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signs in the heavens savoured of heresy. In the ranks of intelligence there were to be found many who refused to surrender, at the bidding of astronomers, their faith in the divine mission, or at least permission, of comets, and the latter were taunted with fixing long periods for their cycles of revolution in order to evade their predictions being tested. Some divided blazing stars into two classes, natural and supernatural. Others, while admitting the material nature of these bodies, maintained that they were not allowed to appear but for some special purpose, as on acts of particular providence. Even the astronomer-divine Whiston, the learned editor of "Josephus," writing in 1737, observes that during the introduction of the Protestant Religion, A.D. 1530, 1531, 1532, and 1533, there appeared no fewer than six comets, and hopes that the comet then visible, or another which was expected at the end of the year, may be introductive of the old Primitive Christian Religion into Britain." Whiston's philosophical speculations, though they will not bear the test of more modern knowledge, deserve attention on account of their ingenuity. By noting the periodicity of several brilliant apparitions recorded in history, he came to the conclusion that they all appertained to one and the same comet. He reckoned that this comet would be in the neighbourhood of the earth at the time of the Deluge, and suggested that the disturbance caused by its proximity may have been the cause of that catastrophe. Going still further back, he supposed that an earlier visit of the same comet effected such an alteration in the earth's rotation as to produce a change of climate corresponding to the change from Paradise to the condition of the earth when Adam was sent forth to labour in sorrow. John Goodridge, in a work published in 1781, intended to show that the comet of 1680 is "the real Phoenix of the ancients," adopts theories evidently borrowed from Whiston; but he goes further, and, if his words are to be taken literally, attributes the transgression of our first parents to the influence of this body, thus saddling a comet with the responsibility of all the ills which have resulted to humanity from that event.

Of the calamities attributed to comets, pestilence has always occupied a foremost place. The pestilence of 1305, the great plague of London in 1665, and perhaps every other plague recorded in history, have been traced to this cause. A custom still in vogue is said to derive its origin from an epidemic which raged A.D. 590, and which was ascribed to the malignant influence of a comet then visible. The disease was characterised by violent paroxysms of sneezing, and on a person being seized with the fatal symptoms the friends and bystanders rendered him what assistance

a pious benediction could afford by exclaiming, "God bless you !" Another symptom, gaping, gave rise to the custom of making the sign of the cross after yawning.

The ascription of pestilential effects to comets continued to receive a certain amount of countenance from some savants long after other such fancies had been relegated to the domain of popular ignorance. Among those who have favoured this idea is Thomas Foster, a physician of some note in the scientific world and member of several learned societies in England and the Continent, who, in a work published in 1829, devotes forty-one pages to a catalogue of plagues and epidemics, in nearly every instance accompanied by a comet. According to the advocates of this theory the pestiferous breath of comets is not always vented upon the human

race.

Sometimes it is the brute creation that suffers. In Egypt, in 1825, horses and other animals succumbed to a comet in great numbers. In two or three cases we read of a serious mortality among fishes, and the great comet of 1668 expended its malignity upon cats.

We thus see how varied and fanciful have been the functions attributed to comets, not merely by the vulgar, but by the most educated and intelligent of mankind in all past ages. They have been regarded as portents of good or bad events, more frequently the latter; as precursors of wars and revolutions, the fall of dynasties, and the death of monarchs; as the causes of earthquakes and cataclysms, as bringing pestilence, murrain, and famine; as visible manifestations of demoniacal malevolence; as instruments of divine vengeance, "heralds-at-arms sent by God to declare war against the human race"; as chariots of fire conveying the shades of heroes to the celestial regions, or as themselves the glorified souls of illustrious persons. Even in the last century they have been connected with such purely moral events as the fall of man and the progress of religious creeds. Latterly, in countries where rational explanations of astronomical phenomena have prevailed, the opinions as to the ways in which terrestial affairs may be affected by comets have been, for the most part, grounded on considerations of the physical constitution of these bodies and their movements. Scares have from time to time arisen lest a comet in its flight through the solar system may come into collision with our planet and set it on fire, cr so disturb its annual or diurnal revolution as to render it unfit for human habitation; or that, by a large comet falling into the sun the earth may be visited with such a sudden increase of heat as would be equally destructive. These, of course, are perfectly legitimate subjects of speculation; but our nineteenth century has not been free from ideas of cometary influence equally fantastic with

those of antiquity and mediævalism. Napoleon I. took, it is said, a comet which appeared at his birth as his protecting genie, and, as we have seen, but a few decades ago an English medical practitioner of standing seriously entertained the opinion that comets exercised a baneful effect on the health of men and animals; and even at the present day a peculiar excellence is supposed to attach to vintages of a "comet year." But of all the curious effects for which comets have been held responsible perhaps the most singular is one pointed out by a correspondent of the Gentleman's Magazine of November 1813. This gentleman, after analysing the events which followed the appearance of a comet two years previously, arrived at the conclusion that it exercised a remarkable fecundative influence on the human subject, an extraordinary number of twins and many triplets having been born in and about the metropolis (why London was particularly favoured does not appear). A shoemaker's wife in Whitechapel had four children at a birth, who lived to receive in baptism the names of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

In 1853 a priest in Russian Poland assembled his flock to show them a comet in the south-east, standing apparently directly over Constantinople. This star, he said, was the same which guided the Magi at the Epiphany. Its appearance was the signal for the Russian eagle to spread out its wings and embrace all mankind in one orthodox faith, and the dull light of the nucleus indicated its sorrow at the delay of the army of the Czar in proceeding to its destination on the shores of the Bosphorus. Possibly this priest may have been drawing on the credulity of his hearers, but it is certain that this comet was regarded .n many parts of Europe as a messenger of coming troubles. And it must be admitted that, in this instance, subsequent events seemed to justify the forebodings, though no such calamities followed the much more brilliant comet of 1858. From a passage in Milne's "Life in China" it appears that a comet is looked upon in that country as a warlike augury, denoting invasion from the quarter where it first appears. This is remarkable, as in China careful astronomical observations have been carried on continuously for thousands of years, and it is to the ancient records. of that nation that we are indebted for the only reliable accounts of comets in early times.

Altogether, the history of comets presents an interesting example of the persistence of what may perhaps be regarded as an instinctive sentiment of the human mind in the face of the dictates of rational philosophy, religion, and common sense.

FRANCIS HENRY BAKER,

T

STENDHAL.

"

The

HE recent publication of the youthful journals of Henr Beyle (Stendhal), though calculated to give rise to bursts of critical merriment at their naïve fatuity, or to excite wonder that this victim of excessive self-analysis should have lived to become the author of the "Chartreuse de Parme" or the "Rouge et Noir," and sole master of Prosper Merimée, at least gratifies that desire which Sainte-Beuve first expressed to know the "first manner of this singular genius, who is hailed as father by the self-styled realists, naturalists, and psychologists of these days of ours. confident self-revelations of the long-ago published correspondence of the man are now supplemented by the daily confessions of the youth; but the character is the same throughout, complete in its startling independence from the beginning. Rousseau prided himself on having been the first to confess himself in public; but Rousseau's morbid vanity impaired his sincerity, and in his selfportraiture he was not so entirely distinct as he supposed from all previous autobiographers, the "falsely sincere." In Stendhal's journals we have the exact notation of the daily moral temperature of one utterly opposed by nature and principle to all vanity and hypocrisy, and an unblushing complacent record, destined solely for the private satisfaction and edification of a youth who found himself supremely interesting, and who was free from that "mania of seeing duties and virtues in everything" from which Rousseau suffered. The enigmas and apparently irreconcilable contradictions of this bizarre and anomalous man of action and of letters would, indeed, seem to baffle any attempt to hold and securely bind this Proteus by a convenient label or formula of criticism; yet many, like him, have been compounded of seemingly contrary and contradictory qualities; many, like him, have provoked excessive enthusiasm or detraction, and seemingly rendered an equitable appreciation almost impossible; and it is by no means impossible to discern an artistic unity in the labyrinth of his twenty volumes of improvisation and self-confession, or at least to find that these eccentricities and incongruities of thought

and action run into well-defined channels, and to comprehend the method of his madness. He may not be one to win cordial sympathy or command unreserved admiration, though Stendhalian fanatics are to be found in France; but he is assuredly a most striking personality, and forcibly enthrals the attention in much the same way as the portrait of some mediæval Italian, self-centred and passionate, anything but regular in feature, nay, almost repulsive, yet fascinating by his lambency of eye and enigmatic smile.

In every age men are to be found who are out of harmony with their environment, born out of due time, alien to their fatherland. Examples of precursors and survivals are sufficiently frequent, and the case of the delicate and cultured who have shrunk from contemporary civilisation, and in the seclusion of their "ivory tower" have loved to live in thought as men of some supposedly more ideal epoch, is almost a commonplace. Stendhal is one of these victims of nostalgia; but his malady is a complicated one, inasmuch as he is no simple Romanticist or Hellenist who imaginatively finds a fuller and more sympathetic existence in an abstract and unhistorical mediæval Europe or ancient Greece. Cosmopolitan were the best term for him; but cosmopolitan in a restricted sense, as limited by certain strong instincts and prejudices, necessarily narrow in proportion to their intensity. Idolising force and energy and power of will as completely as Balzac, and finding in passion the sole inspirer of all that is good in art and life, an age or nation attracts or repels him according to the presence or absence of his favourite qualities. Stendhal's fixed idea is hatred of France and of what Sterne called "the eternal platitude," the "little vanity and no originality at all," of the French character, and intense love of Italy, "where men feel rather than reason, enjoy rather than judge, live for their hearts and not their wits, where reverie is not rare and vanity is unknown, and no one cares to imitate his neighbours or to act solely with an eye to the opinion of others." To travel in Italy and to read English books he declares to be necessary for happiness, and " a man's true country is that in which he meets the most people like him in character." He may revert with delight to the Italian Renaissance and the iron times which preceded it, and amuse his leisure hours by searching in forgotten manuscripts and chronicles for tragic stories telling of sombre energy and frenzied love, yet he is well content to be an Italian of the decadence, and ingloriously while away ennui by the morning study of Correggio and Guido and by the melodies and society conversations in the evening at the opera. It might be that those deliciously thrilling days were gone when

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