letter, and display talent and good writing. Writing was then in fewer hands, and was better of its kind, than now. They soon became a public nuisance, as receptacles of party malice. Of these scurrilous writings Marchamont Needham, Sir John Birkenhead, and Sir Roger L'Estrange were the patriarchs. 6 We pass over a considerable interval of fine writing, which does not seem to us, however, directly to appertain to literature, to the Roman pasquinades. They have been collected in two volumes. Pasquin is a mutilated marble statue at the corner of the palace Ursinos, at Rome. The pasquinades are affixed to this statue during the night. We give in translation some of the most pungent on Pope Alexander VI. Alexander sells the keys, the altars, and Christ. As he bought them first, he had a right to sell them.' On Lucretia. Beneath this stone sleeps Lucretia by name, but Thais by nature; the daughter, the wife, the daughterin-law of Alexander.' Leo X. was a frequent butt for the arrows of Pasquin. Do you ask, why the lion did not take the sacrament on his deathbed? How could he? He had sold it.' A Pope of the Barberini family, formerly pillaged the pantheon of its brass to make brass cannon. Pasquin says What the barbarians would not do, the Barberini perpetrated.' 6 On Clement VII. who was said to have been killed by the medicine of his physician, Dr. Curtius has killed the Pope by his remedies, and ought to be paid, as a man deserving well of the state.' The following is on Pope Paul III. "The Pope is the head of Medusa. The horrid tresses are his nephews. Perseus, cut off the head, and then we shall be rid of these serpent locks.' There is another on Paul. Heretofore money was given to poets, that they might sing. How much will you give me, Paul, to be silent? The brief notice of the attempt to revive Platonism is a most striking one, and we imagine the subject is very little known. This new religion was attempted to be got up by Pletho, an Italian. Thomas Taylor, of London, as most readers know, has attempted the same thing, and preaches what is commonly called atheism. At least, he violently opposes Christianity. He professes to believe in polytheism. The chapter on fashions belongs to another school, and we shall pass it wholly by. We should be glad to extend our article by extracts from the Senate of Jesuits,' the Lover's Heart,'' the history of gloves,'' relics of saints,' &c., but have already extended this notice, perhaps, too far to give them place. We quote a translation of the exquisite verses to the violet on the garland of Julia, of which a most interesting account is given: Modeste en ma couleur, modeste en mon sejour, Mais, si sur votre front je puis me voir un jour, The humblest flower would feel the loftiest pride.' Under the head of tragic actors, he relates an anecdote of Montfleury, who drolly laments the miseries of being an actor and killing himself in personating a thousand characters. At the close of his lamentation, he says, 'If any one ask, of what I died? say not of fever, dropsy, or gout, but let him know that it was of the Andromache. Mondory felt so powerfully the character he assumed, that it cost him his life. Bond, when old, personated Lusignan, in Zara, so exquisitely, that Zara, when she addressed him, found him dead in his chair. It has been a common case in the history of actors. Alas! they were no actors there. Betterton, though of a ruddy and sanguine countenance, in Hamlet, at sight of the ghost appeared so horror stricken, as to become as white as his neckcloth, and his whole body was affected by a strong tremor. The audience caught the horror. Booth, in the ghost, was so terrified with his own influence upon Hamlet, that he could not speak his part. We cannot extract the two fine anecdotes of Le Kain and Mademoiselle Clairon. We regret it the less, for another inducement will operate upon the reader to repair to the book itself. From jocular preachers, it may well be imagined, our author has collected a fund of anecdotes, most of them too extended for insertion. We have never been more amused, than by a considerable extract from a sermon of Menot. Maillard and Father André were also famous in this line. Many of the French preachers fixed the attention of their audience by quirks and puns. Whitfield found his beau ideal in this manner. Bourdaloue, with a collected air, had little action. His eyes were half closed, and he affected the people by the sound of a voice uniform and solemn. Le Rue appeared with the air of a prophet. Old men shuddered at the recollection of the expression which he employed in an apostrophe to the God of vengeance. Eaginare gladium tuum. Massillon had an air of simplicity, modest demeanor, eyes humbly declining, unstudied gesture, passionate tones, but a mild countenance penetrated with his subject, and conveying light and emotions profound and tender. Baron, the tragedian, coming from one of his sermons, said to a companion, My friend, this is an orator. We are only actors.' Among masterly imitations we have only room for the following. Muretus rendered Joseph Scaliger, a great stickler for the ancients, highly ridiculous. He sent him some verses, which, he pretended, were copied from an old MS. The verses were ex cellent, and Scaliger was credulous. He exclaimed, that they were admirable, and attributed them to Trabeus, quoting them as one of the precious fragments of antiquity. Having firmly fixed him in his trap, Muretus exposed him. Pere Commire, in the time of Louis XIV., composed a Latin fable, entitled 'The Sun and the Frogs,' and so artfully imitated Phædrus, that even Wolfius was deceived, and inserted it in his edition of that fabulist. Sigonius was such a master of the style of Cicero as to pass a treatise of his de consolatione, as the lost treatise of that author on the same subject. The public were deceived, but Lipsius was not. He read ten lines of it, threw it away, and exclaimed. "Vah! non est Ciceronis.' Bah! this is not Cicero's. In the anecdotes of Queen Elizabeth a most piquant view is given of her firmness, tyranny, coquetry, and vanity. So thorough a coquette was she, that all princes and ambassadors, and her own great statesmen, were led to think her favorable to them, and disposed to matrimony. Infinite fooleries did this royal belle perpetrate in this line even to old age. She never pardoned any one for not meeting her in participation. She could not forgive Buzenval for ridiculing her bad pronunciation of the French language. Her handwriting was remarkably beautiful and correct, and her education severely classical. In evading the request of the house of commons to marry, nothing can exceed her skill in that line: Were I to tell you that I do not mean to marry, I might say less than I intend; and were I to tell you that I do mean to marry, I might say more than it is proper for you to know therefore I give you an answer, ANSWERLESS.' : We should be glad to quote entire the eccentric account of Pere Bourgeois, of his first attempt to preach a serinon in the Chinese language. There are about 300 monosyllables, that make the whole spoken language, and they are so pronounced, as that they signify 30,000 different things. Gender, number, active, passive, mood, tense are all to be guessed by the intonation, countenance and the context of circumstances. 'I will give you an example of their words. They told me chou signifies a book : so that I thought whenever the word chou was pronounced, a book was the subject. Not at all! Chou, the next time I heard it, I found signified a tree. Now I was to recollect, chou was a book or a tree. But this amounted to nothing: chou, I found, expressed also great heats; chou is to relate; chou is the Aurora; chou means to be accustomed; chou expresses the loss of a wager, &c. I should not finish, were I to attempt to give you all its significations.' The preacher says, 'I recited my sermon to my servant 60 times before I spoke it, and yet my audience only understood, as they expressed it, three parts out of ten.' Fortunately the Chinese are wonderfully patient, and are astonished that any ignorant stranger should be able to learn two words of their language.' The article on medical music records as great wonders in that line, as any that are related of the music of Orpheus. We all remember Chateaubriand's tale of charming the American rattlesnake with a tune. Here are tales, apparently authentic, of the charming of cats, and even spiders, in this way. It cures the bites of vipers and the tarantula, relieves melancholy, and expels evil spirits. Dr. Willis tells of a lady, who could hear only while a drum was beating, and her husband hired a drummer to enjoy the pleasure of her conversation. The cure which the musician Farinelli wrought upon the melancholy king of Spain by his music is well attested, and the effect of the rans des vaches on the Swiss soldiers is unquestionable. We have thus passed over only the first volume of this admirable book, abridging and presenting, sometimes in the language of the author, sometimes in our own, as brevity and compression dictated, some of the more striking themes and anecdotes of the volume. We know not that our readers will follow us. But for us no reading is so delightful as that which opens the chambers of the souls of the intellectual lights, that have glimmered or shone before us on the darkness of human ignorance and error. Such writing, more than any other, qualifies us to think and converse, by furnishing hints and a train. It teaches us to correct the follies and observations of the sons of genius and intellect, without the sad lessons of their experience. They leave us consolations under the aspersions of contemporary rivals and flippant critics. They inform us, that every age has had its great men and its Dunciads, the enviers and revilers of its truly gteat men. They learn us a painful but useful lesson of humility, rebuking that arrogance which imagines that this is an infinitely more enlightened age than any which has preceded it; instructing us, that there is nothing new under the sun; that brilliance, and invention, and prose, and song, and fashions, and follies, and ignorance, and abuse have followed each other from age to age, like the eternal course of the sun and the seasons, and that there is no other novelty to be expected, but the novel aspects of vanity and selfish ness. The other two volumes dwelling less directly on literary subjects, will together furnish the material of another article. Many of Lady Mary Wortley Montague's letters were destroy6ed by her noble mother, who considered authorship a disgraceo It is supposed, that the phrase give a Dowsing is derived from the hearty zeal of this fellow. So late as 1780, a mob consigned the earl of Mansfield's treasury of MSS. to the flames. The prelates Whitgift and Bancroft, urged by the puritanic and Calvinistic factions, destroyed the best books in Stationer's his vexation to the witty Garth. Oh!' replied Garth, he must criticise. Tell him next time, that you have availed yourself of his criticisms. I have done it myself a hundred times.' Pope SONG. "MY LADYE LOVE MY LADYE LOVE." My ladye love! my ladye love! For though this ball, this earthly ball, The fairest things, the fairest things, In all this world below, Are the flowery wreaths, which passing springs Will scatter as they go. The lovely whole, the lovely whole, Are beautifully thine; In thy blooming cheek and beaming soul, More exquisite they shine. The forms are bright, the forms are bright, But to me more sweet is the soft blue light, My ladye love! my ladye love! |