Historical Lectures and Essays..........................................................................................................................1

Charles Kingsley ......................................................................................................................................1

THE FIRST DISCOVERY OF AMERICA............................................................................................1

CYRUS, THE SERVANT OF THE LORD {4}...................................................................................10

ANCIENT CIVILISATION {5} {6} .....................................................................................................19

RONDELET, {7} THE HUGUENOT NATURALIST {8} ..................................................................27

VESALIUS THE ANATOMIST {9}....................................................................................................34

PARACELSUS {13}.............................................................................................................................42

GEORGE BUCHANAN, SCHOLAR ...................................................................................................48

Let me begin this lecture {1} with a scene in the North Atlantic 863 years since.

"Bjarne Grimolfson was blown with his ship into the Irish Ocean; and there came worms and the ship began

to sink under them. They had a boat which they had payed with seals' blubber, for that the sea worms will

not hurt. But when they got into the boat they saw that it would not hold them all. Then said Bjarne, 'As the

boat will only hold the half of us, my advice is that we should draw lots who shall go in her; for that will not

be unworthy of our manhood.' This advice seemed so good that none gainsaid it; and they drew lots. And the

lot fell to Bjarne that he should go in the boat with half his crew. But as he got into the boat, there spake an

Icelander who was in the ship and had followed Bjarne from Iceland, 'Art thou going to leave me here,

Bjarne?' Quoth Bjarne, 'So it must be.' Then said the man, 'Another thing didst thou promise my father, when

I sailed with thee from Iceland, than to desert me thus. For thou saidst that we both should share the same lot.'

Bjarne said, 'And that we will not do. Get thou down into the boat, and I will get up into the ship, now I see

that thou art so greedy after life.' So Bjarne went up into the ship, and the man went down into the boat; and

the boat went on its voyage till they came to Dublin in Ireland. Most men say that Bjarne and his comrades

This story may serve as a text for my whole lecture. Not only does it smack of the seabreeze and the salt

water, like all the finest old Norse sagas, but it gives a glimpse at least of the nobleness which underlay the

grim and often cruel nature of the Norseman. It belongs, too, to the culminating epoch, to the beginning of

that era when the Scandinavian peoples had their great times; when the old fierceness of the worshippers of

Thor and Odin was tempered, without being effeminated, by the Faith of the "White Christ," till the very men

It should have, moreover, a special interest to Americans. Foras American antiquaries are well

awareBjarne was on his voyage home from the coast of New England; possibly from that very Mount

Hope Bay which seems to have borne the same name in the time of those old Norsemen, as afterwards in the

days of King Philip, the last sachem of the Wampanong Indians. He was going back to Greenland, perhaps

for reinforcements, finding, he and his fellowcaptain, Thorfinn, the Esquimaux who then dwelt in that land

too strong for them. For the Norsemen were then on the very edge of discovery, which might have changed

the history not only of this continent but of Europe likewise. They had found and colonised Iceland and

Greenland. They had found Labrador, and called it Helluland, from its icepolished rocks. They had found

Nova Scotia seemingly, and called it Markland, from its woods. They had found New England, and called it

Vinland the Good. A fair land they found it, well wooded, with good pasturage; so that they had already

imported cows, and a bull whose lowings terrified the Esquimaux. They had found selfsown corn too,

probably maize. The streams were full of salmon. But they had called the land Vinland, by reason of its

grapes. Quaint enough, and bearing in its very quaintness the stamp of truth, is the story of the first finding of

the wild foxgrapes. How Leif the Fortunate, almost as soon as he first landed, missed a little wizened old

German servant of his father's, Tyrker by name, and was much vexed thereat, for he had been brought up on

the old man's knee, and hurrying off to find him met Tyrker coming back twisting his eyes abouta trick of

hissmacking his lips and talking German to himself in high excitement. And when they get him to talk

Norse again, he says: "I have not been far, but I have news for you. I have found vines and grapes!" "Is that

true, fosterfather?" says Leif. "True it is," says the old German, "for I was brought up where there was never

The sagaas given by Rafnhad a detailed description of this quaint personage's appearance; and it would

not he amiss if American winegrowers should employ an American sculptorand there are great American

sculptorsto render that description into marble, and set up little Tyrker in some public place, as the Silenus

Thus the first cargoes homeward from Vinland to Greenland had been of timber and of raisins, and of

And more. Beyond Vinland the Good there was said to be another land, Whiteman's Landor Ireland the

Mickle, as some called it. For these Norse traders from Limerick had found Ari Marson, and Ketla of

Ruykjanes, supposed to have been long since drowned at sea, and said that the people had made him and

Ketla chiefs, and baptized Ari. What is all this? and what is this, too, which the Esquimaux children taken in

Markland told the Northmen, of a land beyond them where the folk wore white clothes, and carried flags on

poles? Are these all dreams? or was some part of that great civilisation, the relics whereof your antiquarians

find in so many parts of the United States, still in existence some 900 years ago; and were these old Norse

cousins of ours upon the very edge of it? Be that as it may, how nearly did these fierce Vikings, some of

whom seemed to have sailed far south along the shore, become aware that just beyond them lay a land of

fruits and spices, gold and gems? The adverse current of the Gulf Stream, it may be, would have long

prevented their getting past the Bahamas into the Gulf of Mexico; but, sooner or later, some storm must have

carried a Greenland viking to San Domingo or to Cuba; and then, as has been well said, some Scandinavian

These stories are well known to antiquarians. They may be found, almost all of them, in Professor Rafn's

"Antiquitates Americanae." The action in them stands out often so clear and dramatic, that the internal

evidence of historic truth is irresistible. Thorvald, who, when he saw what seems to be, they say, the bluff

head of Alderton at the southeast end of Boston Bay, said, "Here should I like to dwell," and, shot by an

Esquimaux arrow, bade bury him on that place, with a cross at his head and a cross at his feet, and call the

place Cross Ness for evermore; Gudrida, the magnificent widow, who wins hearts and sees strange deeds

from Iceland to Greenland, and Greenland to Vinland and back, and at last, worn out and sad, goes off on a

pilgrimage to Rome; Helgi and Finnbogi, the Norwegians, who, like our Arctic voyagers in after times,

devise all sorts of sports and games to keep the men in humour during the long winter at Hope; and last, but

not least, the terrible Freydisa, who, when the Norse are seized with a sudden panic at the Esquimaux and flee

from them, as they had three weeks before fled from Thorfinn's bellowing bull, turns, when so weak that she

cannot escape, single handed on the savages, and catching up a slain man's sword, puts them all to flight

with her fierce visage and fierce criesFreydisa the Terrible, who, in another voyage, persuades her husband

to fall on Helgi and Finnbogi, when asleep, and murder them and all their men; and then, when he will not

murder the five women too, takes up an axe and slays them all herself, and getting back to Greenland, when

the dark and unexplained tale comes out, lives unpunished, but abhorred henceforth. All these folks, I say, are

But beyond them, and hovering on the verge of Mythus and Fairyland, there is a ballad called "Finn the Fair,"

An upland Earl had twa braw sons, My story to begin; The tane was Light Haldane the strong, The tither was

and so forth; which was still sung, with other "rimur," or ballads, in the Faroes, at the end of the last century.

Professor Rafn has inserted it, because it talks of Vinland as a wellknown place, and because the brothers

are sent by the princess to slay American kings; but that Rime has another value. It is of a beauty so perfect,

and yet so like the old Scotch ballads in its heroic conception of love, and in all its forms and its qualities,

that it is one proof more, to any student of early European poetry, that we and these old Norsemen are men of

If anything more important than is told by Professor Rafn and Mr. Black {2} be now known to the

antiquarians of Massachusetts, let me entreat them to pardon my ignorance. But let me record my opinion

that, though somewhat too much may have been made in past years of certain rockinscriptions, and so forth,

on this side of the Atlantic, there can be no reasonable doubt that our own race landed and tried to settle on

the shore of New England six hundred years before their kinsmen, and, in many cases, their actual

descendants, the august Pilgrim Fathers of the seventeenth century. And so, as I said, a Scandinavian dynasty

might have been seated now upon the throne of Mexico. And how was that strange chance lost? First, of

course, by the length and danger of the coasting voyage. It was one thing to have, like Columbus and

Vespucci, Cortes and Pizarro, the Azores as a halfway port; another to have Greenland, or even Iceland. It

was one thing to run southwest upon Columbus's track, across the Mar de Damas, the Ladies' Sea, which

hardly knows a storm, with the blazing blue above, the blazing blue below, in an everwarming climate,

where every breath is life and joy; another to struggle against the fogs and icebergs, the rocks and currents of

the dreary North Atlantic. No wonder, then, that the knowledge of Markland, and Vinland, and Whiteman's

Land died away in a few generations, and became but fireside sagas for the winter nights.

But there were other causes, more honourable to the dogged energy of the Norse. They were in those very

years conquering and settling nearer home as no other peopleunless, perhaps, the old Ionian

Greenland, we have seen, they heldthe western side at leastand held it long and well enough to afford, it

is said, 2,600 pounds of walrus' teeth as yearly tithe to the Pope, besides Peter's pence, and to build many a

convent, and church, and cathedral, with farms and homesteads round; for one saga speaks of Greenland as

producing wheat of the finest quality. All is ruined now, perhaps by gradual change of climate.

But they had richer fields of enterprise than Greenland, Iceland, and the Faroes. Their boldest outlaws at that

very timewhether from Norway, Sweden, Denmark, or Britainwere forming the imperial lifeguard of

the Byzantine Emperor, as the once famous Varangers of Constantinople; and that splendid epoch of their

race was just dawning, of which my lamented friend, the late Sir Edmund Head, says so well in his preface to

Viga Glum's Icelandic Saga, "The Sagas, of which this tale is one, were composed for the men who have left

their mark in every corner of Europe; and whose language and laws are at this moment important elements in

the speech and institutions of England, America, and Australia. There is no page of modern history in which

the influence of the Norsemen and their conquests must not be taken into accountRussia, Constantinople,

Greece, Palestine, Sicily, the coasts of Africa, Southern Italy, France, the Spanish Peninsula, England,

Scotland, Ireland, and every rock and island round them, have been visited, and most of them at one time or

the other ruled, by the men of Scandinavia. The motto on the sword of Roger Guiscard was a proud one:

Every island, says Sir Edmund Head, and trulyfor the name of almost every island on the coast of England,

Scotland, and Eastern Ireland, ends in either EY or AY or OE, a Norse appellative, as is the word "island"

itselfis a mark of its having been, at some time or other, visited by the Vikings of Scandinavia.

Norway, meanwhile, was convulsed by war; and what perhaps was of more immediate consequence, Svend

Forkbeard, whom we Englishmen call Sweynthe renegade from that Christian Faith which had been

forced on him by his German conqueror, the Emperor Otto II.with his illustrious son Cnut, whom we call

Canute, were just calling together all the most daring spirits of the Baltic coasts for the subjugation of

England; and when that great feat was performed, the Scandinavian emigration was paralysed, probably, for a

time by the fearful wars at home. While the king of Sweden, and St. Olaf Tryggvason, king of Norway, were

setting on Denmark during Cnut's pilgrimage to Rome, and Cnut, sailing with a mighty fleet to Norway, was

driving St. Olaf into Russia, to return and fall in the fratricidal battle of Stiklesteadduring, strangely

enough, a total eclipse of the sunVinland was like enough to remain still uncolonised. After Cnut's

shortlived triumphking as he was of Denmark, Norway, England, and half Scotland, and what not of

Wendish Folk inside the Balticthe force of the Norsemen seems to have been exhausted in their native

lands. Once more only, if I remember right, did "Lochlin," really and hopefully send forth her "mailed

swarm" to conquer a foreign land; and with a result unexpected alike by them and by their enemies. Had it

Let me sketch for you once morethough you have heard it, doubtless, many a timethe tale of that

tremendous fortnight which settled the fate of Britain, and therefore of North America; which decidedjust

in those great times when the decision was to be made whether we should be on a par with the other

civilised nations of Europe, like them the "heirs of all the ages," with our share not only of Roman

Christianity and Roman centralisationa member of the great comity of European nations, held together in

one Christian bond by the Popebut heirs also of Roman civilisation, Roman literature, Roman Law; and

therefore, in due time, of Greek philosophy and art. No less a question than this, it seems to me, hung in the

Poor old Edward the Confessor, holy, weak, and sad, lay in his new choir of Westminsterwhere the wicked

ceased from troubling, and the weary were at rest. The crowned ascetic had left no heir behind. England

seemed as a corpse, to which all the eagles might gather together; and the SouthEnglish, in their utter need,

had chosen for their king the ablest, and it may be the justest, man in BritainEarl Harold Godwinsson:

himself, like half the upper classes of England then, of the alldominant Norse blood; for his mother was a

Danish princess. Then out of Norway, with a mighty host, came Harold Hardraade, taller than all men, the

ideal Viking of his time. Halfbrother of the now dead St. Olaf, severely wounded when he was but fifteen,

at Stiklestead, when Olaf fell, he had warred and plundered on many a coast. He had been away to Russia to

King Jaroslaf; he had been in the Emperor's Varanger guard at Constantinopleand, it was whispered, had

slain a lion there with his bare hands; he had carved his name and his comrades' in Runic charactersif you

go to Venice you may see them at this day on the loins of the great marble lion, which stood in his time not

in Venice but in Athens. And now, king of Norway and conqueror, for the time, of Denmark, why should he

not take England, as Sweyn and Canute took it sixty years before, when the flower of the English gentry

perished at the fatal battle of Assingdune? If he and his halfbarbarous host had conquered, the civilisation of

Britain would have been thrown back, perhaps, for centuries. But it was not to be.

England WAS to be conquered by the Norman; but by the civilised, not the barbaric; by the Norse who had

settled, but four generations before, in the North East of France under Rou, Rollo, Rolf the

Gangersocalled, they say, because his legs were so long that, when on horseback, he touched the ground

and seemed to gang, or walk. He and his Norsemen had taken their share of France, and called it Normandy

to this day; and meanwhile, with that docility and adaptability which marks so often truly great spirits, they

had changed their creed, their language, their habits, and had become, from heathen and murderous

Berserkers, the most truly civilised people of Europe, andas was most natural thenthe most faithful

allies and servants of the Pope of Rome. So greatly had they changed, and so fast, that William Duke of

Normandy, the great greatgrandson of Rolf the wild Viking, was perhaps the finest gentleman, as well as

the most cultivated sovereign, and the greatest statesman and warrior in all Europe.

So Harold of Norway came with all his Vikings to Stamford Bridge by York; and took, by coming, only that

which Harold of England promised him, namely, "forasmuch as he was taller than any other man, seven feet

The story of that great battle, told with a few inaccuracies, but told as only great poets tell, you should read, if

you have not read it already, in the "Heimskringla" of Snorri Sturluson, the Homer of the North:

High feast that day held the birds of the air and the beasts of the field, Whitetailed erne and sallow glede,

And remember, that on the same day on which that fight befell September 27, 1066William, Duke of

Normandy, with all his French speaking Norsemen, was sailing across the British Channel, under the

protection of a banner consecrated by the Pope, to conquer that England which the Norsespeaking Normans

And now King Harold showed himself a man. He turned at once from the North of England to the South. He

raised the folk of the Southern, as he had raised those of the Central and Northern shires; and in sixteen

daysafter a march which in those times was a prodigious feathe was entrenched upon the fatal down

which men called Heathfield then, and Senlac, but Battle to this daywith William and his French Normans

Then came the battle of Hastings. You all know what befell upon that day; and how the old weapon was

matched against the newthe English axe against the Norman lanceand beaten only because the English

broke their ranks. If you wish to refresh your memories, read the tale once more in Mr. Freeman's "History of

England," or Professor Creasy's " Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World," or even, best of all, the late Lord

Lytton's splendid romance of "Harold." And when you go to England, go, as some of you may have gone

already, to Battle; and there from off the Abbey grounds, or from Mountjoye behind, look down off what was

then "The Heathy Field," over the long slopes of green pasture and the rich hop gardens, where were no

hopgardens then, and the flat tidemarshes winding between the wooded heights, towards the southern sea;

and imagine for yourselves the feelings of an Englishman as he contemplates that broad green sloping lawn,

on which was decided the destiny of his native land. Here, right beneath, rode Taillefer up the slope before

them all, singing the song of Roland, tossing his lance in air and catching it as it fell, with all the Norse

berserker spirit of his ancestors flashing out in him, at the thought of one fair fight, and then purgatory, or

Valhalla Taillefer perhaps preferred the latter. Yonder on the left, in that copse where the redochre gully

runs, is Sanguelac, the drain of blood, into which (as the Bayeux tapestry, woven by Matilda's maids, still

shows) the Norman knights fell, horse and man, till the gully was bridged with writhing bodies for those who

rode after. Here, where you standthe crest of the hill marks where it must have beenwas the stockade on

which depended the fate of England. Yonder, perhaps, stalked out one English squire or housecarle after

another: tall men with longhandled battleaxesone specially terrible, with a wooden helmet which no

sword could piercewho hewed and hewed down knight on knight, till they themselves were borne to earth

at last. And here, among the trees and ruins of the garden, kept trim by those who know the treasure which

they own, stood Harold's two standards of the fightingman and the dragon of Wessex. And here, close by

(for here, for many a century, stood the high altar of Battle Abbey, where monks sang masses for Harold's

soul), upon this very spot the Swanneck found her herolover's corpse. "Ah," says many an

Englishmanand who will blame him for it"how grand to have died beneath that standard on that day!"

Yes, and how right. And yet how right, likewise, that the Norman's cry of DEXAIE!"God Help!"and

not the English hurrah, should have won that day, till William rode up Mountjoye in the afternoon to see the

English army, terrible even in defeat, struggling through copse and marsh away toward Brede, and, like

retreating lions driven into their native woods, slaying more in the pursuit than they slew even in the fight.

But so it was to be; for so it ought to have been. You, my American friends, delight, as I have said already, in

seeing the old places of the old country. Go, I beg you, and look at that old place, and if you be wise, you will

carry back from it one lesson: That God's thoughts are not as our thoughts; nor His ways as our ways.

It was a fearful time which followed. I cannot but believe that our forefathers had been, in some way or other,

great sinners, or two such conquests as Canute's and William's would not have fallen on them within the short

space of sixty years. They did not want for courage, as Stamford Brigg and Hastings showed full well.

English swine, their Norman conquerors called them often enough; but never English cowards. Their ruinous

vice, if we are to trust the records of the time, was what the old monks called accidia[Greek text] and

ranked it as one of the seven deadly sins: a general careless, sleepy, comfortable habit of mind, which lets all

go its way for good or evila habit of mind too often accompanied, as in the case of the AngleDanes, with

selfindulgence, often coarse enough. Huge eaters and huger drinkers, fuddled with ale, were the men who

went down at Hastingsthough they went down like heroesbefore the staid and sober Norman out of

But those were fearful times. As long as William lived, ruthless as he was to all rebels, he kept order and did

justice with a strong and steady hand; for he brought with him from Normandy the instincts of a truly great

statesman. And in his sons' time matters grew worse and worse. After that, in the troubles of Stephen's reign,

anarchy let loose tyranny in its most fearful form, and things were done which recall the cruelties of the old

Spanish CONQUISTADORES in America. Scott's charming romance of "Ivanhoe" must be taken, I fear, as a

This, paradoxical as it may seem: That the Norman conquest was the making of the English people; of the

Paradoxical, but true. First, you must dismiss from your minds the too common notion that there is now, in

England, a governing Norman aristocracy, or that there has been one, at least since the year 1215, when

Magna Charta was won from the Norman John by Normans and by English alike. For the first victors at

Hastings, like the first conquistadores in America, perished, as the monk chronicles point out, rapidly by their

own crimes; and very few of our nobility can trace their names back to the authentic Battle Abbey roll. The

great majority of the peers have sprung from, and all have intermarried with, the Commons; and the peerage

has been from the first, and has become more and more as centuries have rolled on, the prize of success in

The cause is plain. The conquest of England by the Normans was not one of those conquests of a savage by a

civilised race, or of a cowardly race by a brave race, which results in the slavery of the conquered, and leaves

the gulf of caste between two racesmaster and slave. That was the case in France, and resulted, after

centuries of oppression, in the great and dreadful revolution of 1793, which convulsed not only France but the

whole civilised world. But caste, thank God, has never existed in England, since at least the first generation

The vast majority, all but the whole population of England, have been always free; and free, as they are not

where caste exists to change their occupations. They could intermarry, if they were able men, into the ranks

above them; as they could sink, if they were unable men, into the ranks below them. Any man acquainted

with the origin of our English surnames may verify this fact for himself, by looking at the names of a single

parish or a single street of shops. There, jumbled together, he will find names marking the noblest Saxon or

Angle bloodKenward or Kenric, Osgood or Osborne, side by side with Cordery or Banisternow names

of farmers in my own parishor other NormanFrench names which may be, like those two last, in Battle

Abbey rolland side by side the almost ubiquitous Brown, whose ancestor was probably some Danish or

Norwegian house carle, proud of his name Biorn the Bear, and the ubiquitous Smith or Smythe, the Smiter,

whose forefather, whether he be now peasant or peer, assuredly handled the tongs and hammer at his own

forge. This holds true equally in New England and in Old. When I search through (as I delight to do) your

New England surnames, I find the same jumble of namesWest Saxon, Angle, Danish, Norman, and

French Norman likewise, many of primaeval and heathen antiquity, many of high nobility, all worked

If any should wish to know more on this curious and important subject, let me recommend them to study

Ferguson's "Teutonic Name System," a book from which you will discover that some of our quaintest, and

seemingly most plebeian surnamesmany surnames, too, which are extinct in England, but remain in

Americaare really corruptions of good old Teutonic names, which our ancestors may have carried in the

German Forest, before an Englishman set foot on British soil; from which he will rise with the comfortable

feeling that we Englishspeaking men, from the highest to the lowest, are literally kinsmen. Nay, so utterly

made up now is the old blood feud between Norseman and Englishman, between the descendants of those

who conquered and those who were conquered, that in the children of our Prince of Wales, after 800 years,

the blood of William of Normandy is mingled with the blood of the very Harold who fell at Hastings. And so,

by the bitter woes which followed the Norman conquest was the whole population, Dane, Angle, and Saxon,

earl and churl, freeman and slave, crushed and welded together into one homogeneous mass, made just and

merciful towards each other by the most wholesome of all teachings, a community of suffering; and if they

That life is not as idle ore, But heated hot with burning fears, And bathed in baths of hissing tears, And

But how did these wild Vikings become Christian men? It is a long story. So stanch a race was sure to be

converted only very slowly. Noble missionaries as Ansgar, Rembert, and Poppo, had worked for 150 years

and more among the heathens of Denmark. But the patriotism of the Norseman always recoiled, even though

in secret, from the fact that they were German monks, backed by the authority of the German emperor; and

many a man, like Svend Forkbeard, father of the great Canute, though he had the Kaiser himself for

godfather, turned heathen once more the moment he was free, because his baptism was the badge of foreign

conquest, and neither pope nor kaiser should lord it over him, body or soul. St. Olaf, indeed, forced

Christianity on the Norse at the sword's point, often by horrid cruelties, and perished in the attempt. But who

forced it on the Norsemen of Scotland, England, Ireland, Neustria, Russia, and all the Eastern Baltic? It was

absorbed and in most cases, I believe, gradually and willingly, as a gospel and good news to hearts worn out

with the storm of their own passions. And whence came their Christianity? Much of it, as in the case of the

Danes, and still more of the French Normans, came direct from Rome, the city which, let them defy its

influence as they would, was still the fount of all theology, as well as of all civilisation. But I must believe

that much of it came from that mysterious ancient Western Church, the Church of St. Patric, St. Bridget, St.

Columba, which had covered with rude cells and chapels the rocky islets of the North Atlantic, even to

Iceland itself. Even to Iceland; for when that island was first discovered, about A.D. 840, the Norsemen

found in an isle, on the east and west and elsewhere, Irish books and bells and wooden crosses, and named

that island Papey, the isle of the popessome little colony of monks, who lived by fishing, and who are said

to have left the land when the Norsemen settled in it. Let us believe, for it is consonant with reason and

experience, that the sight of those poor monks, plundered and massacred again and again by the "mailed

swarms of Lochlin," yet never exterminated, but springing up again in the same place, ready for fresh

massacre, a sacred plant which God had planted, and which no rage of man could trample outlet us

believe, I say, that that sight taught at last to the buccaneers of the old world that there was a purer manliness,

a loftier heroism, than the ferocious selfassertion of the Berserker, even the heroism of humility, gentleness,

selfrestraint, selfsacrifice; that there was a strength which was made perfect in weakness; a glory, not of

the sword but of the cross. We will believe that that was the lesson which the Norsemen learnt, after many a

wild and bloodstained voyage, from the monks of Iona or of Derry, which caused the building of such

churches as that which Sightrys, king of Dublin, raised about the year 1030, not in the Norse but in the Irish

quarter of Dublin: a sacred token of amity between the new settlers and the natives on the ground of a

common faith. Let us believe, too, that the influence of woman was not wanting in the good workthat the

story of St. Margaret and Malcolm Canmore was repeated, though inversely, in the case of many a heathen

Scandinavian jarl, who, marrying the princely daughter of some Scottish chieftain, found in her creed at last

something more precious than herself; while his brother or his cousin became, at Dublin or Wexford or

Waterford, the husband of some saffronrobed Irish princess, "fair as an elf," as the old saying was; some

Red as the blood which flowed from stricken deer, White as the snow on which that blood ran down, Black as

and possibly, as in the case of Brian Boru's mother, had given his fairhaired sister in marriage to some

Irish prince, and could not resist the spell of their new creed, and the spell too, it may be, of some sister of

theirs who had long given up all thought of earthly marriage to tend the undying fire of St. Bridget among the

I am not drawing from mere imagination. That such things must have happened, and happened again and

again, is certain to anyone who knows, even superficially, the documents of that time. And I doubt not that, in

manners as well as in religion, the Norse were humanised and civilised by their contact with the Celts, both in

Scotland and in Ireland. Both peoples had valour, intellect, imagination: but the Celt had that which the burly

angular Norse character, however deep and stately, and however humorous, wanted; namely, music of nature,

tenderness, grace, rapidity, playfulness; just the qualities, combining with the Scandinavian (and in Scotland

with the Angle) elements of character which have produced, in Ireland and in Scotland, two schools of lyric

And so they were converted to what was then a dark and awful creed; a creed of ascetic selftorture and

purgatorial fires for those who escape the still more dreadful, because endless, doom of the rest of the human

race. But, because it was a sad creed, it suited better, men who had, when conscience reawakened in them,

but too good reason to be sad; and the minsters and cloisters which sprang up over the whole of Northern

Europe, and even beyond it, along the dreary western shores of Greenland itself, are the symbols of a

Gudruna herself, of whom I spoke just now, one of those old Norse heroines who helped to discover

America, though a historic personage, is a symbolic one likewise, and the pattern of a whole class. She too,

after many journeys to Iceland, Greenland, and Winland, goes on a pilgrimage to Rome, to get, I presume,

absolution from the Pope himself for all the sins of her strange, rich, stormy, wayward life.

Have you not readmany of you surely haveLa Motte Fouque's romance of "Sintram?" It embodies all

that I would say. It is the spiritual drama of that early Middle Age; very sad, morbid if you will, but true to

fact. The Lady Verena ought not, perhaps, to desert her husband, and shut herself up in a cloister. But so she

would have done in those old days. And who shall judge her harshly for so doing? When the brutality of the

man seems past all cure, who shall blame the woman if she glides away into some atmosphere of peace and

purity, to pray for him whom neither warnings nor caresses will amend? It is a sad book, "Sintram." And yet

not too sad. For they were a sad people, those old Norse forefathers of ours. Their Christianity was sad; their

minsters sad; there are few sadder, though few grander, buildings than a Norman church.

And yet, perhaps, their Christianity did not make them sad. It was but the other and the healthier side of that

sadness which they had as heathens. Read which you will of the old sagasheathen or half Christianthe

Eyrbiggia, Viga Glum, Burnt Niall, Grettir the Strong, and, above all, Snorri Sturluson's "Heimskringla"

itself and you will see at once how sad they are. There is, in the old sagas, none of that enjoyment of life

which shines out everywhere in Greek poetry, even through its deepest tragedies. Not in complacency with

Nature's beauty, but in the fierce struggle with her wrath, does the Norseman feel pleasure. Nature to him was

not, as in Mr. Longfellow's exquisite poem, {3} the kind old nurse, to take him on her knee and whisper to

him, ever anew, the story without an end. She was a weird witchwife, mother of storm demons and frost

giants, who must be fought with steadily, warily, wearily, over dreary heaths and snowcapped fells, and

rugged nesses and tossing sounds, and away into the boundless seaor who could live? till he got

hardened in the fight into ruthlessness of need and greed. The poor strip of flat strath, ploughed and

reploughed again in the short summer days, would yield no more; or wet harvests spoiled the crops, or

heavy snows starved the cattle. And so the Norseman launched his ships when the lands were sown in spring,

and went forth to pillage or to trade, as luck would have, to summerted, as he himself called it; and came

back, if he ever came, in autumn to the women to help at harvesttime, with blood upon his hand. But had he

stayed at home, blood would have been there still. Three out of four of them had been mixed up in some

The whole of Scandinavia, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Orkney, and the rest, remind me ever of that terrible

picture of the great Norse painter, Tiddeman, in which two splendid youths, lashed together, in true Norse

duel fashion by the waist, are hewing each other to death with the short axe, about some hot words over their

ale. The loss of life, and that of the most gallant of the young, in those days must have been enormous. If the

vitality of the race had not been even more enormous, they must have destroyed each other, as the Red

Indians have done, off the face of the earth. They lived these Norsemen, not to livethey lived to die. For

what cared they? Deathwhat was death to them? what it was to the Jomsburger Viking, who, when led out

to execution, said to the headsman: "Die! with all pleasure. We used to question in Jomsburg whether a man

felt when his head was off? Now I shall know; but if I do, take care, for I shall smite thee with my knife. And

But, oh! what waste! What might not these men have done if they had sought peace, not war; if they had

learned a few centuries sooner to do justly, and love mercy, and walk humbly with their God?

And yet one loves them, bloodstained as they are. Your own poets, men brought up under circumstances,

under ideas the most opposite to theirs, love them, and cannot help it. And why? It is not merely for their bold

daring, it is not merely for their stern endurance; nor again that they had in them that shift and thrift, those

steady and commonsense business habits, which made their noblest men not ashamed to go on voyages of

merchandise. Nor is it, again, that grim humourhumour as of the modern Scotchwhich so often flashes

out into an actual jest, but more usually underlies unspoken all their deeds. Is it not rather that these men are

our forefathers? that their blood runs in the veins of perhaps three men out of four in any general assembly,

whether in America or in Britain? Startling as the assertion may be, I believe it to be strictly true.

Be that as it may, I cannot read the stories of your western men, the writings of Bret Harte, or Colonel John

Hay, for instance, without feeling at every turn that there are the old Norse alive again, beyond the very ocean

It is just thirty years before the Norman conquest of England, the evening of the battle of Sticklestead. St.

Olaf's corpse is still lying unburied on the hillside. The reforming and Christian king has fallen in the attempt

to force Christianity and despotism on the Conservative and halfheathen partythe free bonders or

yeoman farmers of Norway. Thormod, his poetthe man, as his name means, of thunder moodwho has

been standing in the ranks, at last has an arrow in his left side. He breaks off the shaft, and thus sore wounded

goes up, when all is lost, to a farm where is a great barn full of wounded. One Kimbe comes, a man out of the

opposite or bonder part. "There is great howling and screaming in there," he says. "King Olaf's men fought

bravely enough: but it is a shame brisk young lads cannot bear their wounds. On what side wert thou in the

fight?" "On the best side," says the beaten Thormod. Kimbe sees that Thormod has a good bracelet on his

arm. "Thou art surely a king's man. Give me thy gold ring and I will hide thee, ere the bonders kill thee."

Thormod said, "Take it, if thou canst get it. I have lost that which is worth more;" and he stretched out his left

hand, and Kimbe tried to take it. But Thormod, swinging his sword, cut off his hand; and it is said Kimbe

Then Thormod went into the barn; and after he had sung his song there in praise of his dead king, he went

into an inner room, where was a fire, and water warming, and a handsome girl binding up men's wounds. And

he sat down by the door; and one said to him, "Why art thou so dead pale? Why dost thou not call for the

"I am not blooming; and the fair And slender maiden loves to care For blooming youths. Few care for me,

and so forth, improvising after the old Norse fashion. Then Thormod got up and went to the fire, and stood

and warmed himself. And the nursegirl said to him, "Go out, man, and bring some of the split firewood

which lies outside the door." He went out and brought an armful of wood and threw it down. Then the

nursegirl looked him in the face, and said, "Dreadful pale is this man. Why art thou so?" Then sang

"Thou wonderest, sweet bloom, at me, A man so hideous to see. The arrowdrift o'ertook me, girl, A

fineground arrow in the whirl Went through me, and I feel the dart Sits, lovely lass, too near my heart."

The girl said, "Let me see thy wound." Then Thormod sat down, and the girl saw his wounds, and that which

was in his side, and saw that there was a piece of iron in it; but could not tell where it had gone. In a stone pot

she had leeks and other herbs, and boiled them, and gave the wounded man of it to eat. But Thormod said,

"Take it away; I have no appetite now for my broth." Then she took a great pair of tongs and tried to pull out

the iron; but the wound was swelled, and there was too little to lay hold of. Now said Thormod, "Cut in so

deep that thou canst get at the iron, and give me the tongs." She did as he said. Then took Thormod the gold

bracelet off his hand and gave it the nursegirl, and bade her do with it what she liked.

Then Thormod took the tongs and pulled the iron out. But on the iron was a barb, on which hung flesh from

the heart, some red, some white. When he saw that, he said, "The king has fed us well. I am fat, even to the

I wish to speak to you tonight about one of those old despotic empires which were in every case the earliest

known form of civilisation. Were I minded to play the cynic or the mountebank, I should choose some

corrupt and effete despotism, already grown weak and ridiculous by its decayas did at last the Roman and

then the Byzantine Empireand, after raising a laugh at the expense of the old system say: See what a

superior people you are nowhow impossible, under free and enlightened institutions, is anything so base

and so absurd as went on, even in despotic France before the Revolution of 1793. Well, that would be on the

Let us keep our scorn for our own weaknesses, our blame for our own sins, certain that we shall gain more

instruction, though not more amusement, by hunting out the good which is in anything than by hunting out its

evil. I have chosen, not the worst, but the best despotism which I could find in history, founded and ruled by

a truly heroic personage, one whose name has become a proverb and a legend, that so I might lift up your

minds, even by the contemplation of an old Eastern empire, to see that it, too, could be a work and ordinance

of God, and its hero the servant of the Lord. For we are almost bound to call Cyrus, the founder of the Persian

Empire, by this august title for two reasonsFirst, because the Hebrew Scriptures call him so; the next,

because he proved himself to be such by his actions and their consequencesat least in the eyes of those

who believe, as I do, in a farseeing and far reaching Providence, by which all human history is

His work was very different from any that need be done, or can be done, in these our days. But while we

thank God that such work is now as unnecessary as impossible; we may thank God likewise that, when such

work was necessary and possible, a man was raised up to do it: and to do it, as all accounts assert, better,

True, the old conquerors, who absorbed nation after nation, tribe after tribe, and founded empires on their

ruins, are now, I trust, about to be replaced, throughout the world, as here and in Britain at home, by free

The old order changeth, giving place to the new; And God fulfils Himself in many ways, Lest one good

And that custom of conquest and empire and transplantation did more than once corrupt the world. And yet in

it, too, God may have more than once fulfilled His own designs, as He did, if Scripture is to be believed, in

Cyrus, well surnamed the Great, the founder of the Persian Empire some 2400 years ago. For these empires,

it must be remembered, did at least that which the Roman Empire did among a scattered number of savage

tribes, or separate little races, hating and murdering each other, speaking different tongues, and worshipping

different gods, and losing utterly the sense of a common humanity, till they looked on the people who dwelt

in the next valley as fiends, to be sacrificed, if caught, to their own fiends at home. Among such as these,

empires did introduce order, law, common speech, common interest, the notion of nationality and humanity.

They, as it were, hammered together the fragments of the human race till they had moulded them into one.

They did it cruelly, clumsily, ill: but was there ever work done on earth, however noble, which was

Let me talk to you a little about the old hero. He and his hardy Persians should be specially interesting to us.

For in them first does our race, the Aryan race, appear in authentic history. In them first did our race give

promise of being the conquering and civilising race of the future world. And to the conquests of Cyrus so

strangely are all great times and great movements of the human family linked to each otherto his

conquests, humanly speaking, is owing the fact that you are here, and I am speaking to you at this moment.

It is an ofttold story: but so grand a one that I must sketch it for you, however clumsily, once more.

In that mountain province called Farsistan, northeast of what we now call Persia, the dwellingplace of the

Persians, there dwelt, in the sixth and seventh centuries before Christ, a hardy tribe, of the purest blood of

Iran, a branch of the same race as the Celtic, Teutonic, Greek, and Hindoo, and speaking a tongue akin to

theirs. They had wandered thither, say their legends, out of the far north east, from off some lofty plateau of

Central Asia, driven out by the increasing cold, which left them but two mouths of summer to ten of winter.

They despised at firstwould that they had despised always!the luxurious life of the dwellers in the

plains, and the effeminate customs of the Medesa branch of their own race who had conquered and

intermarried with the Turanian, or Finnish tribes; and adopted much of their creed, as well as of their morals,

throughout their vast but shortlived Median Empire. "Soft countries," said Cyrus himselfso runs the

tale"gave birth to small men. No region produced at once delightful fruits and men of a warlike spirit."

Letters were to them, probably, then unknown. They borrowed them in after years, as they borrowed their art,

from Babylonians, Assyrians, and other Semitic nations whom they conquered. From the age of five to that of

twenty, their lads were instructed but in two thingsto speak the truth and to shoot with the bow. To ride

was the third necessary art, introduced, according to Xenophon, after they had descended from their mountain

Their creed was simple enough. Ahura MazdaOrmuzd, as he has been called sincewas the one eternal

Creator, the source of all light and life and good. He spake his word, and it accomplished the creation of

heaven, before the water, before the earth, before the cow, before the tree, before the fire, before man the

truthful, before the Devas and beasts of prey, before the whole existing universe; before every good thing

He needed no sacrifices of blood. He was to be worshipped only with prayers, with offerings of the inspiring

juice of the now unknown herb Homa, and by the preservation of the sacred fire, which, understand, was not

he, but the symbolas was light and the sunof the good spiritof Ahura Mazda. They had no images of

the gods, these old Persians; no temples, no altars, so says Herodotus, and considered the use of them a sign

of folly. They were, as has been well said of them, the Puritans of the old world. When they descended from

their mountain fastnesses, they became the iconoclasts of the old world; and the later Isaiah, out of the depths

of national shame, captivity, and exile, saw in them brother spirits, the chosen of the Lord, whose hero

Cyrus, the Lord was holding by His right hand, till all the foul superstitions and foul effeminacies of the

rotten Semitic peoples of the East, and even of Egypt itself, should be crushed, though, alas! only for awhile,

by men who felt that they had a commission from the God of light and truth and purity, to sweep out all that

But that was a later inspiration. In earlier, and it may be happier, times the duty of the good man was to strive

against all evil, disorder, uselessness, incompetence in their more simple forms. "He therefore is a holy man,"

says Ormuzd in the Zend avesta, "who has built a dwelling on the earth, in which he maintains fire, cattle,

his wife, his children, and flocks and herds; he who makes the earth produce barley, he who cultivates the

fruits of the soil, cultivates purity; he advances the law of Ahura Mazda as much as if he had offered a

To reclaim the waste, to till the land, to make a corner of the earth better than they found it, was to these men

to rescue a bit of Ormuzd's world out of the usurped dominion of Ahriman; to rescue it from the spirit of evil

For they believed in an evil spirit, these old Persians. Evil was not for them a lower form of good. With their

intense sense of the difference between right and wrong it could be nothing less than hateful; to be attacked,

exterminated, as a personal enemy, till it became to them at last impersonate and a person.

Zarathustra, the mystery of evil, weighed heavily on them and on their great prophet, Zoroastersplendour

of gold, as I am told his name signifieswho lived, no man knows clearly when or clearly where, but who

lived and lives for ever, for his works follow him. He, too, tried to solve for his people the mystery of evil;

and if he did not succeed, who has succeeded yet? Warring against Ormuzd, Ahura Mazda, was Ahriman,

Angra Mainyus, literally the being of an evil mind, the illconditioned being. He was labouring perpetually

to spoil the good work of Ormuzd alike in nature and in man. He was the cause of the fall of man, the

tempter, the author of misery and death; he was eternal and uncreate as Ormuzd was. But that, perhaps, was a

corruption of the purer and older Zoroastrian creed. With it, if Ahriman were eternal in the past, he would not

be eternal in the future. Somehow, somewhen, somewhere, in the day when three prophetsthe increasing

light, the increasing truth, and the existing truthshould arise and give to mankind the last three books of the

Zendavesta, and convert all mankind to the pure creed, then evil should be conquered, the creation become

pure again, and Ahriman vanish for ever; and, meanwhile, every good man was to fight valiantly for Ormuzd,

Men who held such a creed, and could speak truth and draw the bow, what might they not do when the hour

and the man arrived? They were not a BIG nation. No; but they were a GREAT nation, even while they were

eating barleybread and paying tribute to their conquerors the Medes, in the sterile valleys of Farsistan.

And at last the hour and the man came. The story is half legendary differently told by different authors.

Herodotus has one tale, Xenophon another. The first, at least, had ample means of information. Astyages is

the old shah of the Median Empire, then at the height of its seeming might and splendour and effeminacy. He

has married his daughter, the Princess Mandane, to Cambyses, seemingly a vassalking or prince of the pure

Persian blood. One night the old man is troubled with a dream. He sees a vine spring from his daughter,

which overshadows all Asia. He sends for the Magi to interpret; and they tell him that Mandane will have a

son who will reign in his stead. Having sons of his own, and fearing for the succession, he sends for

Mandane, and, when her child is born, gives it to Harpagus, one of his courtiers, to be slain. The courtier

relents, and hands it over to a herdsman, to be exposed on the mountains. The herdsman relents in turn, and

When the boy, who goes by the name of Agradates, is grown, he is at play with the other herdboys, and they

choose him for a mimic king. Some he makes his guards, some he bids build houses, some carry his

messages. The son of a Mede of rank refuses, and Agradates has him seized by his guards and chastised with

the whip. The ancestral instincts of command and discipline are showing early in the lad.

The young gentleman complains to his father, the father to the old king, who of course sends for the

herdsman and his boy. The boy answers in a tone so exactly like that in which Xenophon's Cyrus would have

answered, that I must believe that both Xenophon's Cyrus and Herodotus's Cyrus (like Xenophon's Socrates

and Plato's Socrates) are real pictures of a real character; and that Herodotus's story, though Xenophon says

He has done nothing, the noble boy says, but what was just. He had been chosen king in play, because the

boys thought him most fit. The boy whom he had chastised was one of those who chose him. All the rest

obeyed: but he would not, till at last he got his due reward. "If I deserve punishment for that," says the boy, "I

The old king looks keenly and wonderingly at the young king, whose features seem somewhat like his own.

Likely enough in those days, when an Iranian noble or prince would have a quite different cast of complexion

and of face from a Turanian herdsman. A suspicion crosses him; and by threats of torture he gets the truth

To the poor wretch's rapture the old king lets him go unharmed. He has a more exquisite revenge to take, and

sends for Harpagus, who likewise confessed the truth. The wily old tyrant has naught but gentle words. It is

best as it is. He has been very sorry himself for the child, and Mandane's reproaches had gone to his heart.

"Let Harpagus go home and send his son to be a companion to the newfound prince. Tonight there will be

great sacrifices in honour of the child's safety, and Harpagus is to be a guest at the banquet."

Harpagus comes; and after eating his fill, is asked how he likes the king's meat? He gives the usual answer;

and a covered basket is put before him, out of which he is to takein Median fashionwhat he likes. He

finds in it the head and hands and feet of his own son. Like a true Eastern he shows no signs of horror. The

king asks him if he knew what flesh he had been eating. He answers that he knew perfectly. That whatever

Like an Eastern courtier, he knew how to dissemble, but not to forgive, and bided his time. The Magi, to their

credit, told Astyages that his dream had been fulfilled, that Cyrusas we must now call the foundling

princehad fulfilled it by becoming a king in play, and the boy is let to go back to his father and his hardy

Persian life. But Harpagus does not leave him alone, nor perhaps, do his own thoughts. He has wrongs to

avenge on his grandfather. And it seems not altogether impossible to the young mountaineer.

He has seen enough of Median luxury to despise it and those who indulge in it. He has seen his own

grandfather with his cheeks rouged, his eyelids stained with antimony, living a womanlike life, shut up from

He calls together the mountain rulers; makes friends with Tigranes, an Armenian prince, a vassal of the

Mede, who has his wrongs likewise to avenge. And the two little armies of footsoldiersthe Persians had

no cavalrydefeat the innumerable horsemen of the Mede, take the old king, keep him in honourable

captivity, and so change, one legend says, in a single battle, the fortunes of the whole East.

And then begins that series of conquests of which we know hardly anything, save the fact that they were

made. The young mountaineer and his playmates, whom he makes his generals and satraps, sweep onward

towards the West, teaching their men the art of riding, till the Persian cavalry becomes more famous than the

Median had been. They gather to them, as a snowball gathers in rolling, the picked youth of every tribe whom

they overcome. They knit these tribes to them in loyalty and affection by that righteousnessthat

truthfulness and justicefor which Isaiah in his grandest lyric strains has made them illustrious to all time;

which Xenophon has celebrated in like manner in that exquisite book of histhe "Cyropaedia." The great

Lydian kingdom of CroesusAsia Minor as we call it nowgoes down before them. Babylon itself goes

down, after that worldfamed siege which ended in Belshazzar's feast; and when Cyrus diedstill in the

prime of life, the legends seem to sayhe left a coherent and wellorganised empire, which stretched from

So runs the tale, which to me, I confess, sounds probable and rational enough. It may not do so to you; for it

has not to many learned men. They are inclined to "relegate it into the region of myth;" in plain English, to

call old Herodotus a liar, or at least a dupe. What means those wise men can have at this distance of more

than 2000 years, of knowing more about the matter than Herodotus, who lived within 100 years of Cyrus, I

for myself cannot discover. And I say this without the least wish to disparage these hypercritical persons. For

there areand more there ought to be, as long as lies and superstitions remain on this eartha class of

thinkers who hold in just suspicion all stories which savour of the sensational, the romantic, even the

dramatic. They know the terrible uses to which appeals to the fancy and the emotions have been applied, and

are still applied to enslave the intellects, the consciences, the very bodies of men and women. They dread so

much from experience the abuse of that formula, that "a thing is so beautiful it must be true," that they are

inclined to reply: "Rather let us say boldly, it is so beautiful that it cannot be true. Let us mistrust, or even

refuse to believe e priori, and at first sight, all startling, sensational, even poetic tales, and accept nothing as

history, which is not as dull as the ledger of a drygoods' store." But I think that experience, both in nature

and in society, are against that ditchwater philosophy. The weather, being governed by laws, ought always

to be equable and normal, and yet you have whirlwinds, droughts, thunderstorms. The sharemarket, being

governed by laws, ought to be always equable and normal, and yet you have startling transactions, startling

panics, startling disclosures, and a whole sensational romance of commercial crime and folly. Which of us

has lived to be fifty years old, without having witnessed in private life sensation tragedies, alas! sometimes

too fearful to be told, or at least sensational romances, which we shall take care not to tell, because we shall

not be believed? Let the ditchwater philosophy say what it will, human life is not a ditch, but a wild and

roaring river, flooding its banks, and eating out new channels with many a landslip. It is a strange world, and

man, a strange animal, guided, it is true, usually by most commonplace motives; but, for that reason, ready

and glad at times to escape from them and their dulness and baseness; to give vent, if but for a moment, in

wild freedom, to that demoniac element, which, as Goethe says, underlies his nature and all nature; and to

prefer for an hour, to the normal and respectable ditchwater, a bottle of champagne or even a carouse on

How else shall we explain such a phenomenon as those old crusades? Were they undertaken for any purpose,

commercial or other? Certainly not for lightening an overburdened population. Nay, is not the history of your

own Mormons, and their exodus into the far West, one of the most startling instances which the world has

seen for several centuries, of the unexpected and incalculable forces which lie hid in man? Believe me, man's

passions, heated to igniting point, rather than his prudence cooled down to freezing point, are the normal

causes of all great human movement. And a truer law of social science than any that political economists are

wont to lay down, is that old DOV' E LA DONNA? of the Italian judge, who used to ask, as a preliminary to

every case, civil or criminal, which was brought before him, Dov' e la donna? "Where is the lady?" certain,

like a wise old gentleman, that a woman was most probably at the bottom of the matter.

Strangeness? Romance? Did any of you ever readif you have not you should readArchbishop Whately's

"Historic Doubts about the Emperor Napoleon the First"? Therein the learned and witty Archbishop proved,

as early as 1819, by fair use of the criticism of Mr. Hume and the Sceptic School, that the whole history of

the great Napoleon ought to be treated by wise men as a myth and a romance, that there is little or no

evidence of his having existed at all; and that the story of his strange successes and strange defeats was

probably invented by our Government in order to pander to the vanity of the English nation.

I will say this, which Archbishop Whately, in a late edition, foreshadows, wittily enoughthat if one or two

thousand years hence, when the history of the late Emperor Napoleon the Third, his rise and fall, shall come

to be subjected to critical analysis by future Philistine historians of New Zealand or Australia, it will be

proved by them to be utterly mythical, incredible, monstrousand that all the more, the more the actual facts

remain to puzzle their unimaginative brains. What will they make two thousand years hence, of the landing at

Boulogne with the tame eagle? Will not that, and stranger facts still, but just as true, be relegated to the region

of myth, with the dream of Astyages, and the young and princely herdsman playing at king over his

But enough of this. To me these bits of romance often seem the truest, as well as the most important portions

When old Herodotus tells me how, King Astyages having guarded the frontier, Harpagus sent a hunter to

young Cyrus with a freshkilled hare, telling him to open it in private; and how, sewn up in it was the letter,

telling him that the time to rebel was come, I am inclined to say, That must be true. It is so beneath the

dignity of history, so quaint and unexpected, that it is all the more likely NOT to have been invented.

So with that other storyHow young Cyrus, giving out that his grandfather had made him general of the

Persians, summoned them all, each man with a sickle in his hand, into a prairie full of thorns, and bade them

clear it in one day; and how when they, like loyal men, had finished, he bade them bathe, and next day he

took them into a great meadow and feasted them with corn and wine, and all that his father's farm would

yield, and asked them which day they liked best; and, when they answered as was to be expected, how he

opened his parable and told them, "Choose, then, to work for the Persians like slaves, or to be free with me."

Such a tale sounds to me true. It has the very savour of the parables of the Old Testament; as have, surely, the

dreams of the old Sultan, with which the tale begins. Do they not put us in mind of the dreams of

Such stories are actually so beautiful that they are very likely to be true. Understand me, I only say likely; the

ditchwater view of history is not all wrong. Its advocates are right in saying great historic changes are not

produced simply by one great person, by one remarkable event. They have been preparing, perhaps for

centuries. They are the result of numberless forces, acting according to laws, which might have been

foreseen, and will be foreseen, when the science of History is more perfectly understood.

For instance, Cyrus could not have conquered the Median Empire at a single blow, if first that empire had not

been utterly rotten; and next, if he and his handful of Persians had not been tempered and sharpened, by long

Yes, there were all the materials for the catastrophethe cannon, the powder, the shot. But to say that the

Persians must have conquered the Medes, even if Cyrus had never lived, is to say, as too many philosophers

seem to me to say, that, given cannon, powder, and shot, it will fire itself off some day if we only leave it

It may be so. But our usual experience of Nature and Fact is, that spontaneous combustion is a rare and

exceptional phenomenon; that if a cannon is to be fired, someone must arise and pull the trigger. And I

believe that in Society and Politics, when a great event is ready to be done, someone must come and do

itdo it, perhaps, half unwittingly, by some single rash actlike that first fatal shot fired by an electric

I know not whether the "Cyropaedia" is much read in your schools and universities. But it is one of the books

which I should like to see, either in a translation or its own exquisite Greek, in the hands of every young man.

It is not all fact. It is but a historic romance. But it is better than history. It is an ideal book, like Sidney's

"Arcadia" or Spenser's "Fairy Queen"the ideal self education of an ideal hero. And the moral of the

bookponder it well, all young men who have the chance or the hope of exercising authority among your

followmenthe noble and most Christian moral of that heathen book is this: that the path to solid and

beneficent influence over our fellowmen lies, not through brute force, not through cupidity, but through the

highest morality; through justice, truthfulness, humanity, selfdenial, modesty, courtesy, and all which makes

Yes, the "Cyropaedia" is a noble book, about a noble personage. But I cannot forget that there are nobler

words by far concerning that same noble personage, in the magnificent series of Hebrew Lyrics, which begins

"Comfort ye, comfort ye, my people, saith the Lord"in which the inspired poet, watching the rise of Cyrus

and his Puritans, and the fall of Babylon, and the idolatries of the East, and the coming deliverance of his own

countrymen, speaks of the Persian hero in words so grand that they have been often enough applied, and with

Who raised up the righteous man from the East, And called him to attend his steps? Who subdued nations at

his presence, And gave him dominion over kings? And made them like the dust before his sword, And the

driven stubble before his bow? He pursueth them, he passeth in safety, By a way never trodden before by his

feet. Who hath performed and made these things, Calling the generations from the beginning? I, Jehovah, the

Behold my servant, whom I will uphold; My chosen, in whom my soul delighteth; I will make my spirit rest

upon him, And he shall publish judgment to the nations. He shall not cry aloud, nor clamour, Nor cause his

voice to be heard in the streets. The bruised reed he shall not break, And the smoking flax he shall not

quench. He shall publish justice, and establish it. His force shall not be abated, nor broken, Until he has

firmly seated justice in the earth, And the distant nations shall wait for his Law. Thus saith the God, even

Jehovah, Who created the heavens, and stretched them out; Who spread abroad the earth, and its produce: I,

Jehovah, have called thee for a righteous end, And I will take hold of thy hand, and preserve thee, And I will

give thee for a covenant to the people, And for a light to the nations; To open the eyes of the blind, To bring

the captives out of prison, And from the dungeon those who dwell in darkness. I am Jehovahthat is my

name; And my glory will I not give to another, Nor my praise to the graven idols.

Who saith to CyrusThou art my shepherd, And he shall fulfil all my pleasure: Who saith to

JerusalemThou shalt be built; And to the TempleThou shalt be founded. Thus saith Jehovah to his

anointed, To Cyrus whom I hold fast by his right hand, That I may subdue nations under him, And loose the

loins of kings; That I may open before him the twoleaved doors, And the gates shall not be shut; I will go

before thee And bring the mountains low. The gates of brass will I break in sunder, And the bars of iron hew

down. And I will give thee the treasures of darkness, And the hoards hid deep in secret places, That thou

mayest know that I am Jehovah. I have surnamed thee, though thou knowest not me. I am Jehovah, and none

else; Beside me there is no God. I will gird thee, though thou hast not known me, That they may know from

the rising of the sun, And from the west, that there is none beside me; I am Jehovah, and none else; Forming

light and creating darkness; Forming peace, and creating evil. I, Jehovah, make all these.

This is the Hebrew prophet's conception of the great Puritan of the Old World who went forth with such a

The isles saw that, and feared, And the ends of the earth were afraid; They drew near, they came together;

The carver encouraged the smith, He that smoothed with the hammer Him that smote on the anvil; Saying of

Bel bowed down, and Nebo stooped; Their idols were upon the cattle, A burden to the weary beast. They

stoop, they bow down together; They could not deliver their own charge; Themselves are gone into captivity.

We are scarce bound to believe positively the story how Cyrus made one war too many, and was cut off in

the Scythian deserts, falling before the arrows of mere savages; and how their queen, Tomyris, poured blood

down the throat of the dead corpse, with the words, "Glut thyself with the gore for which thou hast thirsted."

But it may be truefor Xenophon states it expressly, and with detailthat Cyrus, from the very time of his

triumph, became an Eastern despot, a sultan or a shah, living apart from his people in mysterious splendour,

in the vast fortified palace which he built for himself; and imitating and causing his nobles and satraps to

imitate, in all but vice and effeminacy, the very Medes whom he had conquered. And of this there is no

doubtthat his sons and their empire ran rapidly through that same vicious circle of corruption to which all

despotisms are doomed, and became within 250 years, even as the Medes, the Chaldeans, the Lydians, whom

they had conquered, children no longer of Ahura Mazda, but of Ahriman, of darkness and not of light, to be

conquered by Alexander and his Greeks even more rapidly and more shamefully than they had conquered the

This is the short epic of the Persian Empire, ending, alas! as all human epics are wont to end, sadly, if not

But let me ask you, Did I say too much, when I said, that to these Persians we owe that we are here tonight?

I do not say that without them we should not have been here. God, I presume, when He is minded to do

But that we are now the last link in a chain of causes and effects which reaches as far back as the emigration

For see. By the fall of Babylon and its empire the Jews were freed from their captivitylarge numbers of

them at leastand sent home to their own Jerusalem. What motives prompted Cyrus, and Darius after him,

Those who like to impute the lowest motives may say, if they will, that Daniel and the later Isaiah found it

politic to worship the rising sun, and flatter the Persian conquerors: and that Cyrus and Darius in turn were

glad to see Jerusalem rebuilt, as an impregnable frontier fortress between them and Egypt. Be it so; I, who

wish to talk of things noble, pure, lovely, and of good report, would rather point you once more to the

magnificent poetry of the later Isaiah which commences at the 40th chapter of the Book of Isaiah, and say

There, upon the very face of the document, stands written the fact that the sympathy between the faithful

Persian and the faithful Jew the two puritans of the Old World, the two haters of lies, idolatries,

superstitions, was actually as intense as it ought to have been, as it must have been.

Be that as it may, the return of the Jews to Jerusalem preserved for us the Old Testament, while it restored to

them a national centre, a sacred city, like that of Delphi to the Greeks, Rome to the Romans, Mecca to the

Muslim, loyalty to which prevented their being utterly absorbed by the more civilised Eastern races among

Then another, and a seemingly needful link of cause and effect ensued: Alexander of Macedon destroyed the

Persian Empire, and the East became Greek, and Alexandria, rather than Jerusalem, became the

headquarters of Jewish learning. But for that very cause, the Scriptures were not left inaccessible to the

mass of mankind, like the old Pehlevi liturgies of the Zendavesta, or the old Sanscrit Vedas, in an obsolete

and hieratic tongue, but were translated into, and continued in, the then all but worldwide Hellenic speech,

Then the East became Roman, without losing its Greek speech. And under the wide domination of that later

Roman Empirewhich had subdued and organised the whole known world, save the Parthian descendants of

those old Persians, and our old Teutonic forefathers in their German forests and on their Scandinavian

shoresthat Divine book was carried far and wide, East and West, and South, from the heart of Abyssinia to

the mountains of Armenia, and to the isles of the ocean, beyond Britain itself to Ireland and to the Hebrides.

And that bookso strangely coinciding with the old creed of the earlier Persiansthat book, long

misunderstood, long overlain by the dust, and overgrown by the parasitic fungi of centuries, that book it was

which sent to these transAtlantic shores the founders of your great nation. That book gave them their

instinct of Freedom, tempered by reverence for Law. That book gave them their hatred of idolatry; and made

them not only say but act upon their own words, with these old Persians and with the Jewish prophets alike,

Sacrifice and burnt offering thou wouldst not; Then said we, Lo, we come. In the volume of the book it is

written of us, that we come to do thy will, O God. Yes, long and fantastic is the chain of causes and effects,

which links you here to the old heroes who came down from Central Asia, because the land had grown so

wondrous cold, that there were ten months of winter to two of summer; and when simply after warmth and

life, and food for them and for their flocks, they wandered forth to found and help to found a spiritual

And even in their migration, far back in these dim and mystic ages, have we found the earliest link of the long

chain? Not so. What if the legend of the change of climate be the dim recollection of an enormous physical

fact? What if it, and the gradual depopulation of the whole north of Asia, be owing, as geologists now

suspect, to the slow and agelong uprise of the whole of Siberia, thrusting the warm Arctic sea farther and

farther to the northward, and placing between it and the Highlands of Thibet an everincreasing breadth of

icy land, destroying animals, and driving whole races southward, in search of the summer and the sun?

What if the first link in the chain, as yet conceivable by man, should be the cosmic changes in the distribution

of land and water, which filled the mouths of the Siberian rivers with frozen carcases of woolly mammoth

and rhinoceros; and those again, doubt it not, of other revolutions, reaching back and back, and on and on,

There is a theory abroad in the world just now about the origin of the human race, which has so many patent

and powerful physiological facts to support it that we must not lightly say that it is absurd or impossible; and

that is, that man's mortal body and brain were derived from some animal and apelike creature. Of that I am

not going to speak now. My subject is: How this creature called man, from whatever source derived, became

civilised, rational, and moral. And I am sorry to say that there is tacked on by many to the first theory,

another which does not follow from it, and which has really nothing to do with it, and it is this: That man,

with all his wonderful and mysterious aspirations, always unfulfilled yet always precious, at once his torment

and his joy, his very hope of everlasting life; that man, I say, developed himself, unassisted, out of a state of

primaeval brutishness, simply by calculations of pleasure and pain, by observing what actions would pay in

the long run and what would not; and so learnt to conquer his selfishness by a more refined and extended

selfishness, and exchanged his brutality for worldliness, and then, in a few instances, his worldliness for

nextworldliness. I hope I need not say that I do not believe this theory. If I did, I could not be a Christian, I

think, nor a philosopher either. At least, if I thought that human civilisation had sprung from such a dunghill

as that, I should, in honour to my race, say nothing about it, here or elsewhere.

Why talk of the shame of our ancestors? I want to talk of their honour and glory. I want to talk, if I talk at all,

about great times, about noble epochs, noble movements, noble deeds, and noble folk; about times in which

the human raceit may be through many mistakes, alas! and sin, and sorrow, and bloodshedstruggled up

one step higher on those great stairs which, as we hope, lead upward towards the faroff city of God; the

perfect polity, the perfect civilisation, the perfect religion, which is eternal in the heavens.

Of great men, then, and noble deeds I want to speak. I am bound to do so first, in courtesy to my hearers. For

in choosing such a subject I took for granted a nobleness and greatness of mind in them which can appreciate

and enjoy the contemplation of that which is lofty and heroic, and that which is useful indeed, though not to

the purses merely or the mouths of men, but to their intellects and spirits; that highest philosophy which,

though she can (as has been sneeringly said of her) bake no bread, sheand she alone, can at least do

I am bound to speak on such subjects, because I have never yet met, or read of, the human company who did

not require, now and then at least, being reminded of such times and such personagesof whatsoever things

are just, pure, true, lovely, and of good report, if there be any manhood and any praise to think, as St. Paul

bids us all, of such things, that we may keep up in our minds as much as possible a lofty standard, a pure

ideal, instead of sinking to the mere selfish standard which judges all things, even those of the world to come,

by profit and by loss, and into that sordid frame of mind in which a man grows to believe that the world is

We are all tempted, and the easier and more prosperous we are, the more we are tempted, to fall into that

sordid and shallow frame of mind. Sordid even when its projects are most daring, its outward luxuries most

refined; and shallow, even when most acute, when priding itself most on its knowledge of human nature, and

of the secret springs which, so it dreams, move the actions and make the history of nations and of men. All

are tempted that way, even the noblesthearted. ADHAESIT PAVIMENTO VENTER, says the old psalmist.

I am growing like the snake, crawling in the dust, and eating the dust in which I crawl. I try to lift up my eyes

to the heavens, to the true, the beautiful, the good, the eternal nobleness which was before all time, and shall

be still when time has passed away. But to lift up myself is what I cannot do. Who will help me? Who will

quicken me? as our old English tongue has it. Who will give me life? The true, pure, lofty human life which I

did NOT inherit from the primaeval ape, which the apenature in me is for ever trying to stifle, and make me

that which I know too well I could so easily becomea cunninger and more daintyfeatured brute? Death

itself, which seems at times so fair, is fair because even it may raise me up and deliver me from the burden of

'Tis life, not death for which I pant; 'Tis life, whereof my nerves are scant; More life, and fuller, that I want.

Man? I am a man not by reason of my bones and muscles, nerves and brain, which I have in common with

apes and dogs and horses. I am a manthou art a man or womannot because we have a fleshGod

forbid! but because there is a spirit in us, a divine spark and ray, which nature did not give, and which nature

cannot take away. And therefore, while I live on earth, I will live to the spirit, not to the flesh, that I may be,

indeed, a man; and this same gross flesh, this animal apenature in me, shall be the very element in me which

I will renounce, defy, despise; at least, if I am minded to be, not a merely higher savage, but a truly higher

civilised man. Civilisation with me shall mean, not more wealth, more finery, more selfindulgenceeven

more aesthetic and artistic luxury; but more virtue, more knowledge, more selfcontrol, even though I earn

scanty bread by heavy toil; and when I compare the Caesar of Rome or the great king, whether of Egypt,

Babylon, or Persia, with the hermit of the Thebaid, starving in his frock of camel's hair, with his soul fixed on

the ineffable glories of the unseen, and striving, however wildly and fantastically, to become an angel and not

There are plenty of histories of civilisation and theories of civilisation abroad in the world just now, and

which profess to show you how the primeval savage has, or at least may have, become the civilised man. For

my part, with all due and careful consideration, I confess I attach very little value to any of them: and for this

Of course, if you assume a proposition as certainly true, it is easy enough to prove that proposition to be true,

at least to your own satisfaction. If you assert with the old proverb, that you may make a silk purse out of a

sow's ear, you will be stupider than I dare suppose anyone here to be, if you cannot invent for yourselves all

the intermediate stages of the transformation, however startling. And, indeed, if modern philosophers had

stuck more closely to this old proverb, and its defining verb "make," and tried to show how some person or

personslet them be who they maymen, angels, or godsmade the sow's ear into the silk purse, and the

savage into the sagethey might have pleaded that they were still trying to keep their feet upon the firm

ground of actual experience. But while their theory is, that the sow's ear grew into a silk purse of itself, and

yet unconsciously and without any intention of so bettering itself in life, why, I think that those who have

studied the history which lies behind them, and the poor human nature which is struggling, and sinning, and

sorrowing, and failing around them, and which seems on the greater part of this planet going downwards and

not upwards, and by no means bettering itself, save in the increase of operahouses, liquorbars, and

gamblingtables, and that which pertaineth thereto; then we, I think, may be excused if we say with the old

Stoics[Greek text]I withhold my judgment. I know nothing about the matter yet; and you, oh my

so sang poor Shelley, and with a certain truth. For if, as I believe, the human race sprang from a single pair,

there must have been among their individual descendants an equality far greater than any which has been

known on earth during historic times. But that equality was at best the infantile innocence of the primary

race, which faded away in the race as quickly, alas! as it does in the individual child. Divinetherefore it

was one of the first blessings which man lost; one of the last, I fear, to which he will return; that to which

civilisation, even at its best yet known, has not yet attained, save here and there for short periods; but towards

The eldest of things which we see actually as history is not equality, but an already developed hideous

inequality, trying to perpetuate itself, and yet by a most divine and gracious law, destroying itself by the very

"There were giants in the earth in those days. And Nimrod began to be a mighty one in the earth"

What we do see isI know not whether you will think me superstitious or oldfashioned, but so I

holdvery much what the earlier books of the Bible show us under symbolic laws. Greek histories, Roman

histories, Egyptian histories, Eastern histories, inscriptions, national epics, legends, fragments of legendsin

the New World as in the Oldall tell the same story. Not the story without an end, but the story without a

beginning. As in the Hindoo cosmogony, the world stands on an elephant, and the elephant on a tortoise, and

the tortoise onwhat? No man knows. I do not know. I only assert deliberately, waiting, as Napoleon says,

till the world come round to me, that the tortoise does not standas is held by certain anthropologists, some

honoured by me, some personally dear to meupon the savages who chipped flints and fed on mammoth

and reindeer in NorthWestern Europe, shortly after the age of ice, a few hundred thousand years ago. These

sturdy little fellowsthe kinsmen probably of the Esquimaux and Lappscould have been but the

AVANTCOURIERS, or more probably the fugitives from the true mass of mankindspreading northward

from the Tropics into climes becoming, after the long catastrophe of the age of ice, once more genial enough

to support men who knew what decent comfort was, and were strong enough to get the same, by all means

fair or foul. No. The tortoise of the human race does not stand on a savage. The savage may stand on an

apelike creature. I do not say that he does not. I do not say that he does. I do not know; and no man knows.

But at least I say that the civilised man and his world stand not upon creatures like to any savage now known

upon the earth. For first, it seems to be most unlikely; and next, and more important to an inductive

philosopher, there is no proof of it. I see no savages becoming really civilised menthat is, not merely men

who will ape the outside of our socalled civilisation, even absorb a few of our ideas; not merely that; but

truly civilised men who will think for themselves, invent for themselves, act for themselves; and when the

sacred lamp of light and truth has been passed into their hands, carry it on unextinguished, and transmit it to

their successors without running back every moment to get it relighted by those from whom they received it:

and who are boundremember thatpatiently and lovingly to relight it for them; to give freely to all their

fellowmen of that which God has given to them and to their ancestors; and let God, not man, be judge of

how much the Red Indian or the Polynesian, the Caffre or the Chinese, is capable of receiving and of using.

Moreover, in history there is no record, absolutely no record, as far as I am aware, of any savage tribe

civilising itself. It is a bold saying. I stand by my assertion: most happy to find myself confuted, even in a

single instance; for my being wrong would give me, what I can have no objection to possess, a higher opinion

But civilisation must have begun somewhen, somewhere, with some person, or some family, or some nation;

I have said already that I do not know. But I have had my dream like the philosopherand as I have not

been ashamed to tell it elsewhere, I shall not be ashamed to tell it here. And it is this:

What if the beginnings of true civilisation in this unique, abnormal, diseased, unsatisfied, incomprehensible,

and truly miraculous and supernatural race we call man, had been literally, and in actual fact, miraculous and

supernatural likewise? What if that be the true key to the mystery of humanity and its origin? What if the few

first chapters of the most ancient and most sacred book should point, under whatever symbols, to the actual

and the only possible origin of civilisation, the education of a man, or a family by beings of some higher race

than man? What if the old Puritan doctrine of Election should be even of a deeper and wider application than

divines have been wont to think? What if individuals, if peoples, have been chosen out from time to time for

a special illumination, that they might be the lights of the earth, and the salt of the world? What if they have,

each in their turn, abused that divine teaching to make themselves the tyrants, instead of the ministers, of the

less enlightened? To increase the inequalities of nature by their own selfishness, instead of decreasing them,

into the equality of grace, by their own self sacrifice? What if the Bible after all was right, and even more

So runs my dream. If, after I have confessed to it, you think me still worth listening to, in this enlightened

At all events, what we see at the beginning of all known and half known history, is not savagery, but high

civilisation, at least of an outward and material kind. Do you demur? Then recollect, I pray you, that the three

oldest peoples known to history on this planet are Egypt, China, Hindostan. The first glimpses of the world

are always like those which the book of Genesis gives us; like those which your own continent gives us. As it

was 400 years ago in America, so it was in North Africa and in Asia 4000 years ago, or 40,000 for aught I

know. Nay, if anyone should askAnd why not 400,000 years ago, on Miocene continents long sunk

beneath the Tropic sea? I for one have no rejoinder saveWe have no proofs as yet.

There loom up, out of the darkness of legend, into the as yet dim dawn of history, what the old Arabs call

Races of preAdamite Sultanscolossal monarchies, with fixed and often elaborate laws, customs, creeds;

with aristocracies, priesthoodsseemingly always of a superior and conquering race; with a mass of

common folk, whether free or halffree, composed of older conquered races; of imported slaves too, and

But whence comes the royal race, the aristocracy, the priesthood? You inquire, and you find that they usually

know not themselves. They are usuallyI had almost dared to say, alwaysforeigners. They have crossed

the neighbouring mountains. The have come by sea, like Dido to Carthage, like Manco Cassae and Mama

Belle to America, and they have sometimes forgotten when. At least they are wiser, stronger, fairer, than the

aborigines. They are to themas Jacques Cartier was to the Indians of Canadaas gods. They are not sure

that they are not descended from gods. They are the Children of the Sun, or what not. The children of light,

who ray out such light as they have, upon the darkness of their subjects. They are at first, probably, civilisers,

not conquerors. For, if tradition is worth anythingand we have nothing else to go uponthey are at first

few in number. They come as settlers, or even as single sages. It is, in all tradition, not the many who

But the higher calling is soon forgotten. The purer light is soon darkened in pride and selfishness, luxury and

lust; as in Genesis, the sons of God see the daughters of men, that they are fair; and they take them wives of

all that they choose. And so a mixed race springs up and increases, without detriment at first to the

commonwealth. For, by a wellknown law of heredity, the cross between two races, probably far apart,

produces at first a progeny possessing the forces, and, alas! probably the vices of both. And when the sons of

God go in to the daughters of men, there are giants in the earth in those days, men of renown. The Roman

Empire, remember, was never stronger than when the old Patrician blood had mingled itself with that of

But it does not last. Selfishness, luxury, ferocity, spread from above, as well as from below. The just

aristocracy of virtue and wisdom becomes an unjust one of mere power and privilege; that again, one of mere

wealth corrupting and corrupt; and is destroyed, not by the people from below, but by the monarch from

But they dare not, know not how. The king must do it for them. He must become the State. "Better one

tyrant," as Voltaire said, "than many." Better stand in fear of one lion far away, than of many wolves, each in

the nearest wood. And so arise those truly monstrous Eastern despotisms, of which modern Persia is, thank

God, the only remaining specimen; for Turkey and Egypt are too amenable of late years to the influence of

the free nations to be counted as despotisms pure and simpledespotisms in which men, instead of

worshipping a Godman, worship the hideous counterfeit, a Mangoda poor human being endowed by

public opinion with the powers of deity, while he is the slave of all the weaknesses of humanity. But such, as

an historic fact, has been the last stage of every civilisation even that of Rome, which ripened itself upon

this earth the last in ancient times, and, I had almost said, until this very day, except among the men who

speak Teutonic tongues, and who have preserved through all temptations, and reasserted through all dangers,

the free ideas which have been our sacred heritage ever since Tacitus beheld us, with respect and awe, among

Yes, it is very sad, the past history of mankind. But shall we despise those who went before us, and on whose

Shall we not reverence our spiritual ancestors? Shall we not show our reverence by copying them, at least

whenever, as in those old Persians, we see in them manliness and truthfulness, hatred of idolatries, and

devotion to the God of light and life and good? And shall we not feel pity, instead of contempt, for their ruder

forms of government, their ignorances, excesses, failuresso excusable in men who, with little or no

previous teaching, were trying to solve for themselves for the first time the deepest social and political

Yes, those old despotisms we trust are dead, and never to revive. But their corpses are the corpses, not of our

enemies, but of our friends and predecessors, slain in the worldold fight of Ormuzd against Ahrimanlight

against darkness, order against disorder. Confusedly they fought, and sometimes ill: but their corpses piled

the breach and filled the trench for us, and over their corpses we step on to what should be to us an easy

For if we be, as we are wont to boast, the salt of the earth and the light of the world, what if the salt should

lose its savour? What if the light which is in us should become darkness? For myself, when I look upon the

responsibilities of the free nations of modern times, so far from boasting of that liberty in which I

delightand to keep which I freely, too, could dieI rather say, in fear and trembling, God help us on

whom He has laid so heavy a burden as to make us free; responsible, each individual of us, not only to

ourselves, but to Him and all mankind. For if we fall we shall fall I know not whither, and I dare not think.

How those old despotisms, the mighty empires of old time, fell, we know, and we can easily explain. Corrupt,

luxurious, effeminate, eaten out by universal selfishness and mutual fear, they had at last no organic

coherence. The moral anarchy within showed through, at last burst through, the painted skin of prescriptive

order which held them together. Some braver and abler, and usually more virtuous people, often some little,

hardy, homely mountain tribe, saw that the fruit was ripe for gathering; and, caring naught for superior

numbersand saying with German Alaric when the Romans boasted of their numbers, "The thicker the hay

the easier it is mowed"struck one brave blow at the huge inflated windbagas Cyrus and his handful of

Persians struck at the Medes; as Alexander and his handful of Greeks struck afterwards at the Persiansand

behold, it collapsed upon the spot. And then the victors took the place of the conquered; and became in their

turn an aristocracy, and then a despotism; and in their turn rotted down and perished. And so the vicious

circle repeated itself, age after age, from Egypt and Assyria to Mexico and Peru.

And therefore, we, free peoples as we are, have need to watch, and sternly watch, ourselves. Equality of some

kind or other is, as I said, our natural and seemingly inevitable goal. But which equality? For there are

twoa true one and a false; a noble and a base; a healthful and a ruinous. There is the truly divine equality,

and there is the brute equality of sheep and oxen, and of flies and worms. There is the equality which is

founded on mutual envy. The equality which respects others, and the equality which asserts itself. The

equality which longs to raise all alike, and the equality which desires to pull down all alike. The equality

which says: Thou art as good as I, and it may be better too, in the sight of God. And the equality which says:

Side by side, in the heart of every free man, and every free people, are the two instincts struggling for the

mastery, called by the same name, but bearing the same relation to each other as Marsyas to Apollo, the Satyr

to the God. Marsyas and Apollo, the base and the noble, are, as in the old Greek legend, contending for the

In proportion as that nobler idea conquers, and men unite in the equality of mutual respect and mutual

service, they move one step farther towards realising on earth that Kingdom of God of which it is written:

"The despots of the nations exercise dominion over them, and they that exercise authority over them are

called benefactors. But he that will be great among you let him be the servant of all."

And in proportion as that base idea conquers, and selfishness, not selfsacrifice, is the ruling spirit of a State,

men move on, one step forward, towards realising that kingdom of the devil upon earth, "Every man for

himself and the devil take the hindmost." Only, alas! in that evil equality of envy and hate, there is no

And so is a period of discontent, revolution, internecine anarchy, followed by a tyranny endured, as in old

Rome, by men once free, because tyranny will at least do for them what they were too lazy and greedy and

And all because they have forgot What 'tis to be a manto curb and spurn. The tyrant in us: the ignobler self

Which boasts, not loathes, its likeness to the brute; And owns no good save ease, no ill save pain, No

purpose, save its share in that wild war In which, through countless ages, living things Compete in

internecine greed. Ah, loving God, Are we as creeping things, which have no lord? That we are brutes, great

God, we know too well; Apes daintierfeatured; silly birds, who flaunt Their plumes, unheeding of the

fowler's step; Spiders, who catch with paper, not with webs; Tigers, who slay with cannon and sharp steel,

Instead of teeth and claws: all these we are. Are we no more than these, save in degree? Mere fools of

nature, puppets of strong lusts, Taking the sword, to perish by the sword Upon the universal battlefield,

The heath eats up green grass and delicate herbs; The pines eat up the heath; the grub the pine; The finch the

grub; the hawk the silly finch; And man, the mightiest of all beasts of prey, Eats what he lists. The strong eat

up the weak; The many eat the few; great nations, small; And he who cometh in the name of all Shall,

greediest, triumph by the greed of all, And, armed by his own victims, eat up all. While ever out of the eternal

heavens Looks patient down the great magnanimous God, Who, Master of all worlds, did sacrifice All to

Himself? Nay: but Himself to all; Who taught mankind, on that first Christmas Day, What 'tis to be a

manto give, not take; To serve, not rule; to nourish, not devour; To lift, not crush; if need, to die, not live.

"He that cometh in the name of all"the popular military despot the "saviour of his country"he is our

internecine enemy on both sides of the Atlantic, whenever he risesthe inaugurator of that Imperialism, that

Caesarism into which Rome sank, when not her liberties merely, but her virtues, were decaying out of

herthe sink into which all wicked States, whether republics or monarchies, are sure to fall, simply because

men must eat and drink for to morrow they die. The Military and Bureaucratic Despotism which keeps the

many quiet, as in old Rome, by PANEM ET CIRCENSESbread and gamesor, if need be, Pilgrimages;

that the few may make money, eat, drink, and be merry, as long as it can last. That, let it ape as it mayas

did the Caesars of old Rome at firstas another Emperor did even in our own daysthe forms of dead

freedom, really upholds an artificial luxury by brute force; and consecrates the basest of all aristocracies, the

That at all risks, even at the price of precious blood, the free peoples of the earth must ward off from them;

for, makeshift and stopgap as it is, it does not even succeed in what it tries to do. It does not last. Have we

not seen that it does not, cannot last? How can it last? This falsehood, like all falsehoods, must collapse at

"Then saw I the end of these men. Namely, how Thou dost set them in slippery places, and casteth them

down. Suddenly do they perish, and come to a fearful end. Yea, like as a dream when one awaketh, so shalt

Have we not seen that too, though, thank God, neither in England nor in the United States?

The future of France and Spain, the future of the Tropical Republics of Spanish America, is utterly blank and

dark; not to be prophesied, I hold, by mortal man, simply because we have no like cases in the history of the

past whereby to judge the tendencies of the present. Will they revive? Under the genial influences of free

institutions will the good seed which is in them take root downwards, and bear fruit upwards? and make them

all what that fair France has been, in spite of all her faults, so often in past yearsa joy and an inspiration to

all the nations round? Shall it be thus? God grant it may; but He, and He alone, can tell. We only stand by,

watching, if we be wise, with pity and with fear, the working out of a tremendous new social problem, which

For if the agonising old nations fail to regenerate themselves, what can befall? What, when even Imperialism

has been tried and failed, as fail it must? What but that lower depth within the lowest deep?

That last dread mood Of sated lust, and dull decrepitude. No law, no art, no faith, no hope, no God. When

round the freezing founts of life in peevish ring, Crouched on the bareworn sod, Babbling about the

unreturning spring, And whining for dead creeds, which cannot save, The toothless nations shiver to their

And we, who think we stand, let us take heed lest we fall. Let us accept, in modesty and in awe, the

responsibility of our freedom, and remember that that freedom can be preserved only in one old fashioned

way. Let us remember that the one condition of a true democracy is the same as the one condition of a true

aristocracy, namely, virtue. Let us teach our children, as grand old Lilly taught our forefathers 300 years

ago"It is virtue, gentlemen, yea, virtue that maketh gentlemen; that maketh the poor rich, the subject a

king, the lowborn noble, the deformed beautiful. These things neither the whirling wheel of fortune can

overturn, nor the deceitful cavillings of worldlings separate, neither sickness abate, nor age abolish."

Yes. Let us teach our children thus on both sides of the Atlantic. For if theywhich God forbidshould

grow corrupt and weak by their own sins, there is no hardier race now left on earth to conquer our

descendants and bring them back to reason, as those old Jews were brought by bitter shame and woe. And all

that is before them and the whole civilised world, would be long centuries of anarchy such as the world has

not seen for agesa true Ragnarok, a twilight of the very gods, an age such as the wise woman foretold in

When brethren shall be Each other's bane, And sisters' sons rend The ties of kin. Hard will be that age, An

age of bad women, An axeage, a swordage, Shields oft cleft in twain, A stormage, a wolfage, Ere earth

So sang, 2000 years ago, perhaps, the great unnamed prophetess, of our own race, of what might be, if we

God grant that day may never come. But God grant, also, that if that day does come, then may come true also

what that wise Vala sang, of the day when gods, and men, and earth should be burnt up with fire.

When slaked Surtur's flame is, Still the man and the maiden, Hight Valour and Life, Shall keep themselves

hid In the wood of remembrance. The dew of the dawning For food it shall serve them: From them spring

New peoples. For after all is said, the ideal form of human society is democracy.

A nationand, were it even possible, a whole worldof free men, lifting free foreheads to God and Nature;

calling no man masterfor one is their master, even God; knowing and obeying their duties towards the

Maker of the Universe, and therefore to each other, and that not from fear, nor calculation of profit or loss,

but because they loved and liked it, and had seen the beauty of righteousness and trust and peace; because the

law of God was in their hearts, and needing at last, it may be, neither king nor priest, for each man and each

woman, in their place, were kings and priests to God. Such a nationsuch a societywhat nobler

conception of mortal existence can we form? Would not that be, indeed, the kingdom of God come on earth?

And tell me not that that is impossibletoo fair a dream to be ever realised. All that makes it impossible is

the selfishness, passions, weaknesses, of those who would be blest were they masters of themselves, and

therefore of circumstances; who are miserable because, not being masters of themselves, they try to master

circumstance, to pull down iron walls with weak and clumsy hands, and forget that he who would be free

But tell me not that the dream is impossible. It is so beautiful that it must be true. If not now, nor centuries

hence, yet still hereafter. God would never, as I hold, have inspired man with that rich imagination had He

The very greatness of the idea, beyond what a single mind or generation can grasp, will ensure failure on

failurefollies, fanaticisms, disappointments, even crimes, bloodshed, hasty furies, as of children baulked of

But it will be at last fulfilled, filled full, and perfected; not perhaps here, or among our peoples, or any people

which now exist on earth: but in some future civilisationit may be in far lands beyond the seawhen all

that you and we have made and done shall be as the forestgrown mounds of the old nameless civilisers of

"Apollo, god of medicine, exiled from the rest of the earth, was straying once across the Narbonnaise in Gaul,

seeking to fix his abode there. Driven from Asia, from Africa, and from the rest of Europe, he wandered

through all the towns of the province in search of a place propitious for him and for his disciples. At last he

perceived a new city, constructed from the ruins of Maguelonne, of Lattes, and of Substantion. He

contemplated long its site, its aspect, its neighbourhood, and resolved to establish on this hill of Montpellier a

temple for himself and his priests. All smiled on his desires. By the genius of the soil, by the character of the

inhabitants, no town is more fit for the culture of letters, and above all of medicine. What site is more

delicious and more lovely? A heaven pure and smiling; a city built with magnificence; men born for all the

labours of the intellect. All around vast horizons and enchanting sitesmeadows, vines, olives, green

champaigns; mountains and hills, rivers, brooks, lagoons, and the sea. Everywhere a luxuriant

vegetationeverywhere the richest production of the land and the water. Hail to thee sweet and dear city!

Hail, happy abode of Apollo, who spreadest afar the light of the glory of thy name!"

"This fine tirade," says Dr. Maurice Raynaudfrom whose charming book on the "Doctors of the Time of

Moliere" I quote"is not, as one might think, the translation of a piece of poetry. It is simply part of a public

oration by Francois Fanchon, one of the most illustrious chancellors of the faculty of medicine of Montpellier

in the seventeenth century." "From time immemorial," he says, "'the faculty' of Montpellier had made itself

remarkable by a singular mixture of the sacred and the profane. The theses which were sustained there began

by an invocation to God, the Blessed Virgin, and St. Luke, and ended by these words: 'This thesis will be

But however extravagant Chancellor Fanchon's praises of his native city may seem, they are really not

exaggerated. The Narbonnaise, or Languedoc, is perhaps the most charming district of charming France. In

the far northeast gleam the white Alps; in the far southwest the white Pyrenees; and from the purple glens

and yellow downs of the Cevennes on the northwest, the Herault slopes gently down towards the "Etangs,"

or great saltwater lagoons, and the vast alluvial flats of the Camargue, the field of Caius Marius, where still

run herds of halfwild horses, descended from some ancient Roman stock; while beyond all glitters the blue

Mediterranean. The great almond orchards, each one sheet of rosecolour in spring; the mulberry orchards,

the oliveyards, the vineyards, cover every foot of available upland soil: save where the rugged and arid downs

are sweet with a thousand odoriferous plants, from which the bees extract the famous white honey of

Narbonne. The native flowers and shrubs, of a beauty and richness rather Eastern than European, have made

the "Flora Montpeliensis," and with it the names of Rondelet and his disciples, famous among botanists; and

the strange fish and shells upon its shores afforded Rondelet materials for his immortal work upon the

"Animals of the Sea." The innumerable wild fowl of the Benches du Rhone; the innumerable songsters and

other birds of passage, many of them unknown in these islands, and even in the north of France itself, which

haunt every copse of willow and aspen along the brooksides; the gaudy and curious insects which thrive

beneath that clear, fierce, and yet bracing sunlight; all these have made the district of Montpellier a home

Neither was Chancellor Fanchon misled by patriotism, when he said the pleasant people who inhabit that

district are fit for all the labours of the intellect. They are a very mixed race, and, like most mixed races,

quickwitted, and handsome also. There is probably much Roman blood among them, especially in the

towns; for Languedoc, or Gallia Narbonnensis, as it was called of old, was said to be more Roman than Rome

itself. The Roman remains are more perfect and more interestingso the late Dr. Whewell used to say

than any to be seen now in Italy; and the old capital, Narbonne itself, was a complete museum of Roman

antiquities ere Francis I. destroyed it, in order to fortify the city upon a modern system against the invading

armies of Charles V. There must be much Visigothic blood likewise in Languedoc: for the Visigothic Kings

held their courts there from the fifth century, until the time that they were crushed by the invading Moors.

Spanish blood, likewise, there may be; for much of Languedoc was held in the early Middle Age by those

descendants of Eudes of Aquitaine who established themselves as kings of Majorca and Arragon; and

Languedoc did not become entirely French till 1349, when Philip le Bel bought Montpellier of those

potentates. The Moors, too, may have left some traces of their race behind. They held the country from about

A.D. 713 to 758, when they were finally expelled by Charles Martel and Eudes. One sees to this day their

towers of meagre stonework, perched on the grand Roman masonry of those old amphitheatres, which they

turned into fortresses. One may see, tooso tradition holds upon those very amphitheatres the stains of

the fires with which Charles Martel smoked them out; and one may see, too, or fancy that one sees, in the

aquiline features, the bright black eyes, the lithe and graceful gestures, which are so common in Languedoc,

some touch of the old Mahommedan race, which passed like a flood over that Christian land.

Whether or not the Moors left behind any traces of their blood, they left behind, at least, traces of their

learning; for the university of Montpellier claimed to have been founded by Moors at a date of altogether

abysmal antiquity. They looked upon the Arabian physicians of the Middle Age, on Avicenna and Averrhoes,

as modern innovators, and derived their parentage from certain mythic doctors of Cordova, who, when the

Moors were expelled from Spain in the eighth century, fled to Montpellier, bringing with them traditions of

that primaeval science which had been revealed to Adam while still in Paradise; and founded Montpellier, the

mother of all the universities in Europe. Nay, some went farther still, and told of Bengessaus and Ferragius,

the physicians of Charlemagne, and of Marilephus, chief physician of King Chilperic, and evenif a letter of

St. Bernard's was to be believedof a certain bishop who went as early as the second century to consult the

doctors of Montpellier; and it would have been in vain to reply to them that in those days, and long after

them, Montpellier was not yet built. The facts are said to be: that as early as the beginning of the thirteenth

century Montpellier had its schools of law, medicine, and arts, which were erected into a university by Pope

The university of Montpellier, likeI believemost foreign ones, resembled more a Scotch than an English

university. The students lived, for the most part, not in colleges, but in private lodgings, and constituted a

republic of their own, ruled by an abbe of the scholars, one of themselves, chosen by universal suffrage. A

terror they were often to the respectable burghers, for they had all the right to carry arms; and a plague

likewise, for, if they ran in debt, their creditors were forbidden to seize their books, which, with their swords,

were generally all the property they possessed. If, moreover, anyone set up a noisy or unpleasant trade near

their lodgings, the scholars could compel the town authorities to turn him out. They were most of them,

probably, mere boys of from twelve to twenty, living poorly, working hard, andthose at least of them who

were in the collegescruelly beaten daily, after the fashion of those times; but they seem to have comforted

themselves under their troubles by a good deal of wild life out of school, by rambling into the country on the

festivals of the saints, and now and then by acting plays; notably, that famous one which Rabelais wrote for

them in 1531: "The moral comedy of the man who had a dumb wife;" which "joyous PATELINAGE"

remains unto this day in the shape of a well known comic song. That comedy young Rondelet must have

seen acted. The son of a druggist, spicer, and grocerthe three trades were then combinedin Montpellier,

and born in 1507, he had been destined for the cloister, being a sickly lad. His uncle, one of the canons of

Maguelonne, near by, had even given him the revenues of a small chapela job of nepotism which was

common enough in those days. But his heart was in science and medicine. He set off, still a mere boy, to

Paris to study there; and returned to Montpellier, at the age of eighteen, to study again.

The next year, 1530, while still a scholar himself, he was appointed procurator of the scholarsa post which

brought him in a small fee on each matriculationand that year he took a fee, among others, from one of the

And what shall I say of him?who stands alone, like Shakespeare, in his generation; possessed of colossal

learningof all science which could be gathered in his daysof practical and statesmanlike wisdomof

knowledge of languages, ancient and modern, beyond all his compeersof eloquence, which when he

speaks of pure and noble things becomes heroic, and, as it were, inspiredof scorn for meanness, hypocrisy,

ignoranceof esteem, genuine and earnest, for the Holy Scriptures, and for the more moderate of the

Reformers who were spreading the Scriptures in Europe,and all this great light wilfully hidden, not under a

bushel, but under a dunghill. He is somewhat like Socrates in face, and in character likewise; in him, as in

Socrates, the demigod and the satyr, the man and the ape, are struggling for the mastery. In Socrates, the true

man conquers, and comes forth high and pure; in Rabelais, alas! the victor is the ape, while the man himself

sinks down in cynicism, sensuality, practical jokes, foul talk. He returns to Paris, to live an idle, luxurious

life; to diesays the legendsaying, "I go to seek a great perhaps," and to leave behind him little save a

school of Pantagruelistscareless young gentlemen, whose ideal was to laugh at everything, to believe in

nothing, and to gratify their five senses like the brutes which perish. There are those who read his books to

make them laugh; the wise man, when he reads them, will be far more inclined to weep. Let any young man

who may see these words remember, that in him, as in Rabelais, the ape and the man are struggling for the

mastery. Let him take warning by the fate of one who was to him as a giant to a pigmy; and think of

Arise, and fly The reeling faun, the sensual feast; Strive upwards, working out the beast, And let the ape and

But to return. Down among them there at Montpellier, like a brilliant meteor, flashed this wonderful Rabelais,

in the year 1530. He had fled, some say, for his life. Like Erasmus, he had no mind to be a martyr, and he had

been terrified at the execution of poor Louis de Berquin, his friend, and the friend of Erasmus likewise. This

Louis de Berquin, a man well known in those days, was a gallant young gentleman and scholar, holding a

place in the court of Francis I., who had translated into French the works of Erasmus, Luther, and

Melancthon, and had asserted that it was heretical to invoke the Virgin Mary instead of the Holy Spirit, or to

call her our Hope and our Life, which titlesBerquin averredbelonged alone to God. Twice had the

doctors of the Sorbonne, with that terrible persecutor, Noel Beda, at their head, seized poor Berquin, and tried

to burn his books and him; twice had that angel in human form, Marguerite d'Angouleme, sister of Francis I.,

saved him from their clutches; but when Francistaken prisoner at the battle of Pavia at last returned

from his captivity in Spain, the suppression of heresy and the burning of heretics seemed to him and to his

mother, Louise of Savoy, a thankoffering so acceptable to God, that Louis Berquinwho would not, in

spite of the entreaties of Erasmus, purchase his life by silencewas burnt at last on the Place de Greve,

Montpellier received its famous guest joyfully. Rabelais was now fortytwo years old, and a distinguished

savant; so they excused him his three years' undergraduate's career, and invested him at once with the red

gown of the bachelors. That red gownor, rather, the ragged phantom of itis still shown at Montpellier,

and must be worn by each bachelor when he takes his degree. Unfortunately, antiquarians assure us that the

precious garment has been renewed again and againthe students having clipped bits of it away for relics,

and clipped as earnestly from the new gowns as their predecessors had done from the authentic original.

Doubtless, the coming of such a man among them to lecture on the Aphorisms of Hippocrates, and the Ars

Parva of Galen, not from the Latin translations then in use, but from original Greek texts, with comments and

corrections of his own, must have had a great influence on the minds of the Montpellier students; and still

more influence and that not altogether a good onemust Rabelais's lighter talk have had, as he

loungedso the story goesin his dressinggown upon the public place, picking up quaint stories from the

cattle drivers off the Cevennes, and the villagers who came in to sell their olives and their grapes, their

vinegar and their vinetwig faggots, as they do unto this day. To him may be owing much of the sound

respect for natural science, and much, too, of the contempt for the superstition around them, which is notable

in that group of great naturalists who were boys in Montpellier at that day. Rabelais seems to have liked

Rondelet, and no wonder: he was a cheery, lovable, honest little fellow, very fond of jokes, a great musician

and player on the violin, and who, when he grew rich, liked nothing so well as to bring into his house any

buffoon or strolling player to make fun for him. Vivacious he was, hottempered, forgiving, and with a

power of learning and a power of work which were prodigious, even in those hardworking days. Rabelais

chaffs Rondelet, under the name of Rondibilis; for, indeed, Rondelet grew up into a very round, fat, little

man; but Rabelais puts excellent sense into his mouth, cynical enough, and too cynical, but both learned and

humorous; and, if he laughs at him for being shocked at the offer of a fee, and taking it, nevertheless, kindly

enough, Rondelet is not the first doctor who has done that, neither will he be the last.

Rondelet, in his turn, put on the red robe of the bachelor, and received, on taking his degree, his due share of

fisticuffs from his dearest friends, according to the ancient custom of the University of Montpellier. He then

went off to practise medicine in a village at the foot of the Alps, and, halfstarved, to teach little children.

Then he found he must learn Greek; went off to Paris a second time, and alleviated his poverty there

somewhat by becoming tutor to a son of the Viscomte de Turenne. There he met Gonthier of Andernach, who

had taught anatomy at Louvain to the great Vesalius, and learned from him to dissect. We next find him

setting up as a medical man amid the wild volcanic hills of the Auvergne, struggling still with poverty, like

Erasmus, like George Buchanan, like almost every great scholar in those days; for students then had to

wander from place to place, generally on foot, in search of new teachers, in search of books, in search of the

necessaries of life; undergoing such an amount of bodily and mental toil as makes it wonderful that all of

them did notas some of them doubtless diddie under the hard training, or, at best, desert the penurious

Rondelet got his doctorate in 1537, and next year fell in love with and married a beautiful young girl called

But he had gained, meanwhile, a powerful patron; and the patronage of the great was then as necessary to

men of letters as the patronage of the public is now. Guillaume Pellicier, Bishop of Maguelonneor rather

then of Montpellier itself, whither he had persuaded Paul II. to transfer the ancient seewas a model of the

literary gentleman of the sixteenth century; a savant, a diplomat, a collector of books and manuscripts, Greek,

Hebrew, and Syriac, which formed the original nucleus of the present library of the Louvre; a botanist, too,

who loved to wander with Rondelet collecting plants and flowers. He retired from public life to peace and

science at Montpellier, when to the evil days of his master, Francis I., succeeded the still worse days of Henry

II., and Diana of Poitiers. That Jezebel of France could conceive no more natural or easy way of atoning for

her own sins than that of hunting down heretics, and feasting her wicked eyesso it is saidupon their

dying torments. Bishop Pellicier fell under suspicion of heresy: very probably with some justice. He fell, too,

under suspicion of leading a life unworthy of a celibate churchman, a fault whichif it really existedwas,

in those days, pardonable enough in an orthodox prelate, but not so in one whose orthodoxy was suspected.

And for awhile Pellicier was in prison. After his release he gave himself up to science, with Rondelet and the

school of disciples who were growing up around him. They rediscovered together the Garum, that classic

sauce, whose praises had been sung of old by Horace, Martial, and Ausonius; and so childlike, superstitious

if you will, was the reverence in the sixteenth century for classic antiquity, that when Pellicier and Rondelet

discovered that the Garum was made from the fish called Picarelcalled Garon by the fishers of Antibes,

and Giroli at Venice, both these last names corruptions of the Latin Gerresthen did the two fashionable

poets of France, Etienne Dolet and Clement Marot, think it not unworthy of their muse to sing the praises of

the sauce which Horace had sung of old. A proud day, too, was it for Pellicier and Rondelet, when wandering

somewhere in the marshes of the Camargue, a scent of garlic caught the nostrils of the gentle bishop, and in

the lovely pink flowers of the watergermander he recognised the Scordium of the ancients. "The discovery,"

says Professor Planchon, "made almost as much noise as that of the famous Garum; for at that moment of

naive fervour on behalf of antiquity, to rediscover a plant of Dioscorides or of Pliny was a good fortune and

I know not whether, after his death, the good bishop's bones reposed beneath some gorgeous tomb, bedizened

with the incongruous half Pagan statues of the Renaissance; but this at least is certain, that Rondelet's

disciples imagined for him a monument more enduring than of marble or of brass, more graceful and more

curiously wrought than all the sculptures of Torrigiano or Cellini, Baccio Bandinelli or Michael Angelo

himself. For they named a lovely little lilac snapdragon, Linaria Domini Pellicerii"Lord Pellicier's

toadflax;" and that name it will keep, we may believe, as long as winter and summer shall endure.

But to return. To this good Patronwho was the Ambassador at Venicethe newlymarried Rondelet

determined to apply for employment; and to Venice he would have gone, leaving his bride behind, had he not

been stayed by one of those angels who sometimes walk the earth in women's shape. Jeanne Sandre had an

elder sister, Catharine, who had brought her up. She was married to a wealthy man, but she had no children of

her own. For four years she and her good husband had let the Rondelets lodge with them, and now she was a

widow, and to part with them was more than she could bear. She carried Rondelet off from the students who

were seeing him safe out of the city, brought him back, settled on him the same day half her fortune, and soon

after settled on him the whole, on the sole condition that she should live with him and her sister. For years

afterwards she watched over the pretty young wife and her two girls and three boysthe three boys, alas! all

died youngand over Rondelet himself, who, immersed in books and experiments, was utterly careless

about money; and was to them all a mother advising, guiding, managing, and regarded by Rondelet with

Honour and good fortune, in a worldly sense, now poured in upon the druggist's son. Pellicier, his own

bishop, stood godfather to his firstborn daughter. Montluc, Bishop of Valence, and that wise and learned

statesman, the Cardinal of Tournon, stood godfathers a few years later to his twin boys; and what was of still

more solid worth to him, Cardinal Tournon took him to Antwerp, Bordeaux, Bayonne, and more than once to

Rome; and in these Italian journeys of his he collected many facts for the great work of his life, that "History

of Fishes" which he dedicated, naturally enough, to the cardinal. This book with its plates is, for the time, a

masterpiece of accuracy. Those who are best acquainted with the subject say, that it is up to the present day a

key to the whole ichthyology of the Mediterranean. Two other men, Belon and Salviani, were then at work on

the same subject, and published their books almost at the same time; a circumstance which caused, as was

natural, a threecornered duel between the supporters of the three naturalists, each party accusing the other of

plagiarism. The simple fact seems to be that the almost simultaneous appearance of the three books in

155455 is one of those coincidences inevitable at moments when many minds are stirred in the same

direction by the same great thoughts coincidences which have happened in our own day on questions of

geology, biology, and astronomy; and which, when the facts have been carefully examined, and the first flush

of natural jealousy has cooled down, have proved only that there were more wise men than one in the world

And this sixteenth century was an age in which the minds of men were suddenly and strangely turned to

examine the wonders of nature with an earnestness, with a reverence, and therefore with an accuracy, with

which they had never been investigated before. "Nature," says Professor Planchon, "long veiled in mysticism

and scholasticism, was opening up infinite vistas. A new superstition, the exaggerated worship of the

ancients, was nearly hindering this movement of thought towards facts. Nevertheless, Learning did her work.

She rediscovered, reconstructed, purified, commented on the texts of ancient authors. Then came in

observation, which showed that more was to be seen in one blade of grass than in any page of Pliny. Rondelet

was in the middle of this crisis a man of transition, while he was one of progress. He reflected the past; he

opened and prepared the future. If he commented on Dioscorides, if he remained faithful to the theories of

Galen, he founded in his 'History of Fishes' a monument which our century respects. He is above all an

inspirer, an initiator; and if he wants one mark of the leader of a school, the foundation of certain scientific

doctrines, there is in his speech what is better than all systems, the communicative power which urges a

generation of disciples along the path of independent research, with Reason for guide, and Faith for aim."

Around Rondelet, in those years, sometimes indeed in his housefor professors in those days took private

pupils as lodgersworked the group of botanists whom Linnaeus calls "the Fathers," the authors of the

descriptive botany of the sixteenth century. Their names, and those of their disciples and their disciples again,

are household words in the mouth of every gardener, immortalised, like good Bishop Pellicier, in the plants

that have been named after them. The Lobelia commemorates Lobel, one of Rondelet's most famous pupils,

who wrote those "Adversaria" which contain so many curious sketches of Rondelet's botanical expeditions,

and who inherited his botanical (as Joubert his biographer inherited his anatomical) manuscripts. The

Magnolia commemorates the Magnols; the Sarracenia, Sarrasin of Lyons; the Bauhinia, Jean Bauhin; the

Fuchsia, Bauhin's earlier German master, Leonard Fuchs; and the Clusiathe received name of that terrible

"Matapalo" or "Scotch attorney," of the West Indies, which kills the hugest tree, to become as huge a tree

itself immortalises the great Clusius, Charles de l'Escluse, citizen of Arras, who, after studying civil law at

Louvain, philosophy at Marburg, and theology at Wittemberg under Melancthon, came to Montpellier in

1551, to live in Rondelet's own house, and become the greatest botanist of his age.

These were Rondelet's palmy days. He had got a theatre of anatomy built at Montpellier, where he himself

dissected publicly. He had, says tradition, a little botanic garden, such as were springing up then in several

universities, specially in Italy. He had a villa outside the city, whose tower, near the modern railway station,

still bears the name of the "Mas de Rondelet." There, too, may be seen the remnants of the great tanks, fed

with water brought through earthen pipes from the Fountain of Albe, wherein he kept the fish whose habits he

observed. Professor Planchon thinks that he had saltwater tanks likewise; and thus he may have been the

father of all "Aquariums." He had a large and handsome house in the city itself, a large practice as physician

in the country round; money flowed in fast to him, and flowed out fast likewise. He spent much upon

building, pulling down, rebuilding, and sent the bills in seemingly to his wife and to his guardian angel

Catharine. He himself had never a penny in his purse: but earned the money, and let his ladies spend it; an

equitable and pleasant division of labour which most married men would do well to imitate. A generous,

affectionate, careless little man, he gave away, says his pupil and biographer, Joubert, his valuable specimens

to any savant who begged for them, or left them about to be stolen by visitors, who, like too many collectors

in all ages, possessed light fingers and lighter consciences. So pacific was he meanwhile, and so brave withal

that even in the fearful years of "The Troubles," he would never carry sword, nor even tuck or dagger: but

went about on the most lonesome journeys as one who wore a charmed life, secure in God and in his calling,

These were the golden years of Rondelet's life; but trouble was coming on him, and a stormy sunset after a

brilliant day. He lost his sisterinlaw, to whom he owed all his fortunes, and who had watched ever since

over him and his wife like a mother; then he lost his wife herself under most painful circumstances; then his

best beloved daughter. Then he married again, and lost the son who was born to him; and then came, as to

many of the best in those days, even sorer trials, trials of the conscience, trials of faith.

For in the meantime Rondelet had become a Protestant, like many of the wisest men round him; like, so it

would seem from the event, the majority of the university and the burghers of Montpellier. It is not to be

wondered at. Montpellier was a sort of halfway resting place for Protestant preachers, whether fugitive or

not, who were passing from Basle, Geneva, or Lyons, to Marguerite of Navarre's little Protestant court at Pan

or at Nerac, where all wise and good men, and now and then some foolish and fanatical ones, found shelter

and hospitality. Thither Calvin himself had been, passing probably through Montpellier and leavingas such

a man was sure to leave the mark of his foot behind him. At Lyons, no great distance up the Rhone,

Marguerite had helped to establish an organised Protestant community; and when in 1536 she herself had

passed through Montpellier, to visit her brother at Valence, and Montmorency's camp at Avignon, she took

with her doubtless Protestant chaplains of her own, who spoke wise wordsit may be that she spoke wise

words herselfto the ardent and inquiring students of Montpellier. Moreover, Rondelet and his disciples had

been for years past in constant communication with the Protestant savants of Switzerland and Germany,

among whom the knowledge of nature was progressing as it never had progressed before. Forit is a fact

always to be rememberedit was only in the free air of Protestant countries the natural sciences could grow

and thrive. They sprung up, indeed, in Italy after the restoration of Greek literature in the fifteenth century;

but they withered there again only too soon under the blighting upas shade of superstition. Transplanted to

the free air of Switzerland, of Germany, of Britain, and of Montpellier, then half Protestant, they developed

rapidly and surely, simply because the air was free; to be checked again in France by the return of

superstition with despotism superadded, until the eve of the great French Revolution.

So Rondelet had been for some years Protestant. He had hidden in his house for a long while a monk who had

left his monastery. He had himself written theological treatises: but when his Bishop Pellicier was imprisoned

on a charge of heresy, Rondelet burnt his manuscripts, and kept his opinions to himself. Still he was a

suspected heretic, at last seemingly a notorious one; for only the year before his death, going to visit patients

at Perpignan, he was waylaid by the Spaniards, and had to get home through bypasses of the Pyrenees, to

And those were times in which it was necessary for a man to be careful, unless he had made up his mind to be

burned. For more than thirty years of Rondelet's life the burning had gone on in his neighbourhood;

intermittently it is true: the spasms of superstitious fury being succeeded, one may charitably hope, by pity

and remorse; but still the burnings had gone on. The Benedictine monk of St. Maur, who writes the history of

Languedoc, says, quite en passant, how someone was burnt at Toulouse in 1553, luckily only in effigy, for he

had escaped to Geneva: but he adds, "next year they burned several heretics," it being not worth while to

mention their names. In 1556 they burned alive at Toulouse Jean Escalle, a poor Franciscan monk, who had

found his order intolerable; while one Pierre de Lavaur, who dared preach Calvinism in the streets of Nismes,

was hanged and burnt. So had the score of judicial murders been increasing year by year, till it had to be, as

all evil scores have to be in this world, paid off with interest, and paid off especially against the ignorant and

fanatic monks who for a whole generation, in every university and school in France, had been howling down

sound science, as well as sound religion; and at Montpellier in 156061, their debt was paid them in a very

ugly way. News came down to the hot southerners of Languedoc of the socalled conspiracy of

Amboise.How the Duc de Guise and the Cardinal de Lorraine had butchered the best blood in France

under the pretence of a treasonable plot; how the King of Navarre and the Prince de Conde had been arrested;

then how Conde and Coligny were ready to take up arms at the head of all the Huguenots of France, and try

to stop this lifelong torturing, by sharp shot and cold steel; then how in six months' time the king would

assemble a general council to settle the question between Catholics and Huguenots. The Huguenots, guessing

how that would end, resolved to settle the question for themselves. They rose in one city after another, sacked

the churches, destroyed the images, put down by main force superstitious processions and dances; and did

many things only to be excused by the exasperation caused by thirty years of cruelty. At Montpellier there

was hard fighting, murdersso say the Catholic historiansof priests and monks, sack of the new cathedral,

destruction of the noble convents which lay in a ring round Montpellier. The city and the university were in

Next year came the counterblow. There were heavy battles with the Catholics all round the neighbourhood,

destruction of the suburbs, threatened siege and sack, and years of misery and poverty for Montpellier and all

Horrible was the state of France in those times of the wars of religion which began in 1562; the times which

are spoken of usually as "The Troubles," as if men did not wish to allude to them too openly. Then, and

afterwards in the wars of the League, deeds were done for which language has no name. The population

decreased. The land lay untilled. The fair face of France was blackened with burnt homesteads and ruined

towns. Ghastly corpses dangled in rows upon the trees, or floated down the bloodstained streams. Law and

order were at an end. Bands of robbers prowled in open day, and bands of wolves likewise. But all through

the horrors of the troubles we catch sight of the little fat doctor riding all unarmed to see his patients

throughout Languedoc; going vast distances, his biographers say, by means of regular relays of horses, till he

too broke down. Well, for him, perhaps, that he broke down when he did; for capture and recapture, massacre

and pestilence, were the fate of Montpellier and the surrounding country, till the better times of Henry IV.

and the Edict of Nantes in 1598, when liberty of worship was given to the Protestants for awhile.

In the burning summer of 1566, Rondelet went a long journey to Toulouse, seemingly upon an errand of

charity, to settle some law affairs for his relations. The sanitary state of the southern cities is bad enough still.

It must have been horrible in those days of barbarism and misrule. Dysentery was epidemic at Toulouse then,

and Rondelet took it. He knew from the first that he should die. He was worn out, it is said, by overexertion;

by sorrow for the miseries of the land; by fruitless struggles to keep the peace, and to strive for moderation in

days when men were all immoderate. But he rode away a day's journeyhe took two days over it, so weak

he wasin the blazing July sun, to a friend's sick wife at Realmont, and there took to his bed, and died a

good man's death. The details of his death and last illness were written and published by his cousin Claude

Formy; and well worth reading they are to any man who wishes to know how to die. Rondelet would have no

tidings of his illness sent to Montpellier. He was happy, he said, in dying away from the tears of his

household, and "safe from insult." He dreaded, one may suppose, lest priests and friars should force their way

to his bedside, and try to extort some recantation from the great savant, the honour and glory of their city. So

they sent for no priest to Realmont; but round his bed a knot of Calvinist gentlemen and ministers read the

Scriptures, and sang David's psalms, and prayed; and Rondelet prayed with them through long agonies, and

The Benedictine monkhistorian of Languedoc, in all his voluminous folios, never mentions, as far as I can

find, Rondelet's existence. Why should he? The man was only a druggist's son and a heretic, who healed

diseases, and collected plants, and wrote a book on fish. But the learned men of Montpellier, and of all

Europe, had a very different opinion of him. His body was buried at Realmont; but before the schools of

Toulouse they set up a white marble slab, and an inscription thereon setting forth his learning and his virtues;

and epitaphs on him were composed by the learned throughout Europe, not only in French and Latin, but in

So lived and so died a noble man; more noble, to my mind, than many a victorious warrior, or successful

statesman, or canonised saint. To know facts, and to heal diseases, were the two objects of his life. For them

he toiled, as few men have toiled; and he died in harness, at his workthe best death any man can die.

I cannot begin a sketch of the life of this great man better than by trying to describe a scene so picturesque, so

tragic in the eyes of those who are wont to mourn over human follies, so comic in the eyes of those who

prefer to laugh over them, that the reader will not be likely to forget either it or the actors in it.

It is a darkened chamber in the College of Alcala, in the year 1562, where lies, probably in a huge fourpost

bed, shrouded in stifling hangings, the heirapparent of the greatest empire in the then world, Don Carlos,

only son of Philip II. and heirapparent of Spain, the Netherlands, and all the Indies. A short sickly boy of

sixteen, with a bull head, a crooked shoulder, a short leg, and a brutal temper, he will not be missed by the

world if he should die. His profligate career seems to have brought its own punishment. To the scandal of his

father, who tolerated no one's vices save his own, as well as to the scandal of the university authorities of

Alcala, he has been scouring the streets at the head of the most profligate students, insulting women, even

ladies of rank, and amenable only to his lovely young stepmother, Elizabeth of Valois, Isabel de la Paz, as the

Spaniards call her, the daughter of Catherine do Medicis, and sister of the King of France. Don Carlos should

have married her, had not his worthy father found it more advantageous for the crown of Spain, as well as

more pleasant for him, Philip, to marry her himself. Whence came heartburnings, rage, jealousies,

romances, calumnies, of which two lastin as far at least as they concern poor Elizabethno wise man now

Going on some errand on which he had no businessthere are two stories, neither of them creditable nor

necessary to repeatDon Carlos has fallen downstairs and broken his head. He comes, by his Portuguese

mother's side, of a house deeply tainted with insanity; and such an injury may have serious consequences.

However, for nine days the wound goes on well, and Don Carlos, having had a wholesome fright, is,

according to Doctor Olivarez, the medico de camara, a very good lad, and lives on chicken broth and dried

plums. But on the tenth day comes on numbness of the left side, acute pains in the head, and then gradually

shivering, high fever, erysipelas. His head and neck swell to an enormous size; then comes raging delirium,

A modern surgeon would, probably, thanks to that training of which Vesalius may be almost called the father,

have had little difficulty in finding out what was the matter with the luckless lad, and little difficulty in

removing the evil, if it had not gone too far. But the Spanish physicians were then, as many of them are said

to be still, as far behind the world in surgery as in other things; and indeed surgery itself was then in its

infancy, because men, ever since the early Greek schools of Alexandria had died out, had been for centuries

feeding their minds with anything rather than with facts. Therefore the learned morosophs who were gathered

round Don Carlos's sick bed had become according to their own confession, utterly confused, terrified, and at

It is the 7th of May, the eighteenth day after the accident according to Olivarez's story: he and Dr Vega have

been bleeding the unhappy prince, enlarging the wound twice, and torturing him seemingly on mere guesses.

"I believe," says Olivarez, "that all was done well: but as I have said, in wounds in the head there are strange

labyrinths." So on the 7th they stand round the bed in despair. Don Garcia de Toledo, the prince's faithful

governor, is sitting by him, worn out with sleepless nights, and trying to supply to the poor boy that mother's

tenderness which he has never known. Alva, too, is there, stern, selfcompressed, most terrible, and yet most

beautiful. He has a God on earth, and that is Philip his master; and though he has borne much from Don

Carlos already, and will have to bear more, yet the wretched lad is to him as a son of God, a second deity,

who will by right divine succeed to the inheritance of the first; and he watches this lesser deity struggling

between life and death with an intensity of which we, in these less loyal days, can form no notion. One would

be glad to have a glimpse of what passed through that mind, so subtle and so ruthless, so disciplined and so

loyal withal: but Alva was a man who was not given to speak his mind, but to act it.

One would wish, too, for a glimpse of what was passing through the mind of another man, who has been

daily in that sick chamber, according to Olivarez's statement, since the first of the month: but he is one who

has had, for some years past, even more reason than Alva for not speaking his mind. What he looked like we

know well, for Titian has painted him from the lifea tall, bold, well dressed man, with a noble brain,

square and yet lofty, short curling locks and beard, an eye which looks as though it feared neither man nor

fiendand it has had good reason to fear bothand features which would be exceeding handsome, but for

the defiant snubnose. That is Andreas Vesalius, of Brussels, dreaded and hated by the doctors of the old

schoolsuspect, moreover, it would seem to inquisitors and theologians, possibly to Alva himself; for he has

dared to dissect human bodies; he has insulted the mediaevalists at Paris, Padua, Bologna, Pisa, Venice, in

open theatre; he has turned the heads of all the young surgeons in Italy and France; he has written a great

book, with prints in it, designed, some say, by Titianthey were actually done by another Netherlander,

John of Calcar, near Clevesin which he has dared to prove that Galen's anatomy was at fault throughout,

and that he had been describing a monkey's inside when he had pretended to be describing a man's; and thus,

by impudence and quackery, he has wormed himselfthis Netherlander, a heretic at heart, as all

Netherlanders are, to God as well as to Galeninto the confidence of the late Emperor Charles V., and gone

campaigning with him as one of his physicians, anatomising human bodies even on the battlefield, and

defacing the likeness of Deity; and worse than that, the most religious King Philip is deceived by him

likewise, and keeps him in Madrid in wealth and honour; and now, in the prince's extreme danger, the king

has actually sent for him, and bidden him try his skilla man who knows nothing save about bones and

muscles and the outside of the body, and is unworthy the name of a true physician.

One can conceive the rage of the old Spanish pedants at the Netherlander's appearance, and still more at what

followed, if we are to believe Hugo Bloet of Delft, his countryman and contemporary. {10} Vesalius, he says,

saw that the surgeons had bound up the wound so tight that an abscess had formed outside the skull, which

could not break: he asserted that the only hope lay in opening it; and did so, Philip having given leave, "by

two crosscuts. Then the lad returned to himself, as if awakened from a profound sleep, affirming that he

Dionysius Daza, who was there with the other physicians and surgeons, tells a different story: "The most

learned, famous, and rare Baron Vesalius," he says, advised that the skull should be trepanned; but his advice

Olivarez's account agrees with that of Daza. They had opened the wounds, he says, down to the skull before

Vesalius came. Vesalius insisted that the injury lay inside the skull, and wished to pierce it. Olivarez spends

much labour in proving that Vesalius had "no great foundation for his opinion:" but confesses that he never

changed that opinion to the last, though all the Spanish doctors were against him. Then on the 6th, he says,

the Bachelor Torres came from Madrid, and advised that the skull should be laid bare once more; and on the

7th, there being still doubt whether the skull was not injured, the operation was performedby whom it is

not saidbut without any good result, or, according to Olivarez, any discovery, save that Vesalius was

Whether this second operation of the 7th of May was performed by Vesalius, and whether it was that of

which Bloet speaks, is an open question. Olivarez's whole relation is apologetic, written to justify himself and

his seven Spanish colleagues, and to prove Vesalius in the wrong. Public opinion, he confesses, had been

very fierce against him. The credit of Spanish medicine was at stake: and we are not bound to believe

implicitly a paper drawn up under such circumstances for Philip's eye. This, at least, we gather: that Don

Carlos was never trepanned, as is commonly said; and this, also, that whichever of the two stories is true,

equally puts Vesalius into direct, and most unpleasant, antagonism to the Spanish doctors. {11}

But Don Carlos still lay senseless; and yielding to popular clamour, the doctors called in the aid of a certain

Moorish doctor, from Valencia, named Priotarete, whose unguents, it was reported, had achieved many

miraculous cures. The unguent, however, to the horror of the doctors, burned the skull till the bone was as

black as the colour of ink; and Olivarez declares he believes it to have been a preparation of pure caustic. On

the morning of the 9th of May, the Moor and his unguents were sent away, "and went to Madrid, to send to

Considering what happened on the morning of the 10th of May, we should now presume that the second

opening of the abscess, whether by Vesalius or someone else, relieved the pressure on the brain; that a critical

period of exhaustion followed, probably prolonged by the Moor's premature caustic, which stopped the

suppuration: but that God's good handiwork, called nature, triumphed at last; and that therefore it came to

pass that the prince was out of danger within three days of the operation. But he was taught, it seems, to

attribute his recovery to a very different source from that of a German knife. For on the morning of the 9th,

when the Moor was gone, and Don Carlos lay seemingly lifeless, there descended into his chamber a Deus e

machina, or rather a whole pantheon of greater or lesser deities, who were to effect that which medical skill

seemed not to have effected. Philip sent into the prince's chamber several of the precious relics which he

usually carried about with him. The miraculous image of the Virgin of Atocha, in embroidering garments for

whom, Spanish royalty, male and female, has spent so many an hour ere now, was brought in solemn

procession and placed on an altar at the foot of the prince's bed; and in the afternoon there entered, with a

procession likewise, a shrine containing the bones of a holy anchorite, one Fray Diego, "whose life and

miracles," says Olivarez, "are so notorious:" and the bones of St. Justus and St. Pastor, the tutelar saints of the

university of Alcala. Amid solemn litanies the relics of Fray Diego were laid upon the prince's pillow, and the

sudarium, or mortuary cloth, which had covered his face, was placed upon the prince's forehead.

Modern science might object that the presence of so many personages, however pious or well intentioned, in

a sick chamber on a hot Spanish May day, especially as the bath had been, for some generations past, held in

religious horror throughout Spain, as a sign of Moorish and Mussulman tendencies, might have somewhat

interfered with the chances of the poor boy's recovery. Nevertheless the event seems to have satisfied Philip's

highest hopes; for that same night (so Don Carlos afterwards related) the holy monk Diego appeared to him

in a vision, wearing the habit of St. Francis, and bearing in his hand a cross of reeds tied with a green band.

The prince stated that he first took the apparition to be that of the blessed St. Francis; but not seeing the

stigmata, he exclaimed, "How? Dost thou not bear the marks of the wounds?" What he replied Don Carlos

did not recollect; save that he consoled him, and told him that he should not die of that malady.

Philip had returned to Madrid, and shut himself up in grief in the great Jeronymite monastery. Elizabeth was

praying for her stepson before the miraculous images of the same city. During the night of the 9th of May

prayers went up for Don Carlos in all the churches of Toledo, Alcala, and Madrid. Alva stood all that night at

the bed's foot. Don Garcia de Toledo sat in the armchair, where he had now sat night and day for more than

a fortnight. The good preceptor, Honorato Juan, afterwards Bishop of Osma, wrestled in prayer for the lad the

whole night through. His prayer was answered: probably it had been answered already, without his being

aware of it. Be that as it may, about dawn Don Carlos's heavy breathing ceased; he fell into a quiet sleep; and

He did not recover his sight, seemingly on account of the erysipelas, for a week more. He then opened his

eyes upon the miraculous image of Atocha, and vowed that, if he recovered, he would give to the Virgin, at

four different shrines in Spain, gold plate of four times his weight; and silver plate of seven times his weight,

when he should rise from his couch. So on the 6th of June he rose, and was weighed in a fur coat and a robe

of damask, and his weight was three arrobas and one poundseventysix pounds in all. On the 14th of June

he went to visit his father at the episcopal palace; then to all the churches and shrines in Alcala, and of course

to that of Fray Diego, whose body it is said he contemplated for some time with edifying devotion. The next

year saw Fray Diego canonised as a saint, at the intercession of Philip and his son; and thus Don Carlos

reentered the world, to be a terror and a torment to all around him, and to dienot by Philip's cruelty, as his

enemies reported too hastily indeed, yet excusably, for they knew him to be capable of any wickednessbut

And now let us go back to the history of "that most learned, famous, and rare Baron Vesalius," who had stood

by and seen all these things done; and try if we cannot, after we have learned the history of his early life,

guess at some of his probable meditations on this celebrated clinical case; and guess also how those

Vesalius (as I said) was a Netherlander, born at Brussels in 1513 or 1514. His father and grandfather had been

medical men of the highest standing in a profession which then, as now, was commonly hereditary. His real

name was Wittag, an ancient family of Wesel, on the Rhine, from which town either he or his father adopted

the name of Vesalius, according to the classicising fashion of those days. Young Vesalius was sent to college

at Louvain, where he learned rapidly. At sixteen or seventeen he knew not only Latin, but Greek enough to

correct the proofs of Galen, and Arabic enough to become acquainted with the works of the Mussulman

physicians. He was a physicist too, and a mathematician, according to the knowledge of those times; but his

Little or nothing (it must be understood) had been done in anatomy since the days of Galen of Pergamos, in

the second century after Christ, and very little even by him. Dissection was all but forbidden among the

ancients. The Egyptians, Herodotus tells us, used to pursue with stones and curses the embalmers as soon as

they had performed their unpleasant office; and though Herophilus and Erasistratus are said to have dissected

many subjects under the protection of Ptolemy Soter in Alexandria itself: yet the public feeling of the Greeks

as well as of the Romans continued the same as that of the ancient Egyptians; and Galen was fainas

Vesalius provedto supplement his ignorance of the human frame by describing that of an ape. Dissection

was equally forbidden among the Mussulmans; and the great Arabic physicians could do no more than

comment on Galen. The same prejudice extended through the Middle Age. Medical men were all clerks,

CLERICI, and as such forbidden to shed blood. The only dissection, as far as I am aware, made during the

Middle Age was one by Mundinus in 1306; and his subsequent commentaries on Galenfor he dare allow

his own eyes to see no more than Galen had seen before himconstituted the best anatomical manual in

Then, in Italy at least, the classic Renaissance gave fresh life to anatomy as to all other sciences. Especially

did the improvements in painting and sculpture stir men up to a closer study of the human frame. Leonardo

da Vinci wrote a treatise on muscular anatomy. The artist and the sculptor often worked together, and realised

that sketch of Michael Angelo's in which he himself is assisting Fallopius, Vesalius's famous pupil, to dissect.

Vesalius soon found that his thirst for facts could not be slaked by the theories of the Middle Age; so in 1530

he went off to Montpellier, where Francis I. had just founded a medical school, and where the ancient laws of

the city allowed the faculty each year the body of a criminal. From thence, after becoming the fellowpupil

and the friend of Rondelet, and probably also of Rabelais and those other luminaries of Montpellier, of whom

I spoke in my essay on Rondelet, he returned to Paris to study under old Sylvius, whose real name was

Jacques Dubois, alias Jock o' the Wood; and to learn lessas he complains himselfin an anatomical

Were it not that the whole question of dissection is one over which it is right to draw a reverent veil, as a

thing painful, however necessary and however innocent, it would be easy to raise ghastly laughter in many a

reader by the stories which Vesalius himself tells of his struggles to learn anatomy. How old Sylvius tried to

demonstrate the human frame from a bit of a dog, fumbling in vain for muscles which he could not find, or

which ought to have been there, according to Galen, and were not; while young Vesalius, as soon as the old

pedant's back was turned, took his place, and, to the delight of the students, found for himprovided it were

there what he could not find himself;how he went bodysnatching and gibbetrobbing, often at the

danger of his life, as when he and his friend were nearly torn to pieces by the cannibal dogs who haunted the

Butte de Montfaucon, or place of public execution;how he acquired, by a long and dangerous process, the

only perfect skeleton then in the world, and the hideous story of the robber to whom it had belongedall

these horrors those who list may read for themselves elsewhere. I hasten past them with this remarkthat to

have gone through the toils, dangers, and disgusts which Vesalius faced, argued in a superstitious and cruel

age like his, no common physical and moral courage, and a deep conscience that he was doing right, and

must do it at all risks in the face of a generation which, peculiarly reckless of human life and human agony,

allowed that frame which it called the image of God to be tortured, maimed, desecrated in every way while

alive; and yetstraining at the gnat after having swallowed the camelforbade it to be examined when

The breaking out of war between Francis I. and Charles V. drove Vesalius back to his native country and

Louvain; and in 1535 we hear of him as a surgeon in Charles V.'s army. He saw, most probably, the

Emperor's invasion of Provence, and the disastrous retreat from before Montmorency's fortified camp at

Avignon, through a country in which that crafty general had destroyed every article of human food, except

the halfripe grapes. He saw, perhaps, the Spanish soldiers, poisoned alike by the sour fruit and by the

blazing sun, falling in hundreds along the white roads which led back into Savoy, murdered by the peasantry

whose homesteads had been destroyed, stifled by the weight of their own armour, or desperately putting

themselves, with their own hands, out of a world which had become intolerable. Half the army perished. Two

thousand corpses lay festering between Aix and Frejus alone. If young Vesalius needed "subjects," the

ambition and the crime of man found enough for him in those blazing September days.

He went to Italy, probably with the remnants of the army. Where could he have rather wished to find himself?

He was at last in the country where the human mind seemed to be growing young once more; the country of

revived arts, revived sciences, learning, languages; andthough, alas! only for awhile of revived free

thought, such as Europe had not seen since the palmy days of Greece. Here at least he would be appreciated;

here at least he would be allowed to think and speak: and he was appreciated. The Italian cities, who were

then, like the Athenians of old, "spending their time in nothing else save to hear or to tell something new,"

welcomed the brave young Fleming and his novelties. Within two years he was professor of anatomy at

Padua, then the first school in the world; then at Bologna and at Pisa at the same time; last of all at Venice,

These years were for him a continual triumph; everywhere, as he demonstrated on the human body, students

crowded his theatre, or hung round him as he walked the streets; professors left their own chairstheir

scholars having deserted them alreadyto go and listen humbly or enviously to the man who could give

them what all brave souls throughout half Europe were craving for, and craving in vainfacts. And so, year

after year, was realised that scene which stands engraved in the frontispiece of his great bookwhere, in the

little quaint Cinquecento theatre, saucy scholars, reverend doctors, gay gentlemen, and even cowled monks,

are crowding the floor, peeping over each other's shoulders, hanging on the balustrades; while in the centre,

over his "subject"which one of those same cowled monks knew but too wellstands young Vesalius,

upright, proud, almost defiant, as one who knows himself safe in the impregnable citadel of fact; and in his

hand the little blade of steel, destinedbecause wielded in obedience to the laws of nature, which are the

laws of Godto work more benefit for the human race than all the swords which were drawn in those days,

or perhaps in any other, at the bidding of most Catholic Emperors and most Christian Kings.

Those were indeed days of triumph for Vesalius; of triumph deserved, because earned by patient and accurate

toil in a good cause: but Vesalius, being but a mortal man, may have contracted in those same days a temper

of imperiousness and selfconceit, such as he showed afterwards when his pupil Fallopius dared to add fresh

discoveries to those of his master. And yet, in spite of all Vesalius knew, how little he knew! How humbling

to his pride it would have been had he known thenperhaps he does know nowthat he had actually again

and again walked, as it were, round and round the true theory of the circulation of the blood, and yet never

seen it; that that discovery which, once made, is intelligible, as far as any phenomenon is intelligible, to the

merest peasant, was reserved for another century, and for one of those Englishmen on whom Vesalius would

To make a long story short: three years after the publication of his famous book, "De Corporis Humani

Fabrica," he left Venice to cure Charles V., at Regensburg, and became one of the great Emperor's

This was the crisis of Vesalius's life. The medicine with which he had worked the cure was

ChinaSarsaparilla, as we call it now brought home from the then newlydiscovered banks of the

Paraguay and Uruguay, where its beds of tangled vine, they say, tinge the clear waters a darkbrown like that

of peat, and convert whole streams into a healthful and pleasant tonic. On the virtues of this China (then

supposed to be a root) Vesalius wrote a famous little book, into which he contrived to interweave his

opinions on things in general, as good Bishop Berkeley did afterwards into his essay on the virtues of

tarwater. Into this book, however, Vesalius introducedas Bishop Berkeley did notmuch, and perhaps

too much, about himself; and much, though perhaps not too much, about poor old Galen, and his substitution

of an ape's inside for that of a human being. The storm which had been long gathering burst upon him. The

old school, trembling for their timehonoured reign, bespattered, with all that pedantry, ignorance, and envy

could suggest, the man who dared not only to revolutionise surgery, but to interfere with the privileged

mysteries of medicine; and, over and above, to become a greater favourite at the court of the greatest of

monarchs. While such as Eustachius, himself an able discoverer, could join in the cry, it is no wonder if a

lower soul, like that of Sylvius, led it openmouthed. He was a mean, covetous, bad man, as George

Bachanan well knew; and, according to his nature, he wrote a furious book "Ad Vesani calumnias

depulsandas." The punning change of Vesalius into Vesanus (madman) was but a fair and gentle stroke for a

polemic, in days in which those who could not kill their enemies with steel or powder, held themselves

justified in doing so, if possible, by vituperation, calumny, and every engine of moral torture. But a far more

terrible weapon, and one which made Vesalius rage, and it may be for once in his life tremble, was the charge

of impiety and heresy. The Inquisition was a very ugly place. It was very easy to get into it, especially for a

Netherlander: but not so easy to get out. Indeed Vesalius must have trembled, when he saw his master,

Charles V., himself take fright, and actually call on the theologians of Salamanca to decide whether it was

lawful to dissect a human body. The monks, to their honour, used their common sense, and answered Yes.

The deed was so plainly useful that it must be lawful likewise. But Vesalius did not feel that he had

triumphed. He dreaded, possibly, lest the storm should only have blown over for a time. He fell, possibly,

into hasty disgust at the folly of mankind, and despair of arousing them to use their common sense, and

acknowledge their true interest and their true benefactors. At all events, he threw into the fire so it is

saidall his unpublished manuscripts, the records of long years of observation, and renounced science

We hear of him after this at Brussels, and at Basle likewisein which latter city, in the company of

physicians, naturalists, and Grecians, he must have breathed awhile a freer air. But he seems to have returned

thence to his old master Charles V., and to have finally settled at Madrid as a court surgeon to Philip II., who

sent him, but too late, to extract the lance splinters from the eye of the dying Henry II.

He was now married to a lady of rank from Brussels, Anne van Hamme by name; and their daughter married

in time Philip II.'s grand falconer, who was doubtless a personage of no small social rank. Vesalius was well

off in worldly things; somewhat fond, it is said, of good living and of luxury; inclined, it may be, to say, "Let

us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die," and to sink more and more into the mere worldling, unless some

And the awakening shock did come. After eight years of court life, he resolved, early in the year 1564, to go

The reasons for so strange a determination are wrapped in mystery and contradiction. The common story was

that he had opened a corpse to ascertain the cause of death, and that, to the horror of the bystanders, the heart

was still seen to beat; that his enemies accused him to the Inquisition, and that he was condemned to death, a

sentence which was commuted to that of going on pilgrimage. But here, at the very outset, accounts differ.

One says that the victim was a nobleman, name not given; another that it was a lady's maid, name not given.

It is most improbable, if not impossible, that Vesalius, of all men, should have mistaken a living body for a

dead one; while it is most probable, on the other hand, that his medical enemies would gladly raise such a

calumny against him, when he was no longer in Spain to contradict it. Meanwhile Llorente, the historian of

the Inquisition, makes no mention of Vesalius having been brought before its tribunal, while he does mention

Vesalius's residence at Madrid. Another story is, that he went abroad to escape the bad temper of his wife;

another that he wanted to enrich himself. Another storyand that not an unlikely oneis, that he was

jealous of the rising reputation of his pupil Fallopius, then professor of anatomy at Venice. This distinguished

surgeon, as I said before, had written a book, in which he added to Vesalius's discoveries, and corrected

certain of his errors. Vesalius had answered him hastily and angrily, quoting his anatomy from memory; for,

as he himself complained, he could not in Spain obtain a subject for dissection; not even, he said, a single

skull. He had sent his book to Venice to be published, and had heard, seemingly, nothing of it. He may have

felt that he was falling behind in the race of science, and that it was impossible for him to carry on his studies

in Madrid; and so, angry with his own laziness and luxury, he may have felt the old sacred fire flash up in

him, and have determined to go to Italy and become a student and a worker once more.

The very day that he set out, Clusius of Arras, then probably the best botanist in the world, arrived at Madrid;

and, asking the reason of Vesalius's departure, was told by their fellowcountryman, Charles de Tisnacq,

procurator for the affairs of the Netherlands, that Vesalius had gone of his own free will, and with all

facilities which Philip could grant him, in performance of a vow which he had made during a dangerous

illness. Here, at least, we have a drop of information, which seems taken from the stream sufficiently near to

the fountainhead: but it must be recollected that De Tisnacq lived in dangerous times, and may have found it

necessary to walk warily in them; that through him had been sent, only the year before, that famous letter

from William of Orange, Horn, and Egmont, the fate whereof may be read in Mr. Motley's fourth chapter;

that the crisis of the Netherlands which sprung out of that letter was coming fast; and that, as De Tisnacq was

on friendly terms with Egmont, he may have felt his head at times somewhat loose on his shoulders;

especially if he had heard Alva say, as he wrote, "that every time he saw the despatches of those three senors,

they moved his choler so, that if he did not take much care to temper it, he would seem a frenzied man." In

such times, De Tisnacq may have thought good to return a diplomatic answer to a fellowcountryman

concerning a third fellowcountryman, especially when that countryman, as a former pupil of Melancthon at

Wittemberg, might himself be under suspicion of heresy, and therefore of possible treason.

Be this as it may, one cannot but suspect some strain of truth in the story about the Inquisition; for, whether

or not Vesalius operated on Don Carlos, he had seen with his own eyes that miraculous Virgin of Atocha at

the bed's foot of the prince. He had heard his recovery attributed, not to the operation, but to the intercession

of Fray, now Saint Diego; {12} and he must have had his thoughts thereon, and may, in an unguarded

For he was, be it always remembered, a Netherlander. The crisis of his country was just at hand. Rebellion

was inevitable, and, with rebellion, horrors unutterable; and, meanwhile, Don Carlos had set his mad brain on

having the command of the Netherlands. In his rage, at not having it, as all the world knows, he nearly killed

Alva with his own hands, some two years after. If it be true that Don Carlos felt a debt of gratitude to

Vesalius, he may (after his wont) have poured out to him some wild confidence about the Netherlands, to

have even heard which would be a crime in Philip's eyes. And if this be but a fancy, still Vesalius was, as I

just said, a Netherlander, and one of a brain and a spirit to which Philip's doings, and the air of the Spanish

court, must have been growing ever more and more intolerable. Hundreds of his country folk, perhaps men

and women whom he had known, were being racked, burnt alive, buried alive, at the bidding of a jocular

ruffian, Peter Titelmann, the chief inquisitor. The "day of the MAUBRULEZ," and the wholesale massacre

which followed it, had happened but two years before; and, by all the signs of the times, these murders and

miseries were certain to increase. And why were all these poor wretches suffering the extremity of horror, but

because they would not believe in miraculous images, and bones of dead friars, and the rest of that science of

unreason and unfact, against which Vesalius had been fighting all his life, consciously or not, by using reason

and observing fact? What wonder if, in some burst of noble indignation and just contempt, he forgot a

moment that he had sold his soul, and his love of science likewise, to be a luxurious, yet uneasy, hangeron

As to the story of his unhappy quarrels with his wife, there may be a grain of truth in it likewise. Vesalius's

religion must have sat very lightly on him. The man who had robbed churchyards and gibbets from his youth

was not likely to be much afraid of apparitions and demons. He had handled too many human bones to care

much for those of saints. He was probably, like his friends of Basle, Montpellier, and Paris, somewhat of a

heretic at heart, probably somewhat of a pagan, while his lady, Anne van Hamme, was probably a strict

Catholic, as her father, being a councillor and master of the exchequer at Brussels, was bound to be; and

freethinking in the husband, crossed by superstition in the wife, may have caused in them that wretched vie e

part, that want of any true communion of soul, too common to this day in Catholic countries.

Be these things as they mayand the exact truth of them will now be never knownVesalius set out to

Jerusalem in the spring of 1564. On his way he visited his old friends at Venice to see about his book against

Fallopius. The Venetian republic received the great philosopher with open arms. Fallopius was just dead; and

the senate offered their guest the vacant chair of anatomy. He accepted it: but went on to the East.

He never occupied that chair; wrecked upon the Isle of Zante, as he was sailing back from Palestine, he died

miserably of fever and want, as thousands of pilgrims returning from the Holy Land had died before him. A

goldsmith recognised him; buried him in a chapel of the Virgin; and put up over him a simple stone, which

So perished, in the prime of life, "a martyr to his love of science," to quote the words of M. Burggraeve of

Ghent, his able biographer and commentator, "the prodigious man, who created a science at an epoch when

everything was still an obstacle to his progress; a man whose whole life was a long struggle of knowledge

Plaudite: Exeat: with Rondelet and Buchanan. And whensoever this poor foolish world needs three such men,

I told you of Vesalius and Rondelet as specimens of the men who three hundred years ago were founding the

physical science of the present day, by patient investigation of facts. But such an age as this would naturally

produce men of a very different stamp, men who could not imitate their patience and humility; who were

trying for royal roads to knowledge, and to the fame and wealth which might be got out of knowledge; who

meddled with vain dreams about the occult sciences, alchemy, astrology, magic, the cabala, and so forth, who

were reputed magicians, courted and feared for awhile, and then, too often, died sad deaths.

Such had been, in the century before, the famous Dr. FaustFaustus, who was said to have made a compact

with Satanactually one of the inventors of printingimmortalised in Goethe's marvellous poem.

Such, in the first half of the sixteenth century, was Cornelius Agrippaa doctor of divinity and a

knightatarms; secretservice diplomatist to the Emperor Maximilian in Austria; astrologer, though

unwilling, to his daughter Margaret, Regent of the Low Countries; writer on the occult sciences and of the

famous "De Vanitate Scientiarum," and what not? who died miserably at the age of forty nine, accused of

magic by the Dominican monks from whom he had rescued a poor girl, who they were torturing on a charge

of witchcraft; and by them hunted to death; nor to death only, for they spread the fablesuch as you may

find in Delrio the Jesuit's "Disquisitions on Magic" {14}that his little pet black dog was a familiar spirit, as

Agrippa kept a Stygian pug I' the garb and habit of a dog That was his taste; and the cur Read to th' occult

Such also was Jerome Cardan, the Italian scholar and physician, the father of algebraic science (you all

recollect Cardan's rule,) believer in dreams, prognostics, astrology; who died, too, miserably enough, in old

Cardan's sad life, and that of Cornelius Agrippa, you can, and ought to read for yourselves, in two admirable

biographies, as amusing as they are learned, by Professor Morley, of the London University. I have not

chosen either of them as a subject for this lecture, because Mr. Morley has so exhausted what is to be known

But what shall I say of the most famous of these menParacelsus? whose name you surely know. He too has

been immortalised in a poem which you all ought to have read, one of Robert Browning's earliest and one of

I think we must accept as true Mr. Browning's interpretation of Paracelsus's character. We must believe that

he was at first an honest and highminded, as he was certainly a most gifted, man; that he went forth into the

world, with an intense sense of the worthlessness of the sham knowledge of the pedants and quacks of the

schools; an intense belief that some higher and truer science might be discovered, by which diseases might be

actually cured, and health, long life, happiness, all but immortality, be conferred on man; an intense belief

that he, Paracelsus, was called and chosen by God to find out that great mystery, and be a benefactor to all

future ages. That fixed idea might degeneratedid, alas! degenerateinto wild selfconceit, rash contempt

of the ancients, violent abuse of his opponents. But there was more than this in Paracelsus. He had one idea to

which, if he had kept true, his life would have been a happier onethe firm belief that all pure science was a

revelation from God; that it was not to be obtained at second or third hand, by blindly adhering to the words

of Galen or Hippocrates or Aristotle, and putting them (as the scholastic philosophers round him did) in the

place of God: but by going straight to nature at first hand, and listening to what Bacon calls "the voice of God

revealed in facts." True and noble is the passage with which he begins his "Labyrinthus Medicorum," one of

"The first and highest book of all healing," he says, "is called wisdom, and without that book no man will

carry out anything good or useful . . . And that book is God Himself. For in Him alone who hath created all

things, the knowledge and principle of all things dwells . . . without Him all is folly. As the sun shines on us

from above, so He must pour into us from above all arts whatsoever. Therefore the root of all learning and

cognition is, that we should seek first the kingdom of Godthe kingdom of God in which all sciences are

founded . . . If any man think that nature is not founded on the kingdom of God, he knows nothing about it.

All gifts," he repeats again and again, confused and clumsily (as is his wont), but with a true earnestness, "are

The true man of science, with Paracelsus, is he who seeks first the kingdom of God in facts, investigating

nature reverently, patiently, in faith believing that God, who understands His own work best, will make him

understand it likewise. The false man of science is he who seeks the kingdom of this world, who cares

nothing about the real interpretation of facts: but is content with such an interpretation as will earn him the

good things of this worldthe red hat and gown, the ambling mule, the silk clothes, the partridges, capons,

and pheasants, the gold florins chinking in his palm. At such pretenders Paracelsus sneered, at last only too

fiercely, not only as men whose knowledge consisted chiefly in wearing white gloves, but as rogues, liars,

villains, and every epithet which his very racy vocabulary, quickened (it is to be feared) by wine and

laudanum, could suggest. With these he contrasts the true men of science. It is difficult for us now to

understand how a man setting out in life with such pure and noble views should descend at last (if indeed he

and have, indeed, his very name, Bombast, used to this day as a synonym of loud, violent, and empty talk. To

understand it at all, we must go back and think a little over these same occult sciences which were believed in

The reverence for classic antiquity, you must understand, which sprang up at the renaissance in the fifteenth

century, was as indiscriminating as it was earnest. Men caught the trash as well as the jewels. They put the

dreams of the Neoplatonists, Iamblicus, Porphyry, or Plotinus, or Proclus, on the same level as the sound

dialectic philosophy of Plato himself. And these Neoplatonists were all, more or less, believers in

magicTheurgy, as it was calledin the power of charms and spells, in the occult virtues of herbs and

gems, in the power of adepts to evoke and command spirits, in the significance of dreams, in the influence of

the stars upon men's characters and destinies. If the great and wise philosopher Iamblicus believed such

And so grew up again in Europe a passion for what were called the Occult sciences. It had always been

haunting the European imagination. Mediaeval monks had long ago transformed the poet Virgil into a great

necromancer. And there were immense excuses for such a belief. There was a mass of collateral evidence that

the occult sciences were true, which it was impossible then to resist. Races far more ancient, learned,

civilised, than any Frenchman, German, Englishman, or even Italian, in the fifteenth century had believed in

these things. The Moors, the best physicians of the Middle Ages, had their heads full, as the "Arabian Nights"

prove, of enchanters, genii, peris, and what not? The Jewish rabbis had their Cabala, which sprang up in

Alexandria, a system of philosophy founded on the mystic meaning of the words and the actual letters of the

text of Scripture, which some said was given by the angel Ragiel to Adam in Paradise, by which Adam talked

with angels, the sun and moon, summoned spirits, interpreted dreams, healed and destroyed; and by that book

of Ragiel, as it was called, Solomon became the great magician and master of all the spirits and their hoarded

So strong, indeed, was the belief in the mysteries of the Cabala, that Reuchlin, the restorer of Hebrew

learning in Germany, and Pico di Mirandola, the greatest of Italian savants, accepted them; and not only Pope

Leo X. himself, but even statesmen and warriors received with delight Reuchlin's cabalistic treatise, "De

Verbo Mirifico," on the mystic word "Schemhamphorash"that hidden name of God, which whosoever can

Amulets, too, and talismans; the faith in them was exceeding ancient. Solomon had his seal, by which he

commanded all daemons; and there is a whole literature of curious nonsense, which you may read if you will,

about the Abraxas and other talismans of the Gnostics in Syria; and another, of the secret virtues which were

supposed to reside in gems: especially in the old Roman and Greek gems, carved into intaglios with figures

of heathen gods and goddesses. Lapidaria, or lists of these gems and their magical virtues, were not

uncommon in the Middle Ages. You may read a great deal that is interesting about them at the end of Mr.

Astrology too; though Pico di Mirandola might set himself against the rest of the world, few were found

daring enough to deny so ancient a science. Luther and Melancthon merely followed the regular tradition of

public opinion when they admitted its truth. It sprang probably from the worship of the Seven Planets by the

old Chaldees. It was brought back from Babylon by the Jews after the Captivity, and spread over all

The rich and mighty of the earth must needs have their nativities cast, and consult the stars; and Cornelius

Agrippa gave mortal offence to the QueenDowager of France (mother of Francis I.) because, when she

compelled him to consult the stars about Francis's chance of getting out of his captivity in Spain after the

Even Newton seems to have hankered after it when young. Among his MSS. in Lord Portsmouth's library at

Hurstbourne are whole folios of astrologic calculations. It went on till the end of the seventeenth century, and

died out only when men had begun to test it, and all other occult sciences, by experience, and induction

Countless students busied themselves over the transmutation of metals. As for magic, necromancy,

pyromancy, geomancy, coscinomancy, and all the other manciesthere was then a whole literature about

them. And the witchburning inquisitors like Sprenger, Bodin, Delrio, and the rest, believed as firmly in the

magic powers of the poor wretches whom they tortured to death, as did, in many cases, the poor wretches

Everyone, almost, believed in magic. Take two cases. Read the story which Benvenuto Cellini, the sculptor,

tells in his life (everyone should read it) of the magician whom he consults in the Coliseum at Rome, and the

figure which he sees as he walks back with the magician, jumping from roof to roof along the tiles of the

And listen to this story, which Mr. Froude has dug up in his researches. A Church commissioner at Oxford, at

the beginning of the Reformation, being unable to track an escaped heretic, "caused a figure to be made by an

expert in astronomy;" by which it was discovered that the poor wretch had fled in a tawny coat and was

making for the sea. Conceive the respected head of your Collegeor whoever he may bein case you slept

out all night without leave, going to a witch to discover whether you had gone to London or to Huntingdon,

and then writing solemnly to inform the Bishop of Ely of his meritorious exertions!

In such a mad world as this was Paracelsus born. The son of a Swiss physician, but of noble blood, Philip

Aureolus Theophrastus was his Christian name, Bombast von Hohenheim his surname, which last word he

turned, after the fashion of the times, into Paracelsus. Born in 1493 at Einsiedeln (the hermitage), in Schweiz,

which is still a famous place of pilgrimage, he was often called Eremitathe hermit. Erasmus, in a letter still

How he passed the first thirtythree years of his life it is hard to say. He used to boast that he had wandered

over all Europe, been in Sweden, Italy, in Constantinople, and perhaps in the far East, with barbersurgeons,

alchemists, magicians, haunting mines, and forges of Sweden and Bohemia, especially those which the rich

It was from that work, he said, that he learnt what he knew: from the study of nature and of facts. He had

heard all the learned doctors and professors; he had read all their books, and they could teach him nothing.

Medicine was his monarch, and no one else. He declared that there was more wisdom under his bald pate

than in Aristotle and Galen, Hippocrates and Rhasis. And fact seemed to be on his side. He reappeared in

Germany about 1525, and began working wondrous cures. He had brought back with him from the East an

arcanum, a secret remedy, and laudanum was its name. He boasted, says one of his enemies, that he could

raise the dead to life with it; and so the event all but proved. Basle was then the university where free thought

and free creeds found their safest home; and hither OEcolampadius the reformer invited young Paracelsus to

It would have been well for him, perhaps, had he never opened his lips. He might have done good enough to

his fellowcreatures by his own undoubted powers of healing. He cured John Frobenius, the printer,

Erasmus's friend, at Basle, when the doctors were going to cut his leg off. His fame spread far and wide.

Round Basle and away into Alsace he was looked on, even an enemy says, as a new AEsculapius.

But these were days in which in a university everyone was expected to talk and teach, and so Paracelsus

began lecturing; and then the weakness which was mingled with his strength showed itself. He began by

burning openly the books of Galen and Avicenna, and declared that all the old knowledge was useless.

Doctors and students alike must begin over again with him. The dons were horrified. To burn Galen and

Avicenna was as bad as burning the Bible. And more horrified still were they when Paracelsus began

lecturing, not in the timehonoured dogLatin, but in good racy German, which everyone could understand.

They shuddered under their red gowns and hats. If science was to be taught in German, farewell to the

Galenists' formulas, and their lucrative monopoly of learning. Paracelsus was bold enough to say that he

wished to break up their monopoly; to spread a popular knowledge of medicine. "How much," he wrote once,

"would I endure and suffer, to see every man his own shepherdhis own healer." He laughed to scorn their

long prescriptions, used the simplest drugs, and declared Nature, after all, to be the best physicianas a dog,

he says, licks his wound well again without our help; or as the broken rib of the ox heals of its own accord.

Such a man was not to be endured. They hated him, he says, for the same reason that they hated Luther, for

the same reason that the Pharisees hated Christ. He met their attacks with scorn, rage, and language as coarse

and violent as their own. The coarseness and violence of those days seem incredible to us now; and, indeed,

Paracelsus, as he confessed himself, was, though of gentle blood, rough and unpolished; and utterly, as one

can see from his writings, unable to give and take, to conciliateperhaps to pardon. He looked impatiently

on these men who were (not unreasonably) opposing novelties which they could not understand, as enemies

of God, who were balking him in his grand plan for regenerating science and alleviating the woes of

Soon they had their revenge. Ugly stories were whispered about. Oporinus, the printer, who had lived with

him for two years, and who left him, it is said, because he thought Paracelsus concealed from him unfairly the

secret of making laudanum, told how Paracelsus was neither more nor less than a sot, who came drunk to his

lectures, used to prime himself with wine before going to his patients, and sat all night in pothouses swilling

Men looked coldly on himlonged to be rid of him. And they soon found an opportunity. He took in hand

some Canon of the city from whom it was settled beforehand that he was to receive a hundred florins. The

priest found himself cured so suddenly and easily that, by a strange logic, he refused to pay the money, and

went to the magistrates. They supported him, and compelled Paracelsus to take six florins instead of the

hundred. He spoke his mind fiercely to them. I believe, according to one story, he drew his long sword on the

Canon. His best friends told him he must leave the place; and within two years, seemingly, after his first

The rest of his life is a blank. He is said to have recommenced his old wanderings about Europe, studying the

diseases of every country, and writing his books, which were none of them published till after his death. His

enemies joyfully trampled on the fallen man. He was a "dull rustic, a monster, an atheist, a quack, a maker of

gold, a magician." When he was drunk, one Wetter, his servant, told Erastus (one of his enemies) that he used

to offer to call up legions of devils to prove his skill, while Wetter, in abject terror of his spells, entreated him

to leave the fiends alonethat he had sent his book by a fiend to the spirit of Galen in hell, and challenged

His books were forbidden to be printed. He himself was refused a hearing, and it was not till after ten years of

Three years afterwards he died in the hospital of St. Sebastian at Salzburg, in the Tyrol. His death was the

signal for empirics and visionaries to foist on the public book after book on occult philosophy, written in his

nameof which you may see ten folios not more than a quarter, I believe, genuine. And these foolish

books, as much as anything, have helped to keep up the popular prejudice against one who, in spite of all his

faults was a true pioneer of science. {15} I believe (with those moderns who have tried to do him justice) that

under all his verbiage and confusion there was a vein of sound scientific, experimental common sense.

When he talks of astronomy as necessary to be known by a physician, it seems to me that he laughs at

astrology, properly so called; that is, that the stars influence the character and destiny of man. Mars, he says,

did not make Nero cruel. There would have been long lived men in the world if Saturn had never ascended

the skies; and Helen would have been a wanton, though Venus had never been created. But he does believe

that the heavenly bodies, and the whole skies, have a physical influence on climate, and on the health of men.

He talks of alchemy, but he means by it, I think, only that sound science which we call chemistry, and at

which he worked, wandering, he says, among mines and forges, as a practical metallurgist.

He tells uswhat sounds startling enoughthat magic is the only preceptor which can teach the art of

healing; but he means, it seems to me, only an understanding of the invisible processes of nature, in which

sense an electrician or a biologist, a Faraday or a Darwin, would be a magician; and when he compares

medical magic to the Cabalistic science, of which I spoke just now (and in which he seems to have believed),

he only means, I think, that as the Cabala discovers hidden meaning and virtues in the text of Scripture, so

ought the man of science to find them in the book of nature. But this kind of talk, wrapt up too in the most

confused style, or rather no style at all, is quite enough to account for ignorant and envious people accusing

him of magic, saying that he had discovered the philosopher's stone, and the secret of Hermes Trismegistus;

that he must make gold, because, though he squandered all his money, he had always money in hand; and that

he kept a "devil'sbird," a familiar spirit, in the pommel of that famous long sword of his, which he was only

too ready to lug out on provocationthe said spirit, Agoth by name, being probably only the laudanum

bottle with which he worked so many wondrous cures, and of which, to judge from his writings, he took only

But the charm of Paracelsus is in his humour, his motherwit. He was blamed for consorting with boors in

pothouses; blamed for writing in racy German, instead of bad schoolLatin: but you can hardly read a

chapter, either of his German or his dogLatin, without finding many a good thingwitty and weighty,

though often not a little coarse. He talks in parables. He draws illustrations, like Socrates of old, from the

commonest and the oddest matters to enforce the weightiest truths. "Fortune and misfortune," he says, for

instance nobly enough, "are not like snow and wind, they must be deduced and known from the secrets of

nature. Therefore misfortune is ignorance, fortune is knowledge. The man who walks out in the rain is not

"Nature," he says again, "makes the text, and the medical man adds the gloss; but the two fit each other no

better than a dog does a bath;" and again, when he is arguing against the doctors who hated

chemistry"Who hates a thing which has hurt nobody? Will you complain of a dog for biting you, if you lay

hold of his tail? Does the emperor send the thief to the gallows, or the thing which he has stolen? The thief, I

think. Therefore science should not be despised on account of some who know nothing about it." You will

say the reasoning is not very clear, and indeed the passage, like too many more, smacks strongly of wine and

laudanum. But such is his quaint racy style. As humorous a man, it seems to me, as you shall meet with for

many a day; and where there is humour there is pretty sure to be imagination, tenderness, and depth of heart.

As for his notions of what a man of science should be, the servant of God, and of Naturewhich is the work

of Godusing his powers not for money, not for ambition, but in love and charity, as he says, for the good

of his fellowmanon that matter Paracelsus is always noble. All that Mr. Browning has conceived on that

point, all the noble speeches which he has put into Paracelsus's mouth, are true to his writings. How can they

be otherwise, if Mr. Browning set them fortha genius as accurate and penetrating as he is wise and pure?

Gentlemen, what concern is that of yours or mine? I have gone into the question, as Mr. Browning did,

Oporinus, who slandered him so cruelly, recanted when Paracelsus was dead, and sang his praisestoo late.

But I do not read that he recanted the charge of drunkenness. His defenders allow it, only saying that it was

the fault not of him alone, but of all Germans. But if so, why was he specially blamed for what certainly

others did likewise? I cannot but fear from his writings, as well as from common report, that there was

something wrong with the man. I say only something. Against his purity there never was a breath of

suspicion. He was said to care nothing for women; and even that was made the subject of brutal jests and lies.

But it may have been that, worn out with toil and poverty, he found comfort in that laudanum which he

believed to be the arcanumthe very elixir of life; that he got more and more into the habit of exciting his

imagination with the narcotic, and then, it may be, when the fit of depression followed, he strung his nerves

up again by wine. It may have been so. We have had, in the last generation, an exactly similar case in a

philosopher, now I trust in heaven, and to whose genius I owe too much to mention his name here.

But that Paracelsus was a sot I cannot believe. That face of his, as painted by the great Tintoretto, is not the

face of a drunkard, quack, bully, but of such a man as Browning has conceived. The great globular brain, the

sharp delicate chin, is not that of a sot. Nor are those eyes, which gleam out from under the deep compressed

brow, wild, intense, hungry, homeless, defiant, and yet complaining, the eyes of a sotbut rather the eyes of

a man who struggles to tell a great secret, and cannot find words for it, and yet wonders why men cannot

understand, will not believe what seems to him as clear as daya tragical face, as you well can see.

God keep us all from making our lives a tragedy by one great sin. And now let us end this sad story with the

last words which Mr. Browning puts into the mouth of Paracelsus, dying in the hospital at Salzburg, which

Meanwhile, I have done well though not all well. As yet men cannot do without contempt; 'Tis for their good;

and therefore fit awhile That they reject the weak and scorn the false, Rather than praise the strong and true in

me: But after, they will know me. If I stoop Into a dark tremendous sea of cloud, It is but for a time. I press

God's lamp Close to my breast; its splendour, soon or late, Will pierce the gloom. I shall emerge one day.

The scholar, in the sixteenth century, was a far more important personage than now. The supply of learned

men was very small, the demand for them very great. During the whole of the fifteenth, and a great part of the

sixteenth century, the human mind turned more and more from the scholastic philosophy of the Middle Ages

to that of the Romans and the Greeks; and found more and more in old Pagan Art an element which Monastic

Art had not, and which was yet necessary for the full satisfaction of their craving after the Beautiful. At such

a crisis of thought and taste, it was natural that the classical scholar, the man who knew old Rome, and still

more old Greece, should usurp the place of the monk, as teacher of mankind; and that scholars should form,

for a while, a new and powerful aristocracy, limited and privileged, and all the more redoubtable, because its

Those who, whether poor or rich, did not fear the monk and priest, at least feared the "scholar," who held, so

the vulgar believed, the keys of that magic lore by which the old necromancers had built cities like Rome, and

worked marvels of mechanical and chemical skill, which the degenerate modern could never equal.

If the "scholar" stopped in a town, his hostess probably begged of him a charm against toothache or

rheumatism. The penniless knight discoursed with him on alchemy, and the chances of retrieving his fortune

by the art of transmuting metals into gold. The queen or bishop worried him in private about casting their

nativities, and finding their fates among the stars. But the statesman, who dealt with more practical matters,

hired him as an advocate and rhetorician, who could fight his master's enemies with the weapons of

Demosthenes and Cicero. Wherever the scholar's steps were turned, he might be master of others, as long as

he was master of himself. The complaints which he so often uttered concerning the cruelty of fortune, the

fickleness of princes and so forth, were probably no more just then than such complaints are now. Then, as

now, he got his deserts; and the world bought him at his own price. If he chose to sell himself to this patron

and to that, he was used and thrown away: if he chose to remain in honourable independence, he was courted

Among the successful scholars of the sixteenth century, none surely is more notable than George Buchanan.

The poor Scotch widow's son, by force of native wit, and, as I think, by force of native worth, fights his way

upward, through poverty and severest persecution, to become the correspondent and friend of the greatest

literary celebrities of the Continent, comparable, in their opinion, to the best Latin poets of antiquity; the

preceptor of princes; the counsellor and spokesman of Scotch statesmen in the most dangerous of times; and

leaves behind him political treatises, which have influenced not only the history of his own country, but that

Such a success could not be attained without making enemies, perhaps without making mistakes. But the

more we study George Buchanan's history, the less we shall be inclined to hunt out his failings, the more

inclined to admire his worth. A shrewd, soundhearted, affectionate man, with a strong love of right and

scorn of wrong, and a humour withal which saved himexcept on really great occasionsfrom bitterness,

and helped him to laugh where narrower natures would have only snarled,he is, in many respects, a type of

those Lowland Scots, who long preserved his jokes, genuine or reputed, as a common household book. {16}

A schoolmaster by profession, and struggling for long years amid the temptations which, in those days,

degraded his class into cruel and sordid pedants, he rose from the mere pedagogue to be, in the best sense of

the word, a courtier: "One," says Daniel Heinsius, "who seemed not only born for a court, but born to amend

it. He brought to his queen that at which she could not wonder enough. For, by affecting a certain liberty in

censuring morals, he avoided all offence, under the cloak of simplicity." Of him and his compeers, Turnebus,

and Muretus, and their friend Andrea Govea, Ronsard, the French court poet, said that they had nothing of the

pedagogue about them but the gown and cap. "Austere in face, and rustic in his looks," says David Buchanan,

"but most polished in style and speech; and continually, even in serious conversation, jesting most wittily."

"Roughhewn, slovenly, and rude," says Peacham, in his "Compleat Gentleman," speaking of him, probably,

as he appeared in old age, "in his person, behaviour, and fashion; seldom caring for a better outside than a

ruggegown girt close about him: yet his inside and conceipt in poesie was most rich, and his sweetness and

facilitie in verse most excellent." A typical Lowland Scot, as I said just now, he seems to have absorbed all

the best culture which France could afford him, without losing the strength, honesty, and humour which he

The story of his life is easily traced. When an old man, he himself wrote down the main events of it, at the

request of his friends; and his sketch has been filled out by commentators, if not always favourable, at least

erudite. Born in 1506, at the Moss, in Killearnwhere an obelisk to his memory, so one reads, has been

erected in this centuryof a family "rather ancient than rich," his father dead in the prime of manhood, his

grandfather a spendthrift, he and his seven brothers and sisters were brought up by a widowed mother, Agnes

Heriotof whom one wishes to know more; for the rule that great sons have great mothers probably holds

good in her case. George gave signs, while at the village school, of future scholarship; and when he was only

fourteen, his uncle James sent him to the University of Paris. Those were hard times; and the youths, or rather

boys, who meant to become scholars, had a cruel life of it, cast desperately out on the wide world to beg and

starve, either into selfrestraint and success, or into ruin of body and soul. And a cruel life George had.

Within two years he was down in a severe illness, his uncle dead, his supplies stopped; and the boy of sixteen

got home, he does not tell how. Then he tried soldiering; and was with Albany's French Auxiliaries at the

ineffectual attack on Wark Castle. Marching back through deep snow, he got a fresh illness, which kept him

in bed all winter. Then he and his brother were sent to St. Andrews, where he got his B.A. at nineteen. The

next summer he went to France once more; and "fell," he says, "into the flames of the Lutheran sect, which

was then spreading far and wide." Two years of penury followed; and then three years of schoolmastering in

the College of St. Barbe, which he has immortalisedat least, for the few who care to read modern Latin

poetryin his elegy on "The Miseries of a Parisian Teacher of the Humanities." The wretched

regentmaster, pale and suffering, sits up all night preparing his lecture, biting his nails and thumping his

desk; and falls asleep for a few minutes, to start up at the sound of the fouro'clock bell, and be in school by

five, his Virgil in one hand, and his rod in the other, trying to do work on his own account at old manuscripts,

and bawling all the while at his wretched boys, who cheat him, and pay each other to answer to truants'

names. The class is all wrong. "One is barefoot, another's shoe is burst, another cries, another writes home.

Then comes the rod, the sound of blows, and howls; and the day passes in tears." "Then mass, then another

lesson, then more blows; there is hardly time to eat." I have no space to finish the picture of the stupid misery

which, Buchanan says, was ruining his intellect, while it starved his body. However, happier days came.

Gilbert Kennedy, Earl of Cassilis, who seems to have been a noble young gentleman, took him as his tutor for

But there his plain speaking got him, as it did more than once afterward, into trouble. He took it into his head

to write, in imitation of Dunbar, a Latin poem, in which St. Francis asks him in a dream to become a Gray

Friar, and Buchanan answered in language which had the unpleasant fault of being too clever, andto judge

from contemporary evidenceonly too true. The friars said nothing at first; but when King James made

Buchanan tutor to one of his natural sons, they, "men professing meekness, took the matter somewhat more

angrily than befitted men so pious in the opinion of the people." So Buchanan himself puts it: but, to do the

poor friars justice, they must have been angels, not men, if they did not writhe somewhat under the scourge

which he had laid on them. To be told that there was hardly a place in heaven for monks, was hard to hear

and bear. They accused him to the king of heresy; but not being then in favour with James, they got no

answer, and Buchanan was commanded to repeat the castigation. Having found out that the friars were not to

be touched with impunity, he wrote, he says, a short and ambiguous poem. But the king, who loved a joke,

demanded something sharp and stinging, and Buchanan obeyed by writing, but not publishing, "The

Franciscans," a long satire, compared to which the "Somnium" was bland and merciful. The storm rose.

Cardinal Beaten, Buchanan says, wanted to buy him of the king, and then, of course, burn him, as he had just

burnt five poor souls; so, knowing James's avarice, he fled to England, through freebooters and pestilence.

There he found, he says, "men of both factions being burned on the same day and in the same fire"a

pardonable exaggeration"by Henry VIII., in his old age more intent on his own safety than on the purity of

religion." So to his beloved France he went again, to find his enemy Beaten ambassador at Paris. The capital

was too hot to hold him; and he fled south to Bordeaux, to Andrea Govea, the Portuguese principal of the

College of Guienne. As Professor of Latin at Bordeaux, we find him presenting a Latin poem to Charles V.;

and indulging that fancy of his for Latin poetry which seems to us nowadays a childish pedantry, which was

thenwhen Latin was the vernacular tongue of all scholarsa serious, if not altogether a useful, pursuit. Of

his tragedies, so famous in their daythe "Baptist," the "Medea," the "Jephtha," and the "Alcestis"there is

neither space nor need to speak here, save to notice the bold declamations in the "Baptist" against tyranny and

priestcraft; and to notice also that these tragedies gained for the poor Scotsman, in the eyes of the best

scholars of Europe, a credit amounting almost to veneration. When he returned to Paris, he found occupation

at once; and, as his Scots biographers love to record, "three of the most learned men in the world taught

Then followed a strange episode in his life. A university had been founded at Coimbra, in Portugal, and

Andrea Govea had been invited to bring thither what French savants he could collect. Buchanan went to

Portugal with his brother Patrick, two more Scotsmen, Dempster and Ramsay, and a goodly company of

French scholars, whose names and histories may be read in the erudite pages of Dr. Irving, went likewise. All

prospered in the new Temple of the Muses for a year or so. Then its highpriest, Govea, died; and, by a

peripeteia too common in those days and countries, Buchanan and two of his friends migrated unwillingly

from the Temple of the Muses for that of Moloch, and found themselves in the Inquisition.

Buchanan, it seems, had said that St. Augustine was more of a Lutheran than a Catholic on the question of the

mass. He and his friends had eaten flesh in Lent; which, he says, almost everyone in Spain did. But he was

suspected, and with reason, as a heretic; the Gray Friars formed but one brotherhood throughout Europe; and

news among them travelled surely if not fast, so that the story of the satire written in Scotland had reached

Portugal. The culprits were imprisoned, examined, bulliedbut not torturedfor a year and a half. At the

end of that time, the proofs of heresy, it seems, were insufficient; but lest, says Buchanan with honest pride,

"they should get the reputation of having vainly tormented a man not altogether unknown," they sent him for

some months to a monastery, to be instructed by the monks. "The men," he says, "were neither inhuman nor

bad, but utterly ignorant of religion;" and Buchanan solaced himself during the intervals of their instructions,

At last he got free, and begged leave to return to France; but in vain. And so, wearied out, he got on board a

Candian ship at Lisbon, and escaped to England. But England, he says, during the anarchy of Edward VI.'s

reign, was not a land which suited him; and he returned to France, to fulfil the hopes which he had expressed

in his charming "Desiderium Lutitiae," and the still more charming, because more simple, "Adventus in

Galliam," in which he bids farewell, in most melodious verse, to "the hungry moors of wretched Portugal,

Some seven years succeeded of schoolmastering and versewriting: the Latin paraphrase of the Psalms;

another of the "Alcestis" of Euripides; an Epithalamium on the marriage of poor Mary Stuart, noble and

sincere, however fantastic and pedantic, after the manner of the times; "Pomps," too, for her wedding, and for

other public ceremonies, in which all the heathen gods and goddesses figure; epigrams, panegyrics, satires,

much of which latter productions he would have consigned to the dustheap in his old age, had not his too

fond friends persuaded him to republish the follies and coarsenesses of his youth. He was now one of the

most famous scholars in Europe, and the intimate friend of all the great literary men. Was he to go on to the

end, die, and no more? Was he to sink into the mere pedant; or, if he could not do that, into the mere court

The wars of religion saved him, as they saved many another noble soul, from that degradation. The events of

156062 forced Buchanan, as they forced many a learned man besides, to choose whether he would be a

child of light or a child of darkness; whether he would be a dilettante classicist, or a preacherit might be a

martyrof the Gospel. Buchanan may have left France in "The Troubles" merely to enjoy in his own

country elegant and learned repose. He may have fancied that he had found it, when he saw himself, in spite

of his public profession of adherence to the Reformed Kirk, reading Livy every afternoon with his exquisite

young sovereign; master, by her favour, of the temporalities of Crossraguel Abbey, and by the favour of

Murray, Principal of St. Leonard's College in St. Andrew's. Perhaps he fancied at times that "tomorrow was

to be as today, and much more abundant;" that thenceforth he might read his folio, and write his epigram,

and joke his joke, as a lazy comfortable pluralist, taking his morning stroll out to the corner where poor

Wishart had been burned, above the blue sea and the yellow sands, and looking up to the castle tower from

whence his enemy Beaton's corpse had been hung out; with the comfortable reflection that quieter times had

come, and that whatever evil deeds Archbishop Hamilton might dare, he would not dare to put the Principal

If such hopes ever crossed Geordie's keen fancy, they were disappointed suddenly and fearfully. The fire

which had been kindled in France was to reach to Scotland likewise. "Revolutions are not made with

rosewater;" and the time was at hand when all good spirits in Scotland, and George Buchanan among them,

had to choose, once and for all, amid danger, confusion, terror, whether they would serve God or Mammon;

Which side, in that war of light and darkness, George Buchanan took, is notorious. He saw then, as others

have seen since, that the two men in Scotland who were capable of being her captains in the strife were Knox

This is the critical epoch in Buchanan's life. By his conduct to Queen Mary he must stand or fall. It is my

belief that he will stand. It is not my intention to enter into the details of a matter so painful, so shocking, so

prodigious; and now that that question is finally set at rest, by the writings both of Mr. Froude and Mr.

Burton, there is no need to allude to it further, save where Buchanan's name is concerned. One may now have

every sympathy with Mary Stuart; one may regard with awe a figure so stately, so tragic, in one sense so

heroic,for she reminds one rather of the heroine of an old Greek tragedy, swept to her doom by some

irresistible fate, than of a being of our own flesh and blood, and of our modern and Christian times. One may

sympathise with the great womanhood which charmed so many while she was alive; which has charmed, in

later years, so many noble spirits who have believed in her innocence, and have doubtless been elevated and

purified by their devotion to one who seemed to them an ideal being. So far from regarding her as a hateful

personage, one may feel oneself forbidden to hate a woman whom God may have loved, and may have

pardoned, to judge from the punishment so swift, and yet so enduring, which He inflicted. At least, he must

so believe who holds that punishment is a sign of mercy; that the most dreadful of all dooms is impunity.

Nay, more, those "Casket" letters and sonnets may be a relief to the mind of one who believes in her guilt on

other grounds; a relief when one finds in them a tenderness, a sweetness, a delicacy, a magnificent

selfsacrifice, however hideously misplaced, which shows what a womanly heart was there; a heart which,

joined to that queenly brain, might have made her a blessing and a glory to Scotland, had not the whole

character been warped and ruinate from childhood, by an education so abominable, that anyone who knows

what words she must have heard, what scenes she must have beheld in France, from her youth up, will

wonder that she sinned so little: not that she sinned so much. One may feel, in a word, that there is every

excuse for those who have asserted Mary's innocence, because their own highmindedness shrank from

believing her guilty: but yet Buchanan, in his own place and time, may have felt as deeply that he could do no

The charges against him, as all readers of Scotch literature know well, may be reduced to two heads. 1st. The

letters and sonnets were forgeries. Maitland of Lethington may have forged the letters; Buchanan, according

to some, the sonnets. Whoever forged them, Buchanan made use of them in his Detection, knowing them to

be forged. 2nd. Whether Mary was innocent or not, Buchanan acted a base and ungrateful part in putting

himself in the forefront amongst her accusers. He had been her tutor, her pensioner. She had heaped him with

favours; and, after all, she was his queen, and a defenceless woman: and yet he returned her kindness, in the

hour of her fall, by invectives fit only for a rancorous and reckless advocate, determined to force a verdict by

Now as to the Casket letters. I should have thought they bore in themselves the best evidence of being

genuine. I can add nothing to the arguments of Mr. Froude and Mr. Burton, save this: that no one clever

enough to be a forger would have put together documents so incoherent, and so incomplete. For the evidence

of guilt which they contain is, after all, slight and indirect, and, moreover, superfluous altogether; seeing that

Mary's guilt was open and palpable, before the supposed discovery of the letters, to every person at home and

abroad who had any knowledge of the facts. As for the alleged inconsistency of the letters with proven facts:

the answer is, that whosoever wrote the letters would be more likely to know facts which were taking place

around them than any critic could be one hundred or three hundred years afterwards. But if these mistakes as

to facts actually exist in them, they are only a fresh argument for their authenticity. Mary, writing in agony

and confusion, might easily make a mistake: forgers would only take too good care to make none.

But the strongest evidence in favour of the letters and sonnets, in spite of the arguments of good Dr.

Whittaker and other apologists for Mary, is to be found in their tone. A forger in those coarse days would

have made Mary write in some Semiramis or Roxana vein, utterly alien to the tenderness, the delicacy, the

pitiful confusion of mind, the conscious weakness, the imploring and most feminine trust which makes the

letters, to those whoas I dobelieve in them, more pathetic than any fictitious sorrows which poets could

invent. More than one touch, indeed, of utter selfabasement, in the second letter, is so unexpected, so subtle,

and yet so true to the heart of woman, thatas has been well saidif it was invented there must have

existed in Scotland an earlier Shakespeare; who yet has died without leaving any other sign, for good or evil,

As for the theory (totally unsupported) that Buchanan forged the poem usually called the "Sonnets;" it is

paying old Geordie's genius, however versatile it may have been, too high a compliment to believe that he

could have written both them and the Detection; while it is paying his shrewdness too low a compliment to

believe that he could have put into them, out of mere carelessness or stupidity, the wellknown line, which

seems incompatible with the theory both of the letters and of his own Detection; and which has ere now been

And, as with the letters, so with the sonnets: their delicacy, their grace, their reticence, are so many arguments

against their having been forged by any Scot of the sixteenth century, and least of all by one in whose

characterwhatever his other virtues may have beendelicacy was by no means the strongest point.

As for the complaint that Buchanan was ungrateful to Mary, it must be said: That even if she, and not

Murray, had bestowed on him the temporalities of Crossraguel Abbey four years before, it was merely fair

pay for services fairly rendered; and I am not aware that payment, or even favours, however gracious, bind

any man's soul and conscience in questions of highest morality and highest public importance. And the

importance of that question cannot be exaggerated. At a moment when Scotland seemed struggling in death

throes of anarchy, civil and religious, and was in danger of becoming a prey either to England or to France, if

there could not be formed out of the heart of her a people, steadfast, trusty, united, strong politically because

strong in the fear of God and the desire of righteousnessat such a moment as this, a crime had been

committed, the like of which had not been heard in Europe since the tragedy of Joan of Naples. All Europe

stood aghast. The honour of the Scottish nation was at stake. More than Mary or Bothwell were known to be

implicated in the deed; andas Buchanan puts it in the opening of his "De Jure Regni""The fault of some

few was charged upon all; and the common hatred of a particular person did redound to the whole nation; so

that even such as were remote from any suspicion were inflamed by the infamy of men's crimes." {17}

To vindicate the national honour, and to punish the guilty, as well as to save themselves from utter anarchy,

the great majority of the Scotch nation had taken measures against Mary which required explicit justification

in the sight of Europe, as Buchanan frankly confesses in the opening of his "De Jure Regni." The chief

authors of those measures had been summoned, perhaps unwisely and unjustly, to answer for their conduct to

the Queen of England. Queen Elizabetha fact which was notorious enough then, though it has been

forgotten till the last few yearswas doing her utmost to shield Mary. Buchanan was deputed, it seems, to

speak out for the people of Scotland; and certainly never people had an abler apologist. If he spoke fiercely,

savagely, it must be remembered that he spoke of a fierce and savage matter; if he usedand it may be

abusedall the arts of oratory, it must be remembered that he was fighting for the honour, and it may be for

the national life, of his country, and strikingas men in such cases have a right to strikeas hard as he

could. If he makes no secret of his indignation, and even contempt, it must be remembered that indignation

and contempt may well have been real with him, while they were real with the soundest part of his

countrymen; with that reforming middle class, comparatively untainted by French profligacy, comparatively

undebauched by feudal subservience, which has been the leaven which has leavened the whole Scottish

people in the last three centuries with the elements of their greatness. If, finally, he heaps up against the

unhappy Queen charges which Mr. Burton thinks incredible, it must be remembered that, as he well says,

these charges give the popular feeling about Queen Mary; and it must be remembered also, that that popular

feeling need not have been altogether unfounded. Stories which are incredible, thank God, in these milder

days, were credible enough then, because, alas! they were so often true. Things more ugly than any related of

poor Mary were possible enoughas no one knew better than Buchananin that very French court in which

Mary had been brought up; things as ugly were possible in Scotland then, and for at least a century later; and

while we may hope that Buchanan has overstated his case, we must not blame him too severely for yielding

to a temptation common to all men of genius when their creative power is roused to its highest energy by a

And that the genius was there, no man can doubt; one cannot read that "hideously eloquent" description of

Kirk o' Field, which Mr. Burton has well chosen as a specimen of Buchanan's style, without seeing that we

are face to face with a genius of a very lofty order: not, indeed, of the loftiestfor there is always in

Buchanan's work, it seems to me, a want of unconsciousness, and a want of tendernessbut still a genius

worthy to be placed beside those ancient writers from whom he took his manner. Whether or not we agree

with his contemporaries, who say that he equalled Virgil in Latin poetry, we may place him fairly as a prose

writer by the side of Demosthenes, Cicero, or Tacitus. And so I pass from this painful subject; only

quotingif I may be permitted to quoteMr. Burton's wise and gentle verdict on the whole. "Buchanan," he

says, "though a zealous Protestant, had a good deal of the Catholic and sceptical spirit of Erasmus, and an

admiring eye for everything that was great and beautiful. Like the rest of his countrymen, he bowed himself

in presence of the lustre that surrounded the early career of his mistress. More than once he expressed his

pride and reverence in the inspiration of a genius deemed by his contemporaries to be worthy of the theme.

There is not, perhaps, to be found elsewhere in literature so solemn a memorial of shipwrecked hopes, of a

sunny opening and a stormy end, as one finds in turning the leaves of the volume which contains the beautiful

epigram "Nympha Caledoniae" in one part, the "Detectio Mariae Reginae" in another; and this contrast is, no

doubt, a faithful parallel of the reaction in the popular mind. This reaction seems to have been general, and

not limited to the Protestant party; for the conditions under which it became almost a part of the creed of the

If Buchanan, as some of his detractors have thought, raised himself by subserviency to the intrigues of the

Regent Murray, the best heads in Scotland seem to have been of a different opinion. The murder of Murray

did not involve Buchanan's fall. He had avenged it, as far as pen could do it, by that "Admonition Direct to

the Trew Lordis," in which he showed himself as great a master of Scottish, as he was of Latin prose. His

satire of the "Chameleon," though its publication was stopped by Maitland, must have been read in

manuscript by many of those same "True Lords;" and though there were nobler instincts in Maitland than any

Buchanan gave him credit for, the satire breathed an honest indignation against that wily turncoat's

misgoings, which could not but recommend the author to all honest men. Therefore it was, I presume, and not

because he was a rogue, and a hired literary spadassin, that to the best heads in Scotland he seemed so useful,

it may be so worthy, a man, that he be provided with continually increasing employment. As tutor to James

I.; as director, for a short time, of the chancery; as keeper of the privy seal, and privy councillor; as one of the

commissioners for codifying the laws, and againfor in the semianarchic state of Scotland, government

had to do everything in the way of organisationin the committee for promulgating a standard Latin

grammar; in the committee for reforming the University of St. Andrew's: in all these Buchanan's talents were

again and again called for; and always ready. The value of his work, especially that for the reform of St.

Andrew's, must be judged by Scotsmen, rather than by an Englishman; but all that one knows of it justifies

Melville's sentence in the wellknown passage in his memoirs, wherein he describes the tutors and household

of the young king. "Mr. George was a Stoic philosopher, who looked not far before him;" in plain words, a

highminded and rightminded man, bent on doing the duty which lay nearest him. The worst that can be

said against him during these times is, that his name appears with the sum of 100 pounds against it, as one of

those "who were to be entertained in Scotland by pensions out of England;" and Ruddiman, of course,

comments on the fact by saying that Buchanan "was at length to act under the threefold character of

malcontent, reformer, and pensioner:" but it gives no proof whatsoever that Buchanan ever received any such

bribe; and in the very month, seemingly, in which that list was written10th March, 1579Buchanan had

given a proof to the world that he was not likely to be bribed or bought, by publishing a book, as offensive

probably to Queen Elizabeth as it was to his own royal pupil; namely, his famous "De Jure Regni apud

Scotos," the very primer, according to many great thinkers, of constitutional liberty. He dedicates that book to

King James, "not only as his monitor, but also as an importunate and bold exactor, which in these his tender

and flexible years may conduct him in safety past the rocks of flattery." He has complimented James already

on his abhorrence of flattery, "his inclination far above his years for undertaking all heroical and noble

attempts, his promptitude in obeying his instructors and governors, and all who give him sound admonition,

and his judgment and diligence in examining affairs, so that no man's authority can have much weight with

him unless it be confirmed by probable reasons." Buchanan may have thought that nine years of his stern rule

had eradicated some of James's ill conditions; the petulance which made him kill the Master of Mar's

sparrow, in trying to wrest it out of his hand; the carelessness with whichif the story told by Chytraeus, on

the authority of Buchanan's nephew, be trueJames signed away his crown to Buchanan for fifteen days,

and only discovered his mistake by seeing Bachanan act in open court the character of King of Scots.

Buchanan had at last made him a scholar; he may have fancied that he had made him likewise a manful man:

yet he may have dreaded that, as James grew up, the old inclinations would return in stronger and uglier

shapes, and that flattery might be, as it was after all, the cause of James's moral ruin. He at least will be no

flatterer. He opens the dialogue which he sends to the king, with a calm but distinct assertion of his mother's

guilt, and a justification of the conduct of men who were now most of them past helping Buchanan, for they

were laid in their graves; and then goes on to argue fairly, but to lay down firmly, in a sort of Socratic

dialogue, those very principles by loyalty to which the House of Hanover has reigned, and will reign, over

these realms. So with his History of Scotland; later antiquarian researches have destroyed the value of the

earlier portions of it: but they have surely increased the value of those later portions, in which Buchanan

inserted so much which he had already spoken out in his Detection of Mary. In that book also liberavit

animam suam; he spoke his mind fearless of consequences, in the face of a king who he must have

knownfor Buchanan was no dullardregarded him with deep dislike, who might in a few years be able to

But those few years were not given to Buchanan. He had all but done his work, and he hastened to get it over

before the night should come wherein no man can work. One must be excused for tellingone would not tell

it in a book intended to be read only by Scotsmen, who know or ought to know the tale alreadyhow the

two Melvilles and Buchanan's nephew Thomas went to see him in Edinburgh, in September, 1581, hearing

that he was ill, and his History still in the press; and how they found the old sage, true to his schoolmaster's

instincts, teaching the Hornbook to his servantlad; and how he told them that doing that was "better than

stealing sheep, or sitting idle, which was as bad," and showed them that dedication to James I., in which he

holds up to his imitation as a hero whose equal was hardly to be found in history, that very King David whose

liberality to the Romish Church provoked James's witticism that "David was a sair saint for the crown."

Andrew Melville, so James Melville says, found fault with the style. Buchanan replied that he could do no

more for thinking of another thing, which was to die. They then went to Arbuthnot's printing house, and

inspected the history, as far as that terrible passage concerning Rizzio's burial, where Mary is represented as

"laying the miscreant almost in the arms of Maud de Valois, the late queen." Alarmed, and not without

reason, at such plain speaking, they stopped the press, and went back to Buchanan's house. Buchanan was in

bed. "He was going," he said, "the way of welfare." They asked him to soften the passage; the king might

prohibit the whole work. "Tell me, man," said Buchanan, "if I have told the truth." They could not, or would

not, deny it. "Then I will abide his feud, and all his kin's; pray, pray to God for me, and let Him direct all."

"So," says Melville, "before the printing of his chronicle was ended, this most learned, wise, and godly man

Camden has a hearsay storywritten, it must be remembered, in James I.'s timethat Buchanan, on his

deathbed, repented of his harsh words against Queen Mary; and an old Lady Rosyth is said to have said that

when she was young a certain David Buchanan recollected hearing some such words from George

Buchanan's own mouth. Those who will, may read what Ruddiman and Love have said, and oversaid, on both

sides of the question: whatever conclusion they come to, it will probably not be that to which George

Chalmers comes in his life of Ruddiman: that "Buchanan, like other liars, who, by the repetition of falsehoods

are induced to consider the fiction as truth, had so often dwelt with complacency on the forgeries of his

Detections, and the figments of his History, that he at length regarded his fictions and his forgeries as most

At all events his fictions and his forgeries had not paid him in that coin which base men generally consider

the only coin worth having, namely, the good things of this life. He left nothing behind himif at least Dr.

Irving has rightly construed the "Testament Dative" which he gives in his appendixsave arrears to the sum

of 100 pounds of his Crossraguel pension. We may believe as we choose the story in Mackenzie's "Scotch

Writers" that when he felt himself dying, he asked his servant Young about the state of his funds, and finding

he had not enough to bury himself withal, ordered what he had to be given to the poor, and said that if they

did not choose to bury him they might let him lie where he was, or cast him in a ditch, the matter was very

little to him. He was buried, it seems, at the expense of the city of Edinburgh, in the Greyfriars'

Churchyardone says in a plain turf graveamong the marble monuments which covered the bones of

worse or meaner men; and whether or not the "Throughstone" which, "sunk under the ground in the

Greyfriars," was raised and cleaned by the Council of Edinburgh in 1701, was really George Buchanan's, the

reigning powers troubled themselves little for several generations where he lay.

For Buchanan's politics were too advanced for his age. Not only Catholic Scotsmen, like Blackwood, Winzet,

and Ninian, but Protestants, like Sir Thomas Craig and Sir John Wemyss, could not stomach the "De Jure

Regni." They may have had some reason on their side. In the then anarchic state of Scotland, organisation

and unity under a common head may have been more important than the assertion of popular rights. Be that

as it may, in 1584, only two years after his death, the Scots Parliament condemned his Dialogue and History

as untrue, and commanded all possessors of copies to deliver them up, that they might be purged of "the

offensive and extraordinary matters" which they contained. The "De Jure Regni" was again prohibited in

Scotland, in 1664, even in manuscript; and in 1683, the whole of Buchanan's political works had the honour

of being burned by the University of Oxford, in company with those of Milton, Languet, and others, as

"pernicious books, and damnable doctrines, destructive to the sacred persons of Princes, their state and

government, and of all human society." And thus the seed which Buchanan had sown, and Milton had

wateredfor the allegation that Milton borrowed from Buchanan is probably true, and equally honourable to

bothlay trampled into the earth, and seemingly lifeless, till it tillered out, and blossomed, and bore fruit to a

To Buchanan's clear head and stout heart, Scotland owes, as England owes likewise, much of her modern

liberty. But Scotland's debt to him, it seems to me, is even greater on the count of morality, public and

private. What the morality of the Scotch upper classes was like, in Buchanan's early days, is too notorious;

and there remains proof enoughin the writings, for instance, of Sir David Lindsaythat the morality of

the populace, which looked up to the nobles as its example and its guide, was not a whit better. As anarchy

increased, immorality was likely to increase likewise; and Scotland was in serious danger of falling into such

a state as that into which Poland fell, to its ruin, within a hundred and fifty years after; in which the savagery

of feudalism, without its order or its chivalry, would be varnished over by a thin coating of French

"civilisation," and, as in the case of Bothwell, the vices of the court of Paris should be added to those of the

Northern freebooter. To deliver Scotland from that ruin, it was needed that she should be united into one

people, strong, not in mere political, but in moral ideas; strong by the clear sense of right and wrong, by the

belief in the government and the judgments of a living God. And the tone which Buchanan, like Knox,

adopted concerning the great crimes of their day, helped notably that national salvation. It gathered together,

organised, strengthened, the scattered and wavering elements of public morality. It assured the hearts of all

men who loved the right and hated the wrong; and taught a whole nation to call acts by their just names,

whoever might be the doers of them. It appealed to the common conscience of men. It proclaimed a universal

and Godgiven morality, a bar at which all, from the lowest to the highest, must alike be judged.

The tone was stern: but there was need of sternness. Moral life and death were in the balance. If the Scots

people were to be told that the crimes which roused their indignation were excusable, or beyond punishment,

or to be hushed up and slipped over in any way, there was an end of morality among them. Every man, from

the greatest to the least, would go and do likewise, according to his powers of evil. That method was being

tried in France, and in Spain likewise, during those very years. Notorious crimes were hushed up under

pretence of loyalty; excused as political necessities; smiled away as natural and pardonable weaknesses. The

result was the utter demoralisation, both of France and Spain. Knox and Buchanan, the one from the

standpoint of an old Hebrew prophet, the other rather from that of a Juvenal or a Tacitus, tried the other

method, and called acts by their just names, appealing alike to conscience and to God. The result was virtue

and piety, and that manly independence of soul which is thought compatible with hearty loyalty, in a country

labouring under heavy disadvantages, long divided almost into two hostile camps, two rival races.

And the good influence was soon manifest, not only in those who sided with Buchanan and his friends, but in

those who most opposed them. The Roman Catholic preachers, who at first asserted Mary's right to impurity

while they allowed her guilt, grew silent for shame, and set themselves to assert her entire innocence; while

the Scots who have followed their example have, to their honour, taken up the same ground. They have

fought Buchanan on the ground of fact, not on the ground of morality: they have allegedas they had a fair

right to dothe probability of intrigue and forgery in an age so profligate: the improbability that a Queen so

gifted by nature and by fortune, and confessedly for a long while so strong and so spotless, should as it were

by a sudden insanity have proved so untrue to herself. Their noblest and purest sympathies have been

enlistedand who can blame them?in loyalty to a Queen, chivalry to a woman, pity for the unfortunate

andas they conceivedthe innocent; but whether they have been right or wrong in their view of facts, the

Scotch partisans of Mary have alwaysas far as I know been right in their view of morals; they have

never deigned to admit Mary's guilt, and then to palliate it by those sentimental, or rather sensual, theories of

human nature, too common in a certain school of French literature, too common, alas! in a certain school of

modern English novels. They have not said, "She did it; but after all, was the deed so very inexcusable?"

They have said, "The deed was inexcusable: but she did not do it." And so the Scotch admirers of Mary, who

have numbered among them many a pure and noble, as well as many a gifted spirit, have kept at least

themselves unstained; and have shown, whether consciously or not, that they too share in that sturdy Scotch

moral sense which has been so much strengthenedas I believe by the plain speech of good old George

{2} Black, translator of Mallett's "Northern Antiquities," Supplementary Chapter I., and Rafn's "Antiquitates

{6} This lecture and the two preceding ones, being published after the author's death, have not had the benefit

{7} A Life of Rondelet, by his pupil Laurent Joubert, is to be found appended to his works; and with an

account of his illness and death, by his cousin, Claude Formy, which is well worth the perusal of any man,

wise or foolish. Many interesting details beside, I owe to the courtesy of Professor Planchon, of Montpellier,

author of a discourse on "Rondelet et vies Disciples," which appeared, with a learned and curious Appendix,

{10} I owe this account of Bloet'swhich appears to me the only one trustworthyto the courtesy and

erudition of Professor Henry Morley, who finds it quoted from Bloet's "Acroama," in the "Observationum

Medicarum Rariorum," lib. vii., of John Theodore Schenk. Those who wish to know several curious passages

of Vesalius's life, which I have not inserted in this article, would do well to consult one by Professor Morley,

"Anatomy in Long Clothes," in "Fraser's Magazine" for November, 1853. May I express a hope, which I am

sure will be shared by all who have read Professor Morley's biographies of Jerome Carden and of Cornelius

Agrippa, that he will find leisure to return to the study of Vesalius's life; and will do for him what he has done

{11} Olivarez's "Relacion" is to be found in the Granvelle State Papers. For the general account of Don

Carlos's illness, and of the miraculous agencies by which his cure was said to have been effected, the general

reader should consult Miss Frere's "Biography of Elizabeth of Valois," vol. i. pp. 30719.

{12} In justice to poor Doctor Olivarez, it must be said that, while he allows all force to the intercession of

the Virgin and of Fray Diego, and of "many just persons," he cannot allow that there was any "miracle

properly so called," because the prince was cured according to "natural order," and by "experimental

{13} This lecture was given at Cambridge in 1869, and has not had the benefit of the author's corrections for

{15} For a true estimate of Paracelsus you must read "Fur Philippus Aureolus Theophrarstus von

Hohenheim," by that great German physician and savant, Professor Marx, of Gottiingen; also a valuable

article founded on Dr. Marx's views in the "Nouveau Biographie Universelle;" and alsowhich is within the

reach of allProfessor Maurice's article on Paracelsus in Vol. II. of his history of "Moral and Metaphysical

{16} So says Dr. Irving, writing in 1817. I have, however, tried in vain to get a sight of this book. I need not

tell Scotch scholars how much I am indebted throughout this article to Mr. David Irving's erudite second

{17} From the quaint old translation of 1721, by "A Person of Honour of the Kingdom of Scotland."