermetically from theouter air, and to breathe our own breaths over and over again; and we paythe penalty of it in a thousand ways unknown to our ancestors, throughwhose rooms all the winds of heaven whistled, and who were glad enough toshelter themselves from draughts in the sitting-room by the high screenround the fire, and in the sleeping-room by the thick curtains of thefour-post bedstead, which is now rapidly disappearing before a highercivilisation. We therefore absolutely require to make for ourselves thevery ventilation from which our ancestors tried to escape. 

But, ladies, there is an old and true proverb, that you may bring a horseto the water, but you cannot make him drink. And in like wise it is tootrue, that you may bring people to the fresh air, but you cannot makethem breathe it. Their own folly, or the folly of their parents andeducators, prevents their lungs being duly filled and duly emptied. Therefore, the blood is not duly oxygenated, and the whole system goeswrong. 

Paleness, weakness, consumption, scrofula, and too many other ailments, are the consequences of ill-filled lungs. For without well-filled lungs, robust health is impossible. 

And if any one shall answer--"We do not want robust health so much asintellectual attainment. The mortal body, being the lower organ, musttake its chance, and be even sacrificed, if need be, to the higherorgan--the immortal mind:"--To such I reply, You cannot do it. The lawsof nature, which are the express will of God, laugh such attempts toscorn. Every organ of the body is formed out of the blood; and if theblood be vitiated, every organ suffers in proportion to its delicacy; andthe brain, being the most delicate and highly specialised of all organs, suffers most of all and soonest of all, as every one knows who has triedto work his brain when his digestion was the least out of order. Nay, the very morals will suffer. From ill-filled lungs, which signify ill-repaired blood, arise year by year an amount not merely of disease, butof folly, temper, laziness, intemperance, madness, and, let me tell youfairly, crime--the sum of which will never be known till that great daywhen men shall be called to account for all deeds done in the body, whether they be good or evil. 

I must refer you on this subject again to Andrew Combe's 'Physiology, 'especially chapters iv. And vii. ; and also to chapter x. Of Madame deWahl's excellent book. I will only say this shortly, that the three mostcommon causes of ill-filled lungs, in children and in young ladies, arestillness, silence, and stays. 

First, stillness; a sedentary life, and want of exercise. A girl is keptfor hours sitting on a form writing or reading, to do which she must leanforward; and if her schoolmistress cruelly attempts to make her situpright, and thereby keep the spine in an attitude for which Nature didnot intend it, she is thereby doing her best to bring on that disease, sofearfully common in girls' schools, lateral curvature of the spine. Butpractically the girl will stoop forward. And what happens? The lowerribs are pressed into the body, thereby displacing more or less somethinginside. The diaphragm in the meantime, which is the very bellows of thelungs, remains loose; the lungs are never properly filled or emptied; andan excess of carbonic acid accumulates at the bottom of them. Whatfollows? Frequent sighing to get rid of it; heaviness of head;depression of the whole nervous system under the influence of the poisonof the lungs; and when the poor child gets up from her weary work, whatis the first thing she probably does? She lifts up her chest, stretches, yawns, and breathes deeply--Nature's voice, Nature's instinctive cure, which is probably regarded as ungraceful, as what is called "lolling" is. As if sitting upright was not an attitude in itself essentiallyungraceful, and such as no artist would care to draw. As if "lolling, "which means putting the body in the attitude of the most perfect easecompatible with a fully expanded chest, was not in itself essentiallygraceful, and to be seen in every reposing figure in Greek bas-reliefsand vases; graceful, and like all graceful actions, healthful at the sametime. The only tolerably wholesome attitude of repose, which I seeallowed in average school-rooms, is lying on the back on the floor, or ona sloping board, in which case the lungs must be fully expanded. Buteven so, a pillow, or some equivalent, ought to be placed under the smallof the back: or the spine will be strained at its very weakest point. 

I now go on to the second mistake--enforced silence. Moderate readingaloud is good: but where there is any tendency to irritability of throator lungs, too much moderation cannot be used. You may as well try tocure a diseased lung by working it, as to cure a lame horse by gallopinghim. But where the breathing organs are of average health, let it besaid once and for all, that children and young people cannot make toomuch noise. The parents who cannot bear the noise of their children haveno right to have brought them into the world. The schoolmistress whoenforces silence on her pupils is committing--unintentionally no doubt, but still committing--an offence against reason, worthy only of aconvent. Every shout, every burst of laughter, every song--nay, in thecase of infants, as physiologists well know, every moderate fit ofcrying--conduces to health, by rapidly filling and emptying the lung, andchanging the blood more rapidly from black to red, that is, from death tolife. Andrew Combe tells a story of a large charity school, in which theyoung girls were, for the sake of their health, shut up in the hall andschool-room during play hours, from November till March, and no rompingor noise allowed. The natural consequences were, the great majority ofthem fell ill; and I am afraid that a great deal of illness has been fromtime to time contracted in certain school-rooms, simply through this onecause of enforced silence. Some cause or other there must be for theamount of ill-health and weakliness which prevails especially among girlsof the middle classes in towns, who have not, poor things, theopportunities which richer girls have, of keeping themselves in stronghealth by riding, skating, archery--that last quite an admirable exercisefor the chest and lungs, and far preferable to croquet, which involvestoo much unwholesome stooping. --Even playing at ball, if milliners andshop-girls had room to indulge in one after their sedentary work, mightbring fresh spirits to many a heart, and fresh colour to many a cheek. Ispoke just now of the Greeks. I suppose you will all allow that theGreeks were, as far as we know, the most beautiful race which the worldever saw. Every educated man knows that they were also the cleverest ofall races; and, next to his Bible, thanks God for Greek literature. 

Now, these people had made physical as well as intellectual education ascience as well as a study. Their women practised graceful, and in somecases even athletic, exercises. They developed, by a free and healthylife, those figures which remain everlasting and unapproachable models ofhuman beauty: but--to come to my third point--they wore no stays. Thefirst mention of stays that I have ever found is in the letters of dearold Synesius, Bishop of Cyrene, on the Greek coast of Africa, about fourhundred years after the Christian era. He tells us how, when he wasshipwrecked on a remote part of the coast, and he and the rest of thepassengers were starving on cockles and limpets, there was among them aslave girl out of the far East, who had a pinched wasp-waist, such as youmay see on the old Hindoo sculptures, and such as you may see in anystreet in a British town. And when the Greek ladies of the neighbourhoodfound her out, they sent for her from house to house, to behold, withastonishment and laughter, this new and prodigious waist, with which itseemed to them it was impossible for a human being to breathe or live;and they petted the poor girl, and fed her, as they might a dwarf or agiantess, till she got quite fat and comfortable, while her owners hadnot enough to eat. So strange and ridiculous seemed our present fashionto the descendants of those who, centuries before, had imagined, becausethey had seen living and moving, those glorious statues which we pretendto admire, but refuse to imitate. 

It seems to me that a few centuries hence, when mankind has learnt tofear God more, and therefore to obey more strictly those laws of natureand of science which are the will of God--it seems to me, I say, that inthose days the present fashion of tight lacing will be looked back uponas a contemptible and barbarous superstition, denoting a very low levelof civilisation in the peoples which have practised it. That forgenerations past women should have been in the habit--not to please men, who do not care about the matter as a point of beauty--but simply to viewith each other in obedience to something called fashion--that theyshould, I say, have been in the habit of deliberately crushing that partof the body which should be specially left free, contracting anddisplacing their lungs, their heart, and all the most vital and importantorgans, and entailing thereby disease, not only on themselves but ontheir children after them; that for forty years past physicians shouldhave been telling them of the folly of what they have been doing: andthat they should as yet, in the great majority of cases, not only turn adeaf ear to all warnings, but actually deny the offence, of which oneglance of the physician or the sculptor, who know what shape the humanbody ought to be, brings them in guilty: this, I say, is an instanceof--what shall I call it?--which deserves at once the lash, not merely ofthe satirist, but of any theologian who really believes that God made thephysical universe. Let me, I pray you, appeal to your common sense for amoment. When any one chooses a horse or a dog, whether for strength, forspeed, or for any other useful purpose, the first thing almost to belooked at is the girth round the ribs; the room for heart and lungs. Exactly in proportion to that will be the animal's general healthiness, power of endurance, and value in many other ways. If you will look ateminent lawyers and famous orators, who have attained a healthy old age, you will see that in every case they are men, like the late LordPalmerston, and others whom I could mention, of remarkable size, notmerely in the upper, but in the lower part of the chest; men who had, therefore, a peculiar power of using the diaphragm to fill and to clearthe lungs, and therefore to oxygenate the blood of the whole body. Now, it is just these lower ribs, across which the diaphragm is stretched likethe head of a drum, which stays contract to a minimum. If you advisedowners of horses and hounds to put their horses or their hounds intostays, and lace them up tight, in order to increase their beauty, youwould receive, I doubt not, a very courteous, but certainly a verydecided, refusal to do that which would spoil not merely the animalsthemselves, but the whole stud or the whole kennel for years to come. Andif you advised an orator to put himself into tight stays, he, no doubt, again would give a courteous answer; but he would reply--if he was areally educated man--that to comply with your request would involve hisgiving up public work, under the probable penalty of being dead withinthe twelvemonth. 

And how much work of every kind, intellectual as well as physical, isspoiled or hindered; how many deaths occur from consumption and othercomplaints which are the result of this habit of tight lacing, is knownpartly to the medical men, who lift up their voices in vain, and knownfully to Him who will not interfere with the least of His own physicallaws to save human beings from the consequences of their own wilfulfolly. 

And now--to end this lecture with more pleasing thoughts--What becomes ofthis breath which passes from your lips? Is it merely harmful; merelywaste? God forbid! God has forbidden that anything should be merelyharmful or merely waste in this so wise and well-made world. Thecarbonic acid which passes from your lips at every breath--ay, even thatwhich oozes from the volcano crater when the eruption is past--is aprecious boon to thousands of things of which you have daily need. Indeedthere is a sort of hint at physical truth in the old fairy tale of thegirl, from whose lips, as she spoke, fell pearls and diamonds; for thecarbonic acid of your breath may help hereafter to make the purecarbonate of lime of a pearl, or the still purer carbon of a diamond. Nay, it may go--in such a world of transformations do we live--to makeatoms of coal strata, which shall lie buried for ages beneath deep seas, shall be upheaved in continents which are yet unborn, and there be burntfor the use of a future race of men, and resolved into their originalelements. Coal, wise men tell us, is on the whole breath and sunlight;the breath of living creatures who have lived in the vast swamps andforests of some primaeval world, and the sunlight which transmuted thatbreath into the leaves and stems of trees, magically locked up for agesin that black stone, to become, when it is burnt at last, light andcarbonic acid, as it was at first. For though you must not breathe yourbreath again, you may at least eat your breath, if you will allow the sunto transmute it for you into vegetables; or you may enjoy its fragranceand its colour in the shape of a lily or a rose. When you walk in asunlit garden, every word you speak, every breath you breathe, is feedingthe plants and flowers around. The delicate surface of the green leavesabsorbs the carbonic acid, and parts it into its elements, retaining thecarbon to make woody fibre, and courteously returning you the oxygen tomingle with the fresh air, and be inhaled by your lungs once more. Thusdo you feed the plants; just as the plants feed you; while the great life-giving sun feeds both; and the geranium standing in the sick child'swindow does not merely rejoice his eye and mind by its beauty andfreshness, but repays honestly the trouble spent on it; absorbing thebreath which the child needs not, and giving to him the breath which heneeds. 

So are the services of all things constituted according to a Divine andwonderful order, and knit together in mutual dependence and mutualhelpfulness. --A fact to be remembered with hope and comfort; but alsowith awe and fear. For as in that which is above nature, so in natureitself; he that breaks one physical law is guilty of all. The wholeuniverse, as it were, takes up arms against him; and all nature, with hernumberless and unseen powers, is ready to avenge herself on him, and onhis children after him, he knows not when nor where. He, on the otherhand, who obeys the laws of nature with his whole heart and mind, willfind all things working together to him for good. He is at peace withthe physical universe. He is helped and befriended alike by the sunabove his head and the dust beneath his feet: because he is obeying thewill and mind of Him who made sun, and dust, and all things; and who hasgiven them a law which cannot be broken. 

THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE. 

The more I have contemplated that ancient story of the Fall, the more ithas seemed to me within the range of probability, and even of experience. It must have happened somewhere for the first time; for it has happenedonly too many times since. It has happened, as far as I can ascertain, in every race, and every age, and every grade of civilisation. It ishappening round us now in every region of the globe. Always andeverywhere, it seems to me, have poor human beings been tempted to eat ofsome "tree of knowledge, " that they may be, even for an hour, as gods;wise, but with a false wisdom; careless, but with a frantic carelessness;and happy, but with a happiness which, when the excitement is past, leaves too often--as with that hapless pair in Eden--depression, shame, and fear. Everywhere, and in all ages, as far as I can ascertain, hasman been inventing stimulants and narcotics to supply that want ofvitality of which he is so painfully aware; and has asked nature, and notGod, to clear the dull brain, and comfort the weary spirit. 

This has been, and will be perhaps for many a century to come, almost themost fearful failing of this poor, exceptional, over-organised, diseased, and truly fallen being called man, who is in doubt daily whether he be agod or an ape; and in trying wildly to become the former, ends but toooften in becoming the latter. 

For man, whether savage or civilised, feels, and has felt in every age, that there is something wrong with him. He usually confesses thisfact--as is to be expected--of his fellow-men, rather than of himself;and shows his sense that there is something wrong with them bycomplaining of, hating, and killing them. But he cannot always concealfrom himself the fact that he, too, is wrong, as well as they; and as hewill not usually kill himself, he tries wild ways to make himself atleast feel--if not to be--somewhat "better. " Philosophers may bid him becontent; and tell him that he is what he ought to be, and what nature hasmade him. But he cares nothing for the philosophers. He knows, usually, that he is not what he ought to be; that he carries about with him, inmost cases, a body more or less diseased and decrepit, incapable of doingall the work which he feels that he himself could do, or expressing allthe emotions which he himself longs to express; a dull brain and dullsenses, which cramp the eager infinity within him; as--so Goethe oncesaid with pity--the horse's single hoof cramps the fine intelligence andgenerosity of his nature, and forbids him even to grasp an object, likethe more stupid cat, and baser monkey. And man has a self, too, within, from which he longs too often to escape, as from a household ghost; whopulls out, at unfortunately rude and unwelcome hours, the ledger ofmemory. And so when the tempter--be he who he may--says to him "Takethis, and you will 'feel better'--Take this, and you shall be as gods, knowing good and evil:" then, if the temptation was, as the old storysays, too much for man while healthy and unfallen, what must it be forhis unhealthy and fallen children? In vain we say to man--

 "'Tis life, not death, for which you pant; 'Tis life, whereof your nerves are scant; More life, and fuller, that you want. "

And your tree of knowledge is not the tree of life: it is, in every case, the tree of death; of decrepitude, madness, misery. He prefers the voiceof the tempter--"Thou shalt not surely die. " Nay, he will say atlast, --"Better be as gods awhile, and die: than be the crawling, insufficient thing I am; and live. "

He--did I say? Alas! I must say she likewise. The sacred story is onlytoo true to fact, when it represents the woman as falling, not merely atthe same time as the man, but before the man. Only let us remember thatit represents the woman as tempted; tempted, seemingly, by a rationalbeing, of lower race, and yet of superior cunning; who must, therefore, have fallen before the woman. Who or what the being was, who is calledthe Serpent in our translation of Genesis, it is not for me to say. Wehave absolutely, I think, no facts from which to judge; and Rabbinicaltraditions need trouble no man much. But I fancy that a missionary, preaching on this story to Negroes; telling them plainly that the"Serpent" meant the first Obeah man; and then comparing the experiencesof that hapless pair in Eden, with their own after certain orgies not yetextinct in Africa and elsewhere, would be only too well understood: sowell, indeed, that he might run some risk of eating himself, not of thetree of life, but of that of death. The sorcerer or sorceress temptingthe woman; and then the woman tempting the man; this seems to be, certainly among savage peoples, and, alas! too often among civilisedpeoples also, the usual course of the world-wide tragedy. 

But--paradoxical as it may seem--the woman's yielding before the man isnot altogether to her dishonour, as those old monks used to allege whohated, and too often tortured, the sex whom they could not enjoy. It isnot to the woman's dishonour, if she felt, before her husband, higheraspirations than those after mere animal pleasure. To be as gods, knowing good and evil, is a vain and foolish, but not a base and brutal, wish. She proved herself thereby--though at an awful cost--a woman, andnot an animal. And indeed the woman's more delicate organisation, hermore vivid emotions, her more voluble fancy, as well as her mere physicalweakness and weariness, have been to her, in all ages, a special sourceof temptation which it is to her honour that she has resisted so muchbetter than the physically stronger, and therefore more culpable, man. 

As for what the tree of knowledge was, there really is no need for us towaste our time in guessing. If it was not one plant, then it wasanother. It may have been something which has long since perished offthe earth. It may have been--as some learned men have guessed--thesacred Soma, or Homa, of the early Brahmin race; and that may have been astill existing narcotic species of Asclepias. It certainly was not thevine. The language of the Hebrew Scripture concerning it, and the sacreduse to which it is consecrated in the Gospels, forbid that notionutterly; at least to those who know enough of antiquity to pass by, witha smile, the theory that the wines mentioned in Scripture were notintoxicating. And yet--as a fresh corroboration of what I am trying tosay--how fearfully has that noble gift to man been abused for the sameend as a hundred other vegetable products, ever since those mythic dayswhen Dionusos brought the vine from the far East, amid troops of humanMaenads and half-human Satyrs; and the Bacchae tore Pentheus in pieces onCithaeron, for daring to intrude upon their sacred rites; and since thosehistoric days, too, when, less than two hundred years before theChristian era, the Bacchic rites spread from Southern Italy into Etruria, and thence to the matrons of Rome; and under the guidance of PoeniaAnnia, a Campanian lady, took at last shapes of which no man must speak, but which had to be put down with terrible but just severity, by theConsuls and the Senate. 

But it matters little, I say, what this same tree of knowledge was. Wasevery vine on earth destroyed to-morrow, and every vegetable also fromwhich alcohol is now distilled, man would soon discover something elsewherewith to satisfy the insatiate craving. Has he not done so already?Has not almost every people had its tree of knowledge, often more deadlythan any distilled liquor, from the absinthe of the cultivated Frenchman, and the opium of the cultivated Chinese, down to the bush-poisonswherewith the tropic sorcerer initiates his dupes into the knowledge ofgood and evil, and the fungus from which the Samoiede extracts in autumna few days of brutal happiness, before the setting in of the long sixmonths' night? God grant that modern science may not bring to lightfresh substitutes for alcohol, opium, and the rest; and give the whiteraces, in that state of effeminate and godless quasi-civilisation which Isometimes fear is creeping upon them, fresh means of destroyingthemselves delicately and pleasantly off the face of the earth. 

It is said by some that drunkenness is on the increase in this island. Ihave no trusty proof of it: but I can believe it possible; for everycause of drunkenness seems on the increase. Overwork of body and mind;circumstances which depress health; temptation to drink, and drink again, at every corner of the streets; and finally, money, and ever more money, in the hands of uneducated people, who have not the desire, and too oftennot the means, of spending it in any save the lowest pleasures. These, it seems to me, are the true causes of drunkenness, increasing or not. And if we wish to become a more temperate nation, we must lessen them, ifwe cannot eradicate them. 

First, overwork. We all live too fast, and work too hard. "All thingsare full of labour, man cannot utter it. " In the heavy struggle forexistence which goes on all around us, each man is tasked more andmore--if he be really worth buying and using--to the utmost of his powersall day long. The weak have to compete on equal terms with the strong;and crave, in consequence, for artificial strength. How we shall stopthat I know not, while every man is "making haste to be rich, andpiercing himself through with many sorrows, and falling into foolish andhurtful lusts, which drown men in destruction and perdition. " How weshall stop that, I say, I know not. The old prophet may have been rightwhen he said, "Surely it is not of the Lord that the people shall labourin the very fire, and weary themselves for very vanity;" and in somejuster, wiser, more sober system of society--somewhat more like theKingdom of The Father come on earth--it may be that poor human beingswill not need to toil so hard, and to keep themselves up to their work bystimulants, but will have time to sit down, and look around them, andthink of God, and of God's quiet universe, with something of quiet inthemselves; something of rational leisure, and manful sobriety of mind, as well as of body. 

But it seems to me also, that in such a state of society, when--as it wasonce well put--"every one has stopped running about like rats:"--thatthose who work hard, whether with muscle or with brain, would not besurrounded, as now, with every circumstance which tempts toward drink; byevery circumstance which depresses the vital energies, and leaves them aneasy prey to pestilence itself; by bad light, bad air, bad food, badwater, bad smells, bad occupations, which weaken the muscles, cramp thechest, disorder the digestion. Let any rational man, fresh from thecountry--in which I presume God, having made it, meant all men, more orless, to live--go through the back streets of any city, or through wholedistricts of the "black countries" of England: and then ask himself--Isit the will of God that His human children should live and toil in suchdens, such deserts, such dark places of the earth? Let him askhimself--Can they live and toil there without contracting a probablydiseased habit of body; without contracting a certainly dull, weary, sordid habit of mind, which craves for any pleasure, however brutal, toescape from its own stupidity and emptiness? When I run through, byrail, certain parts of the iron-producing country--streets of furnaces, collieries, slag heaps, mud, slop, brick house-rows, smoke, dirt--andthat is all; and when I am told, whether truly or falsely, that the mainthing which the well-paid and well-fed men of those abominable wastescare for is--good fighting-dogs: I can only answer, that I am notsurprised. 

I say--as I have said elsewhere, and shall do my best to say again--thatthe craving for drink and narcotics, especially that engendered in ourgreat cities, is not a disease, but a symptom of disease; of a far deeperdisease than any which drunkenness can produce; namely, of the growingdegeneracy of a population striving in vain by stimulants and narcoticsto fight against those slow poisons with which our greedy barbarism, miscalled civilisation, has surrounded them from the cradle to the grave. I may be answered that the old German, Angle, Dane, drank heavily. Iknow it: but why did they drink, save for the same reason that the fenmandrank, and his wife took opium, at least till the fens were drained? whybut to keep off the depressing effects of the malaria of swamps and newclearings, which told on them--who always settled in the lowestgrounds--in the shape of fever and ague? Here it may be answered again, that stimulants have been, during the memory of man, the destruction ofthe Red Indian race in America. I reply boldly, that I do not believeit. There is evidence enough in Jaques Cartier's 'Voyages to the Riversof Canada;' and evidence more than enough in Strachey's 'Travaile inVirginia'--to quote only two authorities out of many--to prove that theRed Indians, when the white man first met with them, were, in North andSouth alike, a diseased, decaying, and, as all their traditions confess, decreasing race. Such a race would naturally crave for "the water oflife, " the "usque-bagh, " or whisky, as we have contracted the old namenow. But I should have thought that the white man, by introducing amongthese poor creatures iron, fire-arms, blankets, and above all horseswherewith to follow the buffalo-herds which they could never follow onfoot, must have done ten times more towards keeping them alive, than hehas done towards destroying them by giving them the chance of a week'sdrunkenness twice a year, when they came in to his forts to sell theskins which, without his gifts, they would never have got. 

Such a race would, of course, if wanting vitality, crave for stimulants. But if the stimulants, and not the original want of vitality, combinedwith morals utterly detestable, and worthy only of the gallows--and hereI know what I say, and dare not tell what I know, from eye-witnesses--havebeen the cause of the Red Indians' extinction: then how is it, let meask, that the Irishman and the Scotsman have, often to their great harm, been drinking as much whisky--and usually very bad whisky--not merelytwice a year, but as often as they could get it, during the whole "ironage;" and, for aught any one can tell, during the "bronze age, " and the"stone age" before that: and yet are still the most healthy, able, valiant, and prolific races in Europe? Had they drunk less whisky theywould, doubtless, have been more healthy, able, valiant, and perhaps evenmore prolific, than they are now. They show no sign, however, as yet, ofgoing the way of the Red Indian. 

But if the craving for stimulants and narcotics is a token of deficientvitality: then the deadliest foe of that craving, and all its miserableresults, is surely the Sanatory Reformer; the man who preaches, and--asfar as ignorance and vested interests will allow him, procures--for themasses, pure air, pure sunlight, pure water, pure dwelling-houses, purefood. Not merely every fresh drinking-fountain: but every fresh publicbath and wash-house, every fresh open space, every fresh growing tree, every fresh open window, every fresh flower in that window--each of theseis so much, as the old Persians would have said, conquered for Ormuzd, the god of light and life, out of the dominion of Ahriman, the king ofdarkness and of death; so much taken from the causes of drunkenness anddisease, and added to the causes of sobriety and health. 

Meanwhile one thing is clear: that if this present barbarism and anarchyof covetousness, miscalled modern civilisation, were tamed and drilledinto something more like a Kingdom of God on earth: then we should notsee the reckless and needless multiplication of liquor shops, whichdisgraces this country now. 

As a single instance: in one country parish of nine hundred inhabitants, in which the population has increased only one-ninth in the last fiftyyears, there are now practically eight public-houses, where fifty yearsago there were but two. One, that is, for every hundred and ten--orrather, omitting children, farmers, shopkeepers, gentlemen, and theirhouseholds, one for every fifty of the inhabitants. In the face of theallurements, often of the basest kind, which these dens offer, theclergyman and the schoolmaster struggle in vain to keep up night-schoolsand young men's clubs, and to inculcate habits of providence. 

The young labourers over a great part of the south and east, at least, ofEngland, --though never so well off, for several generations, as they arenow--are growing up thriftless, shiftless; inferior, it seems to me, totheir grandfathers in everything, save that they can usually read andwrite, and their grandfathers could not; and that they wear smart cheapcloth clothes, instead of their grandfathers' smock-frocks. 

And if it be so in the country: how must it be in towns? There must comea thorough change in the present licensing system, in spite of all the"pressure" which certain powerful vested interests may bring to bear ongovernments. And it is the duty of every good citizen, who cares for hiscountrymen, and for their children after them, to help in bringing aboutthat change as speedily as possible. 

Again: I said just now that a probable cause of increasing drunkennesswas the increasing material prosperity of thousands who knew norecreation beyond low animal pleasure. If I am right--and I believe thatI am right--I must urge on those who wish drunkenness to decrease, thenecessity of providing more, and more refined recreation for the people. 

Men drink, and women too, remember, not merely to supply exhaustion; notmerely to drive away care: but often simply to drive away dulness. Theyhave nothing to do save to think over what they have done in the day, orwhat they expect to do to-morrow; and they escape from that dreary roundof business thought, in liquor or narcotics. There are still those, byno means of the hand-working class, but absorbed all day by business, whodrink heavily at night in their own comfortable homes, simply to recreatetheir overburdened minds. Such cases, doubtless, are far less commonthan they were fifty years ago: but why? Is not the decrease of drinkingamong the richer classes certainly due to the increased refinement andvariety of their tastes and occupations? In cultivating the aestheticside of man's nature; in engaging him with the beautiful, the pure, thewonderful, the truly natural; with painting, poetry, music, horticulture, physical science--in all this lies recreation, in the true and literalsense of that word, namely, the recreating and mending of the exhaustedmind and feelings, such as no rational man will now neglect, either forhimself, his children, or his work-people. 

But how little of all this is open to the masses, all should know but toowell. How little opportunity the average hand-worker, or his wife, hasof eating of any tree of knowledge, save of the very basest kind, is buttoo palpable. We are mending, thank God, in this respect. Freelibraries and museums have sprung up of late in other cities besideLondon. God's blessing rest upon them all. And the Crystal Palace, andstill later, the Bethnal Green Museum, have been, I believe, of far moreuse than many average sermons and lectures from many average orators. 

But are we not still far behind the old Greeks, and the Romans of theEmpire likewise, in the amount of amusement and instruction, and even ofshelter, which we provide for the people? Recollect the--tome--disgraceful fact; that there is not, as far as I am aware, throughoutthe whole of London, a single portico or other covered place, in whichthe people can take refuge during a shower: and this in the climate ofEngland! Where they do take refuge on a wet day the publican knows buttoo well; as he knows also where thousands of the lower classes, simplyfor want of any other place to be in, save their own sordid dwellings, spend as much as they are permitted of the Sabbath day. Let us put down"Sunday drinking" by all means, if we can. But let us remember that byclosing the public-house on Sunday, we prevent no man or woman fromcarrying home as much poison as they choose on Saturday night, tobrutalise themselves therewith, perhaps for eight-and-forty hours. Andlet us see--in the name of Him who said that He had made the Sabbath forman, and not man for the Sabbath--let us see, I say, if we cannot dosomething to prevent the townsman's Sabbath being, not a day of rest, buta day of mere idleness; the day of most temptation, because of mostdulness, of the whole seven. 

And here, perhaps, some sweet soul may look up reprovingly and say--Hetalks of rest. Does he forget, and would he have the working man forget, that all these outward palliatives will never touch the seat of thedisease, the unrest of the soul within? Does he forget, and would hehave the working man forget, who it was who said--who only has the rightto say--"Come unto Me, all ye who are weary and heavy laden, and I willgive you rest"? Ah no, sweet soul. I know your words are true. I knowthat what we all want is inward rest; rest of heart and brain; the calm, strong, self-contained, self-denying character; which needs nostimulants, for it has no fits of depression; which needs no narcotics, for it has no fits of excitement; which needs no ascetic restraints, forit is strong enough to use God's gifts without abusing them; thecharacter, in a word, which is truly temperate, not in drink or foodmerely, but in all desires, thoughts, and actions; freed from the wildlusts and ambitions to which that old Adam yielded, and, seeking forlight and life by means forbidden, found thereby disease and death. Yes;I know that; and know, too, that that rest is found, only where you havealready found it. 

And yet: in such a world as this; governed by a Being who has madesunshine, and flowers, and green grass, and the song of birds, and happyhuman smiles; and who would educate by them--if we would let Him--Hishuman children from the cradle to the grave; in such a world as this, will you grudge any particle of that education, even any harmlesssubstitute for it, to those spirits in prison, whose surroundings toooften tempt them, from the cradle to the grave, to fancy that the worldis composed of bricks and iron, and governed by inspectors and policemen?Preach to those spirits in prison, as you know far better than we parsonshow to preach: but let them have besides some glimpses of the splendidfact, that outside their prison-house is a world which God, not man, hasmade; wherein grows everywhere that tree of knowledge which is likewisethe tree of life; and that they have a right to some small share of itsbeauty, and its wonder, and its rest, for their own health of soul andbody, and for the health of their children after them. 

NAUSICAA IN LONDON: OR, THE LOWER EDUCATION OF WOMAN. 

Fresh from the Marbles of the British Museum, I went my way throughLondon streets. My brain was still full of fair and grand forms; theforms of men and women whose every limb and attitude betokened perfecthealth, and grace, and power, and a self-possession and self-restraint sohabitual and complete that it had become unconscious, andundistinguishable from the native freedom of the savage. For I had beenup and down the corridors of those Greek sculptures, which remain as aperpetual sermon to rich and poor, amid our artificial, unwholesome, andit may be decaying pseudo-civilisation; saying with looks more expressivethan all words--Such men and women can be; for such they have been; andsuch you may be yet, if you will use that science of which you too oftenonly boast. Above all, I had been pondering over the awful and yettender beauty of the maiden figures from the Parthenon and its kindredtemples. And these, or such as these, I thought to myself, were thesisters of the men who fought at Marathon and Salamis; the mothers ofmany a man among the ten thousand whom Xenophon led back from Babylon tothe Black Sea shore; the ancestresses of many a man who conquered theEast in Alexander's host, and fought with Porus in the far Punjab. Andwere these women mere dolls? These men mere gladiators? Were they notthe parents of philosophy, science, poetry, the plastic arts? We talk ofeducation now. Are we more educated than were the ancient Greeks? Do weknow anything about education, physical, intellectual, or aesthetic, andI may say moral likewise--religious education, of course, in our sense ofthe word, they had none--but do we know anything about education of whichthey have not taught us at least the rudiments? Are there not somebranches of education which they perfected, once and for ever; leaving usnorthern barbarians to follow, or else not to follow, their example? Toproduce health, that is, harmony and sympathy, proportion and grace, inevery faculty of mind and body--that was their notion of education. Toproduce that, the text-book of their childhood was the poetry of Homer, and not of--But I am treading on dangerous ground. It was for this thatthe seafaring Greek lad was taught to find his ideal in Ulysses; whilehis sister at home found hers, it may be, in Nausicaa. It was for this, that when perhaps the most complete and exquisite of all the Greeks, Sophocles the good, beloved by gods and men, represented on the Athenianstage his drama of Nausicaa, and, as usual, could not--for he had novoice--himself take a speaking part, he was content to do one thing inwhich he specially excelled; and dressed and masked as a girl, to play atball amid the chorus of Nausicaa's maidens. 

That drama of Nausicaa is lost; and if I dare say so of any play ofSophocles', I scarce regret it. It is well, perhaps, that we have nosecond conception of the scene, to interfere with the simplicity, sogrand, and yet so tender, of Homer's idyllic episode. 

Nausicaa, it must be remembered, is the daughter of a king. But not of aking in the exclusive modern European or old Eastern sense. Her father, Alcinous, is simply "primus inter pares" among a community of merchants, who are called "kings" likewise; and Mayor for life--so to speak--of anew trading city, a nascent Genoa or Venice, on the shore of theMediterranean. But the girl Nausicaa, as she sleeps in her "carvedchamber, " is "like the immortals in form and face;" and two handmaidenswho sleep on each side of the polished door "have beauty from theGraces. "

To her there enters, in the shape of some maiden friend, none less thanPallas Athene herself, intent on saving worthily her favourite, theshipwrecked Ulysses; and bids her in a dream go forth--and wash theclothes. {72}

 "Nausicaa, wherefore doth thy mother bear Child so forgetful? This long time doth rest, Like lumber in the house, much raiment fair. Soon must thou wed, and be thyself well-drest, And find thy bridegroom raiment of the best. These are the things whence good repute is born, And praises that make glad a parent's breast. Come, let us both go washing with the morn; So shalt thou have clothes becoming to be worn. 

 "Know that thy maidenhood is not for long, Whom the Phoeacian chiefs already woo, Lords of the land whence thou thyself art sprung. Soon as the shining dawn comes forth anew, For wain and mules thy noble father sue, Which to the place of washing shall convey Girdles and shawls and rugs of splendid hue. This for thyself were better than essay Thither to walk: the place is distant a long way. "

Startled by her dream, Nausicaa awakes, and goes to find her parents--

 "One by the hearth sat, with the maids around, And on the skeins of yarn, sea-purpled, spent Her morning toil. Him to the council bound, Called by the honoured kings, just going forth she found. "

And calling him, as she might now, "Pappa phile, " Dear Papa, asks for themule waggon: but it is her father's and her five brothers' clothes shefain would wash, --

 "Ashamed to name her marriage to her father dear. "

But he understood all--and she goes forth in the mule waggon, with theclothes, after her mother has put in "a chest of all kinds of delicatefood, and meat, and wine in a goatskin;" and last but not least, theindispensable cruse of oil for anointing after the bath, to which bothJews, Greeks, and Romans owed so much health and beauty. And then weread in the simple verse of a poet too refined, like the rest of hisrace, to see anything mean or ridiculous in that which was not ugly andunnatural, how she and her maids got into the "polished waggon, " "withgood wheels, " and she "took the whip and the studded reins, " and "beatthem till they started;" and how the mules "rattled" away, and "pulledagainst each other, " till

 "When they came to the fair flowing river Which feeds good lavatories all the year, Fitted to cleanse all sullied robes soever, They from the wain the mules unharnessed there, And chased them free, to crop their juicy fare By the swift river, on the margin green; Then to the waters dashed the clothes they bare And in the stream-filled trenches stamped them clean. 

 "Which, having washed and cleansed, they spread before The sunbeams, on the beach, where most did lie Thick pebbles, by the sea-wave washed ashore. So, having left them in the heat to dry, They to the bath went down, and by-and-by, Rubbed with rich oil, their midday meal essay, Couched in green turf, the river rolling nigh. Then, throwing off their veils, at ball they play, While the white-armed Nausicaa leads the choral lay. "

The mere beauty of this scene all will feel, who have the sense of beautyin them. Yet it is not on that aspect which I wish to dwell, but on itshealthfulness. Exercise is taken, in measured time, to the sound ofsong, as a duty almost, as well as an amusement. For this game of ball, which is here mentioned for the first time in human literature, nearlythree thousand years ago, was held by the Greeks and by the Romans afterthem, to be an almost necessary part of a liberal education; principally, doubtless, from the development which it produced in the upper half ofthe body, not merely to the arms, but to the chest, by raising andexpanding the ribs, and to all the muscles of the torso, whetherperpendicular or oblique. The elasticity and grace which it was believedto give were so much prized, that a room for ball-play, and a teacher ofthe art, were integral parts of every gymnasium; and the Athenians wentso far as to bestow on one famous ballplayer, Aristonicus of Carystia, astatue and the rights of citizenship. The rough and hardy youngSpartans, when passing from boyhood into manhood, received the title ofball-players, seemingly from the game which it was then their specialduty to learn. In the case of Nausicaa and her maidens, the game wouldjust bring into their right places all that is liable to be contractedand weakened in women, so many of whose occupations must needs besedentary and stooping; while the song which accompanied the game at oncefilled the lungs regularly and rhythmically, and prevented violentmotion, or unseemly attitude. We, the civilised, need physiologists toremind us of these simple facts, and even then do not act on them. Thoseold half-barbarous Greeks had found them out for themselves, and, moreover, acted on them. 

But fair Nausicaa must have been--some will say--surely a mere child ofnature, and an uncultivated person?

So far from it, that her whole demeanour and speech show culture of thevery highest sort, full of "sweetness and light. "--Intelligent andfearless, quick to perceive the bearings of her strange and suddenadventure, quick to perceive the character of Ulysses, quick to answerhis lofty and refined pleading by words as lofty and refined, and piouswithal;--for it is she who speaks to her handmaids the once so famouswords:

 "Strangers and poor men all are sent from Zeus; And alms, though small, are sweet"

Clear of intellect, prompt of action, modest of demeanour, shrinking fromthe slightest breath of scandal; while she is not ashamed, when Ulysses, bathed and dressed, looks himself again, to whisper to her maidens herwish that the Gods might send her such a spouse. --This is Nausicaa asHomer draws her; and as many a scholar and poet since Homer has acceptedher for the ideal of noble maidenhood. I ask my readers to study forthemselves her interview with Ulysses, in Mr. Worsley's translation, orrather in the grand simplicity of the original Greek, {76} and judgewhether Nausicaa is not as perfect a lady as the poet who imaginedher--or, it may be, drew her from life--must have been a perfectgentleman; both complete in those "manners" which, says the old proverb, "make the man:" but which are the woman herself; because with her--whoacts more by emotion than by calculation--manners are the outward andvisible tokens of her inward and spiritual grace, or disgrace; and flowinstinctively, whether good or bad, from the instincts of her innernature. 

True, Nausicaa could neither read nor write. No more, most probably, could the author of the Odyssey. No more, for that matter, couldAbraham, Isaac, and Jacob, though they were plainly, both in mind andmanners, most highly-cultivated men. Reading and writing, of course, have now become necessaries of humanity; and are to be given to everyhuman being, that he may start fair in the race of life. But I am notaware that Greek women improved much, either in manners, morals, orhappiness, by acquiring them in after centuries. A wise man would soonersee his daughter a Nausicaa than a Sappho, an Aspasia, a Cleopatra, oreven an Hypatia. 

Full of such thoughts, I went through London streets, among the Nausicaasof the present day; the girls of the period; the daughters and hereaftermothers of our future rulers, the great Demos or commercial middle classof the greatest mercantile city in the world: and noted what I had notedwith fear and sorrow, many a day, for many a year; a type, and anincreasing type, of young women who certainly had not had the"advantages, " "educational" and other, of that Greek Nausicaa of old. 

Of course, in such a city as London, to which the best of everything, physical and other, gravitates, I could not but pass, now and then, beautiful persons, who made me proud of those "grandes Anglaises auxjoues rouges, " whom the Parisiennes ridicule--and envy. But I could nothelp suspecting that their looks showed them to be either country-bred, or born of country parents; and this suspicion was strengthened by thefact, that when compared with their mothers, the mother's physique was, in the majority of cases, superior to the daughters'. Painful it was, toone accustomed to the ruddy well-grown peasant girl, stalwart, even when, as often, squat and plain, to remark the exceedingly small size of theaverage young woman; by which I do not mean mere want of height--that isa little matter--but want of breadth likewise; a general want of thoselarge frames, which indicate usually a power of keeping strong andhealthy not merely the muscles, but the brain itself. 

Poor little things. I passed hundreds--I pass hundreds every day--tryingto hide their littleness by the nasty mass of false hair--or what doesduty for it; and by the ugly and useless hat which is stuck upon it, making the head thereby look ridiculously large and heavy; and by thehigh heels on which they totter onward, having forgotten, or neverlearnt, the simple art of walking; their bodies tilted forward in thatungraceful attitude which is called--why that name of all others?--a"Grecian bend;" seemingly kept on their feet, and kept together at all, in that strange attitude, by tight stays which prevented all graceful andhealthy motion of the hips or sides; their raiment, meanwhile, beingpurposely misshapen in this direction and in that, to hide--it must bepresumed--deficiencies of form. If that chignon and those heels had beentaken off, the figure which would have remained would have been that toooften of a puny girl of sixteen. And yet there was no doubt that thesewomen were not only full grown, but some of them, alas! wives andmothers. 

Poor little things. --And this they have gained by so-called civilisation:the power of aping the "fashions" by which the worn-out Parisienne hidesher own personal defects; and of making themselves, by innate want ofthat taste which the Parisienne possesses, only the cause of somethinglike a sneer from many a cultivated man; and of something like a sneer, too, from yonder gipsy woman who passes by, with bold bright face, andswinging hip, and footstep stately and elastic; far better dressed, according to all true canons of taste, than most town-girls; and thankingher fate that she and her "Rom" are no house-dwellers andgaslight-sightseers, but fatten on free air upon the open moor. 

But the face which is beneath that chignon and that hat? Well--it issometimes pretty: but how seldom handsome, which is a higher quality byfar. It is not, strange to say, a well-fed face. Plenty of money, andperhaps too much, is spent on those fine clothes. It had been better, tojudge from the complexion, if some of that money had been spent in solidwholesome food. She looks as if she lived--as she too often does, Ihear--on tea and bread-and-butter, or rather on bread with the minimum ofbutter. For as the want of bone indicates a deficiency of phosphaticfood, so does the want of flesh about the cheeks indicate a deficiency ofhydrocarbon. Poor little Nausicaa:--that is not her fault. Our boastedcivilisation has not even taught her what to eat, as it certainly has notincreased her appetite; and she knows not--what every country fellowknows--that without plenty of butter and other fatty matters, she is notlikely to keep even warm. Better to eat nasty fat bacon now, than tosupply the want of it some few years hence by nastier cod-liver oil. Butthere is no one yet to tell her that, and a dozen other equally simplefacts, for her own sake, and for the sake of that coming Demos which sheis to bring into the world; a Demos which, if we can only keep it healthyin body and brain, has before it so splendid a future: but which, if bodyand brain degrade beneath the influence of modern barbarism, is but toolikely to follow the Demos of ancient Byzantium, or of modern Paris. 

Ay, but her intellect. She is so clever, and she reads so much, and sheis going to be taught to read so much more. 

Ah, well--there was once a science called physiognomy. The Greeks, fromwhat I can learn, knew more of it than any people since: though theItalian painters and sculptors must have known much; far more than we. Ina more scientific civilisation there will be such a science once more:but its laws, though still in the empiric stage, are not altogetherforgotten by some. Little children have often a fine and clear instinctof them. Many cultivated and experienced women have a fine and clearinstinct of them likewise. And some such would tell us that there isintellect in plenty in the modern Nausicaa: but not of the quality whichthey desire for their country's future good. Self-consciousness, eagerness, volubility, petulance, in countenance, in gesture, and invoice--which last is too often most harsh and artificial, the breathbeing sent forth through the closed teeth, and almost entirely at thecorners of the mouth--and, with all this, a weariness often about thewrinkling forehead and the drooping lids;--all these, which are growingtoo common, not among the Demos only, nor only in the towns, are signs, they think, of the unrest of unhealth, physical, intellectual, spiritual. At least they are as different as two types of physiognomy in the samerace can be, from the expression both of face and gesture, in those oldGreek sculptures, and in the old Italian painters; and, it must be said, in the portraits of Reynolds, and Gainsborough, Copley, and Romney. Notsuch, one thinks, must have been the mothers of Britain during the latterhalf of the last century and the beginning of the present; when theirsons, at times, were holding half the world at bay. 

And if Nausicaa has become such in town: what is she when she goes to theseaside, not to wash the clothes in fresh-water, but herself in salt--thevery salt-water, laden with decaying organisms, from which, though notpolluted further by a dozen sewers, Ulysses had to cleanse himself, anointing, too, with oil, ere he was fit to appear in the company ofNausicaa of Greece? She dirties herself with the dirty salt-water; andprobably chills and tires herself by walking thither and back, andstaying in too long; and then flaunts on the pier, bedizened in garmentswhich, for monstrosity of form and disharmony of colours, would have setthat Greek Nausicaa's teeth on edge, or those of any average Hindoo womannow. Or, even sadder still, she sits on chairs and benches all the wearyafternoon, her head drooped on her chest, over some novel from the"Library;" and then returns to tea and shrimps, and lodgings of which thefragrance is not unsuggestive, sometimes not unproductive, of typhoidfever. Ah, poor Nausicaa of England! That is a sad sight to some whothink about the present, and have read about the past. It is not a sadsight to see your old father--tradesman, or clerk, or what not--who hasdone good work in his day, and hopes to do some more, sitting by your oldmother, who has done good work in her day--among the rest, that heaviestwork of all, the bringing you into the world and keeping you in it tillnow--honest, kindly, cheerful folk enough, and not inefficient in theirown calling; though an average Northumbrian, or Highlander, or IrishEasterling, beside carrying a brain of five times the intellectual force, could drive five such men over the cliff with his bare hands. It is nota sad sight, I say, to see them sitting about upon those seaside benches, looking out listlessly at the water, and the ships, and the sunlight, andenjoying, like so many flies upon a wall, the novel act of doing nothing. It is not the old for whom wise men are sad: but for you. Where is yourvitality? Where is your "Lebensgluckseligkeit, " your enjoyment ofsuperfluous life and power? Why can you not even dance and sing, tillnow and then, at night, perhaps, when you ought to be safe in bed, butwhen the weak brain, after receiving the day's nourishment, has rouseditself a second time into a false excitement of gaslight pleasure? Whatthere is left of it is all going into that foolish book, which thewomanly element in you, still healthy and alive, delights in; because itplaces you in fancy in situations in which you will never stand, andinspires you with emotions, some of which, it may be, you had betternever feel. Poor Nausicaa--old, some men think, before you have beenever young. 

And now they are going to "develop" you; and let you have your share in"the higher education of women, " by making you read more books, and domore sums, and pass examinations, and stoop over desks at night afterstooping over some other employment all day; and to teach you Latin, andeven Greek. 

Well, we will gladly teach you Greek, if you learn thereby to read thehistory of Nausicaa of old, and what manner of maiden she was, and whatwas her education. You will admire her, doubtless. But do not let youradmiration limit itself to drawing a meagre half-mediaevalized design ofher--as she never looked. Copy in your own person; and even if you donot descend as low--or rise as high--as washing the household clothes, atleast learn to play at ball; and sing, in the open air and sunshine, notin theatres and concert-rooms by gaslight; and take decent care of yourown health; and dress not like a "Parisienne"--nor, of course, likeNausicaa of old, for that is to ask too much:--but somewhat more like anaverage Highland lassie; and try to look like her, and be like her, ofwhom Wordsworth sang--

 "A mien and face In which full plainly I can trace Benignity and home-bred sense, Ripening in perfect innocence. Here scattered, like a random seed, Remote from men, thou dost not need The embarrassed look of shy distress And maidenly shamefacedness. Thou wear'st upon thy forehead clear The freedom of a mountaineer. A face with gladness overspread, Soft smiles, by human kindness bred, And seemliness complete, that sways Thy courtesies, about thee plays. With no restraint, save such as springs From quick and eager visitings Of thoughts that lie beyond the reach Of thy few words of English speech. A bondage sweetly brooked, a strife That gives thy gestures grace and life. "

Ah, yet unspoilt Nausicaa of the North; descendant of the dark tender-hearted Celtic girl, and the fair deep-hearted Scandinavian Viking, thankGod for thy heather and fresh air, and the kine thou tendest, and thewool thou spinnest; and come not to seek thy fortune, child, in wickedLondon town; nor import, as they tell me thou art doing fast, the uglyfashions of that London town, clumsy copies of Parisian cockneydom, intothy Highland home; nor give up the healthful and graceful, free andmodest dress of thy mother and thy mother's mother, to disfigure thelittle kirk on Sabbath days with crinoline and corset, high-heeled boots, and other women's hair. 

It is proposed, just now, to assimilate the education of girls more andmore to that of boys. If that means that girls are merely to learn morelessons, and to study what their brothers are taught, in addition to whattheir mothers were taught; then it is to be hoped, at least byphysiologists and patriots, that the scheme will sink into that limbowhither, in a free and tolerably rational country, all imperfect and ill-considered schemes are sure to gravitate. But if the proposal be a bonafide one: then it must be borne in mind that in the public schools ofEngland, and in all private schools, I presume, which take their tonefrom them, cricket and football are more or less compulsory, beingconsidered integral parts of an Englishman's education; and that they arelikely to remain so, in spite of all reclamations: because masters andboys alike know that games do not, in the long run, interfere with aboy's work; that the same boy will very often excel in both; that thegames keep him in health for his work; that the spirit with which hetakes to his games when in the lower school, is a fair test of the spiritwith which he will take to his work when he rises into the higher school;and that nothing is worse for a boy than to fall into that loafing, tuck-shop-haunting set, who neither play hard nor work hard, and are usuallyextravagant, and often vicious. Moreover, they know well that gamesconduce, not merely to physical, but to moral health; that in the playing-field boys acquire virtues which no books can give them; not merelydaring and endurance, but, better still, temper, self-restraint, fairness, honour, unenvious approbation of another's success, and allthat "give and take" of life which stand a man in such good stead when hegoes forth into the world, and without which, indeed, his success isalways maimed and partial. 

Now: if the promoters of higher education for women will compel girls toany training analogous to our public school games; if, for instance, theywill insist on that most natural and wholesome of all exercises, dancing, in order to develop the lower half of the body; on singing, to expand thelungs and regulate the breath; and on some games--ball or what not--whichwill ensure that raised chest, and upright carriage, and general strengthof the upper torso, without which full oxygenation of the blood, andtherefore general health, is impossible; if they will sternly forbidtight stays, high heels, and all which interferes with free growth andfree motion; if they will consider carefully all which has been writtenon the "half-time system" by Mr. Chadwick and others; and accept thecertain physical law that, in order to renovate the brain day by day, thegrowing creature must have plenty of fresh air and play, and that thechild who learns for four hours and plays for four hours, will learnmore, and learn it more easily, than the child who learns for the wholeeight hours; if, in short, they will teach girls not merely to understandthe Greek tongue, but to copy somewhat of the Greek physical training, ofthat "music and gymnastic" which helped to make the cleverest race of theold world the ablest race likewise: then they will earn the gratitude ofthe patriot and the physiologist, by doing their best to stay thedownward tendencies of the physique, and therefore ultimately of themorale, in the coming generation of English women. 

I am sorry to say that, as yet, I hear of but one movement in thisdirection among the promoters of the "higher education of women. " {88} Itrust that the subject will be taken up methodically by those giftedladies; who have acquainted themselves, and are labouring to acquaintother women, with the first principles of health; and that they may availto prevent the coming generations, under the unwholesome stimulant ofcompetitive examinations, and so forth, from "developing" into so manyChinese-dwarfs--or idiots. 

THE AIR-MOTHERS. 

 "Die Natur ist die Bewegung. "

Who are these who follow us softly over the moor in the autumn eve? Theirwings brush and rustle in the fir-boughs, and they whisper before us andbehind, as if they called gently to each other, like birds flockinghomeward to their nests. 

The woodpecker on the pine-stems knows them, and laughs aloud for joy asthey pass. The rooks above the pasture know them, and wheel round andtumble in their play. The brown leaves on the oak trees know them, andflutter faintly, and beckon as they pass. And in the chattering of thedry leaves there is a meaning, and a cry of weary things which long forrest. 

"Take us home, take us home, you soft air-mothers, now our fathers thesunbeams are grown dull. Our green summer beauty is all draggled, andour faces are grown wan and wan; and the buds, the children whom wenourished, thrust us off, ungrateful, from our seats. Waft us down, yousoft air-mothers, upon your wings to the quiet earth, that we may go toour home, as all things go, and become air and sunlight once again. "

And the bold young fir-seeds know them, and rattle impatient in theircones. "Blow stronger, blow fiercer, slow air-mothers, and shake us fromour prisons of dead wood, that we may fly and spin away north-eastward, each on his horny wing. Help us but to touch the moorland yonder, and wewill take good care of ourselves henceforth; we will dive like arrowsthrough the heather, and drive our sharp beaks into the soil, and riseagain as green trees toward the sunlight, and spread out lusty boughs. "

They never think, bold fools, of what is coming, to bring them low in themidst of their pride; of the reckless axe which will fell them, and thesaw which will shape them into logs; and the trains which will roar andrattle over them, as they lie buried in the gravel of the way, till theyare ground and rotted into powder, and dug up and flung upon the fire, that they too may return home, like all things, and become air andsunlight once again. 

And the air-mothers hear their prayers, and do their bidding: butfaintly; for they themselves are tired and sad. 

Tired and sad are the air-mothers, and their garments rent and wan. Lookat them as they stream over the black forest, before the dimsouth-western sun; long lines and wreaths of melancholy grey, stainedwith dull yellow or dead dun. They have come far across the seas, anddone many a wild deed upon their way; and now that they have reached theland, like shipwrecked sailors, they will lie down and weep till they canweep no more. 

Ah, how different were those soft air-mothers when, invisible to mortaleyes, they started on their long sky-journey, five thousand miles acrossthe sea! Out of the blazing caldron which lies between the two NewWorlds, they leapt up when the great sun called them, in whirls andspouts of clear hot steam; and rushed of their own passion to thenorthward, while the whirling earth-ball whirled them east. So north-eastward they rushed aloft, across the gay West Indian isles, leavingbelow the glitter of the flying-fish, and the sidelong eyes of cruelsharks; above the cane-fields and the plaintain-gardens, and the cocoa-groves which fringe the shores; above the rocks which throbbed withearthquakes, and the peaks of old volcanoes, cinder-strewn; while, farbeneath, the ghosts of their dead sisters hurried home upon the north-east breeze. 

Wild deeds they did as they rushed onward, and struggled and fought amongthemselves, up and down, and round and backward, in the fury of theirblind hot youth. They heeded not the tree as they snapped it, nor theship as they whelmed it in the waves; nor the cry of the sinking sailor, nor the need of his little ones on shore; hasty and selfish even aschildren, and, like children, tamed by their own rage. For they tiredthemselves by struggling with each other, and by tearing the heavy waterinto waves; and their wings grew clogged with sea-spray, and soaked moreand more with steam. But at last the sea grew cold beneath them, andtheir clear steam shrank to mist; and they saw themselves and each otherwrapped in dull rain-laden clouds. They then drew their whitecloud-garments round them, and veiled themselves for very shame; andsaid, "We have been wild and wayward: and, alas! our pure bright youth isgone. But we will do one good deed yet ere we die, and so we shall nothave lived in vain. We will glide onward to the land, and weep there;and refresh all things with soft warm rain; and make the grass grow, thebuds burst; quench the thirst of man and beast, and wash the soiled worldclean. "

So they are wandering past us, the air-mothers, to weep the leaves intotheir graves; to weep the seeds into their seed-beds, and weep the soilinto the plains; to get the rich earth ready for the winter, and thencreep northward to the ice-world, and there die. 

Weary, and still more weary, slowly, and more slowly still, they willjourney on far northward, across fast-chilling seas. For a doom is laidupon them, never to be still again, till they rest at the North Poleitself, the still axle of the spinning world; and sink in death aroundit, and become white snow-clad ghosts. 

But will they live again, those chilled air-mothers? Yes, they must liveagain. For all things move for ever; and not even ghosts can rest. Sothe corpses of their sisters, piling on them from above, press themoutward, press them southward toward the sun once more; across the floesand round the icebergs, weeping tears of snow and sleet, while men hatetheir wild harsh voices, and shrink before their bitter breath. Theyknow not that the cold bleak snow-storms, as they hurtle from the blacknorth-east, bear back the ghosts of the soft air-mothers, as penitents, to their father, the great sun. 

But as they fly southwards, warm life thrills them, and they drop theirloads of sleet and snow; and meet their young live sisters from thesouth, and greet them with flash and thunder-peal. And, please God, before many weeks are over, as we run Westward Ho, we shall overtake theghosts of these air-mothers, hurrying back toward their father, the greatsun. Fresh and bright under the fresh bright heaven, they will race withus toward our home, to gain new heat, new life, new power, and set forthabout their work once more. Men call them the south-west wind, those air-mothers; and their ghosts the north-east trade; and value them, andrightly, because they bear the traders out and home across the sea. Butwise men, and little children, should look on them with more seeing eyes;and say, "May not these winds be living creatures? They, too, arethoughts of God, to whom all live. "

For is not our life like their life? Do we not come and go as they? Outof God's boundless bosom, the fount of life, we came; through selfish, stormy youth, and contrite tears--just not too late; through manhood notaltogether useless; through slow and chill old age, we return from Whencewe came; to the Bosom of God once more--to go forth again, it may be, with fresh knowledge, and fresh powers, to nobler work. Amen. 

* * * * *

Such was the prophecy which I learnt, or seemed to learn, from the south-western wind off the Atlantic, on a certain delectable evening. And itwas fulfilled at night, as far as the gentle air-mothers could fulfil it, for foolish man. 

 "There was a roaring in the woods all night; The rain came heavily and fell in floods; But now the sun is rising calm and bright, The birds are singing in the distant woods; Over his own sweet voice the stock-dove broods, The jay makes answer as the magpie chatters, And all the air is filled with pleasant noise of waters"

But was I a gloomy and distempered man, if, upon such a morn as that, Istood on the little bridge across a certain brook, and watched the waterrun, with something of a sigh? Or if, when the schoolboy beside melamented that the floods would surely be out, and his day's fishingspoiled, I said to him--"Ah, my boy, that is a little matter. Look atwhat you are seeing now, and understand what barbarism and waste mean. Look at all that beautiful water which God has sent us hither off theAtlantic, without trouble or expense to us. Thousands, and tens ofthousands, of gallons will run under this bridge to-day; and what shallwe do with it? Nothing. And yet: think only of the mills which thatwater would have turned. Think how it might have kept up health andcleanliness in poor creatures packed away in the back streets of thenearest town, or even in London itself. Think even how country folk, inmany parts of England, in three months' time, may be crying out for rain, and afraid of short crops, and fever, and scarlatina, and cattle-plague, for want of the very water which we are now letting run back, wasted, into the sea from whence it came. And yet we call ourselves a civilisedpeople. "

It is not wise, I know, to preach to boys. And yet, sometimes, a manmust speak his heart; even, like Midas' slave, to the reeds by the riverside. And I had so often, fishing up and down full many a stream, whispered my story to those same river-reeds; and told them that my Lordthe Sovereign Demos had, like old Midas, asses' ears in spite of all hisgold, that I thought I might for once tell it the boy likewise, in hopethat he might help his generation to mend that which my own generationdoes not seem like to mend. 

I might have said more to him: but did not. For it is not well todestroy too early the child's illusion, that people must be wise becausethey are grown up, and have votes, and rule--or think they rule--theworld. The child will find out how true that is soon enough for himself. If the truth be forced on him by the hot words of those with whom helives, it is apt to breed in him that contempt, stormful and thereforebarren, which makes revolutions; and not that pity, calm and thereforehelpful, which makes reforms. 

So I might have said to him, but did not--

And then men pray for rain:

My boy, did you ever hear the old Eastern legend about the Gipsies? Howthey were such good musicians, that some great Indian Sultan sent for thewhole tribe, and planted them near his palace, and gave them land, andploughs to break it up, and seed to sow it, that they might dwell there, and play and sing to him. 

But when the winter arrived, the Gipsies all came to the Sultan, andcried that they were starving. "But what have you done with the seed-corn which I gave you?" "O Light of the Age, we ate it in the summer. ""And what have you done with the ploughs which I gave you?" "O Glory ofthe Universe, we burnt them to bake the corn withal. "

Then said that great Sultan--"Like the butterflies you have lived; andlike the butterflies you shall wander. " So he drove them out. And thatis how the Gipsies came hither from the East. 

Now suppose that the Sultan of all Sultans, who sends the rain, shouldmake a like answer to us foolish human beings, when we prayed for rain:"But what have you done with the rain which I gave you six months since?""We have let it run into the sea. " "Then, ere you ask for more rain, make places wherein you can keep it when you have it. " "But that wouldbe, in most cases, too expensive. We can employ our capital moreprofitably in other directions. "

It is not for me to say what answer might be made to such an excuse. Ithink a child's still unsophisticated sense of right and wrong would soonsupply one; and probably one--considering the complexity, and difficulty, and novelty, of the whole question--somewhat too harsh; as children'sjudgments are wont to be. 

But would it not be well if our children, without being taught to blameanyone for what is past, were taught something about what ought to bedone now, what must be done soon, with the rainfall of these islands; andabout other and kindred health-questions, on the solution of whichdepends, and will depend more and more, the life of millions? One wouldhave thought that those public schools and colleges which desire tomonopolise the education of the owners of the soil; of the greatemployers of labour; of the clergy; and of all, indeed, who ought to beacquainted with the duties of property, the conditions of public health, and, in a word, with the general laws of what is now called SocialScience--one would have thought, I say, that these public schools andcolleges would have taught their scholars somewhat at least about suchmatters, that they might go forth into life with at least some roughnotions of the causes which make people healthy or unhealthy, rich orpoor, comfortable or wretched, useful or dangerous to the State. But aslong as our great educational institutions, safe, or fancying themselvessafe, in some enchanted castle, shut out by ancient magic from the livingworld, put a premium on Latin and Greek verses: a wise father will, during the holidays, talk now and then, I hope, somewhat after thisfashion:--

You must understand, my boy, that all the water in the country comes outof the sky, and from nowhere else; and that, therefore, to save and storethe water when it falls is a question of life and death to crops, andman, and beast; for with or without water is life or death. If I took, for instance, the water from the moors above and turned it over yonderfield, I could double, and more than double, the crops in that fieldhenceforth. 

Then why do I not do it?

Only because the field lies higher than the house; and if--now here isone thing which you and every civilised man should know--if you havewater-meadows, or any "irrigated" land, as it is called, above a house, or even on a level with it, it is certain to breed not merely cold anddamp, but fever or ague. Our forefathers did not understand this; andthey built their houses, as this is built, in the lowest places theycould find: sometimes because they wished to be near ponds, from whencethey could get fish in Lent; but more often, I think, because they wantedto be sheltered from the wind. They had no glass, as we have, in theirwindows; or, at least, only latticed casements, which let in the wind andcold; and they shrank from high and exposed, and therefore reallyhealthy, spots. But now that we have good glass, and sash windows, anddoors that will shut tight, we can build warm houses where we like. Andif you ever have to do with the building of cottages, remember that it isyour duty to the people who will live in them, and therefore to theState, to see that they stand high and dry, where no water can drain downinto their foundations, and where fog, and the poisonous gases which aregiven out by rotting vegetables, cannot drain down either. You willlearn more about all that when you learn, as every civilised lad shouldin these days, something about chemistry, and the laws of fluids andgases. But you know already that flowers are cut off by frost in the lowgrounds sooner than in the high; and that the fog at night always liesalong the brooks; and that the sour moor-smell which warns us to shut ourwindows at sunset, comes down from the hill, and not up from the valley. Now all these things are caused by one and the same law; that cold air isheavier than warm; and, therefore, like so much water, must run downhill. 

But what about the rainfall?

Well, I have wandered a little from the rainfall: though not as far asyou fancy; for fever and ague and rheumatism usually mean--rain in thewrong place. But if you knew how much illness, and torturing pain, anddeath, and sorrow arise, even to this very day, from ignorance of thesesimple laws, then you would bear them carefully in mind, and wish to knowmore about them. But now for water being life to the beasts. Do youremember--though you are hardly old enough--the cattle-plague? How thebeasts died, or had to be killed and buried, by tens of thousands; andhow misery and ruin fell on hundreds of honest men and women over many ofthe richest counties of England: but how we in this vale had no cattle-plague; and how there was none--as far as I recollect--in the uplands ofDevon and Cornwall, nor of Wales, nor of the Scotch Highlands? Now, doyou know why that was? Simply because we here, like those otheruplanders, are in such a country as Palestine was before the foolish Jewscut down all their timber, and so destroyed their own rainfall--a "landof brooks of water, of fountains and depths that spring out of valleysand hills. " There is hardly a field here that has not, thank God, itsrunning brook, or its sweet spring, from which our cattle were drinkingtheir health and life, while in the clay-lands of Cheshire, and in theCambridgeshire fens--which were drained utterly dry--the poor thingsdrank no water, too often, save that of the very same putrid ponds inwhich they had been standing all day long, to cool themselves, and tokeep off the flies. I do not say, of course, that bad water caused thecattle-plague. It came by infection from the East of Europe. But I saythat bad water made the cattle ready to take it, and made it spread overthe country; and when you are old enough I will give you plenty ofproof--some from the herds of your own kinsmen--that what I say is true. 

And as for pure water being life to human beings: why have we never feverhere, and scarcely ever diseases like fever--zymotics, as the doctorscall them? Or, if a case comes into our parish from outside, why doesthe fever never spread? For the very same reason that we had no cattle-plague. Because we have more pure water close to every cottage than weneed. And this I tell you: that the only two outbreaks of deadly diseasewhich we have had here for thirty years, were both of them, as far as Icould see, to be traced to filthy water having got into the poor folk'swells. Water, you must remember, just as it is life when pure, is deathwhen foul. For it can carry, unseen to the eye, and even when it looksclear and sparkling, and tastes soft and sweet, poisons which haveperhaps killed more human beings than ever were killed in battle. Youhave read, perhaps, how the Athenians, when they were dying of theplague, accused the Lacedaemonians outside the walls of poisoning theirwells; or how, in some of the pestilences of the middle ages, the commonpeople used to accuse the poor harmless Jews of poisoning the wells, andset upon them and murdered them horribly. They were right, I do notdoubt, in their notion that the well-water was giving them thepestilence: but they had not sense to see that they were poisoning thewells themselves by their dirt and carelessness; or, in the case of poorbesieged Athens, probably by mere overcrowding, which has cost many alife ere now, and will cost more. And I am sorry to tell you, my littleman, that even now too many people have no more sense than they had, anddie in consequence. If you could see a battle-field, and men shot down, writhing and dying in hundreds by shell and bullet, would not that seemto you a horrid sight? Then--I do not wish to make you sad too early, but this is a fact which everyone should know--that more people, and notstrong men only, but women and little children too, are killed andwounded in Great Britain every year by bad water and want of watertogether, than were killed and wounded in any battle which has beenfought since you were born. Medical men know this well. And when youare older, you may see it for yourself in the Registrar-General'sreports, blue-books, pamphlets, and so on, without end. 

But why do not people stop such a horrible loss of life?

Well, my dear boy, the true causes of it have only been known for thelast thirty or forty years; and we English are, as good King Alfred foundus to his sorrow a thousand years ago, very slow to move, even when wesee a thing ought to be done. Let us hope that in this matter--we havebeen so in most matters as yet--we shall be like the tortoise in thefable, and not the hare; and by moving slowly, but surely, win the raceat last. But now think for yourself: and see what you would do to savethese people from being poisoned by bad water. Remember that the plainquestion is this--The rainwater comes down from heaven as water, andnothing but water. Rainwater is the only pure water, after all. Howwould you save that for the poor people who have none? There; run awayand hunt rabbits on the moor: but look, meanwhile, how you would savesome of this beautiful and precious water which is roaring away into thesea. 

* * * * *

Well? What would you do? Make ponds, you say, like the old monks'ponds, now all broken down. Dam all the glens across their mouths, andturn them into reservoirs. 

"Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings"--Well, that will have to bedone. That is being done more and more, more or less well. The goodpeople of Glasgow did it first, I think; and now the good people ofManchester, and of other northern towns, have done it, and have savedmany a human life thereby already. But it must be done, some day, allover England and Wales, and great part of Scotland. For the mountaintops and moors, my boy, by a beautiful law of nature, compensate fortheir own poverty by yielding a wealth which the rich lowlands cannotyield. You do not understand? Then see. Yon moor above can growneither corn nor grass. But one thing it can grow, and does grow, without which we should have no corn nor grass, and that is--water. Notonly does far more rain fall up there than falls here down below, buteven in drought the high moors condense the moisture into dew, and soyield some water, even when the lowlands are burnt up with drought. Thereason of that you must learn hereafter. That it is so, you should knowyourself. For on the high chalk downs, you know, where farmers make asheep-pond, they never, if they are wise, make it in a valley or on ahill-side, but on the bleakest top of the very highest down; and there, if they can once get it filled with snow and rain in winter, the blesseddews of night will keep some water in it all the summer through, whilethe ponds below are utterly dried up. And even so it is, as I know, withthis very moor. Corn and grass it will not grow, because there is toolittle "staple, " that is, soluble minerals, in the sandy soil. But howmuch water it might grow, you may judge roughly for yourself, byremembering how many brooks like this are running off it now to carrymere dirt into the river, and then into the sea. 

But why should we not make dams at once; and save the water?

Because we cannot afford it. No one would buy the water when we hadstored it. The rich in town and country will always take care--and quiteright they are--to have water enough for themselves, and for theirservants too, whatever it may cost them. But the poorer people are--andtherefore usually, alas! the more ignorant--the less water they get; andthe less they care to have water; and the less they are inclined to payfor it; and the more, I am sorry to say, they waste what little they doget; and I am still more sorry to say, spoil, and even steal and sell--inLondon at least--the stop-cocks and lead-pipes which bring the water intotheir houses. So that keeping a water-shop is a very troublesome anduncertain business; and one which is not likely to pay us or any oneround here. 

But why not let some company manage it, as they manage railways, and gas, and other things?

Ah--you have been overhearing a good deal about companies of late, I see. But this I will tell you; that when you grow up, and have a vote andinfluence, it will be your duty, if you intend to be a good citizen, notonly not to put the water-supply of England into the hands of freshcompanies, but to help to take out of their hands what water-supply theymanage already, especially in London; and likewise the gas-supply; andthe railroads; and everything else, in a word, which everybody uses, andmust use. For you must understand--at least as soon as you can--thatthough the men who make up companies are no worse than other men, andsome of them, as you ought to know, very good men; yet what they have tolook to is their profits; and the less water they supply, and the worseit is, the more profit they make. For most water, I am sorry to say, isfouled before the water companies can get to it, as this water which runspast us will be, and as the Thames water above London is. Therefore ithas to be cleansed, or partly cleansed, at a very great expense. Sowater companies have to be inspected--in plain English, watched--at avery heavy expense to the nation, by government officers; and compelledto do their best, and take their utmost care. And so it has come to passthat the London water is not now nearly as bad as some of it was thirtyyears ago, when it was no more fit to drink than that in the cattle yardtank. But still we must have more water, and better, in London; for itis growing year by year. There are more than three millions of peoplealready in what we call London; and ere you are an old man there may bebetween four and five millions. Now to supply all these people withwater is a duty which we must not leave to any private companies. Itmust be done by a public authority, as is fit and proper in a free self-governing country. In this matter, as in all others, we will try to dowhat the Royal Commission told us four years ago we ought to do. I hopethat you will see, though I may not, the day when what we call London, but which is really, nine-tenths of it, only a great nest of separatevillages huddled together, will be divided into three greatself-governing cities, London, Westminster, and Southwark; each with itsown corporation, like that of the venerable and well-governed City ofLondon; each managing its own water-supply, gas-supply, and sewage, andother matters besides; and managing them, like Dublin, Glasgow, Manchester, Liverpool, and other great northern towns, far more cheaplyand far better than any companies can do it for them. 

But where shall we get water enough for all these millions of people?There are no mountains near London. But we might give them the water offour moors. 

No, no, my boy. 

 "He that will not when he may, When he will, he shall have nay. "

Some fifteen years ago the Londoners might have had water from us; and Iwas one of those who did my best to get it for them: but the watercompanies did not choose to take it; and now this part of England isgrowing so populous and so valuable that it wants all its little rainfallfor itself. So there is another leaf torn out of the Sibylline books forthe poor old water companies. You do not understand: you will some day. But you may comfort yourself about London. For it happens to be, Ithink, the luckiest city in the world; and if it had not been, we shouldhave had pestilence on pestilence in it, as terrible as the great plagueof Charles II. 's time. The old Britons, without knowing in the leastwhat they were doing, settled old London city in the very centre of themost wonderful natural reservoir in this island, or perhaps in allEurope; which reaches from Kent into Wiltshire, and round again intoSuffolk; and that is, the dear old chalk downs. 

Why, they are always dry. 

Yes. But the turf on them never burns up, and the streams which flowthrough them never run dry, and seldom or never flood either. Do you notknow, from Winchester, that that is true? Then where is all the rain andsnow gone, which falls on them year by year, but into the chalk itself, and into the greensands, too, below the chalk? There it is, soaked up asby a sponge, in quantity incalculable; enough, some think, to supplyLondon, let it grow as huge as it may. I wish I too were sure of that. But the Commission has shown itself so wise and fair, and bravelikewise--too brave, I am sorry to say, for some who might have supportedthem--that it is not for me to gainsay their opinion. 

But if there was not water enough in the chalk, are not the Londonersrich enough to bring it from any distance?

My boy, in this also we will agree with the Commission--that we ought notto rob Peter to pay Paul, and take water to a distance which other peopleclose at hand may want. Look at the map of England and southernScotland; and see for yourself what is just, according to geography andnature. There are four mountain-ranges; four great water-fields. First, the hills of the Border. Their rainfall ought to be stored for theLothians and the extreme north of England. Then the Yorkshire andDerbyshire hills--the central chine of England. Their rainfall is beingstored already, to the honour of the shrewd northern men, for themanufacturing counties east and west of the hills. Then come the lakemountains--the finest water-field of all, because more rain by far fallsthere than in any place in England. But they will be wanted to supplyLancashire, and some day Liverpool itself; for Liverpool is now usingrain which belongs more justly to other towns; and besides, there areplenty of counties and towns, down into Cheshire, which would be glad ofwhat water Lancashire does not want. And last come the Snowdonmountains, a noble water-field, which I know well; for an old dream ofmine has been, that ere I died I should see all the rain of the Carnedds, and the Glyders, and Siabod, and Snowdon itself, carried across theConway river to feed the mining districts of North Wales, where thestreams are now all foul with oil and lead; and then on into the westerncoal and iron fields, to Wolverhampton and Birmingham itself: and if Iwere the engineer who got that done, I should be happier--prouder I darenot say--than if I had painted nobler pictures than Raffaelle, or writtennobler plays than Shakespeare. I say that, boy, in most deliberateearnest. But meanwhile, do you not see that in districts where coal andiron may be found, and fresh manufactures may spring up any day in anyplace, each district has a right to claim the nearest rainfall foritself? And now, when we have got the water into its proper place, letus see what we shall do with it. 

But why do you say we? Can you and I do all this?

My boy, are not you and I free citizens; part of the people, theCommons--as the good old word runs--of this country? And are we not--orought we not to be in time--beside that, educated men? By the people, remember, I mean, not only the hand-working man who has just got a vote;I mean the clergy of all denominations; and the gentlemen of the press;and last, but not least, the scientific men. If those four classestogether were to tell every government--"Free water we will have, and asmuch as we reasonably choose;" and tell every candidate for the House ofCommons, --"Unless you promise to get us as much free water as wereasonably choose, we will not return you to Parliament:" then, I think, we four should put such a "pressure" on government as no water companies, or other vested interests, could long resist. And if any of those fourclasses should hang back, and waste their time and influence over mattersfar less important and less pressing, the other three must laugh at them, and more than laugh at them; and ask them--"Why have you education, whyhave you influence, why have you votes, why are you freemen and notslaves, if not to preserve the comfort, the decency, the health, thelives of men, women, and children--most of those latter your own wivesand your own children?"

But what shall we do with the water?

Well, after all, that is a more practical matter than speculationsgrounded on the supposition that all classes will do their duty. But thefirst thing we will do will be to give to the very poorest houses aconstant supply, at high pressure; so that everybody may take as muchwater as he likes, instead of having to keep the water in littlecisterns, where it gets foul and putrid only too often. 

But will they not waste it then?

So far from it, wherever the water has been laid on at high pressure, thewaste, which is terrible now--some say that in London one-third of thewater is wasted--begins to lessen; and both water and expense are saved. If you will only think, you will see one reason why. If a woman leaves ahigh-pressure tap running, she will flood her place and her neighbour'stoo. She will be like the magician's servant, who called up the demon todraw water for him; and so he did: but when he had begun he would notstop, and if the magician had not come home, man and house would havebeen washed away. 

But if it saves money, why do not the water companies do it?

Because--and really here there are many excuses for the poor old watercompanies, when so many of them swerve and gib at the very mention ofconstant water-supply, like a poor horse set to draw a load which hefeels is too heavy for him--because, to keep everything in order amongdirty, careless, and often drunken people, there must be officers withlawful authority--water-policemen we will call them--who can enterpeople's houses when they will, and if they find anything wrong with thewater, set it to rights with a high hand, and even summon the people whohave set it wrong. And that is a power which, in a free country, mustnever be given to the servants of any private company, but only to theofficers of a corporation or of the government. 

And what shall we do with the rest of the water?

Well, we shall have, I believe, so much to spare that we may at least dothis--In each district of each city, and the centre of each town, we maybuild public baths and lavatories, where poor men and women may get theirwarm baths when they will; for now they usually never bathe at all, because they will not--and ought not, if they be hard-worked folk--bathein cold water during nine months of the year. And there they shall washtheir clothes, and dry them by steam; instead of washing them as now, athome, either under back sheds, where they catch cold and rheumatism, ortoo often, alas! in their own living rooms, in an atmosphere of foulvapour, which drives the father to the public-house and the children intothe streets; and which not only prevents the clothes from beingthoroughly dried again, but is, my dear boy, as you will know when youare older, a very hot-bed of disease. And they shall have othercomforts, and even luxuries, these public lavatories; and be made, intime, graceful and refining, as well as merely useful. Nay, we willeven, I think, have in front of each of them a real fountain; not likethe drinking-fountains--though they are great and needful boons--whichyou see here and there about the streets, with a tiny dribble of water toa great deal of expensive stone: but real fountains, which shall leap, and sparkle, and plash, and gurgle; and fill the place with life, andlight, and coolness; and sing in the people's ears the sweetest of allearthly songs--save the song of a mother over her child--the song of "TheLaughing Water. "

But will not that be a waste?

Yes, my boy. And for that very reason, I think we, the people, will haveour fountains; if it be but to make our governments, and corporations, and all public bodies and officers, remember that they all--save HerMajesty the Queen--are our servants; and not we theirs; and that wechoose to have water, not only to wash with, but to play with, if welike. And I believe--for the world, as you will find, is full not onlyof just but of generous souls--that if the water-supply were set reallyright, there would be found, in many a city, many a generous man who, over and above his compulsory water-rate, would give his poorfellow-townsmen such a real fountain as those which ennoble the greatsquare at Carcasonne and the great square at Nismes; to be "a thing ofbeauty and a joy for ever. "

And now, if you want to go back to your Latin and Greek, you shalltranslate for me into Latin--I do not expect you to do it into Greek, though it would turn very well into Greek, for the Greeks knew all aboutthe matter long before the Romans--what follows here; and you shallverify the facts and the names, &c. , in it from your dictionaries ofantiquity and biography, that you may remember all the better what itsays. And by that time, I think, you will have learnt something moreuseful to yourself, and, I hope, to your country hereafter, than if youhad learnt to patch together the neatest Greek and Latin verses whichhave appeared since the days of Mr. Canning. 

* * * * *

I have often amused myself, by fancying one question which an old Romanemperor would ask, were he to rise from his grave and visit the sights ofLondon under the guidance of some minister of state. The august shadewould, doubtless, admire, our railroads and bridges, our cathedrals andour public parks, and much more of which we need not be ashamed. Butafter a while, I think, he would look round, whether in London or in mostof our great cities, inquiringly and in vain, for one class of buildings, which in his empire were wont to be almost as conspicuous and assplendid, because, in public opinion, almost as necessary, as thebasilicas and temples--"And where, " he would ask, "are your publicbaths?" And if the minister of state who was his guide should answer--"Ogreat Caesar, I really do not know. I believe there are some somewhereat the back of that ugly building which we call the National Gallery; andI think there have been some meetings lately in the East End, and anamateur concert at the Albert Hall, for restoring, by privatesubscriptions, some baths and wash-houses in Bethnal Green, which hadfallen to decay. And there may be two or three more about themetropolis; for parish vestries have powers by Act of Parliament toestablish such places, if they think fit, and choose to pay for them outof the rates:"--Then, I think, the august shade might well makeanswer--"We used to call you, in old Rome, northern barbarians. It seemsthat you have not lost all your barbarian habits. Are you aware that, inevery city in the Roman empire, there were, as a matter of course, publicbaths open, not only to the poorest freeman, but to the slave, usuallyfor the payment of the smallest current coin, and often gratuitously? Areyou aware that in Rome itself, millionaire after millionaire, emperorafter emperor, from Menenius Agrippa and Nero down to Diocletian andConstantine, built baths, and yet more baths; and connected with themgymnasia for exercise, lecture-rooms, libraries, and porticos, whereinthe people might have shade and shelter, and rest?--I remark, by-the-by, that I have not seen in all your London a single covered place in whichthe people may take shelter during a shower--Are you aware that thesebaths were of the most magnificent architecture, decorated with marbles, paintings, sculptures, fountains, what not? And yet I had heard, inHades down below, that you prided yourselves here on the study of thelearned languages; and, indeed, taught little but Greek and Latin at yourpublic schools?"

Then, if the minister should make reply--"Oh yes, we know all this. Evensince the revival of letters in the end of the fifteenth century a wholeliterature has been written--a great deal of it, I fear, by pedants whoseldom washed even their hands and faces--about your Greek and Romanbaths. We visit their colossal ruins in Italy and elsewhere with awe andadmiration; and the discovery of a new Roman bath in any old city of ourisles sets all our antiquaries buzzing with interest. "

"Then why, " the shade might ask, "do you not copy an example which you somuch admire? Surely England must be much in want, either of water, or offuel to heat it with?"

"On the contrary, our rainfall is almost too great; our soil so damp thatwe have had to invent a whole art of subsoil drainage unknown to you;while, as for fuel, our coal-mines make us the great fuel-exportingpeople of the world. "

What a quiet sneer might curl the lip of a Constantine as he replied--"Notin vain, as I said, did we call you, some fifteen hundred years ago, thebarbarians of the north. But tell me, good barbarian, whom I know to beboth brave and wise--for the fame of your young British empire hasreached us even in the realms below, and we recognise in you, with allrespect, a people more like us Romans than any which has appeared onearth for many centuries--how is it you have forgotten that sacred dutyof keeping the people clean, which you surely at one time learnt from us?When your ancestors entered our armies, and rose, some of them, to begreat generals, and even emperors, like those two Teuton peasants, Justinand Justinian, who, long after my days, reigned in my own Constantinople:then, at least, you saw baths, and used them; and felt, after the bath, that you were civilised men, and not 'sordidi ac foetentes, ' as we usedto call you when fresh out of your bullock-waggons and cattle-pens. Howis it that you have forgotten that lesson?"

The minister, I fear, would have to answer that our ancestors werebarbarous enough, not only to destroy the Roman cities, and temples, andbasilicas, and statues, but the Roman baths likewise; and then retired, each man to his own freehold in the country, to live a life not much morecleanly or more graceful than that of the swine which were his favouritefood. But he would have a right to plead, as an excuse, that not only inEngland, but throughout the whole of the conquered Latin empire, theLatin priesthood, who, in some respects, were--to their honour--therepresentatives of Roman civilisation and the protectors of its remnants, were the determined enemies of its cleanliness; that they looked onpersonal dirt--like the old hermits of the Thebaid--as a sign ofsanctity; and discouraged--as they are said to do still in some of theRomance countries of Europe--the use of the bath, as not only luxurious, but also indecent. 

At which answer, it seems to me, another sneer might curl the lip of theaugust shade, as he said to himself--"This, at least, I did not expect, when I made Christianity the state religion of my empire. But you, goodbarbarian, look clean enough. You do not look on dirt as a sign ofsanctity?"

"On the contrary, sire, the upper classes of our empire boast of beingthe cleanliest--perhaps the only perfectly cleanly--people in the world:except, of course, the savages of the South Seas. And dirt is so farfrom being a thing which we admire, that our scientific men--than whomthe world has never seen wiser--have proved to us, for a whole generationpast, that dirt is the fertile cause of disease and drunkenness, miseryand recklessness. "

"And, therefore, " replies the shade, ere he disappears, "of discontentand revolution; followed by a tyranny endured, as in Rome and manyanother place, by men once free; because tyranny will at least do forthem what they are too lazy, and cowardly, and greedy to do forthemselves. Farewell, and prosper; as you seem likely to prosper, on thewhole. But if you wish me to consider you a civilised nation: let mehear that you have brought a great river from the depths of the earth, bethey a thousand fathoms deep, or from your nearest mountains, be theyfive hundred miles away; and have washed out London's dirt--and your ownshame. Till then, abstain from judging too harshly a Constantine, oreven a Caracalla; for they, whatever were their sins, built baths, andkept their people clean. But do your gymnasia--your schools anduniversities, teach your youth nought about all this?"

THRIFT. A LECTURE DELIVERED AT WINCHESTER, MARCH 17, 1869. 

Ladies, --I have chosen for the title of this lecture a practical andprosaic word, because I intend the lecture itself to be as practical andprosaic as I can make it, without becoming altogether dull. 

The question of the better or worse education of women is one far tooimportant for vague sentiment, wild aspirations, or Utopian dreams. 

It is a practical question, on which depends not merely money or comfort, but too often health and life, as the consequences of a good education, or disease and death--I know too well of what I speak--as theconsequences of a bad one. 

I beg you, therefore, to put out of your minds at the outset any fancythat I wish for a social revolution in the position of women; or that Iwish to see them educated by exactly the same methods, and in exactly thesame subjects, as men. British lads, on an average, are far tooill-taught still, in spite of all recent improvements, for me to wishthat British girls should be taught in the same way. 

Moreover, whatever defects there may have been--and defects there must bein all things human--in the past education of British women, it has beenmost certainly a splendid moral success. It has made, by the grace ofGod, British women the best wives, mothers, daughters, aunts, sisters, that the world, as far as I can discover, has yet seen. 

Let those who will sneer at the women of England. We who have to do thework and to fight the battle of life know the inspiration which we derivefrom their virtue, their counsel, their tenderness, and--but toooften--from their compassion and their forgiveness. There is, I doubtnot, still left in England many a man with chivalry and patriotism enoughto challenge the world to show so perfect a specimen of humanity as acultivated British woman. 

But just because a cultivated British woman is so perfect a personage;therefore I wish to see all British women cultivated. Because thewomanhood of England is so precious a treasure; I wish to see none of itwasted. It is an invaluable capital, or material, out of which thegreatest possible profit to the nation must be made. And that can onlybe done by thrift; and that, again, can only be attained by knowledge. 

Consider that word thrift. If you will look at Dr. Johnson's Dictionary, or if you know your Shakespeare, you will see that thrift signifiedoriginally profits, gain, riches gotten--in a word, the marks of a man'sthriving. 

How, then, did the word thrift get to mean parsimony, frugality, theopposite of waste? Just in the same way as economy--which first, ofcourse, meant the management of a household--got to mean also theopposite of waste. 

It was found that in commerce, in husbandry, in any process, in fact, menthrove in proportion as they saved their capital, their material, theirforce. 

Now this is a great law which runs through life; one of those laws ofnature--call them, rather, laws of God--which apply not merely topolitical economy, to commerce, and to mechanics; but to physiology, tosociety; to the intellect, to the heart, of every person in this room. 

The secret of thriving is thrift; saving of force; to get as much work aspossible done with the least expenditure of power, the least jar andobstruction, the least wear and tear. 

And the secret of thrift is knowledge. In proportion as you know thelaws and nature of a subject, you will be able to work at it easily, surely, rapidly, successfully; instead of wasting your money or yourenergies in mistaken schemes, irregular efforts, which end indisappointment and exhaustion. 

The secret of thrift, I say, is knowledge. The more you know, the moreyou can save yourself and that which belongs to you; and can do more workwith less effort. 

A knowledge of the laws of commercial credit, we all know, saves capital, enabling a less capital to do the work of a greater. Knowledge of theelectric telegraph saves time; knowledge of writing saves human speechand locomotion; knowledge of domestic economy saves income; knowledge ofsanitary laws saves health and life; knowledge of the laws of theintellect saves wear and tear of brain; and knowledge of the laws of thespirit--what does it not save?

A well-educated moral sense, a well-regulated character, saves fromidleness and ennui, alternating with sentimentality and excitement, thosetenderer emotions, those deeper passions, those nobler aspirations ofhumanity, which are the heritage of the woman far more than of the man;and which are potent in her, for evil or for good, in proportion as theyare left to run wild and undisciplined, or are trained and developed intograceful, harmonious, self-restraining strength, beautiful in themselves, and a blessing to all who come under their influence. 

What, therefore, I recommend to ladies in this lecture is thrift; thriftof themselves and of their own powers: and knowledge as the parent ofthrift. 

And because it is well to begin with the lower applications of thrift, and to work up to the higher, I am much pleased to hear that the firstcourse of the proposed lectures to women in this place will be one ondomestic economy. 

I presume that the learned gentleman who will deliver these lectures willbe the last to mean by that term the mere saving of money; that he willtell you, as--being a German--he will have good reason to know, that theyoung lady who learns thrift in domestic economy is also learning thriftof the very highest faculties of her immortal spirit. He will tell you, I doubt not--for he must know--how you may see in Germany young ladiesliving in what we more luxurious British would consider something likepoverty; cooking, waiting at table, and performing many a householdoffice which would be here considered menial; and yet finding time for acultivation of the intellect, which is, unfortunately, too rare in GreatBritain. 

The truth is, that we British are too wealthy. We make money, if not toorapidly for the good of the nation at large, yet too rapidly, I fear, forthe good of the daughters of those who make it. Their temptation--I donot, of course, say they all yield to it--but their temptation is, towaste of the very simplest--I had almost said, if I may be pardoned theexpression, of the most barbaric--kind; to an oriental waste of money, and waste of time; to a fondness for mere finery, pardonable enough, butstill a waste; and to the mistaken fancy that it is the mark of a lady tosit idle and let servants do everything for her. 

Such women may well take a lesson by contrast from the pure and noble, useful and cultivated thrift of an average German young lady--for ladiesthese German women are, in every possible sense of the word. 

But it is not of this sort of waste of which I wish to speak to-day. Ionly mention the matter in passing, to show that high intellectualculture is not incompatible with the performance of homely householdduties, and that the moral success of which I spoke just now need not beinjured, any more than it is in Germany, by intellectual successlikewise. I trust that these words may reassure those parents, if anysuch there be here, who may fear that these lectures will withdraw womenfrom their existing sphere of interest and activity. That they shouldentertain such a fear is not surprising, after the extravagant opinionsand schemes which have been lately broached in various quarters. 

The programme to these lectures expressly disclaims any such intentions;and I, as a husband and a father, expressly disclaim any such intentionlikewise. 

"To fit women for the more enlightened performance of their specialduties;" to help them towards learning how to do better what we doubt notthey are already doing well; is, I honestly believe, the only object ofthe promoters of this scheme. 

Let us see now how some of these special duties can be better performedby help of a little enlightenment as to the laws which regulate them. 

Now, no man will deny--certainly no man who is past forty-five, and whosedigestion is beginning to quail before the lumps of beef and mutton whichare the boast of a British kitchen, and to prefer, with Justice Shallow, and, I presume, Sir John Falstaff also, "any pretty little tinykickshaws"--no man, I say, who has reached that age, but will feel it apractical comfort to him to know that the young ladies of his family areat all events good cooks; and understand, as the French do, thrift in thematter of food. 

Neither will any parent who wishes, naturally enough, that his daughtersshould cost him as little as possible; and wishes, naturally enough also, that they should be as well dressed as possible, deny that it would be agood thing for them to be practical milliners and mantua-makers; and, bymaking their own clothes gracefully and well, exercise thrift inclothing. 

But, beside this thrift in clothing, I am not alone, I believe, inwishing for some thrift in the energy which produces it. Labourmisapplied, you will agree, is labour wasted; and as dress, I presume, isintended to adorn the person of the wearer, the making a dress which onlydisfigures her may be considered as a plain case of waste. It would beimpertinent in me to go into any details: but it is impossible to walkabout the streets now without passing young people who must be under adeep delusion as to the success of their own toilette. Instead ofgraceful and noble simplicity of form, instead of combinations of colourat once rich and delicate, because in accordance with the chromatic lawsof nature, one meets with phenomena more and more painful to the eye, andstartling to common sense, till one would be hardly more astonished, andcertainly hardly more shocked, if in a year or two one should pass someone going about like a Chinese lady, with pinched feet, or like a savageof the Amazons, with a wooden bung through her lower lip. It is easy tocomplain of these monstrosities: but impossible to cure them, it seems tome, without an education of the taste, an education in those laws ofnature which produce beauty in form and beauty in colour. For that thecause of these failures lies in want of education is patent. They aremost common in--I had almost said they are confined to--those classes ofwell-to-do persons who are the least educated; who have no standard oftaste of their own; and who do not acquire any from cultivated friendsand relations: who, in consequence, dress themselves blindly according towhat they conceive to be the Paris fashions, conveyed at third-handthrough an equally uneducated dressmaker; in innocent ignorance of thefact--for fact I believe it to be--that Paris fashions are invented nownot in the least for the sake of beauty, but for the sake of producing, through variety, increased expenditure, and thereby increased employment;according to the strange system which now prevails in France ofcompelling, if not prosperity, at least the signs of it; and likeschoolboys before a holiday, nailing up the head of the weather glass toinsure fine weather. 

Let British ladies educate themselves in those laws of beauty which areas eternal as any other of nature's laws; which may be seen fulfilled, asMr. Ruskin tells us, so eloquently in every flower and every leaf, inevery sweeping down and rippling wave: and they will be able to inventgraceful and economical dresses for themselves, without importing tawdryand expensive ugliness from France. 

Let me now go a step further, and ask you to consider this. --There are inEngland now a vast number, and an increasing number, of young women who, from various circumstances which we all know, must in after life beeither the mistresses of their own fortunes, or the earners of their ownbread. And, to do that wisely and well, they must be more or less womenof business; and to be women of business, they must know something of themeaning of the words capital, profit, price, value, labour, wages, and ofthe relation between those two last. In a word, they must know a littlepolitical economy. Nay, I sometimes think that the mistress of everyhousehold might find, not only thrift of money, but thrift of brain;freedom from mistakes, anxieties, worries of many kinds, all of which eatout the health as well as the heart, by a little sound knowledge of theprinciples of political economy. 

When we consider that every mistress of a household is continuallybuying, if not selling; that she is continually hiring and employinglabour in the form of servants; and very often, into the bargain, keepingher husband's accounts: I cannot but think that her hard-worked brainmight be clearer, and her hard-tried desire to do her duty by everysubject in her little kingdom, might be more easily satisfied, had sheread something of what Mr. John Stuart Mill has written, especially onthe duties of employer and employed. A capitalist, a commercialist, anemployer of labour, and an accountant--every mistress of a household isall these, whether she likes it or not; and it would be surely well forher, in so very complicated a state of society as this, not to trustmerely to that mother-wit, that intuitive sagacity and innate power ofruling her fellow-creatures, which carries women so nobly through theirwork in simpler and less civilised societies. 

And here I stop to answer those who may say--as I have heard it said--Thata woman's intellect is not fit for business; that when a woman takes tobusiness, she is apt to do it ill, and unpleasantly likewise; to be moresuspicious, more irritable, more grasping, more unreasonable, thanregular men of business would be; that--as I have heard it put--"a womandoes not fight fair. " The answer is simple. That a woman's intellect iseminently fitted for business is proved by the enormous amount ofbusiness she gets through without any special training for it: but thosefaults in a woman of which some men complain are simply the results ofher not having had a special training. She does not know the laws ofbusiness. She does not know the rules of the game she is playing; andtherefore she is playing it in the dark, in fear and suspicion, apt tojudge of questions on personal grounds, often offending those with whomshe has to do, and oftener still making herself miserable over matters oflaw or of business, on which a little sound knowledge would set her headand her heart at rest. 

When I have seen widows, having the care of children, of a greathousehold, of a great estate, of a great business, struggling heroically, and yet often mistakenly; blamed severely for selfishness and ambition, while they were really sacrificing themselves with the divine instinct ofa mother for their children's interest: I have stood by with mingledadmiration and pity, and said to myself--"How nobly she is doing the workwithout teaching! How much more nobly would she have done it had shebeen taught! She is now doing the work at the most enormous waste ofenergy and of virtue: had she had knowledge, thrift would have followedit; she would have done more work with far less trouble. She willprobably kill herself if she goes on: sound knowledge would have savedher health, saved her heart, saved her friends, and helped the very lovedones for whom she labours, not always with success. "

A little political economy, therefore, will at least do no harm to awoman; especially if she have to take care of herself in after life;neither, I think, will she be much harmed by some sound knowledge ofanother subject, which I see promised in these lectures, --"Naturalphilosophy, in its various branches, such as the chemistry of commonlife, light, heat, electricity, &c. , &c. "

A little knowledge of the laws of light, for instance, would teach manywomen that by shutting themselves up day after day, week after week, indarkened rooms, they are as certainly committing a waste of health, destroying their vital energy, and diseasing their brains, as if theywere taking so much poison the whole time. 

A little knowledge of the laws of heat would teach women not to clothethemselves and their children after foolish and insufficient fashions, which in this climate sow the seeds of a dozen different diseases, andhave to be atoned for by perpetual anxieties, and by perpetual doctors'bills; and as for a little knowledge of the laws of electricity, onethrift I am sure it would produce--thrift to us men, of having to answercontinual inquiries as to what the weather is going to be, when a slightknowledge of the barometer, or of the form of the clouds and thedirection of the wind, would enable many a lady to judge for herself, andnot, after inquiry on inquiry, disregard all warnings, go out on thefirst appearance of a strip of blue sky, and come home wet through, withwhat she calls "only a chill, " but which really means a nail driven intoher coffin--a probable shortening, though it may be a very small one, ofher mortal life; because the food of the next twenty-four hours, whichshould have gone to keep the vital heat at its normal standard, will haveto be wasted in raising it up to that standard, from which it has fallenby a chill. 

Ladies; these are subjects on which I must beg to speak a little more atlength, premising them by one statement, which may seem jest, but issolemn earnest--that, if the medical men of this or any other city werewhat the world now calls "alive to their own interests"--that is, to themere making of money; instead of being, what medical men are, the mostgenerous, disinterested, and high-minded class in these realms, then theywould oppose by all means in their power the delivery of lectures onnatural philosophy to women. For if women act upon what they learn inthose lectures--and having women's hearts, they will act upon it--thereought to follow a decrease of sickness and an increase of health, especially among children; a thrift of life, and a thrift of expensebesides, which would very seriously affect the income of medical men. 

For let me ask you, ladies, with all courtesy, but with allearnestness--Are you aware of certain facts, of which every one of thoseexcellent medical men is too well aware? Are you aware that more humanbeings are killed in England every year by unnecessary and preventablediseases than were killed at Waterloo or at Sadowa? Are you aware thatthe great majority of those victims are children? Are you aware that thediseases which carry them off are for the most part such as ought to bespecially under the control of the women who love them, pet them, educatethem, and would in many cases, if need be, lay down their lives for them?Are you aware, again, of the vast amount of disease which, so both wisemothers and wise doctors assure me, is engendered in the sleeping-roomfrom simple ignorance of the laws of ventilation, and in the school-roomlikewise, from simple ignorance of the laws of physiology? from anignorance of which I shall mention no other case here save one--that toooften from ignorance of signs of approaching disease, a child is punishedfor what is called idleness, listlessness, wilfulness, sulkiness; andpunished, too, in the unwisest way--by an increase of tasks andconfinement to the house, thus overtasking still more a brain alreadyovertasked, and depressing still more, by robbing it of oxygen and ofexercise, a system already depressed? Are you aware, I ask again, of allthis? I speak earnestly upon this point, because I speak withexperience. As a single instance: a medical man, a friend of mine, passing by his own school-room, heard one of his own little girlsscreaming and crying, and went in. The governess, an excellent woman, but wholly ignorant of the laws of physiology, complained that the childhad of late become obstinate and would not learn; and that therefore shemust punish her by keeping her indoors over the unlearnt lessons. Thefather, who knew that the child was usually a very good one, looked ather carefully for a little while; sent her out of the school-room; andthen said, "That child must not open a book for a month. " "If I had notacted so, " he said to me, "I should have had that child dead of brain-disease within the year. "

Now, in the face of such facts as these, is it too much to ask ofmothers, sisters, aunts, nurses, governesses--all who may be occupied inthe care of children, especially of girls--that they should study thriftof human health and human life, by studying somewhat the laws of life andhealth? There are books--I may say a whole literature of books--writtenby scientific doctors on these matters, which are in my mind far moreimportant to the school-room than half the trashy accomplishments, so-called, which are expected to be known by governesses. But are theybought? Are they even to be bought, from most country booksellers? Ah, for a little knowledge of the laws to the neglect of which is owing somuch fearful disease, which, if it does not produce immediate death, toooften leaves the constitution impaired for years to come. Ah the wasteof health and strength in the young; the waste, too, of anxiety andmisery in those who love and tend them. How much of it might be saved bya little rational education in those laws of nature which are the will ofGod about the welfare of our bodies, and which, therefore, we are as muchbound to know and to obey, as we are bound to know and obey the spirituallaws whereon depends the welfare of our souls. 

Pardon me, ladies, if I have given a moment's pain to any one here: but Iappeal to every medical man in the room whether I have not spoken thetruth; and having such an opportunity as this, I felt that I must speakfor the sake of children, and of women likewise, or else for everhereafter hold my peace. 

Let me pass on from this painful subject--for painful it has been to mefor many years--to a question of intellectual thrift--by which I meanjust now thrift of words; thrift of truth; restraint of the tongue;accuracy and modesty in statement. 

Mothers complain to me that girls are apt to be--not intentionallyuntruthful--but exaggerative, prejudiced, incorrect, in repeating aconversation or describing an event; and that from this fault arise, asis to be expected, misunderstandings, quarrels, rumours, slanders, scandals, and what not. 

Now, for this waste of words there is but one cure: and if I be told thatit is a natural fault of women; that they cannot take the calm judicialview of matters which men boast, and often boast most wrongly, that theycan take; that under the influence of hope, fear, delicate antipathy, honest moral indignation, they will let their eyes and ears be governedby their feelings; and see and hear only what they wish to see and hear:I answer, that it is not for me as a man to start such a theory; but thatif it be true, it is an additional argument for some education which willcorrect this supposed natural defect. And I say deliberately that thereis but one sort of education which will correct it; one which will teachyoung women to observe facts accurately, judge them calmly, and describethem carefully, without adding or distorting: and that is, some trainingin natural science. 

I beg you not to be startled: but if you are, then test the truth of mytheory by playing to-night at the game called "Russian Scandal;" in whicha story, repeated in secret by one player to the other, comes out at theend of the game, owing to the inaccurate and--forgive me if I sayit--uneducated brains through which it has passed, utterly unlike itsoriginal; not only ludicrously maimed and distorted, but often with themost fantastic additions of events, details, names, dates, places, whicheach player will aver that he received from the player before him. I amafraid that too much of the average gossip of every city, town, andvillage is little more than a game of "Russian Scandal;" with thisdifference, that while one is but a game, the other is but toomischievous earnest. 

But now, if among your party there shall be an average lawyer, medicalman, or man of science, you will find that he, and perhaps he alone, willbe able to retail accurately the story which has been told him. And why?Simply because his mind has been trained to deal with facts; to ascertainexactly what he does see or hear, and to imprint its leading featuresstrongly and clearly on his memory. 

Now, you certainly cannot make young ladies barristers or attorneys; noremploy their brains in getting up cases, civil or criminal; and as forchemistry, they and their parents may have a reasonable antipathy tosmells, blackened fingers, and occasional explosions and poisonings. Butyou may make them something of botanists, zoologists, geologists. 

I could say much on this point: allow me at least to say this: I verilybelieve that any young lady who would employ some of her leisure time incollecting wild flowers, carefully examining them, verifying them, andarranging them; or who would in her summer trip to the sea-coast do thesame by the common objects of the shore, instead of wasting her holiday, as one sees hundreds doing, in lounging on benches on the esplanade, reading worthless novels, and criticizing dresses--that such a younglady, I say, would not only open her own mind to a world of wonder, beauty, and wisdom, which, if it did not make her a more reverent andpious soul, she cannot be the woman which I take for granted she is; butwould save herself from the habit--I had almost said the necessity--ofgossip; because she would have things to think of and not merely persons;facts instead of fancies; while she would acquire something of accuracy, of patience, of methodical observation and judgment, which would standher in good stead in the events of daily life, and increase her power ofbridling her tongue and her imagination. "God is in heaven, and thouupon earth; therefore let thy words be few;" is the lesson which thoseare learning all day long who study the works of God with reverentaccuracy, lest by misrepresenting them they should be tempted to say thatGod has done that which He has not; and in that wholesome discipline Ilong that women as well as men should share. 

And now I come to a thrift of the highest kind, as contrasted with awaste the most deplorable and ruinous of all; thrift of those facultieswhich connect us with the unseen and spiritual world; with humanity, withChrist, with God; thrift of the immortal spirit. I am not going now togive you a sermon on duty. You hear such, I doubt not, in church everySunday, far better than I can preach to you. I am going to speak ratherof thrift of the heart, thrift of the emotions. How they are wasted inthese days in reading what are called sensation novels, all know but toowell; how British literature--all that the best hearts and intellectsamong our forefathers have bequeathed to us--is neglected for lightfiction, the reading of which is, as a lady well said, "the worst form ofintemperance--dram-drinking and opium-eating, intellectual and moral. "

I know that the young will delight--they have delighted in all ages, andwill to the end of time--in fictions which deal with that "oldest talewhich is for ever new. " Novels will be read: but that is all the morereason why women should be trained, by the perusal of a higher, broader, deeper literature, to distinguish the good novel from the bad, the moralfrom the immoral, the noble from the base, the true work of art from thesham which hides its shallowness and vulgarity under a tangled plot andmelodramatic situations. She should learn--and that she can only learnby cultivation--to discern with joy, and drink in with reverence, thegood, the beautiful, and the true; and to turn with the fine scorn of apure and strong womanhood from the bad, the ugly, and the false. 

And if any parent should be inclined to reply--"Why lay so much stressupon educating a girl in British literature? Is it not far moreimportant to make our daughters read religious books?" I answer--Ofcourse it is. I take for granted that that is done in a Christian land. But I beg you to recollect that there are books and books; and that inthese days of a free press it is impossible, in the long run, to preventgirls reading books of very different shades of opinion, and verydifferent religious worth. It may be, therefore, of the very highestimportance to a girl to have her intellect, her taste, her emotions, hermoral sense, in a word, her whole womanhood, so cultivated and regulatedthat she shall herself be able to discern the true from the false, theorthodox from the unorthodox, the truly devout from the merelysentimental, the Gospel from its counterfeits. 

I should have thought that there never had been in Britain, since theReformation, a crisis at which young Englishwomen required more carefulcultivation on these matters; if at least they are to be saved frommaking themselves and their families miserable; and from ending--as Ihave known too many end--with broken hearts, broken brains, brokenhealth, and an early grave. 

Take warning by what you see abroad. In every country where the womenare uneducated, unoccupied; where their only literature is French novelsor translations of them--in every one of those countries the women, evento the highest, are the slaves of superstition, and the puppets ofpriests. In proportion as, in certain other countries--notably, I willsay, in Scotland--the women are highly educated, family life and familysecrets are sacred, and the woman owns allegiance and devotion to noconfessor or director, but to her own husband or to her own family. 

I say plainly, that if any parents wish their daughters to succumb atlast to some quackery or superstition, whether calling itself scientific, or calling itself religious--and there are too many of both just now--theycannot more certainly effect their purpose than by allowing her to growup ignorant, frivolous, luxurious, vain; with her emotions excited, butnot satisfied, by the reading of foolish and even immoral novels. 

In such a case the more delicate and graceful the organization, the morenoble and earnest the nature, which has been neglected, the more certainit is--I know too well what I am saying--to go astray. 

The time of depression, disappointment, vacuity, all but despair, mustcome. The immortal spirit, finding no healthy satisfaction for itshighest aspirations, is but too likely to betake itself to an unhealthyand exciting superstition. Ashamed of its own long self-indulgence, itis but too likely to flee from itself into a morbid asceticism. Nothaving been taught its God-given and natural duties in the world, it isbut too likely to betake itself, from the mere craving for action, toself-invented and unnatural duties out of the world. Ignorant of truescience, yet craving to understand the wonders of nature and of spirit, it is but too likely to betake itself to nonscience--nonsense as it isusually called--whether of spirit-rapping and mesmerism, or of miraculousrelics and winking pictures. Longing for guidance and teaching, andnever having been taught to guide and teach itself, it is but too likelyto deliver itself up in self-despair to the guidance and teaching ofthose who, whether they be quacks or fanatics, look on uneducated womenas their natural prey. 

You will see, I am sure, from what I have said, that it is not my wishthat you should become mere learned women; mere female pedants, asuseless and unpleasing as male pedants are wont to be. The educationwhich I set before you is not to be got by mere hearing lectures orreading books: for it is an education of your whole character; a self-education; which really means a committing of yourself to God, that Hemay educate you. Hearing lectures is good, for it will teach you howmuch there is to be known, and how little you know. Reading books isgood, for it will give you habits of regular and diligent study. Andtherefore I urge on you strongly private study, especially in case alibrary should be formed here of books on those most practical subjectsof which I have been speaking. But, after all, both lectures and booksare good, mainly in as far as they furnish matter for reflection: whilethe desire to reflect and the ability to reflect must come, as I believe, from above. The honest craving after light and power, after knowledge, wisdom, active usefulness, must come--and may it come to you--by theinspiration of the Spirit of God. 

One word more, and I have done. Let me ask women to educate themselves, not for their own sakes merely, but for the sake of others. For, whetherthey will or not, they must educate others. I do not speak merely ofthose who may be engaged in the work of direct teaching; that they oughtto be well taught themselves, who can doubt? I speak of those--and in sodoing I speak of every woman, young and old--who exercises as wife, asmother, as aunt, as sister, or as friend, an influence, indirect it maybe, and unconscious, but still potent and practical, on the minds andcharacters of those about them, especially of men. How potent andpractical that influence is, those know best who know most of the worldand most of human nature. There are those who consider--and I agree withthem--that the education of boys under the age of twelve years ought tobe entrusted as much as possible to women. Let me ask--of what period ofyouth and of manhood does not the same hold true? I pity the ignoranceand conceit of the man who fancies that he has nothing left to learn fromcultivated women. I should have thought that the very mission of womanwas to be, in the highest sense, the educator of man from infancy to oldage; that that was the work towards which all the God-given capacities ofwomen pointed; for which they were to be educated to the highest pitch. Ishould have thought that it was the glory of woman that she was sent intothe world to live for others, rather than for herself; and therefore Ishould say--Let her smallest rights be respected, her smallest wrongsredressed: but let her never be persuaded to forget that she is sent intothe world to teach man--what, I believe, she has been teaching him allalong, even in the savage state--namely, that there is something morenecessary than the claiming of rights, and that is, the performing ofduties; to teach him specially, in these so-called intellectual days, that there is something more than intellect, and that is--purity andvirtue. Let her never be persuaded to forget that her calling is not thelower and more earthly one of self-assertion, but the higher and thediviner calling of self-sacrifice; and let her never desert that higherlife, which lives in others and for others, like her Redeemer and herLord. 

And if any should answer that this doctrine would keep woman a dependantand a slave, I rejoin--Not so: it would keep her what she should be--themistress of all around her, because mistress of herself. And more, Ishould express a fear that those who made that answer had not yet seeninto the mystery of true greatness and true strength; that they did notyet understand the true magnanimity, the true royalty of that spirit, bywhich the Son of man came not to be ministered unto, but to minister, andto give His life a ransom for many. 

Surely that is woman's calling--to teach man: and to teach him what? Toteach him, after all, that his calling is the same as hers, if he willbut see the things which belong to his peace. To temper his fiercer, coarser, more self-assertive nature, by the contact of her gentleness, purity, self-sacrifice. To make him see that not by blare of trumpets, not by noise, wrath, greed, ambition, intrigue, puffery, is good andlasting work to be done on earth: but by wise self-distrust, by silentlabour, by lofty self-control, by that charity which hopeth all things, believeth all things, endureth all things; by such an example, in short, as women now in tens of thousands set to those around them; such as theywill show more and more, the more their whole womanhood is educated toemploy its powers without waste and without haste in harmonious unity. Let the woman begin in girlhood, if such be her happy lot--to quote thewords of a great poet, a great philosopher, and a great Churchman, William Wordsworth--let her begin, I say--

 "With all things round about her drawn From May-time and the cheerful dawn; A dancing shape, an image gay, To haunt, to startle, and waylay. "

Let her develop onwards--

 "A spirit, yet a woman too, With household motions light and free, And steps of virgin liberty. A countenance in which shall meet Sweet records, promises as sweet; A creature not too bright and good For human nature's daily food; For transient sorrows, simple wiles, Praise, blame, love, kisses, tears, and smiles. 

But let her highest and her final development be that which not nature, but self-education alone can bring--that which makes her once and forever--

 "A being breathing thoughtful breath; A traveller betwixt life and death. With reason firm, with temperate will, Endurance, foresight, strength and skill. A perfect woman, nobly planned, To warn, to comfort and command. And yet a spirit still and bright With something of an angel light. "

THE STUDY OF NATURAL HISTORY. A LECTURE DELIVERED TO THE OFFICERS OF THE ROYAL ARTILLERY, WOOLWICH. 

Gentlemen:--When I accepted the honour of lecturing here, I took forgranted that so select an audience would expect from me not mereamusement, but somewhat of instruction; or, if that be too ambitious aword for me to use, at least some fresh hint--if I were able to giveone--as to how they should fulfil the ideal of military men in such anage as this. 

To touch on military matters, even had I been conversant with them, seemed to me an impertinence. I am bound to take for granted that everyman knows his own business best; and I incline more and more to theopinion that military men should be left to work out the problems oftheir art for themselves, without the advice or criticism of civilians. But I hold--and I am sure that you will agree with me--that if thesoldier is to be thus trusted by the nation, and left to himself to dohis own work his own way, he must be educated in all practical matters ashighly as the average of educated civilians. He must know all that theyknow, and his own art beside. Just as a clergyman, being a man plus apriest, is bound to be a man, and a good man, over and above hispriesthood, so is the soldier bound to be a civilian, and ahighly-educated civilian, plus his soldierly qualities and acquirements. 

It seemed to me, therefore, that I might, without impertinence, ask youto consider a branch of knowledge which is becoming yearly more and moreimportant in the eyes of well-educated civilians; of which, therefore, the soldier ought at least to know something, in order to put him on apar with the general intelligence of the nation. I do not say that he isto devote much time to it, or to follow it up into specialities: but thathe ought to be well grounded in its principles and methods; that he oughtto be aware of its importance and its usefulness; that so, if he comesinto contact--as he will more and more--with scientific men, he mayunderstand them, respect them, befriend them, and be befriended by themin turn; and how desirable this last result is, I shall tell youhereafter. 

There are those, I doubt not, among my audience who do not need theadvice which I shall presume to give to-night; who belong to that fastincreasing class among officers of whom I have often said--and I havefound scientific men cordially agree with me--that they are the mostmodest and the most teachable of men. But even in their case there canbe no harm in going over deliberately a question of such importance; inputting it, as it were, into shape; and insisting on arguments which mayperhaps not have occurred to some of them. 

Let me, in the first place, reassure those--if any such there be--who maysuppose, from the title of my lecture, that I am only going to recommendthem to collect weeds and butterflies, "rats and mice, and such smalldeer. " Far from it. The honourable title of Natural History has, andunwisely, been restricted too much of late years to the mere study ofplants and animals. I desire to restore the words to their original andproper meaning--the History of Nature; that is, of all that is born, andgrows in time; in short, of all natural objects. 

If anyone shall say--By that definition you make not only geology andchemistry branches of natural history, but meteorology and astronomylikewise--I cannot deny it. They deal, each of them, with realms ofNature. Geology is, literally, the natural history of soils and lands;chemistry the natural history of compounds, organic and inorganic;meteorology the natural history of climates; astronomy the naturalhistory of planetary and solar bodies. And more, you cannot now studydeeply any branch of what is popularly called Natural History--that is, plants and animals--without finding it necessary to learn something, andmore and more as you go deeper, of those very sciences. As themarvellous interdependence of all natural objects and forces unfoldsitself more and more, so the once separate sciences, which treated ofdifferent classes of natural objects, are forced to interpenetrate, as itwere; and to supplement themselves by knowledge borrowed from each other. Thus--to give a single instance--no man can now be a first-rate botanistunless he be also no mean meteorologist, no mean geologist, and--as Mr. Darwin has shown in his extraordinary discoveries about the fertilisationof plants by insects--no mean entomologist likewise. 

It is difficult, therefore, and indeed somewhat unwise and unfair, to putany limit to the term Natural History, save that it shall deal only withnature and with matter; and shall not pretend--as some would have it todo just now--to go out of its own sphere to meddle with moral andspiritual matters. But, for practical purposes, we may define thenatural history of any given spot as the history of the causes which havemade it what it is, and filled it with the natural objects which itholds. And if anyone would know how to study the natural history of aplace, and how to write it, let him read--and if he has read itsdelightful pages in youth, read once again--that hitherto unrivalledlittle monograph, White's 'Natural History of Selborne;' and let him thentry, by the light of improved science, to do for any district where hemay be stationed, what White did for Selborne nearly one hundred yearsago. Let him study its plants, its animals, its soils and rocks; andlast, but not least, its scenery, as the total outcome of what the soils, and plants, and animals have made it. I say, have made it. How far thenature of the soils and the rocks will affect the scenery of a districtmay be well learnt from a very clever and interesting little book ofProfessor Geikie's, on 'The Scenery of Scotland, as affected by itsGeological Structure. ' How far the plants and trees affect not merelythe general beauty, the richness or barrenness of a country, but also itsvery shape; the rate at which the hills are destroyed and washed into thelowland; the rate at which the seaboard is being removed by the action ofwaves--all these are branches of study which is becoming more and moreimportant. 

And even in the study of animals and their effects on the vegetation, questions of really deep interest will arise. You will find that certainplants and trees cannot thrive in a district, while others can, becausethe former are browsed down by cattle, or their seeds eaten by birds, andthe latter are not; that certain seeds are carried in the coats ofanimals, or wafted abroad by winds--others are not; certain treesdestroyed wholesale by insects, while others are not; that in a hundredways the animal and vegetable life of a district act and react upon eachother, and that the climate, the average temperature, the maximum andminimum temperatures, the rainfall, act on them, and in the case of thevegetation, are reacted on again by them. The diminution of rainfall bythe destruction of forests, its increase by replanting them, and theeffect of both on the healthiness or unhealthiness of a place--as in thecase of the Mauritius, where a once healthy island has becomepestilential, seemingly from the clearing away of the vegetation on thebanks of streams--all this, though to study it deeply requires a fairknowledge of meteorology, and even of a science or two more, is surelywell worth the attention of any educated man who is put in charge of thehealth and lives of human beings. 

You will surely agree with me that the habit of mind required for such astudy as this, is the very same as is required for successful militarystudy. In fact, I should say that the same intellect which would developinto a great military man, would develop also into a great naturalist. Isay, intellect. The military man would require--what the naturalistwould not--over and above his intellect, a special force of will, inorder to translate his theories into fact, and make his campaigns in thefield and not merely on paper. But I am speaking only of the habit ofmind required for study; of that inductive habit of mind which works, steadily and by rule, from the known to the unknown; that habit of mindof which it has been said:--"The habit of seeing; the habit of knowingwhat we see; the habit of discerning differences and likenesses; thehabit of classifying accordingly; the habit of searching for hypotheseswhich shall connect and explain those classified facts; the habit ofverifying these hypotheses by applying them to fresh facts; the habit ofthrowing them away bravely if they will not fit; the habit of generalpatience, diligence, accuracy, reverence for facts for their own sake, and love of truth for its own sake; in one word, the habit of reverentand implicit obedience to the laws of Nature, whatever they may be--theseare not merely intellectual, but also moral habits, which will stand menin practical good stead in every affair of life, and in every question, even the most awful, which may come before them as rational and socialbeings. " And specially valuable are they, surely, to the military man, the very essence of whose study, to be successful, lies first incontinuous and accurate observation, and then in calm and judiciousarrangement. 

Therefore it is that I hold, and hold strongly, that the study ofphysical science, far from interfering with an officer's studies, muchless unfitting for them, must assist him in them, by keeping his mindalways in the very attitude and the very temper which they require. Ifany smile at this theory of mine, let them recollect one curious fact:that perhaps the greatest captain of the old world was trained by perhapsthe greatest philosopher of the old world--the father of Natural History;that Aristotle was the tutor of Alexander of Macedon. I do not fancy, ofcourse, that Aristotle taught Alexander any Natural History. But this weknow, that he taught him to use those very faculties by which Aristotlebecame a natural historian, and many things beside; that he called out inhis pupil somewhat of his own extraordinary powers of observation, extraordinary powers of arrangement. He helped to make him a greatgeneral: but he helped to make him more--a great politician, coloniser, discoverer. He instilled into him such a sense of the importance ofNatural History, that Alexander helped him nobly in his researches; and, if Athenaeus is to be believed, gave him 800 talents towards perfectinghis history of animals. Surely it is not too much to say that this closefriendship between the natural philosopher and the soldier has changedthe whole course of civilisation to this very day. Do not consider meUtopian when I tell you, that I should like to see the study of physicalscience an integral part of the curriculum of every military school. Iwould train the mind of the lad who was to become hereafter an officer inthe army--and in the navy like wise--by accustoming him to carefulobservation of, and sound thought about, the face of nature; of thecommonest objects under his feet, just as much as of the stars above hishead; provided always that he learnt, not at second-hand from books, butwhere alone he can really learn either war or nature--in the field; byactual observation, actual experiment. A laboratory for chemicalexperiment is a good thing, it is true, as far as it goes; but I shouldprefer to the laboratory a naturalists' field club, such as areprospering now at several of the best public schools, certain that theboys would get more of sound inductive habits of mind, as well as morehealth, manliness, and cheerfulness, amid scenes to remember which willbe a joy for ever, than they ever can by bending over retorts andcrucibles, amid smells even to remember which is a pain for ever. 

But I would, whether a field club existed or not, require of every youngman entering the army or navy--indeed of every young man entering anyliberal profession whatsoever--a fair knowledge, such as would enable himto pass an examination, in what the Germans call_Erd-kunde_--earth-lore--in that knowledge of the face of the earth andof its products, for which we English have as yet cared so little that wehave actually no English name for it, save the clumsy and questionableone of physical geography; and, I am sorry to say, hardly any readableschool books about it, save Keith Johnston's 'Physical Atlas'--anacquaintance with which last I should certainly require of young men. 

It does seem most strange--or rather will seem most strange 100 yearshence--that we, the nation of colonists, the nation of sailors, thenation of foreign commerce, the nation of foreign military stations, thenation of travellers for travelling's sake, the nation of which one manhere and another there--as Schleiden sets forth in his book, 'The Plant, 'in a charming ideal conversation at the Travellers' Club--has seen andenjoyed more of the wonders and beauties of this planet than the men ofany nation, not even excepting the Germans--that this nation, I say, should as yet have done nothing, or all but nothing, to teach in herschools a knowledge of that planet, of which she needs to know more, andcan if she will know more, than any other nation upon it. 

As for the practical utility of such studies to a soldier, I only need, Itrust, to hint at it to such an assembly as this. All must see of whatadvantage a rough knowledge of the botany of a district would be to anofficer leading an exploring party, or engaged in bush warfare. To knowwhat plants are poisonous; what plants, too, are eatable--and many moreare eatable than is usually supposed; what plants yield oleaginoussubstances, whether for food or for other uses; what plants yieldvegetable acids, as preventives of scurvy; what timbers are available foreach of many different purposes; what will resist wet, salt-water, andthe attacks of insects; what, again, can be used, at a pinch, formedicine or for styptics--and be sure, as a wise West Indian doctor oncesaid to me, that there is more good medicine wild in the bush than thereis in all the druggists' shops--surely all this is a knowledge notbeneath the notice of any enterprising officer, above all of an officerof engineers. I only ask anyone who thinks that I may be in the right, to glance through the lists of useful vegetable products given inLindley's 'Vegetable Kingdom'--a miracle of learning--and see the vastfield open still to a thoughtful and observant man, even while onservice; and not to forget that such knowledge, if he should hereafterleave the service and settle, as many do, in a distant land, may be asolid help to his future prosperity. So strongly do I feel on thismatter, that I should like to see some knowledge at least of Dr. Oliver'sexcellent little 'First Book of Indian Botany' required of all officersgoing to our Indian Empire: but as that will not be, at least for many ayear to come, I recommend any gentlemen going to India to get that book, and wile away the hours of the outward voyage by acquiring knowledgewhich will be a continual source of interest, and it may be now and thenof profit, to them during their stay abroad. 

And for geology, again. As I do not expect you all, or perhaps any ofyou, to become such botanists as General Monro, whose recent 'Monographof the Bamboos' is an honour to British botanists, and a proof of thescientific power which is to be found here and there among Britishofficers: so I do not expect you to become such geologists as SirRoderick Murchison, or even to add such a grand chapter to the history ofextinct animals as Major Cautley did by his discoveries in the SewalikHills. Nevertheless, you can learn--and I should earnestly advise you tolearn--geology and mineralogy enough to be of great use to you in yourprofession, and of use, too, should you relinquish your professionhereafter. It must be profitable for any man, and specially for you, toknow how and where to find good limestone, building stone, road metal; itmust be good to be able to distinguish ores and mineral products; it mustbe good to know--as a geologist will usually know, even in a countrywhich he sees for the first time--where water is likely to be found, andat what probable depth; it must be good to know whether the water is fitfor drinking or not, whether it is unwholesome or merely muddy; it mustbe good to know what spots are likely to be healthy, and what unhealthy, for encamping. The two last questions depend, doubtless, onmeteorological as well as geological accidents: but the answers to themwill be most surely found out by the scientific man, because the factsconnected with them are, like all other facts, determined by naturallaws. After what one has heard, in past years, of barracks built inspots plainly pestilential; of soldiers encamped in ruined cities, reeking with the dirt and poison of centuries; of--but it is not my placeto find fault; all I will say is, that the wise and humane officer, whenonce his eyes are opened to the practical value of physical science, willsurely try to acquaint himself somewhat with those laws of drainage andof climate, geological, meteorological, chemical, which influence, oftenwith terrible suddenness and fury, the health of whole armies. He willnot find it beyond his province to ascertain the amount and period ofrainfalls, the maxima of heat and of cold which his troops may have toendure, and many another point on which their health and efficiency--nay, their very life may depend, but which are now too exclusively delegatedto the doctor, to whose province they do not really belong. For cure, Itake the liberty of believing, is the duty of the medical officer;prevention, that of the military. 

Thus much I can say just now--and there is much more to be said--on thepractical uses of the study of Natural History. But let me remind you, on the other side, if Natural History will help you, you in return canhelp her; and would, I doubt not, help her, and help scientific men athome, if once you looked fairly and steadily at the immense importance ofNatural History--of the knowledge of the "face of the earth. " I believethat all will one day feel, more or less, that to know the earth _on_which we live, and the laws of it _by_ which we live, is a sacred duty toourselves, to our children after us, and to all whom we may have tocommand and to influence; aye, and a duty to God likewise. For is it nota duty of common reverence and faith towards Him, if He has put us into abeautiful and wonderful place, and given us faculties by which we cansee, and enjoy, and use that place--is it not a duty of reverence andfaith towards Him to use these faculties, and to learn the lessons whichHe has laid open for us? If you feel that, as I think you all will someday feel, then you will surely feel likewise that it will be a gooddeed--I do not say a necessary duty, but still a good deed andpraiseworthy--to help physical science forward; and to add yourcontributions, however small, to our general knowledge of the earth. Andhow much may be done for science by British officers, especially onforeign stations, I need not point out. I know that much has been done, chivalrously and well, by officers; and that men of science owe them, andgive them, hearty thanks for their labours. But I should like, Iconfess, to see more done still. I should like to see every foreignstation, what one or two highly-educated officers might easily make it, an advanced post of physical science, in regular communication with ourscientific societies at home, sending to them accurate and methodicdetails of the natural history of each district--details 99/100ths ofwhich might seem worthless in the eyes of the public, but which would allbe precious in the eyes of scientific men, who know that no fact isreally unimportant; and more, that while plodding patiently throughseemingly unimportant facts, you may stumble on one of infiniteimportance, both scientific and practical. For the student of nature, gentlemen, if he will be but patient, diligent, methodical, is liable atany moment to the same good fortune as befel Saul of old, when he wentout to seek his father's asses, and found a kingdom. 

There are those, lastly, who have neither time nor taste for thetechnicalities, and nice distinctions, of formal Natural History; whoenjoy Nature, but as artists or as sportsmen, and not as men of science. Let them follow their bent freely: but let them not suppose that infollowing it they can do nothing towards enlarging our knowledge ofNature, especially when on foreign stations. So far from it, drawingsought always to be valuable, whether of plants, animals, or scenery, provided only they are accurate; and the more spirited and full of geniusthey are, the more accurate they are certain to be; for Nature beingalive, a lifeless copy of her is necessarily an untrue copy. Mostthankful to any officer for a mere sight of sketches will be the closetbotanist, who, to his own sorrow, knows three-fourths of his plants onlyfrom dried specimens; or the closet zoologist, who knows his animals fromskins and bones. And if anyone answers--But I cannot draw. I rejoin, You can at least photograph. If a young officer, going out to foreignparts, and knowing nothing at all about physical science, did me thehonour to ask me what he could do for science, I should tell him--Learnto photograph; take photographs of every strange bit of rock-formationwhich strikes your fancy, and of every widely extended view which maygive a notion of the general lie of the country. Append, if you can, anote or two, saying whether a plain is rich or barren; whether the rockis sandstone, limestone, granitic, metamorphic, or volcanic lava; and ifthere be more rocks than one, which of them lies on the other; and sendthem to be exhibited at a meeting of the Geological Society. I doubt notthat the learned gentlemen there will find in your photographs a valuablehint or two, for which they will be much obliged. I learnt, forinstance, what seemed to me most valuable geological lessons, from mereglances at drawings--I believe from photographs--of the Abyssinian rangesabout Magdala. 

Or again, let a man, if he knows nothing of botany, not trouble himselfwith collecting and drying specimens; let him simply photograph everystrange and new tree or plant he sees, to give a general notion of itsspecies, its look; let him append, where he can, a photograph of itsleafage, flower, fruit; and send them to Dr. Hooker, or any distinguishedbotanist: and he will find that, though he may know nothing of botany, hewill have pretty certainly increased the knowledge of those who do know. 

The sportsman, again--I mean the sportsman of that type which seemspeculiar to these islands, who loves toil and danger for their own sakes;he surely is a naturalist, ipso facto, though he knows it not. He hasthose very habits of keen observation on which all sound knowledge ofnature is based; and he, if he will--as he may do without interferingwith his sport--can study the habits of the animals among whom he spendswholesome and exciting days. You have only to look over such good oldbooks as Williams's 'Wild Sports of the East, ' Campbell's 'Old ForestRanger, ' Lloyd's 'Scandinavian Adventures, ' and last, but not least, Waterton's 'Wanderings, ' to see what valuable additions to truezoology--the knowledge of live creatures, not merely dead ones--Britishsportsmen have made, and still can make. And as for the employment oftime, which often hangs so heavily on a soldier's hands, really I amready to say, if you are neither men of science, nor draughtsmen, norsportsmen, why go and collect beetles. It is not very dignified, I know, nor exciting: but it will be something to do. It cannot harm you, if youtake, as beetle-hunters do, an india-rubber sheet to lie on; and it willcertainly benefit science. Moreover, there will be a noble humility inthe act. You will confess to the public that you consider yourself onlyfit to catch beetles; by which very confession you will prove yourselffit for much finer things than catching beetles: and meanwhile, as I saidbefore, you will be at least out of harm's way. At a foreign barrackonce, the happiest officer I met, because the most regularly employed, was one who spent his time in collecting butterflies. He knew nothingabout them scientifically--not even their names. He took them simply fortheir wonderful beauty and variety; and in the hope, too--in which he wasreally scientific--that if he carefully kept every form which he saw, hiscollection might be of use some day to entomologists at home. A mostpleasant gentleman he was; and, I doubt not, none the worse soldier forhis butterfly catching. Commendable, also, in my eyes, was anotherofficer--whom I have not the pleasure of knowing--who, on a remoteforeign station, used wisely to escape from the temptations of the worldinto an entirely original and most pleasant hermitage. For finding--sothe story went--that many of the finest insects kept to the tree-tops, and never came to ground at all, he used to settle himself among theboughs of some tree in the tropic forests, with a long-handled net andplenty of cigars, and pass his hours in that airy flower garden, makingdashes every now and then at some splendid monster as it fluttered roundhis head. His example need not be followed by everyone; but it must beallowed that--at least as long as he was in his tree--he was neitherdawdling, grumbling, spending money, nor otherwise harming himself, andperhaps his fellow creatures, from sheer want of employment. 

One word more, and I have done. If I was allowed to give one specialpiece of advice to a young officer, whether of the army or navy, I wouldsay--Respect scientific men; associate with them; learn from them; findthem to be, as you will usually, the most pleasant and instructive ofcompanions: but always respect them. Allow them chivalrously, you whohave an acknowledged rank, their yet unacknowledged rank; and treat themas all the world will treat them, in a higher and truer state ofcivilisation. They do not yet wear the Queen's uniform; they are not yetaccepted servants of the State; as they will be in some more perfectlyorganised and civilised land: but they are soldiers nevertheless, andgood soldiers and chivalrous, fighting their nation's battle, often oneven less pay than you, --and with still less chance of promotion and offame, against most real and fatal enemies--against ignorance of the lawsof this planet, and all the miseries which that ignorance begets. Honourthem for their work; sympathise in it; give them a helping hand in itwhenever you have an opportunity--and what opportunities you have, I havebeen trying to sketch for you to-night; and more, work at it yourselveswhenever and wherever you can. Show them that the spirit which animatesthem--the hatred of ignorance and disorder, and of their bestialconsequences--animates you likewise; show them that the habit of mindwhich they value in themselves--the habit of accurate observation andcareful judgment--is your habit likewise; show them that you valuescience, not merely because it gives better weapons of destruction and ofdefence, but because it helps you to become clear-headed, large-minded, able to take a just and accurate view of any subject which comes beforeyou, and to cast away every old prejudice and every hasty judgment in theface of truth and of duty: and it will be better for you and for them. 

But why? What need for the soldier and the man of science to fraternisejust now? This need:--The two classes which will have an increasing, itmay be a preponderating, influence on the fate of the human race for sometime, will be the pupils of Aristotle and those of Alexander--the men ofscience and the soldiers. In spite of all appearances, and alldeclamations to the contrary, that is my firm conviction. They, and theyalone, will be left to rule; because they alone, each in his own sphere, have learnt to obey. It is therefore most needful for the welfare ofsociety that they should pull with, and not against each other; that theyshould understand each other, respect each other, take counsel with eachother, supplement each other's defects, bring out each other's highertendencies, counteract each other's lower ones. The scientific man hassomething to learn of you, gentlemen, which I doubt not that he willlearn in good time. You, again, have--as I have been hinting to you to-night--something to learn of him, which you, I doubt not, will learn ingood time likewise. Repeat, each of you according to his powers, the oldfriendship between Aristotle and Alexander; and so, from the sympathy andco-operation of you two, a class of thinkers and actors may yet arisewhich can save this nation, and the other civilised nations of the world, from that of which I had rather not speak; and wish that I did not think, too often and too earnestly. 

I may be a dreamer: and I may consider, in my turn, as wilder dreamersthan myself, certain persons who fancy that their only business in lifeis to make money, the scientific man's only business is to show them howto make money, and the soldier's only business to guard their money forthem. Be that as it may, the finest type of civilised man which we arelikely to see for some generations to come, will be produced by acombination of the truly military with the truly scientific man. I say--Imay be a dreamer: but you at least, as well as my scientific friends, will bear with me; for my dream is to your honour. 

ON BIO-GEOLOGY. AN ADDRESS GIVEN TO THE SCIENTIFIC SOCIETY OF WINCHESTER. 

I am not sure that the subject of my address is rightly chosen. I am notsure that I ought not to have postponed a question of mere naturalhistory, to speak to you, as scientific men, on the questions of life anddeath, which have been forced upon us by the awful warning of anillustrious personage's illness; of preventible disease, its frightfulprevalency; of the 200, 000 persons who are said to have died of feveralone since the Prince Consort's death, ten years ago; of the remedies;of drainage; of sewage disinfection and utilisation; and of theassistance which you, as a body of scientific men, can give to any efforttowards saving the lives and health of our fellow-citizens from thoseunseen poisons which lurk like wild beasts couched in the jungle, readyto spring at any moment on the unsuspecting, the innocent, the helpless. Of all this I longed to speak: but I thought it best only to hint at it, and leave the question to your common sense and your humanity; taking forgranted that your minds, like the minds of all right-minded Englishmen, have been of late painfully awakened to its importance. It seemed to mealmost an impertinence to say more in a city of whose local circumstancesI know little or nothing. As an old sanitary reformer, practical, aswell as theoretical, I am but too well aware of the difficulties whichbeset any complete scheme of drainage, especially in an ancient city likethis; where men are paying the penalty of their predecessors' ignorance;and dwelling, whether they choose or not, over fifteen centuries ofaccumulated dirt. 

And, therefore, taking for granted that there is energy and intellectenough in Winchester to conquer these difficulties in due time, I go onto ask you to consider, for a time, a subject which is growing more andmore important and interesting, a subject the study of which will do muchtowards raising the field naturalist from a mere collector ofspecimens--as he was twenty years ago--to a philosopher elucidating someof the grandest problems. I mean the infant science of Bio-geology--thescience which treats of the distribution of plants and animals over theglobe, and the causes of that distribution. 

I doubt not that there are many here who know far more about the subjectthan I; who are far better read than I am in the works of Forbes, Darwin, Wallace, Hooker, Moritz Wagner, and the other illustrious men who havewritten on it. But I may, perhaps, give a few hints which will be of useto the younger members of this Society, and will point out to them how toget a new relish for the pursuit of field science. 

Bio-geology, then, begins with asking every plant or animal you meet, large or small, not merely--What is your name? That is the collector andclassifier's duty; and a most necessary duty it is, and one to beperformed with the most conscientious patience and accuracy, so that asound foundation may be built for future speculations. But youngnaturalists should act not merely as Nature's registrars andcensus-takers, but as her policemen and gamekeepers; and ask everythingthey meet--How did you get here? By what road did you come? What wasyour last place of abode? And now you are here, how do you get yourliving? Are you and your children thriving, like decent people who cantake care of themselves, or growing pauperised and degraded, and dyingout? Not that we have a fear of your becoming a dangerous class. MadamNature allows no dangerous classes, in the modern sense. She has, doubtless for some wise reason, no mercy for the weak. She rewards eachorganism according to its works; and if anything grows too weak or stupidto take care of itself, she gives it its due deserts by letting it dieand disappear. So, you plant or you animal, are you among the strong, the successful, the multiplying, the colonising? Or are you among theweak, the failing, the dwindling, the doomed?

These questions may seem somewhat rude: but you may comfort yourself bythe thought that plants and animals, though they deserve all kindness, all admiration, deserve no courtesy--at least in this respect. For theyare, one and all, wherever you find them, vagrants and landloupers, intruders and conquerors, who have got where they happen to be simply bythe law of the strongest--generally not without a little robbery andmurder. They have no right save that of possession; the same by whichthe puffin turns out the old rabbits, eats the young ones, and then laysher eggs in the rabbit burrow--simply because she can. 

Now, you will see at once that such a course of questioning will call outa great many curious and interesting answers, if you can only get thethings to tell you their story; as you always may, if you willcross-examine them long enough; and will lead you into many subjectsbeside mere botany or entomology. So various, indeed, are the subjectswhich you will thus start, that I can only hint at them now in the mostcursory fashion. 

At the outset you will soon find yourself involved in chemical andmeteorological questions: as, for instance, when you ask--How is it thatI find one flora on the sea-shore, another on the sandstone, another onthe chalk, and another on the peat-making gravelly strata? The usualanswer would be, I presume--if we could work it out by twenty years'experiment, such as Mr. Lawes, of Rothampsted, has been making on thegrowth of grasses and leguminous plants in different soils and underdifferent manures--the usual answer, I say, would be--Because we plantswant such and such mineral constituents in our woody fibre; again, because we want a certain amount of moisture at a certain period of theyear: or, perhaps, simply because the mechanical arrangement of theparticles of a certain soil happens to suit the shape of our roots and oftheir stomata. Sometimes you will get an answer quickly enough;sometimes not. If you ask, for instance, _Asplenium viride_ how itcontrives to grow plentifully in the Craven of Yorkshire down to 600 or800 feet above the sea, while in Snowdon it dislikes growing lower than2000 feet, and is not plentiful even there?--it will reply--Because inthe Craven I can get as much carbonic acid as I want from the decomposinglimestone: while on the Snowdon Silurian I get very little; and I have tomake it up by clinging to the mountain tops, for the sake of the greaterrainfall. But if you ask _Polopodium calcareum_--How is it you chooseonly to grow on limestone, while _Polypodium Dryopteris_, of which, Isuspect, you are only a variety, is ready to grow anywhere?--_Polypodiumcalcareum_ will refuse, as yet, to answer a word. 

Again--I can only give you the merest string of hints--you will find inyour questionings that many plants and animals have no reason at all toshow why they should be in one place and not in another, save the verysound reason for the latter which was suggested to me once by a greatnaturalist. I was asking--Why don't I find such and such a species in myparish, while it is plentiful a few miles off in exactly the samesoil?--and he answered--For the same reason that you are not in America. Because you have not got there. Which answer threw to me a flood oflight on this whole science. Things are often where they are, simplybecause they happen to have got there, and not elsewhere. But they musthave got there by some means: and those means I want young naturalists todiscover; at least to guess at. 

A species, for instance--and I suspect it is a common case withinsects--may abound in a single spot, simply because, long years ago, asingle brood of eggs happened to hatch at a time when eggs of otherspecies, who would have competed against them for food, did not hatch;and they may remain confined to that spot, though there is plenty of goodfood for them outside it, simply because they do not increase fast enoughto require to spread out in search of more food. Thus I should explain acase which I heard of lately of _Anthocera trifolii_, abundant for yearsin one corner of a certain field, and only there; while there was just asmuch trefoil all round for its larvae as there was in the selected spot. I can, I say, only give hints: but they will suffice, I hope, to show thepath of thought into which I want young naturalists to turn their minds. 

Or, again, you will have to inquire whether the species has not beenprevented from spreading by some natural barrier. Mr. Wallace, whom youall of course know, has shown in his 'Malay Archipelago' that a strait ofdeep sea can act as such a barrier between species. Moritz Wagner hasshown that, in the case of insects, a moderately broad river may dividetwo closely allied species of beetles, or a very narrow snow-range twoclosely allied species of moths. 

Again, another cause, and a most common one is: that the plants cannotspread because they find the ground beyond them already occupied by otherplants, who will not tolerate a fresh mouth, having only just enough tofeed themselves. Take the case of _Saxifraga hypnoides_ and _S. Umbrosa_, "London pride. " They are two especially strong species. Theyshow that, _S. Hypnoides_ especially, by their power of sporting, ofdiverging into varieties; they show it equally by their power of thrivinganywhere, if they can only get there. They will both grow in my sandygarden, under a rainfall of only 23 inches, more luxuriantly than intheir native mountains under a rainfall of 50 or 60 inches. Then how isit that _S. Hypnoides_ cannot get down off the mountains; and that _S. Umbrosa_, though in Kerry it has got off the mountains and down to thesea level, exterminating, I suspect, many species in its progress, yetcannot get across county Cork? The only answer is, I believe: that bothspecies are continually trying to go ahead; but that the other plantsalready in front of them are too strong for them, and massacre theirinfants as soon as born. 

And this brings us to another curious question: the sudden and abundantappearance of plants, like the foxglove and _Epilobium angustifolium_, inspots where they have never been seen before. Are their seeds, as somethink, dormant in the ground; or are the seeds which have germinatedfresh ones wafted thither by wind or otherwise, and only able togerminate in that one spot, because there the soil is clear? GeneralMonro, now famous for his unequalled memoir on the bamboos, holds to thelatter theory. He pointed out to me that the _Epilobium_ seeds, beingfeathered, could travel with the wind; that the plant always made itsappearance first on new banks, landslips, clearings, where it had nothingto compete against; and that the foxglove did the same. True, and mostpainfully true, in the case of thistles and groundsels: but foxgloveseeds, though minute, would hardly be carried by the wind any more thanthose of the white clover, which comes up so abundantly in drained fens. Adhuc sub judice lis est, and I wish some young naturalists would workcarefully at the solution; by experiment, which is the most sure way tofind out anything. 

But in researches in this direction they will find puzzles enough. Iwill give them one which I shall be most thankful to hear they havesolved within the next seven years--How is it that we find certainplants, namely, the thrift and the scurvy grass, abundant on thesea-shore and common on certain mountain-tops, but nowhere between thetwo? Answer me that. For I have looked at the fact for years--before, behind, sideways, upside down, and inside out--and I cannot understandit. 

But all these questions, and specially, I suspect, that last one, oughtto lead the young student up to the great and complex question--How werethese islands re-peopled with plants and animals, after the long andwholesale catastrophe of the glacial epoch?

I presume you all know, and will agree, that the whole of these islands, north of the Thames, save certain ice-clad mountain-tops, were buried forlong ages under an icy sea. From whence did vegetable and animal lifecrawl back to the land, as it rose again; and cover its mantle of glacialdrift with fresh life and verdure?

Now let me give you a few prolegomena on this matter. You must study theplants of course, species by species. Take Watson's 'Cybele Britannica, 'and Moore's 'Cybele Hibernica;' and let--as Mr. Matthew Arnold wouldsay--"your thought play freely about them. " Look carefully, too, in thecase of each species, at the note on its distribution, which you willfind appended in Bentham's 'Handbook, ' and in Hooker's 'Student's Flora. 'Get all the help you can, if you wish to work the subject out, fromforeign botanists, both European and American; and I think that, on thewhole, you will come to some such theory as this for a general startingplatform. We do not owe our flora--I must keep to the flora just now--toso many different regions, or types, as Mr. Watson conceives, but tothree, namely: an European or Germanic flora, from the south-east; anAtlantic flora, from the south-west; a Northern flora from the north. These three invaded us after the glacial epoch; and our general flora istheir result. 

But this will cause you much trouble. Before you go a step further youwill have to eliminate from all your calculations most of the plantswhich Watson calls glareal, _i. E_. Found in cultivated ground abouthabitations. And what their limit may be I think we never shall know. But of this we may be sure; that just as invading armies always bringwith them, in forage or otherwise, some plants from their owncountry--just as the Cossacks, in 1815, brought more than one Russianplant through Germany into France--just as you have already a crop ofNorth German plants upon the battle-fields of France--thus do conqueringraces bring new plants. The Romans, during their 300 or 400 years ofoccupation and civilisation, must have brought more species, I believe, than I dare mention. I suspect them of having brought, not merely thecommon hedge elm of the south, not merely the three species of nettle, but all our red poppies, and a great number of the weeds which are commonin our cornfields; and when we add to them the plants which may have beenbrought by returning crusaders and pilgrims; by monks from every part ofEurope, by Flemings or other dealers in foreign wool; we have to cut ahuge cantle out of our indigenous flora: only, having no records, wehardly know where and what to cut out; and can only, we elder ones, recommend the subject to the notice of the younger botanists, that theymay work it out after our work is done. 

Of course these plants introduced by man, if they are cut out, must becut out of only one of the floras, namely, the European; for they, probably, came from the south-east, by whatever means they came. 

That European flora invaded us, I presume, immediately after the glacialepoch, at a time when France and England were united, and the GermanOcean a mere network of rivers, which emptied into the deep sea betweenScotland and Scandinavia. And here I must add, that endless questions ofinterest will arise to those who will study, not merely the invasion ofthat truly European flora, but the invasion of reptiles, insects, andbirds, especially birds of passage, which must have followed it as soonas the land was sufficiently covered with vegetation to support life. Whole volumes remain to be written on this subject. I trust that some ofyour younger members may live to write one of them. The way to beginwill be: to compare the flora and fauna of this part of England verycarefully with that of the southern and eastern counties; and then tocompare them again with the fauna and flora of France, Belgium, andHolland. 

As for the Atlantic flora, you will have to decide for yourselves whetheryou accept or not the theory of a sunken Atlantic continent. I confessthat all objections to that theory, however astounding it may seem, areoutweighed in my mind by a host of facts which I can explain by no othertheory. But you must judge for yourselves; and to do so you must studycarefully the distribution of heaths, both in Europe and at the Cape; andtheir non-appearance beyond the Ural Mountains, and in America, save inLabrador, where the common ling, an older and less specialised form, exists. You must consider, too, the plants common to the Azores, Portugal, the West of England, Ireland, and the Western Hebrides. In sodoing young naturalists will at least find proofs of a change in thedistribution of land and water, which will utterly astound them when theyface it for the first time. 

As for the Northern flora, the question whence it came is puzzlingenough. It seems difficult to conceive how any plants could havesurvived when Scotland was an archipelago in the same ice-coveredcondition as Greenland is now; and we have no proof that there existedafter the glacial epoch any northern continent from which the plants andanimals could have come back to us. The species of plants and animalscommon to Britain, Scandinavia, and North America, must have spread inpre-glacial times, when a continent joining them did exist. 

But some light has been thrown on this question by an article, ascharming as it is able, on "The Physics of the Arctic Ice, " by Dr. Brown, of Campster. You will find it in the 'Quarterly Journal of theGeological Society' for February 1870. He shows there that even inGreenland peaks and crags are left free enough from ice to support avegetation of between 300 or 400 species of flowering plants; and, therefore, he well says, we must be careful to avoid concluding that theplant and animal life on the dreary shores or mountain-tops of the oldglacial Scotland was poor. The same would hold good of our mountains;and, if so, we may look with respect, even with awe, on the Alpine plantsof Wales, Scotland, and the Lake mountains, as organisms stunted, it maybe, and even degraded, by their long battle with the elements; butvenerable from their age, historic from their endurance. Relics of anolder temperate world, they have lived through thousands of centuries offrost and fog, to sun themselves in a temperate climate once more. I cannever pick one of them without a tinge of shame; and to exterminate oneof them is to destroy for the mere pleasure of collecting the last of afamily which God has taken the trouble to preserve for thousands ofcenturies. 

I trust that these hints--for I can call them nothing more--will at leastawaken any young naturalist who has hitherto only collected naturalobjects, to study the really important and interesting question--How didthese things get here?

Now hence arise questions which may puzzle the mind of a Hampshirenaturalist. You have in this neighbourhood, as you well know, two, orrather three, soils, each carrying its peculiar vegetation. First, youhave the clay lying on the chalk, and carrying vast woodlands, seeminglyprimeval. Next, you have the chalk, with its peculiar, delicate, andoften fragrant crop of lime-loving plants; and next you have the poorsands and clays of the New Forest basin, saturated with iron, andtherefore carrying a moorland or peat-loving vegetation, in many respectsquite different from the others. And this moorland soil, and thisvegetation, with a few singular exceptions, repeats itself, as I daresayyou know, in the north of the county, in the Bagshot basin, as it iscalled--the moors of Aldershot, Hartford Bridge, and Windsor Forest. 

Now what a variety of interesting questions are opened up by these simplefacts. How did these three floras get each to its present place? Wheredid each come from? How did it get past or through the other, till eachset of plants, after long internecine competition, settled itself down inthe sheet of land most congenial to it? And when did each come hither?Which is the oldest? Will any one tell me whether the heathy flora ofthe moors, or the thymy flora of the chalk downs, were the earlierinhabitants of these isles? To these questions I cannot get any answer;and they cannot be answered without first--a very careful study of therange of each species of plant on the continent of Europe; and next, without careful study of those stupendous changes in the shape of thisisland which have taken place at a very late geological epoch. Thecomposition of the flora of our moorlands is as yet to me an utterpuzzle. We have Lycopodiums--three species--enormously ancient formswhich have survived the age of ice: but did they crawl downward hitherfrom the northern mountains, or upward hither from the Pyrenees? We havethe beautiful bog asphodel again--an enormously ancient form; for it is, strange to say, common to North America and to Northern Europe, but doesnot enter Asia--almost an unique instance. It must, surely, have comefrom the north; and points--as do many species of plants and animals--tothe time when North Europe and North America were joined. We have, sparingly, in North Hampshire, though, strangely, not on the Bagshotmoors, the Common or Northern Butterwort (_Pinguicula vulgaris_); andalso, in the south, the New Forest part of the county, the delicatelittle _Pinguicula lusitanica_, the only species now found in Devon andCornwall, marking the New Forest as the extreme eastern limit of theAtlantic flora. We have again the heaths, which, as I have just said, are found neither in America nor in Asia, and must, I believe, have comefrom some south-western land long since submerged beneath the sea. Butmore, we have in the New Forest two plants which are members of the SouthEurope, or properly, the Atlantic flora; which must have come from thesouth and south-east; and which are found in no other spots in theseislands. I mean the lovely _Gladiolus_, which grows abundantly under theferns near Lyndhurst, certainly wild but it does not approach Englandelsewhere nearer than the Loire and the Rhine; and next, that delicateorchid, the _Spiranthes aestivalis_, which is known only in a bog nearLyndhurst and in the Channel Islands, while on the Continent it extendsfrom southern Europe all through France. Now, what do these two plantsmark? They give us a point in botany, though not in time, to determinewhen the south of England was parted from the opposite shores of France;and whenever that was, it was just after the Gladiolus and Spiranthes gothither. Two little colonies of these lovely flowers arrived just beforetheir retreat was cut off. They found the country already occupied withother plants; and, not being reinforced by fresh colonists from thesouth, have not been able to spread farther north than Lyndhurst. Thus, in the New Forest, and, I may say, in the Bagshot moors, you find plantswhich you do not expect, and do not find plants which you do expect; andyou are, or ought to be, puzzled, and I hope also interested, and stirredup to find out more. 

I spoke just now of the time when England was joined to France, asbearing on Hampshire botany. It bears no less on Hampshire zoology. Ininsects, for instance, the presence of the purple emperor and the whiteadmiral in our Hampshire woods, as well as the abundance of the greatstag-beetle, point to a time when the two countries were joined, atleast, as far west as Hampshire; while the absence of these insectsfarther to the westward shows that the countries, if ever joined, werealready parted; and that those insects have not yet had time to spreadwestward. The presence of these two butterflies, and partly of the stag-beetle, along the south-east coast of England as far as the primevalforests of South Lincolnshire, points--as do a hundred other facts--to atime when the Straits of Dover either did not exist, or were the bed of ariver running from the west; and when, as I told you just now, all therivers which now run into the German Ocean, from the Humber on the westto the Elbe on the east, discharged themselves into the sea betweenScotland and Norway, after wandering through a vast lowland, covered withcountless herds of mammoth, rhinoceros, gigantic ox, and other mammalsnow extinct; while the birds, as far as we know; the insects; the fresh-water fish; and even, as my friend Mr. Brady has proved, the_Entomostraca_ of the rivers, were the same in what is now Holland as inwhat is now our Eastern counties. I could dwell long on this matter. Icould talk long about how certain species of _Lepidoptera_--moths andbutterflies--like _Papilio Machaon_ and _P. Podalirius_, swarm throughFrance, reach up to the British Channel, and have not crossed it; withthe exception of one colony of _Machaon_ in the Cambridgeshire fens. Icould talk long about a similar phenomenon in the case of our migratoryand singing birds: how many exquisite species--notably those two glorioussongsters, the Orphean Warbler and Hippolais, which delight our earseverywhere on the other side of the Channel--follow our nightingales, blackcaps, and warblers northward every spring almost to the Straits ofDover: but dare not cross, simply because they have been, as it were, created since the gulf was opened, and have never learnt from theirparents how to fly over it. 

In the case of fishes, again, I might say much on the curious fact thatthe Cyprinidae, or white fish--carp, &c. --and their natural enemy, thepike, are indigenous, I believe, only to the rivers, English orcontinental, on the eastern side of the Straits of Dover; while therivers on the western side were originally tenanted, like our Hampshirestreams, as now, almost entirely by trout, their only Cyprinoid being theminnow--if it, too, be not an interloper; and I might ask you to considerthe bearing of this curious fact on the former junction of England andFrance. 

But I have only time to point out to you a few curious facts with regardto reptiles, which should be specially interesting to a Hampshire bio-geologist. You know, of course, that in Ireland there are no reptiles, save the little common lizard, _Lacerta agilis_, and a few frogs on themountain-tops--how they got there I cannot conceive. And you will, ofcourse, guess, and rightly, that the reason of the absence of reptilesis: that Ireland was parted off from England before the creatures, whichcertainly spread from southern and warmer climates, had time to getthere. You know, of course, that we have a few reptiles in England. Butyou may not be aware that, as soon as you cross the Channel, you findmany more species of reptiles than here, as well as those which you findhere. The magnificent green lizard which rattles about like a rabbit ina French forest, is never found here; simply because it had not workednorthward till after the Channel was formed. But there are threereptiles peculiar to this part of England which should be mostinteresting to a Hampshire zoologist. The one is the sand lizard (_L. Stirpium_), found on Bourne-heath, and, I suspect, in the South Hampshiremoors likewise--a North European and French species. Another, the_Coronella laevis_, a harmless French and Austrian snake, which has beenfound about me, in North Hants and South Berks, now about fifteen ortwenty times. I have had three specimens from my own parish. I believeit not to be uncommon; and most probably to be found, by those who willlook, both in the New Forest and Woolmer. The third is the Natterjack, or running toad (_Bufo Rubeta_), a most beautifully spotted animal, witha yellow stripe down his back, which is common with me at Eversley, andcommon also in many moorlands of Hants and Surrey; and, according toFleming, on heaths near London, and as far north-east as Lincolnshire; inwhich case it will belong to the Germanic fauna. Now, here again we havecases of animals which have just been able to get hither before theseverance of England and France; and which, not being reinforced from therear, have been forced to stop, in small and probably decreasingcolonies, on the spots nearest the coast which were fit for them. 

I trust that I have not kept you too long over these details. What Iwish to impress upon you is that Hampshire is a county specially fittedfor the study of important bio-geological questions. 

To work them out, you must trace the geology of Hampshire, and, indeed, of East Dorset. You must try to form a conception of how the land wasshaped in miocene times, before that tremendous upheaval which reared thechalk cliffs at Freshwater upright, lifting the tertiary beds upon theirnorthern slopes. You must ask--Was there not land to the south of theIsle of Wight in those ages, and for ages after; and what was its extentand shape? You must ask--When was the gap between the Isle of Wight andthe Isle of Purbeck sawn through, leaving the Needles as remnants on oneside, and Old Harry on the opposite? And was it sawn asunder merely bythe age-long gnawing of the waves? You must ask--Where did the greatriver which ran from the west, where Poole Harbour is now, and probablythrough what is now the Solent, depositing brackish water-beds right andleft--where, I say, did it run into the sea? Where the Straits of Doverare now? Or, if not there, where? What, too, is become of the land tothe Westward, composed of ancient metamorphic rocks, out of which it ran, and deposited on what are now the Haggerstone Moors of Poole, vast bedsof grit? What was the climate on its banks when it washed down thedelicate leaves of broad-leaved trees, akin to our modern English ones, which are found in the fine mud-sand strata of Bournemouth? When, finally, did it dwindle down to the brook which now runs through Warehamtown? Was its bed sea, or dry land, or under an ice sheet, during thelong ages of the glacial epoch? And if you say--Who is sufficient forthese things?--Who can answer these questions? I answer--Who but you, oryour pupils after you, if you will but try?

And if any shall reply--And what use if I do try? What use, if I do try?What use if I succeed in answering every question which you havepropounded to-night? Shall I be the happier for it? Shall I be thewiser?

My friends, whether you will be the happier for it, or for any knowledgeof physical science, or for any other knowledge whatsoever, I cannottell: that lies in the decision of a Higher Power than I; and, indeed, tospeak honestly, I do not think that bio-geology or any other branch ofphysical science is likely, at first at least, to make you happy. Neitheris the study of your fellow-men. Neither is religion itself. We werenot sent into the world to be happy, but to be right; at least, poorcreatures that we are, as right as we can be; and we must be content withbeing right, and not happy. For I fear, or rather I hope, that most ofus are not capable of carrying out Talleyrand's recipe for perfecthappiness on earth--namely, a hard heart and a good digestion. Therefore, as our hearts are, happily, not always hard, and our digestions, unhappily, not always good, we will be content to be made wise byphysical science, even though we be not made happy. 

And we shall be made truly wise if we be made content; content, too, notonly with what we can understand, but, content with what we do notunderstand--the habit of mind which theologians call--and rightly--faithin God; the true and solid faith, which comes often out of sadness, andout of doubt, such as bio-geology may well stir in us at first sight. Forour first feeling will be--I know mine was when I began to look intothese matters--one somewhat of dread and of horror. 

Here were all these creatures, animal and vegetable, competing againsteach other. And their competition was so earnest and complete, that itdid not mean--as it does among honest shopkeepers in a civilisedcountry--I will make a little more money than you; but--I will crush you, enslave you, exterminate you, eat you up. "Woe to the weak, " seems to beNature's watchword. The Psalmist says, "The righteous shall inherit theland. " If you go to a tropical forest, or, indeed, if you observecarefully a square acre of any English land, cultivated or uncultivated, you will find that Nature's text at first sight looks a very differentone. She seems to say--Not the righteous, but the strong, shall inheritthe land. Plant, insect, bird, what not--Find a weaker plant, insect, bird, than yourself, and kill it, and take possession of its littlevineyard, and no Naboth's curse shall follow you: but you shall inherit, and thrive therein, you, and your children after you, if they will beonly as strong and as cruel as you are. That is Nature's law: and is itnot at first sight a fearful law? Internecine competition, ruthlessselfishness, so internecine and so ruthless that, as I have wandered intropic forests, where this temper is shown more quickly and fiercely, though not in the least more evilly, than in our slow and cold temperateone, I have said--Really these trees and plants are as wicked as so manyhuman beings. 

Throughout the great republic of the organic world, the motto of themajority is, and always has been as far back as we can see, what it is, and always has been, with the majority of human beings, "Every one forhimself, and the devil take the hindmost. " Over-reaching tyranny; thetemper which fawns, and clings, and plays the parasite as long as it isdown, and when it has risen, fattens on its patron's blood andlife--these, and the other works of the flesh, are the works of averageplants and animals, as far as they can practise them. At least, so saysat first sight the science of bio-geology; till the naturalist, if he bealso human and humane, is glad to escape from the confusion and darknessof the universal battle-field of selfishness into the order and light ofChristmas-tide. 

For then there comes to him the thought--And are these all the facts? Andis this all which the facts mean? That mutual competition is one law ofNature, we see too plainly. But is there not, besides that law, a law ofmutual help? True it is, as the wise man has said, that the very hyssopon the wall grows there because all the forces of the universe could notprevent its growing. All honour to the hyssop. A brave plant, it hasfought a brave fight, and has its just deserts--as everything in Naturehas--and so has won. But did all the powers of the universe combine toprevent it growing? Is not that a one-sided statement of facts? Did notall the powers of the universe also combine to make it grow, if only ithad valour and worth wherewith to grow? Did not the rains feed it, thevery mortar in the wall give lime to its roots? Were not electricity, gravitation, and I know not what of chemical and mechanical forces, busyabout the little plant, and every cell of it, kindly and patiently readyto help it, if it would only help itself? Surely this is true; true ofevery organic thing, animal and vegetable, and mineral, too, for aught Iknow: and so we must soften our sadness at the sight of the universalmutual war by the sight of an equally universal mutual help. 

But more. It is true--too true if you will--that all things live on eachother. But is it not, therefore, equally true that all things live foreach other?--that self-sacrifice, and not selfishness, is at the bottomthe law of Nature, as it is the law of Grace; and the law of bio-geology, as it is the law of all religion and virtue worthy of the name? Is itnot true that everything has to help something else to live, whether itknows it or not?--that not a plant or an animal can turn again to itsdust without giving food and existence to other plants, otheranimals?--that the very tiger, seemingly the most useless tyrant of alltyrants, is still of use, when, after sending out of the world suddenly, and all but painlessly, many an animal which would without him havestarved in misery through a diseased old age, he himself dies, and, indying, gives, by his own carcase, the means of life and of enjoyment to athousandfold more living creatures than ever his paws destroyed?

And so, the longer one watches the great struggle for existence, the morecharitable, the more hopeful, one becomes; as one sees that, consciouslyor unconsciously, the law of Nature is, after all, self-sacrifice;unconscious in plants and animals, as far as we know; save always thosemagnificent instances of true self-sacrifice shown by the social insects, by ants, bees, and others, which put to shame by a civilization trulynoble--why should I not say divine, for God ordained it?--the selfishnessand barbarism of man. But be that as it may, in man the law ofself-sacrifice--whether unconscious or not in the animals--rises intoconsciousness just as far as he is a man; and the crowning lesson of bio-geology may be, when we have worked it out, after all, the lesson ofChristmas-tide--of the infinite self-sacrifice of God for man; and Natureas well as religion may say to us--

 "Ah, could you crush that ever craving lust For bliss, which kills all bliss, and lose your life, Your barren unit life, to find again A thousand times in those for whom you die-- So were you men and women, and should hold Your rightful rank in God's great universe, Wherein, in heaven or earth, by will or nature, Naught lives for self. All, all, from crown to base-- The Lamb, before the world's foundation slain-- The angels, ministers to God's elect-- The sun, who only shines to light the worlds-- The clouds, whose glory is to die in showers-- The fleeting streams, who in their ocean graves Flee the decay of stagnant self-content-- The oak, ennobled by the shipwright's axe-- The soil, which yields its marrow to the flower-- The flower, which feeds a thousand velvet worms Born only to be prey to every bird-- All spend themselves on others: and shall man, Whose two-fold being is the mystic knot Which couples earth with heaven, doubly bound, As being both worm and angel, to that service By which both worms and angels hold their life, Shall he, whose every breath is debt on debt, Refuse, forsooth, to be what God has made him? No; let him show himself the creatures' Lord By free-will gift of that self-sacrifice Which they, perforce, by Nature's laws endure. "

My friends, scientific and others, if the study of bio-geology shall helpto teach you this, or anything like this; I think that though it may notmake you more happy, it may yet make you more wise; and, therefore, whatis better than being more happy, namely, more blessed. 

HEROISM

It is an open question whether the policeman is not demoralizing us; andthat in proportion as he does his duty well; whether the perfection ofjustice and safety, the complete "preservation of body and goods, " maynot reduce the educated and comfortable classes into that lap-dogcondition in which not conscience, but comfort, doth make cowards of usall. Our forefathers had, on the whole, to take care of themselves; wefind it more convenient to hire people to take care of us. So much thebetter for us, in some respects: but, it may be, so much the worse inothers. So much the better; because, as usually results from thedivision of labour, these people, having little or nothing to do save totake care of us, do so far better than we could; and so prevent a vastamount of violence and wrong, and therefore of misery, especially to theweak: for which last reason we will acquiesce in the existence ofpolicemen and lawyers, as we do in the results of arbitration, as thelesser of two evils. The odds in war are in favour of the bigger bully;in arbitration, in favour of the bigger rogue; and it is a questionwhether the lion or the fox be the safer guardian of human interests. Butarbitration prevents war: and that, in three cases out of four, is fullreason for employing it. 

On the other hand, the lap-dog condition, whether in dogs or in men, iscertainly unfavourable to the growth of the higher virtues. Safety andcomfort are good, indeed, for the good; for the brave, theself-originating, the earnest. They give to such a clear stage and nofavour wherein to work unhindered for their fellow-men. But for themajority, who are neither brave, self-originating, nor earnest, but themere puppets of circumstance, safety and comfort may, and actually do, merely make their lives mean and petty, effeminate and dull. Thereforetheir hearts must be awakened, as often as possible, to take exerciseenough for health; and they must be reminded, perpetually andimportunately, of what a certain great philosopher called "whatsoeverthings are true, honourable, just, pure, lovely, and of good report;" "ifthere be any manhood, and any just praise, to think of such things. "

This pettiness and dulness of our modern life is just what keeps aliveour stage, to which people go to see something a little less petty, alittle less dull, than what they see at home. It is, too, the cause of--Ihad almost said the excuse for--the modern rage for sensational novels. Those who read them so greedily are conscious, poor souls, of capacitiesin themselves of passion and action, for good and evil, for which theirfrivolous humdrum daily life gives no room, no vent. They know too wellthat human nature can be more fertile, whether in weeds and poisons, orin flowers and fruits, than it is usually in the streets and houses of awell-ordered and tolerably sober city. And because the study of humannature is, after all, that which is nearest to every one and mostinteresting to every one, therefore they go to fiction, since they cannotgo to fact, to see what they themselves might be had they the chance; tosee what fantastic tricks before high heaven men and women likethemselves can play; and how they play them. 

Well: it is not for me to judge, for me to blame. I will only say thatthere are those who cannot read sensational novels, or, indeed, anynovels at all, just because they see so many sensational novels beingenacted round them in painful facts of sinful flesh and blood. There arethose, too, who have looked in the mirror too often to wish to see theirown disfigured visage in it any more; who are too tired of themselves andashamed of themselves to want to hear of people like themselves; who wantto hear of people utterly unlike themselves, more noble, and able, andjust, and sweet, and pure; who long to hear of heroism and to conversewith heroes; and who, if by chance they meet with an heroic act, bathetheir spirits in that, as in May-dew, and feel themselves thereby, if butfor an hour, more fair. 

If any such shall chance to see these words, let me ask them to considerwith me that one word Hero, and what it means. 

Hero; Heroic; Heroism. These words point to a phase of human nature, thecapacity for which we all have in ourselves, which is as startling and asinteresting in its manifestations as any, and which is always beautiful, always ennobling, and therefore always attractive to those whose heartsare not yet seared by the world or brutalized by self-indulgence. 

But let us first be sure what the words mean. There is no use talkingabout a word till we have got at its meaning. We may use it as a cantphrase, as a party cry on platforms; we may even hate and persecute ourfellow-men for the sake of it: but till we have clearly settled in ourown minds what a word means, it will do for fighting with, but not forworking with. Socrates of old used to tell the young Athenians that theground of all sound knowledge was--to understand the true meaning of thewords which were in their mouths all day long; and Socrates was a wiserman than we shall ever see. So, instead of beginning an oration inpraise of heroism, I shall ask my readers to think with me what heroismis. 

Now, we shall always get most surely at the meaning of a word by gettingat its etymology--that is, at what it meant at first. And if heroismmeans behaving like a hero, we must find out, it seems to me, not merelywhat a hero may happen to mean just now, but what it meant in theearliest human speech in which we find it. 

A hero or a heroine, then, among the old Homeric Greeks, meant a man orwoman who was like the gods; and who, from that likeness, stood superiorto his or her fellow-creatures. Gods, heroes, and men, is a threefolddivision of rational beings, with which we meet more than once or twice. Those grand old Greeks felt deeply the truth of the poet's saying--

 "Unless above himself he can Exalt himself, how poor a thing is man. "

But more: the Greeks supposed these heroes to be, in some way or other, partakers of a divine nature; akin to the gods; usually, either they, orsome ancestor of theirs, descended from a god or goddess. Those who haveread Mr. Gladstone's 'Juventus Mundi' will remember the section (cap. Ix. Section 6) on the modes of the approximation between the divine and thehuman natures; and whether or not they agree with the author altogether, all will agree, I think, that the first idea of a hero or a heroine was agodlike man or godlike woman. 

A godlike man. What varied, what infinite forms of nobleness that wordmight include, ever increasing, as men's notions of the gods became purerand loftier, or, alas! decreasing, as their notions became degraded. Theold Greeks, with that intense admiration of beauty which made them, inafter ages, the master sculptors and draughtsmen of their own, and, indeed, of any age, would, of course, require in their hero, theirgodlike man, beauty and strength, manners, too, and eloquence, and alloutward perfections of humanity, and neglect his moral qualities. Neglect, I say, but not ignore. The hero, by virtue of his kindred withthe gods, was always expected to be a better man than common men, asvirtue was then understood. And how better? Let us see. 

The hero was at least expected to be more reverent than other men tothose divine beings of whose nature he partook, whose society he mightenjoy even here on earth. He might be unfaithful to his own highlineage; he might misuse his gifts by selfishness and self-will; hemight, like Ajax, rage with mere jealousy and wounded pride till his rageended in shameful madness and suicide. He might rebel against the verygods, and all laws of right and wrong, till he perished in his [Greektext], "Smitten down, blind in his pride, for a sign and a terror to mortals. "

But he ought to have, he must have, to be true to his name of Hero, justice, self-restraint, and [Greek text]--that highest form of modesty, for which we have, alas! no name in the English tongue; that perfectrespect for the feelings of others which springs out of perfectself-respect. And he must have, too--if he were to be a hero of thehighest type--the instinct of helpfulness; the instinct that, if he werea kinsman of the gods, he must fight on their side, through toil anddanger, against all that was unlike them, and therefore hateful to them. Who loves not the old legends, unsurpassed for beauty in the literatureof any race, in which the hero stands out as the deliverer, the destroyerof evil? Theseus ridding the land of robbers, and delivering it from theyearly tribute of boys and maidens to be devoured by the Minotaur;Perseus slaying the Gorgon, and rescuing Andromeda from the sea-beast;Heracles with his twelve famous labours against giants and monsters; andall the rest--

 "Who dared, in the god-given might of their manhood Greatly to do and to suffer, and far in the fens and the forests Smite the devourers of men, heaven-hated, brood of the giants; Transformed, strange, without like, who obey not the golden-haired rulers"--

These are figures whose divine moral beauty has sunk into the hearts, notmerely of poets or of artists, but of men and women who suffered and whofeared; the memory of them, fables though they may have been, ennobledthe old Greek heart; they ennobled the heart of Europe in the fifteenthcentury, at the rediscovery of Greek literature. So far fromcontradicting the Christian ideal, they harmonised with--I had almostsaid they supplemented--that more tender and saintly ideal of heroismwhich had sprung up during the earlier Middle Ages. They justified, andactually gave a new life to, the old noblenesses of chivalry, which hadgrown up in the later Middle Ages as a necessary supplement of active andmanly virtue to the passive and feminine virtue of the cloister. Theyinspired, mingling with these two other elements, a literature, both inEngland, France, and Italy, in which the three elements, the saintly, thechivalrous, and the Greek heroic, have become one and undistinguishable, because all three are human, and all three divine; a literature whichdeveloped itself in Ariosto, in Tasso, in the Hypnerotomachia, theArcadia, the Euphues, and other forms, sometimes fantastic, sometimesquestionable, but which reached its perfection in our own Spenser's'Fairy Queen'--perhaps the most admirable poem which has ever been pennedby mortal man. 

And why? What has made these old Greek myths live, myths though they be, and fables, and fair dreams? What, though they have no body, and, perhaps, never had, has given them an immortal soul, which can speak tothe immortal souls of all generations to come?

What but this, that in them--dim it may be and undeveloped, but stillthere--lies the divine idea of self-sacrifice as the perfection ofheroism; of self-sacrifice, as the highest duty and the highest joy ofhim who claims a kindred with the gods?

Let us say, then, that true heroism must involve self-sacrifice. Thosestories certainly involve it, whether ancient or modern, which thehearts, not of philosophers merely, or poets, but of the poorest and themost ignorant, have accepted instinctively as the highest form of moralbeauty--the highest form, and yet one possible to all. 

Grace Darling rowing out into the storm toward the wreck. --The "drunkenprivate of the Buffs, " who, prisoner among the Chinese, and commanded toprostrate himself and kotoo, refused in the name of his country'shonour--"He would not bow to any Chinaman on earth:" and so was knockedon the head, and died surely a hero's death. --Those soldiers of the'Birkenhead, ' keeping their ranks to let the women and children escape, while they watched the sharks who in a few minutes would be tearing themlimb from limb. --Or, to go across the Atlantic--for there are heroes inthe Far West--Mr. Bret Harte's "Flynn of Virginia, " on the CentralPacific Railway--the place is shown to travellers--who sacrificed hislife for his married comrade, --

 "There, in the drift, Back to the wall, He held the timbers Ready to fall. Then in the darkness I heard him call, -- 'Run for your life, Jake! Run for your wife's sake! Don't wait for me. '

 "And that was all Heard in the din-- Heard of Tom Flynn, Flynn of Virginia. "

Or the engineer, again, on the Mississippi, who, when the steamer caughtfire, held, as he had sworn he would, her bow against the bank till everysoul save he got safe on shore, --

 "Through the hot black breath of the burning boat Jim Bludso's voice was heard; And they all had trust in his cussedness, And knew he would keep his word. And sure's you're born, they all got off Afore the smokestacks fell, -- And Bludso's ghost went up alone In the smoke of the 'Prairie Belle. '

 "He weren't no saint--but at judgment I'd run my chance with Jim 'Longside of some pious gentlemen That wouldn't shake hands with him. He'd seen his duty--a dead sure thing-- And went for it there and then; And Christ is not going to be too hard On a man that died for men. "

To which gallant poem of Colonel John Hay's--and he has written manygallant and beautiful poems--I have but one demurrer: Jim Bludso did notmerely do his duty, but more than his duty. He did a voluntary deed, towhich he was bound by no code or contract, civil or moral; just as he whointroduced me to that poem won his Victoria Cross--as many a cross, Victoria and other, has been won--by volunteering for a deed to which he, too, was bound by no code or contract, military or moral. And it is ofthe essence of self-sacrifice, and, therefore, of heroism, that it shouldbe voluntary; a work of supererogation, at least towards society and man:an act to which the hero or heroine is not bound by duty, but which isabove though not against duty. 

Nay, on the strength of that same element of self-sacrifice, I will notgrudge the epithet heroic, which my revered friend Mr. Darwin justlyapplies to the poor little monkey, who once in his life did that whichwas above his duty; who lived in continual terror of the great baboon, and yet, when the brute had sprung upon his friend the keeper, and wastearing out his throat, conquered his fear by love, and, at the risk ofinstant death, sprang in turn upon his dreaded enemy, and bit andshrieked till help arrived. 

Some would now-a-days use that story merely to prove that the monkey'snature and the man's nature are, after all, one and the same. Well: I, at least, have never denied that there is a monkey-nature in man as thereis a peacock-nature, and a swine-nature, and a wolf-nature--of all whichfour I see every day too much. The sharp and stern distinction betweenmen and animals, as far as their natures are concerned, is of a moremodern origin than people fancy. Of old the Assyrian took the eagle, theox, and the lion--and not unwisely--as the three highest types of humancapacity. The horses of Homer might be immortal, and weep for theirmaster's death. The animals and monsters of Greek myth--like the Ananzispider of Negro fable--glide insensibly into speech and reason. Birds--themost wonderful of all animals in the eyes of a man of science or apoet--are sometimes looked on as wiser, and nearer to the gods, than man. The Norseman--the noblest and ablest human being, save the Greek, of whomhistory can tell us--was not ashamed to say of the bear of his nativeforests that he had "ten men's strength and eleven men's wisdom. " Howcould Reinecke Fuchs have gained immortality, in the Middle Ages andsince, save by the truth of its too solid and humiliating theorem--thatthe actions of the world of men were, on the whole, guided by passionsbut too exactly like those of the lower animals? I have said, and sayagain, with good old Vaughan--

 "Unless above himself he can Exalt himself, how mean a thing is man. "

But I cannot forget that many an old Greek poet or sage, and many asixteenth and seventeenth century one, would have interpreted themonkey's heroism from quite a different point of view; and would havesaid that the poor little creature had been visited suddenly by some"divine afflatus"--an expression quite as philosophical and quite asintelligible as most philosophic formulas which I read now-a-days--andhad been thus raised for the moment above his abject selfishmonkey-nature, just as man requires to be raised above his. But thattheory belongs to a philosophy which is out of date and out of fashion, and which will have to wait a century or two before it comes into fashionagain. 

And now: if self-sacrifice and heroism be, as I believe, identical, Imust protest against a use of the word sacrifice which is growing toocommon in newspaper-columns, in which we are told of an "enormoussacrifice of life;" an expression which means merely that a great manypoor wretches have been killed, quite against their own will, and for nopurpose whatsoever: no sacrifice at all, unless it be one to the demonsof ignorance, cupidity or mismanagement. 

The stout Whig undergraduate understood better the meaning of such words, who, when asked, "In what sense might Charles the First be said to be amartyr?" answered, "In the same sense that a man might be said to be amartyr to the gout. "

And I must protest, in like wise, against a misuse of the words hero, heroism, heroic, which is becoming too common, namely, applying them tomere courage. We have borrowed the misuse, I believe, as we have morethan one beside, from the French press. I trust that we shall neitheraccept it, nor the temper which inspires it. It may be convenient forthose who flatter their nation, and especially the military part of it, into a ruinous self-conceit, to frame some such syllogism asthis--"Courage is heroism: every Frenchman is naturally courageous:therefore every Frenchman is a hero. " But we, who have been trained atonce in a sounder school of morals, and in a greater respect for facts, and for language as the expression of facts, shall be careful, I hope, not to trifle thus with that potent and awful engine--human speech. Weshall eschew likewise, I hope, a like abuse of the word moral, which hascrept from the French press now and then, not only into our own press, but into the writings of some of our military men, who, as Englishmen, should have known better. We were told again and again, during the latewar, that the moral effect of such a success had been great; that themorale of the troops was excellent; or again, that the morale of thetroops had suffered, or even that they were somewhat demoralised. Butwhen one came to test what was really meant by these fine words, onediscovered that morals had nothing to do with the facts which theyexpressed; that the troops were in the one case actuated simply by theanimal passion of hope, in the other simply by the animal passion offear. This abuse of the word moral has crossed, I am sorry to say, theAtlantic; and a witty American, whom we must excuse, though we must notimitate, when some one had been blazing away at him with a revolver, hebeing unarmed, is said to have described his very natural emotions on theoccasion, by saying that he felt dreadfully demoralised. We, I hope, shall confine the word demoralisation, as our generals of the lastcentury would have done, when applied to soldiers, to crime, including, of course, the neglect of duty or of discipline; and we shall mean by theword heroism in like manner, whether applied to a soldier or to any humanbeing, not mere courage; not the mere doing of duty: but the doing ofsomething beyond duty; something which is not in the bond; somespontaneous and unexpected act of self-devotion. 

I am glad, but not surprised, to see that Miss Yonge has held to thissound distinction in her golden little book of 'Golden Deeds;' and said, "Obedience, at all costs and risks, is the very essence of a soldier'slife. It has the solid material, but it has hardly the exceptionalbrightness, of a golden deed. "

I know that it is very difficult to draw the line between mere obedienceto duty and express heroism. I know also that it would be both invidiousand impertinent in an utterly unheroic personage like me, to try to drawthat line; and to sit at home at ease, analysing and criticising deedswhich I could not do myself: but--to give an instance or two of what Imean--

To defend a post as long as it is tenable is not heroic. It is simpleduty. To defend it after it has become untenable, and even to die in sodoing, is not heroic, but a noble madness, unless an advantage is to begained thereby for one's own side. Then, indeed, it rises towards, ifnot into, the heroism of self-sacrifice. 

Who, for example, will not endorse the verdict of all ages on the conductof those Spartans at Thermopylae, when they sat "combing their yellowhair for death" on the sea-shore? They devoted themselves to hopelessdestruction: but why? They felt--I must believe that, for they behavedas if they felt--that on them the destinies of the Western World mighthang; that they were in the forefront of the battle between civilisationand barbarism, between freedom and despotism; and that they must teachthat vast mob of Persian slaves, whom the officers of the Great King weredriving with whips up to their lance-points, that the spirit of the oldheroes was not dead; and that the Greek, even in defeat and death, was amightier and a nobler man than they. And they did their work. Theyproduced, if you will, a "moral" effect, which has lasted even to thisvery day. They struck terror into the heart, not only of the Persianhost, but of the whole Persian empire. They made the event of that warcertain, and the victories of Salamis and Plataea comparatively easy. They made Alexander's conquest of the East, 150 years afterwards, notonly possible at all, but permanent when it came; and thus helped todetermine the future civilisation of the whole world. 

They did not, of course, foresee all this. No great or inspired man canforesee all the consequences of his deeds: but these men were, as I hold, inspired to see somewhat at least of the mighty stake for which theyplayed; and to count their lives worthless, if Sparta had sent themthither to help in that great game. 

Or shall we refuse the name of heroic to those three German cavalryregiments who, in the battle of Mars La Tour, were bidden to hurlthemselves upon the chassepots and mitrailleuses of the unbroken Frenchinfantry, and went to almost certain death, over the corpses of theircomrades, on and in and through, reeling man over horse, horse over man, and clung like bull-dogs to their work, and would hardly leave, even atthe bugle-call, till in one regiment thirteen officers out of nineteenwere killed or wounded? And why?

Because the French army must be stopped, if it were but for a quarter ofan hour. A respite must be gained for the exhausted Third Corps. Andhow much might be done, even in a quarter of an hour, by men who knewwhen, and where, and why to die. Who will refuse the name of heroes tothese men? And yet they, probably, would have utterly declined thehonour. They had but done that which was in the bond. They were butobeying orders after all. As Miss Yonge well says of all heroicpersons--"'I have but done that which it was my duty to do, ' is thenatural answer of those capable of such actions. They have beenconstrained to them by duty or pity; have never deemed it possible to actotherwise; and did not once think of themselves in the matter at all. "

These last true words bring us to another element in heroism: itssimplicity. Whatsoever is not simple; whatsoever is affected, boastful, wilful, covetous, tarnishes, even destroys, the heroic character of adeed; because all these faults spring out of self. On the other hand, wherever you find a perfectly simple, frank, unconscious character, thereyou have the possibility, at least, of heroic action. For it is noblerfar to do the most commonplace duty in the household, or behind thecounter, with a single eye to duty, simply because it must be done--noblerfar, I say, than to go out of your way to attempt a brilliant deed, witha double mind, and saying to yourself not only--"This will be a brilliantdeed, " but also--"and it will pay me, or raise me, or set me off, intothe bargain. " Heroism knows no "into the bargain. " And therefore, again, I must protest against applying the word heroic to any deeds, however charitable, however toilsome, however dangerous, performed forthe sake of what certain French ladies, I am told, call "faire sonsalut"--saving one's soul in the world to come. I do not mean to judge. Other and quite unselfish motives may be, and doubtless often are, mixedup with that selfish one: womanly pity and tenderness; love for, anddesire to imitate, a certain incarnate ideal of self-sacrifice, who is atonce human and divine. But that motive of saving the soul, which is toooften openly proposed and proffered, is utterly unheroic. The desire toescape pains and penalties hereafter by pains and penalties here; thebalance of present loss against future gain--what is this but selfishnessextended out of this world into eternity? "Not worldliness, " indeed, asa satirist once said with bitter truth, "but other-worldliness. "

Moreover--and the young and the enthusiastic should also bear this inmind--though heroism means the going beyond the limits of strict duty, itnever means the going out of the path of strict duty. If it is your dutyto go to London, go thither: you may go as much further as you chooseafter that. But you must go to London first. Do your duty first; itwill be time after that to talk of being heroic. 

And therefore one must seriously warn the young, lest they mistake forheroism and self-sacrifice what is merely pride and self-will, discontentwith the relations by which God has bound them, and the circumstanceswhich God has appointed for them. I have known girls think they weredoing a fine thing by leaving uncongenial parents or disagreeablesisters, and cutting out for themselves, as they fancied, a more usefuland elevated line of life than that of mere home duties; while, afterall, poor things, they were only saying, with the Pharisees of old, "Corban, it is a gift, by whatsoever thou mightest be profited by me;"and in the name of God, neglecting the command of God to honour theirfather and mother. 

There are men, too, who will neglect their households and leave theirchildren unprovided for, and even uneducated, while they are spendingtheir money on philanthropic or religious hobbies of their own. It isill to take the children's bread and cast it to the dogs; or even to theangels. It is ill, I say, trying to make God presents, before we havetried to pay God our debts. The first duty of every man is to the wifewhom he has married, and to the children whom she has brought into theworld; and to neglect them is not heroism, but self-conceit; the conceitthat a man is so necessary to Almighty God, that God will actually allowhim to do wrong, if He can only thereby secure the man's invaluableservices. Be sure that every motive which comes not from the single eye;every motive which springs from self; is by its very essence unheroic, let it look as gaudy or as beneficent as it may. 

But I cannot go so far as to say the same of the love of approbation--thedesire for the love and respect of our fellow-men. 

That must not be excluded from the list of heroic motives. I know thatit is, or may be proved to be, by victorious analysis, an emotion commonto us and the lower animals. And yet no man excludes it less than thattrue hero, St. Paul. If those brave Spartans, if those brave Germans, ofwhom I spoke just now, knew that their memories would be wept over andworshipped by brave men and fair women, and that their names would becomewatchwords to children in their fatherland: what is that to us, save thatit should make us rejoice, if we be truly human, that they had thatthought with them in their last moments to make self-devotion more easy, and death more sweet?

And yet--and yet--is not the highest heroism that which is free even fromthe approbation of our fellow-men, even from the approbation of the bestand wisest? The heroism which is known only to our Father who seeth insecret? The Godlike deeds alone in the lonely chamber? The Godlikelives lived in obscurity?--a heroism rare among us men, who live perforcein the glare and noise of the outer world: more common among women; womenof whom the world never hears; who, if the world discovered them, wouldonly draw the veil more closely over their faces and their hearts, andentreat to be left alone with God. True, they cannot always hide. Theymust not always hide; or their fellow-creatures would lose the goldenlesson. But, nevertheless, it is of the essence of the perfect andwomanly heroism, in which, as in all spiritual forces, woman transcendsthe man, that it would hide if it could. 

And it was a pleasant thought to me, when I glanced lately at the goldendeeds of woman in Miss Yonge's book--it was a pleasant thought to me, that I could say to myself--Ah! yes. These heroines are known, and theirfame flies through the mouths of men. But if so, how many thousands ofheroines there must have been, how many thousands there may be now, ofwhom we shall never know. But still they are there. They sow in secretthe seed of which we pluck the flower and eat the fruit, and know notthat we pass the sower daily in the street; perhaps some humble ill-drestwoman, earning painfully her own small sustenance. She who nurses abedridden mother, instead of sending her to the workhouse. She whospends her heart and her money on a drunken father, a reckless brother, on the orphans of a kinsman or a friend. She who--But why go on with thelong list of great little heroisms, with which a clergyman at least comesin contact daily--and it is one of the most ennobling privileges of aclergyman's high calling that he does come in contact with them--why goon, I say, save to commemorate one more form of great little heroism--thecommonest, and yet the least remembered of all--namely, the heroism of anaverage mother? Ah, when I think of that last broad fact, I gather hopeagain for poor humanity; and this dark world looks bright, this diseasedworld looks wholesome to me once more--because, whatever else it is or isnot full of, it is at least full of mothers. 

While the satirist only sneers, as at a stock butt for his ridicule, atthe managing mother trying to get her daughters married off her hands bychicaneries and meannesses, which every novelist knows too well how todraw--would to heaven he, or rather, alas! she, would find some morechivalrous employment for his or her pen--for were they not, too, born ofwoman?--I only say to myself--having had always a secret fondness forpoor Rebecca, though I love Esau more than Jacob--Let the poor thingalone. With pain she brought these girls into the world. With pain sheeducated them according to her light. With pain she is trying to obtainfor them the highest earthly blessing of which she can conceive, namely, to be well married; and if in doing that last, she manoeuvres a little, commits a few basenesses, even tells a few untruths, what does all thatcome to, save this--that in the confused intensity of her motherly self-sacrifice, she will sacrifice for her daughters even her own conscienceand her own credit? We may sneer, if we will, at such a poor hard-drivensoul when we meet her in society: our duty, both as Christians and ladiesand gentlemen, seems to me to be--to do for her something very differentindeed. 

But to return. Looking at the amount of great little heroisms, which arebeing, as I assert, enacted around us every day, no one has a right tosay, what we are all tempted to say at times--"How can I be heroic? Thisis no heroic age, setting me heroic examples. We are growing more andmore comfortable, frivolous, pleasure-seeking, money-making; more andmore utilitarian; more and more mercenary in our politics, in our morals, in our religion; thinking less and less of honour and duty, and more andmore of loss and gain. I am born into an unheroic time. You must notask me to become heroic in it. "

I do not deny that it is more difficult to be heroic, while circumstancesare unheroic round us. We are all too apt to be the puppets ofcircumstance; all too apt to follow the fashion; all too apt, like somany minnows, to take our colour from the ground on which we lie, inhopes, like them, of comfortable concealment, lest the new tyrant deity, called public opinion, should spy us out, and, like Nebuchadnezzar ofold, cast us into a burning fiery furnace--which public opinion can makevery hot--for daring to worship any god or man save the will of thetemporary majority. 

Yes, it is difficult to be anything but poor, mean, insufficient, imperfect people, as like each other as so many sheep; and, like so manysheep, having no will or character of our own, but rushing altogetherblindly over the same gap, in foolish fear of the same dog, who, afterall, dare not bite us; and so it always was and always will be. 

For the third time I say, --

 "Unless above himself he can Exalt himself, how poor a thing is man. "

But, nevertheless, any man or woman who will, in any age and under anycircumstances, can live the heroic life and exercise heroic influences. 

If any ask proof of this, I shall ask them, in return, to read twonovels; novels, indeed, but, in their method and their moral, partakingof that heroic and ideal element, which will make them live, I trust, long after thousands of mere novels have returned to their native dust. Imean Miss Muloch's 'John Halifax, Gentleman, ' and Mr. Thackeray's'Esmond, ' two books which no man or woman ought to read without being thenobler for them. 

'John Halifax, Gentleman, ' is simply the history of a poor young clerk, who rises to be a wealthy mill-owner in the manufacturing districts, inthe early part of this century. But he contrives to be an heroic andideal clerk, and an heroic and ideal mill-owner; and that without doinganything which the world would call heroic or ideal, or in anywisestepping out of his sphere, minding simply his own business, and doingthe duty which lies nearest him. And how? By getting into his head fromyouth the strangest notion, that in whatever station or business he maybe, he can always be what he considers a gentleman; and that if he onlybehaves like a gentleman, all must go right at last. A beautiful book. As I said before, somewhat of an heroic and ideal book. A book which didme good when first I read it; which ought to do any young man good whowill read it, and then try to be, like John Halifax, a gentleman, whetherin the shop, the counting-house, the bank, or the manufactory. 

The other--an even more striking instance of the possibility, at least, of heroism anywhere and everywhere--is Mr. Thackeray's 'Esmond. ' On themeaning of that book I can speak with authority. For my dear andregretted friend told me himself that my interpretation of it was thetrue one; that this was the lesson which he meant men to learn therefrom. 

Esmond is a man of the first half of the eighteenth century; living in acoarse, drunken, ignorant, profligate, and altogether unheroic age. Heis--and here the high art and the high morality of Mr. Thackeray's geniusis shown--altogether a man of his own age. He is not a sixteenth-centuryor a nineteenth-century man born out of time. His information, hispolitics, his religion, are no higher than of those round him. Hismanners, his views of human life, his very prejudices and faults, arethose of his age. The temptations which he conquers are just those underwhich the men around him fall. But how does he conquer them? By holdingfast throughout to honour, duty, virtue. Thus, and thus alone, hebecomes an ideal eighteenth-century gentleman, an eighteenth-centuryhero. This was what Mr. Thackeray meant--for he told me so himself, Isay--that it was possible, even in England's lowest and foulest times, tobe a gentleman and a hero, if a man would but be true to the light withinhim. 

But I will go further. I will go from ideal fiction to actual, and yetideal, fact; and say that, as I read history, the most unheroic age whichthe civilized world ever saw was also the most heroic; that the spirit ofman triumphed most utterly over his circumstances, at the very momentwhen those circumstances were most against him. 

How and why he did so is a question for philosophy in the highest senseof that word. The fact of his having done so is matter of history. ShallI solve my own riddle?

Then, have we not heard of the early Christian martyrs? Is there a doubtthat they, unlettered men, slaves, weak women, even children, didexhibit, under an infinite sense of duty, issuing in infiniteself-sacrifice, a heroism such as the world had never seen before; didraise the ideal of human nobleness a whole stage--rather say, a wholeheaven--higher than before; and that wherever the tale of their greatdeeds spread, men accepted, even if they did not copy, those martyrs asideal specimens of the human race, till they were actually worshipped bysucceeding generations, wrongly, it may be, but pardonably, as a choir oflesser deities?

But is there, on the other hand, a doubt that the age in which they wereheroic was the most unheroic of all ages; that they were bred, lived, anddied, under the most debasing of materialist tyrannies, with art, literature, philosophy, family and national life dying or dead aroundthem, and in cities the corruption of which cannot be told for veryshame--cities, compared with which Paris is the abode of Arcadiansimplicity and innocence? When I read Petronius and Juvenal, andrecollect that they were the contemporaries of the Apostles; when--togive an instance which scholars, and perhaps, happily, only scholars, canappreciate--I glance once more at Trimalchio's feast, and remember thatwithin a mile of that feast St. Paul may have been preaching to aChristian congregation, some of whom--for St. Paul makes no secret ofthat strange fact--may have been, ere their conversion, partakers in justsuch vulgar and bestial orgies as those which were going on in the richfreedman's halls: after that, I say, I can put no limit to thepossibility of man's becoming heroic, even though he be surrounded by ahell on earth; no limit to the capacities of any human being to form forhimself or herself a high and pure ideal of human character; and, without"playing fantastic tricks before high heaven, " to carry out that ideal inevery-day life; and in the most commonplace circumstances, and the mostmenial occupations, to live worthy of--as I conceive--our heavenlybirthright, and to imitate the heroes, who were the kinsmen of the gods. 

SUPERSTITION. A LECTURE DELIVERED AT THE ROYAL INSTITUTION, LONDON. 

Having accepted the very great honour of being allowed to deliver heretwo lectures, I have chosen as my subject Superstition and Science. Itis with Superstition that this first lecture will deal. 

The subject seems to me especially fit for a clergyman; for he should, more than other men, be able to avoid trenching on two subjects rightlyexcluded from this Institution; namely, Theology--that is, the knowledgeof God; and Religion--that is, the knowledge of Duty. If he knows, as heshould, what is Theology, and what is Religion, then he should best knowwhat is not Theology, and what is not Religion. 

For my own part, I entreat you at the outset to keep in mind that theselectures treat of matters entirely physical; which have in reality, andought to have in our minds, no more to do with Theology and Religion thanthe proposition that theft is wrong, has to do with the proposition thatthe three angles of a triangle are equal to two right angles. 

It is necessary to premise this, because many are of opinion thatsuperstition is a corruption of religion; and though they would agreethat as such, "corruptio optimi pessima, " yet they would look on religionas the state of spiritual health, and superstition as one of spiritualdisease. 

Others, again, holding the same notion, but not considering thatcorruptio optimi pessima, have been in all ages somewhat inclined to bemerciful to superstition, as a child of reverence; as a mere accidentalmisdirection of one of the noblest and most wholesome faculties of man. 

This is not the place wherein to argue with either of these parties; andI shall simply say that superstition seems to me altogether a physicalaffection, as thoroughly material and corporeal as those of eating orsleeping, remembering or dreaming. 

After this, it will be necessary to define superstition, in order to havesome tolerably clear understanding of what we are talking about. I begleave to define it as--Fear of the unknown. 

Johnson, who was no dialectician, and, moreover, superstitious enoughhimself, gives eight different definitions of the word; which isequivalent to confessing his inability to define it at all:--

"1. Unnecessary fear or scruples in religion; observance of unnecessaryand uncommanded rites or practices; religion without morality. 

"2. False religion; reverence of beings not proper objects of reverence;false worship. 

"3. Over nicety; exactness too scrupulous. "

Eight meanings; which, on the principle that eight eighths, or indeed800, do not make one whole, may be considered as no definition. Hisfirst thought, as often happens, is the best--"Unnecessary fear. " Butafter that he wanders. The root-meaning of the word is still to seek. But, indeed, the popular meaning, thanks to popular common sense, willgenerally be found to contain in itself the root-meaning. 

Let us go back to the Latin word Superstitio. Cicero says that thesuperstitious element consists in "a certain empty dread of the gods"--apurely physical affection, if you will remember three things:--

1. That dread is in itself a physical affection. 

2. That the gods who were dreaded were, with the vulgar, who alonedreaded them, merely impersonations of the powers of nature. 

3. That it was physical injury which these gods were expected toinflict. 

But he himself agrees with this theory of mine; for he says shortlyafter, that not only philosophers, but even the ancient Romans, hadseparated superstition from religion; and that the word was first appliedto those who prayed all day ut liberi sui sibi superstites essent--mightsurvive them. On the etymology no one will depend who knows theremarkable absence of any etymological instinct in the ancients, inconsequence of their weak grasp of that sound inductive method which hascreated modern criticism. But if it be correct, it is a natural andpathetic form for superstition to take in the minds of men who saw theirchildren fade and die; probably the greater number of them beneathdiseases which mankind could neither comprehend nor cure. 

The best exemplification of what the ancients meant by superstition is tobe found in the lively and dramatic words of Aristotle's great pupil, Theophrastus. 

The superstitious man, according to him, after having washed his handswith lustral water--that is, water in which a torch from the altar hadbeen quenched, goes about with a laurel-leaf in his mouth, to keep offevil influences, as the pigs in Devonshire used, in my youth, to go aboutwith a withe of mountain ash round their necks to keep off the evil eye. If a weasel crosses his path, he stops, and either throws three pebblesinto the road, or, with the innate selfishness of fear, lets some oneelse go before him, and attract to himself the harm which may ensue. Hehas a similar dread of a screech-owl, whom he compliments in the name ofits mistress, Pallas Athene. If he finds a serpent in his house, he setsup an altar to it. If he pass at a four-cross-way an anointed stone, hepours oil on it, kneels down, and adores it. If a rat has nibbled one ofhis sacks he takes it for a fearful portent--a superstition which Ciceroalso mentions. He dare not sit on a tomb, because it would be assistingat his own funeral. He purifies endlessly his house, saying thatHecate--that is, the moon--has exercised some malign influence on it; andmany other purifications he observes, of which I shall only say that theyare by their nature plainly, like the last, meant as preservativesagainst unseen malarias or contagions, possible or impossible. Heassists every month with his children at the mysteries of the Orphicpriests; and finally, whenever he sees an epileptic patient, he spits inhis own bosom to avert the evil omen. 

I have quoted, I believe, every fact given by Theophrastus; and you willagree, I am sure, that the moving and inspiring element of such acharacter is mere bodily fear of unknown evil. The only superstitionattributed to him which does not at first sight seem to have its root indread is that of the Orphic mysteries. But of them Muller says that theDionusos whom they worshipped "was an infernal deity, connected withHades, and was the personification, not merely of rapturous pleasure, butof a deep sorrow for the miseries of human life. " The Orphic societiesof Greece seem to have been peculiarly ascetic, taking no animal foodsave raw flesh from the sacrificed ox of Dionusos. And Plato speaks of alower grade of Orphic priests, Orpheotelestai, "who used to come beforethe doors of the rich, and promise, by sacrifices and expiatory songs, torelease them from their own sins, and those of their forefathers;" andsuch would be but too likely to get a hearing from the man who was afraidof a weasel or an owl. 

Now, this same bodily fear, I verily believe, will be found at the rootof all superstition whatsoever. 

But be it so. Fear is a natural passion, and a wholesome one. Withoutthe instinct of self-preservation, which causes the sea-anemone tocontract its tentacles, or the fish to dash into its hover, species wouldbe extermined wholesale by involuntary suicide. 

Yes; fear is wholesome enough, like all other faculties, as long as it iscontrolled by reason. But what if the fear be not rational, butirrational? What if it be, in plain homely English, blind fear; fear ofthe unknown, simply because it is unknown? Is it not likely, then, to beafraid of the wrong object? to be hurtful, ruinous to animals as well asto man? Any one will confess that, who has ever seen a horse inflict onhimself mortal injuries, in his frantic attempts to escape from a quiteimaginary danger. I have good reasons for believing that not onlyanimals here and there, but whole flocks and swarms of them, are oftendestroyed, even in the wild state, by mistaken fear; by such panics, forinstance, as cause a whole herd of buffalos to rush over a bluff, and bedashed to pieces. And remark that this capacity of panic, fear--ofsuperstition, as I should call it--is greatest in those animals, the dogand the horse for instance, which have the most rapid and vivid fancy. Does not the unlettered Highlander say all that I want to say, when heattributes to his dog and his horse, on the strength of these verymanifestations of fear, the capacity of seeing ghosts and fairies beforehe can see them himself?

But blind fear not only causes evil to the coward himself: it makes him asource of evil to others; for it is the cruellest of all human states. Ittransforms the man into the likeness of the cat, who, when she is caughtin a trap, or shut up in a room, has too low an intellect to understandthat you wish to release her; and, in the madness of terror, bites andtears at the hand which tries to do her good. Yes; very cruel is blindfear. When a man dreads he knows not what, he will do he cares not what. When he dreads desperately, he will act desperately. When he dreadsbeyond all reason, he will behave beyond all reason. He has no law ofguidance left, save the lowest selfishness. No law of guidance: and yethis intellect, left unguided, may be rapid and acute enough to lead himinto terrible follies. Infinitely more imaginative than the lowestanimals, he is for that very reason capable of being infinitely morefoolish, more cowardly, more superstitious. He can--what the loweranimals, happily for them, cannot--organise his folly; erect hissuperstitions into a science; and create a whole mythology out of hisblind fear of the unknown. And when he has done that--Woe to the weak!For when he has reduced his superstition to a science, then he willreduce his cruelty to a science likewise, and write books like theMalleus Maleficarum, and the rest of the witch-literature of thefifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries; of which Mr. Lecky hasof late told the world so much, and told it most faithfully and mostfairly. 

But, fear of the unknown? Is not that fear of the unseen world? And isnot that fear of the spiritual world? Pardon me: a great deal of thatfear--all of it, indeed, which is superstition--is simply not fear of thespiritual, but of the material; and of nothing else. 

The spiritual world--I beg you to fix this in your minds--is not merelyan invisible world which may become visible, but an invisible world whichis by its essence invisible; a moral world, a world of right and wrong. And spiritual fear--which is one of the noblest of all affections, asbodily fear is one of the basest--is, if properly defined, nothing lessor more than the fear of doing wrong; of becoming a worse man. 

But what has that to do with mere fear of the unseen? The fancy whichconceives the fear is physical, not spiritual. Think for yourselves. What difference is there between a savage's fear of a demon, and ahunter's fear of a fall? The hunter sees a fence. He does not know whatis on the other side: but he has seen fences like it with a great ditchon the other side, and suspects one here likewise. He has seen horsesfall at such, and men hurt thereby. He pictures to himself his horsefalling at that fence, himself rolling in the ditch, with possibly abroken limb; and he recoils from the picture he himself has made; andperhaps with very good reason. His picture may have its counterpart infact; and he may break his leg. But his picture, like the previouspictures from which it was compounded, is simply a physical impression onthe brain, just as much as those in dreams. 

Now, does the fact of the ditch, the fall, and the broken leg, beingunseen and unknown, make them a spiritual ditch, a spiritual fall, aspiritual broken leg? And does the fact of the demon and his doings, being as yet unseen and unknown, make them spiritual, or the harm that hemay do, a spiritual harm? What does the savage fear? Lest the demonshould appear; that is, become obvious to his physical senses, andproduce an unpleasant physical effect on them. He fears lest the fiendshould entice him into the bog, break the hand-bridge over the brook, turn into a horse and ride away with him, or jump out from behind a treeand wring his neck--tolerably hard physical facts, all of them; thechildren of physical fancy, regarded with physical dread. Even if thesuperstition proved true; even if the demon did appear; even if he wrungthe traveller's neck in sound earnest, there would be no more spiritualagency or phenomenon in the whole tragedy than there is in the parlourtable, when spiritual somethings make spiritual raps upon spiritual wood;and human beings, who are really spirits--and would to heaven they wouldremember that fact, and what it means--believe that anything has happenedbeyond a clumsy juggler's trick. 

You demur? Do you not see that the demon, by the mere fact of havingproduced physical consequences, would have become himself a physicalagent, a member of physical Nature, and therefore to be explained, he andhis doings, by physical laws? If you do not see that conclusion at firstsight, think over it till you do. 

It may seem to some that I have founded my theory on a very narrow basis;that I am building up an inverted pyramid; or that, considering thenumberless, complex, fantastic shapes which superstition has assumed, bodily fear is too simple to explain them all. 

But if those persons will think a second time, they must agree that mybase is as broad as the phenomena which it explains; for every man iscapable of fear. And they will see, too, that the cause of superstitionmust be something like fear, which is common to all men: for all, atleast as children, are capable of superstition; and that it must besomething which, like fear, is of a most simple, rudimentary, barbarickind; for the lowest savage, of whatever he is not capable, is stillsuperstitious, often to a very ugly degree. Superstition seems, indeed, to be, next to the making of stone-weapons, the earliest method ofasserting his superiority to the brutes which has occurred to thatutterly abnormal and fantastic lusus naturae called man. 

Now let us put ourselves awhile, as far as we can, in the place of thatsame savage; and try whether my theory will not justify itself; whetheror not superstition, with all its vagaries, may have been, indeed musthave been, the result of that ignorance and fear which he carried aboutwith him, every time he prowled for food through the primeval forest. 

A savage's first division of nature would be, I should say, into thingswhich he can eat, and things which can eat him; including, of course, hismost formidable enemy, and most savoury food--his fellow-man. In findingout what he can eat, we must remember, he will have gone through muchexperience which will have inspired him with a serious respect for thehidden wrath of nature; like those Himalayan folk, of whom Hooker says, that as they know every poisonous plant, they must have tried themall--not always with impunity. 

So he gets at a third class of objects--things which he cannot eat, andwhich will not eat him; but will only do him harm, as it seems to him, out of pure malice, like poisonous plants and serpents. There arenatural accidents, too, which fall into the same category, stones, floods, fires, avalanches. They hurt him or kill him, surely for ends oftheir own. If a rock falls from the cliff above him, what more naturalthan to suppose that there is some giant up there who threw it at him? Ifhe had been up there, and strong enough, and had seen a man walkingunderneath, he would certainly have thrown the stone at him and killedhim. For first, he might have eaten the man after; and even if he werenot hungry, the man might have done him a mischief; and it was prudent toprevent that, by doing him a mischief first. Besides, the man might havea wife; and if he killed the man, then the wife would, by a very ancientlaw common to man and animals, become the prize of the victor. Such isthe natural man, the carnal man, the soulish man, the [Greek text] of St. Paul, with five tolerably acute senses, which are ruled by five veryacute animal passions--hunger, sex, rage, vanity, fear. It is with theworking of the last passion, fear, that this lecture has to do. 

So the savage concludes that there must be a giant living in the cliff, who threw stones at him, with evil intent; and he concludes in like wiseconcerning most other natural phenomena. There is something in themwhich will hurt him, and therefore likes to hurt him: and if he cannotdestroy them, and so deliver himself, his fear of them grows quiteboundless. There are hundreds of natural objects on which he learns tolook with the same eyes as the little boys of Teneriffe look on theuseless and poisonous _Euphorbia canariensis_. It is to them--accordingto Mr. Piazzi Smyth--a demon who would kill them, if it could only runafter them; but as it cannot, they shout Spanish curses at it, and peltit with volleys of stones, "screeching with elfin joy, and using worsenames than ever, when the poisonous milk spurts out from its bruisedstalks. "

And if such be the attitude of the uneducated man towards the permanentterrors of nature, what will it be towards those which are sudden andseemingly capricious?--towards storms, earthquakes, floods, blights, pestilences? We know too well what it has been--one of blind, andtherefore often cruel, fear. How could it be otherwise? WasTheophrastus's superstitious man so very foolish for pouring oil on everyround stone? I think there was a great deal to be said for him. Thisworship of Baetyli was rational enough. They were aerolites, fallen fromheaven. Was it not as well to be civil to such messengers from above?--totestify by homage to them due awe of the being who had thrown them atmen, and who though he had missed his shot that time, might not miss itthe next? I think if we, knowing nothing of either gunpowder, astronomy, or Christianity, saw an Armstrong bolt fall within five miles of London, we should be inclined to be very respectful to it indeed. So theaerolites, or glacial boulders, or polished stone weapons of an extinctrace, which looked like aerolites, were the children of Ouranos theheaven, and had souls in them. One, by one of those strangetransformations in which the logic of unreason indulges, the image ofDiana of the Ephesians, which fell down from Jupiter; another was theAncile, the holy shield which fell from the same place in the days ofNuma Pompilius, and was the guardian genius of Rome; and several morebecame notable for ages. 

Why not? The uneducated man of genius, unacquainted alike withmetaphysics and with biology, sees, like a child, a personality in everystrange and sharply-defined object. A cloud like an angel may be anangel; a bit of crooked root like a man may be a man turned intowood--perhaps to be turned back again at its own will. An erratic blockhas arrived where it is by strange unknown means. Is not that anevidence of its personality? Either it has flown hither itself, or someone has thrown it. In the former case, it has life, and isproportionally formidable; in the latter, he who had thrown it isformidable. 

I know two erratic blocks of porphyry--I believe there are three--inCornwall, lying one on serpentine, one, I think, on slate, which--so Iwas always informed as a boy--were the stones which St. Kevern threwafter St. Just when the latter stole his host's chalice and paten, andran away with them to the Land's End. Why not? Before we knew anythingabout the action of icebergs and glaciers, that is, until the last eightyyears, that was as good a story as any other; while how lifelike theseboulders are, let a great poet testify; for the fact has not escaped thedelicate eye of Wordsworth:

 "As a huge stone is sometimes seen to lie Couched on the bald top of an eminence; Wonder to all who do the same espy, By what means it could thither come, and whence, So that it seems a thing endued with sense; Like a sea-beast crawled forth, that on a shelf Of rock or sand reposeth, there to sun itself. "

To the civilised poet, the fancy becomes a beautiful simile; to a savagepoet, it would have become a material and a very formidable fact. Hestands in the valley, and looks up at the boulder on the far-off fells. He is puzzled by it. He fears it. At last he makes up his mind. It isalive. As the shadows move over it, he sees it move. May it not sleepthere all day, and prowl for prey all night? He had been always afraidof going up those fells; now he will never go. There is a monster there. 

Childish enough, no doubt. But remember that the savage is always achild. So, indeed, are millions, as well clothed, housed, and policed asourselves--children from the cradle to the grave. But of them I do nottalk; because, happily for the world, their childishness is so overlaidby the result of other men's manhood; by an atmosphere of civilisationand Christianity which they have accepted at second-hand as theconclusions of minds wiser than their own, that they do all manner ofreasonable things for bad reasons, or for no reason at all, save thepassion of imitation. Not in them, but in the savage, can we see man ashe is by nature, the puppet of his senses and his passions, the naturalslave of his own fears. 

But has the savage no other faculties, save his five senses and fivepassions? I do not say that. I should be most unphilosophical if I saidit; for the history of mankind proves that he has infinitely more in himthan that. Yes: but in him that infinite more, which is not only thenoblest part of humanity; but, it may be, humanity itself, is not to becounted as one of the roots of superstition. For in the savage man, inwhom superstition certainly originates, that infinite more is stillmerely in him; inside him; a faculty: but not yet a fact. It has notcome out of him into consciousness, purpose, and act; and is to betreated as non-existent: while what has come out, his passions andsenses, is enough to explain all the vagaries of superstition; a veracausa for all its phenomena. And if we seem to have found a sufficientexplanation already, it is unphilosophical to look further, at least tillwe have tried whether our explanation fits the facts. 

Nevertheless, there is another faculty in the savage, to which I havealready alluded, common to him and to at least the highervertebrates--fancy; the power of reproducing internal images of externalobjects, whether in its waking form of physical memory--if, indeed, allmemory be not physical--or in its sleeping form of dreaming. Upon thislast, which has played so very important a part in superstition in allages, I beg you to think a moment. Recollect your own dreams duringchildhood; and recollect again that the savage is always a child. Recollect how difficult it was for you in childhood, how difficult itmust be always for the savage, to decide whether dreams are phantasms orrealities. To the savage, I doubt not, the food he eats, the foes hegrapples with, in dreams, are as real as any waking impressions. But, moreover, these dreams will be very often, as children's dreams are wontto be, of a painful and terrible kind. Perhaps they will be alwayspainful; perhaps his dull brain will never dream, save under theinfluence of indigestion, or hunger, or an uncomfortable attitude. Andso, in addition to his waking experience of the terrors of nature, hewill have a whole dream-experience besides, of a still more terrifickind. He walks by day past a black cavern mouth, and thinks, with ashudder--Something ugly may live in that ugly hole: what if it jumped outupon me? He broods over the thought with the intensity of a narrow andunoccupied mind; and a few nights after, he has eaten--but let us draw aveil before the larder of a savage--his chin is pinned down on his chest, a slight congestion of the brain comes on; and behold he finds himselfagain at that cavern's mouth, and something ugly does jump out upon him:and the cavern is a haunted spot henceforth to him and to all his tribe. It is in vain that his family tell him that he has been lying asleep athome all the while. He has the evidence of his senses to prove thecontrary. He must have got out of himself, and gone into the woods. Whenwe remember that certain wise Greek philosophers could find no betterexplanation of dreaming than that the soul left the body, and wanderedfree, we cannot condemn the savage for his theory. Now, I submit that inthese simple facts we have a group of "true causes" which are the rootsof all the superstitions of the world. 

And if any one shall complain that I am talking materialism: I shallanswer, that I am doing exactly the opposite. I am trying to eliminateand get rid of that which is material, animal, and base; in order thatthat which is truly spiritual may stand out, distinct and clear, in itsdivine and eternal beauty. 

To explain, and at the same time, as I think, to verify my hypothesis, let me give you an example--fictitious, it is true, but probable factnevertheless; because it is patched up of many fragments of actual fact:and let us see how, in following it out, we shall pass through almostevery possible form of superstition. 

Suppose a great hollow tree, in which the formidable wasps of the tropicshave built for ages. The average savage hurries past the spot in merebodily fear; for if they come out against him, they will sting him todeath; till at last there comes by a savage wiser than the rest, withmore observation, reflection, imagination, independence of will--thegenius of his tribe. 

The awful shade of the great tree, added to his terror of the wasps, weighs on him, and excites his brain. Perhaps, too, he has had a wife ora child stung to death by these same wasps. These wasps, so small, yetso wise, far wiser than he: they fly, and they sting. Ah, if he couldfly and sting; how he would kill and eat, and live right merrily. Theybuild great towns; they rob far and wide; they never quarrel with eachother: they must have some one to teach them, to lead them--they musthave a king. And so he gets the fancy of a Wasp-King; as the westernIrish still believe in the Master Otter; as the Red Men believe in theKing of the Buffalos, and find the bones of his ancestors in the Mammothremains of Big-bone Lick; as the Philistines of Ekron--to quote anotorious instance--actually worshipped Baal-zebub, lord of the flies. 

If they have a king, he must be inside that tree, of course. If he, thesavage, were a king, he would not work for his bread, but sit at home andmake others feed him; and so, no doubt, does the wasp-king. 

And when he goes home he will brood over this wonderful discovery of thewasp-king; till, like a child, he can think of nothing else. He will goto the tree, and watch for him to come out. The wasps will getaccustomed to his motionless figure, and leave him unhurt; till the newfancy will rise in his mind that he is a favourite of this wasp-king: andat last he will find himself grovelling before the tree, saying--"Ohgreat wasp-king, pity me, and tell your children not to sting me, and Iwill bring you honey, and fruit, and flowers to eat, and I will flatteryou, and worship you, and you shall be my king. "

And then he would gradually boast of his discovery; of the new mysteriousbond between him and the wasp-king; and his tribe would believe him, andfear him; and fear him still more when he began to say, as he surelywould, not merely--"I can ask the wasp-king, and he will tell hischildren not to sting you:" but--"I can ask the wasp-king, and he willsend his children, and sting you all to death. " Vanity and ambition willhave prompted the threat: but it will not be altogether a lie. The manwill more than half believe his own words; he will quite believe themwhen he has repeated them a dozen times. 

And so he will become a great man, and a king, under the protection ofthe king of the wasps; and he will become, and it may be his childrenafter him, priest of the wasp-king, who will be their fetish, and thefetish of their tribe. 

And they will prosper, under the protection of the wasp-king. The waspwill become their moral ideal, whose virtues they must copy. The newchief will preach to them wild eloquent words. They must sting likewasps, revenge like wasps, hold all together like wasps, build likewasps, work hard like wasps, rob like wasps; then, like the wasps, theywill be the terror of all around, and kill and eat all their enemies. Soon they will call themselves The Wasps. They will boast that theirking's father or grandfather, and soon that the ancestor of the wholetribe, was an actual wasp; and the wasp will become at once their eponymhero, their deity, their ideal, their civiliser; who has taught them tobuild a kraal of huts, as he taught his children to build a hive. 

Now, if there should come to any thinking man of this tribe, at thisepoch, the new thought--Who made the world? he will be sorely puzzled. The conception of a world has never crossed his mind before. He neverpictured to himself anything beyond the nearest ridge of mountains; andas for a Maker, that will be a greater puzzle still. What makers orbuilders more cunning than those wasps of whom his foolish head is full?Of course, he sees it now. A Wasp made the world; which to him entirelynew guess might become an integral part of his tribe's creed. That wouldbe their cosmogony. And if, a generation or two after, another savagegenius should guess that the world was a globe hanging in the heavens, hewould, if he had imagination enough to take the thought in at all, put itto himself in a form suited to his previous knowledge and conceptions. Itwould seem to him that The Wasp flew about the skies with the world inhis mouth, as he carries a bluebottle fly; and that would be theastronomy of his tribe henceforth. Absurd enough; but--as every man whois acquainted with old mythical cosmogonies must know--no more absurdthan twenty similar guesses on record. Try to imagine the gradualgenesis of such myths as the Egyptian scarabaeus and egg, or the Hindootheory that the world stood on an elephant, the elephant on a tortoise, the tortoise on that infinite note of interrogation which, as some oneexpresses it, underlies all physical speculations, and judge: must theynot have arisen in some such fashion as that which I have pointed out?

This, I say, would be the culminating point of the wasp-worship, whichhad sprung up out of bodily fear of being stung. 

But times might come for it in which it would go through various changes, through which every superstition in the world, I suppose, has passed oris doomed to pass. 

The wasp-men might be conquered, and possibly eaten, by a stronger tribethan themselves. What would be the result? They would fight valiantlyat first, like wasps. But what if they began to fail? Was not the wasp-king angry with them? Had not he deserted them? He must be appeased; hemust have his revenge. They would take a captive, and offer him to thewasps. So did a North American tribe, in their need, some forty yearsago; when, because their maize-crops failed, they roasted alive a captivegirl, cut her to pieces, and sowed her with their corn. I would not tellthe story, for the horror of it, did it not bear with such fearful forceon my argument. What were those Red Men thinking of? What chain ofmisreasoning had they in their heads when they hit on that as a devicefor making the crops grow? Who can tell? Who can make the crookedstraight, or number that which is wanting? As said Solomon of old, somust we--"The foolishness of fools is folly. " One thing only we can sayof them, that they were horribly afraid of famine, and took that means ofridding themselves of their fear. 

But what if the wasp-tribe had no captives? They would offer slaves. What if the agony and death of slaves did not appease the wasps? Theywould offer their fairest, their dearest, their sons and their daughters, to the wasps; as the Carthaginians, in like strait, offered in one day200 noble boys to Moloch, the volcano-god, whose worship they had broughtout of Syria; whose original meaning they had probably forgotten; of whomthey only knew that he was a dark and devouring being, who must beappeased with the burning bodies of their sons and daughters. And so theveil of fancy would be lifted again, and the whole superstition standforth revealed as the mere offspring of bodily fear. 

But more; the survivors of the conquest might, perhaps, escape, and carrytheir wasp-fetish into a new land. But if they became poor and weakly, their brains and imagination, degenerating with their bodies, woulddegrade their wasp-worship till they knew not what it meant. Away fromthe sacred tree, in a country the wasps of which were not so large orformidable, they would require a remembrancer of the wasp-king; and theywould make one--a wasp of wood, or what not. After a while, according tothat strange law of fancy, the root of all idolatry, which you may see atwork in every child who plays with a doll, the symbol would becomeidentified with the thing symbolised; they would invest the wooden waspwith all the terrible attributes which had belonged to the live wasps ofthe tree; and after a few centuries, when all remembrance of the tree, the wasp-prophet and chieftain, and his descent from the divine wasp--aye, even of their defeat and flight--had vanished from their songs andlegends, they would be found bowing down in fear and trembling to alittle ancient wooden wasp, which came from they knew not whence, andmeant they knew not what, save that it was a very "old fetish, " a "greatmedicine, " or some such other formula for expressing their own ignoranceand dread. Just so do the half-savage natives of Thibet, and theIrishwomen of Kerry, by a strange coincidence--unless the ancient Irishwere Buddhists, like the Himalayans--tie just the same scraps of rag onarise, and show men that they are not the puppets of Nature, but herlords; and that they are to fear God, and fear naught else. 

And so ends my true myth of the wasp-tree. No, it need not end there; itmay develop into a yet darker and more hideous form of superstition, which Europe has often seen; which is common now among the Negros; {256}which, we may hope, will soon be exterminated. 

This might happen. For it, or something like it, has happened too manytimes already. 

That to the ancient women who still kept up the irrational remnant of thewasp-worship, beneath the sacred tree, other women might resort; notmerely from curiosity, or an excited imagination, but from jealousy andrevenge. Oppressed, as woman has always been under the reign of bruteforce; beaten, outraged, deserted, at best married against her will, shehas too often gone for comfort and help--and those of the very darkestkind--to the works of darkness; and there never were wanting--there arenot wanting, even now, in remote parts of these isles--wicked old womenwho would, by help of the old superstitions, do for her what she wished. Soon would follow mysterious deaths of rivals, of husbands, of babes;then rumours of dark rites connected with the sacred tree, with poison, with the wasp and his sting, with human sacrifices; lies mingled withtruth, more and more confused and frantic, the more they weremisinvestigated by men mad with fear: till there would arise one of thosewitch-manias, which are too common still among the African Negros, whichwere too common of old among the men of our race. 

I say, among the men. To comprehend a witch-mania, you must look at itas--what the witch-literature confesses it unblushingly to be--man'sdread of Nature excited to its highest form, as dread of woman. 

She is to the barbarous man--she should be more and more to the civilisedman--not only the most beautiful and precious, but the most wonderful andmysterious of all natural objects, if it be only as the author of hisphysical being. She is to the savage a miracle to be alternately adoredand dreaded. He dreads her more delicate nervous organisation, whichoften takes shapes to him demoniacal and miraculous; her quickerinstincts, her readier wit, which seem to him to have in them somewhatprophetic and superhuman, which entangle him as in an invisible net, andrule him against his will. He dreads her very tongue, more crushing thanhis heaviest club, more keen than his poisoned arrows. He dreads thosehabits of secresy and falsehood, the weapons of the weak, to which savageand degraded woman always has recourse. He dreads the very medicinalskill which she has learnt to exercise, as nurse, comforter, and slave. He dreads those secret ceremonies, those mysterious initiations which noman may witness, which he has permitted to her in all ages, in so many--ifnot all--barbarous and semi-barbarous races, whether Negro, American, Syrian, Greek, or Roman, as a homage to the mysterious importance of herwho brings him into the world. If she turn against him--she, with allher unknown powers, she who is the sharer of his deepest secrets, whoprepares his very food day by day--what harm can she not, may she not do?And that she has good reason to turn against him, he knows too well. Whatdeliverance is there from this mysterious house-fiend, save brute force?Terror, torture, murder, must be the order of the day. Woman must becrushed, at all price, by the blind fear of the man. 

I shall say no more. I shall draw a veil, for very pity and shame, overthe most important and most significant facts of this, the most hideousof all human follies. I have, I think, given you hints enough to showthat it, like all other superstitions, is the child--the last born andthe ugliest child--of blind dread of the unknown. 

SCIENCE: A lecture delivered at the Royal Institution. 

I said, that Superstition was the child of Fear, and Fear the child ofIgnorance; and you might expect me to say antithetically, that Sciencewas the child of Courage, and Courage the child of Knowledge. 

But these genealogies--like most metaphors--do not fit exactly, as youmay see for yourselves. 

If fear be the child of ignorance, ignorance is also the child of fear;the two react on, and produce each other. The more men dread Nature, theless they wish to know about her. Why pry into her awful secrets? It isdangerous; perhaps impious. She says to them, as in the Egyptian templeof old--"I am Isis, and my veil no mortal yet hath lifted. " And whyshould they try or wish to lift it? If she will leave them in peace, they will leave her in peace. It is enough that she does not destroythem. So as ignorance bred fear, fear breeds fresh and willingignorance. 

And courage? We may say, and truly, that courage is the child ofknowledge. But we may say as truly, that knowledge is the child ofcourage. Those Egyptian priests in the temple of Isis would have toldyou that knowledge was the child of mystery, of special illumination, ofreverence, and what not; hiding under grand words their purpose ofkeeping the masses ignorant, that they might be their slaves. Reverence?I will yield to none in reverence for reverence. I will all but agreewith the wise man who said that reverence is the root of all virtues. Butwhich child reverences his father most? He who comes joyfully andtrustfully to meet him, that he may learn his father's mind, and do hiswill: or he who at his father's coming runs away and hides, lest heshould be beaten for he knows not what? There is a scientific reverence, a reverence of courage, which is surely one of the highest forms ofreverence. That, namely, which so reveres every fact, that it dare notoverlook or falsify it, seem it never so minute; which feels that becauseit is a fact, it cannot be minute, cannot be unimportant; that it must bea fact of God; a message from God; a voice of God, as Bacon has it, revealed in things; and which therefore, just because it stands in solemnawe of such paltry facts as the Scolopax feather in a snipe's pinion, orthe jagged leaves which appear capriciously in certain honeysuckles, believes that there is likely to be some deep and wide secret underlyingthem, which is worth years of thought to solve. That is reverence; areverence which is growing, thank God, more and more common; which willproduce, as it grows more common still, fruit which generations yetunborn shall bless. 

But as for that other reverence, which shuts its eyes and ears in piousawe--what is it but cowardice decked out in state robes, putting on thesacred Urim and Thummim, not that men may ask counsel of the Deity, butthat they may not? What is it but cowardice, very pitiable whenunmasked; and what is its child but ignorance as pitiable, which would beludicrous were it not so injurious? If a man comes up to Nature as to aparrot or a monkey, with this prevailing thought in his head--Will itbite me?--will he not be pretty certain to make up his mind that it maybite him, and had therefore best be left alone? It is only the man ofcourage--few and far between--who will stand the chance of a first bite, in the hope of teaching the parrot to talk, or the monkey to fire off agun. And it is only the man of courage--few and far between--who willstand the chance of a first bite from Nature, which may kill him foraught he knows--for her teeth, though clumsy, are very strong--in orderthat he may tame her and break her in to his use by the very same methodby which that admirable inductive philosopher, Mr. Rarey, used to breakin his horses; first, by not being afraid of them; and next, by trying tofind out what they were thinking of. But after all, as with animals, sowith Nature; cowardice is dangerous. The surest method of getting bittenby an animal is to be afraid of it; and the surest method of beinginjured by Nature is to be afraid of it. Only as far as we understandNature are we safe from it; and those who in any age counsel mankind notto pry into the secrets of the universe, counsel them not to provide fortheir own life and well-being, or for their children after them. But howfew there have been in any age who have not been afraid of Nature. Howfew have set themselves, like Rarey, to tame her by finding out what sheis thinking of. The mass are glad to have the results of science, asthey are to buy Mr. Rarey's horses after they are tamed: but for want ofcourage or of wit, they had rather leave the taming process to some oneelse. And therefore we may say that what knowledge of Nature we have--andwe have very little--we owe to the courage of those men--and they havebeen very few--who have been inspired to face Nature boldly; and say--or, what is better, act as if they were saying--"I find something in me whichI do not find in you; which gives me the hope that I can grow tounderstand you, though you may not understand me; that I may become yourmaster, and not as now, you mine. And if not, I will know: or die in thesearch. "

It is to those men, the few and far between, in a very few ages and veryfew countries, who have thus risen in rebellion against Nature, andlooked it in the face with an unquailing glance, that we owe what we callPhysical Science. 

There have been four races--or rather a very few men of each fourraces--who have faced Nature after this gallant wise. 

First, the old Jews. I speak of them, be it remembered, exclusively froman historical, and not a religious point of view. 

These people, at a very remote epoch, emerged from a country highlycivilised, but sunk in the superstitions of nature-worship. They invadedand mingled with tribes whose superstitions were even more debased, silly, and foul than those of the Egyptians from whom they escaped. Theirown masses were for centuries given up to nature-worship. Now amongthose Jews arose men--a very few--sages--prophets--call them what youwill, the men were inspired heroes and philosophers--who assumed towardsnature an attitude utterly different from the rest of their countrymenand the rest of the then world; who denounced superstition and the dreadof nature as the parent of all manner of vice and misery; who forthemselves said boldly that they discerned in the universe an order, aunity, a permanence of law, which gave them courage instead of fear. Theyfound delight and not dread in the thought that the universe obeyed a lawwhich could not be broken; that all things continued to that dayaccording to a certain ordinance. They took a view of Nature totally newin that age; healthy, human, cheerful, loving, trustful, and yetreverent--identical with that which happily is beginning to prevail inour own day. They defied those very volcanic and meteoric phenomena oftheir land, to which their countrymen were slaying their own children inthe clefts of the rocks, and, like Theophrastus' superstitious man, pouring their drink-offerings on the smooth stones of the valley; anddeclared that, for their part, they would not fear, though the earth wasmoved, and though the hills were carried into the midst of the sea;though the waters raged and swelled, and the mountains shook at thetempest. 

The fact is indisputable. And you must pardon me if I express my beliefthat these men, if they had felt it their business to found a school ofinductive physical science, would, owing to that temper of mind, haveachieved a very signal success. I ground that opinion on the remarkable, but equally indisputable fact, that no nation has ever succeeded inperpetuating a school of inductive physical science, save those whoseminds have been saturated with this same view of Nature, which theyhave--as an historic fact--slowly but thoroughly learnt from the writingsof these Jewish sages. 

Such is the fact. The founders of inductive physical science were notthe Jews: but first the Chaldaeans, next the Greeks, next their pupilsthe Romans--or rather a few sages among each race. But what success hadthey? The Chaldaean astronomers made a few discoveries concerning themotions of the heavenly bodies, which, rudimentary as they were, stillprove them to have been men of rare intellect. For a great and a patientgenius must he have been, who first distinguished the planets from thefixed stars, or worked out the earliest astronomical calculation. Butthey seem to have been crushed, as it were, by their own discoveries. They stopped short. They gave way again to the primeval fear of Nature. They sank into planet-worship. They invented, it would seem, thatfantastic pseudo-science of astrology, which lay for ages after as anincubus on the human intellect and conscience. They became the magiciansand quacks of the old world; and mankind owed them thenceforth nothingbut evil. Among the Greeks and Romans, again, those sages who dared faceNature like reasonable men, were accused by the superstitious mob asirreverent, impious, atheists. The wisest of them all, Socrates, wasactually put to death on that charge; and finally, they failed. Schoolafter school, in Greece and Rome, struggled to discover, and to get ahearing for, some theory of the universe which was founded on somethinglike experience, reason, common sense. They were not allowed toprosecute their attempt. The mud-ocean of ignorance and fear in whichthey struggled so manfully was too strong for them; the mud-waves closedover their heads finally, as the age of the Antonines expired; and thelast effort of Graeco-Roman thought to explain the universe wasNeoplatonism--the muddiest of the muddy--an attempt to apologise for, andorganise into a system, all the nature-dreading superstitions of theRoman world. Porphyry, Plotinus, Proclus, poor Hypatia herself, and allher school--they may have had themselves no bodily fear of Nature; forthey were noble souls. Yet they spent their time in justifying those whohad; in apologising for the superstitions of the very mob which theydespised: just as--it sometimes seems to me--some folk in these days arelike to end in doing; begging that the masses might be allowed to believein anything, however false, lest they should believe in nothing at all:as if believing in lies could do anything but harm to any human being. And so died the science of the old world, in a true second childhood, just where it began. 

The Jewish sages, I hold, taught that science was probable; the Greeksand Romans proved that it was possible. It remained for our race, underthe teaching of both, to bring science into act and fact. 

Many causes contributed to give them this power. They were a personallycourageous race. This earth has yet seen no braver men than theforefathers of Christian Europe, whether Scandinavian or Teuton, Angle orFrank. They were a practical hard-headed race, with a strongappreciation of facts, and a strong determination to act on them. Theirlaws, their society, their commerce, their colonisation, their migrationsby land and sea, proved that they were such. They were favoured, moreover, by circumstances, or--as I should rather put it--by that divineProvidence which determined their times, and the bounds of theirhabitation. They came in as the heritors of the decaying civilisation ofGreece and Rome; they colonised territories which gave to man specialfair play, but no more, in the struggle for existence, the battle withthe powers of Nature; tolerably fertile, tolerably temperate; withboundless means of water communication; freer than most parts of theworld from those terrible natural phenomena, like the earthquake and thehurricane, before which man lies helpless and astounded, a child beneaththe foot of a giant. Nature was to them not so inhospitable as to starvetheir brains and limbs, as it has done for the Esquimaux or Fuegian; andnot so bountiful as to crush them by its very luxuriance, as it hascrushed the savages of the tropics. They saw enough of its strength torespect it; not enough to cower before it: and they and it have fought itout; and it seems to me, standing either on London Bridge or on a Hollandfen-dyke, that they are winning at last. But they had a sore battle: abattle against their own fear of the unseen. They brought with them, outof the heart of Asia, dark and sad nature-superstitions, some of whichlinger among our peasantry till this day, of elves, trolls, nixes, andwhat not. Their Thor and Odin were at first, probably, only the thunderand the wind: but they had to be appeased in the dark marches of theforest, where hung rotting on the sacred oaks, amid carcases of goat andhorse, the carcases of human victims. No one acquainted with the earlylegends and ballads of our race, but must perceive throughout them allthe prevailing tone of fear and sadness. And to their own superstitions, they added those of the Rome which they conquered. They dreaded theRoman she-poisoners and witches, who, like Horace's Canidia, stillperformed horrid rites in grave-yards and dark places of the earth. Theydreaded as magical the delicate images engraved on old Greek gems. Theydreaded the very Roman cities they had destroyed. They were the work ofenchanters. Like the ruins of St. Albans here in England, they were allfull of devils, guarding the treasures which the Romans had hidden. TheCaesars became to them magical man-gods. The poet Virgil became theprince of necromancers. If the secrets of Nature were to be known, theywere to be known by unlawful means, by prying into the mysteries of theold heathen magicians, or of the Mohammedan doctors of Cordova andSeville; and those who dared to do so were respected and feared, andoften came to evil ends. It needed moral courage, then, to face andinterpret fact. Such brave men as Pope Gerbert, Roger Bacon, Galileo, even Kepler, did not lead happy lives; some of them found themselves inprison. All the medieval sages--even Albertus Magnus--were stigmatisedas magicians. One wonders that more of them did not imitate poorParacelsus, who, unable to get a hearing for his coarse common sense, took--vain and sensual--to drinking the laudanum which he himself haddiscovered, and vaunted as a priceless boon to men; and died as the fooldieth, in spite of all his wisdom. For the "Romani nominis umbra, " theshadow of the mighty race whom they had conquered, lay heavy on ourforefathers for centuries. And their dread of the great heathens wasreally a dread of Nature, and of the powers thereof. For when theauthority of great names has reigned unquestioned for many centuries, those names become, to the human mind, integral and necessary parts ofNature itself. They are, as it were, absorbed into it; they become itslaws, its canons, its demiurges, and guardian spirits; their words becomeregarded as actual facts; in one word, they become a superstition, andare feared as parts of the vast unknown; and to deny what they have saidis, in the minds of the many, not merely to fly in the face of reverentwisdom, but to fly in the face of facts. During a great part of themiddle ages, for instance, it was impossible for an educated man to thinkof Nature itself, without thinking first of what Aristotle had said ofher. Aristotle's dicta were Nature; and when Benedetti, at Venice, opposed in 1585 Aristotle's opinions on violent and natural motion, therewere hundreds, perhaps, in the universities of Europe--as there certainlywere in the days of the immortal 'Epistolae Obscurorum Virorum'--who wereready, in spite of all Benedetti's professed reverence for Aristotle, toaccuse him of outraging not only the father of philosophy, but Natureitself and its palpable and notorious facts. For the restoration ofletters in the fifteenth century had not at first mended matters, sostrong was the dread of Nature in the minds of the masses. The minds ofmen had sported forth, not toward any sound investigation of facts, buttoward an eclectic resuscitation of Neoplatonism; which endured, notwithout a certain beauty and use--as let Spenser's 'Faery Queen' bearwitness--till the latter half of the seventeenth century. 

After that time a rapid change began. It is marked by--it has beennotably assisted by--the foundation of our own Royal Society. Its causesI will not enter into; they are so inextricably mixed, I hold, withtheological questions, that they cannot be discussed here. I will onlypoint out to you these facts: that, from the latter part of theseventeenth century, the noblest heads and the noblest hearts of Europeconcentrated themselves more and more on the brave and patientinvestigation of physical facts, as the source of priceless futureblessings to mankind; that the eighteenth century, which it has been thefashion of late to depreciate, did more for the welfare of mankind, inevery conceivable direction, than the whole fifteen centuries before it;that it did this good work by boldly observing and analysing facts; thatthis boldness toward facts increased in proportion as Europe becameindoctrinated with the Jewish literature; and that, notably, such men asKepler, Newton, Berkeley, Spinoza, Leibnitz, Descartes, in whatsoeverelse they differed, agreed in this, that their attitude towards Naturewas derived from the teaching of the Jewish sages. I believe that we arenot yet fully aware how much we owe to the Jewish mind, in the gradualemancipation of the human intellect. The connection may not, of course, be one of cause and effect; it may be a mere coincidence. I believe itto be a cause; one of course of very many causes: but still an integralcause. At least the coincidence is too remarkable a fact not to beworthy of investigation. 

I said, just now--The emancipation of the human intellect. I did notsay--Of science, or of the scientific intellect; and for this reason:

That the emancipation of science is the emancipation of the common mindof all men. All men can partake of the gains of free scientific thought, not merely by enjoying its physical results, but by becoming morescientific men themselves. 

Therefore it was, that though I began my first lecture by definingsuperstition, I did not begin my second by defining its antagonist, science. For the word science defines itself. It means simplyknowledge; that is, of course, right knowledge, or such an approximationas can be obtained; knowledge of any natural object, its classification, its causes, its effects; or in plain English, what it is, how it camewhere it is, and what can be done with it. 

And scientific method, likewise, needs no definition; for it is simplythe exercise of common sense. It is not a peculiar, unique, professional, or mysterious process of the understanding: but the samewhich all men employ, from the cradle to the grave, in forming correctconclusions. 

Every one who knows the philosophic writings of Mr. John Stuart Mill, will be familiar with this opinion. But to those who have no leisure tostudy him, I should recommend the reading of Professor Huxley's thirdlecture on the origin of species. 

In that he shows, with great logical skill, as well as with some humour, how the man who, on rising in the morning, finds the parlour window open, the spoons and teapot gone, the mark of a dirty hand on the window-sill, and that of a hob-nailed boot outside, and comes to the conclusion thatsome one has broken open the window and stolen the plate, arrives at thathypothesis--for it is nothing more--by a long and complex train ofinductions and deductions, of just the same kind as those which, according to the Baconian philosophy, are to be used for investigatingthe deepest secrets of Nature. 

This is true, even of those sciences which involve long mathematicalcalculations. In fact, the stating of the problem to be solved is themost important element in the calculation; and that is so thoroughly alabour of common sense that an utterly uneducated man may, and oftendoes, state an abstruse problem clearly and correctly; seeing what oughtto be proved, and perhaps how to prove it, though he may be unable towork the problem out, for want of mathematical knowledge. 

But that mathematical knowledge is not--as all Cambridge men are surelyaware--the result of any special gift. It is merely the development ofthose conceptions of form and number which every human being possesses;and any person of average intellect can make himself a fair mathematicianif he will only pay continuous attention; in plain English, think enoughabout the subject. 

There are sciences, again, which do not involve mathematical calculation;for instance, botany, zoology, geology, which are just now passing fromtheir old stage of classificatory sciences into the rank of organic ones. These are, without doubt, altogether within the scope of the merestcommon sense. Any man or woman of average intellect, if they will butobserve and think for themselves, freely, boldly, patiently, accurately, may judge for themselves of the conclusions of these sciences, may add tothese conclusions fresh and important discoveries; and if I am asked fora proof of what I assert, I point to 'Rain and Rivers, ' written by noprofessed scientific man, but by a colonel in the Guards, known to fameonly as one of the most perfect horsemen in the world. 

Let me illustrate my meaning by an example. A man--I do not say ageologist, but simply a man, squire or ploughman--sees a small valley, say one of the side-glens which open into the larger valleys in theWindsor forest district. He wishes to ascertain its age. 

He has, at first sight, a very simple measure--that of denudation. Hesees that the glen is now being eaten out by a little stream, the productof innumerable springs which arise along its sides, and which are fedentirely by the rain on the moors above. He finds, on observation, thatthis stream brings down some ten cubic yards of sand and gravel, on anaverage, every year. The actual quantity of earth which has been removedto make the glen may be several million cubic yards. Here is an easy sumin arithmetic. At the rate of ten cubic yards a year, the stream hastaken several hundred thousand years to make the glen. 

You will observe that this result is obtained by mere common sense. Hehas a right to assume that the stream originally began the glen, becausehe finds it in the act of enlarging it; just as much right as he has toassume, if he finds a hole in his pocket, and his last coin in the act offalling through it, that the rest of his money has fallen through thesame hole. It is a sufficient cause, and the simplest. A number ofobservations as to the present rate of denudation, and a sum which anyrailroad contractor can do in his head, to determine the solid contentsof the valley, are all that are needed. The method is that of science:but it is also that of simple common sense. You will remember, therefore, that this is no mere theory or hypothesis, but a pretty fairand simple conclusion from palpable facts; that the probability lies withthe belief that the glen is some hundreds of thousands of years old; thatit is not the observer's business to prove it further, but other persons'to disprove it, if they can. 

But does the matter end here? No. And, for certain reasons, it is goodthat it should not end here. 

The observer, if he be a cautious man, begins to see if he can disprovehis own conclusion; moreover, being human, he is probably somewhat awed, if not appalled, by his own conclusion. Hundreds of thousands of yearsspent in making that little glen! Common sense would say that the longerit took to make, the less wonder there was in its being made at last: butthe instinctive human feeling is the opposite. There is in men, andthere remains in them, even after they are civilised, and all other formsof the dread of Nature have died out in them, a dread of size, of vastspace, of vast time; that latter, mind, being always imagined as space, as we confess when we speak instinctively of a space of time. They willnot understand that size is merely a relative, not an absolute term; thatif we were a thousand times larger than we are, the universe would be athousand times smaller than it is; that if we could think a thousandtimes faster than we do, time would be a thousand times longer than itis; that there is One in whom we live, and move, and have our being, towhom one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day. Ibelieve this dread of size to be merely, like all other superstitions, aresult of bodily fear; a development of the instinct which makes a littledog run away from a big dog. Be that as it may, every observer has it;and so the man's conclusion seems to him strange, doubtful: he willreconsider it. 

Moreover, if he be an experienced man, he is well aware that firstguesses, first hypotheses, are not always the right ones; and if he be amodest man, he will consider the fact that many thousands of thoughtfulmen in all ages, and many thousands still, would say, that the glen canonly be a few thousand, or possibly a few hundred, years old. And hewill feel bound to consider their opinion; as far as it is, like his own, drawn from facts, but no further. 

So he casts about for all other methods by which the glen may have beenproduced, to see if any one of them will account for it in a shortertime. 

1. Was it made by an earthquake? No; for the strata on both sides areidentical, at the same level, and in the same plane. 

2. Or by a mighty current? If so, the flood must have run in at theupper end, before it ran out at the lower. But nothing has run in at theupper end. All round above are the undisturbed gravel beds of thehorizontal moor, without channel or depression. 

3. Or by water draining off a vast flat as it was upheaved out of thesea? That is a likely guess. The valley at its upper end spreads outlike the fingers of a hand, as the gullies in tide-muds do. 

But that hypothesis will not stand. There is no vast unbroken flatbehind the glen. Right and left of it are other similar glens, partedfrom it by long narrow ridges: these also must be explained on the samehypothesis; but they cannot. For there could not have beensurface-drainage to make them all, or a tenth of them. There are noother possible hypotheses; and so he must fall back on the originaltheory--the rain, the springs, the brook; they have done it all, even asthey are doing it this day. 

But is not that still a hasty assumption? May not their denuding powerhave been far greater in old times than now?

Why should it? Because there was more rain then than now? That he mustput out of court; there is no evidence of it whatsoever. 

Because the land was more friable originally? Well, there is a greatdeal to be said for that. The experience of every countryman tells himthat bare or fallow land is more easily washed away than land undervegetation. And no doubt, when these gravels and sands rose from thesea, they were barren for hundreds of years. He has some measure of thetime required, because he can tell roughly how long it takes for sandsand shingles left by the sea to become covered with vegetation. But hemust allow that the friability of the land must have been originally muchgreater than now, for hundreds of years. 

But again, does that fact really cut off any great space of time from hishundreds of thousands of years? For when the land first rose from thesea, that glen was not there. Some slight bay or bend in the shoredetermined its site. That stream was not there. It was split up into amillion little springs, oozing side by side from the shore, and havingeach a very minute denuding power, which kept continually increasing bycombination as the glen ate its way inwards, and the rainfall drained byall these little springs was collected into the one central stream. Sothat when the ground being bare was most liable to be denuded, the waterwas least able to do it; and as the denuding power of the waterincreased, the land, being covered with vegetation, became more and moreable to resist it. All this he has seen, going on at the present day, inthe similar gullies worn in the soft strata of the South Hampshire coast;especially round Bournemouth. 

So the two disturbing elements in the calculation may be fairly set offagainst each other, as making a difference of only a few thousands ortens of thousands of years either way; and the age of the glen may fairlybe, if not a million years, yet such a length of years as mankind stillspeak of with bated breath, as if forsooth it would do them some harm. 

I trust that every scientific man in this room will agree with me, thatthe imaginary squire or ploughman would have been conducting hisinvestigation strictly according to the laws of the Baconian philosophy. You will remark, meanwhile, that he has not used a single scientificterm, or referred to a single scientific investigation; and has observednothing and thought nothing which might not have been observed andthought by any one who chose to use his common sense, and not to beafraid. 

But because he has come round, after all this further investigation, tosomething very like his first conclusion, was all that furtherinvestigation useless? No--a thousand times, no. It is this veryverification of hypotheses which makes the sound ones safe, and destroysthe unsound. It is this struggle with all sorts of superstitions whichmakes science strong and sure, and her march irresistible, winning groundslowly, but never receding from it. It is this buffeting of adversitywhich compels her not to rest dangerously upon the shallow sand of firstguesses, and single observations; but to strike her roots down, deep, wide, and interlaced into the solid ground of actual facts. 

It is very necessary to insist on this point. For there have been men inall past ages--I do not say whether there are any such now, but I aminclined to think that there will be hereafter--men who have tried torepresent scientific method as something difficult, mysterious, peculiar, unique, not to be attained by the unscientific mass; and this not for thepurpose of exalting science, but rather of discrediting her. For as longas the masses, educated or uneducated, are ignorant of what scientificmethod is, they will look on scientific men, as the middle age looked onnecromancers, as a privileged, but awful and uncanny caste, possessed ofmighty secrets; who may do them great good, but may also do them greatharm. 

Which belief on the part of the masses will enable these persons toinstal themselves as the critics of science, though not scientific menthemselves: and--as Shakespeare has it--to talk of Robin Hood, thoughthey never shot in his bow. Thus they become mediators to the massesbetween the scientific and the unscientific worlds. They tell them--Youare not to trust the conclusions of men of science at first hand. Youare not fit judges of their facts or of their methods. It is we whowill, by a cautious eclecticism, choose out for you such of theirconclusions as are safe for you; and them we will advise you to believe. To the scientific man, on the other hand, as often as anything isdiscovered unpleasing to them, they will say, imperiously and ecathedra--Your new theory contradicts the established facts of science. For they will know well that whatever the men of science think of theirassertion, the masses will believe it; totally unaware that the speakersare by their very terms showing their ignorance of science; and that whatthey call established facts scientific men call merely provisionalconclusions, which they would throw away to-morrow without a pang werethe known facts explained better by a fresh theory, or did fresh factsrequire one. 

This has happened too often. It is in the interest of superstition thatit should happen again; and the best way to prevent it surely is to tellthe masses--Scientific method is no peculiar mystery, requiring apeculiar initiation. It is simply common sense, combined with uncommoncourage, which includes uncommon honesty and uncommon patience; and ifyou will be brave, honest, patient, and rational, you will need nomystagogues to tell you what in science to believe and what not tobelieve; for you will be just as good judges of scientific facts andtheories as those who assume the right of guiding your convictions. Youare men and women: and more than that you need not be. 

And let me say that the man of our days whose writings exemplify mostthoroughly what I am going to say is the justly revered Mr. ThomasCarlyle. 

As far as I know he has never written on any scientific subject. Foraught I am aware of, he may know nothing of mathematics or chemistry, ofcomparative anatomy or geology. For aught I am aware of, he may know agreat deal about them all, and, like a wise man, hold his tongue, andgive the world merely the results in the form of general thought. Butthis I know; that his writings are instinct with the very spirit ofscience; that he has taught men, more than any living man, the meaningand end of science; that he has taught men moral and intellectualcourage; to face facts boldly, while they confess the divineness offacts; not to be afraid of Nature, and not to worship nature; to believethat man can know truth; and that only in as far as he knows truth can helive worthily on this earth. And thus he has vindicated, as no other manin our days has done, at once the dignity of Nature and the dignity ofspirit. That he would have made a distinguished scientific man, we maybe as certain from his writings as we may be certain, when we see a fineold horse of a certain stamp, that he would have made a first-classhunter, though he has been unfortunately all his life in harness. Therefore, did I try to train a young man of science to be true, devout, and earnest, accurate and daring, I should say--Read what you will: butat least read Carlyle. It is a small matter to me--and I doubt not tohim--whether you will agree with his special conclusions: but hispremises and his method are irrefragable; for they stand on the"voluntatem Dei in rebus revelatam"--on fact and common sense. 

And Mr. Carlyle's writings, if I am correct in my estimate of them, willafford a very sufficient answer to those who think that the scientifichabit of mind tends to irreverence. 

Doubtless this accusation will always be brought against science by thosewho confound reverence with fear. For from blind fear of the unknown, science does certainly deliver man. She does by man as he does by anunbroken colt. The colt sees by the road side some quite new object--acast-away boot, an old kettle, or what not. What a fearful monster! Whatunknown terrific powers may it not possess! And the colt shies acrossthe road, runs up the bank, rears on end; putting itself thereby, as manya man does, in real danger. What cure is there? But one; experience. Soscience takes us, as we should take the colt, gently by the halter; andmakes us simply smell at the new monster; till after a few tremblingsniffs, we discover, like the colt, that it is not a monster, but akettle. Yet I think, if we sum up the loss and gain, we shall find thecolt's character has gained, rather than lost, by being thus disabused. He learns to substitute a very rational reverence for the man who isbreaking him in, for a totally irrational reverence for the kettle; andbecomes thereby a much wiser and more useful member of society, as doesthe man when disabused of his superstitions. 

From which follows one result. That if science proposes--as she does--tomake men brave, wise, and independent, she must needs excite unpleasantfeelings in all who desire to keep men cowardly, ignorant, and slavish. And that too many such persons have existed in all ages is but toonotorious. There have been from all time, goetai, quacks, powwow men, rain-makers, and necromancers of various sorts, who having for their ownpurposes set forth partial, ill-grounded, fantastic, and frightfulinterpretations of nature, have no love for those who search after atrue, exact, brave, and hopeful one. And therefore it is to be feared, or hoped, science and superstition will to the world's end remainirreconcilable and internecine foes. 

Conceive the feelings of an old Lapland witch, who has had for the lastfifty years all the winds in a sealskin bag, and has been selling fairbreezes to northern skippers at so much a puff, asserting her powers sooften, poor old soul, that she has got to half believe themherself, --conceive, I say, her feelings at seeing her customers watch theAdmiralty storm-signals, and con the weather reports in the 'Times. 'Conceive the feelings of Sir Samuel Baker's African friend, Katchiba, therain-making chief, who possessed a whole housefull of thunder andlightning--though he did not, he confessed, keep it in a bottle as theydo in England--if Sir Samuel had had the means, and the will, of givingto Katchiba's Negros a course of lectures on electricity, withappropriate experiments, and a real bottle full of real lightning amongthe foremost. 

It is clear that only two methods of self-defence would have been open tothe rain-maker: namely, either to kill Sir Samuel, or to buy his realsecret of bottling the lightning, that he might use it for his own ends. The former method--that of killing the man of science--was found moreeasy in ancient times; the latter in these modern ones. And there havebeen always those who, too good-natured to kill the scientific man, havepatronised knowledge, not for its own sake, but for the use which may bemade of it; who would like to keep a tame man of science, as they would atame poet, or a tame parrot; who say--Let us have science by all means, but not too much of it. It is a dangerous thing; to be doled out to theworld, like medicine, in small and cautious doses. You, the scientificman, will of course freely discover what you choose. Only do not talktoo loudly about it: leave that to us. We understand the world, and aremeant to guide and govern it. So discover freely: and meanwhile handover your discoveries to us, that we may instruct and edify the populacewith so much of them as we think safe, while we keep our positionthereby, and in many cases make much money by your science. Do that, andwe will patronise you, applaud you, ask you to our houses; and you shallbe clothed in purple and fine linen, and fare sumptuously with us everyday. I know not whether these latter are not the worst enemies whichscience has. They are often such excellent, respectable, orderly, well-meaning persons. They desire so sincerely that everyone should be wise:only not too wise. They are so utterly unaware of the mischief they aredoing. They would recoil with horror if they were told they were so manyIscariots, betraying Truth with a kiss. 

But science, as yet, has withstood both terrors and blandishments. Inold times, she endured being imprisoned and slain. She came to lifeagain. Perhaps it was the will of Him in whom all things live, that sheshould live. Perhaps it was His spirit which gave her life. 

She can endure, too, being starved. Her votaries have not as yet caredmuch for purple and fine linen, and sumptuous fare. There are a very fewamong them who, joining brilliant talents to solid learning, have risento deserved popularity, to titles, and to wealth. But even theirlabours, it seems to me, are never rewarded in any proportion to the timeand the intellect spent on them, nor to the benefits which they bring tomankind; while the great majority, unpaid and unknown, toil on, and haveto find in science her own reward. Better, perhaps, that it should beso. Better for science that she should be free, in holy poverty, to gowhere she will and say what she knows, than that she should be hired outat so much a year to say things pleasing to the many, and to those whoguide the many. And so, I verily believe, the majority of scientific menthink. There are those among them who have obeyed very faithfully St. Paul's precept, "No man that warreth entangleth himself with the affairsof this life. " For they have discovered that they are engaged in a war--averitable war--against the rulers of darkness, against ignorance and itstwin children, fear and cruelty. Of that war they see neither the endnor even the plan. But they are ready to go on; ready, with Socrates, "to follow reason withersoever it leads;" and content, meanwhile, likegood soldiers in a campaign, if they can keep tolerably in line, and usetheir weapons, and see a few yards ahead of them through the smoke andthe woods. They will come out somewhere at last; they know not where norwhen: but they will come out at last, into the daylight and the openfield; and be told then--perhaps to their own astonishment--as many agallant soldier has been told, that by simply walking straight on, anddoing the duty which lay nearest them, they have helped to win a greatbattle, and slay great giants, earning the thanks of their country and ofmankind. 

And, meanwhile, if they get their shilling a day of fighting-pay, theyare content. I had almost said, they ought to be content. For scienceis, I verily believe, like virtue, its own exceeding great reward. I canconceive few human states more enviable than that of the man to whom, panting in the foul laboratory, or watching for his life under the tropicforest, Isis shall for a moment lift her sacred veil, and show him, onceand for ever, the thing he dreamed not of; some law, or even mere hint ofa law, explaining one fact; but explaining with it a thousand more, connecting them all with each other and with the mighty whole, till orderand meaning shoots through some old Chaos of scattered observations. 

Is not that a joy, a prize, which wealth cannot give, nor poverty takeaway? What it may lead to, he knows not. Of what use it may become, heknows not. But this he knows, that somewhere it must lead; of some useit will be. For it is a truth; and having found a truth, he hasexorcised one more of the ghosts which haunt humanity. He has left oneobject less for man to fear; one object more for man to use. Yes, thescientific man may have this comfort, that whatever he has done, he hasdone good; that he is following a mistress who has never yet conferredaught but benefits on the human race. 

What physical science may do hereafter I know not; but as yet she hasdone this:

She has enormously increased the wealth of the human race; and hastherefore given employment, food, existence, to millions who, withoutscience, would either have starved or have never been born. She hasshown that the dictum of the early political economists, that populationhas a tendency to increase faster than the means of subsistence, is nolaw of humanity, but merely a tendency of the barbaric and ignorant man, which can be counteracted by increasing manifold by scientific means hispowers of producing food. She has taught men, during the last few years, to foresee and elude the most destructive storms; and there is no reasonfor doubting, and many reasons for hoping, that she will gradually teachmen to elude other terrific forces of nature, too powerful and tooseemingly capricious for them to conquer. She has discovered innumerableremedies and alleviations for pains and disease. She has thrown suchlight on the causes of epidemics, that we are able to say now that thepresence of cholera--and probably of all zymotic diseases--in any place, is usually a sin and a shame, for which the owners and authorities ofthat place ought to be punishable by law, as destroyers of their fellow-men; while for the weak, for those who, in the barbarous andsemi-barbarous state--and out of that last we are only just emerging--howmuch has she done; an earnest of much more which she will do? She hasdelivered the insane--I may say by the scientific insight of one man, more worthy of titles and pensions than nine-tenths of those who earnthem--I mean the great and good Pinel--from hopeless misery and tortureinto comparative peace and comfort, and at least the possibility of cure. For children, she has done much, or rather might do, would parents readand perpend such books as Andrew Combe's and those of other writers onphysical education. We should not then see the children, even of therich, done to death piecemeal by improper food, improper clothes, neglectof ventilation and the commonest measures for preserving health. Weshould not see their intellects stunted by Procrustean attempts to teachthem all the same accomplishments, to the neglect, most often, of anysound practical training of their faculties. We should not see slightindigestion, or temporary rushes of blood to the head, condemned andpunished as sins against Him who took up little children in His arms andblessed them. 

But we may have hope. When we compare education now with what it waseven forty years ago, much more with the stupid brutality of the monasticsystem, we may hail for children, as well as for grown people, the adventof the reign of common sense. 

And for woman--What might I not say on that point? But most of it wouldbe fitly discussed only among physicians and biologists: here I will sayonly this--Science has exterminated, at least among civilised nations, witch-manias. Women--at least white women--are no longer tortured orburnt alive from man's blind fear of the unknown. If science had done nomore than that, she would deserve the perpetual thanks and the perpetualtrust, not only of the women whom she has preserved from agony, but themen whom she has preserved from crime. 

These benefits have already accrued to civilised men, because they havelately allowed a very few of their number peaceably to imitate Mr. Rarey, and find out what nature--or rather, to speak at once reverently andaccurately, He who made nature--is thinking of; and obey the "voluntatemDei in rebus revelatam. " This science has done, while yet in herinfancy. What she will do in her maturity, who dare predict? At least, in the face of such facts as these, those who bid us fear, or restrain, or mutilate science, bid us commit an act of folly, as well as ofingratitude, which can only harm ourselves. For science has as yet donenothing but good. Will any one tell me what harm it has ever done? Whenany one will show me a single result of science, of the knowledge of anduse of physical facts, which has not tended directly to the benefit ofmankind, moral and spiritual, as well as physical and economic--then Ishall be tempted to believe that Solomon was wrong when he said that theone thing to be sought after on earth, more precious than all treasure, she who has length of days in her right hand, and in her left hand richesand honour, whose ways are ways of pleasantness and all her paths arepeace, who is a tree of life to all who lay hold on her, and makes happyevery one who retains her, is--as you will see if you will yourselvesconsult the passage--that very Wisdom--by which God has founded theearth; and that very Understanding--by which He has established theheavens. 

GROTS AND GROVES

I wish this lecture to be suggestive, rather that didactic; to set youthinking and inquiring for yourselves, rather than learning at second-hand from me. Some among my audience, I doubt not, will neither need tobe taught by me, nor to be stirred up to inquiry for themselves. Theyare already, probably, antiquarians; already better acquainted with thesubject than I am. They come hither, therefore, as critics; I trust notas unkindly critics. They will, I hope, remember that I am trying toexcite a general interest in that very architecture in which theydelight, and so to make the public do justice to their labours. Theywill therefore, I trust, "Be to my faults a little blind, Be to my virtues very kind;"

and if my architectural theories do not seem to them correct in alldetails--well-founded I believe them myself to be--remember that it is aslight matter to me, or to the audience, whether any special and petfancy of mine should be exactly true or not: but it is not a light matterthat my hearers should be awakened--and too many just now need an actualawakening--to a right, pure, and wholesome judgment on questions of art, especially when the soundness of that judgment depends, as in this case, on sound judgments about human history, as well as about natural objects. 

Now, it befel me that, fresh from the Tropic forests, and with theirforms hanging always, as it were, in the background of my eye, I wasimpressed more and more vividly the longer I looked, with the likeness ofthose forest forms to the forms of our own Cathedral of Chester. Thegrand and graceful Chapter-house transformed itself into one of thosegreen bowers, which, once seen, and never to be seen again, make one atonce richer and poorer for the rest of life. The fans of groining sprangfrom the short columns, just as do the feathered boughs of the far morebeautiful Maximiliana palm, and just of the same size and shape: and metoverhead, as I have seen them meet, in aisles longer by far than ourcathedral nave. The free upright shafts, which give such strength, andyet such lightness, to the mullions of each window, pierced upwardthrough those curving lines, as do the stems of young trees through thefronds of palm; and, like them, carried the eye and the fancy up into theinfinite, and took off a sense of oppression and captivity which theweight of the roof might have produced. In the nave, in the choir thesame vision of the Tropic forest haunted me. The fluted columns not onlyresembled, but seemed copied from the fluted stems beneath which I hadridden in the primeval woods; their bases, their capitals, seemed copiedfrom the bulgings at the collar of the root, and at the spring of theboughs, produced by a check of the redundant sap; and were garlandedoften enough like the capitals of the columns, with delicate tracery ofparasite leaves and flowers; the mouldings of the arches seemed copiedfrom the parallel bundles of the curving bamboo shoots; and even theflatter roof of the nave and transepts had its antitype in that highestlevel of the forest aisles, where the trees, having climbed at last tothe light-food which they seek, care no longer to grow upward, but spreadout in huge limbs, almost horizontal, reminding the eye of thefour-centred arch which marks the period of Perpendicular Gothic. 

Nay, to this day there is one point in our cathedral which, to me, keepsup the illusion still. As I enter the choir, and look upward toward theleft, I cannot help seeing, in the tabernacle work of the stalls, theslender and aspiring forms of the "rastrajo;" the delicate second growthwhich, as it were, rushes upward from the earth wherever the forest iscleared; and above it, in the tall lines of the north-west pier of thetower--even though defaced, along the inner face of the western arch, byugly and needless perpendicular panelling--I seem to see the stems ofhuge Cedars, or Balatas, or Ceibas, curving over, as they would do, intothe great beams of the transept roof, some seventy feet above the ground. 

Nay, so far will the fancy lead, that I have seemed to see, in thestained glass between the tracery of the windows, such gorgeous sheets ofcolour as sometimes flash on the eye, when, far aloft, between high stemsand boughs, you catch sight of some great tree ablaze with flowers, either its own or those of a parasite; yellow or crimson, white orpurple; and over them again the cloudless blue. 

Now, I know well that all these dreams are dreams; that the men who builtour northern cathedrals never saw these forest forms; and that thelikeness of their work to those of Tropic nature is at most only acorroboration of Mr. Ruskin's dictum, that "the Gothic did not arise outof, but developed itself into, a resemblance to vegetation. . . . It wasno chance suggestion of the form of an arch from the bending of a bough, but the gradual and continual discovery of a beauty in natural formswhich could be more and more transferred into those of stone, whichinfluenced at once the hearts of the people and the form of the edifice. "So true is this, that by a pure and noble copying of the vegetable beautywhich they had seen in their own clime, the medieval craftsmen went sofar--as I have shown you--as to anticipate forms of vegetable beautypeculiar to Tropic climes, which they had not seen: a fresh proof, ifproof were needed, that beauty is something absolute and independent ofman; and not, as some think, only relative, and what happens to bepleasant to the eye of this man or that. 

But thinking over this matter, and reading over, too, that which Mr. Ruskin has written thereon in his 'Stones of Venice, ' vol. Ii. Cap. Vi. , on the nature of Gothic, I came to certain further conclusions--or atleast surmises--which I put before you to-night, in hopes that if theyhave no other effect on you, they will at least stir some of you up toread Mr. Ruskin's works. 

Now Mr. Ruskin says, "That the original conception of Gothic architecturehas been derived from vegetation, from the symmetry of avenues and theinterlacing of branches, is a strange and vain supposition. It is atheory which never could have existed for a moment in the mind of anyperson acquainted with early Gothic: but, however idle as a theory, it ismost valuable as a testimony to the character of the perfected style. "

Doubtless so. But you must remember always that the subject of mylecture is Grots and Groves; that I am speaking not of Gothicarchitecture in general, but of Gothic ecclesiastical architecture; andmore, almost exclusively of the ecclesiastical architecture of theTeutonic or northern nations; because in them, as I think, theresemblance between the temple and the forest reached the fullestexactness. 

Now the original idea of a Christian church was that of a grot; a cave. That is a historic fact. The Christianity which was passed on to usbegan to worship, hidden and persecuted, in the catacombs of Rome, it maybe often around the martyrs' tombs, by the dim light of candle or oftorch. The candles on the Roman altars, whatever they have been made tosymbolise since then, are the hereditary memorials of that fact. Throughout the North, in these isles as much as in any land, the idea ofthe grot was, in like wise, the idea of a church. The saint or hermitbuilt himself a cell; dark, massive, intended to exclude light as well asweather; or took refuge in a cave. There he prayed and worshipped, andgathered others to pray and worship round him, during his life. Therehe, often enough, became an object of worship, in his turn, after hisdeath. In after ages his cave was ornamented, like that of the hermit ofMontmajour by Arles; or his cell-chapel enlarged, as those of the Scotchand Irish saints have been, again and again; till at last a statelyminster rose above it. Still, the idea that the church was to be a grothaunted the minds of builders. 

But side by side with the Christian grot there was throughout the Northanother form of temple, dedicated to very different gods; namely, thetrees from whose mighty stems hung the heads of the victims of Odin or ofThor, the horse, the goat, and in time of calamity or pestilence, of men. Trees and not grots were the temples of our forefathers. 

Scholars know well--but they must excuse my quoting it for the sake ofthose who are not scholars--the famous passage of Tacitus which tells howour forefathers "held it beneath the dignity of the gods to coop themwithin walls, or liken them to any human countenance: but consecratedgroves and woods, and called by the name of gods that mystery which theyheld by faith alone;" and the equally famous passage of Claudian, about"the vast silence of the Black Forest, and groves awful with ancientsuperstition; and oaks, barbarian deities;" and Lucan's "groves inviolatefrom all antiquity, and altars stained with human blood. "

To worship in such spots was an abomination to the early Christian. Itwas as much a test of heathendom as the eating of horse-flesh, sacred toOdin, and therefore unclean to Christian men. The Lombard laws andothers forbid expressly the lingering remnants of grove worship. St. Boniface and other early missionaries hewed down in defiance the sacredoaks, and paid sometimes for their valour with their lives. 

It is no wonder, then, if long centuries elapsed ere the likeness ofvegetable forms began to reappear in the Christian churches of the North. And yet both grot and grove were equally the natural temples which thereligious instinct of all deep-hearted peoples, conscious of sin, andconscious, too, of yearnings after a perfection not to be found on earth, chooses from the earliest stage of awakening civilisation. In them, alone, before he had strength and skill to build nobly for himself, couldman find darkness, the mother of mystery and awe, in which he is remindedperforce of his own ignorance and weakness; in which he learns first toremember unseen powers, sometimes to his comfort and elevation, sometimesonly to his terror and debasement; darkness; and with it silence andsolitude, in which he can collect himself, and shut out the noise andglare, the meanness and the coarseness, of the world; and be alone awhile with his own thoughts, his own fancy, his own conscience, his ownsoul. 

But for a while, as I have said, that darkness, solitude, and silencewere to be sought in the grot, not in the grove. 

Then Christianity conquered the Empire. It adapted, not merely itsarchitecture, but its very buildings, to its worship. The Roman Basilicabecame the Christian church; a noble form of building enough, though onein which was neither darkness, solitude, nor silence, but crowdedcongregations, clapping--or otherwise--the popular preacher; or fightingabout the election of a bishop or a pope, till the holy place ran withChristian blood. The deep-hearted Northern turned away, in weariness anddisgust, from those vast halls, fitted only for the feverish superstitionof a profligate and worn-out civilisation; and took himself, amid his ownrocks and forests, moors and shores, to a simpler and sternerarchitecture, which should express a creed, sterner; and at heart farsimpler; though dogmatically the same. 

And this is, to my mind, the difference, and the noble difference, between the so-called Norman architecture, which came hither about thetime of the Conquest; and that of Romanized Italy. 

But the Normans were a conquering race; and one which conquered, be italways remembered, in England at least, in the name and by the authorityof Rome. Their ecclesiastics, like the ecclesiastics on the Continent, were the representatives of Roman civilisation, of Rome's right, intellectual and spiritual, to rule the world. 

Therefore their architecture, like their creed, was Roman. They took themassive towering Roman forms, which expressed domination; and piled themone on the other, to express the domination of Christian Rome over thesouls, as they had represented the domination of heathen Rome over thebodies, of men. And so side by side with the towers of the Norman keeprose the towers of the Norman cathedral--the two signs of a doubleservitude. 

But, with the thirteenth century, there dawned an age in Northern Europe, which I may boldly call an heroic age; heroic in its virtues and in itscrimes; an age of rich passionate youth, or rather of early manhood; fullof aspirations, of chivalry, of self-sacrifice as strange and terrible asit was beautiful and noble, even when most misguided. The Teutonicnations of Europe--our own forefathers most of all--having absorbed allthat heathen Rome could teach them, at least for the time being, began tothink for themselves; to have poets, philosophers, historians, architects, of their own. The thirteenth century was especially an ageof aspiration; and its architects expressed, in buildings quite unlikethose of the preceding centuries, the aspirations of the time. 

The Pointed Arch had been introduced half a century before. It may bethat the Crusaders saw it in the East and brought it home. It may bethat it originated from the quadripartite vaulting of the Normans, thesegmental groins of which, crossing diagonally, produced to appearancethe pointed arch. It may be that it was derived from that mysticalfigure of a pointed oval form, the vesica piscis. It may be, lastly, that it was suggested simply by the intersection of semicircular arches, so frequently found in ornamental arcades. The last cause may perhaps bethe true one: but it matters little whence the pointed arch came. Itmatters much what it meant to those who introduced it. And at thebeginning of the Transition or semi-Norman period, it seems to have meantnothing. It was not till the thirteenth century that it had graduallyreceived, as it were, a soul, and had become the exponent of a greatidea. As the Norman architecture and its forms had signified domination, so the Early English, as we call it, signified aspiration; an idea whichwas perfected, as far as it could be, in what we call the Decoratedstyle. 

There is an evident gap, I had almost said a gulf, between thearchitectural mind of the eleventh and that of the thirteenth century. Avertical tendency, a longing after lightness and freedom, appears; andwith them a longing to reproduce the graces of nature and art. And hereI ask you to look for yourselves at the buildings of this new era--thereis a beautiful specimen in yonder arcade {304}--and judge for yourselveswhether they, and even more than they the Decorated style into which theydeveloped, do not remind you of the forest shapes?

And if they remind you: must they not have reminded those who shapedthem? Can it have been otherwise? We know that the men who built wereearnest. The carefulness, the reverence, of their work have given asubject for some of Mr. Ruskin's noblest chapters, a text for some of hisnoblest sermons. We know that they were students of vegetable form. Thatis proved by the flowers, the leaves, even the birds, with which theyenwreathed their capitals and enriched their mouldings. Look up there, and see. 

You cannot look at any good church-work from the thirteenth to the middleof the fifteenth century, without seeing that leaves and flowers wereperpetually in the workman's mind. Do you fancy that stems and boughswere never in his mind? He kept, doubtless, in remembrance thefundamental idea, that the Christian church should symbolise a grot orcave. He could do no less; while he again and again saw hermits aroundhim dwelling and worshipping in caves, as they had done ages before inEgypt and Syria; while he fixed, again and again, the site of his conventand his minster in some secluded valley guarded by cliffs and rocks, likeVale Crucis in North Wales. But his minster stood often not among rocksonly, but amid trees; in some clearing in the primeval forest, as ValeCrucis was then. At least he could not pass from minster to minster, from town to town, without journeying through long miles of forest. Doyou think that the awful shapes and shadows of that forest never hauntedhis imagination as he built? He would have cut down ruthlessly, as hispredecessors the early missionaries did, the sacred trees amid which Thorand Odin had been worshipped by the heathen Saxons; amid which stilldarker deities were still worshipped by the heathen tribes of EasternEurope. But he was the descendant of men who had worshipped in thosegroves; and the glamour of them was upon him still. He peopled the wildforest with demons and fairies: but that did not surely prevent hisfeeling its ennobling grandeur, its chastening loneliness. His ancestorshad held the oaks for trees of God, even as the Jews held the Cedar, andthe Hindoos likewise; for the Deodara pine is not only, botanists tellus, the same as the Cedar of Lebanon: but its very name--theDeodara--signifies nought else but "The tree of God. "

His ancestors, I say, had held the oaks for trees of God. It may be thatas the monk sat beneath their shade with his Bible on his knee, like goodSt. Boniface in the Fulda forest, he found that his ancestors were right. 

To understand what sort of trees they were from which he got hisinspiration: you must look, not at an average English wood, perpetuallythinned out as the trees arrive at middle age. Still less must you lookat the pines, oaks, beeches, of an English park, where each tree has hadspace to develop itself freely into a more or less rounded form. Youmust not even look at the tropic forests. For there, from the immensediversity of forms, twenty varieties of tree will grow beneath eachother, forming a close-packed heap of boughs and leaves, from the groundto a hundred feet and more aloft. 

You should look at the North American forests of social trees--especiallyof pines and firs, where trees of one species, crowded together, andcompeting with equal advantages for the air and light, form themselvesinto one wilderness of straight smooth shafts, surmounted by a flat sheetof foliage, held up by boughs like the ribs of a groined roof; whileunderneath the ground is bare as a cathedral floor. 

You all know, surely, the Hemlock spruce of America; which, while growingby itself in open ground, is the most wilful and fantastic, as well asthe most graceful, of all the firs; imitating the shape, not of itskindred, but of an enormous tuft of fern. 

Yet if you look at the same tree, when it has struggled long for lifefrom its youth amid other trees of its own kind and its own age; you findthat the lower boughs have died off from want of light, leaving not ascar behind. The upper boughs have reached at once the light, and theirnatural term of years. They are content to live, and little more. Thecentral trunk no longer sends up each year a fresh perpendicular shoot toaspire above the rest: but as weary of struggling ambition as they are, is content to become more and more their equal as the years pass by. Andthis is a law of social forest trees, which you must bear in mind, whenever I speak of the influence of tree-forms on Gothic architecture. 

Such forms as these are rare enough in Europe now. I never understoodhow possible, how common, they must have been in medieval Europe, till Isaw in the forest of Fontainebleau a few oaks like the oak ofCharlemagne, and the Bouquet du Roi, at whose age I dare not guess, butwhose size and shape showed them to have once formed part of a continuouswood, the like whereof remains not in these isles--perhaps not east ofthe Carpathian Mountains. In them a clear shaft of at least sixty, itmay be eighty feet, carries a flat head of boughs, each in itself a tree. In such a grove, I thought, the heathen Gaul, even the heathen Frank, worshipped, beneath "trees of God. " Such trees, I thought, centuriesafter, inspired the genius of every builder of Gothic aisles and roofs. 

Thus, at least, we can explain that rigidity, which Mr. Ruskin tells us, "is a special element of Gothic architecture. Greek and Egyptianbuildings, " he says--and I should have added, Roman buildings also, inproportion to their age, _i. E_. , to the amount of the Roman elements inthem--"stand for the most part, by their own weight and mass, one stonepassively incumbent on another: but in the Gothic vaults and traceriesthere is a stiffness analogous to that of the bones of a limb, or fibresof a tree; an elastic tension and communication of force from part topart; and also a studious expression of this throughout every part of thebuilding. " In a word, Gothic vaulting and tracery have been studiouslymade like to boughs of trees. Were those boughs present to the mind ofthe architect? Or is the coincidence merely fortuitous? You knowalready how I should answer. The cusped arch, too, was it actually notintended to imitate vegetation? Mr. Ruskin seems to think so. He saysthat it is merely the special application to the arch of the greatornamental system of foliation, which, "whether simple as in the cuspedarch, or complicated as in tracery, arose out of the love of leafage. Notthat the form of the arch is intended to imitate a leaf, but to beinvested with the same characters of beauty which the designer haddiscovered in the leaf. " Now I differ from Mr. Ruskin with extremehesitation. I agree that the cusped arch is not meant to imitate a leaf. I think with Mr. Ruskin, that it was probably first adopted on account ofits superior strength; and that it afterwards took the form of a bough. But I cannot as yet believe that it was not at last intended to imitate abough; a bough of a very common form, and one in which "active rigidity"is peculiarly shown. I mean a bough which has forked. If the lower forkhas died off, for want of light, we obtain something like the simplycusped arch. If it be still living--but short and stunted in comparisonwith the higher fork--we obtain, it seems to me, something like thefoliated cusp; both likenesses being near enough to those of commonobjects to make it possible that those objects may have suggested them. And thus, more and more boldly, the mediaeval architect learnt to copyboughs, stems, and, at last, the whole effect, as far always as stonewould allow, of a combination of rock and tree, of grot and grove. 

So he formed his minsters, as I believe, upon the model of those leafyminsters in which he walked to meditate, amid the aisles which God, notman, has built. He sent their columns aloft like the boles of ancienttrees. He wreathed their capitals, sometimes their very shafts, withflowers and creeping shoots. He threw their arches out, and interwovethe groinings of their vaults, like the bough-roofage overhead. Hedecked with foliage and fruit the bosses above and the corbels below. Hesent up out of those corbels upright shafts along the walls, in thelikeness of the trees which sprang out of the rocks above his head. Heraised those walls into great cliffs. He pierced them with the arches ofthe triforium, as with hermits' cells. He represented in the horizontalsills of his windows, and in his horizontal string-courses, thehorizontal strata of the rocks. He opened the windows into high andlofty glades, broken, as in the forest, by the tracery of stems andboughs, through which was seen, not merely the outer, but the upperworld. For he craved, as all true artists crave, for light and colour;and had the sky above been one perpetual blue, he might have been contentwith it, and left his glass transparent. But in that dark dank northernclime, rain and snowstorm, black cloud and grey mist, were all that hewas like to see outside for nine months in the year. So he took suchlight and colour as nature gave in her few gayer moods; and set aloft hisstained glass windows the hues of the noonday and the rainbow, and thesunrise and the sunset, and the purple of the heather, and the gold ofthe gorse, and the azure of the bugloss, and the crimson of the poppy;and among them, in gorgeous robes, the angels and the saints of heaven, and the memories of heroic virtues and heroic sufferings, that he mightlift up his own eyes and heart for ever out of the dark, dank, sad worldof the cold north, with all its coarsenesses and its crimes, toward arealm of perpetual holiness, amid a perpetual summer of beauty and oflight; as one who--for he was true to nature, even in that--from betweenthe black jaws of a narrow glen, or from beneath the black shade ofgnarled trees, catches a glimpse of far lands gay with gardens andcottages, and purple mountain ranges, and the far off sea, and the hazyhorizon melting into the hazy sky; and finds his heart carried out intoan infinite at once of freedom and of repose. 

And so out of the cliffs and the forests he shaped the inside of hischurch. And how did he shape the outside? Look for yourselves, andjudge. But look: not at Chester, but at Salisbury. Look at thosechurches which carry not mere towers, but spires, or at least pinnacledtowers approaching the pyrmidal form. The outside form of every Gothiccathedral must be considered imperfect if it does not culminate insomething pyramidal. 

The especial want of all Greek and Roman buildings with which we areacquainted is the absence--save in a few and unimportant cases--of thepyramidal form. The Egyptians knew at least the worth of the obelisk:but the Greeks and Romans hardly knew even that: their buildings are flat-topped. Their builders were contented with the earth as it was. Therewas a great truth involved in that; which I am the last to deny. Butreligions which, like the Buddhist or the Christian, nurse a noble self-discontent, are sure to adopt sooner or later an upward and aspiring formof building. It is not merely that, fancying heaven to be above earth, they point towards heaven. There is a deeper natural language in thepyramidal form of a growing tree. It symbolises growth, or the desire ofgrowth. The Norman tower does nothing of the kind. It does not aspireto grow. Look--I mention an instance with which I am most familiar--atthe Norman tower of Bury St. Edmund's. It is graceful--awful, if youwill--but there is no aspiration in it. It is stately: but self-content. Its horizontal courses; circular arches; above all, its flat sky-line, seem to have risen enough: and wish to rise no higher. For it has notouch of that unrest of soul, which is expressed by the spire, and stillmore by the compound spire, with its pinnacles, crockets, finials, whichare finials only in name; for they do not finish, and are really terminalbuds, as it were, longing to open and grow upward, even as the crocketsare bracts and leaves thrown off as the shoot has grown. 

You feel, surely, the truth of these last words. You cannot look at thecanopy work or the pinnacle work of this cathedral without seeing thatthey do not merely suggest buds and leaves, but that the buds and leavesare there carven before your eyes. I myself cannot look at thetabernacle work of our stalls without being reminded of the young pineforests which clothe the Hampshire moors. But if the details are copiedfrom vegetable forms, why not the whole? Is not a spire like a growingtree, a tabernacle like a fir-tree, a compound spire like a group offirs? And if we can see that: do you fancy that the man who planned thespire did not see it as clearly as we do; and perhaps more clearly still?

I am aware, of course, that Norman architecture had sometimes itspinnacle, a mere conical or polygonal capping. I am aware that thisform, only more and more slender, lasted on in England during thethirteenth and the early part of the fourteenth century; and on theContinent, under many modifications, one English kind whereof is usuallycalled a "broach, " of which you have a beautiful specimen in the newchurch at Hoole. 

Now, no one will deny that that broach is beautiful. But it would bedifficult to prove that its form was taken from a North European tree. The cypress was unknown, probably, to our northern architects. TheLombardy poplar--which has wandered hither, I know not when, all the wayfrom Cashmere--had not wandered then, I believe, further than NorthItaly. The form is rather that of mere stone; of the obelisk, or of themountain peak; and they, in fact, may have at first suggested the spire. The grandeur of an isolated mountain, even of a dolmen or single uprightstone, is evident to all. 

But it is the grandeur, not of aspiration, but of defiance; not of theChristian; not even of the Stoic: but rather of the Epicurean. It says--Icannot rise. I do not care to rise. I will be contentedly and valiantlythat which I am; and face circumstances, though I cannot conquer them. But it is defiance under defeat. The mountain-peak does not grow, butonly decays. Fretted by rains, peeled by frost, splintered by lightning, it must down at last; and crumble into earth, were it as old, as hard, aslofty as the Matterhorn itself. And while it stands, it wants not onlyaspiration, it wants tenderness; it wants humility; it wants the unrestwhich tenderness and humility must breed, and which Mr. Ruskin so clearlyrecognises in the best Gothic art. And, meanwhile, it wants naturalness. The mere smooth spire or broach--I had almost said, even the spire ofSalisbury--is like no tall or commanding object in Nature. It is merelythe caricature of one; it may be of the mountain-peak. The outline mustbe broken, must be softened, before it can express the soul of a creedwhich, in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries far more than now, wasone of penitence as well as of aspiration, of passionate emotion as wellas of lofty faith. But a shape which will express that soul must besought, not among mineral, but among vegetable, forms. And rememberalways, if we feel thus even now, how much more must those medieval menof genius have felt thus, whose work we now dare only copy line by line?

So--as it seems to me--they sought among vegetable forms for what theyneeded: and they found it at once in the pine, or rather the fir, --thespruce and silver firs of their own forests. They are not, of course, indigenous to England. But they are so common through all the rest ofEurope, that not only would the form suggest itself to a Continentalarchitect, but to any English clerk who travelled, as all did who could, across the Alps to Rome. The fir-tree, not growing on level ground, likethe oaks of Fontainebleau, into one flat roof of foliage, but clinging tothe hill-side and the crag, old above young, spire above spire, whorlabove whorl--for the young shoots of each whorl of boughs point upward inthe spring; and now and then a whole bough, breaking away, as it were, into free space, turns upward altogether, and forms a secondary spire onthe same tree--this surely was the form which the mediaeval architectseized, to clothe with it the sides and roof of the stone mountain whichhe had built; piling up pinnacles and spires, each crocketed at theangles; that, like a group of firs upon an isolated rock, every point ofthe building might seem in act to grow toward heaven, till his ideaculminated in that glorious Minster of Cologne, which, if it ever becompleted, will be the likeness of one forest-clothed group of cliffs, surmounted by three enormous pines. 

One feature of the Norman temple he could keep; for it was copied fromthe same nature which he was trying to copy--namely, the high-pitchedroof and gables. Mr. Ruskin lays it down as a law, that the acute anglein roofs, gables, spires, is the distinguishing mark of northern Gothic. It was adopted, most probably, at first from domestic buildings. Anorthern house or barn must have a high-pitched roof: or the snow willnot slip off it. But that fact was not discovered by man; it was copiedby him from the rocks around. He saw the mountain peak jut black andbare above the snows of winter; he saw those snows slip down in sheets, rush down in torrents under the sun, from the steep slabs of rock whichcoped the hill-side; and he copied, in his roofs, the rocks above histown. But as the love for decoration arose, he would deck his roofs asnature had decked hers, till the grey sheets of the cathedral slatesshould stand out amid pinnacles and turrets rich with foliage, as thegrey mountain sides stood out amid knolls of feathery birch and toweringpine. 

He failed, though he failed nobly. He never succeeded in attaining aperfectly natural style. 

The medieval architects were crippled to the last by the tradition ofartificial Roman forms. They began improving them into naturalness, without any clear notion of what they wanted; and when that notion becameclear, it was too late. Take, as an instance, the tracery of theirwindows. It is true, as Mr. Ruskin says, that they began by piercingholes in a wall of the form of a leaf, which developed, in the rosewindow, into the form of a star inside, and of a flower outside. Look atsuch aloft there. Then, by introducing mullions and traceries into thelower part of the window, they added stem and bough forms to those flowerforms. But the two did not fit. Look at the west window of our choir, and you will see what I mean. The upright mullions break off into boughcurves graceful enough: but these are cut short--as I hold, spoiled--bycircular and triangular forms of rose and trefoil resting on them as suchforms never rest in Nature; and the whole, though beautiful, is only halfbeautiful. It is fragmentary, unmeaning, barbaric, because unnatural. 

They failed, too, it may be, from the very paucity of the vegetable formsthey could find to copy among the flora of this colder clime; and so, stopped short in drawing from nature, ran off into mere purposelessluxuriance. Had they been able to add to their stock of memories ahundred forms which they would have seen in the Tropics, they might havegone on for centuries copying Nature without exhausting her. 

And yet, did they exhaust even the few forms of beauty which they sawaround them? It must be confessed that they did not. I believe thatthey could not, because they dared not. The unnaturalness of the creedwhich they expressed always hampered them. It forbade them to lookNature freely and lovingly in the face. It forbade them--as one glaringexample--to know anything truly of the most beautiful of all naturalobjects--the human form. They were tempted perpetually to take Nature asornament, not as basis; and they yielded at last to the temptation; till, in the age of Perpendicular architecture, their very ornament becameunnatural again; because conventional, untrue, meaningless. 

But the creed for which they worked was dying by that time, and thereforethe art which expressed it must needs die too. And even that death, orrather the approach of it, was symbolised truly in the flatter roof, thefour-centred arch, the flat-topped tower of the fifteenth-century church. The creed had ceased to aspire: so did the architecture. It had ceasedto grow: so did the temple. And the arch sank lower; and the raftersgrew more horizontal; and the likeness to the old tree, content to growno more, took the place of the likeness to the young tree strugglingtoward the sky. 

And now--unless you are tired of listening to me--a few practical words. 

We are restoring our old cathedral stone by stone after its ancientmodel. We are also trying to build a new church. We are building it--asmost new churches in England are now built--in a pure Gothic style. 

Are we doing right? I do not mean morally right. It is always morallyright to build a new church, if needed, whatever be its architecture. Itis always morally right to restore an old church, if it be beautiful andnoble, as an heirloom handed down to us by our ancestors, which we haveno right--I say, no right--for the sake of our children, and of ourchildren's children, to leave to ruin. 

But are we artistically, aesthetically right? Is the best Gothic fit forour worship? Does it express our belief? Or shall we choose some otherstyle?

I say that it is; and that it is so because it is a style which, if notfounded on Nature, has taken into itself more of Nature, of Naturebeautiful and healthy, than any other style. 

With greater knowledge of Nature, both geographical and scientific, freshstyles of architecture may and will arise, as much more beautiful, and asmuch more natural, than the Gothic, as Gothic is more beautiful andnatural than the Norman. Till then we must take the best models which wehave; use them; and, as it were, use them up and exhaust them. By thattime we may have learnt to improve on them; and to build churches moreGothic than Gothic itself, more like grot and grove than even a northerncathedral. 

That is the direction in which we must work. And if any shall say to us, as it has been said ere now--"After all, your new Gothic churches are butimitations, shams, borrowed symbols, which to you symbolise nothing. Theyare Romish churches, meant to express Romish doctrine, built for aProtestant creed which they do not express, and for a Protestant worshipwhich they will not fit. " Then we shall answer--Not so. The objectionmight be true if we built Norman or Romanesque churches; for we shouldthen be returning to that very foreign and unnatural style which Rometaught our forefathers, and from which they escaped gradually into thecomparative freedom, the comparative naturalness of that true Gothic ofwhich Mr. Ruskin says so well:--

 "It is gladdening to remember that, in its utmost nobleness, the very temper which has been thought most averse to it, the Protestant temper of self-dependence and inquiry, were expressed in every case. Faith and aspiration there were in every Christian ecclesiastical building from the first century to the fifteenth: but the moral habits to which England in this age owes the kind of greatness which she has--the habits of philosophical investigation, of accurate thought, of domestic seclusion and independence, of stern self-reliance, and sincere upright searching into religious truth, --were only traceable in the features which were the distinctive creations of the Gothic schools, in the varied foliage and thorny fretwork, and shadowy niche, and buttressed pier, and fearless height of subtle pinnacle and crested tower, sent 'like an unperplexed question up to heaven. '"

So says Mr. Ruskin. I, for one, endorse his gallant words. And I thinkthat a strong proof of their truth is to be found in two facts, whichseem at first paradoxical. First, that the new Roman Catholic churcheson the Continent--I speak especially of France, which is the most highlycultivated Romanist country--are, like those which the Jesuits built inthe seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, less and less Gothic. Theformer were sham-classic; the latter are rather of a new fantasticRomanesque, or rather Byzantinesque style, which is a real retrogressionfrom Gothic towards earlier and less natural schools. Next, that thePuritan communions, the Kirk of Scotland and the English Nonconformists, as they are becoming more cultivated--and there are now many highlycultivated men among them--are introducing Gothic architecture more andmore into their churches. There are elements in it, it seems, which donot contradict their Puritanism; elements which they can adapt to theirown worship; namely, the very elements which Mr. Ruskin has discerned. 

But if they can do so, how much more can we of the Church of England? Aslong as we go on where our medieval forefathers left off; as long as wekeep to the most perfect types of their work, in waiting for the day whenwe shall be able to surpass them, by making our work even morenaturalistic than theirs, more truly expressive of the highestaspirations of humanity: so long we are reverencing them, and that latentProtestantism in them, which produced at last the Reformation. 

And if any should say--"Nevertheless, your Protestant Gothic church, though you made it ten times more beautiful, and more symbolic, thanCologne Minster itself, would still be a sham. For where would be yourimages? And still more, where would be your Host? Do you not know thatin the medieval church the vistas of its arcades, the alternations of itslights and shadows, the gradations of its colouring, and all itscarefully subordinated wealth of art, pointed to, were concentratedround, one sacred spot, as a curve, however vast its sweep though space, tends at every moment toward a single focus? And that spot, that focus, was, and is still, in every Romish church, the body of God, present uponthe altar in the form of bread? Without Him, what is all your building?Your church is empty: your altar bare; a throne without a king; an eye-socket without an eye. "

My friends, if we be true children of those old worthies, whom Tacitussaw worshipping beneath the German oaks; we shall have but one answer tothat scoff:--

We know it; and we glory in the fact. We glory in it, as the old Jewsgloried in it, when the Roman soldiers, bursting through the Temple, andinto the Holy of Holies itself, paused in wonder and in awe when theybeheld neither God, nor image of God, but blank yet all-suggestive--theempty mercy-seat. 

Like theirs, our altar is an empty throne. For it symbolises our worshipof Him who dwelleth not in temples made with hands; whom the heaven andthe heaven of heavens cannot contain. Our eye-socket holds no eye. Forit symbolises our worship of that Eye which is over all the earth; whichis about our path, and about our bed, and spies out all our ways. Weneed no artificial and material presence of Deity. For we believe inThat One Eternal and Universal Real Presence--of which it is written "Heis not far from any one of us; for in God we live, and move, and have ourbeing;" and again, "Lo, I am with you, even to the End of the World;" andagain--"Wheresoever two or three are gathered together in My Name, theream I in the midst of them. "

He is the God of nature, as well as the God of grace. For ever He looksdown on all things which He has made: and behold, they are very good. And, therefore, we dare offer to Him, in our churches, the most perfectworks of naturalistic art, and shape them into copies of whatever beautyHe has shown us, in man or woman, in cave or mountain peak, in tree orflower, even in bird or butterfly. 

But Himself?--Who can see Him? Except the humble and the contrite heart, to whom He reveals Himself as a Spirit to be worshipped in spirit and intruth, and not in bread, nor wood, nor stone, nor gold, norquintessential diamond. 

So we shall obey the sound instinct of our Christian forefathers, whenthey shaped their churches into forest aisles, and decked them with theboughs of the woodland, and the flowers of the field: but we shall obeytoo, that sounder instinct of theirs, which made them at last cast out oftheir own temples, as misplaced and unnatural things, the idols whichthey had inherited from Rome. 

So we shall obey the sound instinct of our heathen forefathers, when theyworshipped the unknown God beneath the oaks of the primeval forest: butwe shall obey, too, that sounder instinct of theirs, which taught themthis, at least, concerning God--That it was beneath His dignity to coopHim within walls; and that the grandest forms of nature, as well as thedeepest consciousnesses of their own souls, revealed to them a mysteriousBeing, who was to be beheld by faith alone. 

GEORGE BUCHANAN, SCHOLAR

The scholar, in the sixteenth century, was a far more important personagethan now. The supply of learned men was very small, the demand for themvery great. During the whole of the fifteenth, and a great part of thesixteenth century, the human mind turned more and more from thescholastic philosophy of the Middle Ages to that of the Romans and theGreeks; and found more and more in old Pagan Art an element whichMonastic Art had not, and which was yet necessary for the fullsatisfaction of their craving after the Beautiful. At such a crisis ofthought and taste, it was natural that the classical scholar, the man whoknew old Rome, and still more old Greece, should usurp the place of themonk, as teacher of mankind; and that scholars should form, for a while, a new and powerful aristocracy, limited and privileged, and all the moreredoubtable, because its power lay in intellect, and had been won byintellect alone. 

Those who, whether poor or rich, did not fear the monk and priest, atleast feared the "scholar, " who held, so the vulgar believed, the keys ofthat magic lore by which the old necromancers had built cities like Rome, and worked marvels of mechanical and chemical skill, which the degeneratemodern could never equal. 

If the "scholar" stopped in a town, his hostess probably begged of him acharm against toothache or rheumatism. The penniless knight discoursedwith him on alchemy, and the chances of retrieving his fortune by the artof transmuting metals into gold. The queen or bishop worried him inprivate about casting their nativities, and finding their fates among thestars. But the statesman, who dealt with more practical matters, hiredhim as an advocate and rhetorician, who could fight his master's enemieswith the weapons of Demosthenes and Cicero. Wherever the scholar's stepswere turned, he might be master of others, as long as he was master ofhimself. The complaints which he so often uttered concerning the crueltyof fortune, the fickleness of princes, and so forth, were probably nomore just then than such complaints are now. Then, as now, he got hisdeserts; and the world bought him at his own price. If he chose to sellhimself to this patron and to that, he was used and thrown away: if hechose to remain in honourable independence, he was courted and feared. 

Among the successful scholars of the sixteenth century, none surely ismore notable than George Buchanan. The poor Scotch widow's son, by forceof native wit, and, as I think, by force of native worth, fights his wayupward, through poverty and severest persecution, to become thecorrespondent and friend of the greatest literary celebrities of theContinent, comparable, in their opinion, to the best Latin poets ofantiquity; the preceptor of princes; the counsellor and spokesman ofScotch statesmen in the most dangerous of times; and leaves behind himpolitical treatises, which have influenced not only the history of hisown country, but that of the civilised world. 

Such a success could not be attained without making enemies, perhapswithout making mistakes. But the more we study George Buchanan'shistory, the less we shall be inclined to hunt out his failings, the moreinclined to admire his worth. A shrewd, sound-hearted, affectionate man, with a strong love of right and scorn of wrong, and a humour withal whichsaved him--except on really great occasions--from bitterness, and helpedhim to laugh where narrower natures would have only snarled, --he is, inmany respects, a type of those Lowland Scots, who long preserved hisjokes, genuine or reputed, as a common household book. {328} Aschoolmaster by profession, and struggling for long years amid thetemptations which, in those days, degraded his class into cruel andsordid pedants, he rose from the mere pedagogue to be, in the best senseof the word, a courtier; "One, " says Daniel Heinsius, "who seemed notonly born for a court, but born to amend it. He brought to his queenthat at which she could not wonder enough. For, by affecting a certainliberty in censuring morals, he avoided all offence, under the cloak ofsimplicity. " Of him and his compeers, Turnebus, and Muretus, and theirfriend Andrea Govea, Ronsard, the French court poet, said that they hadnothing of the pedagogue about them but the gown and cap. "Austere inface, and rustic in his looks, " says David Buchanan, "but most polishedin style and speech; and continually, even in serious conversation, jesting most wittily. " "Roughhewn, slovenly, and rude, " says Peacham, inhis 'Compleat Gentleman, ' speaking of him, probably, as he appeared inold age, "in his person, behaviour, and fashion; seldom caring for abetter outside than a rugge-gown girt close about him: yet his inside andconceipt in poesie was most rich, and his sweetness and facilitie inverse most excellent. " A typical Lowland Scot, as I said just now, heseems to have absorbed all the best culture which France could affordhim, without losing the strength, honesty, and humour which he inheritedfrom his Stirlingshire kindred. 

The story of his life is easily traced. When an old man, he himselfwrote down the main events of it, at the request of his friends; and hissketch has been filled out by commentators, if not always favourable, atleast erudite. Born in 1506, at the Moss, in Killearn--where an obeliskto his memory, so one reads, has been erected in this century--of afamily "rather ancient than rich, " his father dead in the prime ofmanhood, his grandfather a spendthrift, he and his seven brothers andsisters were brought up by a widowed mother, Agnes Heriot--of whom onewishes to know more; for the rule that great sons have great mothersprobably holds good in her case. George gave signs, while at the villageschool, of future scholarship; and when he was only fourteen, his uncleJames sent him to the University of Paris. Those were hard times; andthe youths, or rather boys, who meant to become scholars, had a cruellife of it, cast desperately out on the wide world to beg and starve, either into self-restraint and success, or into ruin of body and soul. And a cruel life George had. Within two years he was down in a severeillness, his uncle dead, his supplies stopped; and the boy of sixteen gothome, he does not tell how. Then he tried soldiering; and was withAlbany's French Auxiliaries at the ineffectual attack on Wark Castle. Marching back through deep snow, he got a fresh illness, which kept himin bed all winter. Then he and his brother were sent to St. Andrew's, where he got his B. A. At nineteen. The next summer he went to Franceonce more; and "fell, " he says, "into the flames of the Lutheran sect, which was then spreading far and wide. " Two years of penury followed;and then three years of schoolmastering in the College of St. Barbe, which he has immortalised--at least for the few who care to read modernLatin poetry--in his elegy on 'The Miseries of a Parisian Teacher of theHumanities. ' The wretched regent master, pale and suffering, sits up allnight preparing his lecture, biting his nails, and thumping his desk; andfalls asleep for a few minutes, to start up at the sound of the fouro'clock bell, and be in school by five, his Virgil in one hand, and hisrod in the other, trying to do work on his own account at oldmanuscripts, and bawling all the while at his wretched boys, who cheathim, and pay each other to answer to truants' names. The class is allwrong. "One is barefoot, another's shoe is burst, another cries, anotherwrites home. Then comes the rod, the sound of blows and howls; and theday passes in tears. " "Then mass, then another lesson, then more blows;there is hardly time to eat. "--I have no space to finish the picture ofthe stupid misery which, Buchanan says, was ruining his intellect, whileit starved his body. However, happier days came. Gilbert Kennedy, Earlof Cassilis, who seems to have been a noble young gentleman, took him ashis tutor for the next five years; and with him he went back to Scotland. 

But there his plain speaking got him, as it did more than once afterward, into trouble. He took it into his head to write, in imitation of Dunbar, a Latin poem, in which St. Francis asks him in a dream to become a GreyFriar, and Buchanan answered in language which had the unpleasant faultof being too clever, and--to judge from contemporary evidence--only tootrue. The friars said nothing at first: but when King James madeBuchanan tutor to one of his natural sons, they, "men professingmeekness, took the matter somewhat more angrily than befitted men sopious in the opinion of the people. " So Buchanan himself puts it: but, to do the poor friars justice, they must have been angels, not men, ifthey did not writhe somewhat under the scourge which he had laid on them. To be told that there was hardly a place in heaven for monks, was hard tohear and bear. They accused him to the king of heresy: but not beingthen in favour with James, they got no answer, and Buchanan was commandedto repeat the castigation. Having found out that the friars were not tobe touched with impunity, he wrote, he says, a short and ambiguous poem. But the king, who loved a joke, demanded something sharp and stinging, and Buchanan obeyed by writing, but not publishing, the 'Franciscans, ' along satire, compared to which the 'Somnium' was bland and merciful. Thestorm rose. Cardinal Beaton, Buchanan says, wanted to buy him of theking, and then, of course, burn him, as he had just burnt five poorsouls: so, knowing James's avarice, he fled to England, throughfreebooters and pestilence. 

There he found, he says, "men of both factions being burned on the sameday and in the same fire"--a pardonable exaggeration--"by Henry VIII. , inhis old age more intent on his own safety than on the purity ofreligion. " So to his beloved France he went again, to find his enemyBeaton ambassador at Paris. The capital was too hot to hold him; and hefled south to Bourdeaux, to Andrea Govea, the Portuguese principal of theCollege of Gruienne. As Professor of Latin at Bourdeaux, we find himpresenting a Latin poem to Charles V. ; and indulging that fancy of hisfor Latin poetry which seems to us now-a-days a childish pedantry; whichwas then--when Latin was the vernacular tongue of all scholars--aserious, if not altogether a useful, pursuit. Of his tragedies, sofamous in their day--the 'Baptist, ' the 'Medea, ' the 'Jephtha, ' and the'Alcestis'--there is neither space nor need to speak here, save to noticethe bold declamations in the 'Baptist' against tyranny and priestcraft;and to notice also that these tragedies gained for the poor Scotsman, inthe eyes of the best scholars of Europe, a credit amounting almost toveneration. When he returned to Paris, he found occupation at once;and--as his Scots biographers love to record--"three of the most learnedmen in the world taught humanity in the same college, " viz. , Turnebus, Muretus, and Buchanan. 

Then followed a strange episode in his life. A university had beenfounded at Coimbra, in Portugal, and Andrea Govea had been invited tobring thither what French savans he could collect. Buchanan went toPortugal with his brother Patrick; two more Scotsmen, Dempster andRamsay: and a goodly company of French scholars, whose names andhistories may be read in the erudite pages of Dr. Irving, went likewise. All prospered in the new Temple of the Muses for a year or so. Then itshigh-priest, Govea, died; and, by a peripeteia too common in those daysand countries, Buchanan and two of his friends migrated, unwillingly, from the Temple of the Muses for that of Moloch, and found themselves inthe Inquisition. 

Buchanan, it seems, had said that St. Augustine was more of a Lutheranthan a Catholic on the question of the mass. He and his friends hadeaten flesh in Lent; which, he says, almost everyone in Spain did. Buthe was suspected, and with reason, as a heretic; the Grey Friars formedbut one brotherhood throughout Europe; and news among them travelledsurely if not fast: so that the story of the satire written in Scotlandhad reached Portugal. The culprits were imprisoned, examined, bullied--but not tortured--for a year and a half. At the end of thattime, the proofs of heresy, it seems, were insufficient; but lest--saysBuchanan with honest pride--"they should get the reputation of havingvainly tormented a man not altogether unknown, " they sent him for somemonths to a monastery, to be instructed by the monks. "The men, " hesays, "were neither inhuman nor bad, but utterly ignorant of religion;"and Buchanan solaced himself during the intervals of their instructions, by beginning his Latin translation of the Psalms. 

At last he got free, and begged leave to return to France; but in vain. Wearied out at last, he got on board a Candian ship at Lisbon, andescaped to England. But England, he says, during the anarchy of EdwardVI. 's reign, was not a land which suited him; and he returned to hisbeloved France, to fulfil the hopes which he had expressed in hischarming 'Desiderium Lutitiae, ' and the still more charming, because moresimple, 'Adventus in Galliam, ' in which he bids farewell, in mostmelodious verse, to "the hungry moors of wretched Portugal, and her clodsfertile in naught but penury. "

Some seven years succeeded of schoolmastering and verse-writing:--TheLatin paraphrase of the Psalms; another of the 'Alcestis' of Euripides;an Epithalamium on the marriage of poor Mary Stuart, noble and sincere, however fantastic and pedantic, after the manner of the times; "Pomps, "too, for her wedding, and for other public ceremonies, in which all theheathen gods and goddesses figure; epigrams, panegyrics, satires, much ofwhich latter productions he would have consigned to the dust-heap in hisold age, had not his too fond friends persuaded him to republish thefollies and coarsenesses of his youth. He was now one of the most famousscholars in Europe, and the intimate friend of all the great literarymen. Was he to go on to the end, die, and no more? Was he to sink intothe mere pedant; or, if he could not do that, into the mere courtversifier?

The wars of religion saved him, as they saved many another noble soul, from that degradation. The events of 1560-1-2 forced Buchanan, as theyforced many a learned man besides, to choose whether he would be a childof light or a child of darkness; whether he would be a dilettanteclassicist, or a preacher--it might be a martyr--of the Gospel. Buchananmay have left France in "the troubles" merely to enjoy in his own countryelegant and learned repose. He may have fancied that he had found it, when he saw himself, in spite of his public profession of adherence tothe Reformed Kirk, reading Livy every afternoon with his exquisite youngsovereign; master, by her favour, of the temporalities of CrossraguelAbbey, and by the favour of Murray, Principal of St. Leonard's College inSt. Andrew's. Perhaps he fancied at times that "to-morrow was to be asto-day, and much more abundant;" that thenceforth he might read hisfolio, and write his epigram, and joke his joke, as a lazy comfortablepluralist, taking his morning stroll out to the corner where poor Wisharthad been burned, above the blue sea and the yellow sands, and looking upto the castle tower from whence his enemy Beaton's corpse had been hungout; with the comfortable reflection that quietier times had come, andthat whatever evil deeds Archbishop Hamilton might dare, he would notdare to put the Principal of St. Leonard's into the "bottle dungeon. "

If such hopes ever crossed Geordie's keen fancy, they were disappointedsuddenly and fearfully. The fire which had been kindled in France was toreach to Scotland likewise. "Revolutions are not made with rose-water;"and the time was at hand when all good spirits in Scotland, and GeorgeBuchanan among them, had to choose, once and for all, amid danger, confusion, terror, whether they would serve God or Mammon; for to serveboth would be soon impossible. 

Which side, in that war of light and darkness, George Buchanan took, isnotorious. He saw then, as others have seen since, that the two men inScotland who were capable of being her captains in the strife were Knoxand Murray; and to them he gave in his allegiance heart and soul. 

This is the critical epoch in Buchanan's life. By his conduct to QueenMary he must stand or fall. It is my belief that he will stand. It isnot my intention to enter into the details of a matter so painful, soshocking, so prodigious; and now that that question is finally set atrest, by the writings both of Mr. Froude and Mr. Burton, there is no needto allude to it further, save where Buchanan's name is concerned. Onemay now have every sympathy with Mary Stuart; one may regard with awe afigure so stately, so tragic, in one sense so heroic, --for she remindsone rather of the heroine of an old Greek tragedy, swept to her doom bysome irresistible fate, than of a being of our own flesh and blood, andof our modern and Christian times. One may sympathise with the greatwomanhood which charmed so many while she was alive; which has charmed, in later years, so many noble spirits who have believed in her innocence, and have doubtless been elevated and purified by their devotion to onewho seemed to them an ideal being. So far from regarding her as ahateful personage, one may feel oneself forbidden to hate a woman whomGod may have loved, and may have pardoned, to judge from the punishmentso swift, and yet so enduring, which He inflicted. At least, he must sobelieve who holds that punishment is a sign of mercy; that the mostdreadful of all dooms is impunity. Nay, more, those "casket" letters andsonnets may be a relief to the mind of one who believes in her guilt onother grounds; a relief when one finds in them a tenderness, a sweetness, a delicacy, a magnificent self-sacrifice, however hideously misplaced, which shows what a womanly heart was there; a heart which, joined to thatqueenly brain, might have made her a blessing and a glory to Scotland, had not the whole character been warped and ruinate from childhood, by aneducation so abominable, that any one who knows what words she must haveheard, what scenes she must have beheld in France, from her youth up, will wonder that she sinned so little: not that she sinned so much. Onemay feel, in a word, that there is every excuse for those who haveasserted Mary's innocence, because their own high-mindedness shrank frombelieving her guilty: but yet Buchanan, in his own place and time, mayhave felt as deeply that he could do no otherwise than he did. 

The charges against him, as all readers of Scotch literature know well, may be reduced to two heads. 1st. The letters and sonnets wereforgeries. Maitland of Lethington may have forged the letters; Buchanan, according to some, the sonnets. Whoever forged them, Buchanan made useof them in his Detection, knowing them to be forged. 2nd. Whether Marywas innocent or not, Buchanan acted a base and ungrateful part in puttinghimself in the forefront amongst her accusers. He had been her tutor, her pensioner. She had heaped him with favours; and, after all, she washis queen, and a defenceless woman: and yet he returned her kindness, inthe hour of her fall, by invectives fit only for a rancorous and recklessadvocate, determined to force a verdict by the basest arts of oratory. 

Now as to the "casket" letters. I should have thought they bore inthemselves the best evidence of being genuine. I can add nothing to thearguments of Mr. Froude and Mr. Burton, save this: that no one cleverenough to be a forger, would have put together documents so incoherent, and so incomplete. For the evidence of guilt which they contain is, after all, slight and indirect, and, moreover, superfluous altogether;seeing that Mary's guilt was open and palpable, before the supposeddiscovery of the letters, to every person at home and abroad who had anyknowledge of the facts. As for the alleged inconsistency of the letterswith proven facts: the answer is, that whosoever wrote the letters wouldbe more likely to know facts which were taking place around them than anycritic could be one hundred or three hundred years afterwards. But ifthese mistakes as to facts actually exist in them, they are only a freshargument for their authenticity. Mary, writing in agony and confusion, might easily make a mistake: forgers would only take too good care tomake none. 

But the strongest evidence in favour of the letters and sonnets, in spiteof the arguments of good Dr. Whittaker and other apologists for Mary, isto be found in their tone. A forger in those coarse days would have madeMary write in some Semiramis or Roxana vein, utterly alien to thetenderness, the delicacy, the pitiful confusion of mind, the consciousweakness, the imploring and most feminine trust which makes the letters, to those who--as I do--believe in them, more pathetic than any fictitioussorrows which poets could invent. More than one touch, indeed, of utterself-abasement, in the second letter, is so unexpected, so subtle, andyet so true to the heart of woman, that--as has been well said--if it wasinvented there must have existed in Scotland an earlier Shakespeare; whoyet has died without leaving any other sign, for good or evil, of hisdramatic genius. 

As for the theory (totally unsupported) that Buchanan forged the poemusually called the Sonnets; it is paying old Geordie's genius, howeverversatile it may have been, too high a compliment to believe that hecould have written both them and the Detection; while it is paying hisshrewdness too low a compliment to believe that he could have put intothem, out of mere carelessness or stupidity, the well-known line, whichseems incompatible with the theory both of the letters and of his ownDetection; and which has ere now been brought forward as a fresh proof ofMary's innocence. 

And, as with the letters, so with the sonnets: their delicacy, theirgrace, their reticence, are so many arguments against their having beenforged by any Scot of the sixteenth century, and least of all by one inwhose character--whatever his other virtues may have been--delicacy wasby no means the strongest point. 

As for the complaint that Buchanan was ungrateful to Mary, it must besaid: That even if she, and not Murray, had bestowed on him thetemporalities of Crossraguel Abbey four years before, it was merely fairpay for services fairly rendered; and I am not aware that payment, oreven favours, however gracious, bind any man's soul and conscience inquestions of highest morality and highest public importance. And theimportance of that question cannot be exaggerated. At a moment whenScotland seemed struggling in death-throes of anarchy, civil andreligious, and was in danger of becoming a prey either to England or toFrance, if there could not be formed out of the heart of her a people, steadfast, trusty, united, strong politically because strong in the fearof God and the desire of righteousness--at such a moment as this, a crimehad been committed, the like of which had not been heard in Europe sincethe tragedy of Joan of Naples. All Europe stood aghast. The honour ofthe Scottish nation was at stake. More than Mary or Bothwell were knownto be implicated in the deed; and--as Buchanan puts it in the opening ofhis 'De Jure Regni'--"The fault of some few was charged upon all; and thecommon hatred of a particular person did redound to the whole nation; sothat even such as were remote from any suspicion were inflamed by theinfamy of men's crimes. " {343}

To vindicate the national honour, and to punish the guilty, as well as tosave themselves from utter anarchy, the great majority of the Scotchnation had taken measures against Mary which required explicitjustification in the sight of Europe, as Buchanan frankly confesses inthe opening of his "De Jure Regni. " The chief authors of those measureshad been summoned, perhaps unwisely and unjustly, to answer for theirconduct to the Queen of England. Queen Elizabeth--a fact which wasnotorious enough then, though it has been forgotten till the last fewyears--was doing her utmost to shield Mary. Buchanan was deputed, itseems, to speak out for the people of Scotland; and certainly neverpeople had an abler apologist. If he spoke fiercely, savagely, it mustbe remembered that he spoke of a fierce and savage matter; if he used--andit may be abused--all the arts of oratory, it must be remembered that hewas fighting for the honour, and it may be for the national life, of hiscountry, and striking--as men in such cases have a right to strike--ashard as he could. If he makes no secret of his indignation, and evencontempt, it must be remembered that indignation and contempt may wellhave been real with him, while they were real with the soundest part ofhis countrymen; with that reforming middle class, comparatively untaintedby French profligacy, comparatively undebauched by feudal subservience, which has been the leaven which has leavened the whole Scottish people inthe last three centuries with the elements of their greatness. If, finally, he heaps up against the unhappy Queen charges which Mr. Burtonthinks incredible, it must be remembered that, as he well says, thesecharges give the popular feeling about Queen Mary; and it must beremembered also, that that popular feeling need not have been altogetherunfounded. Stories which are incredible, thank God, in these milderdays, were credible enough then, because, alas! they were so often true. Things more ugly than any related of poor Mary, were possible enough--asno one knew better than Buchanan--in that very French court in which Maryhad been brought up; things as ugly were possible in Scotland then, andfor at least a century later; and while we may hope that Buchanan hasoverstated his case, we must not blame him too severely for yielding to atemptation common to all men of genius when their creative power isroused to its highest energy by a great cause and a great indignation. 

And that the genius was there, no man can doubt; one cannot read that"hideously eloquent" description of Kirk o' Field, which Mr. Burton haswell chosen as a specimen of Buchanan's style, without seeing that we areface to face with a genius of a very lofty order: not, indeed, of theloftiest--for there is always in Buchanan's work, it seems to me, a wantof unconsciousness, and a want of tenderness--but still a genius worthyto be placed beside those ancient writers from whom he took his manner. Whether or not we agree with his contemporaries, who say that he equalledVirgil in Latin poetry, we may place him fairly as a prose writer by theside of Demosthenes, Cicero, or Tacitus. And so I pass from this painfulsubject; only quoting--if I may be permitted to quote--Mr. Burton's wiseand gentle verdict on the whole. "Buchanan, " he says, "though a zealousProtestant, had a good deal of the Catholic and sceptical spirit ofErasmus, and an admiring eye for everything that was great and beautiful. Like the rest of his countrymen, he bowed himself in presence of thelustre that surrounded the early career of his mistress. More than oncehe expressed his pride and reverence in the inspiration of a geniusdeemed by his contemporaries to be worthy of the theme. There is not, perhaps, to be found elsewhere in literature so solemn a memorial ofshipwrecked hopes, of a sunny opening and a stormy end, as one finds inturning the leaves of the volume which contains the beautiful epigram'Nympha Caledoniae' in one part, the 'Detectio Mariae Reginae' inanother; and this contrast is, no doubt, a faithful parallel of thereaction in the popular mind. This reaction seems to have been general, and not limited to the Protestant party; for the conditions under whichit became almost a part of the creed of the Church of Rome to believe inher innocence had not arisen. "

If Buchanan, as some of his detractors have thought, raised himself bysubserviency to the intrigues of the Regent Murray, the best heads inScotland seem to have been of a different opinion. The murder of Murraydid not involve Buchanan's fall. He had avenged it, as far as pen coulddo it, by that 'Admonition Direct to the Trew Lordis, ' in which he showedhimself as great a master of Scottish, as he was of Latin, prose. Hissatire of the 'Chameleon, ' though its publication was stopped byMaitland, must have been read in manuscript by many of those same "TrueLords;" and though there were nobler instincts in Maitland than anyBuchanan gave him credit for, the satire breathed an honest indignationagainst that wily turncoat's misdoings, which could not but recommend theauthor to all honest men. Therefore it was, I presume, and not becausehe was a rogue, and a hired literary spadassin, that to the best heads inScotland he seemed so useful, it may be so worthy, a man, that he beprovided with continually increasing employment. As tutor to James I. ;as director, for a short time, of the chancery; as keeper of the privyseal, and privy councillor; as one of the commissioners for codifying thelaws, and again--for in the semi-anarchic state of Scotland, governmenthad to do everything in the way of organisation--in the committee forpromulgating a standard Latin grammar; in the committee for reforming theUniversity of St. Andrew's: in all these Buchanan's talents were againand again called for; and always ready. The value of his work, especially that for the reform of St. Andrew's, must be judged byScotchmen, rather than by an Englishman: but all that one knows of itjustifies Melville's sentence in the well-known passage in his memoirs, wherein he describes the tutors and household of the young King. "Mr. George was a Stoic philosopher, who looked not far before him;" in plainwords, a high-minded and right-minded man, bent on doing the duty whichlay nearest him. The worst that can be said against him during thesetimes is, that his name appears with the sum of 100 pounds against it, asone of those "who were to be entertained in Scotland by pensions out ofEngland"; and Ruddiman, of course, comments on the fact by saying thatBuchanan "was at length to act under the threefold character ofmalcontent, reformer, and pensioner:" but it gives no proof whatsoeverthat Buchanan ever received any such bribe; and in the very month, seemingly, in which that list was written--10th March, 1579--Buchanan hadgiven a proof to the world that he was not likely to be bribed or bought, by publishing a book, as offensive probably to Queen Elizabeth as it wasto his own royal pupil; namely, his famous 'De Jure Regni apud Scotos, 'the very primer, according to many great thinkers, of constitutionalliberty. He dedicates that book to King James, "not only as his monitor, but also an importunate and bold exactor, which in these his tender andflexible years may conduct him in safety past the rocks of flattery. " Hehas complimented James already on his abhorrence of flattery, "hisinclination far above his years for undertaking all heroical and nobleattempts, his promptitude in obeying his instructors and governors, andall who give him sound admonition, and his judgment and diligence inexamining affairs, so that no man's authority can have much weight withhim unless it be confirmed by probable reasons. " Buchanan may havethought that nine years of his stern rule had eradicated some of James'sill conditions; the petulance which made him kill the Master of Mar'ssparrow, in trying to wrest it out of his hand; the carelessness withwhich--if the story told by Chytraeus, on the authority of Buchanan'snephew, be true--James signed away his crown to Buchanan for fifteendays, and only discovered his mistake by seeing Buchanan act in opencourt the character of King of Scots. Buchanan had at last made him ascholar; he may have fancied that he had made him likewise a manful man:yet he may have dreaded that, as James grew up, the old inclinationswould return in stronger and uglier shapes, and that flattery might be, as it was after all, the cause of James's moral ruin. He at least willbe no flatterer. He opens the dialogue which he sends to the king, witha calm but distinct assertion of his mother's guilt, and a justificationof the conduct of men who were now most of them past helping Buchanan, for they were laid in their graves; and then goes on to argue fairly, butto lay down firmly, in a sort of Socratic dialogue, those very principlesby loyalty to which the House of Hanover has reigned, and will reign, over these realms. So with his History of Scotland; later antiquarianresearches have destroyed the value of the earlier portions of it: butthey have surely increased the value of those later portions, in whichBuchanan inserted so much which he had already spoken out in hisDetection of Mary. In that book also, "liberavit animam suam;" he spokehis mind, fearless of consequences, in the face of a king who he musthave known--for Buchanan was no dullard--regarded him with deep dislike, who might in a few years be able to work his ruin. 

But those few years were not given to Buchanan. He had all but done hiswork, and he hastened to get it over before the night should come whereinno man can work. One must be excused for telling--one would not tell itin a book intended to be read only by Scotchmen, who know or ought toknow the tale already--how the two Melvilles and Buchanan's nephew Thomaswent to see him in Edinburgh, in September, 1581, hearing that he wasill, and his History still in the press; and how they found the old sage, true to his schoolmaster's instincts, teaching the Hornbook to hisservant-lad; and how he told them that doing that was "better thanstealing sheep, or sitting idle, which was as bad, " and showed them thatdedication to James I. , in which he holds up to his imitation as a herowhose equal was hardly to be found in history, that very King David whoseliberality to the Romish Church provoked James's witticism that "Davidwas a sair saint for the crown. " Andrew Melville, so James Melvillesays, found fault with the style. Buchanan replied that he could do nomore for thinking of another thing, which was to die. They then went toArbuthnot's printing-house, and inspected the history, as far as thatterrible passage concerning Rizzio's burial, where Mary is represented as"laying the miscreant almost in the arms of Maud de Valois, the latequeen. " Alarmed, and not without reason, at such plain speaking, theystopped the press, and went back to Buchanan's house. Buchanan was inbed. "He was going, " he said, "the way of welfare. " They asked him tosoften the passage; the king might prohibit the whole work. "Tell me, man, " said Buchanan, "if I have told the truth. " They could not, orwould not, deny it. "Then I will abide his feud, and all his kin's;pray, pray to God for me, and let Him direct all. " "So, " says Melville, "by the printing of his chronicle was ended, this most learned, wise, andgodly man ended his mortal life. "

Camden has a hearsay story--written, it must be remembered, in James I. 'stime--that Buchanan, on his death-bed repented of his harsh words againstQueen Mary; and an old Lady Rosyth is said to have said that when she wasyoung a certain David Buchanan recollected hearing some such words fromGeorge Buchanan's own mouth. Those who will, may read what Ruddiman andLove have said, and oversaid, on both sides of the question: whateverconclusion they come to, it will probably not be that to which GeorgeChalmers comes in his life of Ruddiman: that "Buchanan, like other liars, who by the repetition of falsehoods are induced to consider the fictionas truth, had so often dwelt with complacency on the forgeries of hisDetections, and the figments of his History, that he at length regardedhis fictions and his forgeries as most authentic facts. "

At all events his fictions and his forgeries had not paid him in thatcoin which base men generally consider the only coin worth having, namely, the good things of this life. He left nothing behind him--if atleast Dr. Irving has rightly construed the "Testament Dative" which hegives in his appendix--save arrears to the sum of 100_l_. Of hisCrossraguel pension. We may believe as we choose the story inMackenzie's 'Scotch Writers, ' that when he felt himself dying, he askedhis servant Young about the state of his funds, and finding he had notenough to bury himself withal, ordered what he had to be given to thepoor, and said that if they did not choose to bury him they might let himlie where he was, or cast him in a ditch, the matter was very little tohim. He was buried, it seems, at the expense of the city of Edinburgh, in the Greyfriars' Churchyard--one says in a plain turf grave--among themarble monuments which covered the bones of worse or meaner men; andwhether or not the "Throughstone" which, "sunk under the ground in theGreyfriars, " was raised and cleaned by the Council of Edinburgh in 1701, was really George Buchanan's, the reigning powers troubled themselveslittle for several generations where he lay. 

For Buchanan's politics were too advanced for his age. Not only CatholicScotsmen, like Blackwood, Winzet, and Ninian, but Protestants, like SirThomas Craig and Sir John Wemyss, could not stomach the 'De Jure Regni. 'They may have had some reason on their side. In the then anarchic stateof Scotland, organisation and unity under a common head may have beenmore important than the assertion of popular rights. Be that as it may, in 1584, only two years after his death, the Scots Parliament condemnedhis Dialogue and History as untrue, and commanded all possessors ofcopies to deliver them up, that they might be purged of "the offensiveand extraordinary matters" which they contained. The 'De Jure Regni' wasagain prohibited in Scotland, in 1664, even in manuscript; and in 1683, the whole of Buchanan's political works had the honour of being burned bythe University of Oxford, in company with those of Milton, Languet, andothers, as "pernicious books, and damnable doctrines, destructive to thesacred persons of Princes, their state and government, and of all humansociety. " And thus the seed which Buchanan had sown, and Milton hadwatered--for the allegation that Milton borrowed from Buchanan isprobably true, and equally honourable to both--lay trampled into theearth, and seemingly lifeless, till it tillered out, and blossomed, andbore fruit to a good purpose, in the Revolution of 1688. 

To Buchanan's clear head and stout heart, Scotland owes, as England oweslikewise, much of her modern liberty. But Scotland's debt to him, itseems to me, is even greater on the count of morality, public andprivate. What the morality of the Scotch upper classes was like, inBuchanan's early days, is too notorious; and there remains proofenough--in the writings, for instance, of Sir David Lindsay--that themorality of the populace which looked up to the nobles as its example andits guide, was not a whit better. As anarchy increased, immorality waslikely to increase likewise; and Scotland was in serious danger offalling into such a state as that into which Poland fell, to its ruin, within a hundred and fifty years after; in which the savagery offeudalism, without its order or its chivalry, would be varnished over bya thin coating of French "civilisation, " and, as in the case of Bothwell, the vices of the court of Paris should be added to those of the Northernfreebooter. To deliver Scotland from that ruin, it was needed that sheshould be united into one people, strong, not in mere political, but inmoral ideas; strong by the clear sense of right and wrong, by the beliefin the government and the judgments of a living God. And the tone whichBuchanan, like Knox, adopted concerning the great crimes of their day, helped notably that national salvation. It gathered together, organised, strengthened, the scattered and wavering elements of public morality. Itassured the hearts of all men who loved the right and hated the wrong;and taught a whole nation to call acts by their just names, whoever mightbe the doers of them. It appealed to the common conscience of men. Itproclaimed a universal and God-given morality, a bar at which all, fromthe lowest to the highest, must alike be judged. 

The tone was stern: but there was need of sternness. Moral life anddeath were in the balance. If the Scots people were to be told that thecrimes which roused their indignation were excusable, or beyondpunishment, or to be hushed up and slipped over in any way, there was anend of morality among them. Every man, from the greatest to the least, would go and do likewise, according to his powers of evil. That methodwas being tried in France, and in Spain likewise, during those veryyears. Notorious crimes were hushed up under pretence of loyalty;excused as political necessities; smiled away as natural and pardonableweaknesses. The result was the utter demoralisation, both of France andSpain. Knox and Buchanan, the one from the stand-point of an old Hebrewprophet, the other rather from that of a Juvenal or a Tacitus, tried theother method, and called acts by their just names, appealing alike toconscience and to God. The result was virtue and piety, and that manlyindependence of soul which is thought compatible with hearty loyalty, ina country labouring under heavy disadvantages, long divided almost intotwo hostile camps, two rival races. 

And the good influence was soon manifest, not only in those who sidedwith Buchanan and his friends, but in those who most opposed them. TheRoman Catholic preachers, who at first asserted Mary's right to impunity, while they allowed her guilt, grew silent for shame, and set themselvesto assert her entire innocence; while the Scots who have followed theirexample have, to their honour, taken up the same ground. They havefought Buchanan on the ground of fact, not on the ground of morality:they have alleged--as they had a fair right to do--the probability ofintrigue and forgery in an age so profligate: the improbability that aQueen so gifted by nature and by fortune, and confessedly for a longwhile so strong and so spotless, should as it were by a sudden insanityhave proved so untrue to herself. Their noblest and purest sympathieshave been enlisted--and who can blame them?--in loyalty to a Queen, chivalry to a woman, pity for the unfortunate and--as they conceived--theinnocent; but whether they have been right or wrong in their view offacts, the Scotch partisans of Mary have always--as far as I know--beenright in their view of morals; they have never deigned to admit Mary'sguilt, and then to palliate it by those sentimental, or rather sensual, theories of human nature, too common in a certain school of Frenchliterature, --too common, alas! in a certain school of modern Englishnovels. They have not said, "She did it; but after all, was the deed sovery inexcusable?" They have said, "The deed was inexcusable: but shedid not do it. " And so the Scotch admirers of Mary, who have numberedamong them many a pure and noble, as well as many a gifted spirit, havekept at least themselves unstained; and have shown, whether consciouslyor not, that they too share in that sturdy Scotch moral sense which hasbeen so much strengthened--as I believe--by the plain speech of good oldGeorge Buchanan. 

RONDELET, THE HUGUENOT NATURALIST {358}

"Apollo, god of medicine, exiled from the rest of the earth, was strayingonce across the Narbonnaise in Gaul, seeking to fix his abode there. Driven from Asia, from Africa, and from the rest of Europe, he wanderedthrough all the towns of the province in search of a place propitious forhim and for his disciples. At last he perceived a new city, constructedfrom the ruins of Maguelonne, of Lattes, and of Substantion. Hecontemplated long its site, its aspect, its neighbourhood, and resolvedto establish on this hill of Montpellier a temple for himself and hispriests. All smiled on his desires. By the genius of the soil, by thecharacter of the inhabitants, no town is more fit for the culture ofletters, and above all of medicine. What site is more delicious and morelovely? A heaven pure and smiling; a city built with magnificence; menborn for all the labours of the intellect. All around vast horizons andenchanting sites--meadows, vines, olives, green champaigns; mountains andhills, rivers, brooks, lagoons, and the sea. Everywhere a luxuriantvegetation--everywhere the richest production of the land and the water. Hail to thee, sweet and dear city! Hail, happy abode of Apollo, whospreadest afar the light of the glory of thy name!"

"This fine tirade, " says Dr. Maurice Raynaud--from whose charming book onthe 'Doctors of the Time of Moliere' I quote--"is not, as one mightthink, the translation of a piece of poetry. It is simply part of apublic oration by Francois Fanchon, one of the most illustriouschancellors of the faculty of medicine of Montpellier in the seventeenthcentury. " "From time immemorial, " he says, "'the faculty' of Montpellierhad made itself remarkable by a singular mixture of the sacred and theprofane. The theses which were sustained there began by an invocation toGod, the Blessed Virgin, and St. Luke, and ended by these words:--'Thisthesis will be sustained in the sacred Temple of Apollo. '"

But however extravagant Chancellor Fanchon's praises of his native citymay seem, they are really not exaggerated. The Narbonnaise, orLanguedoc, is perhaps the most charming district of charming France. Inthe far north-east gleam the white Alps; in the far south-west the whitePyrenees; and from the purple glens and yellow downs of the Cevennes onthe northwest, the Herault slopes gently down towards the "Etangs, " orgreat salt-water lagoons, and the vast alluvial flats of the Camargue, the field of Caius Marius, where still run herds of half-wild horses, descended from some ancient Roman stock; while beyond all glitters theblue Mediterranean. The great almond orchards, each one sheet of rose-colour in spring; the mulberry orchards, the oliveyards, the vineyards, cover every foot of available upland soil: save where the rugged and ariddowns are sweet with a thousand odoriferous plants, from which the beesextract the famous white honey of Narbonne. The native flowers andshrubs, of a beauty and richness rather Eastern than European, have madethe 'Flora Monspeliensis, ' and with it the names of Rondelet and hisdisciples, famous among botanists; and the strange fish and shells uponits shores afforded Rondelet materials for his immortal work upon the'Animals of the Sea. ' The innumerable wild fowl of the "Bouches duRhone;" the innumerable songsters and other birds of passage, many ofthem unknown in these islands, and even in the north of France itself, which haunt every copse of willow and aspen along the brook sides; thegaudy and curious insects which thrive beneath that clear, fierce, andyet bracing sunlight; all these have made the district of Montpellier ahome prepared by Nature for those who study and revere her. 

Neither was Chancellor Fanchon misled by patriotism, when he said thepleasant people who inhabit that district are fit for all the labours ofthe intellect. They are a very mixed race, and like most mixed races, quick-witted, and handsome also. There is probably much Roman bloodamong them, especially in the towns; for Languedoc, or GalliaNarbonnensis, as it was called of old, was said to be more Roman thanRome itself. The Roman remains are more perfect and more interesting--sothe late Dr. Whewell used to say--than any to be seen now in Italy; andthe old capital, Narbonne itself, was a complete museum of Romanantiquities ere Francis I. Destroyed it, in order to fortify the cityupon a modern system against the invading armies of Charles V. Theremust be much Visigothic blood likewise in Languedoc; for the VisigothicKings held their courts there from the fifth century, until the time thatthey were crushed by the invading Moors. Spanish blood, likewise, theremay be; for much of Languedoc was held in the early Middle Age by thosedescendants of Eudes of Acquitaine who established themselves as kings ofMajorca and Arragon; and Languedoc did not become entirely French till1349, when Philip le Bel bought Montpellier of those potentates. TheMoors, too, may have left some traces of their race behind. They heldthe country from about A. D. 713 to 758, when they were finally expelledby Charles Martel and Eudes. One sees to this day their towers of meagrestone-work, perched on the grand Roman masonry of those oldamphitheatres, which they turned into fortresses. One may see, too--sotradition holds--upon those very amphitheatres the stains of the fireswith which Charles Martel smoked them out; and one may see, too, or fancythat one sees, in the aquiline features, the bright black eyes, the litheand graceful gestures, which are so common in Languedoc, some touch ofthe old Mahommedan race, which passed like a flood over that Christianland. 

Whether or not the Moors left behind any traces of their blood, they leftbehind, at least, traces of their learning; for the university ofMontpellier claimed to have been founded by Moors at a date of altogetherabysmal antiquity. They looked upon the Arabian physicians of the MiddleAge, on Avicenna and Averrhoes, as modern innovators, and derived theirparentage from certain mythic doctors of Cordova, who, when the Moorswere expelled from Spain in the eighth century, fled to Montpellier, bringing with them traditions of that primeval science which had beenrevealed to Adam while still in Paradise; and founded Montpellier, themother of all the universities in Europe. Nay, some went further still, and told of Bengessaus and Ferragius, the physicians of Charlemagne, andof Marilephus, chief physician of King Chilperic, and even--if a letterof St. Bernard's was to be believed--of a certain bishop who went asearly as the second century to consult the doctors of Montpellier; and itwould have been in vain to reply to them that in those days, and longafter them, Montpellier was not yet built. The facts are said to be:that as early as the beginning of the thirteenth century Montpellier hadits schools of law, medicine, and arts, which were erected into auniversity by Pope Nicholas IV. In 1289. 

The university of Montpellier, like--I believe--most foreign ones, resembled more a Scotch than an English university. The students lived, for the most part, not in colleges, but in private lodgings, andconstituted a republic of their own, ruled by an abbe of the scholars, one of themselves, chosen by universal suffrage. A terror they wereoften to the respectable burghers, for they had all the right to carryarms; and a plague likewise, for, if they ran in debt, their creditorswere forbidden to seize their books, which, with their swords, weregenerally all the property they possessed. If, moreover, any one set upa noisy or unpleasant trade near their lodgings, the scholars couldcompel the town authorities to turn him out. They were most of them, probably, mere boys of from twelve to twenty, living poorly, workinghard, and--those at least of them who were in the colleges--cruellybeaten daily, after the fashion of those times; but they seem to havecomforted themselves under their troubles by a good deal of wild life outof school, by rambling into the country on the festivals of the saints, and now and then by acting plays; notably, that famous one which Rabelaiswrote for them in 1531: "The moral comedy of the man who had a dumbwife;" which "joyous patelinage" remains unto this day in the shape of awell-known comic song. That comedy young Rondelet must have seen acted. The son of a druggist, spicer, and grocer--the three trades were thencombined--in Montpellier, and born in 1507, he had been destined for thecloister, being a sickly lad. His uncle, one of the canons ofMaguelonne, near by, had even given him the revenues of a small chapel--ajob of nepotism which was common enough in those days. But his heart wasin science and medicine. He set off, still a mere boy, to Paris to studythere; and returned to Montpellier, at the age of eighteen, to studyagain. 

The next year, 1530, while still a scholar himself, he was appointedprocurator of the scholars--a post which brought him in a small fee oneach matriculation--and that year he took a fee, among others, from oneof the most remarkable men of that or of any age, Francois Rabelaishimself. 

And what shall I say of him?--who stands alone, like Shakespeare, in hisgeneration; possessed of colossal learning--of all science which could begathered in his days--of practical and statesmanlike wisdom--of knowledgeof languages, ancient and modern, beyond all his compeers--of eloquence, which when he speaks of pure and noble things becomes heroic, and, as itwere, inspired--of scorn for meanness, hypocrisy, ignorance--of esteem, genuine and earnest, for the Holy Scriptures, and for the more moderateof the Reformers who were spreading the Scriptures in Europe, --and allthis great light wilfully hidden, not under a bushel, but under adunghill. He is somewhat like Socrates in face, and in characterlikewise; in him, as in Socrates, the demigod and the satyr, the man andthe ape, are struggling for the mastery. In Socrates, the true manconquers, and comes forth high and pure; in Rabelais, alas! the victor isthe ape, while the man himself sinks down in cynicism, sensuality, practical jokes, foul talk. He returns to Paris, to live an idle, luxurious life; to die--says the legend--saying, "I go to seek a greatperhaps, " and to leave behind him little save a school ofPantagruelists--careless young gentlemen, whose ideal was to laugh ateverything, to believe in nothing, and to gratify their five senses likethe brutes which perish. There are those who read his books to make themlaugh; the wise man, when he reads them, will be far more inclined toweep. Let any young man who may see these words remember, that in him, as in Rabelais, the ape and the man are struggling for the mastery. Lethim take warning by the fate of one who was to him as a giant to a pigmy;and think of Tennyson's words:--

 "Arise, and fly The reeling faun, the sensual feast; Strive upwards, working out the beast, And let the ape and tiger die. "

But to return. Down among them there at Montpellier, like a brilliantmeteor, flashed this wonderful Rabelais, in the year 1530. He had fled, some say, for his life. Like Erasmus, he had no mind to be a martyr, andhe had been terrified at the execution of poor Louis de Berquin, hisfriend, and the friend of Erasmus likewise. This Louis de Berquin, a manwell known in those days, was a gallant young gentleman and scholar, holding a place in the court of Francis I. , who had translated intoFrench the works of Erasmus, Luther, and Melancthon, and had assertedthat it was heretical to invoke the Virgin Mary instead of the HolySpirit, or to call her our Hope and our Life, which titles--Berquinaverred--belonged alone to God. Twice had the doctors of the Sorbonne, with that terrible persecutor, Noel Beda, at their head, seized poorBerquin, and tried to burn his books and him; twice had that angel inhuman form, Marguerite d'Angouleme, sister of Francis I. , saved him fromtheir clutches; but when Francis--taken prisoner at the battle ofPavia--at last returned from his captivity in Spain, the suppression ofheresy and the burning of heretics seemed to him and to his mother, Louise of Savoy, a thank-offering so acceptable to God, that LouisBerquin--who would not, in spite of the entreaties of Erasmus, purchasehis life by silence--was burnt at last on the Place de Greve, being firststrangled, because he was of gentle blood. 

Montpellier received its famous guest joyfully. Rabelais was now forty-two years old, and a distinguished savant; so they excused him his threeyears' undergraduate's career, and invested him at once with the red gownof the bachelors. That red gown--or, rather, the ragged phantom of it--isstill shown at Montpellier, and must be worn by each bachelor when hetakes his degree. Unfortunately, antiquarians assure us that theprecious garment has been renewed again and again--the students havingclipped bits of it away for relics, and clipped as earnestly from the newgowns as their predecessors had done from the authentic original. 

Doubtless the coming of such a man among them to lecture on the Aphorismsof Hippocrates, and the Ars Parva of Galen, not from the Latintranslations then in use, "but from original Greek texts, with commentsand corrections of his own, must have had a great influence on the mindsof the Montpellier students; and still more influence--and that notaltogether a good one--must Rabelais' lighter talk have had, as helounged--so the story goes--in his dressing-gown upon the public place, picking up quaint stories from the cattle-drivers off the Cevennes, andthe villagers who came in to sell their olives and their grapes, theirvinegar and their vine-twig faggots, as they do unto this day. To himmay be owing much of the sound respect for natural science, and much, too, of the contempt for the superstition around them, which is notablein that group of great naturalists who were boys in Montpellier at thatday. Rabelais seems to have liked Rondelet, and no wonder: he was acheery, lovable, honest little fellow, very fond of jokes, a greatmusician and player on the violin, and who, when he grew rich, likednothing so well as to bring into his house any buffoon or strollingplayer to make fun for him. Vivacious he was, hot-tempered, forgiving, and with a power of learning and a power of work which were prodigious, even in those hard-working days. Rabelais chaffs Rondelet, under thename of Rondibilis; for, indeed, Rondelet grew up into a very round, fat, little man; but Rabelais puts excellent sense into his mouth, cynicalenough, and too cynical, but both learned and humorous; and, if he laughsat him for being shocked at the offer of a fee, and taking it, nevertheless, kindly enough, Rondelet is not the first doctor who hasdone that, neither will he be the last. 

Rondelet, in his turn, put on the red robe of the bachelor, and received, on taking his degree, his due share of fisticuffs from his dearestfriends, according to the ancient custom of the University ofMontpellier. He then went off to practise medicine in a village at thefoot of the Alps, and, half-starved, to teach little children. Then hefound he must learn Greek; went off to Paris a second time, andalleviated his poverty there somewhat by becoming tutor to a son of theViscomte de Turenne. There he met Gonthier of Andernach, who had taughtanatomy at Louvain to the great Vesalius, and learned from him todissect. We next find him setting up as a medical man amid the wildvolcanic hills of the Auvergne, struggling still with poverty, likeErasmus, like George Buchanan, like almost every great scholar in thosedays; for students then had to wander from place to place, generally onfoot, in search of new teachers, in search of books, in search of thenecessaries of life; undergoing such an amount of bodily and mental toilas makes it wonderful that all of them did not--as some of them doubtlessdid--die under the hard training, or, at best, desert the penurious Musesfor the paternal shop or plough. 

Rondelet got his doctorate in 1537, and next year fell in love with andmarried a beautiful young girl called Jeanne Sandre, who seems to havebeen as poor as he. 

But he had gained, meanwhile, a powerful patron and the patronage of thegreat was then as necessary to men of letters as the patronage of thepublic is now. Guillaume Pellicier, Bishop of Maguelonne--or rather thenof Montpellier itself, whither he had persuaded Paul II. To transfer theancient see--was a model of the literary gentleman of the sixteenthcentury; a savant, a diplomat, a collector of books and manuscripts, Greek, Hebrew, and Syriac, which formed the original nucleus of thepresent library of the Louvre; a botanist, too, who loved to wander withRondelet collecting plants and flowers. He retired from public life topeace and science at Montpellier, when to the evil days of his master, Francis I. , succeeded the still worse days of Henry II. , and Diana ofPoitiers. That Jezebel of France could conceive no more natural or easyway of atoning for her own sins than that of hunting down heretics, andfeasting her wicked eyes--so it is said--upon their dying torments. Bishop Pellicier fell under suspicion of heresy: very probably with somejustice. He fell, too, under suspicion of leading a life unworthy of acelibate churchman, a fault which--if it really existed--was, in thosedays, pardonable enough in an orthodox prelate, but not so in one whoseorthodoxy was suspected. And for a while Pellicier was in prison. Afterhis release he gave himself up to science, with Rondelet, and the schoolof disciples who were growing up around him. They rediscovered togetherthe Garum, that classic sauce, whose praises had been sung of old byHorace, Martial, and Ausonius; and so childlike, superstitious if youwill, was the reverence in the sixteenth century for classic antiquity, that when Pellicier and Rondelet discovered that the Garum was made fromthe fish called Picarel--called Garon by the fishers of Antibes, andGiroli at Venice, both these last names corruptions of the LatinGerres--then did the two fashionable poets of France, Etienne Dolet andClement Marot, think it not unworthy of their muse to sing the praises ofthe sauce which Horace had sung of old. A proud day, too, was it forPellicier and Rondelet, when wandering somewhere in the marshes of theCamargue, a scent of garlic caught the nostrils of the gentle bishop, andin the lovely pink flowers of the water-germander he recognised theScordium of the ancients. "The discovery, " says Professor Planchon, "made almost as much noise as that of the famous Garum; for at thatmoment of naive fervour on behalf of antiquity, to rediscover a plant ofDioscorides or of Pliny was a good fortune and almost an event. "

I know not whether, after his death, the good bishop's bones reposedbeneath some gorgeous tomb, bedizened with the incongruous half-Paganstatues of the Renaissance: but this, at least, is certain, thatRondelet's disciples imagined for him a monument more enduring than ofmarble or of brass, more graceful and more curiously wrought than all thesculptures of Torrigiano or Cellini, Baccio Bandinelli or Michael Angelohimself. For they named a lovely little lilac snapdragon, _LinariaDomini Pellicerii_, --"Lord Pellicier's toad-flax;" and that name it willkeep, we may believe, as long as winter and summer shall endure. 

But to return. To this good patron--who was the Ambassador at Venice--thenewly-married Rondelet determined to apply for employment; and to Venicehe would have gone, leaving his bride behind, had he not been stayed byone of those angels who sometimes walk the earth in women's shape. JeanneSandre had an elder sister, Catherine, who had brought her up. She wasmarried to a wealthy man, but she had no children of her own. For fouryears she and her good husband had let the Rondelets lodge with them, andnow she was a widow, and to part with them was more than she could bear. She carried Rondelet off from the students who were seeing him safe outof the city, brought him back, settled on him the same day half herfortune, and soon after settled on him the whole, on the sole conditionthat she should live with him and her sister. For years afterwards shewatched over the pretty young wife and her two girls and three boys--thethree boys, alas! all died young--and over Rondelet himself, who, immersed in books and experiments, was utterly careless about money; andwas to them all a mother, advising, guiding, managing, and regarded byRondelet with genuine gratitude as his guardian angel. 

Honour and good fortune, in the worldly sense, now poured in upon thedruggist's son. Pellicier, his own bishop, stood godfather to his first-born daughter. Montluc, Bishop of Valence, and that wise and learnedstatesman, the Cardinal of Tournon, stood godfathers a few years later tohis twin boys; and what was of still more solid worth to him, CardinalTournon took him to Antwerp, Bordeaux, Bayonne, and more than once toRome; and in these Italian journeys of his he collected many facts forthe great work of his life, that 'History of Fishes' which he dedicated, naturally enough, to the cardinal. This book with its plates is, for thetime, a masterpiece of accuracy. Those who are best acquainted with thesubject say, that it is up to the present day a key to the wholeichthyology of the Mediterranean. Two other men, Belon and Salviani, were then at work on the same subject, and published their books almostat the same time; a circumstance which caused, as was natural, a three-cornered duel between the supporters of the three naturalists, each partyaccusing the other of plagiarism. The simple fact seems to be that thealmost simultaneous appearance of the three books in 1554-5 is one ofthose coincidences inevitable at moments when many minds are stirred inthe same direction by the same great thoughts--coincidences which havehappened in our own day on questions of geology, biology, and astronomy;and which, when the facts have been carefully examined, and the firstflush of natural jealousy has cooled down, have proved only that therewere more wise men than one in the world at the same time. 

And this sixteenth century was an age in which the minds of men weresuddenly and strangely turned to examine the wonders of nature with anearnestness, with a reverence, and therefore with an accuracy, with whichthey had never been investigated before. "Nature, " says ProfessorPlanchon, "long veiled in mysticism and scholasticism, was opening upinfinite vistas. A new superstition, the exaggerated worship of theancients, was nearly hindering this movement of thought towards facts. Nevertheless learning did her work. She rediscovered, reconstructed, purified, commented on the texts of ancient authors. Then came inobservation, which showed that more was to be seen in one blade of grassthan in any page of Pliny. Rondelet was in the middle of this crisis aman of transition, while he was one of progress. He reflected the past;he opened and prepared the future. If he commented on Dioscorides, if heremained faithful to the theories of Galen, he founded in his 'History ofFishes' a monument which our century respects. He is above all aninspirer, an initiator; and if he wants one mark of the leader of aschool, the foundation of certain scientific doctrines, there is in hisspeech what is better than all systems, the communicative power whichurges a generation of disciples along the path of independent research, with Reason for guide, and Faith for aim. "

Around Rondelet, in those years, sometimes indeed in his house--forprofessors in those days took private pupils as lodgers--worked the groupof botanists whom Linnaeus calls "the Fathers, " the authors of thedescriptive botany of the sixteenth century. Their names, and those oftheir disciples and their disciples again, are household words in themouth of every gardener, immortalised, like good Bishop Pellicier, in theplants which have been named after them. The Lobelia commemorates Lobel, one of Rondelet's most famous pupils, who wrote those 'Adversaria' whichcontain so many curious sketches of Rondelet's botanical expeditions, andwho inherited his botanical (as Joubert his biographer inherited hisanatomical) manuscripts. The Magnolia commemorates the Magnols; theSarracenia, Sarrasin of Lyons; the Bauhinia, Jean Bauhin; the Fuchsia, Bauhin's earlier German master, Leonard Fuchs; and the Clusia--thereceived name of that terrible "Matapalo, " or "Scotch attorney, " of theWest Indies, which kills the hugest tree, to become as huge a treeitself--immortalizes the great Clusius, Charles de l'Escluse, citizen ofArras, who after studying civil law at Louvain, philosophy at Marburg, and theology at Wittemberg under Melancthon, came to Montpellier in 1551, to live in Rondelet's own house, and become the greatest botanist of hisage. 

These were Rondelet's palmy days. He had got a theatre of anatomy builtat Montpellier, where he himself dissected publicly. He had, saystradition, a little botanic garden, such as were springing up then inseveral universities, specially in Italy. He had a villa outside thecity, whose tower, near the modern railway station, still bears the nameof the "Mas de Rondelet. " There, too, may be seen the remnants of thegreat tanks, fed with water brought through earthen pipes from theFountain of Albe, wherein he kept the fish whose habits he observed. Professor Planchon thinks that he had salt-water tanks likewise; and thushe may have been the father of all "Aquariums. " He had a large andhandsome house in the city itself, a large practice as physician in thecountry round; money flowed in fast to him, and flowed out fast likewise. He spent much upon building, pulling down, rebuilding, and sent the billsin seemingly to his wife and to his guardian angel Catherine. He himselfhad never a penny in his purse: but earned the money, and let his ladiesspend it; an equitable and pleasant division of labour which most marriedmen would do well to imitate. A generous, affectionate, careless littleman, he gave away, says his pupil and biographer, Joubert, his valuablespecimens to any savant who begged for them, or left them about to bestolen by visitors, who, like too many collectors in all ages, possessedlight fingers and lighter consciences. So pacific was he meanwhile, andso brave withal, that even in the fearful years of the troubles, he wouldnever carry sword, nor even tuck or dagger; but went about on the mostlonesome journeys as one who wore a charmed life, secure in God and inhis calling, which was to heal, and not to kill. 

These were the golden years of Rondelet's life; but trouble was coming onhim, and a stormy sunset after a brilliant day. He lost his sister-in-law, to whom he owed all his fortunes, and who had watched ever sinceover him and his wife like a mother; then he lost his wife herself undermost painful circumstances; then his best-beloved daughter. Then hemarried again, and lost the son who was born to him; and then came, as tomany of the best in those days, even sorer trials, trials of theconscience, trials of faith. 

For in the mean time Rondelet had become a Protestant, like many of thewisest men round him; like, so it would seem from the event, the majorityof the university and the burghers of Montpellier. It is not to bewondered at. Montpellier was a sort of half-way resting-place forProtestant preachers, whether fugitive or not, who were passing fromBasle, Geneva, or Lyons, to Marguerite of Navarre's little Protestantcourt at Pau or at Nerac, where all wise and good men, and now and thensome foolish and fanatical ones, found shelter and hospitality. ThitherCalvin himself had been, passing probably through Montpellier, andleaving--as such a man was sure to leave--the mark of his foot behindhim. At Lyons, no great distance up the Rhone, Marguerite had helped toestablish an organised Protestant community; and when in 1536 she herselfhad passed through Montpellier, to visit her brother at Valence, andMontmorency's camp at Avignon, she took with her doubtless Protestantchaplains of her own, who spoke wise words--it may be that she spoke wisewords herself--to the ardent and inquiring students of Montpellier. Moreover, Rondelet and his disciples had been for years past in constantcommunication with the Protestant savants of Switzerland and Germany, among whom the knowledge of nature was progressing as it never hadprogressed before. For--it is a fact always to be remembered--it wasonly in the free air of Protestant countries the natural sciences couldgrow and thrive. They sprung up, indeed, in Italy after the restorationof Greek literature in the fifteenth century; but they withered thereagain only too soon under the blighting upas shade of superstition. Transplanted to the free air of Switzerland, of Germany, of Britain, andof Montpellier, then half Protestant, they developed rapidly and surely, simply because the air was free; to be checked again in France by thereturn of superstition with despotism super-added, until the eve of thegreat French Revolution. 

So Rondelet had been for some years Protestant. He had hidden in hishouse for a long while a monk who had left his monastery. He had himselfwritten theological treatises: but when his Bishop Pellicier wasimprisoned on a charge of heresy, Rondelet burnt his manuscripts, andkept his opinions to himself. Still he was a suspected heretic, at lastseemingly a notorious one; for only the year before his death, going tovisit patients at Perpignan, he was waylaid by the Spaniards, and had toget home through bypasses of the Pyrenees, to avoid being thrown into theInquisition. 

And those were times in which it was necessary for a man to be careful, unless he had made up his mind to be burned. For more than thirty yearsof Rondelet's life the burning had gone on in his neighbourhood;intermittently it is true: the spasms of superstitious fury beingsucceeded, one may charitably hope, by pity and remorse: but still theburnings had gone on. The Benedictine monk of St. Maur, who writes thehistory of Languedoc, says, quite _en passant_, how some one was burnt atToulouse in 1553, luckily only in effigy, for he had escaped to Geneva:but he adds, "next year they burned several heretics, " it being not worthwhile to mention their names. In 1556 they burned alive at Toulouse JeanEscalle, a poor Franciscan monk, who had found his order intolerable;while one Pierre de Lavaur, who dared preach Calvinism in the streets ofNismes, was hanged and burnt. So had the score of judicial murders beenincreasing year by year, till it had to be, as all evil scores have to bein this world, paid off with interest, and paid off especially againstthe ignorant and fanatic monks who for a whole generation, in everyuniversity and school in France, had been howling down sound science, aswell as sound religion; and at Montpellier in 1560-1, their debt was paidthem in a very ugly way. News came down to the hot southerners ofLanguedoc of the so-called conspiracy of Amboise. --How the Duc de Guiseand the Cardinal de Lorraine had butchered the best blood in France underthe pretence of a treasonable plot; how the King of Navarre and thePrince de Conde had been arrested; then how Conde and Coligny were readyto take up arms at the head of all the Huguenots of France, and try tostop this lifelong torturing, by sharp shot and cold steel; then how insix months' time the king would assemble a general council to settle thequestion between Catholics and Huguenots. The Huguenots, guessing howthat would end, resolved to settle the question for themselves. Theyrose in one city after another, sacked the churches, destroyed theimages, put down by main force superstitious processions and dances; anddid many things only to be excused by the exasperation caused by thirtyyears of cruelty. At Montpellier there was hard fighting, murders--sosay the Catholic historians--of priests and monks, sack of the newcathedral, destruction of the noble convents which lay in a ring roundMontpellier. The city and the university were in the hands of theHuguenots, and Montpellier became Protestant on the spot. 

Next year came the counter blow. There were heavy battles with theCatholics all round the neighbourhood, destruction of the suburbs, threatened siege and sack, and years of misery and poverty forMontpellier and all who were therein. 

Horrible was the state of France in those times of the wars of religionwhich began in 1562; the times which are spoken of usually as "TheTroubles, " as if men did not wish to allude to them too openly. Then, and afterwards in the wars of the League, deeds were done for whichlanguage has no name. The population decreased. The land lay untilled. The fair face of France was blackened with burnt homesteads and ruinedtowns. Ghastly corpses dangled in rows upon the trees, or floated downthe blood-stained streams. Law and order were at an end. Bands ofrobbers prowled in open day, and bands of wolves likewise. But allthrough the horrors of the troubles we catch sight of the little fatdoctor riding all unarmed to see his patients throughout Languedoc; goingvast distances, his biographers say, by means of regular relays ofhorses, till he too broke down. Well for him, perhaps, that he brokedown when he did; for capture and recapture, massacre and pestilence, were the fate of Montpellier and the surrounding country, till the bettertimes of Henry IV. And the Edict of Nantes in 1598, when liberty ofworship was given to the Protestants for a while. 

In the burning summer of 1566 Rondeletius went a long journey toToulouse, seemingly upon an errand of charity, to settle some law affairsfor his relations. The sanitary state of the southern cities is badenough still. It must have been horrible in those days of barbarism andmisrule. Dysentery was epidemic at Toulouse then, and Rondelet took it. He knew from the first that he should die. He was worn out, it is said, by over-exertion; by sorrow for the miseries of the land; by fruitlessstruggles to keep the peace, and to strive for moderation in days whenmen were all immoderate. But he rode away a day's journey--he took twodays over it, so weak he was--in the blazing July sun, to a friend's sickwife at Realmont, and there took to his bed, and died a good man's death. The details of his death and last illness were written and published byhis cousin Claude Formy; and well worth reading they are to any man whowishes to know how to die. Rondelet would have no tidings of his illnesssent to Montpellier. He was happy, he said, in dying away from the tearsof his household, and "safe from insult. " He dreaded, one may suppose, lest priests and friars should force their way to his bedside, and try toextort some recantation from the great savant, the honour and glory oftheir city. So they sent for no priest to Realmont: but round his bed aknot of Calvinist gentlemen and ministers read the Scriptures, and sangDavid's psalms, and prayed; and Rondelet prayed with them through longagonies, and so went home to God. 

The Benedictine monk-historian of Languedoc, in all his voluminousfolios, never mentions, as far as I can find, Rondelet's existence. Whyshould he? The man was only a druggist's son and a heretic, who healeddiseases, and collected plants, and wrote a book on fish. But thelearned men of Montpellier, and of all Europe, had a very differentopinion of him. His body was buried at Realmont: but before the schoolsof Toulouse they set up a white marble slab, and an inscription thereonsetting forth his learning and his virtues; and epitaphs on him werecomposed by the learned throughout Europe, not only in French and Latin, but in Greek, Hebrew, and even Chaldee. 

So lived and so died a noble man; more noble--to my mind--than many avictorious warrior, or successful statesman, or canonised saint. To knowfacts, and to heal diseases, were the two objects of his life. For themhe toiled, as few men have toiled; and he died in harness, at hiswork--the best death any man can die. 

VESALIUS THE ANATOMIST

I cannot begin a sketch of the life of this great man better than bytrying to describe a scene so picturesque, so tragic in the eyes of thosewho are wont to mourn over human follies, so comic in the eyes of thosewho prefer to laugh over them, that the reader will not be likely toforget either it or the actors in it. 

It is a darkened chamber in the College of Alcala, in the year 1562, where lies, probably in a huge four-post bed, shrouded in stiflinghangings, the heir-apparent of the greatest empire in the then world, DonCarlos, only son of Philip II. , and heir-apparent of Spain, theNetherlands, and all the Indies. A short sickly boy of sixteen, with abull head, a crooked shoulder, a short leg, and a brutal temper, he willnot be missed by the world if he should die. His profligate career seemsto have brought its own punishment. To the scandal of his father, whotolerated no one's vices save his own, as well as to the scandal of theuniversity authorities of Alcala, he has been scouring the streets at thehead of the most profligate students, insulting women, even ladies ofrank, and amenable only to his lovely young stepmother, Elizabeth ofValois, Isabel de la Paz, as the Spaniards call her, the daughter ofCatherine de Medicis, and sister of the King of France. Don Carlosshould have married her, had not his worthy father found it moreadvantageous for the crown of Spain, as well as more pleasant for himPhilip, to marry her himself. Whence came heart-burnings, rage, jealousies, romances, calumnies, of which two last--in as far at least asthey concern poor Elizabeth--no wise man now believes a word. 

Going on some errand on which he had no business--there are two stories, neither of them creditable nor necessary to repeat--Don Carlos has fallendown stairs and broken his head. He comes, by his Portuguese mother'sside, of a house deeply tainted with insanity; and such an injury mayhave serious consequences. However, for nine days the wound goes onwell, and Don Carlos, having had a wholesome fright, is, according toDoctor Olivarez, the _medico de camara_, a very good lad, and lives onchicken broth and dried plums. But on the tenth day comes on numbness ofthe left side, acute pains in the head, and then gradually shivering, high fever, erysipelas. His head and neck swell to an enormous size;then comes raging delirium, then stupefaction, and Don Carlos lies as onedead. 

A modern surgeon would, probably, thanks to that training of whichVesalius may be almost called the father, have had little difficulty infinding out what was the matter with the luckless lad, and littledifficulty in removing the evil, if it had not gone too far. But theSpanish physicians were then, as many of them are said to be still, asfar behind the world in surgery as in other things; and indeed surgeryitself was then in its infancy, because men, ever since the early Greekschools of Alexandria had died out, had been for centuries feeding theirminds with anything rather than with facts. Therefore the learnedmorosophs who were gathered round Don Carlos's sick bed had become, according to their own confession, utterly confused, terrified, and attheir wits' end. 

It is the 7th of May, the eighteenth day after the accident, according toOlivarez' story: he and Dr. Vega have been bleeding the unhappy prince, enlarging the wound twice, and torturing him seemingly on mere guesses. "I believe, " says Olivarez, "that all was done well: but as I have said, in wounds in the head there are strange labyrinths. " So on the 7th theystand round the bed in despair. Don Garcia de Toledo, the prince'sfaithful governor, is sitting by him, worn out with sleepless nights, andtrying to supply to the poor boy that mother's tenderness which he hasnever known. Alva too is there, stern, self-compressed, most terrible, and yet most beautiful. He has a God on earth, and that is Philip hismaster; and though he has borne much from Don Carlos already, and willhave to bear more, yet the wretched lad is to him as a son of God, asecond deity, who will by right divine succeed to the inheritance of thefirst; and he watches this lesser deity struggling between life and deathwith an intensity of which we, in these less loyal days, can form nonotion. One would be glad to have a glimpse of what passed through thatmind, so subtle and so ruthless, so disciplined and so loyal withal: butAlva was a man who was not given to speak his mind, but to act it. 

One would wish, too, for a glimpse of what was passing through the mindof another man, who has been daily in that sick chamber, according toOlivarez' statement, since the first of the month: but he is one who hashad, for some years past, even more reason than Alva for not speaking hismind. What he looked like we know well, for Titian has painted him fromthe life--a tall, bold, well-dressed man, with a noble brain, square andyet lofty, short curling locks and beard, an eye which looks as though itfeared neither man nor fiend--and it has had good reason to fear both--andfeatures which would be exceeding handsome, but for the defiantsnub-nose. That is Andreas Vesalius, of Brussels, dreaded and hated bythe doctors of the old school--suspect, moreover, it would seem, toinquisitors and theologians, possibly to Alva himself; for he has daredto dissect human bodies; he has insulted the medievalists at Paris, Padua, Bologna, Pisa, Venice, in open theatre; he has turned the heads ofall the young surgeons in Italy and France; he has written a great book, with prints in it, designed, some say, by Titian--they were actually doneby another Netherlander, John of Calcar, near Cleves--in which he hasdared to prove that Galen's anatomy was at fault throughout, and that hehad been describing a monkey's inside when he had pretended to bedescribing a man's; and thus, by impudence and quackery, he has wormedhimself--this Netherlander, a heretic at heart, as all Netherlanders are, to God as well as to Galen--into the confidence of the late EmperorCharles V. , and gone campaigning with him as one of his physicians, anatomising human bodies even on the battle-field, and defacing thelikeness of Deity; and worse than that, the most religious King Philip isdeceived by him likewise, and keeps him in Madrid in wealth and honour;and now, in the prince's extreme danger, the king has actually sent forhim, and bidden him try his skill--a man who knows nothing save aboutbones and muscles and the outside of the body, and is unworthy the nameof a true physician. 

One can conceive the rage of the old Spanish pedants at theNetherlander's appearance, and still more at what followed, if we are tobelieve Hugo Bloet of Delft, his countryman and contemporary. {390}Vesalius, he says, saw that the surgeons had bound up the wound so tightthat an abscess had formed outside the skull, which could not break: heasserted that the only hope lay in opening it; and did so, Philip havinggiven leave, "by two cross-cuts. Then the lad returned to himself, as ifawakened from a profound sleep, affirming that he owed his restoration tolife to the German doctor. "

Dionysius Daza, who was there with the other physicians and surgeons, tells a different story: "The most learned, famous, and rare BaronVesalius, " he says, advised that the skull should be trepanned; but hisadvice was not followed. 

Olivarez' account agrees with that of Daza. They had opened the wounds, he says, down to the skull before Vesalius came. Vesalius insisted thatthe injury lay inside the skull, and wished to pierce it. Olivarezspends much labour in proving that Vesalius had "no great foundation forhis opinion:" but confesses that he never changed that opinion to thelast, though all the Spanish doctors were against him. Then on the 6th, he says, the Bachelor Torres came from Madrid, and advised that the skullshould be laid bare once more; and on the 7th, there being still doubtwhether the skull was not injured, the operation was performed--by whomit is not said--but without any good result, or, according to Olivarez, any discovery, save that Vesalius was wrong, and the skull uninjured. 

"Whether this second operation of the 7th of May was performed byVesalius, and whether it was that of which Bloet speaks, is an openquestion. Olivarez' whole relation is apologetic, written to justifyhimself and his seven Spanish colleagues, and to prove Vesalius in thewrong. Public opinion, he confesses, had been very fierce against him. The credit of Spanish medicine was at stake: and we are not bound tobelieve implicitly a paper drawn up under such circumstances for Philip'seye. This, at least, we gather: that Don Carlos was never trepanned, asis commonly said; and this, also, that whichever of the two stories istrue, equally puts Vesalius into direct, and most unpleasant, antagonismto the Spanish doctors. {392}

But Don Carlos still lay senseless; and yielding to popular clamour, thedoctors called in the aid of a certain Moorish doctor, from Valencia, named Priotarete, whose unguents, it was reported, had achieved manymiraculous cures. The unguent, however, to the horror of the doctors, burned the skull till the bone was as black as the colour of ink; andOlivarez declares he believes it to have been a preparation of purecaustic. On the morning of the 9th of May, the Moor and his unguentswere sent away, "and went to Madrid, to send to heaven Hernando de Vega, while the prince went back to our method of cure. "

Considering what happened on the morning of the 10th of May, we shouldnow presume that the second opening of the abscess, whether by Vesaliusor someone else, relieved the pressure on the brain; that a criticalperiod of exhaustion followed, probably prolonged by the Moor's prematurecaustic, which stopped the suppuration: but that God's good handiwork, called nature, triumphed at last; and that therefore it came to pass thatthe prince was out of danger within three days of the operation. But hewas taught, it seems, to attribute his recovery to a very differentsource from that of a German knife. For on the morning of the 9th, whenthe Moor was gone, and Don Carlos lay seemingly lifeless, there descendedinto his chamber a Deus e machina, or rather a whole pantheon of greateror lesser deities, who were to effect that which medical skill seemed notto have effected. Philip sent into the prince's chamber several of theprecious relics which he usually carried about with him. The miraculousimage of the Virgin of Atocha, in embroidering garments for whom, Spanishroyalty, male and female, has spent so many an hour ere now, was broughtin solemn procession and placed on an altar at the foot of the prince'sbed; and in the afternoon there entered, with a procession likewise, ashrine containing the bones of a holy anchorite, one Fray Diego, "whoselife and miracles, " says Olivarez, "are so notorious;" and the bones ofSt. Justus and St. Pastor, the tutelar saints of the university ofAlcala. Amid solemn litanies the relics of Fray Diego were laid upon theprince's pillow, and the sudarium, or mortuary cloth, which had coveredhis face, was placed upon the prince's forehead. 

Modern science might object that the presence of so many personages, however pious or well intentioned, in a sick chamber on a hot Spanish Mayday, especially as the bath had been, for some generations past, held inreligious horror throughout Spain, as a sign of Moorish and Mussulmantendencies, might have somewhat interfered with the chances of the poorboy's recovery. Nevertheless the event seems to have satisfied Philip'shighest hopes; for that same night (so Don Carlos afterwards related) theholy monk Diego appeared to him in a vision, wearing the habit of St. Francis, and bearing in his hand a cross of reeds tied with a green band. The prince stated that he first took the apparition to be that of theblessed St. Francis; but not seeing the stigmata, he exclaimed, "How?Dost thou not bear the marks of the wounds?" What he replied Don Carlosdid not recollect; save that he consoled him, and told him that he shouldnot die of that malady. 

Philip had returned to Madrid, and shut himself up in grief in the greatJeronymite monastery. Elizabeth was praying for her step-son before themiraculous images of the same city. During the night of the 9th of Mayprayers went up for Don Carlos in all the churches of Toledo, Alcala, andMadrid. Alva stood all that night at the bed's foot. Don Garcia deToledo sat in the arm-chair, where he had now sat night and day for morethan a fortnight. The good preceptor, Honorato Juan, afterwards Bishopof Osma, wrestled in prayer for the lad the whole night through. Hisprayer was answered: probably it had been answered already, without hisbeing aware of it. Be that as it may, about dawn Don Carlos' heavybreathing ceased; he fell into a quiet sleep; and when he awoke allperceived at once that he was saved. 

He did not recover his sight, seemingly on account of the erysipelas, fora week more. He then opened his eyes upon the miraculous image ofAtocha, and vowed that, if he recovered, he would give to the Virgin, atfour different shrines in Spain, gold plate of four times his weight; andsilver plate of seven times his weight, when he should rise from hiscouch. So on the 6th of June he rose, and was weighed in a fur coat anda robe of damask, and his weight was three arrobas and one pound--seventy-six pounds in all. On the 14th of June he went to visit his father atthe episcopal palace; then to all the churches and shrines in Alcala, andof course to that of Fray Diego, whose body it is said he contemplatedfor some time with edifying devotion. The next year saw Fray Diegocanonised as a saint, at the intercession of Philip and his son; and thusDon Carlos re-entered the world, to be a terror and a torment to allaround him, and to die--not by Philip's cruelty, as his enemies reportedtoo hastily indeed, yet excusably, for they knew him to be capable of anywickedness--but simply of constitutional insanity. 

And now let us go back to the history of "that most learned, famous, andrare Baron Vesalius, " who had stood by and seen all these things done;and try if we cannot, after we have learned the history of his earlylife, guess at some of his probable meditations on this celebratedclinical case; and guess also how those meditations may have affectedseriously the events of his after life. 

Vesalius (as I said) was a Netherlander, born at Brussels in 1513 or1514. His father and grandfather had been medical men of the higheststanding in a profession which then, as now, was commonly hereditary. Hisreal name was Wittag, an ancient family of Wesel, on the Rhine, fromwhich town either he or his father adopted the name of Vesalius, according to the classicising fashion of those days. Young Vesalius wassent to college at Louvain, where he learned rapidly. At sixteen orseventeen he knew not only Latin, but Greek enough to correct the proofsof Galen, and Arabic enough to become acquainted with the works of theMussulman physicians. He was a physicist, too, and a mathematician, according to the knowledge of those times; but his passion--the study towhich he was destined to devote his life--was anatomy. 

Little or nothing (it must be understood) had been done in anatomy sincethe days of Galen of Pergamos, in the second century after Christ, andvery little even by him. Dissection was all but forbidden among theancients. The Egyptians, Herodotus tells us, used to pursue with stonesand curses the embalmers as soon as they had performed their unpleasantoffice; and though Herophilus and Erasistratus are said to have dissectedmany subjects under the protection of Ptolemy Soter in Alexandria itself:yet the public feeling of the Greeks as well as of the Romans continuedthe same as that of the ancient Egyptians; and Galen was fain--asVesalius proved--to supplement his ignorance of the human frame bydescribing that of an ape. Dissection was equally forbidden among theMussulmans; and the great Arabic physicians could do no more than commenton Galen. The same prejudice extended through the middle age. Medicalmen were all clerks, clerici, and as such forbidden to shed blood. Theonly dissection, as far as I am aware, made during the middle age was oneby Mundinus in 1306; and his subsequent commentaries on Galen--for hedare allow his own eyes to see no more than Galen had seen beforehim--constituted the best anatomical manual in Europe till the middle ofthe fifteenth century. 

Then, in Italy at least, the classic Renaissance gave fresh life toanatomy as to all other sciences. Especially did the improvements inpainting and sculpture stir men up to a closer study of the human frame. Leonardo da Vinci wrote a treatise on muscular anatomy: the artist andthe sculptor often worked together, and realised that sketch of MichaelAngelo's in which he himself is assisting Fallopius, Vesalius' famouspupil, to dissect. Vesalius soon found that his thirst for facts couldnot be slaked by the theories of the middle age; so in 1530 he went offto Montpellier, where Francis I. Had just founded a medical school, andwhere the ancient laws of the city allowed the faculty each year the bodyof a criminal. From thence, after becoming the fellow-pupil and thefriend of Rondelet, and probably also of Rabelais and those otherluminaries of Montpellier, of whom I spoke in my essay on Rondelet, hereturned to Paris to study under old Sylvius, whose real name was JacquesDubois, _alias_ Jock o' the Wood; and to learn less--as he complainshimself--in an anatomical theatre than a butcher might learn in his shop. 

Were it not that the whole question of dissection is one over which it isright to draw a reverent veil, as a thing painful, however necessary andhowever innocent, it would be easy to raise ghastly laughter in many areader by the stories which Vesalius himself tells of his struggles tolearn anatomy. --How old Sylvius tried to demonstrate the human frame froma bit of a dog, fumbling in vain for muscles which he could not find, orwhich ought to have been there, according to Galen, and were not; whileyoung Vesalius, as soon as the old pedant's back was turned, took hisplace, and, to the delight of the students, found for him--provided itwere there--what he could not find himself;--how he went body-snatchingand gibbet-robbing, often at the danger of his life, as when he and hisfriend were nearly torn to pieces by the cannibal dogs who haunted theButte de Montfaucon, or place of public execution;--how he acquired, by along and dangerous process, the only perfect skeleton then in the world, and the hideous story of the robber to whom it had belonged--all thesehorrors those who list may read for themselves elsewhere. I hasten pastthem with this remark--that to have gone through the toils, dangers, anddisgusts which Vesalius faced, argued in a superstitious and cruel agelike his, no common physical and moral courage, and a deep consciencethat he was doing right, and must do it at all risks in the face of ageneration which, peculiarly reckless of human life and human agony, allowed that frame which it called the image of God to be tortured, maimed, desecrated in every way while alive; and yet--straining at thegnat after having swallowed the camel--forbade it to be examined whendead, though for the purpose of alleviating the miseries of mankind. 

The breaking out of war between Francis I. And Charles V. Drove Vesaliusback to his native country and Louvain; and in 1535 we hear of him as asurgeon in Charles V. 's army. He saw, most probably, the Emperor'sinvasion of Provence, and the disastrous retreat from beforeMontmorency's fortified camp at Avignon, through a country in which thatcrafty general had destroyed every article of human food, except the half-ripe grapes. He saw, perhaps, the Spanish soldiers, poisoned alike bythe sour fruit and by the blazing sun, falling in hundreds along thewhite roads which led back into Savoy, murdered by the peasantry whosehomesteads had been destroyed, stifled by the weight of their own armour, or desperately putting themselves, with their own hands, out of a worldwhich had become intolerable. Half the army perished. Two thousandcorpses lay festering between Aix and Frejus alone. If young Vesaliusneeded "subjects, " the ambition and the crime of man found enough for himin those blazing September days. 

He went to Italy, probably with the remnants of the army. Where could hehave rather wished to find himself? He was at last in the country wherethe human mind seemed to be growing young once more; the country ofrevived arts, revived sciences, learning, languages; and--though, alas, only for a while--of revived free thought, such as Europe had not seensince the palmy days of Greece. Here at least he would be appreciated;here at least he would be allowed to think and speak: and he wasappreciated. The Italian cities, who were then, like the Athenians ofold, "spending their time in nothing else save to hear or to tellsomething new, " welcomed the brave young Fleming and his novelties. Within two years he was professor of anatomy at Padua, then the firstschool in the world; then at Bologna and at Pisa at the same time; lastof all at Venice, where Titian painted that portrait of him which remainsunto this day. 

These years were for him a continual triumph; everywhere, as hedemonstrated on the human body, students crowded his theatre, or hunground him as he walked the streets; professors left their ownchairs--their scholars having deserted them already--to go and listenhumbly or enviously to the man who could give them what all brave soulsthroughout half Europe were craving for, and craving in vain: facts. Andso, year after year, was realised that scene which stands engraved in thefrontispiece of his great book--where, in the little quaint Cinquecentotheatre, saucy scholars, reverend doctors, gay gentlemen, and even cowledmonks, are crowding the floor, peeping over each other's shoulders, hanging on the balustrades; while in the centre, over his "subject"--whichone of those same cowled monks knew but too well--stands young Vesalius, upright, proud, almost defiant, as one who knows himself safe in theimpregnable citadel of fact; and in his hand the little blade of steel, destined--because wielded in obedience to the laws of nature, which arethe laws of God--to work more benefit for the human race than all theswords which were drawn in those days, or perhaps in any other, at thebidding of most Catholic Emperors and most Christian Kings. 

Those were indeed days of triumph for Vesalius; of triumph deserved, because earned by patient and accurate toil in a good cause: butVesalius, being but a mortal man, may have contracted in those same daysa temper of imperiousness and self-conceit, such as he showed afterwardswhen his pupil Fallopius dared to add fresh discoveries to those of hismaster. And yet, in spite of all Vesalius knew, how little he knew! Howhumbling to his pride it would have been had he known then--perhaps hedoes know now--that he had actually again and again walked, as it were, round and round the true theory of the circulation of the blood, and yetnever seen it; that that discovery which, once made, is intelligible, asfar as any phenomenon is intelligible, to the merest peasant, wasreserved for another century, and for one of those Englishmen on whomVesalius would have looked as semi-barbarians. 

To make a long story short: three years after the publication of hisfamous book, 'De Corporis Humani Fabrica, ' he left Venice to cure CharlesV. , at Regensburg, and became one of the great Emperor's physicians. 

This was the crisis of Vesalius' life. The medicine with which he hadworked the cure was China--Sarsaparilla, as we call it now--brought homefrom the then newly-discovered banks of the Paraguay and Uruguay, whereits beds of tangled vine, they say, tinge the clear waters a dark brownlike that of peat, and convert whole streams into a healthful andpleasant tonic. On the virtues of this China (then supposed to be aroot) Vesalius wrote a famous little book, into which he contrived tointerweave his opinions on things in general, as good Bishop Berkeley didafterwards into his essay on the virtues of tar-water. Into this book, however, Vesalius introduced--as Bishop Berkeley did not--much, andperhaps too much, about himself; and much, though perhaps not too much, about poor old Galen, and his substitution of an ape's inside for that ofa human being. The storm which had been long gathering burst upon him. The old school, trembling for their time-honoured reign, bespattered, with all that pedantry, ignorance, and envy could suggest, the man whodared not only to revolutionise surgery, but to interfere with theprivileged mysteries of medicine; and, over and above, to become afavourite at the court of the greatest of monarchs. While such asEustachius, himself an able discoverer, could join in the cry, it is nowonder if a lower soul, like that of Sylvius, led it open-mouthed. Hewas a mean, covetous, bad man, as George Buchanan well knew; and, according to his nature, he wrote a furious book, 'Ad Vesani calumniasdepulsandas. ' The punning change of Vesalius into Vesanus (madman) wasbut a fair and gentle stroke for a polemic, in days in which those whocould not kill their enemies with steel or powder, held themselvesjustified in doing so, if possible, by vituperation, culumny, and everyengine of moral torture. But a far more terrible weapon, and one whichmade Vesalius rage, and it may be for once in his life tremble, was thecharge of impiety and heresy. The Inquisition was a very ugly place. Itwas very easy to get into it, especially for a Netherlander: but not soeasy to get out. Indeed Vesalius must have trembled, when he saw hismaster, Charles V. , himself take fright, and actually call on thetheologians of Salamanca to decide whether it was lawful to dissect ahuman body. The monks, to their honour, used their common sense, andanswered Yes. The deed was so plainly useful, that it must be lawfullikewise. But Vesalius did not feel that he had triumphed. He dreaded, possibly, lest the storm should only have blown over for a time. Hefell, possibly, into hasty disgust at the folly of mankind, and despairof arousing them to use their common sense, and acknowledge their trueinterest and their true benefactors. At all events, he threw into thefire--so it is said--all his unpublished manuscripts, the records of longyears of observation, and renounced science thenceforth. 

We hear of him after this at Brussels, and at Basle likewise--in whichlatter city, in the company of physicians, naturalists, and Grecians, hemust have breathed awhile a freer air. But he seems to have returnedthence to his old master Charles V. , and to have finally settled atMadrid as a court surgeon to Philip II. , who sent him, but too late, toextract the lance splinters from the eye of the dying Henry II. 

He was now married to a lady of rank from Brussels, Anne van Hamme byname; and their daughter married in time Philip II. 's grand falconer, whowas doubtless a personage of no small social rank. He was well off inworldly things; somewhat fond, it is said, of good living and of luxury;inclined, it may be, to say, "Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow wedie, " and to sink more and more into the mere worldling, unless someshock awoke him from his lethargy. 

And the awakening shock did come. After eight years of court life, heresolved early in the year 1564 to go on pilgrimage to Jerusalem. 

The reasons for so strange a determination are wrapped in mystery andcontradiction. The common story was that he had opened a corpse toascertain the cause of death, and that, to the horror of the bystanders, the heart was still seen to beat; that his enemies accused him to theInquisition, and that he was condemned to death, a sentence which wascommuted to that of going on pilgrimage. But here, at the very outset, accounts differ. One says that the victim was a nobleman, name notgiven; another that it was a lady's maid, name not given. It is mostimprobable, if not impossible, that Vesalius, of all men, should havemistaken a living body for a dead one; while it is most probable, on theother hand, that his medical enemies would gladly raise such a calumnyagainst him, when he was no longer in Spain to contradict it. MeanwhileLlorente, the historian of the Inquisition, makes no mention of Vesaliushaving been brought before its tribunal, while he does mention Vesalius'residence at Madrid. Another story is, that he went abroad to escape thebad temper of his wife; another that he wanted to enrich himself. Anotherstory--and that not an unlikely one--is, that he was jealous of therising reputation of his pupil Fallopius, then professor of anatomy atVenice. This distinguished surgeon, as I said before, had written abook, in which he had added to Vesalius' discoveries, and correctedcertain errors of his. Vesalius had answered him hastily and angrily, quoting his anatomy from memory; for, as he himself complained, he couldnot in Spain obtain a subject for dissection; not even, he said, a singleskull. He had sent his book to Venice to be published, and had heard, seemingly, nothing of it. 

He may have felt that he was falling behind in the race of science, andthat it was impossible for him to carry on his studies in Madrid; and so, angry with his own laziness and luxury, he may have felt the old sacredfire flash up in him, and have determined to go to Italy and become astudent and a worker once more. 

The very day that he set out, Clusius of Arras, then probably the bestbotanist in the world, arrived at Madrid; and, asking the reason ofVesalius' departure, was told by their fellow-countryman, Charles deTisnacq, procurator for the affairs of the Netherlands, that Vesalius hadgone of his own free will, and with all facilities which Philip couldgrant him, in performance of a vow which he had made during a dangerousillness. Here, at least, we have a drop of information, which seemstaken from the stream sufficiently near to the fountain-head: but it mustbe recollected that De Tisnacq lived in dangerous times, and may havefound it necessary to walk warily in them; that through him had beensent, only the year before, that famous letter from William of Orange, Horn, and Egmont, the fate whereof may be read in Mr. Motley's fourthchapter; that the crisis of the Netherlands which sprung out of thatletter was coming fast; and that, as De Tisnacq was on friendly termswith Egmont, he may have felt his head at times somewhat loose on hisshoulders; especially if he had heard Alva say, as he wrote, "that everytime he saw the despatches of those three senors, they moved his cholerso, that if he did not take much care to temper it, he would seem afrenzied man. " In such times, De Tisnacq may have thought good to returna diplomatic answer to a fellow-countryman concerning a thirdfellow-countryman, especially when that countryman, as a former pupil ofMelancthon at Wittemberg, might himself be under suspicion of heresy, andtherefore of possible treason. 

Be this as it may, one cannot but suspect some strain of truth in thestory about the Inquisition; perhaps in that, also, of his wife'sunkindness; for, whether or not Vesalius operated on Don Carlos, he hadseen with his own eyes that miraculous Virgin of Atocha at the bed's footof the prince. He had heard his recovery attributed, not to theoperation, but to the intercession of Fray, now Saint, Diego; {408} andhe must have had his thoughts thereon, and may, in an unguarded moment, have spoken them. 

For he was, be it always remembered, a Netherlander. The crisis of hiscountry was just at hand. Rebellion was inevitable, and, with rebellion, horrors unutterable; and, meanwhile, Don Carlos had set his mad brain onhaving the command of the Netherlands. In his rage at not having it, asall the world knows, he nearly killed Alva with his own hands, some twoyears after. If it be true that Don Carlos felt a debt of gratitude toVesalius, he may (after his wont) have poured out to him some wildconfidence about the Netherlands, to have even heard which would be acrime in Philip's eyes. And if this be but a fancy, still Vesalius was, as I just said, a Netherlander, and one of a brain and a spirit to whichPhilip's doings, and the air of the Spanish court, must have been growingeven more and more intolerable. Hundreds of his country folk, perhapsmen and women whom he had known, were being racked, burnt alive, buriedalive, at the bidding of a jocular ruffian, Peter Titelmann, the chiefinquisitor. The "day of the _mau-brulez_, " and the wholesale massacrewhich followed it, had happened but two years before; and, by all thesigns of the times, these murders and miseries were certain to increase. And why were all these poor wretches suffering the extremity of horror, but because they would not believe in miraculous images, and bones ofdead friars, and the rest of that science of unreason and unfact, againstwhich Vesalius had been fighting all his life, consciously or not, byusing reason and observing fact? What wonder if, in some burst of nobleindignation and just contempt, he forgot a moment that he had sold hissoul, and his love of science likewise, to be a luxurious, yet uneasy, hanger-on at the tyrant's court; and spoke unadvisedly some word worthyof a German man?

As to the story of his unhappy quarrels with his wife, there may be agrain of truth in it likewise. Vesalius' religion must have sat verylightly on him. The man who had robbed churchyards and gibbets from hisyouth was not likely to be much afraid of apparitions and demons. He hadhandled too many human bones to care much for those of saints. He wasprobably, like his friends of Basle, Montpellier, and Paris, somewhat ofa heretic at heart, probably somewhat of a pagan. His lady, Anne vanHamme, was probably a strict Catholic, as her father, being a councillorand master of the exchequer at Brussels, was bound to be; andfreethinking in the husband, crossed by superstition in the wife, mayhave caused in them that wretched vie a part, that want of any truecommunion of soul, too common to this day in Catholic countries. 

Be these things as they may--and the exact truth of them will now benever known--Vesalius set out to Jerusalem in the spring of 1564. On hisway he visited his old friends at Venice to see about his book againstFallopius. The Venetian republic received the great philosopher withopen arms. Fallopius was just dead; and the senate offered their guestthe vacant chair of anatomy. He accepted it: but went on to the East. 

He never occupied that chair; wrecked upon the Isle of Zante, as he wassailing back from Palestine, he died miserably of fever and want, asthousands of pilgrims returning from the Holy Land had died before him. Agoldsmith recognised him; buried him in a chapel of the Virgin; and putup over him a simple stone, which remained till late years; and mayremain, for aught I know, even now. 

So perished, in the prime of life, "a martyr to his love of science, " toquote the words of M. Burggraeve of Ghent, his able biographer andcommentator, "the prodigious man, who created a science at an epoch wheneverything was still an obstacle to his progress; a man whose whole lifewas a long struggle of knowledge against ignorance, of truth againstlies. "

Plaudite: Exeat: with Rondelet and Buchanan. And whensoever this poorfoolish world needs three such men, may God of his great mercy send them. 

Footnotes

{15} 9, Adam Street, Adelphi, London. 

{72} I quote from the translation of the late lamented Philip StanhopeWorsley, of Corpus Christi College, Oxford. 

{76} Odyssey, book vi. 127-315; vol. I. Pp. 143-150 of Mr. Worsley'stranslation. 

{88} Since this essay was written, I have been sincerely delighted tofind that my wishes had been anticipated at Girton College, nearCambridge, and previously at Hitchin, whence the college was removed: andthat the wise ladies who superintend that establishment propose also thatmost excellent institution--a swimming bath. A paper, moreover, readbefore the London Association of Schoolmistresses in 1866, on "PhysicalExercises and Recreation for Girls, " deserves all attention. May thosewho promote such things prosper as they deserve. 

{256} For an account of Sorcery and Fetishism among the African Negros, see Burton's 'Lake Regions of Central Africa, ' vol. Ii. Pp. 341-360. 

{304} An arcade in the King's School, Chester. 

{328} So says Dr. Irving, writing in 1817. I have, however, tried invain to get a sight of this book. I need not tell Scotch scholars howmuch I am indebted throughout this article to Dr. David living's eruditesecond edition of Buchanan's Life. 

{343} From the quaint old translation of 1721, by "A Person of Honour ofthe Kingdom of Scotland. "

{358} A Life of Rondelet, by his pupil Laurent Joubert, is to be foundappended to his works; and with it an account of his illness and death, by his cousin, Claude Formy, which is well worth the perusal of any man, wise or foolish. Many interesting details beside, I owe to the courtesyof Professor Planchon, of Montpellier, author of a discourse on 'Rondeletet ses Disciples, ' which appeared, with a learned and curious Appendice, in the 'Montpellier Medical' for 1866. 

{390} I owe this account of Bloet's--which appears to me the only onetrustworthy--to the courtesy and erudition of Professor Henry Morley, whofinds it quoted from Bloet's 'Acroama, ' in the 'Observationum MedicarumRariorum, lib. Vii. , ' of John Theodore Schenk. Those who wish to knowseveral curious passages of Vesalius' life, which I have not inserted inthis article, would do well to consult one by Professor Morley, 'Anatomyin Long Clothes, ' in 'Fraser's Magazine' for November, 1853. May Iexpress a hope, which I am sure will be shared by all who have readProfessor Morley's biographies of Jerome Cardan and of Cornelius Agrippa, that he will find leisure to return to the study of Vesalius' life; andwill do for him what he has done for the two just-mentioned writers?

{392} Olivarez' 'Relacion' is to be found in the Granvelle State Papers. For the general account of Don Carlos' illness, and of the miraculousagencies by which his cure was said to have been effected, the generalreader should consult Miss Frere's 'Biography of Elizabeth of Valois, 'vol. I. Pp. 307-19. 

{408} In justice to poor Doctor Olivarez, it must be said, that while heallows all force to the intercession of the Virgin and of Fray Diego, andof "many just persons, " he cannot allow that there was any "miracleproperly so called, " because the prince was cured according to "naturalorder, " and by "experimented remedies" of the physicians.