Chapter 6

THE AUTHOR DISPLAYS A LITTLE MORE OF SUCH READING AS IS SELDOM READ, AND SHOWS THAT LORD BYRON AND AN ESSEX WIDOW DIFFERED IN OPINION CONCERNING FRIDAY.

Si j'avois dispersé ceci en divers endroits de mon ouvrage, j'aurois évité la censure de ceux qui appelleront ce chapitre un fatras de petit recueils. Mais comme je cherche la commodité de mes lecteurs plutôt que la mienne, je veux bien au depens de cette censure, leur épargner la peine de rassembler ce que j'aurois dispersé.

BAYLE.

There is no superstition, however harmless it may appear, and may indeed long continue to be, but has in it some latent evil. Much has arisen from the distinction of unlucky days, which may very innocently and naturally have originated, though it was afterwards dexterously applied by astrologers, and by the priests of false religions, to their own purposes. No one would willingly commence an important undertaking on the anniversary of a day which had brought to him some great and irreparable calamity. It would be indecent to fix upon St. Bartholomew's for a day of public rejoicing in France; or in Portugal upon that day on which Lisbon was laid in ruins by the great earthquake. On the other hand an English General, and an English army, would feel something more than their wonted hope and expectation of victory, if they gave the enemy battle on the anniversaries of Waterloo, or Blenheim, Cressy, Poictiers, or Agincourt. God be thanked neither our fleets, or armies have ever yet caused a day to be noted with black in the English calendar!

But many a good ship has lost that tide which might have led to fortune, because the captain and the crew thought it unlucky to begin their voyage on a Friday. You were in no danger of being left behind by the packet's sailing on that day, however favourable the wind, if it were possible for the captain to devise any excuse for remaining till the morrow in harbour. Lord Byron partook this superstition; and if any thing of the slightest importance in which he was concerned were commenced on a Friday, he was seriously disconcerted.

Such however are the effects of superstitious animosity, that (as the Puritans in the next generation made Christmas-day a fast by an ordinance of Parliament) in James the first's reign Friday was kept as a sort of holyday. The biographer of a Spanish lady, who came to England for the purpose of secretly serving the Roman Catholic cause, says “that among her other griefs she had that of hearing the wheel go round, by which they roasted whole quarters of beef on every Friday, delighting to profane with forbidden food that day on which the catholics, by fasting and other works of penitence, manifested their sense, every week throughout the year, of the sufferings of their Lord and Saviour. In all English houses,” he says, “both private and public (to which latter great part of the people went for their meals) all kinds of meat roasted and boiled, are seen on Fridays, Good Friday not excepted, as if it were a land of Jews or Turks. The nobles in particular reserve their feasts and entertainments of all kinds of meats and delicacies for Fridays. It is the sport of the great, and their sort of piety, to testify by these sacrileges their hatred to the Roman church.”

There is probably some exaggeration in this statement; and if the biographer was conversant with the history of his own country, he must have known that there was a time when his own countrymen made it a point of duty to eat pork on Saturdays, for the sake of despiting the Jews. But the practice cannot have been so common as he represents it, for if it had, Friday would not have retained its inauspicious character to the present time. Yet even this which is in common opinion the most unlucky of all the days, may, from particular circumstances, deserve it appears to be marked with a white stone. Upon a trial brought at the Chelmsford Assizes, by a disconsolate widow against a faithless suitor, for breach of promise, a letter of the defendant's was produced, containing this passage: “Mrs. Martha Harris, you say I have used you ill; but I do not think I have at all; for I told you not to count too much, lest something should happen to disappoint. You say the day was mine; but respecting that, I said, ‘if before harvest it must be very soon, or it would be in harvest;’ and you said ‘fix any time soon.’ But you said you should like to marry on a Friday, for you thought that a good day; for on a Friday your husband died, and on a Friday I first came to see you, and Friday was market day.”

Old opinions, however groundless, are not often so easily overcome. The farmer has let precious days pass by without profiting by favourable weather, because he was warned against them by his almanack, or by tradition; and for the same reason, measures which might have relieved and saved a patient, have been fatally procrastinated. There were about thirty days in the christian year to which such malignant influences were imputed, that the recovery of any person who fell ill upon them was thought to be almost impossible: in any serious disease how greatly must this persuasion have increased the danger!

More than half the days in the year are unlucky in Madagascar: and the Ombiasses, as the sort of bastard Mahomedan jugglers in that great island are called, have made the deluded people believe that any child born on one of those days, will, if it be allowed to grow up, prove a parricide, be addicted to every kind of wickedness, and moreover be miserable throughout the whole course of its life. The infant is always exposed in consequence; and unless some humaner parents employ a slave or relation to preserve it, and remove it for ever from their knowledge, it is left for beasts, birds, or reptiles to devour!

The unfortunate days in Christendom, according to the received superstition in different countries, were either a little more or less than thirty,—about a twelfth part of the year; the fortunate were not quite so many, all the rest are left, if the astrologers had so pleased, in their natural uncertainty. And how uncertain all were is acknowledged in the oldest didactics upon this subject, after what were then the most approved rules had been given.

Ἃιδε μεν ἡμέραι εἰσίν ἐπιχθονίοις μέγ’ ὄνειαρ.Ἃι δ’ἄλλαι μεταδουποι, ἀκήριοι, οὔτι φερουσαι.Ἂλλος δ’ἀλλοίην αἰνεῖ, παῦροι δε τ’ἴσασιν.Ἀλλοτε μητρυιὴ πελει ἡμέρη, ἄλλοτε μήτηρ.Τάων ἐυδαίμων τε και ὄλβιος ὃς τάδε πάνταἘιδὼς ἐργάζηται ἀναίτιος ἀθανάτοισιν,Ὂρνιθας κρίνων, και ὑπερβασίας ἀλεείνων.1

1HESIOD.

These are the days of which the careful heedEach human enterprise will favouring speed:Others there are, which intermediate fall,Mark'd with no auspice, and unomen'd all:And these will some, and those will others praise;But few are vers'd in mysteries of days.Now as a stepmother the day we findSevere, and now as is a mother kind.O fortunate the man! O blest is he,Who skill'd in these, fulfills his ministry:—He to whose note the auguries are giv'n,No rite transgress'd, and void of blame to Heaven.2

2ELTON.

The fixed days for good and evil were said to have been disclosed by an angel to Job. I know not whether it comes from the Rabbinical mint of fables that Moses determined upon Saturday for the Israelites' Sabbath, because that day is governed by Saturn, and Saturn being a malignant planet, all manner of work that might be undertaken on the Saturday might be expected not to prosper. The Sabbatarians might have found here an astrological argument for keeping their sabbath on the same day as the Jews.

Sunday however is popularly supposed in France to be a propitious day for a Romish sabbath,—which is far better than a Sir-Andrew-Agnewish one.Il est reconnu, says a Frenchman, whose testimony on such a point is not invalidated by his madness,—que les jours de la semaine ne peuvent se ressembler, puisqu'ils coulent sous l'influence de differentes planettes. Le soleil, qui preside au dimanche, est censé nous procurer un beau jour plus riant que les autres jours de la semaine; et voila aussi pourquoi on se reserve ce jour pour se livrer aux plaisirs et amusements honnêtes.

The Jews say that the Sun always shines on Wednesdays, because his birth day was on Wednesday, and he keeps it in this manner every week. In Feyjoo's time the Spaniards had a proverbial saying, that no Saturday is ever without sunshine; nor could they be disabused of this notion because in their country it is really a rare thing to have a Saturday, or any other day, in some part or other of which the sun is not seen. But on the Wednesday in Passion week they held that it always rains, because on that day it was that Peter went out and wept bitterly, and they think that it behoves the heavens to weep, after this manner, as if in commemoration of his tears.

The saints indeed have been supposed to affect the weather so much upon their own holydays, that a French Bishop is said to have formed an ingenious project for the benefit of a particular branch of agriculture, by reforming a small part of the Calendar. This prelate was the Bishop of Auxerre, Francis D'Inteville, first of that name. He had observed that for many years the vineyards had suffered severely on certain Saints days, by frost, hail, cold rains or blighting winds, and he had come to the conclusion that though the said Saints had their festivals during the time when the sun is passing through Taurus, they were neverthelessSaints gresleurs, geleurs, et gasteurs du bourgeon.

Now this Bishop loved good wine,comme fait tout homme de bien;and he conceived that if these foul weather Saints, who seemed in this respect to act as if they had enrolled themselves in a Temperance Society, were to have their days changed, and be calendared between Christmas Day and St. Typhaines, they might hail, and freeze and bluster to their hearts content; and if their old festivals were assigned to new patrons, who were supposed to have no dislike for vineyards, all would go on well. St. George, St. Mark, St. Philip and St. Vitalis were some of the Saints who were to be provided for at Christmas; St. Christopher, St. Dominic, St. Laurence and St. Magdalene, the most illustrious of those who should have been installed in their places,—for on their daystant s'en faut qu'on soit en danger de gelèe, que lors mestier au monde n'est qui tant soit de requeste comme est des faiseurs de friscades, et refraischisseurs de vin. These changes however in the Saints' administration were not effected; and it appears by Rabelais' manner of relating the fact, that the Bishop never got from the optative to the potential mood.

Master Rabelais says that the Bishop called the mother of the Three Kings St. Typhaine;—it is certain that such a Saint was made out ofLa Sainte Epiphanié, and that the Three Kings of Cologne were filiated upon her. But whether or not this Prelate were in this respect as ignorant as his flock, he is praised by writers of his own communion for having by his vigilance and zeal kept his diocese as long as he lived, free from the Lutheran pestilence. And he deserves to be praised by others for having given a fine organ to his cathedral, and a stone pulpit, which was scarcely surpassed in beauty by any in the whole kingdom.

The Japanese, who are a wise people, have fixed upon the five most unfortunate days in the year for their five great festivals; and this they have done purposely, and prudently, in order by this universal mirth to divert and propitiate their Camis, or Deities; and also by their custom on those days of wishing happiness to each other, to avert the mishaps that might otherwise befall them. They too are careful never to begin a journey at an inauspicious time, and therefore in all their road and house books there is a printed table, shewing what days of the month are unfortunate for this purpose: they amount to four and twenty in the year. The wise and experienced Astrologer, Abino Seimei, who invented the table, was a personage endowed with divine wisdom, and the precious gift of prognosticating things to come. It is to be presumed that he derived this from his parentage, which was very remarkable on the mother's side. Take, gentle Reader, for thy contentment, what Lightfoot would have called no lean story.

Prince Abino Jassima was in the Temple of Inari, who, being the God and the Protector of Foxes, ought to have a temple in the Bishoprick of Durham, and in Leicestershire, and wherever Foxes are preserved. Foxes' lungs, it seems, were then as much esteemed as a medicine by the Japanese, as Fox-glove may be by European physicians; and a party of Courtiers were fox-hunting at this time in order to make use of the lungs in a prescription. They were in full cry after a young fox, when the poor creature ran into the temple, and instead of looking for protection to the God Inari, took shelter in Prince Jassima's bosom. The Prince on this occasion behaved very well, and the fox-hunters very ill, as it may be feared most fox-hunters would do in similar circumstances. They insisted upon his turning the fox out; he protested that he would commit no such crime, for a crime it would have been in such a case; they attempted to take the creature by force, and Prince Jassima behaved so bravely that he beat them all, and set the fox at liberty. He had a servant with him, but whether this servant assisted him, has not been recorded; neither is it stated that the Fox God, Inari, took any part in the defence of his own creature and his princely votary; though from what followed it may be presumed that he was far from being an unconcerned spectator. I pass over the historical consequences which make “the hunting of that day” more important in Japanese history, than that of Chevy Chace is in our own. I pass them over because they are not exactly pertinent to this place. Suffice it to say that King Jassima, as he must now be called, revenged his father's murder upon these very hunters, and succeeded to his throne; and then, after his victory, the fox appeared, no longer in vulpine form, but in the shape of a lady of incomparable beauty, whom he took to wife, and by whom he became the happy father of our Astrologer, Abino Seimei. Gratitude had moved this alopegyne, gynalopex, fox-lady, or lady-fox, to love; she told her love indeed,—but she never told her gratitude: nor did King Jassima know, nor could he possibly suspect, that his lovely bride had been that very fox whose life he had with so much generosity and courage preserved,—that very fox, I say, “another and the same;”—never did he imagine, nor never could he have imagined this, till an extraordinary change took place in his beautiful and beloved wife. Her ears, her nose, her claws and her tail began to grow, and by degrees this wonderful creature became a fox again! My own opinion is, that she must have been a daughter of the great Fox-God Inari himself.

Abino Seimei, her son, proved to be, as might have been expected, a cunning personage, in the old and good meaning of that word. But as he inherited this cunning from his mysterious mother, he derived also an equal share of benevolence from his kind-hearted father, King Jassima: and therefore, after having calculated for the good of mankind the table of unfortunate days, he, for their farther good, composed anUta, or couplet, of mystical words, by pronouncing which, the poor traveller who is necessitated to begin a journey upon one of those days, may avert all those evils, which, if he were not preserved by such a spell, must infallibly befall him. He did this for the benefit of persons in humble life, who were compelled at any time to go wherever their lords and masters might send them. I know not whether Lord Byron would have ventured to set out on a Friday, after reciting these words, if he had been made acquainted with their value; but here they are, expressed in our own characters, to gratify the “curious in charms.”

Sada Mejesi Tabicatz Fidori Josi Asijwa,Omojitatz Figo Kitz Nito Sen.

CONCERNING PETER HOPKINS AND THE INFLUENCE OF THE MOON AND TIDES UPON THE HUMAN BODY. A CHAPTER WHICH SOME PERSONS MAY DEEM MORE CURIOUS THAN DULL, AND OTHERS MORE DULL THAN CURIOUS.

A man that travelleth to the most desirable home, hath a habit of desire to it all the way; but his present business is his travel; and horse, and company, and inns, and ways, and weariness, &c., may take up more of his sensible thoughts, and of his talk and action, than his home.

BAXTER.

Few things in this world are useless,—none indeed but what are of man's own invention. It was one of Oberlin's wise maxims that nothing should be destroyed, nothing thrown away, or wasted; he knew that every kind of refuse which will not serve to feed pigs, may be made to feed both man and beast in another way by serving for manure: perhaps he learnt this from the Chinese proverb, that a wise man saves even the parings of his nails and the clippings of his beard, for this purpose. “To burn a hair,” says Darwin, “or a straw, unnecessarily, diminishes the sum of matter fit for quick nutrition, by decomposing it nearly into its elements: and should therefore give some compunction to a mind of universal sympathy.” Let not this cant about universal sympathy nauseate a reader of common sense, and make him regard Darwin's opinion here with the contempt which his affectation deserves. Every thing may be of use to the farmer. And so it is with knowledge; there is none, however vain in itself and however little it may be worth the pains of acquiring it, which may not at some time or other be turned to account.

Peter Hopkins found that his acquaintance with astrology was sometimes of good service in his professional practice. In his days most of the Almanacs contained Rules Astrological showing under what aspects and positions different modes of remedy were to be administered, and different complections were to let blood. He had often to deal with persons who believed in their Almanack as implicitly as in their Bible, and who studied this part of it with a more anxious sense of its practical importance to themselves. When these notions were opposed to the course of proceeding which the case required, he could gain his point by talking to them in their own language, and displaying, if it were called for, a knowledge of the art which might have astonished the Almanack-maker himself. If he had reasoned with them upon any other ground, they would have retained their own opinion, even while they submitted to his authority; and would neither have had faith in him, nor in his prescriptions.

Peter Hopkins would never listen to any patient who proposed waiting for a lucky day before he entered upon a prescribed course of medicine. “Go by the moon as much as you please,” he would say; “have your hair cut, if you think best while it wexes, and cut your corns while it wanes; and put off any thing till a lucky day that may as well be done on one day as another. But the right day to be bled is when you want bleeding; the right day for taking physic is when physic is necessary.”

He was the better able to take this course, because he himself belonged to the debateable land between credulity and unbelief. Some one has said that the Devil's dubitative is a negative,—dubius in fide, infidelis est;1and there are cases, as in Othello's, in which from the infirmity of human nature, it is too often seen that

to be once in doubtIs—once to be resolved.

1SEXTUSPYTHAGORAS.

There is however a state of mind, or to speak more accurately a way of thinking, in which men reverse the Welshman's conclusion in the old comedy, and instead of saying ‘it may be, but it is very impossible,’ resolve within themselves that it is very impossible, but it may be. So it was in some degree with Peter Hopkins; his education, his early pursuits, and his turn of mind disposed him to take part with what was then the common opinion of common men, and counterbalanced, if they did not perhaps a little preponderate against the intelligence of the age, and his own deliberate judgment if he had been called upon seriously to declare it. He saw plainly that astrology had been made a craft by means whereof knaves practised upon fools; but so had his own profession; and it no more followed as a necessary consequence from the one admission that the heavenly bodies exercised no direct influence upon the human frame, than it did from the other that the art of medicine was not beneficial to mankind.

In the high days of astrology when such an immediate influence was affirmed upon the then undisputed authority of St. Augustin, it was asked how it happened that the professors of this science so frequently deceived others, and were deceived themselves? The answer was that too often instead of confining themselves within the legitimate limits of the art, they enlarged their phylacteries too much. Farther, that there were many more fixed stars than were known to us, yet these also must have their influence; and moreover that the most learned professors differed upon some of the most important points. Nevertheless so many causes and effects in the course of nature were so visibly connected, that men, whether astrologers or not, drew from them their own conclusions, and presaged accordingly:mirum non est, si his et similibus solerter pensiculatis, non tam astrologi quam philosophi, medici, et longâ experientiâ edocti agricolæ et nautæ, quotidie de futuris multa vera predicunt, etiam sine astrologiæ regulis de morbis, de annonâ, deque tempestatibus.

All persons in Peter Hopkins's days believed that change of weather may be looked for at the change of the Moon; and all men except a few philosophers believe so still, and all the philosophers in Europe could not persuade an old sailor out of the belief. And that the tides have as much influence over the human body in certain stages of disease, as the moon has over the tides, is a popular belief in many parts of the world. The Spaniards think that all who die of chronic diseases breathe their last during the ebb. Among the wonders of the Isle and City of Cadiz, which the historian of that city, Suares de Salazar, enumerates, one is, according to P. Labat, that the sick never die there while the tide is rising or at its height, but always during the ebb: he restricts the notion to the Isle of Leon, but implies that the effect was there believed to take place in diseases of any kind, acute as well as chronic. “Him fever,” says the Negro in the West Indies, “shall go when the water come low. Him alway come hot when the tide high.”

If the Negroes had ever heard the theory of the tides which Herrera mentions, they would readily believe it, and look upon it as completely explaining the ground of their assertion; for according to that theory the tides are caused by a fever of the sea, which rages for six hours, and then intermits for as many more.

But the effect of the tides upon the human constitution in certain states is not a mere vulgar opinion. Major Moor says that near the tropics, especially in situations where the tide of the sea has a great rise and fall, scarcely any person, and certainly no one affected with feverish or nervous symptoms, is exempted from extraordinary sensations at the periods of spring tides. That these are caused by the changes of the moon he will not say, for he had never fully convinced himself, however plausible the theory, that the coincident phenomena of spring tides, and full and change of the moon, were cause and effect; but at the conjunction and opposition, or what amounts to the same, at the spring tides, these sensations are periodically felt. There is an account of one singular case in which the influence was entirely lunar. When Mr. Galt was travelling in the Morea, he fell in with a peasant, evidently in an advanced stage of dropsy, who told him, that his father had died of a similar complaint, but differing from his in this remarkable respect—the father's continued to grow regularly worse, without any intervals of alleviation; but at the change of the moon the son felt comparatively much easier. As the moon advanced to the full, the swelling enlarged; and as she waned, it again lessened. Still, however, though this alteration continued, the disease was gaining ground.

“The moon,” Mr. Galt observes, “has, or is believed to have, much more to say in the affairs of those parts, than with us. The climate is more regular; and if the air have tides, like the ocean, of course their effects are more perceptible.”

In an early volume of the Philosophical Transactions are some observations made by Mr. Paschal on the motions of diseases, and on the births and deaths of men and other animals, in different parts of the day and night. Having suspected, he says, that the causes of the tides at sea exert their power elsewhere, though the effect may not be so sensibly perceived on the solid as on the fluid parts of the globe, he divided, for trial of this notion, the natural day into four senaries of hours; the first consisting of three hours before the moon's southing, and three after; the second, of the six hours following; and the third and fourth contained the two remaining quarters of the natural day. Observing then the times of birth and death, both in human and other subjects, as many as came within the circle of his knowledge, he found, he says, none that were born or died a natural death in the first and third senaries, (which he called first and second tides,) but every one either in the second or fourth senaries, (which he called the first and second ebbs). He then made observations upon the motions of diseases, other circumstances connected with the human frame, alterations of the weather, and such accounts as he could meet with of earthquakes and other things, and he met with nothing to prevent him from laying down this as a maxim:—that motion, vigour, action, strength, &c., appear most and do best, in the tiding senaries; and that rest, relaxation, decay, dissolution, belong to the ebbing ones.

This theorist must have been strongly possessed with a favorite opinion, before he could imagine that the deep subterranean causes of earthquakes could in any degree be affected by the tides. But that the same influences which occasion the ebb and flow of the ocean have an effect upon certain diseases, is a conclusion to which Dr. Pinckard came in the West Indies, and Dr. Balfour in the East, from what they observed in the course of their own practice, and what they collected from the information of others. “In Bengal,” Dr. Balfour says, “there is no room to doubt that the human frame is affected by the influences connected with the relative situations of the sun and moon. In certain states of health and vigour, this influence has not power to show itself by any obvious effects, and in such cases its existence is often not acknowledged. But in certain states of debility and disease it is able to manifest itself by exciting febrile paroxysms. Such paroxysms shew themselves more frequently during the period of the spring tides, and as these advance become more violent and obstinate, and on the other hand tend no less invariably to subside and terminate during the recess.

“I have no doubt,” says this practitioner, “that any physician who will carefully attend to the diurnal and nocturnal returns of the tides, and will constantly hold before him the prevailing tendency of fevers to appear at the commencement, and during the period of the spring; and to subside and terminate at the commencement and during the period of the recess, will soon obtain more information respecting the phenomena of fevers, and he able to form more just and certain judgements and prognostics respecting every event, than if he were to study the history of medicine, as it is now written, for a thousand years. There is no revolution or change in the course of fevers that may not be explained by these general principles in a manner consistent with the laws of the human constitution, and of the great system of revolving bodies which unite together in producing them.”

Dr. Balfour spared no pains in collecting information to elucidate and confirm his theory during the course of thirty years practice in India. He communicated upon it with most of the European practitioners in the Company's dominions; and the then Governor General, Lord Teignmouth, considered the subject as so important, that he properly as well as liberally ordered the correspondence and the treatise, in which its results were embodied, to be printed and circulated at the expense of the government. The author drew up his scheme of an Astronomical Ephemeris, for the purposes of Medicine and Meteorology, and satisfied himself that he had “discovered the laws of febrile paroxysms,” and unfolded a history and theory of fevers entirely new, consistent with itself in every part, and with the other appearances of nature, perfectly conformable to the laws discovered by the immortal Newton, and capable of producing important improvements in medicine and meteorology. He protested against objections to his theory as if it were connected with the wild and groundless delusions of astrology. Yet the letter of his correspondent, Dr. Helenus Scott, of Bombay, shews how naturally and inevitably it would be connected with them in that country. “The influence of the moon on the human body,” says that physician, “has been observed in this part of India by every medical practitioner. It is universally acknowledged by the doctors of all colours, of all casts, and of all countries. The people are taught to believe it in their infancy, and as they grow up, they acknowledge it from experience. I suppose that in the northern latitudes this power of the moon is far less sensible than in India. Here we universally think that the state of weakly and diseased bodies is much influenced by its motions. Every full and change increases the number of the patients of every practitioner. That the human body is affected in a remarkable manner by them I am perfectly convinced, and that an attention to the power of the moon is highly necessary to the medical practitioner in India.”

This passage tends to confirm, what indeed no judicious person can doubt, that the application of astrology to medicine, though it was soon perverted, and debased till it became a mere craft, originated in actual observations of the connection between certain bodily affections, and certain times and seasons. Many, if not most of the mischievous systems in physics and divinity have arisen from dim perceptions or erroneous apprehensions of some important truth. And not a few have originated in the common error of drawing bold and hasty inferences from weak premises. Sailors say, what they of all men have most opportunities of observing, that the moon as it rises clears the sky of clouds:a puesta del sol, says a Spanish chronicler,parescio la luna, e comio poco a poco todas las nuves.The “learned and reverend” Dr. Goad, sometime Master of Merchant Taylors' School, published a work “of vast pains, reading and many years experience,” which he called “Astro-Meteorologia, or a Demonstration of the Influences of the Stars in the alterations of the Air; proving that there is not an Earthquake, Comet, Parhelia, Halo, Thunder-storm or Tempest, or any other Phenomena, but is referable to its particular planetary aspect, as the sub-solar cause thereof.”

REMARKS OF AN IMPATIENT READER ANTICIPATED AND ANSWERED.

Ὦ πολλὰ λέξας ἄρτι κάνόνητ᾽ ἔπη,Οὐ μνημονεύεις οὐκέτ᾽ οὐδὲν;SOPHOCLES.

Novel readers are sometimes so impatient to know how the story is to end, that they look at the last chapter, and so—escape, should I say—or forfeit that state of agitating suspense in which it was the author or authoress's endeavour to keep them till they should arrive by a regular perusal at the well-concealed catastrophe. It may be apprehended that persons of this temper, having in their composition much more of Eve's curiosity than of Job's patience, will regard with some displeasure a work like the present, of which the conclusion is not before them; and some perhaps may even be so unreasonable as to complain that they go through chapter after chapter without making any progress in the story. “What care the Public,” says one of these readers, (for every reader is a self-constituted representative of that great invisible body)—“what do the Public care for Astrology and Almanacks, and the Influence of the Tides upon diseases, and Mademoiselle des Roches's flea, and the Koran, and the Chronology of this fellow's chapters, and Potteric Carr, and the Corporation of Doncaster, and the Theory of Signatures, and the Philosophy of the Alchemists, and the Devil knows what besides! What have these things to do with the subject of the book, and who would ever have looked for them in a Novel?”

“A Novel do you call it, Mr. Reader?”

“Yes, Mr. Author, what else should I call it? It has been reviewed as a Novel and advertised as a Novel.”

“I confess that in this very day's newspaper it is advertised in company with four new Novels; the first in the list being ‘Warleigh, or the Fatal Oak,’ a Legend of Devon, by Mrs. Bray: the second, ‘Dacre,’ edited by the Countess of Morley; Mr. James's ‘Life and Adventures of John Marston Hall,’ is the third: fourthly, comes the dear name of ‘The Doctor;’ and last in the list, ‘The Court of Sigismund Augustus, or Poland in the Seventeenth Century.’”

I present my compliments to each and all of the authoresses and authors with whom I find myself thus associated. At the same time I beg leave to apologize for this apparent intrusion into their company, and to assure them that the honour which I have thus received has been thrust upon me. Dr. Stegman had four patients whose disease was that they saw themselves double: “they perceived,” says Mr. Turner, “another self, exterior to themselves!” I am not one of Dr. Stegman's patients; but I see myself double in a certain sense, and in that sense have another and distinct self,—the one incog, the other out of cog. Out of cog I should be as willing to meet the novelist of the Polish Court, as any other unknown brother or sister of the quill. Out of cog I should be glad to shake hands with Mr. James, converse with him about Charlemagne, and urge him to proceed with his French biography. Out of cog I should have much pleasure in making my bow to Lady Morley or her editee. Out of cog I should like to be introduced to Mrs. Bray in her own lovely land of Devon, and see the sweet innocent face of her humble friend Mary Colling. But without a proper introduction I should never think of presenting myself to any of these persons; and having incog the same sense of propriety as out of cog, I assure them that the manner in which my one self has been associated with them is not the act and deed of my other self, but that of Messrs. Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, Green and Longman, my very worthy and approved good publishers.

“Why, Mr. Author, you do not mean to say that the book is not printed as a novel, does not appear as one, and is not intended to pass for one. Have you the face to deny it?”

“Lecteur, mon ami, la demande est bien faite sans doute, et bien apparente; mais la response vous contentera, ou j'ai le sens malgallefretu!”

“Lecteur, mon ami!an Incog has no face. But this I say in the face, or in all the faces, of that Public which has more heads than a Hindu Divinity, that the character and contents of the book were fairly, fully, carefully and considerately denoted,—that is to say, notified or made known, in the title-page. Turn to it, I intreat you, Sir! The first thing which you cannot but notice, is, that it is in motley. Ought you not to have inferred, concerning the author, that in his brain

—he hath strange places cramm'dWith observation, the which he ventsIn mangled forms.1

And it you could fail to perceive the conspicuous and capacious

&c.

which in its omnisignificance may promise anything, and yet pledges the writer to nothing; and if you could also overlook the mysterious monograph

logo

your attention was invited to all this by a sentence of Butler's on the opposite page, so apposite that it seems as if he had written it with a second-sight of the application thus to be made of it: ‘There is a kind of physiognomy in the titles of books no less than in the faces of men, by which a skilful observer will as well know what to expect from the one as the other.’ This was the remark of one whose wisdom can never be obsolete; and whose wit, though much of it has become so, it will always be worth while for an Englishman to study and to understand.

1SHAKESPEARE.

“Mr. D'Israeli has said that ‘the false idea which a title conveys is alike prejudicial to the author and the reader, and that titles are generally too prodigal of their promises;’ but yet there is an error on the other hand to be avoided, for if they say too little they may fail of attracting notice. I bore in mind what Baillet says upon this subject, to which he has devoted a long chapter:le titre d'un Livre doit être son abregé, et il en doit renfermer tout l'esprit, autant qu'il est possible. Il doit être le centre de toutes les paroles et de toutes les pensées du Livre; de telle sorte qu'on n'y en puisse pas même trouver une qui n'y dit de la correspondance et du rapport.From this rule there has been no departure. Every thing that is said of Peter Hopkins relates to the Doctor prospectively, because he was the Doctor's master: every thing that may be said of, or from myself, relates to the Doctor retrospectively, or reflectively, because he, though in a different sense, was mine: and every thing that is said about anything else, relates to him collaterally, being either derivative or tributary, either divergent from the main subject, or convergent to its main end.

“But albeit I claim the privilege of motley, and in right thereof

I must have libertyWithal, as large a charter as the wind,To blow on whom I please;——2

yet I have in no instance abused that charter, nor visited any one too roughly. Nor will I ever do against all the world what John Kinsaider did, in unseemly defiance,—nor against the wind either; though it has been no maxim of mine, nor ever shall be, to turn with the tide, or go with the crowd, unless they are going my road, and there is no other way that I can take to escape the annoyance of their company.”

2SHAKESPEARE.

“And is this any reason, Mr. Author, why you should get on as slowly with the story of your book, as the House of Commons with the business of the nation, in the present reformed Parliament, with Lord Althorpe for its leader?”

“Give me credit, Sir, for a temper as imperturbably good as that which Lord Althorpe presents, like a sevenfold shield of lamb's wool, to cover him against all attacks, and I will not complain of the disparagement implied in your comparison.”

“Your confounded good temper, Mr. Author, seems to pride itself upon trying experiments on the patience of your readers. Here I am in the middle of the third volume, and if any one asked me what the book is about, it would be impossible for me to answer the question. I have never been able to guess at the end of one chapter, what was likely to be the subject of the next.”

“Let me reply to that observation, Sir, by an anecdote. A collector of scarce books was one day showing me his small but curious hoard; ‘Have you ever seen a copy of this book?’ he asked, with every rare volume that he put into my hands: and when my reply was that I had not, he always rejoined with a look and tone of triumphant delight, ‘I should have been exceedingly sorry if you had!’

“Let me tell you another anecdote, not less to the purpose. A thorough-bred fox-hunter found himself so much out of health a little before the season for his sport began, that he took what was then thought a long journey to consult a physician, and get some advice which he hoped would put him into a condition for taking the field. Upon his return his friends asked him what the Doctor had said. ‘Why,’ said the Squire, ‘he told me that I've got a dyspepsy:—I don't know what that is: but it's some damn'd thing or other I suppose!’—My good Sir, however much at a loss you may be to guess what is coming in the next chapter, you can have no apprehension that it may turn out anything like what he, with too much reason, supposed a dyspepsy to be.

“Lecteur, mon ami, I have given you the advantage of a motto from Sophocles, and were it as apposite to me, as it seems applicable when coming from you, I might content myself with replying to it in a couplet of the honest old wine-bibbing, Water-poet:—

That man may well be called an idle momeThat mocks the Cock because he wears a comb.

But no one who knows a hawk from a hernshaw, or a sheep's head from a carrot, or the Lord Chancellor Brougham in his wig and robes, from a Guy Vaux on the fifth of November, can be so mistaken in judgment as to say that I make use of many words in making nothing understood; nor as to think me,

ἄνθρωπον ἀγριοποἰον, αὐθαδόστομον,ἔχοντ᾽ ἀχαλινον, ἀκρατὲς, ἀπύλωτον στόμὰ,ἀπεριλάλητον, κομποφακελοῤῥήμονα.3

3ARISTOPHANES.

“Any subject is inexhaustible if it be fully treated of; that is, if it be treated doctrinally and practically, analytically and synthetically, historically and morally, critically, popularly and eloquently, philosophically, exegetically and æsthetically, logically, neologically, etymologically, archaiologically, Daniologically and Doveologically, which is to say, summing up all in one, Doctorologically.

“Now, my good Reader, whether I handle my subject in any of these ways, or in any other legitimate way, this is certain, that I never handle it as a cow does a musquet; and that I have never wandered from it, not even when you have drawn me into a Tattle-de-Moy.”

“Auctor incomparabilis, what is a Tattle-de Moy?”

“Lecteur mon ami, you shall now know what to expect in the next chapter, for I will tell you there what a Tattle-de-Moy is.”

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