danger to be spoiled by my horse, and received læsio in testiculo, which was like to have proved fatal. Made my first address, in an ill hour! to Joan Sumner: all my business and affairs ran kim-kam."!! After this we have nothing to remark but that, for a sober, plodding antiquary, our friend Aubrey led a most unaccountable life. At Easter 1639 his uncle's nag ran away with him, and gave him a dangerous fall; in 1655 he had a fall at Epsom, and broke one of his ribs, and was afraid of an apostumation; in 1659 he was like to break his neck at Ely Minster; (he was evidently hunting,) next day his horse tumbled over and over him; in 1662 he had a terrible fit of the spleen and piles at Orleans; in 1677 an imposthume broke in his head; and he was in danger of being run through by a sword with a young Templar; again in danger of being killed by the Earl of Pembroke; again in danger of being killed by a drunkard in Gray's Inn Gate; in danger of being drowned twice; and, lastly, he was always in danger of arrests. We have only to add that Mr. Britton has executed his work both with diligence and taste; with diligence in collecting such copious materials as could enable him to treat his subject with fullness and accuracy; and with taste in the arrangement he has made of them, and the agreeable manner in which he has diversified his narrative. We do not think that in any hands the subject could have been better treated, and we shall place it in our library among the other valuable productions of our learned and venerable friend, Τοῦ φιλοπονοῦ, τοῦ φιλολογοῦ, καὶ Extracts from the Portfolio of a Man of the World. Thursday. Again in company with Sir Humphry Davy and Z. and some men whose names I never heard. One of them said something to Sir Humphry about his great discoveries in science. I objected to the confined and modern use of the word science, which, in its original and enlarged sense, meant any species of knowledge. Z. supported his use by common usage, and said it was stupid to pull off the leaves and go back to the naked parent tree of a word. Davy. In this case, however, we are narrowing by usage, not enlarging; in the extended use of the word we lose our modern distinction-a useful distinction, so far as the common purposes of life are concerned. In the business-of-life words we must have a common currency, a circulating medium, we cannot go on paying in kind, though so much more real; we cannot have the corn and oxen bodily before us, "such bulky bribes" would be as inconvenient in conversation as in diplomacy. object of language is to distinguish every word should tell. The great Z. Yet we cannot use, every time we speak, the formula of "that part of science which relates to chemistry and astronomy;" we use science as belonging to real visibilities, and to talk of the science of metaphysics would be misusing the word. D. We must not chain ourselves to definitions. Where would be poetry, where would be eloquence, if we were to move in the trammels of language-rules? The greatest charm of poetry, the greatest effect of eloquence, is in the unaccustomed force of some new use, some unexpected ১ position in our words. How tame is French poetry, from their impossibility of bursting through their pedantry of rhymes ! I said it was only wonderful how much beauty there is in their poetry, hampered as it is with all their masculines and feminines. Davy said it was wonderful, and so wonderful that the French could not believe there could be any poetry where these contrivances for ingenuity are not. Fancy a Frenchman at Coleridge's Ancient Mariner, or In Xanadee did Kubla Khan A stately pleasure-dome decree; It would indeed have puzzled a Frenchman to see the beauty of these beautiful lines in Sir Humphry's execrable recitation. Strange that, with so much poetry of mind, he should not have the least ear, or be incapable of perceiving his own want of harmony in reciting. D. How such lines seem to realise the fable of the Pythoness, maddened by her own inspiration-an extacy-no other word can describe the state in which one fancies a great poet in the fervour of compositioncould he if he would stop to pick and choose and weigh his words? Fetter strong madness with a silken cord. To throw chains upon the Hellespont, lashing its narrow confines, were not more vain than to bid the poet analyse his words. Who would go with a lapidary's scales to weigh the jewels of Cleopatra's diadem? who should dare to tell the carat measure of Aaron's breastplate ? Z. It is reserved for Sir Humphry Davy to lay such secrets bare, and shew the world the diamond's original. D. It is not the mere diamond that I am admiring, it is the position; as a poet, I should scorn to consider one by one the gems in Cleopatra's crown. Z. But, as a cold-hearted chemist, you would tell us they were not merely dust and ashes but charcoal. D. As a chemist, but not as a cold-hearted one: I should be as much disgusted as a chemist with the stupidity that would think only of the base origin instead of adoring the magnificence of nature in its result. You may look at a single hair in a microscope, and loathe the coarseness of its texture, when you have just been admiring its exquisite glossy fineness in the belle chevelure of a fine woman; or take her soft hand and magnify it to coarseness, but the end it was created for would not be changed, its perfection to the eye that was intended to behold it would remain the same. Z. A great philosopher like you, taking in every creature and its kind, not only as its kind, but for its end, may do so, but the result to threefourths of the world would be to depreciate the science which disenchanted the beautiful. D. I do not think so. A map-maker admires in a map the perfection of the engraving, the agreeing of the points, the more or less distinctness of the printing; the tourist cares only to find how many miles he can get over between breakfast and dinner; while the experienced, philosophic traveller, would in the names never think of looking if they were in piça or in capitals; he would feel a host of classic recollections rise at the name of Marathon, while at the word Grenada, Moors and tournaments, and all the chivalry of romance, are before him. How captivating to me are those black masses of shading, those dark blotches in the map of Germany which denote Saxon Switzerland-Styria, that beautiful land. I see, when I look at those lines-so unmeaning in reality-the deep-wooded glen, the mighty German oak standing up in all the reverence of dignified antiquity, stretching its boughs up to the "old and still enduring skies." I can almost hear the brawling runnel or the dashing cataract. Z. "The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling," has always a power of seeing a good deal more than exists; but to have the ear too frenzied into a sounding-board is new. D. Those cataracts and gushing streams are so much a part of that glorious land, you can hardly separate them in your memory. I never wish to do so. The sunny glades, the scattered fragments of a former world, those grey granitic masses overgrown with flaunting boughs, deep thickets, miniature forests, chance-sown, and each containing such a world of beauty, each so exactly what the painters call "study from nature," to wander through those bright scenes with all their cheerful summer hum, or dive into the shade, and stretched beside some dark pool with dank black stony sides, the ferns and water-weeds all gemmed and dripping with the torrent spray, what a luxury of idleness, what repose of body, what relaxation, what a lulled swooning of the mind! I asked if there were no inhabitants in this Arcadia, no shepherds or shepherdesses ? D. Yes, there are cottages, shielings, chalets in the wilder parts, comfortable farm-houses with well-fed bauers and fraus in them; but I always looked for the most untenanted spot, though even there I was now and then interrupted by a party of university students; but they were in keeping with the scenery; their picturesque dress, and their wild countenances and free gestures of unshackled enjoyment, did not shock me. " Did you hear any of the traditionary ballads and spectre stories of the land?" D. No, not many; and they were all much the same as what we have heard so often: demons bringing logs of gold, or giant spectres haunting the mountain tops; had I seen more of the people I might have acquired some good spectral lore perhaps, for a country better fitted for it cannot be. The mountains are so varied in their form, and, wherever mountains are, such unceasing variety of light and shade, such grand stage effect when the great curtain of mist is drawn aside, and such an amphitheatre displayed; the hanging woods, the upward range of giant pines in all their savage grandeur, the grassy lawns between on every mountain side, the lichen-covered rocks protruding as if the skeleton original had worn through in lapse of years, and the grassy space on which one stands, with all the distant peaks stretching far, far away, and mixing with the sky. Wild scenery is perhaps a necessary of life to one Cornish born, like myself, and I have a sort of tenderness for all mountain lands, but more especially for these German highlands, the wild glens and deep forests of Styria, where I have wandered so many happy summer days. Z. You see, in your mind's eye, the sparkling streams and the sweet little playful trout, and you taste in your recollective palate their excellent flavour, while your hand has a mental convulsion as it clutches its imaginary rod, playing its victim with all the joy that none but anglers know. D. "With all the joys that none but anglers know," and joys they are that belong to a very superior turn of mind I do maintain, for though there be men that catch fish to sell " You, who catch them only to eat," said I, " are surely very much superior. You have arrived as near the perfection of savage simplicity as is attainable in these degenerate days of civilisation. At Killarney, in Ireland, you complete it, do not you, by not only killing and eating, but actually cooking your salmon yourself?" D. Yes, and why not? Man is defined as a cooking animal, and chemistry is so nearly allied to it, that I must say I do not like to have cookery derided and degraded as a mere servile employment. Besides, a business which is so essential to existence cannot be despised. How much wiser than ourselves are the French in the seriousness with which they attend to that-science, I shall certainly term it, which is of such hourly necessity, upon which our health and not only our happiness, but our powers, mental and bodily, so much depend. "The ancient philosophers with their herbs and water from the spring were not of your opinion," said I; "they considered bodily wants as an intrusion on the spirituality of their nature, that should be only suffered, but never encouraged." Z. Yet the greatest philosophers have given some of their most exalted conversations the name of The Banquet, where, if I mistake not, they ate something more substantial than herbs, and drank something more enlivening than spring-water. D. We have very little beyond negative evidence of any great man who practised his theoretic starvation. But we have the very positive fact, that Franklin gave up his bread-and-raisins diet very early in life, and his powers do not appear to have suffered by it. Z. It seems to have been always rather to attract the vulgar, these pretensions to extraordinary abstemiousness; I doubt whether any man ever did any thing great, mentally or bodily, who did not eat a good dinner every day. D. An anchorite in some far distant cave, or a monk emaciated and pale with vigils and with fasts, is always as you say something very captivating to the vulgar, something very nearly allied to jugglery, and one of those coarsely embodied parables to catch public attention, despicable to all true religious feeling and absurd to all real philosophy; but there is a romance attached to this notion of the keeping under of the body that is attractive; the solitary situation which these starvers chose, the flinty bed where they flung their limbs to rest, the old worn hollow of a living rock, the deep shade of some vast forest, the sense of solitude, the being alone with nature, should inspire the noblest thoughts of nature's God; the calm of evening, the beauty of sunrise, the noontide stillness, when Pan himself sleeps; or the awful majesty of storm and tempest, heard, seen, and felt in all its grandeur, undefended, uninterrupted by any haunt or habitation of man; there is a sublimity in such a life that charms the imagination, but the imagination only. Such things are glorious only in theory: what is the practical result? what is the reality? These hungry hermits see only Now glaring fiends and snakes on rolling spires, If not utterly stupified, they are almost mad; and what remains after them? what do they eventuate, what do they effect for their fellow creatures or for themselves? Believe me, that, to keep the end of existence in view, the body is essential to the mind, and that to the body good food, and plenty of it, is as necessary as good society is to the mind; deprive the body of its rights, and it will make the mind wrong. "Sir Isaac Newton and his forgotten chicken," said I, " are strongly against you. According to your theory, a philosopher should remember his dinner as dutifully as his speculations; and Sir Isaac was not only inattentive, but guilty." Z. No-he was only ungrateful; if he had forgotten to eat the chicken he would, as Davy says, have been a rebel to the laws of nature, but he did his duty in eating it. " Not quite," said I, " he should have sat still to allow time for digestion-to be carried away from thinking of his dinner by thinking of the centre of gravity, was a capital error." D. You laugh, but it is perfectly true, Sir Isaac did overwork his mind; he was for a time it is now proved quite stupid, and without the use of his intellect, while his eyes were strained so that a bright sun was always before them. "But he died as a philosopher: were not his last words, 'What are the meaning of these flashes of light that I see?" D. It was worthy of such a mind. To die in the full possession of the intellect, and with the great objects of that intellect embodied in words on your lips as you cast away this mortal coil, is a happiness that falls to the lot of few except great warriors killed in battle: they have the supreme advantage to die by a sudden and violent stroke, which separates the earthy from the celestial; this knot intrinsicate of life Undoes at once; and the last thoughts and last words are, in such a moment of exalted excitement, such as become a hero's life, a hero's end. To fancy that the freed spirit continues these high heroic thoughts is such mere speculation that it is called absurd to dwell upon it, but it surely exalts the mind. Z. And has the advantage-such aspirations of being inexhaustible, as they can never be satisfied. D. That is the condition of our humanity. "It would, however," said I, " be terrible to think, that a partial eclipse of intellect or the decay of old age was to forfeit for a mighty mind all that it had thought or attained while in its vigour." D. Horrible, most horrible! so shocking to me is it that I at once reject and cast it from me; I do so from the first spontaneous burst of instinctive feeling, but I should do so on the most close and philosophic reasoning. All that has been once in possession of the mind is not lost because it is not seen; all that is known is not ever present; something must call it forth, something must Wake all those cells where memory slept. The dulled powers of age cannot, may not, shall not, quench the vividness of youth. The moon reappears after an eclipse as bright, or the sun as stedfast, as before. We awake every day after the annihilation of sleep to all the energetic business of the day before; passing through that great mystery we are the same as when we entered it; and such I believe to be the case with a mighty intellect; though age or illness may cloud, it never GENT. MAG VOL. XXV. E |