June 20, 1740.
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“The following was sent me a few months ago by the minister of Kirklees in Yorkshire, the burying place of Robin Hood. My correspondent tells me it was found among the papers of the late Dr. Gale of York, and is supposed to have been the genuine epitaph of that noted English outlaw. He adds that the grave stone is yet to be seen, but the characters are now worn out.
Here undernead dis laitl SteanLaiz Robert Earl of Huntingtun.Nea Arcir ver az hie sa geud,An Piple kauld im Robin Heud.Sick utlawz az hi and is menVil england nivr si agen.Obiit 24. Kal. Dehembris, 1247.
Here undernead dis laitl SteanLaiz Robert Earl of Huntingtun.Nea Arcir ver az hie sa geud,An Piple kauld im Robin Heud.Sick utlawz az hi and is menVil england nivr si agen.Obiit 24. Kal. Dehembris, 1247.
I am, dear Sir, your most faithful and humble Servant,
JOSIAHRELPH.”
Note in Nichols.—See the stone engraved in the Sepulchral Monuments, vol. i. p. cviii. Mr. Gough says the inscription was never on it; and that the stone must have been brought from another place, as the ground under it, on being explored, was found to have been never before disturbed.2
2On the disputed question of the genuineness of the above epitaph, see the Notes and Illustrations to Ritson's Robin Hood, pp. xliv—1. Robin Hood's Death and Burial is the last Ballad in the second volume.
“And there they buried bold Robin Hood,Near to the fair Kirkleys.”
“And there they buried bold Robin Hood,Near to the fair Kirkleys.”
Lord Dalmeny, son of the E. of Rosebery, married about eighty years ago a widow at Bath for her beauty. They went abroad, she sickened and on her death-bed requested that she might be interred in some particular church-yard, either in Sussex or Suffolk I forget which. The body was embalmed, but at the custom-house in the port where it was landed the officer suspected smuggling and insisted on opening it. They recognized the features of the wife of their own clergyman,—who having been married to him against her own inclination had eloped. Both husbands followed the body to the grave. The Grandfather of Dr. Smith of Norwich knew the Lord.
It was a melancholy notion of the Stoics that the condition of the Soul, and even its individual immortality, might be affected by the circumstances of death: for example, that if any person were killed by a great mass of earth falling upon him, or the ruins of a building, the Soul as well as the body would be crushed, and not being able to extricate itself would be extinguished there:existimant animam hominis magno pondere extriti permeare non posse, et statim spargi, quia non fuerit illi exitus liber.
Upon this belief, the satirical epitaph on Sir John Vanbrugh would convey what might indeed be called a heavy curse.
Some of the Greenlanders, for even in Greenland there are sects, suppose the soul to be so corporeal that it can increase or decrease, is divisible, may lose part of its substance, and have it restored again. On its way to Heaven which is five days dreadful journey, all the way down a rugged rock, which is so steep that they must slide down it, and so rough that their way is tracked with blood, they are liable to be destroyed, and this destruction, which they call the second death, is final, and therefore justly deemed of all things the most terrible. It is beyond the power of their Angekoks to remedy this evil; but these impostors pretend to the art of repairing a maimed soul, bringing home a strayed or runaway one, and of changing away one that is sickly, for the sound and sprightly one of a hare, a rein deer, a bird, or an infant.
“This is the peevishness of our humane wisdom, yea, rather of our humane folly, to earn for tidings from the dead, as if a spirit departed could declare anything more evidently than the book of God, which is the sure oracle of life? This was Saul's practise,—neglect Samuel when he was alive, and seek after him when he was dead. What says the Prophet,Should not a people seek unto their God? Should the living repair to the dead? (Isai. viij. 19.)Among the works of Athanasius I find (though he be not the author of the questions to Antiochus,) a discourse full of reason, why God would not permit the soul of any of those that departed from hence to return back unto us again, and to declare the state of things in hell unto us. For what pestilent errors would arise from thence to seduce us? Devils would transform themselves into the shapes of men that were deceased, pretend that they were risen from the dead (for what will not the Father of lies feign?) and so spread in any false doctrines, or incite us to many barbarous actions, to our endless error and destruction. And admit they be not Phantasms, and delusions, but the very men, yet all men are liars, but God is truth. I told you what a Necromancer Saul was in the Old Testament, he would believe nothing unless a prophet rose from the grave to teach him. There is another as good as himself in the New Testament, and not another pattern in all the Scripture to my remembrance, Luke xvi. 27. The rich man in hell urged Abraham to send Lazarus to admonish his brethren of their wicked life; Abraham refers to Moses and the Prophets. He that could not teach himself when he was alive, would teach Abraham himself being in hell,Nay, Father Abraham, but if one went unto them from the dead, they will repent.
“The mind is composed with quietness to hear the living; the apparitions of dead men, beside the suspicion of delusion, would fill us with gastly horror, and it were impossible we should be fit scholars to learn if such strong perturbation of fear should be upon us. How much better hath God ordained for our security, and tranquillity,that the priest's lips should preserve knowledge?I know, if God shall see it fit to have us disciplined by such means, he can stir up the spirits of the faithful departed to come among us: So, after Christ's resurrection many dead bodies of the Saints which slept arose, and came out of their graves, and went into the Holy City, and appeared unto many. This was not upon a small matter, but upon a brave and renowned occasion: But for the Spirits of damnation, that are tied in chains of darkness, there is no repassage for them, and it makes more to strengthen our belief that never any did return from hell to tell us their woeful tale, than if any should return. It is among the severe penalties of damnation that there is no indulgence for the smallest respite to come out of it. The heathen put that truth into this fable. The Lion asked the Fox, why he never came to visit him when he was sick: Says the Fox, because I can trace many beasts by the print of their foot that have gone toward your den, Sir Lion, but I cannot see the print of one foot that ever came back:
Quia me vestigia terrentOmnia te advorsum spectantia, nulla retrorsum.
Quia me vestigia terrentOmnia te advorsum spectantia, nulla retrorsum.
So there is a beaten, and a broad road that leads the reprobate to hell, but you do not find the print of one hoof that ever came back. When I have given you my judgment about apparitions of the dead in their descending from Heaven, or ascending from hell, I must tell you in the third place, I have met with a thousand stories in Pontifician writings concerning some that have had repassage from Purgatory to their familiars upon earth. Notwithstanding the reverence I bear to Gregory the Great, I cannot refrain to say; He was much to blame to begin such fictions upon his credulity; others have been more to blame that have invented such Legends; and they are most to be derided that believe them.O miserable Theology!if, thy tenets must be confirmed by sick men's dreams, and dead men's phantastical apparitions!”
BP. HACKETT.
“It is a morose humour in some, even ministers, that they will not give a due commendation to the deceased: whereby they not only offer a seeming unkindness to the dead, but do a real injury to the living, by discouraging virtue, and depriving us of the great instruments of piety, good examples: which usually are far more effective methods of instruction, than any precepts: These commonly urging only the necessity of those duties, while the other shew the possibility and manner of performing.
“But then, 'tis a most unchristian and uncharitable mistake in those, that think it unlawful to commemorate the dead, and to celebrate their memories: whereas there is no one thing does so much uphold and keep up the honour and interest of religion amongst the multitude, as the due observance of those Anniversaries which the Church has, upon this account, scattered throughout the whole course of the year, would do: and indeed to our neglect of this in a great part the present decay of religion may rationally be imputed.
“Thus in this age of our's what Pliny saith of his,Postquam desimus facere laudanda, laudari quoque ineptum putamus.Since people have left off doing things that are praiseworthy, they look upon praise itself as a silly thing.
“And possibly the generality of hearers themselves are not free from this fault; who peradventure may fancy their own life upbraided, when they hear another's commended.
“But that the servants of God, which depart this life in his faith and fear, may and must be praised, I shall endeavour to make good upon these three grounds.
“In common justice to the deceased themselves.Ordinary civility teaches us to speak well of the dead.Nec quicquam sanctius habet reverentia superstitum, quàm ut amissos venerabiliter recordetur,says Ausonius, and makes this the ground of the Parentalia, which had been ever since Numa's time.
“Praise, however it may become the living, is a just debt to the deserts of the dead, who are now got clear out of the reach of envy; which, if it have anything of the generous in it, will scorn, vulture-like, to prey upon carcass.
“Besides, Christianity lays a greater obligation upon us;The Communion of Saintsis aTenetof our faith. Now, as we ought notprayto or for them, so we may and mustpraisethem.
“This is the least we can do in return for those great offices, they did the Church Militant, while they were with us, and now do, they are with God; nor have we any other probable way of communicating with them.
“The Philosopher in his Morals makes it a question, whether the dead are in any way concerned in what befals them or their posterity after their decease; and whether those honours and reproaches, which survivors cast upon them, reach them or no? and he concludes it after a long debate in the affirmative; not so, he says, as to alter their state, but,συμβάλλεσθαί τι, to contribute somewhat to it.
“Tully, though not absolutely persuaded of an immortal soul, as speaking doubtfully and variously of it, yet is constant to this, that he takes a good name and a reputation, we leave behind us, to be a kind of immortality.
“But there is more in it than so. Our remembrance of the Saints may be a means to improve their bliss, and heighten their rewards to all eternity. Abraham, the Father of the Faithful, hath his bosom thus daily enlarged for new comers.
“Whether the heirs of the kingdom are, at their first admission, instated into a full possession of all their glory, and kept to that stint, I think may be a doubt. For if the faculty be perfected by the object, about which 'tis conversant; then the faculties of those blessed ones being continually employed upon an infinite object, must needs be infinitely perficible, and capable still of being more and more enlarged, and consequently of receiving still new and further additions of glory.
“Not only so, (this is in Heaven:) but even the influence of that example, they leave behind them on earth, drawing still more and more souls after them to God, will also add to those improvements to the end of the world, and bring in a revenue of accessory joys.
“And would it not be unjust in us then to deny them those glorious advantages, which our commemoration and inclination may and ought to give them.”3
ADAMLITTLETON.
3“Five Sermons formerly printed,” p. 61., at the end of the volume. The one from which the above passage is extracted is that preached at the obsequies of the Right Honorable the Lady Jane Cheyne.
Circles and right lines limit and close all bodies, and the mortal right lined circle, must conclude to shut up all. There is no Antidote against the Opinion of Time, which, temporally considereth all things; Our Fathers find their Graves in our short memories and sadly tell us how we may be buried in our survivors. Grave-stones tell truth scarce forty years: Generations pass while some Trees stand, and old families last not three oaks. To be read by bare Inscriptions like many in Gruter, to hope for Eternity by Ænigmatical Epithetes, or first Letters of our names to be studied by Antiquaries, who we were, and have new names given us like many of the Mummies, are cold consolations unto the students of perpetuity even by everlasting Languages.
SIRT. BROWNE.
CHARITY OF THE DOCTOR IN HIS OPINIONS.—MASON THE POET.—POLITICAL MEDICINE.—SIR WILLIAM TEMPLE.—CERVANTES.—STATE PHYSICIANS.—ADVANTAGE TO BE DERIVED FROM, WHETHER TO KING, CABINET, LORDS OR COMMONS.—EXAMPLES.—PHILOSOPHY OF POPULAR EXPRESSIONS.—COTTON MATHER.—CLAUDE PAJON AND BARNABAS OLEY.—TIMOTHY ROGERS AND MELANCHOLY.
Go to!You are a subtile nation, you physicians,And grown the only cabinets in court!B. JONSON.
Go to!You are a subtile nation, you physicians,And grown the only cabinets in court!B. JONSON.
The Doctor, who was charitable in all his opinions, used to account and apologize for many of the errors of men, by what he called the original sin of their constitution, using the term not theologically, but in a physico-philosophical sense. What an old French physician said concerning Charles VIII. was in entire accord with his speculations,—ce corps etoit composé de mauvais pâte, et de matiere cathareuse.Men of hard hearts and heavy intellect, he said, were made of stony materials. For a drunkard, his qualifying censure was,—“poor fellow! bibulous clay—bibulous clay!” Your light-brained, light-hearted people, who are too giddy ever to be good, had not earth enough, he said, in their composition. Those upon whose ungrateful temper benefits were ill bestowed, and on whom the blessings of fortune were thrown away, he excused by saying that they were made from a sandy soil;—and for Mammon's muckworms,—their mould was taken from the dunghill.
Mason the poet was a man of ill-natured politics, out of humour with his country till the French Revolution startled him and brought him into a better state of feeling. This however was not while the Doctor lived, and till that time he could see nothing but tyranny and injustice in the proceedings of the British Government, and nothing but slavery and ruin to come for the nation. These opinions were the effects of Whiggery1acting upon a sour stomach and a saturnine constitution. To think ill of the present and augur worse of the future has long been accounted a proof of patriotism among those who by an illustrious antiphrasis call themselves patriots. “What the Romans scorned to do after the battle of Cannæ,” said Lord Keeper Finch in one of his solid and eloquent speeches, “what the Venetians never did when they had lost all theirterra firma, that men are now taught to think a virtue and the sign of a wise and good man,desperare de Republica:and all this in a time of as much justice and peace at home, as good laws for the security of religion and liberty, as good execution of these laws, as great plenty of trade and commerce abroad, and as likely a conjuncture of affairs for the continuance of these blessings to us, as ever nation prospered under.”
1See Vol. IV. p. 375.
The Doctor, when he spoke of this part of Mason's character, explained it by saying that the elements had not been happily tempered in him—“cold and dry, Sir!” and then he shook his head and knit his brow with that sort of compassionate look which came naturally into his countenance when he was questioned concerning a patient whose state was unfavourable.
But though he believed that many of our sins and propensities are bred in the bone, he disputed the other part of the proverb, and maintained that they might be got out of the flesh. And then generalizing with a rapidity worthy of Humboldt himself, he asserted that all political evils in modern ages and civilized states were mainly owing to a neglect of the medical art;—and that there would not, and could not be so many distempers in the body politic, if theprimæ viæwere but attended to with proper care; an opinion in which he was fortified by the authority of Sir William Temple.
“I have observed the fate ofCampania,” says that eminent statesman, “determine contrary to all appearances, by the caution and conduct of a General, which was attributed by those that knew him, to his age and infirmities, rather than his own true qualities, acknowledged otherwise to have been as great as most men of the age. I have seen the counsels of a noble country grow bold, or timorous, according to the fits of his good or ill-health that managed them, and the pulse of the Government beat high with that of the Governor; and this unequal conduct makes way for great accidents in the world. Nay, I have often reflected upon the counsels and fortunes of the greatest monarchies rising and decaying sensibly with the ages and healths of the Princes and chief officers that governed them. And I remember one great minister that confessed to me, when he fell into one of his usual fits of the gout, he was no longer able to bend his mind or thought to any public business, nor give audiences beyond two or three of his domestics, though it were to save a kingdom; and that this proceeded not from any violence of pain, but from a general languishing and faintness of spirits, which made him in those fits think nothing worth the trouble of one careful or solicitous thought. For the approaches, or lurkings of the Gout, the Spleen, or the Scurvy, nay the very fumes of indigestion, may indispose men to thought and to care, as well as diseases of danger and pain. Thus accidents of health grow to be accidents of State, and public constitutions come to depend in a great measure upon those of particular men; which makes it perhaps seem necessary in the choice of persons for great employments (at least such as require constant application and pains) to consider their bodies as well as their minds, and ages and health as well as their abilities.”
Cervantes according to the Doctor clearly perceived this great truth, and went farther than Sir W. Temple, for he perceived also the practical application, though it was one of those truths which because it might have been dangerous for him to propound them seriously, he was fain to bring forward in a comic guise, leaving it for the wise to discover his meaning, and for posterity to profit by it. He knew—(Daniel loquitur)what did not Cervantes know?—that if Philip II. had committed himself to the superintendence of a Physician instead of a Father Confessor, many of the crimes and miseries by which his reign is so infamously distinguished, might have been prevented. A man of his sad spirit and melancholy complection to be dieted upon fish the whole forty days of Lent, two days in the week during the rest of the year, and on the eve of every holiday besides,—what could be expected but atrabilious thoughts, and cold-blooded resolutions? Therefore Cervantes appointed a Physician over Sancho in his Baratarian government: the humour of the scene was for all readers, the application for those who could penetrate beyond the veil, the benefit for happier ages when the art of Government should be better understood, and the science of medicine be raised to its proper station in the state.
Shakespere intended to convey the same political lesson, when he said “take physic pomp!” He used the word pomp instead of power, cautiously, for in those days it was a perilous thing to meddle with matters of state.
When the Philosopher Carneades undertook to confute Zeno the Stoic in public argument, (still readerDaniel loquitur) how did he prepare himself for the arduous disputation? by purging his head with hellebore, to the intent that the corrupt humours which ascended thither from the stomach should not disturb the seat of memory and judgment, and obscure his intellectual perception. The theory, Sir, was erroneous, but the principle is good. When we require best music from the instrument, ought we not first to be careful that all its parts are in good order, and if we find a string that jars, use our endeavours for tuning it?
It may have been the jest of a satirist that Dryden considered stewed prunes as the best means of putting his body into a state favourable for heroic composition; but that odd person George Wither tells us of himself that he usually watched and fasted when he composed, that his spirit was lost if at such times he tasted meat or drink, and that if he took a glass of wine he could not write a verse:—no wonder therefore that his verses were for the most part in a weak and watery vein.2Father Paul Sarpi had a still more extraordinary custom; it is not to an enemy, but to his friend and admirers that we are indebted for informing us with what care that excellent writer attended to physical circumstance as affecting his intellectual powers. For when he was either reading or writing, alone, “his manner,” says Sir Henry Wotton, “was to sit fenced with a castle of paper about his chair, and over head; for he was of our Lord of St. Alban's opinionthat all air is predatory, and especially hurtful when the spirits are most employed.”
2The Greek Proverb, adverted to by Horace in i. Epist. xix., was in the Doctor's thoughts.
ὓδωρ δὲ πίνων οὐδὲν ἂν τέκοι σοφόν.
ὓδωρ δὲ πίνων οὐδὲν ἂν τέκοι σοφόν.
There should be a State Physician to the King, besides his Physicians ordinary and extraordinary,—one whose sole business should be to watch over the royal health as connected with the discharge of the royal functions, a head keeper of the King's health.
For the same reason there ought to be a Physician for the Cabinet, a Physician for the Privy Council, a Physician for the Bench of Bishops, a Physician for the twelve Judges, two for the House of Lords, four for the House of Commons, one for the Admiralty, one for the War Office, one for the Directors of the East India Company, (there was no Board of Controul in the Doctor's days, or he would certainly have advised that a Physician should be placed upon that Establishment also): one for the Lord Mayor, two for the Common Council, four for the Livery. (He was speaking in the days of Wilkes and Liberty). How much mischief, said he, might have been prevented by cupping the Lord Mayor, blistering a few of the Aldermen, administering salts and manna to lower the pulse of civic patriotism, and keeping the city orators upon a low regimen for a week before every public meeting.
Then in the Cabinet what evils might be averted by administering laxatives or corroborants as the case required.
In the Lords and Commons, by clearing away bile, evacuating ill humours and occasionally by cutting for the simples.3
3The probable origin of this Proverb is given in Grose's Dictionary of the vulgar tongue.
While men are what they are, weak, frail, inconstant, fallible, peccable, sinful creatures,—it is in vain to hope that Peers and Commoners will prepare themselves for the solemn exercise of their legislative functions by fasting and prayer,—that so they may be better fitted for retiring into themselves, and consulting upon momentous questions the Urim and Thummim which God hath placed in the breast of every man. But even as Laws are necessary for keeping men within the limits of their duty when conscience fails, so in this case it should be part of the law of Parliament that what its Members will not do for themselves, the Physician should do for them. They should go through a preparatory course of medicine before every session, and be carefully attended as long as Parliament was sitting.
Traces of such a practice, as of many important and primeval truths, are found among savages, from whom the Doctor was of opinion that much might be learnt, if their customs were diligently observed and their traditions carefully studied. In one of the bravest nations upon the Mississippi, the warriors before they set out upon an expedition always prepared themselves by taking the Medicine of War, which was an emetic, about a gallon in quantity for each man, and to be swallowed at one draught. There are other tribes in which the Beloved Women prepare a beverage at the Physic Dance, and it is taken to wash away sin.
Here said the Doctor are vestiges of early wisdom, probably patriarchal and if so, revealed,—for he held that all needful knowledge was imparted to man at his creation. And the truth of the principle is shown in common language. There is often a philosophy in popular expressions and forms of speech, which escapes notice, because words are taken as they are uttered, at their current value and we rest satisfied with their trivial acceptation. We take them in the husk and the shell, but sometimes it is worth while to look for the kernel. Do we not speak ofsoundand orthodox opinions,—soundprinciples,soundlearning?mens sana in corpore sano.A sound mind is connected with a sound body, and sound and orthodox opinions result from the sanity of both. Unsound opinions are diseased ones, and therefore the factious, the heretical and the schismatic, ought to be put under the care of a physician.
“I have read of a gentleman,” says Cotton Mather, “who had an humour of making singular and fanciful expositions of scripture; but one Doctor Sim gave him a dose of physic, which when it had wrought, the gentleman became orthodox immediately and expounded at the old rate no more.”
Thus as the accurate and moderate and erudite Mosheim informs us, the French theologian Claude Pajon was of opinion that in order to produce that amendment of the heart which is called regeneration, nothing more is requisite than to put the body, if its habit is bad, into a sound state by the power of physic, and having done this, than to set truth and falsehood before the understanding, and virtue and vice before the will, clearly and distinctly in their genuine colours, so as that their nature and their properties may be fully apprehended. But the Doctor thought that Pajon carried his theory too far, and ought to have been physicked himself.
That learned and good man Barnabas Oley, the friend and biographer of the saintly Herbert, kept within the bounds of discretion, when he delivered an opinion of the same tendency. After showing what power is exercised by art over nature, 1st. in inanimate materials, 2dly. in vegetables, and 3dly. the largeness or latitude of its power over the memory, the imagination and locomotive faculties of sensitive creatures, he proceeds to the fourth rank, the rational, “which adds a diadem of excellency to the three degrees above mentioned, being an approach unto the nature angelical and divine.” “Now,” says he, “1st. in as much as the human body partly agrees with the first rank of materials inanimate, so can Art partly use it, as it uses them, to frame (rather to modify the frame of) it into great variety; the head thus, the nose so; and other ductile parts, as is seen and read, after other fashions. 2. Art can do something to the Body answerable to what Gardeners do to plants. If our Blessed Saviour's words (Matthew VI. 27.) deny all possibility of adding procerity or tallness to the stature, yet as the Lord Verulam notes to make the Body dwarfish, crook-shouldered (as some Persians did) to recover straightness, or procure slenderness, is in the power of Art. But, 3. much more considerable authority has it over the humours, either so to impel and enrage them, that like furious streams they shall dash the Body (that bottom wherein the precious Soul is embarked) against dangerous rocks, or run it upon desperate sands; or so to attemper and tune them, that they shall become like calm waters or harmonious instruments for virtuous habits, introduced by wholesome moral precepts, to practise upon. It is scarce credible what services theNoble Science of Physicmay do unto Moral, (yea to Grace and Christian) virtue, by prescribing diet to prevent, or medicine to allay the fervors and eruptions of humours, of blood, and of thatirriguum concupiscentiæ, orὁ τροχὸς τῆς γενέσεως, especially if these jewels, their recipes, light into obedient ears. These helps of bettering nature, are within her lowest and middle region of Diet and Medicine.”
A sensible woman of the Doctor's acquaintance, (the mother of a young family) entered so far into his views upon this subject, that she taught her children from their earliest childhood to consider ill-humour as a disorder which was to be cured by physic. Accordingly she had always small doses ready, and the little patients whenever it was thought needful took rhubarbfor the crossness. No punishment was required. Peevishness or ill-temper and rhubarb were associated in their minds always as cause and effect.
There are Divines who have thought that melancholy may with advantage be treated in age, as fretfulness in this family was in childhood. Timothy Rogers, who having been long afflicted with Trouble of Mind and the Disease of Melancholy, wrote a discourse concerning both for the use of his fellow sufferers, says of Melancholy, that “it does generally indeed first begin at the body, and then conveys its venom to the mind; and if any thing could be found that might keep the blood and spirits in their due temper and motion, this would obstruct its further progress, and in a great measure keep the soul clear. I pretend not (he continues) to tell you what medicines are proper to remove it, and I know of none, I leave you to advise with such as are learned in the profession of Physic.” And then he quotes a passage from “old Mr. Greenham's Comfort for afflicted Consciences.” “If a Man,” saith old Mr. Greenham, “that is troubled in conscience come to a Minister, it may be he will look all to the Soul and nothing to the Body: if he come to a Physician he considereth the Body and neglecteth the Soul. For my part, I would never have the Physician's counsel despised, nor the labour of the Minister neglected: because the Soul and Body dwelling together,—it is convenient, that as the Soul should be cured by the Word, by Prayer, by Fasting, or by Comforting, so the Body must be brought into some temperature by physic, and diet, by harmless diversions and such like ways; providing always that it be so done in the fear of God, as not to think by these ordinary means quite to smother or evade our troubles, but to use them as preparatives, whereby our Souls may be made more capable of the spiritual methods which are to follow afterwards.”
But Timothy Bright, Doctor of Physic, is the person who had the most profound reverence for the medical art. “No one,” he said, “should touch so holy a thing that hath not passed the whole discipline of liberal sciences, and washed himself pure and clean in the waters of wisdom and understanding.” “O Timothy Bright, Timothy Bright,” said the Doctor, “rightly wert thou called Timothy Bright, for thou wert a Bright Timothy!” Nor art thou less deserving of praise, O Timothy Bright, say I, for having published an abridgement of the Book of Acts and Monuments of the Church, written by that Reverend Father Master John Fox, and by thee thus reduced into a more accessible form,—for such as either through want of leisure or ability, have not the use of so necessary a history.
MORE MALADIES THAN THE BEST PHYSICIANS CAN PREVENT BY REMEDIES.—THE DOCTOR NOT GIVEN TO QUESTIONS, AND OF THE POCO-CURANTE SCHOOL AS TO ALL THE POLITICS OF THE DAY.
A slight answer to an intricate and useless question is a fit cover to such a dish; a cabbage leaf is good enough to cover a pot of mushrooms.
JEREMYTAYLOR.
Yet in his serious moods the Doctor sadly confessed with that Sir George, whom the Scotch ungratefully call Bloody Mackenzie, that “as in the body natural, so likewise in the politic, Nature hath provided more diseases than the best of Physicians can prevent by remedies.” He knew that kingdoms as well as individuals have their agues and calentures, are liable to plethora sometimes and otherwhiles to atrophy, to fits of madness which no hellebore can cure, and to decay and dissolution which no human endeavours can avert. With the maladies of the State indeed he troubled himself not, for though a true-born Englishman, he was as to all politics of the day, of the Poco-curante school. But with those of the human frame his thoughts were continually employed; it was his business to deal with them; his duty and his earnest desire to heal them, under God's blessing, where healing was humanly possible, or to alleviate them, when any thing more than alleviation was beyond the power of human skill.
The origin of evil was a question upon which he never ventured. Here too, he said with Sir George Mackenzie, “as I am not able by the Jacob's Ladder of my merit to scale Heaven, so am I less able by the Jacob's Staff of my private ability to take up the true altitude of its mysteries:” and borrowing a play upon words from the same old Essayist, he thought the brain had too littlepia mater, which was too curious in such inquiries. But the mysteries of his own profession afforded “ample room and verge enough” for his speculations, however wide and wild their excursions. Those mysteries are so many, so momentous, and so inscrutable that he wondered not at any superstitions which have been excogitated by bewildered imagination, and implicitly followed by human weakness in its hopes and fears, its bodily and its mental sufferings.
As little did he wonder at the theories advanced by men who were in their days, the Seraphic and Angelic and Irrefragable Doctors of the healing art:—the tartar of Paracelsus, the Blas and Gas of Van Helmont, nor in later times at the animalcular hypotheses of Langius and Paullinus; nor at the belief of elder nations, as the Jews, and of savages every-where that all maladies are the immediate work of evil spirits. But when he called to mind the frightful consequences to which the belief of this opinion has led, the cruelties which have been exercised, the crimes which have been perpetrated, the miseries which have been inflicted and endured, it made him shudder at perceiving that the most absurd error may produce the greatest mischief to society, if it be accompanied with presumption, and if any real or imaginary interest be connected with maintaining it.
The Doctor like his Master and benefactor Peter Hopkins, was of the Poco-curante school in politics. He said that the Warwickshire gentleman who was going out with his hounds when the two armies were beginning to engage at Edge-hill, was not the worst Englishman who took the field that day.
Local circumstances favoured this tendency to political indifference. It was observed in the 34th Chapter of this Opus that one of the many reasons for which our Philosopher thought Doncaster a very likeable place of residence was that it sent no Members to Parliament. And Yorkshire being too large a county for any of its great families to engage lightly in contesting it, the Election fever however it might rage in other towns or other parts of the county, never prevailed there. But the constitution of the Doctor's mind secured him from all excitement of this nature. Even in the days of Wilkes and Liberty, when not a town in England escaped the general Influenza, he was not in the slightest degree affected by it, nor did he ever take up the Public Advertiser for the sake of one of Junius's Letters.
SIMONIDES.—FUNERAL POEMS.—UNFEELING OPINION IMPUTED TO THE GREEK POET, AND EXPRESSED BY MALHERBE.—SENECA.—JEREMY TAYLOR AND THE DOCTOR ON WHAT DEATH MIGHT HAVE BEEN, AND WERE MEN WHAT CHRISTIANITY WOULD MAKE THEM, MIGHT BE.
Intendale chi può; che non è strettoAlcuno a creder pïu di quel che vuole.ORLANDOINNAMORATO.
Intendale chi può; che non è strettoAlcuno a creder pïu di quel che vuole.ORLANDOINNAMORATO.
Among the lost works of antiquity, there are few poems which I should so much rejoice in recovering, as those of Simonides. Landor has said of him that he and Pindar wrote nothing bad; that his characteristics were simplicity, brevity, tenderness, and an assiduous accuracy of description. “If I were to mention,” he adds “what I fancy would give an English reader the best idea of his manner, I should say, the book of Ruth.”
One species of composition wherein he excelled was that which the Dutch in their straight-forward way callLykzangenorLykdichten, but for which we have no appropriate name,—poems in commemoration of the dead. Beautiful specimens are to be found in the poetry of all countries, and this might be expected, threnodial being as natural as amatory verse; and as the characteristic of the latter is passion with little reflection, that of the former is, as naturally, to be at the same time passionate and thoughtful.
Our own language was rich in such poems during the Elizabethan age, and that which followed it. Of foreign poets none has in this department exceeded Chiabrera.
There is a passage among the fragments of Simonides which is called by his old editor consolatory,παρηγορικόν:but were it not for the authority of Seneca, who undoubtedly was acquainted with the whole poem, I should not easily be persuaded that so thoughtful, so pensive, so moralizing a poet would, in any mood of mind have recommended such consolation:
Τοῦ μὲν θανόντος οὐκ ἄν ἐνθυμοίμεθα,Εἴ τι φρονοῖμεν, πλεῖον ἡμέρας μιᾶς·
Τοῦ μὲν θανόντος οὐκ ἄν ἐνθυμοίμεθα,Εἴ τι φρονοῖμεν, πλεῖον ἡμέρας μιᾶς·
let us not call to mind the dead, if we think of him at all, more than a single day. Indeed I am not certain from what Seneca says, whether the poet was speaking in his own, or in an assumed character, nor whether he spoke seriously or satirically; or I cannot but suspect that the passage would appear very differently, if we saw it in its place. Malherbe gives the same sort of advice in his consolation to M. du Périer upon the death of a daughter.
Ne te lasse donc plus d'inutiles complaintes;Mais sage à l'avenir,Aime une ombre comme ombre, et des cendres éteintesEteins le souvenir;
Ne te lasse donc plus d'inutiles complaintes;Mais sage à l'avenir,Aime une ombre comme ombre, et des cendres éteintesEteins le souvenir;
such a feeling is much more in character with a Frenchman than with Simonides.
Seneca himself, Stoic though he was, gave no such advice, but accounted the remembrance of his departed friends among his solemn delights, not looking upon them as lost: “mihi amicorum defunctorum cogitatio dulcis ac blanda est; habui enim illos, tanquam amissurus; amissi tanquam habeam.”
My venerable friend was not hardened by a profession, which has too often the effect of blunting the feelings, even if it does not harden the heart. His disposition and his happy education preserved him from that injury; and as his religion taught him that death was not in itself an evil,—that for him, and for those who believed with him, it had no sting,—the subject was as familiar to his meditations as to his professional practice. A speculation which Jeremy Taylor, without insisting on it, offers to the consideration of inquisitive and modest persons, appeared to him far more probable than the common opinion which Milton expresses when he says that the fruit of the Forbidden Tree brought death into the world. That, the Bishop argues, “whichwould have been, had there been no sin, and that whichremainswhen the sin or guiltiness is gone, is not properly the punishment of the sin. But dissolution of the soul and body should have been, if Adam had not sinned; for the world would have been too little to have entertained those myriads of men, which must, in all reason, have been born from that blessing of ‘Increase and multiply,’ which was given at the first creation: and to have confined mankind to the pleasures of this world, in case he had not fallen, would have been a punishment of his innocence: but however, itmight have been, though God had not been angry, andshall still be, even when the sin is taken off. The proper consequent of this will be, that when the Apostle says ‘Death came in by Sin,' and that ‘Death is the wages of Sin,’ he primarily and literally means the solemnities, and causes, and infelicities, and untimeliness of temporal death; and not merely the dissolution, which is directly no evil, but an inlet to a better state.”
As our friend agreed in this opinion with Bishop Taylor; and moreover as he read in Scriptures that Enoch and Elijah had been translated from this world without tasting of death; and as he deemed it probable at least, that St. John, the beloved disciple, had been favoured with a like exemption from the common lot, he thought that Asgill had been hardly dealt with in being expelled from Parliament for his “Argument,” that according to the Covenant of Eternal Life, revealed in the Scriptures, man might be translated from hence, without passing through death. The opinion Dr. Dove thought, might be enthusiastic, the reasoning wild, the conclusion untenable, and the manner of the book indecorous, or irreverent. But he had learnt that much, which appears irreverent, and in reality is so, has not been irreverently intended; and the opinion, although groundless, seemed to him any thing rather than profane.
But the exemptions which are recorded in the Bible could not, in his judgement be considered as showing what would have been the common lot if our first parents had preserved their obedience. This he opined would more probably have been euthanasy than translation; death, not preceded by infirmity and decay, but as welcome, and perhaps as voluntary as sleep.
Or possibly the transition from a corporeal to a spiritual,—or more accurately in our imperfect language,—from an earthly to a celestial state of being, might have been produced by some developement, some formal mutation as visible, (adverting to a favourite fancy of his own) as that which in the butterfly was made by the ancients their emblem of immortality. Bishop Van Mildert shews us upon scriptural authority that “the degree of perfection at which we may arrive has no definite limits, but is to go on increasing as long as this state of probation continues.” So in the paradisiacal, and possibly in the millennial state, he thought, that with such an intellectual and moral improvement, a corresponding organic evolution might keep pace; and that as the child expands into man, so man might mature into Angel.